Double birthday last week, for the two girls in the house. It's all right being born on your birthday, but giving birth on your birthday? That's one hell of a way to get a present.
The twin celebrations are rather unfair to the older party, who gets overshadowed and ignored every year as a way of celebrating getting stitches. This year the festivities involved Mel leading a post-Goth, pseudo-emo expedition to Camden Town in search of funky jewellery and bleeding edge tee-shirts, followed by a full six-berth raclette. For those who don't know, a raclette started out as a kind of cheese but changed its job description and is now like a chocolate fondue but with more fighting and less chocolate. Great fun, a sort of grilled bun-fight. and fortunately the girl who only eats fish couldn't come. Fish and raclette cooking don't really make natural partners, and I was dreading having to supervise fish fingers sitting in a little spade-shaped frying pan.
The cat has stayed close to home, and now that we're into the rainy season she is staying in a bit more. At night she now chases moths around the house. This was not in her original job description, and unfortunately she seems to enjoy it a great deal more than chasing mice. Mice eat our food and the moths she catches are not eating anything we have any interest in, not even our clothes. If she rootled out those little mottled jobs with the threads still dangling out of the corners of their little mottled mouths I would be quite pleased. But no. Instead she prefers big, floppy, lost moths to the small, zippy, determined clothes moths we share our wardrobe and sock drawers with.
In other news I am sitting here waiting for an air ticket to India to arrive via cyberspace. I have been invited to stay in Bangalore, and am much looking forward to it.