It has taken 10 days for a very large molehill to return after liberal applications of garlic. More garlic, more swearing and shouting, more threats from better half to use traps (empty these threats, he's too kind). The most pungent garlic I've ever found is from a local grocers; it's amazing anything coming near the raw crushed stuff would be able to breathe, let alone find worms to eat. Perhaps I can play at being scientific and say that the garlic has a half-life of 10 days, then I could time things properly. So far the most recent dousing with it has kept the piles of earth away for 2 days. 8 days to go then. Tomorrow I shall abandon any pretence at science and try an old wives' remedy: mothballs. (Why are there no old husbands' remedies or tales? No old husbands or no husbands with stories or cures?)

It has also taken 10 days for my e mail to be fixed. And 3 days for the computer to be away to be checked out. And no, it wasn't my computer. I'd hate for my little white box to be slandered.

Without e mail a sort of peace reigns. No distractions. No replies to be made before writing anything. Much less opportunity for procrastination.

Without a computer ...

A fountain pen and a block of paper served me very well. A tip I was given ages ago (thank you Andy) was, in fact, to write long hand to stop endless redrafting on the screen which just held me up. I found lots of ideas at the end of a pen. Although a very useful tip would be not to write long hand after a certain amount of wine: all those wonderful sentences and all that exquisite prose will be completely illegible the following morning.

Perhaps one should measure how much alcohol it takes (for each individual) to create unreadable writing. A half life then. Something like two glasses and one loses sense of punctuation. The rest of the bottle and you couldn't read anything at all the morning after.

Maybe inhaling moth balls might clear the head.

That's it. Cats are having their morning nap.