This morning I got up, looked out of the window at the roof of my car, and saw that the ice on it had formed a beautiful pattern of six-inch semicircles for no very clear reason. None of the other cars I could see from my window had the same thing. I immediately dived for my camera in the hope of posting a photo for people to admire and/or explain, only to find that important-looking bits were falling off said camera after I bashed it around unmercifully in my ever-present rucksack for two and a half years. Oh well. Apparently we're in for a cold winter, so if I get a new camera then the ice phenomenon will probably happen again at some point.

At the weekend I bought a packet of biscuits from Sainsbury's Freefrom range. They're rather nice; shortbread biscuits with bits of raspberry jam inside. They have one odd property, though, which is that the raspberry jam has not entirely stayed in its blobs, but has slightly permeated the entire inside of the biscuit – but not the outside. The result is that from the outside you see a normal-looking golden brown disc of shortbread, but when you bite into it it looks pinkish at the centre, giving you the rather curious impression that you're eating a medium rare biscuit. I fear that by the time I get to the end of the pack I'll be craving steak.

I got an old-pupils newsletter from one of my old schools last week. A girl I was at school with is now wicket keeper and opening batsman for the England women's cricket team, which won the women's Ashes this summer. I found an account of the matches on Wikipedia, and you couldn't go more than a few sentences without it saying something of the order of ‘and then Claire Taylor did something impressive’. I wonder if any of it managed to be televised in among the huge fuss made of the men's matches; I might have made an effort to watch some if I'd known.

Saturday was good. I wasn't really sure what I'd do for most of the morning, but then xanna phoned me up and suggested a pub lunch with some other people, which was very enjoyable; in the evening I wandered along to vyvyan's birthday drinks in another pub, and then we went on to hoiho's party where I played with bass instruments. That was odd. I used to be a violinist and I've dabbled a little in guitar and piano since then; a cello is a concept I can cope with (just about), but a double bass scares me because fundamentally I'm used to musical instruments which I can win a wrestling match with. Also everything I know how to play is a leading melody of some sort and sounds very odd played on a bass or a bass guitar.