Goodness, I seem to have slept properly. I'm sure this bodes no good; the current exchange rate between a good night's sleep and all other forms of karma seems worryingly high, so I've probably sacrificed all sorts of other good stuff just for the sake of not being completely out of it on a Monday morning.

Also I seem to be turning into a cook, or at least into someone with delusions of cookhood. My continuing campaign of inviting nice people round to eat dinner with me has recently run me to the edge of my rather limited recipe collection, so I thought I'd extend it. The phrase ‘mushroom risotto’ came to mind, so I looked it up in my risotto recipe book and found myself thinking ‘no, that'll never work, it'll have the same problems as the last risotto I tried to make out of that book’. So I googled for alternative recipes, found a few, and found myself criticising them as well for different reasons. Eventually I put together a recipe that I felt looked vaguely believable, by means of cobbling together the best features of several different ones and fixing any obvious bugs.

I've always been the sort of cook who mindlessly follows recipes; I've never considered myself to have the imagination or the intuition to make food up as I go along. So it slightly puzzles me that it seemed so obviously right in this case to scoff at the various recipes I saw and invent my own. Also, while on the one hand it seems right and proper and good that my confidence is growing in this way, on the other hand I feel really quite nervous at the fact that I'm going to attempt to cook this for a guest this week without having had time to test it out on my own first!

Still, I suppose if I blow up the kitchen we can always send out for a takeaway. And a fire engine.