:: update

Bertie's blood test came back clean: no sign of an infection. So he's booked in for tomorrow morning (yes, he's letting himself out quietly so as not to wake me -- well hell, the clinic's practically at the bottom of the road, only one busy street to cross!) and I've been told to starve him from 9pm, because he's probably going to have a biopsy.

Of course I've been hitting the internet and have diagnosed a sialocele, a salivary gland cyst. How impressed will the vet be when I trot that out? Not very, I suspect, so I'll just let them get on with it. But it's good to know he's not about to keel over.

This morning the swelling seemed to have gone down a bit, so it may even just get better on its own.

Yesterday I had my hair done and whizzed round town doing 50 things, all in blazing, sticky heat, and roared off home thinking I would have time to mow the lawn before meeting Fiona. It started raining at Barnton. Fiona and I had had equally knackering weekends so gratefully agreed to put off drinks. I should have rushed upstairs and at least primed the bedroom walls, but instead I whipped up a lovely tasty dinner and then joed out -- after walking Bertie.

:: poor dog

Yesterday morning while out walking Bertie ate a lot of grass and honked it up. Uh oh. I checked him over and noticed that the glands on one side of his neck were swollen. Uh oh. I phoned the vet and whizzed over to Linlithgow for a consultation. He's not keen on the Linlithgow surgery because one time I left him there and the evil vets knocked him out and he had to wear a boot for weeks afterwards. However he was pleased to discover that the other pet in the waiting room was a rabbit in a cardboard box. Also the next pet in was another greyhound, hurrah. Lucky old rabbit owners.

So the vet had a look and couldn't see anything down his throat. His other glands are ok and his temperature's normal. She gave him two shots, antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory. The vet said the antibiotic shot "might sting". Well, apparently it hurt. It really really really really hurt. He squealed and cried and cried and cried. He cried so much and so loudly that the receptionist came in to see what was going on. He cried so much that the other greyhound howled along. The vet gave him a biscuit, and he managed to eat it without stopping crying.

I've got to take him back in tomorrow morning, and if he's not better they'll knock him out and have a good look down his throat. I fear it might be a hedgehog quill stuck down his throat. He isn't any better today; in fact his neck is more swollen than yesterday. He's not eating as much of his dry dog food as normal, but he is managing to choke down a huge quantity of treats. He's in good spirits, chasing rabbits and bouncing around, and his nose is still cold and wet so I'm not too worried. But I feel a massive vet's bill coming on.

I've nearly finished stripping the wallpaper off my bedroom -- ghastly business -- and I should finish tonight. Tomorrow I've got the vet, then I'm getting my hair done and going to the Christian Aid booksale in George St, then in the evening I'm meeting Fiona for a drink. But that could change depending on whether I have to collect a zonked-out dog from Linlithgow -- they don't have an operating room at the local branch. The bedroom's going to be blue. Eventually.

Last night I went to a great concert, Ralph Vaughan Williams' Sea Sympony, plus Elgar's Sea Pictures and a couple of other things. A woman at work is in the chorus and she flogged us tickets: John, his wife and I went. We'd also been asked to go by Martin, who knows someone else in the chorus, and he was there with his son. We all met up in a pub & had something to eat before the concert, then went back to the pub afterwards. We had to move pubs because it turned out that Martin's son is barred from the first one! He's not a ruffian, just a free spirit.

:: back due to popular demand...

No, Bertie's coat is not still green. He scrubbed himself up and down the hedge while it was wet and then dried off on the carpet. Oh the joys of pet ownership.

In other news ... well, nothing. I've got a couple of good books on the go (All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland and Ilium by Dan Simmons) and sped-read another, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Oh, and I've also started Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. I recommend them all, though Ilium is only for hard-core sci-fi fans. Having said that, it has inspired me to download Homer's Iliad from the net and store it on my Palm. How sci-fi is that? I've got four other books on there, plus all my addresses etc, several photos, calculator and what-have-you, and plenty of room left. Twenty years ago I was all excited to have a computer with two floppy disc drives (and they really were floppy); now I've got a library in my handbag. I love technology.

