All I do is eat and sleep and sing

I still feel like rubbish. I think I’m going to have to start simply living with this illness, like my friend Ellen does with her bad back. I’m permanently exhausted, permanently coughing, and my voice now reaches down to a bottom A. On the bright side, I always wanted to be able to sing a bottom a!

It’s been a beautiful early autumn day today, and the sun’s been very warm. I did a morning’s work and then went into town to meet Nathan for a very late lunch. We bought baked potatoes from the take away cafe at the end of West Street, and sat and ate them in the middle of Seven Dials whilst the sun warmed our faces.

The manager of the garage telephoned Nathan this morning and they immediately locked horns, although by the end of the conversation a compromise was reached. We will pay for the part, and they will pay for the labour required to have it fitted. It seems just about fair enough, although I'm still not convinced that the cord simply "snapped." The very fact that they're offering to fit it free of charge surely indicates an acceptance of guilt, I don't think people make "good will gestures" any more.

I genuinely don’t have a great deal else to say. I haven’t even seen the news to be able to make any comment on that. I could talk about Gardener’s World, but that seems really tragic...

Because this blog entry is so dull, and because I'm in the mood for nostalgia, I have compiled a list of the ten greatest television theme tunes of all time...

Here they are... If you're my age, you'll be pleasantly surprised by every one. You may even cry before the first one ends...

Number One
Number Two
Number Three
Number Four
Number Five
Number Six - stick with this one, it goes fabulously weird and hippy in the middle
Number Seven 
Number Eight
Number Nine
Number Ten

Pepys woke up 350 years ago to the sound of his father and mother rowing “as they used to in London.” He was very disappointed. Part of the reason for their coming to the country was to resurrect their relationship. He told them both off, suggesting it would be preferable if they tried to live what little time they had left on earth in “love and quiet.” It was home time for Pepys, and he decided to take Elizabeth back to London via Baldock in Hertfordshire, where there was a fair. He probably wished he’d not bothered, as he was immediately fleeced out of 14 pence for a “mouthful of pork.” They must have seen the upwardly mobile Londoner coming. From Baldock they travelled to Stevenage, where they dodged a rain storm, and from Stevenage they rode easily to Welwyn, where they stayed the night. There were two beds in the room and the couple slept very well...

“of all the nights that ever I slept in my life I never did pass a night with more epicurism of sleep; there being now and then a noise of people stirring that waked me, and then it was a very rainy night, and then I was a little weary, that what between waking and then sleeping again, one after another, I never had so much content in all my life, and so my wife says it was with her.”