1. The vet says Lily can have the painkillers long term: she started on them for a sore throat but they helped her sore joints more and they’ve made her a bouncing puppy dog again :)

2. We have kippers with poached eggs and potato cakes for lunch – yum!

2b. And curry for dinner – double yum!

3. I find the wool floating under the water to be slightly surreal but very beautiful: its halo of fluffiness floating free and shimmering with the slightest movement.

3b. I spun the wool quite tightly but it blooms as it dries, until it looks and feels much softer. I hate the smell of washing new wool but it’s worth it for these transformations.

4. I shift around the ceramics that have set up home in the dining room: moving my new favourites into prime position and putting bad older work away in a box. I find two sets of small wall plaques/tiles that now seem nicer than I originally thought and remember how much I like some of my simple coiled pieces from the start of the year.

5. Rather than leave it on the stairs for us to trip over for the next week, I take the laundered bedding up to the top room – and am rewarded with a Kaufman, stretched out on the bed. (I have a sneaking suspicion that whenever we think the cats are outside, they’re really just in the top room, having a break from us annoying humans and the bumbling dog.) I curl up around him and use him as a purring pillow.

5b. Later, Kaufman has relocated to our bed. When I look in on him, he’s in the deepest sleep I’ve ever seen with his tongue hanging out just a little bit.

5c. So the others don’t feel left out: Tilda going into winter mode and reclaiming the hammock after a summer elsewhere. And Strange is, as always, in strange mode, burrowing between my legs and under my laptop then popping up between me and my screen. She also blocks the frame when I try to take a photo of my sketchbook: I’m evidently just kidding myself if I think I want a photo of my ideas more than one of the cat.