I am glad that I bought this woodstove last year.

Not only have I been nice and warm for most of the day, I had another lovely tea tonight. Pizza of course, but in the absence of any bread (what with the boulangère forgetting me yesterday) I had baked potatoes with garlic butter.

Not only that, I boiled a couple of kettles on the top, and made a big pot of coffee, half of which I drank and the other half I put in a thermos flask. I'll be intrigued to see what that will be like in the morning. I could be on to something here.

Strange as it may seem, I was up and about at 08:30 this morning, so an early breakfast and a film followed by a couple of hours work on the radio script. But coming downstairs at mid-morning I encountered the black feral cat that roams around here. Normally it totally ignores me but today it maiowed at me, came to me when I called it, let me stroke it and even let me pick it up. All that I can think of is that there's no wild food around in this weather. Being a vegan, I'm not able to help it out and it turned its nose up at the soya milk. If this weather keeps up, I'll have to splash out on a box of munchies. In the meantime, I'll leave the door open to the verandah and the lean-to. There's a mouse running around somewhere in there and a hungry cat is a useful ally.

I also found a footy match this afternoon - Terjat's 2nd Xi against the 3rd XI of Quinssaines. Terjat had about 70% of the play but somehow managed to lose 4-1. Twice they were hit on the break, a third time a lucky deflection in the penalty area found an unmarked attacker, and the fourth time a tired defence was caught stationary. But it was an astonishing match all the same. We all froze to death and there was, tragically, no coffee.

So tomorrow I really must get cracking. i'm in danger of falling behind.