Winter

Brrr. It’s cold…the mountain tops are sprinkled with snow, my car won’t start in the mornings and I’m thinking about mending the cat flap. We don’t actually have a cat flap - what we have is a big square hole in the kitchen door. In the winter, the snow drifts into the kitchen and if it’s really cold, it turns into a nasty patch of black ice…and we don’t want poor old Ginger hitting that, do we? Not after that other time… the time I’d pushed the gas bottle in front of the hole to keep Ginger outside (this was during his mangled-bird-offering period) and he came streaking in (probably startled by a fly or something – he’s such a wimp) and…boiiing… slammed into the gas bottle like…well, like a cartoon cat does. He was still resonating when I plucked him off the doorstep…

Another thing I have to do is purge the radiators but I have no idea what that means.

I can’t think of a single interesting thing to do in winter apart from stay in bed. Wasn’t it George Mikes who said “Continental people have sex-lives; the English have hot-water bottles”? Huh. I live on the Continent and I’m English - and I don’t have either of those…