I had a lovely letter from Uncle Jock, who sounds in good spirits despite having 10% kidney function and a crook ticker. Dog tucker, he reckons, but he's not letting it get him down. I've resolved never again to whine about my arthritis.

:: green dog

Why aren't dogs ever green? It would be better camouflage than white, surely, especially for a dog that can't take the cold. Bertie is trying out a new coat colour at the moment, thanks to a freshly-cut lawn. Mmm, very fetching.





After mowing the lawn and strimming the edges I ran out of steam and spent the rest of the afternoon sitting outside reading the paper. I know this is technically a "waste" of my time off, but my feeling it was to do just this that I bought this house in the first place.

I have a cold. I've had a vaguely sore throat all week, but the actual cold only developed in the last couple of hours at work last night. How irritating! It's nothing serious though, just a dribbly nose & slight fever.

Neighbours with dogs:
Neighbour A, who has been Holding Forth on the topic of Orkney for a good ten minutes, spies Neighbour B coming along with her dogs. "I hope you don't mind if I avoid her ... she does go on a bit. I think she's rather lonely; she buttonholes me and goes on and on with all the latest gossip." I have a brisk chat with Neighbour B about the GPS course she's doing, then rejoin Neighbour A, who proceeds to Hold Forth on the subject of narrow boats for another ten minutes.

I really like them both, by the way.

:: creepy clones

My website used to be www.hockadilly.co.uk, but then I got cheesed off with my ISP and shifted away. I didn't take hockadilly.co.uk with me because it would have cost ?75. Instead I got the dot-com version and moved on. The old url was registered to me until November last year, and this month, someone reregistered it. No biggie. (Though the word "why?" did cross my mind.)

Then tonight I googled the word hockadilly, just out of curiosity, and was amazed to see 1,360 hits. Even more amazing, the first two were for hockadilly.co.uk - not my own work, but something called "Be Equipped: Deuteronomy: Aquiring the Tools for Spiritual Success". A work by Warren W Wiersbe. It wasn't cached, and the link just leads to a message saying the site is "offline due to server maintenance operations". Weird.

A lot of the hits were for sites that trawl the web looking for search terms and listing the results; so I'm down for things like "fairy necklaces" and "dog coat knitting". Just stuff I write about normally.

Didn't do much today -- went to the pet supermarket, where Bertie met a truly terrifying little boy. His mother told him sternly not to try and pat the poor scared doggie -- so he went and got a great big ball off the shelf and threw it at him!

They've moved the live rabbits and guinea pigs from the dogfood section to over by the cat toys, but apparently you can still smell them.

:: days of whine and roses

Kate and Robbie's wedding ceilidh was wonderful: Kate looked radiant and elegant, and Robbie was magnificent in full fig Highland dress. Andrew was also in a kilt and formal jacket & bow tie. I know kilts are a Victorian invention -- originally it was just a long bit of fabric bundled up round the waist with a belt, with the excess tossed over the shoulder -- but I do think it's gorgeous. Blokes like it because it comes with a non-embarrassing handbag, the sporran. This year, they're putting their digital cameras in there! Slightly nerdy digression, since we're talking tartan: I now know how to tell a military kilt from a civilian one. At the back, the pleats of the civilian kilt make checks when they hang flat. On a military kilt, they make stripes. You probably already knew that, but I didn't.

So yes, lots of wild dancing, including the tango -- Robbie is from Argentina. My camera is rubbish at taking flash pictures in large spaces so I didn't take a lot. This one, of Andrew doing the tango with the best man's wife, required a lot of technical fiddling around with to show up at all. He's got a rose between his teeth, put there by Paul. And yes, that's the best man in the background. He was a very nice person!



The age range went from tiny babies (the youngest was six weeks old) to ancient folk, and everyone had a ball. Here's another picture of Andrew:



Afterwards we piled into a minibus and had a brief drink in a manically noisy bar/club before repairing to the hotel where Andrew, Paul and several other wedding guests were staying.

So that's the roses part. The whine part was the hotel where I stayed. Whiiiiiiiine! My room was unbelievably tiny -- no room for Bertie to turn round without backing into the bathroom -- and jammed full of ornate furniture and hectic florals. Bertie hated it. I think he's always slightly worried in case this is our new home.



