Thank you for the music

I woke up this morning with a full-on cold. I'm coughing all the time and can't hear out of one of my ears! Raily and Tanya were with us last night, and we must have stayed up pretty late 'cus I woke up at 10am, feeling like I'd been run over by a brick-filled wheel barrow. There was a mini crisis in the night involving one of the female rats who's been staying with us. I think she's had some kind of major haemorrhage because her cage looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. There was blood everywhere and the poor thing was limping around trying to wash herself clean. I think her plight brought out the maternal instincts in Raily and Tanya, because they immediately leaped to action stations and started helping with the clean-up operation. Poor McCann Rat is definitely not long for this world, but she seemed a great deal chirpier this morning, which makes me think we might be able to give her back to her owners in a cage rather than a freezer bag!

I went to see Philippa, Kate, Gob and Deia today. The adults were all utterly exhausted and took every opportunity we could manufacture to sit down with a nice cup of tea. Deia, however, had different plans, and we played a rather large amount of hide and seek. There were baked potatoes for lunch on a kitchen table covered with jigsaw puzzles and early autumn leaves which were being collected for a collage.

I went through some of my photographs with Phil, and discovered this stunning detail on one of them. It's her and Deia at the Uffington White Horse last weekend, and for some reason I hadn't noticed it before. I think it's one of my best, so enjoy...

I went from Columbia Road to Northern Essex to see the parents. They took us for a lovely meal in Saffron Walden and we retired to Thaxted afterwards for tea and scones and a chat with an apiarist called Stuart who made Nathan and me realise  how lovely it must be to keep bees.

It's almost impossible to comprehend that it's now 10 years since 9/11. It really does feel like yesterday. We were rehearsing Taboo at the time and I remember the sense of sadness and disbelief as though it were yesterday.

September 11th, 1661, and Pepys spent the day wandering around London, talking to various lawyers and learned men about his Uncle's will, which was still not entirely sorted.

He called in on one Dr Williams, who took him into a garden where, we're told, there was an abundance of grapes. There was also a dog which had been trained to kill the cats who regularly appeared in search of the pigeons Dr Williams kept. The doctor was obviously an eccentric individual who  carefully buried every cat that had been killed in this manner. Apparently the tally stood at around 100. One assumes there were rather a lot of cats in London in those days!

In the afternoon, Pepys went to the theatre, despite having recently promised his wife he'd only ever attend in the future when she was with him. One assumes he confessed that his perpetual search for pleasure was stopping him from doing his job properly and, like a loyal wife, she told him she'd keep an eye on him. He didn't like the deception and, as a result, hated every minute of the play!