For those of you still waiting for the Fireside Chat, I promise it’s coming soon. Fate seems to be conspiring to keep me away from the iMac, but I hopefully will get some editing done soon.

Had to drag myself out of bed this morning to take Chris to the Showroom Theatre in Sheffield for a film workshop he was attending. On arriving back home it was time to hoover up the balls.

This tiny cottage that I rent has a lot of quirks – the dodgy floorboards, the cooker on castors that you have to drag out of the way to get to the washing machine, the ever-flushing toilet (more on that later) and the polystyrene balls that ooze out of the air vent in the downstairs bathroom.
My landlord had cavity wall insulation installed late last year and since then every time we get a moderate gust of wind or a sparrow flaps its wing at the bottom of the garden, tiny little grey polystyrene balls cascade from the vent and scatter all over the floor. On some occasions they can be an inch deep and fill the sink. How they can still be coming out several months on is a mystery to me, but they do. Having said that, I’ve never actually SEEN any of these things emerging-  you just get up in the morning to thousands of the things. They are a bit like the xenomorphs in ALIENS: ‘They mostly come out at night… mostly.’

Perhaps more important news, at least to me, is that Tamar and I have finally set a wedding date! We’ve decided to just go for it and get hitched at Chesterfield Registry Office, so that our families can attend. It will be the 9th July at 11.30. I really can’t wait.

Only one show today and that proved pretty stressful. This wasn’t  because of the children, the audience were wonderful, but because I got stuck in traffic and ended up being ten minutes late. Ten minutes doesn’t sound a lot, but it is awful watching the start time of your show getting closer and closer and being in a stationary traffic jam. Luckily I was able to maintain contact with the school who had booked me right up until the moment I arrived, so everything went smoothly once I did get there. I had to be super nice though, so I cut the jokes I’d planned to do about the spelling mistakes on the school website.

We had another panic tonight when Tamar anxiously exclaimed that she thought she’d hoovered up her engagement ring! I took a knife to the dust bag and was up to my elbows in muck, dead skin and hair when she came out to sheepishly tell me she’d found it under the bed. For some strange reason I found it hard to stop what I was doing and actually carried on searching through the crap even when I knew it was safe. I found a hair clip and 20p so – result!

I’m signing off now. Going to go and check the toilet because it’s going through one of its non-stop flushing phases. Our toilet either flushes all the time or not at all. There are times when you have to stand pumping the handle in a demented fashion to coax a trickle of water out of it, then sometimes it just keeps filling up and flushing like crazy. I’m sure this house was designed by a practical joker.

Ok, going now.

Goodnight all.