Creatures that love night love not such nights as these

Which just goes to show that books may come and books may go, but your A-level set texts stay with you forever.

The weather has returned to a more everyday kind of horrible, which is to say that the wind is blowing, the rain is lashing down, and the temperature plummeting, but the sea and the river remain in their proper places for the moment. Tonight I am taking stock, hunkering down for the winter, surrounded by books and wool (both excellent insulators of thin Victorian walls). Having just finished the in-the-worst-possible-taste excesses of Grunts by Mary Gentle, I have finally go around to Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, which I am enjoying as I have enjoyed all her other novels. I have a very nearly finished object to show you once I have sewn a couple of short seams and found a suitably sized teddy model (producing a baby to model it would be rather too lengthy a process and a trifle excessive). I have a rapidly growing scarf on the needles, and a pile of DVDs that I can finally watch. For over a year I have had to dangle myself precariously down the back of the television set to change over leads every time I wanted to use the DVD player, but with our new television I can just open the machine, put a disc in, and play it, which seems like unutterable luxury.

Today I applied for a provisional driving license. I may be going to become more mobile.