1) Once a year, if you're lucky, you get an evening like last night's: November cool and grey with the smell of plum blossoms and cherries and daphne and hyacinths, and everything but lilac in fact. I should have cut some of the flowering plum yesterday because today it was ready to scatter when I did. It won't last long in my kitchen but for one morning at least I'll have that delicate perfume to come down to.

2) The heat is on, and on high, because though I was well enough last night with the thermostat at 16C, I was also triple bagged in cotton and flannel under flannel and wool covers, which makes turning over in bed something of a problem. And I must turn over or I wake up abominably stiff. Which I did today, and have been sore all day in consequence.

3) I cannot exactly Konmari my bookshelves but I can throw out the books that make my heart sink within me. These are largely bunko classic manga like Wind and Tree Song and Poe no Ichizoku which were a chore to wade through even when I was better sighted. There's much truth in melannen's comment that one needs to tidy one's dreams before you can tidy your stuff. At the age of thirty-seven she realized she'd never... no, ok, at 37 I had no limitations. But 30+ years later I must face that I will never be really literate in Japanese, will always be looking up kanji and vocab I've been looking up for decades, will rarely be able to skim a manga for pleasure. I suppose I can bear not to have read Hagio Moto's or Takemiya Keiko's oeuvre, there being little pleasure or profit in it, and I suppose I should be glad that I'm relieved of the duty to do so. At least I get shelf space for my 100 Demons now. I toyed with the idea of an Ima Ichiko test: 'do I look forward to reading this as much as I do to reading Hyakki Yakou?' But no one would ever pass it.

4) Seriously thinking of getting a junk busters company in to clean out the back two rooms of the basement and half the front as well. One fell swoop, and maybe they'd take the ancient fridge out as well.

5) Because work is being traumatic I went to Pauper's pub last night for their Murphy's stew. Made with stout and root veg, they say, but I call it a boeuf bourgignon near as dammit, and prize it. Next to me a guy was having something that looked like meatloaf. The server said it was ribs. So today I went back and had those. My mother made ribs very occasionally, with barbecue sauce, and I never cared for the ketchupy dryness of them, but 'falling off the bone' has an enticing sound to it. And well, yes, they *were* prisable off the bone, but in the end I still don't see what the fuss is about. Messy meal, and the taste is all in the sauce. Like chicken wings, another pub food I never understood. It must be the cold weather that gives me meat and potato longings just now. Hopefully I can get back to the veg and fish mode, because my scale is not happy about my western diet.