The bed was excruciatingly uncomfortable, so what with Bertie moaning and grizzling and everyone else in the hotel getting up at 7:30am, I got hardly any sleep. Then at breakfast came the final insult: I was seated at a table right at the back of the dining room, next to the kitchen. I had to scramble under a palm tree and shove aside wine-bucket stands to sit down. Grrr.

What cheeses me off most, though, is that I didn't complain. I should be more assertive, I should have refused to sit at the damned table. But I was tired and hungover, so I just paid up and slunk out.

Yesterday it rained and rained, but I went to the Hermitage for a walk anyway -- it's lovely there whatever. Meeting up with Andrew and Paul lightened my bad mood, but then I fell over!! Argh. I gave up and went home, where I had a nice hot bath and a nap. In my wonderful comfy bed, in my spacious bedroom. Bliss.

:: too busy to blog

Have a look at this instead: kevan.org. There are a lot of amusing things to do on Kevan's site, like making up slang. He's also doing The Diary of a Nobody as a blog, which is a grand idea. Someone else is doing Pepys's blog.

Oh, I talked to Faye today. I called her on her mobile after first phoning her landline and getting her employer, the 90-something former Oxford philosophy don. He's deaf and won't use a hearing aid, and got quite tetchy with me for not speaking clearly.

"When I answer the telephone I expect to get a name. Now, who is it you wish to speak to?"
"Faye. F, A, Y, E..."
"Wye Ee? There's no-one here by that name!"

:: It's still me

I just changed the name ... no good reason, I just felt like a change.

Maybe it's because spring is here. I do feel energised generally -- I cleaned the house twice in the space of a month, and didn't even have guests! The garden's erupting quite nicely. The rose hedge out the front that I hacked down is sprouting, and the giant honeysuckle that wove in amongst the roses -- now reduced to a twisted stump -- is also sprouting, so that's good. I'm hoping to keep it all down to about waist height. It was 6ft high or more.


This is an early photo -- the hedge is the second wodge of greenery.

Without the hedge though, the front looks kind of bare. There's a honeysuckle next to the front door and a nice dark red rose under the kitchen window, but nothing under the dining room at all. I would love to put a tree there, but I can't because all the drain manholes are there -- I don't know why my place got lumbered with them but it did. There's one huge one and two smaller ones. Now and then an official water authority van drives up and men in clumpy boots stamp all over my lawn and garden. Shrub-in-a-tub's an option, but knowing my expertise in causing early plant death that may be over-optimistic. I could always just stop strimming the edge and cultivate a tiny "meadow" strip.

I love spring, it's my favourite season. Especially here -- it's so dramatic after the winter, and so welcome.

:: oops!

My hush.com email account was deleted for lack of activity -- ie I hadn't checked my mail for a while. So, sorry if you wrote to me there and I never wrote back. I'm too slack for my own good.

Lately I've been busy mainly with work and dog-walking. On Monday I went to Tentsmuir, had a fantastic walk there. First off I went to the West Beach at St Andrews, but it was too crowded -- Bertie is too neurotic to do well on crowded beaches. He wasn't too bad; he was nice and friendly to a woman and her son. But then she sat down and he rushed over and barked in her face, and then danced around and wouldn't let me catch him. So we went to Tentsmuir, where there are miles and miles of empty sand and forest and it's like dog heaven. He met a very interesting lurcher and they played chase. Bertie lost: the lurcher dashed through water up to its chest without giving it a second thought, and Bertie had to detour round because he's such a wimp.

It was a changeable day, with bursts of bright blue sky and acres of dark, heavy rainclouds piling up along the horizon. There were seals off the beach, poking their heads up to stare, and flocks of darting black birds. It was just wonderful.

I'm on a healthy eating stint. I don't know how long it will last, but I'm enjoying it. I make delicious salads to take in to work, and on my days off I have steak and salad, things like that. Today I baked a piece of salmon for tomorrow's salad. Yum. And lots of fruit.

