This week it's Clapham

with kittens in a flat where the rooms in the building amplify every shuffle and sneeze to the point that a person walking around in a normal manner sounds like a drunk elephant and a man in the flat upstairs is bellowing his story about trying to have drunk sex last night in the car outside his home. I listened to the full account ...  she was hot ... having to run into the house to get condom ... not finding it ... breaking a few things ... going back to the car ... waking the girl up ...   

at last ... they were in a tangly undressed mess on the back seat 

and his phone rang      

and he answered it    

it was his mum  looking out of his bedroom window and wondering why he was still in his car and when he was going to come in

Nigel and I are getting on famously

I know he likes me - last night he turned up in my bedroom in high excitement and spent an eternity arranging the back half of a mouse perfectly centered on the carpet - all ready for my breakfast 

Today I'm showing him how to use the kettle and tea bags

We picked puffball mushrooms

bigger than a big man's head. I thought they'd be fluffy and full of air but they were surprisingly heavy and wet. As many as possible were sliced and laid out on sheets of newspaper in the hot wooden summerhouse, the nearly-dry slices now threaded and strung across the windows, they look a bit like chicken breast until you touch them and then they feel like polystyrene. 

The house is permeated with an earthy, trufflish odour

Puffball goes golden yellow when fried. Circular pieces fill the pan, like crepes, these cooked are layered between greaseproof paper and are now at rest in the freezer.

My holiday is over 

I have returned to a fancy-pants part of London to finish my studies with Nigel-the-cat in a large modernist house. We have a banjo and Beautiful Art and a view-to-die-for - what could possibly stop me writing?

New Cats

the excitement's died down and I'm back at my Cat Woman day job in London with two fat boy cats - a cross-looking-black one and an anxious black-and-white one.  The anxious one nibbles things in other people's gardens which can result in an allergic reaction in the form of a swollen lower lip which makes him look a bit daft.

I'm in Brixton, which is one of my favourite bits of London and really great for not reading the academic tomes or writing the big essays that I am supposed to be doing RIGHT NOW.

Today I went touring fabric shops with Pam where we got lost in shiny things, she bought several metres of silver embossed plastic tablecloth which she might use as wallpaper in her new bathroom. I bought a metre of silky silvered fabric because the-man-at-home  wants something like tough silver cling film to make a 'sound camera' and this might be the stuff to do it.