I like having visitors: they inspire me to clean the place up a bit before they arrive. Then for the next week or so I'm walking around a marginally clean flat, which is rather nice...

Mary dropped round for the afternoon (if you can call it "dropping round" when you're twenty minutes' drive away and have to pre-arrange a lift in each direction!), which made for a fun afternoon of chattering, wittering, giggling and (as it turned out) investigating this wobbly-Tetris game that everyone's been talking about, which is outstandingly silly and rather cool. If I count correctly I've now entertained a grand total of five guests here in the last six months, which is not a lot really. People should come and visit me more! But not too many at once, due to space constraints :-/

(Hmmm. All five have been different people, come to think of it. Nobody has so far enjoyed being here enough to come back :-)

After that I attempted to cook myself some sausage stew, but I rather miscalculated the quantities and ended up quite literally only just able to get the lid on the saucepan. The meal turned out OK in the end, but it took quite some time to cook, and also I have a number of minor burns on my fingers from having repeatedly rescued bits of veg that escaped over the side of the pan while I was stirring it. And after all that pain it didn't even taste that good: Cumberland sausages from the Sainsbury's meat counter contain a lot of real meat but they seem a bit short on Cumberland, so the nice herby flavour was largely absent. Bah.

The evening rounded itself out nicely with an Emergency Lack Of Party Party, which in the later stages mostly turned into a game of Apples To Apples, a brilliantly simple and totally silly card game involving finding the noun that most aptly illustrates an adjective. Much giggling and fun.