I haven't been out to check if the grass seed has sprouted.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I bought an outfit for weddings! Well, a top. But I also bought a pair of high heeled shoes! Anyone who knows me would be amazed. Next thing I'll be buying a frock. The top is nice, a dark purple with flowers embroidered on it, and most importantly, it's comfortable. In the same shopping session I also got a wedding present for Kate and Robbie and a christening present for Calum, plus all the paper, cards etc.

:: spring clean

I spent the weekend mainly doing DIY, gardening and housework. The lawn had its first mow of the year, mainly so I could sprinkle around some grass seed. It's from Canada, apparently that makes it extra tough. It had better be, if it's to compete against buttercup, moss, dandelion and dog pee. I planted a lavender bush in the front garden that I bought ages ago, but I haven't yet decided where to put a bunch of blue polyanthus and some pansies, which I got at a knock-down price at B&Q. I was there buying a pot of paint for my bedroom, a project for May, perhaps, when I might have some time.

On Monday I had a desultory go at buying something vaguely dressy for wearing to weddings (only a fortnight until Kate's ceilidh; the other one's in June) but didn't even try anything on. Frills and chiffon? Hmmm. I don't think so. I'm going to have a really good go at getting something on Saturday.

I'm still waiting to hear all about Pinky's investiture, hint hint. I'm sure it all went swimmingly and that you all had a lovely time at the party afterwards. Wish I could have been there!!

:: social whirl

In today's mail was an invitation to the wedding celebration of a couple I've never met. They're getting married in Las Vegas, but the dance is right here in Edinburgh. I'm going to go -- it's always interesting to meet new people. (It's the daughter of a colleague.)

I did a spot of gardening today, in between torrential rain and hailstorms. I really must do something about the front garden, it's a tip. The daphne is still hanging on in there, but it's frazzled-looking, and it's on a lean now too. I might dig it up and put it round the back in a pot. That will teach it to lean over!! The back is like a detention camp, home to a bunch of skinny, starved plants barely clinging to life. I was thinking I might put a row of pots round the front too -- surely I'd remember to water them! -- to brighten things up. But what I really need is more evergreens. It doesn't look too bad in summer, but it's too bare in the winter. Which is most of the year, let's face it.

The garlic's doing ok. And the Spanish bluebells too, they're flourishing.

On my day off I spent a bit of time going through my computer back-ups and looking at a lot of old writings and web projects. It was quite inspiring, so I think on my next days off I may have a go at a redesign.

Right now I'd better get on with my (paid) work.

:: Faye's away

Faye left this morning, heading for her new job caring for a very elderly chap, a former Oxford don. He's in his nineties and lives on the outskirts of the city. When Faye arrived here she only knew the general area he lived in, so we looked at a map of Oxford and decided one particular street looked nice -- near the open country, away from the ring road -- and lo and behold, that is indeed where she'll be living.

While she was here we did a bit of out-and-abouting. Went to see Pieces of April, which we both enjoyed, and had one whole day shopping for new clothes for me along Princes Street. Faye was determined not to buy anything herself, but couldn't resist a gorgeous pair of black brocade jeans on sale. I got boring work clothes mostly, but also some nice floppy linen trousers for summer.

I'm starting to plan my holidays: three weeks in September/October (with Pinky in France), then at least another three weeks in February/March (in New Zealand) next year. Awful bunch-up of hols, but cannot be avoided. In 2006 I swear I am going to take a fortnight in high summer season! Actually I probably won't -- I prefer to have holidays in spring and autumn when it's relatively quiet. I'd like to go to New York for a week in spring, or to somewhere in New England in the autumn.

Spring has definitely sprung here -- the weather's gone haywire and the lawn's started growing. Weeds, too. All my neighbours have been out busying themselves pruning and tidying and double-digging. Not me -- it's a jungle out there. A tiny pink cyclamen is blooming away madly and the big straggly purple-flowered thing in the rockery is budding. Loads of Spanish bluebells are coming up, despite my best efforts. The massacred rose hedge is showing signs of life -- I hope it will bush out, because I don't fancy having to grub it up and replace it. I don't know if I said, but Mrs Blacker grew it specifically to keep the paperboy from cutting across her front lawn. Hah!

