1. Heather has come to have lunch with us all the way from London, where she is staying with her husband's cousin on her visit from Canada. I am so touched that she has come to see us, just on the strength of Three Beautiful Things. She is lovely -- as comfortable and as kind and as wise as I imagined from our chats.
2. Heather brought us a thoughtful, observant bag of presents -- the bag itself is decorated with a photo of the sour sweeties that I craved while I was pregnant with Alec. There is a book about a young sheep who wants to do his own thing (which I hope will inspire my little lamb). There is an insulated cup to preserve me from the new mother's cold tea. There is a book for me-- "If you like to read cook books, you'll love this" -- by Edna Staebler, who I am very glad to meet, as she is very much my kind of food writer. She is both chatty and curmudgeonly and her comments and annecdotes are scattered between the recipes like marginalia scribbled in a cook's notebook.
3. We eat a lot of live yoghurt here -- it pleases Nick's temperamental digestive system -- and tonight we pour genuine Canadian maple syrup over it.
