So it's early Monday morning and I am determined to post a daily diary of life in the suburbs of a country town - forget London and learn to live again as I will tell. The snow settled in and I was in a wonderful fairyland, expecting the white prince to ride to me, his horse's hooves being the first to mark that virgin snow. Instead I opened the door to my friend Irene who was patient with me while she taught me the rudiments of this useless activity, blogging. What is it about the human psyche that makes us want to tell about our lives to the rest of the world? Perhaps without it we do not exist. If we sat in an empty room with nobody around and no outside communication then we would not, would we? Now I exist because of the information on this blog.

As the snow melted along with my dreams of rescue by the handsome prince, I settled in to what is the second thing I love doing the most (the first being the actual writing) - editing my completed novel Brother's Keeper, taking out all those useless colons and semi-colons, cutting long sentences (I love long sentences, clauses, sub-clauses and convolutions) and making sure the action scenes work. Having wallowed in history for my first three novels, which are in the process of being published by Goldenford Publishers, I have jumped to a novel set in the last fifty years, basing it on family myth and stories. The novel will need another few edits and checks - does anyone know, for instance, if boys from Uppingham (the Catholic public school) go to Cambridge?

Spent a good half hour having a chat with my oldest friend (well, not in age but in time known - we went to infant's school together) catching up on her family and moaning about mine.

I use the snow as an excuse not to go and see my brother in the Acute Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit in Blackheath - a round trip of over 100 miles - but feel guilty all afternoon and some of the evening, until the wine kicks in, because he has very few visitors, I'm his closest relative as he never married and has no children. More about him and the wonderful NHS as we go along - I'm writing a faction about our experiences since February 2007 when he was first diagnosed with a brain tumour. My first piece of advice relating to the NHS: don't go near it, it will make you ill.

Then in the early evening I decide to cook experimentally. I don't do cooking, having a wonderful spouse who is creative in that area, but he's mummy-sitting at the moment - more later - but this recipe is great, an adjustment from one in a magazine, because I don't have any of the recommended walnuts and I like garlic:

take half of a peanut pumpkin and cook in oven until soft (about 45 minutes)
when soft, grill in a non-stick frying pan as much bacon as you think is appropriate to eat with the pumpkin, with some garlic, then when the bacon is cooked, thrown in as many flaked almonds as you want (or the walnuts if you have them) then pour over some sherry-vinegar (buy in the Deli in FarnboroughSurrey - a fantastic shop) and when all is sizzling take the pumpkin out of the oven and pour over the bacon mixture - and eat piping hot with some salad or green veggie.

You can see I'm all for throwing anything in and letting it rip....

Ended the day reading some of the Sunday supplements, and listening to Mozart's sacred music which put me in a melancholy-happy mood. And so to bed.