Oh, all the things I would do...

I really have nothing interesting to write about. I've done nothing today but purge; four bin liners-worth of purging, in fact, from my bedroom alone. We woke up this morning to find a letter which said we didn't have enough money in our joint account to pay the rent; no doubt a knock-on effect from our having to shell out £600 to have the car released by bailiffs. I’ve only just received the compensation cheque from Haringey Council, so with any luck, that should take us back into the black.

My cold is a little better today. Nathan’s been to the doctor’s to get some antibiotics to help him out of his fifth week of chest infection and I sincerely hope mine doesn’t drag on that long. My voice has gone all squeaky as a result of all the coughing. I sound like I'm going through puberty all over again.

We’re still waiting to collect our car from the MOT place, so don’t yet know the sheer horror of exactly how much it’s going to cost us to get it roadworthy again. Without the car, we’ve been unable to return the lady rats to their owners. We keep peering into their cage to check that the poor elderly rat is still alive. It would be horrible to have to give her back dead, just because we didn’t have a car to transport her in! Fortunately, she was still alive when we last checked.

Nathan showed me a picture today that he’d been sent on Twitter. It was taken by a man who was doing work on the antennae at the top of the Empire State Building, and it's of two workers who were doing work on the building below him. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most vertigo-inducing picture I have EVER seen, but wonderful nevertheless. I’d have dropped my camera, trying to take it, without question. In fact, interestingly, at the top of the Empire State building, all sorts of weird things happen to cameras... something to do with electro-magnetics. I think... Or maybe I've just chosen that word because it sounds plausible to a luddite like me.

Saturday 14^th September 1661, and Pepys was meant to spend the day sorting out his dead Aunt Kite’s papers... but got a better offer. Colonel Robert Slingsby and his wife were in town, and Pepys, ever one to climb social ladders, hired a boat and took them all onto the Thames to look at the King’s collection of four pleasure yachts.