Bad habit, morning errand and Mrs Tiggywinkle.

1. We have got into the habit of plunking Alec in front of the TV in the mornings. It's a questionable habit but it gives me the space I need to bub Bettany, eat breakfast and get dressed. However, I make sure that I am on the sofa next to him for Q Pootle 5, a cartoon about chubby aliens on a rather lovely desert planet. It's a landscape of crashed space junk, craters, scrapyards and mineral lakes with spots of lush vegetation. I never get tired of looking at it (and I never get tired of cuddling Alec and discussing the plot).

2. Alec is much less wayward when we go out walking -- it is now possible to fit in a morning errand. We porgle down to Oxfam Books to pick up a paperback that's come to the end of the road. I'm going to grow mushrooms on it.

3. I know I loved Mrs Tiggywinkle as a child, but I'd forgotten why. On the last page Beatrix Potter claims to have seen the little door in the hillside, and now I come to read it again I definitely remember being delighted by this, and convinced that one day I would go to the Catbells and find it (and perhaps Little Town farm) for myself.