I was boiling to write yesterday - I don't know if I should stop listening to Today or whether a rant a day keeps complacency away.

"The public expect us to make year on year efficiencies."

Do we? Does no one else know the story of Bazie's donkey? Haven't I mentioned it before?

Down Eckington behind the wreck are the ranches - don't think the American West, think allotments where you allowed to keep animals. In my mum's youth there was a man call Baz who had a ranch and kept a donkey on it. He was a mean man, and obviously not very bright, because he decided to economise by feeding his donkey gradually less and less.

One day he went down the Miner's very disgruntled, "Does tha know" he said, "I'd got that donkey down to one straw a day and she ups and dies on me!"

Anorexia is maybe not just an eating disorder. Isn't it obvious that both private businesses and public services as well as people can be too thin.

"Adults and parents are responsible for children not the media."

So: parents are not adults? The media is not run by adults?

By this point I was scribbling in the margin of the puzzle page ( and making fatal mistakes in the Sudoku) and it struck me that this was my first breakfast alone for more than a week and Mum had been taking the brunt of my rants, which is why I'd got them out of my system by 9 o'clock.

On to today:

I was singing "I can see clearly now" on the way back from the paper shop at 7:45 [Yesterday was a three coat day. Unfortunately I only have two so the tea time walk was short and damp.]. There was a hint of sunshine to come - a patch of blue, the pavement barely damp...

At 8:15 I looked up from my breakfast

to see that it was snowing again!

They had enough in Scotland yesterday to bring down power lines and leave thousands without electricity - apparently it was the wrong kind of snow -wet large flakes.

It had stopped in 10 minutes and by 9:00 we were off to collect the Thompson and Morgan parcel that, of course, they had tried to deliver the one day this week when the house was empty at 11.30. The seeds were in it but not the potatoes or onions.

We averaged 116 s.p.m. over 65 minutes. Angel is now curled up dreaming. This is her on Wednesday night - she had a haircut on Tuesday. The picture is conincidentally my favourite bit of one of Susan's.