From quite sunny, we progress to extremely sunny, and hot with it. Reminds me of our two weeks in Canada earlier this year. Coincidentally we had dinner last night with two of our Canadian friends – Karol and Pete Walpole – at the new, expanded home of Anne and Philip Robinson, who are just home from another holiday, this time in Crete.

Now Dot has left me: she should be arriving at Stansted airport about now en route to Eindhoven and eventually Hilversum in Holland, where she and Barbara will deliver a couple of P4C workshops tomorrow. I may be wrong, but I think this will be the first time Dot and I have been in separate countries since we were married. The last couple of days have been taken up largely with making sure that Dot knows what she’s taking and is taking it. Hope that worked out all right. Meanwhile, I am thinking about doing my tax return. Eventually, I may even do it.

The other item at the top of my to-do list is the forthcoming Paston poetry book, provisionally named Another Country. We’re aiming at 30 pages of A5, with some art – assuming we can persuade the artists to produce something. If not, it will be with photographs. At the moment e-mails are flying backwards and forwards in an attempt to decide who will pay what towards production costs, and who will receive any profits. Using the word “profits” very loosely. I am going to be putting most of it together. I also need to write a couple of poems, the introduction and some notes.

Our Humax, which has been acting very strangely – recording things it wasn’t asked to, not recording what it should, labelling recordings wrongly and duplicating this that and the other – has suddenly gone very quiet after it seized up and I rebooted it. Suddenly all the recorded programmes disappeared, and it seems to be recording things correctly again. Can this last? I hope so, because I’ve cancelled Ryan (Mr Hometech Solutions) who was going to come and have a look at it. In other news on the technology front, Dropbox seems to have nearly finished uploading my picture files. It has started forecasting the end of the operation in hours instead of days – currently 41 hours.

Amid all the Euro-preparations, Dot and I dropped in at Ethika on Timberhill on Tuesday to view Annette’s new fashion collaboration. Looks good. Teri was also there. Dot bought a bag and a hat, the latter from someone other than Annette.