Boss can't have used any form of transport today, because I got not one single phone call. Perhaps he's lying dead somewhere. If so, I have no doubt that he will call me from the hearse sometime soon.

My best friend of an evening is a good book, but I'm ploughing through something at the moment that I know will intrigue me sometime soon, but hasn't yet. I do miss dead authors. I remember Annie Walker on Coronation Street once envying Mavis because she was beginning her first Catherine Cookson novel. "Oh", she cried, "how lucky! The whole of Catherine Cookson before you!" I wish it were like that for me with Graham Greene or Brian Moore. Living authors that I love are Anne Tyler, Lionel Shriver, Margaret Forster etc, but they don't write as quickly as I read. I re-read my favourites, and they never disappoint. Alice in Wonderland! Pure joy.

The rain is pouring onto my little garden, and I look out with sorrow and hope. Sorrow that all my weeding efforts will have to be redoubled - and, how do you weed a patch that has wild bluebells in it without destroying them? Hope, because I look out and see the table and chairs, the blossom tree, the fairy lights, the folded children's deckchairs, the windchimes and fairies hanging from the tree, the hidden fairies in the beds, and their fairy doors in the walls, and I remember so many lovely afternoons out there, and hope for more, more, so many more. Olivia and Scarlett are too tall now to play their laundry fairies game with my washing line - but Natasha, Francesca and Primrose are just about the right height......