Alas, Patsington and I do not have one of the fancy DVD recorders that are sweeping the nation (or that small section of the nation that has several hundred quid to spare) but happily some of our friends do, including barsine and her beau. The latter recorded the new BBC version of My Family and Other Animals over Christmas, which I missed due to being at Patsington's cousin's wedding. I really wanted to see it, though, so was delighted when barsine lent me the disc a few weeks ago. But it wouldn't play, not on our DVD player nor our laptops! In fact, the disc seemed unreadable by all of our machines, none of which could even recognise its presence. I thought it was a one-off problem with the disc, but yesterday I borrowed a film which a friend had recorded onto DVD, and the same thing happened. Could we change settings on our DVD player so it can recognise the disc (our player can play Mpegs and has always been able to play copied DVDs)? Is there a codex we can download so our laptops can read the files? Or will we just have to wait until we have a DVD recorder of our own (preferably one with a hard drive)? Because our first priority when it comes to purchasing expensive electrical items is a Dyson. Yes, thanks to Ju Ju and her ever-increasing fluff, we are forced to spend hundreds of euros on a bloody hoover when we could be buying a lovely shiney DVD recorder instead. Bah.

Speaking of Ju Ju, last night I had a freakish dream in which Patsington and I had mysteriously aquired several more fat white cats, and were getting worried because we couldn't distinguish the original Ju Ju. I think this dream may have been inspired by my experience on the way home from the bus stop yesterday evening with our old chum Gerald. I was crossing the road when I noticed a man with two Gerald-like dogs heading into the lane on which Gerald resides. "Aha!" I thought. "Gerald's chums! Haven't seen them in a while. Or possibly it's Gerald himself - he hasn't been out in his garden recently." But when the man and his canine chums headed into the garden of Gerald's home, I wondered how I could possibly have confused these tall and nimble beasts with Gerald himself, who waddled out to greet them looking like a pom pom with four twinkling little legs. Not for the first time when confronted with the sight of Gerald, I laughed out loud.