The most disabled person in the world

It's Sunday and we're on our way to the cinema to see Cameron Diaz playing a teacher. It was that or the X Men, but those high octane films give me vertigo! 

I've been writing music all day, which is a fairly tragic announcement for a day when, no doubt, everyone else was sitting in a park. 

Speaking of which, we're early for the cinema, so have found ourselves on Hampstead Heath. The recent rain has made everything smell extraordinary; a heady blend of cow parsley and damp leaves. It's the smell of my childhood; the smell of creating a camp in a hedgerow, of picking wild flowers after a summer storm. 

So, Nathan has gone back to his old job at the box office in a West End theatre. A lot of tickets get sold over the phone in an upstairs room. Yesterday, one of the girls he works with, picked up the phone to a very odd-sounding man. The voice was strained and sounded a little like a goose honking. "Hello, I'm disabled" the voice said, "can I buy tickets?" The girl assumed it was Nathan, who was downstairs at the time. She burst into peels of hysterical laughter and hung up on the caller.

Minutes later, the phone rang again and the same voice said "hello, I'm disabled, can I buy a ticket please?" Once again, the girl laughed manically and hung up. She ran down the stairs to Nathan and told him off for being so naughty. 

And that was the moment she realised it wasn't a prank call. She'd just laughed at, and hung up on a genuinely disabled caller! 

One of those stories you don't know whether to follow with gales of laughter or cascades of tears!

A typical day for Pepys 350 years ago, which found him overseeing the completion of the painting work in his house (thank the Lord), and buzzing around Westminster in pursuit of Lady Jemina. Only his final paragraph stands out:

One thing I must observe here while I think of it, that I am now become the most negligent man in the world as to matters of news, insomuch that, now-a-days, I neither can tell any, nor ask any of others! 

I know how he feels...