It hasn't been a good day, so far.

I took the day off work so that an engineer could come round and replace the gas meter. Shortly before noon he showed up, took one look, and said it couldn't be done: apparently regulations have become stricter about the minimum distance between gas meters and electric wiring since mine was installed, so that if he changed it in place he'd be breaking the law. Which presumably means some other engineer will have to come round and do a much more extensive job on it at some other point (the word the guy used was ‘re-site’; I am continually amazed at the number of synonyms people feel the need to invent for perfectly simple words like ‘move’) and I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to make me use up another of my days off work for that.

Also today I have stubbed my toe painfully on the sofa, crashed my main home computer so hard that it required an hour and a half of filesystem repair before it would boot again, and thrown breakfast cereal all over the newly hoovered kitchen floor.

Now I'm going to go and spend the rest of the afternoon at the Gallery. With any luck nothing worse will happen to me there than an embarrassing defeat at some board game or other, which I'm pretty much used to by now.