Cat on my knee

I am trying to blog on my laptop with a cat on my knee. This is not easy. She keeps getting up, moving round, digging her claws in, rubbing the side of her face against the screen and generally being a pain in the backside. She is only here because she is getting so thin, scraggy and balding that I am sorry for her. But whatever is the matter with her cannot alter her essential spirit - stroppy, demanding, noisy, caterwauling and a bully of all other cats, even those three or four times her size.

We had a great visit to our friends in Derbyshire: lovely food, wine, good conversation, leisurely walk after lunch and a mooch around their very fine garden. Once again I have come back with plants for mine. I wonder if there is any market for advanced plant scrounging skills?

These friends are the best kind. You know how you have friends of all different kinds? Friends for having a good time with, friends for serious conversation, friends for drinking too much and staying out too late with, friends for hard times, friends for easy times, friends you have to be feeling in the mood for, friends who you love but who can still baffle or infuriate? Well these friends are the kind you are always in the mood for, who can do serious and silly, good times and bad, who are similar enough for easy empathy and understanding but different enough (artistic and design types) for the difference to have a sort of glamour. God alone knows whether that works both ways, certainly we are a bit short on the glamour front but we can do, indeed have done in coming here, mad.

So it was worth going away from home for but tomorrow it is back to London. I have ludicrous amounts to do for work. I even thought of doing some work when we got home tonight but first I had to catch up with blogs and now I am blogging myself and then it will be time for bed. Get your priorities right.

We have been trying to grow mushrooms in a box on the floor of the pantry and tonight we opened up and there they were, looking uncannily like mushrooms. I don't know what I thought they would be like but these have amazed me by looking just like mushrooms from a shop. Will post pic to prove it.

Something of a scattergun blog today. Certainly would not sustain a column in a quality glossy.