Last night I held an impromptu Bagpuss-viewing evening, which was good fun although I still have one of the songs stuck in my head on repeat play. It makes a nice change to have guests rather than being one; there's a feeling of unaccustomed luxury at the thought that when everybody else is leaving to make their way home, you don't have to go anywhere :-)

(If anyone reads this and is offended not to have been invited: sorry, but there wasn't really room for anyone else owing to my small living room. Such is life. Display enough interest and it might happen again at some future date...)

This was duly followed by the usual sort of chitchat, such as speculation as to the chemical state of the writer's mind, wonderings about why the mice suddenly begin to undergo character development in the last two episodes rather than sooner, and mutterings about how children's TV isn't what it used to be. ("Professor Yaffle, I choose YOU!" just doesn't have the same ring to it, somehow.)

Visitors were particularly welcome because I've been getting very bored at home recently; I blame the weather, which makes it very uncomfortable for me to do any prolonged hacking because my precautionary Tubigrips are excessively hot. It's all right at work because we have decent air conditioning (and this year it hasn't even broken down yet!), but proper aircon is unfortunately not a standard fixture in ordinary residential sorts of places. It should be.

Arrgh. When you go to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, and two people are standing in there having a chat, and you have to ask one of them to move out of the way so you can get to the jar of coffee ... why can the other one, who's standing in front of the hot water machine, not exercise one or two brain cells and work out that once you have coffee in the mug you will have to ask him to move out of the way so you can get to that too? Even if he couldn't have proactively moved out of the way he could at least have avoided looking surprised.

I'm sure their conversation about chip design was of great commercial importance and was directly enhancing shareholder value, but it would have been nice if they could have been receptive to GREAT BIG HINTS that they were holding it in an outstandingly inconvenient place. For goodness' sake, just moving it six feet over to the less high-traffic corner of the kitchen would have been enough.

We've always been told that informal chats in the company kitchens are to be encouraged, are a major cause of Things Getting Done, and are an important social activity. I'm starting to think that in many cases they're actually an important antisocial activity.

As a wise man once said, "Out of my way, peasants!"