You’ll be so pleased to know that I’ve ticked off two items and done a third that hadn’t even made it to the List.  Updating the satnav was a bit anxious though – it warns sternly about unplugging it while it’s updating, but it got stuck and nothing was happening, though the ‘Force Quit’ list didn’t have it as unresponsive.  So I ferreted around on the Garmin website and found nothing in the FAQs or the manual, so used the chatline.  And apparently it’s fine to unplug it, it just makes it a bit reproachful; and next time it uploaded the new maps as if it had been looking forward to that all week.  I printed off the manual, by the way, and have found out how to alter a route to the one I want to use, and to tell it how to remember it.  So hah, for the next time we travel south west.

RasPutin, father of the kittens, was – as you may remember – a poor old thing back in the summer.  He vanished for a few weeks and returned painfully skinny with a thin coat, so that I could see his skin through the hair.  It took weeks for him to start to gain weight but finally he recovered (from what, I don’t know) and his coat grew thick again and he grew plump.  How plump, I only realised today, when I went to the porch door to find Eloise cat sitting right by it, on the outside.  I had to chivvy her away to open it.  I saw her fixed gaze and I thought it was Rose and Lawrence’s cat Chip, who’s a big, long haired tabby that Eloise cat dislikes.  But it wasn’t; it was RasPutin.  He walked away and I realised how fat he’s become.  Honestly, his tum was so rotund that, if I hadn’t known he was a tom, I might have thought he was a pregnant queen.  We suspect he’s being fed all round the village, because what I give him isn’t enough for that and I don’t think he’s got that rotund by eating mice.  He clearly fancies coming in the house – and he can think again.  No.