Not superstitious at all

but you never know.....I won £50 on my Premium Bonds this month, and about time too, if you ask me; that Ernie is such a tight git. Then today I had an email from the National Lottery entitled "News about your ticket!" telling me that that they have "some exciting news" about my ticket. Excitement wasn't actually my first response: torrents of spam promising me millions have made me an unreachable cynic, but the accurate spelling and the use of my first name made this message seem a little more genuine, so I restrained my automatic tap on the Delete button.

Very occasionally I buy a lottery ticket online, after my sister had a major win on the Postcode Lottery - I would post the video of her surprise visit by a tv crew here, but if I did, she would most definitely have to kill me - hoping that her luck would somehow transfer to me; the greed-warped logic of that now escapes me. Also, as a Sagittarian, the least lucky of all star signs, I don't expect to win anything, and am usually proved right. Anyway, after checking that this was a genuine Lotto email and not one of our old scam friends from Nigeria testing my gullibility, I signed in, and found that I had indeed won the lottery. A whole ten pounds of it.

Still, maybe third time luckier, but if not, this month's winnings can't be sneezed at, although my sister did call me an amateur. Cruel and unnecessary, I thought. She has clearly forgotten that I have that video clip of her answering the door in her slippers and a disbelieving attitude to a film crew from the local news channel.....

No begging letters please.

Tuesday/Wednesday Revenge of the Loaf

Join the dots: freshly baked bread, not quite cool, small slice - just to test, you know - with nice French butter, bedtime, sleeplessness, indigestion, getting up to wander about, more sleeplessness, radio only offering dreary/tragic/depressing stuff, dawn breaking, some dozing, time to get up, visitors due at 11, freshly (well, last night's) baked bread required for lunch, not for me though - insides still protesting - but bread pronounced great success.

Some of us never learn.

How is he?

Well, Kevin seems fine. But someone is throwing up on the landing (twice today). Could be Kevin, but could also be Harry, whose ability to overeat has been raised to new levels since he discovered how to get to Kevin's dish, which for over a year been placed in an inaccessible spot, too high for a Billy Bunter of a cat to get to.

Kevin has always been athletic, and good at jumping and climbing, so a high feeding place poses no problems for him. It also places him near the sink, where he likes to meditate. Harry, too rotund to do much more than heave himself onto a bed or an armchair, knew that there was a higher place (no, not Cat Heaven) where food could be lurking, but the logistics of reaching such a place defeated him for a long time. But eventually, when I was away for a few days, he learned to get up onto the hob, which is lower than the other kitchen work surfaces, and trot nimbly round the worktops, fired by gluttony, and finish up whatever un-greedy Kevin had left. He has become quite brazen about it too.

Antibacterial surface cleaners are big in this house; I know it's not green, but if any of my friends were to to die of food poisoning, I'd rather the investigation focused on supermarket ready meals or the Council's staff canteen, and not on the slack approach to paw hygiene taken by certain persons round here.