Falling Leaves
5 September

Out in the back garden the plum tree is beginning to shed its leaves and the flowers on the honeysuckle are turning to bright red berries. Spiders' webs are filmed with a delicate morning mist.

There is some late colour out there with the purple flowers of the caryopteris bushes, the yellow of the rudbeckia flowers and the delicate white flowers of our garlic chives.

Jemima is increasingly perturbed by the cold mornings. It's nearly a year since she first came to live with us. Initially, she spent all of her time indoors warmed by the central heating. When it came time for her to venture out, we were already well into spring. She has never really known the chills of the dark times of the year. We suspect that she will spend an increasing amount of time sheltering from the outside.

Today has been a busy day. We took a trip into town first thing via the new local recycling plant where they take plastic as well as the usual glass and paper, so we are continuing our drive to be more ecological. From there, we went to John Lewis where we bought some new day-to-day cutlery as our previous stock was showing its age. Our regular dining set was bought for me by my Aunt Ellen when I moved into Egerton Street. We also bought a mattress to replace the one I bought when I first moved into Percy Street. I suppose it is not surprising that, after nearly ten years together, there's very little left of my life before Ross.

Then it was off to Lady Green Nurseries where we bought some sage, thyme and lavender for the back garden. We spent a little time planting them out in the border at tthe bottom end of the garden. Finally, we started packing up the Music Room into boxes as a preparation for decorating.

So, busy little boys we are.

Elsewhere, little Mickey came back to England but went to Newcastle rather than Liverpool. Chiz!

We've watched a couple of films too.

Ong-Bak was a Hong Kong martial arts film. Jony Jaa, our hero, was very watchable but I don't know that I would want to watch many films in this genre. On one level, it was very simplistic in terms of good and evil and all of the plot was a sequence of devices to get us from one fight to another - and the fights, which were incredibly well choreographed, were quite amazing if you could turn off from the fact that they were representing violence. There were also some fairly bizarre moments like a chase using local taxis which looked like milk floats - I don't know if this was meant to be comic or not but it appeared to be a part of the genre.

Tie Me Up; Tie Me Down is an early Almodóvar film starring a young Antonio Banderas when he was very . Whilst it's not in the same class as Almodóvar's later films, it is still a very good couple of hours. I first saw it when it came out in the late 1980s with Richard but I didn't let that spoil my enjoyment and it's certainly stood the test of time.