And the first birds start to sing

We’ve been in slow motion all day - moving at half speed in a sort of Sunday afternoon haze of tiredness. Nathan was quite drunk last night – and it must have been close to 4am when we finally turned in. The dawn chorus had already started. I forget what it’s like to live the life of a West End performer. Everything shifts by about 3 hours. Breakfast becomes lunch, lunch becomes tea, and bedtime, in early summer, is at dawn!

Almost tragically, I’ve been working all day. I guess it's not really the best way to to spend a Sunday, especially after a doctor's told you to relax, but I have an incredibly busy week ahead, and a great amount of arranging to do for my concert, so no rest for Benjy.

Fortunately we were rescued by Fiona in the early evening, and the three of us went for a long walk. Autumn has definitely arrived. There’s a chill in the air. In fact, the heating's just gone on for the first time. We went in search of a warming pudding, and set off for our walk with food cooking in the oven. I was horrified when Nathan announced we’d been gone for an hour. We ran back to the house, expecting to find the place on fire, but our oven is so rubbish, that, an hour and a half after we’d fed it a chips and veggie burgers, the damned things still weren’t fully cooked! It was another half hour before we could eat.

The whole situation became an absolute joke, when the pudding we’d bought on our walk – a lovely chocolate thing – burnt to a crisp within ten minutes of being put in the oven!

Pepys, like me, stayed in bed for most of the morning 350 years ago. Elizabeth spent the day interviewing maids. Their current one, Mary, had been on trial for a month, but had left to work in a “tradesman’s house where there was but one maid.” Pepys joined his wife in the latter stages of the interviews and they ended up choosing a girl called Nell, who arrived with her mother, and refused to be hired for less than half a year. Her amusing cheek got her the job!