The Tyndarids go to Hackney

It’s been another slightly depressing day. I spent much of the morning mooching around, feeling a little bit sorry for myself. Thank God we're getting out of London tomorrow. The northern air is bound to cheer me up. I think I’m allowed the odd maudlin weekend, but any more than this would be utterly indulgent.

Nathan and I spent the day together; the first proper time we’ve had together for weeks. We pottered around the house, did some housework, ate poached eggs in a greasy spoon, and went to the gym.

At 5pm, we put the Tyndarids into their cage and drove to Hackney, where they're going to have a lovely holiday in a house with 3 cats and 3 other rats, two of whom happen to be their mother and sister. I love the idea that they might be able to spend some time with relatives, but sadly, the likelihood is that if we put them in a cage together, we'd end up with an incestuous litter of baby ratties, so it's probably best to keep them apart! Still, I held Pol for a while above his mother's cage, and rather wonderfully, they started licking each other through the wire meshing. The Romantic in me hoped that they'd somehow recognised each other, but the probability is that Pol was simply having inappropriate stirrings...

That said, my mother tells the tale of her dog, Bonnie, once seeing her own mother in a parked car, and the two dogs going mad in an attempt to try to reach one another. They had a special bond.
This evening Marinella came round to watch Dancing on Ice. Oddly, she’d never seen the programme before, which I thought was weird, bordering on freakish, but needless to say, she's now a convert.

I'm whitening my teeth with little strips that were given to me in the States the last time I visited. They are banned in England and I'm worried they're going to make my teeth fall out, despite their being made by Crest! Still, anything's better than the nasty ivory-coloured things that were staring back at me when I looked in the mirror last week.

March 20th, 1661, and Pepys spent much of the day doing Lord Sandwich’s accounts. Whilst he worked, Sir William Penn, sat down with a map to teach everyone about Jamaica; an island he’d taken from the Spaniards in 1655.

The gossip du jour was about the general election, and the peculiar choices of MP that were being made in the City of London.