Six-legged alarm clock

Calliope burst into my room with a buzzing head. I turned on the bedside lamp, and the world's fattest fly hurtled from her mouth towards the light. A frantic chase over my bed, face, windowsill etc. until she caught it again. Nauseatingly, it buzzed in her mouth for some time until she gave a thoughtful prrrt! and began crunching. Oh for the days of my gentle morning phone alarm.

Off to a just opened Sainsburys and returned for a chat with Mindy, who only short weeks after her breast cancer op is being incredibly busy and cheerful, and was just leaving, like some Victorian urchin, to work in her partner's candle factory. I am writing a small new Skelton Yawngrave piece for her Radio Dinosaur project, which they want to record at the end of the week. And after a Mindy pep talk and brief, I sat down and wrote it. It will be the first of a series and I am going to use it to test some ideas for Skelton Yawngrave and the Terrifying Clown, which I hope will be the second in the series.

Then off to the gym for a mild mannered hulk legs and treadmill session, which I enjoyed.

Then home to type in more of the anthology of Guernsey material, breaking off to cut the jasmine which grows rampantly in my yard and provides fragrant shelter for Twitten micturators and other unspeakables. This I cut back, pausing to chat to neighbours. Calliope always gets very excited when I'm outside, and she bolted up and down the Twitten with a wild face, and hid herself in the jasmine clippings springing out from time to time at my ankles.

A sluggish evening watching football.