:: thrillsville

Excitements in my street this week:

Dave and Diane painted a bright pink stripe around the bottom of their house. It's semi-detached and the neighbour's stripe is dull rust to tone in with the harling (roughcast). Diane was downcast; she thinks it's too bright. Dave likes it though: "I think it's quite gay!" "Very gay," was my opinion. But in a seaside kind of way. "Huh, I suppose we should stick pictures of boats to it," huffed Diane.

Meanwhile, the couple next door to Bridie have constructed two raised beds in their front garden. "And can you guess what they've gone and planted in them? Only potatoes!!" Potatoes in their front garden! What next.

In other news, I got my Ikea bookcases built without too much bother and they look fantastic. I ripped into a big scrubbing and decluttering exercise, and the place is looking spiffy.

Work: The top-secret project is that we have gone compact on Saturdays. We had all guessed by the time we were told. Teeny tiny little paper, much more work but fun. I've been appointed chief nag, which is why it's fun.

Faye's arriving on Saturday on a break between jobs. The last one didn't work out -- no phone signal, hardly any time off, persnicketty clients. Happily the agency is very understanding, so she'll be posted elsewhere without any bother. She's motoring up -- the train was going to cost some astronomical amount and the bus takes 12 hours. She's here until Tuesday.

:: pics

This isn't a great picture, but I took dozens trying to get the colour to show true and this is the closest I got.



Just to remind you, here's the old green.

:: greens

That was some week. I didn't do the bedroom in the end. I could have if I'd put my mind to it, but by Wednesday I was cream-crackered and couldn't even think about starting another room. I papered the dining room first -- not quiiiite as simple as I'd imagined, given there was no pattern-matching involved. Once that was pretty much done I cleared out the livingroom, threw plastic sheets over the sofa and chairs and started tearing off wallpaper.

It was at this point that Bertie barked at me. Yep, he was trying to tell me something, just like Lassie. "Are you mad? This is pointless. Where's my damned rug? I hate you!" He flounced off upstairs, where his bed was surrounded by dining chairs and sofa cushions. He flounced back down and did some more barking. By now I was lying on the plastic-covered sofa watching TV and eating olives and oat cakes. I'm surprised he didn't call the SSPCA.

After getting all the paper up (including incredibly fiddly bits around the windows and the gas fire), I took half a day off -- went out for drinks and a movie (Something's Gotta Give, 6 out of 10) with Fiona.

Next was the moment of truth: had I got the colour right?

Last year I painted the livingroom walls what I thought was a nice soft green. It turned out to be a nasty yellowy lime. When the sun poured in (which it does) it became fluorescent. Plus I still had the awful wallpaper underneath.


This doesn't do justice to the yellowness of the colour.

The new colour, whew, is much more to my liking. It's got a bluish caste; at first I thought it might be too blue. But it's perfect. In bright sunlight it fades out to a pale, fresh green. At night it darkens down somehow & is almost cosy. I'll post some pics tomorrow.

To Bertie's relief I've replaced all the livingroom furniture. My books are all still upstairs -- I haven't got the new shelves yet.

:: Ready or not

The walls are all stripped down, the piles of (stinky) wallpaper have been binned, and I'm ready for action. I've got lining paper, paste, size, brushes, bucket and seam roller -- I'm going to do this properly. I've got the Wallpapering section of my jumbo DIY manual memorised, I'm all set.

So imagine how irritated I was yesterday when my boss said, "You know that week off you've got ... how committed are you to that?"

Argh!

Very committed, was the answer -- especially since the compromise alternative of the week after next off was ruled out. And the week after that was also a non-starter. So I'm still having next week off, but I may lose my days off the following week, which are the Sunday and Monday. I chose that week in particular because I knew I'd have those days off tacked on the end, but my boss has booked his weekend off at the Flodigarry Country House Hotel (my fault, I gave him vouchers), so he won't be around.

The cause of all this disruption is some top-secret project that will keep us all busy over the next few weeks. I'll be busy manning the fort, I'm not involved in the project.

Back to the decorating: frustratingly, B&Q have run out of the colour I've chosen for my bedroom (Blue Sky), so I'll have to trail back into town at some point. Or maybe I'll just paint it Magnolia.

:: interior decor

Why? I had this lovely (almost) flawless wallpaper:



And I had to go and scrape it all off.


First the paper had to be torn off, then either I steam/scrape/scrub the glued bit left behind -- it's like a ghost of the paper. If I decide to go with lining paper, then I don't have to scrape the glued bit off.



It took hours, long hours, it soaked up my entire long weekend, and it's not even finished yet. It took hours just to get all my books out:



It had better be worth it. I'm taking next week off to redecorate the dining room and my bedroom, and possibly the livingroom too, depending on how I get on. I thought I'd get a good headstart this weekend. Hah! By the end of next week I'll be knackered -- I'm already aching all over.

However. It did have to be done. I painted the livingroom over the wallpaper, which I really don't like, and guess what? I still don't like it. In fact it's worse, because it's the wrong colour.

Did I tell you about the toilet in the dining room? Frances next door told me a little while back that once Mrs B couldn't manage the stairs any longer, her son-in-law installed a toilet for her downstairs. She was sleeping in what is now the diningroom, so that's where the toilet went. After she went into the home, he took it out again. So while stripping off the wallpaper I discovered where all the pipes went. How fascinating! What a lovely mental image.

In other news: a message from Faye. She says she can't get a signal on her mobile at her new home, and internet access at the library is fully booked, hence the silence. However, it's a lovely house and a busy job. Can I suggest that everyone send her a card/letter the olde worlde way?

Spooky moment while stripping wallpaper: I was listening to Poetry Please on Radio 4, something I don't usually do because a) I'm usually working and b) I hate the way Roger McGough says "poo-etry". So anyway it's a poetry (pooetry) request programme, and as I scraped away, I thought, I should write in and ask them to play Sorley McLean reading my favourite poem (pooem), his great work Hallaig. And I swear, the very next reading was ... yes, Sorley McLean reading Hallaig. I nearly fell off the ladder.

You can listen to the programme via the internet, follow this link.

In between scraping and scraping and scraping, I went on some good walks, cooked some nice meals and watched a bit of TV. Just now I've had a lovely long bath. Now I'm off to the 24-hour supermarket for some dog food. Bertie hates interior decoration -- it's completely pointless and makes a hideous mess. I have to compensate with lots of treats and nice walks.

:: blither

Where does the time go?

Faye got away all right, had a fairly cold and miserable trip south though, by the sound of things. She's now settled in to her new home/job and I hope to hear all about it soon.

The Saturday before she left was nice and sunny so we went for a walk in the Pentlands. By the time we got there it had clouded over, but we soldiered on. The plan was to have a good walk and then have lunch in the Flotterstone Inn. But it seems everyone in Edinburgh had the same idea -- the hills were hotching with people and dogs.

It was bitterly cold, so we didn't walk that far, just up to the top of the reservoir. The inn was packed out, with a queue for tables, so we headed back to the car. In the rain. "It's nearly snow," I said. By the time we got into the car it was snow. We drove to Carlops in a blizzard. Had a nice pub meal there though, in the Allan Ramsay hotel. I had thought of going to a film or something in the evening, but Faye was busy packing and, well, it was too cold and snowy outside to bother.

So yes, she's gone south and I've been busying myself with sleeping, reading, doing embroidery and playing with my new Palm. Oh, and walking the dog and walking.

Inspired by the great crib-painting expedition, I'm taking a week off later in the month and finally doing up the dining room and my bedroom. It'll take at least a week, what with scraping the vile wallpaper off. I'm going to start preparations this weekend.

:: getting there

Faye's gradually working her way through the morass of paperwork and phone calls. Her backpack has arrived safely via air freight; she just had to call the official, who faxed her a customs form, then talk to the official for half an hour, fill in the customs form and fax it back, then talk to the official again to organise a delivery date. I think she's just about co-ordinated the activities of Lothian and Borders Police and several departments/branches of Lloyd's Bank regarding her stolen cards and chequebook. And I'm pretty sure she's mailed off her application form for a visa renewal. She's organised her start date at her new job and discussed details of her duties with the other carer.

She's also getting over her jetlag, and is very cheerful and positive despite all the hassles she's had to wade through.

We had a nice day yesterday -- I got my hair done (always a treat) and she took her car in to have its wheels aligned, then we met up and she treated me to lunch. After that we had a trawl through the charity shops of Morningside before I headed off to work.

There was a tremendous rainstorm in Edinburgh yesterday, complete with thunder and lightning. The building I work in has a glass roof, so the noise of rain hammering down was tremendous. Reminded me of listening to rain on the crib roof. Ah, the summers of yesteryear!

Anyway, Faye has an extra day, so she leaves for the south on Sunday. She's planning to stay overnight at Whitby, and then spend Monday night at Banbury. It's close to Oxford but not as expensive.

In other news I'm enjoying my new Palm in an extremely nerdy way. The whanau should be grateful though: I'm putting in everyone's birthdays, with a seven-day advance reminder. It's a chore entering all the data, but it will be worth it. I've already found it much, much more useful than paper diaries etc, but in such nerdy ways I'm not even going to tell you.

Faye wants one now: she's downsized from a fat Filofax to a skinny diary, a skinny address book and a skinny shopping list, but a PDA would be even skinnier. Trouble is, the old computer I gave her doesn't have USB. So now she's thinking of a lap-top plus PDA. I think with her mobile lifestyle (and a fresh desire to lighten her luggage load) that set-up would be perfect. Some places she doesn't have room to set up the computer, and it's a clunky old thing anyway.

At one point, Faye was looking for something in her suitcase. She sat back and looked round at all her stuff and sighed. "I think I might have a disorder," she said.

But the thing is, all our family has the same disorder. I know I do. When I came to this country I had a backpack and a small suitcase, and I sent over a tea-chest by sea freight. ("What've you got in this, rocks?" puffed the delivery man as he hauled the chest up the stairs. In fact I did have rocks in it, including a beautiful white river rock that John gave me.) Now I have a three-bedroom house with ample storage, two sheds and loft space and I have an amazing amount of stuff squirrelled away. So much in fact that I lose track of things. Like my Christmas stuff: somewhere I've got a box filled with ornaments, fairy lights, wrapping paper and Bertie's antlers. Can't find it anywhere.

Trevor certainly has the disorder. I asked him once if I could get him a model kit for a birthday or whatever. He took me through to his study and flung open the cupboard doors. There were shelves and shelves of unopened model kits. Mum .... well, we've all seen inside your wardrobe! Full marks for tidy storage. Pinky's flat is so tiny (and so tidy) that you wouldn't think she could have the disorder, but she's confessed to having a big cupboard downstairs. So there you go. It's genetic.

:: the eagle has landed

Yep, Faye arrived this morning, safe and sound and bang on time, and looking tanned. We had a cup of tea and a good catch-up chat before she hit the wall: no sleep to speak of for over 24 hours, plus jet-lag. I've put her in my room: I figure she has greater need of the comfy bed than me!

She starts her new job on Monday, which is a shame -- not that she's starting a job, but that it's so soon. Bertie is thrilled to bits to see her again, and it's mutual.

I had a great few days off. I drove through sleet and high winds to get my Palm -- and got a little karmic payback for not using public transport. The shop has a parking building right next to it, so I though, aha, I won't have to go outside. But I had to collect the Palm at its customer pick-up depot, which is across the road! Damn. But it was worth it -- it's the coolest thing out, so little and neat.

Sunday morning I met up with a work colleague and his wife and their dog for a walk -- Bertie and Oz are great pals. Then Andrew turned up with Faye's car and we had another walk before I drove him into town to catch his train back home. Then I went on to Fiona's for dinner -- that was fun, there was a good crowd there.

Yesterday was mainly practical stuff -- cleaning, laundry, supermarket shopping, entering data into the Palm. I also had a good walk on Blackford Hill, Bertie's favourite venue. Many, many dogs, mainly labradors.

My knees are much better just now. One of my neighbours was having a clean-out and found a couple of (unopened) tubs of high-strength glucosamine sulphate tablets, so he passed them on to me. They seem to be working: the inflamation has gone down and my knees feel much stronger and more stable. Still get jolts of pain, but nothing like the same constant aching. I've still been using my stick though, it helps on downhill stretches.