Bare Feet on the Tiles
3 September

Tomorrow, my yoga classes start up again and summer is officially over.

Well, emotionally anyway. I know that autumn does not begin in calendar terms until the equinox on 21 September. But this week also sees the schools open their doors again and the Last Night of the Proms takes place. So, it's as good a starting point for autumn as you could hope for - or at least for mentally preparing for autumn.

There are certain counter-indicators about. For example, the tiles on the kitchen floor. These provide a more than adequate guide as to the ambient temperature of the air. Come mid-winter, they are almost icy. You wouldn't want to spend too long walking across them in bare feet. Slippers are required footwear in the morning whilst preparing breakfast. Currently, however, padding around in bare feet in the mornings is a true late summer joy.

And today has been the epitome of a good weather day on the Western coast of England. Warm but not hot sun. A light breeze. Herds of high, white, woolly clouds ambling across the blue sward of the sky. My little heart just leaps for joy.

There's been a couple of good garden moments recently as well. I spotted a little Jenny wren bobbing about on the back garden wall and Ross snapped some shots of this elephant moth which took up residence on the side of the house for a couple of days.

We've also had a little scare with heilige pusskin, Jemima. She suddenly started screaming when her tail was touched near the base. We wondered what was up with her. She could move it so it obviously wasn't broken or anything like that. Closer examination revealed a wound on the underside. Again, we wondered if she'd caught it in a door when it banged shut or if she'd been in a fight of some sort or if she's had to defend her honour from a randy tom. Anyhow, a trip to the vet's was certainly called for and he pronounced that she had been bitten and that, from the pattern of the bite, he would guess that it had been a rat. So maybe she was after the babies and momma rat defended her home. Anyhow, she's had a few jabs and she's on antibiotics to prevent infection.

There's been recent conviviality as well.

Ross and I went swimming this afternoon at Crosby Leisure Centre. Ross tells me that, at nearly 31 years of age, he was 14 when he last went swimming. Given the 17 year gap and the fact that he has ME, he did very well indeed. We are hoping to make this a regular feature of our week. As carer, I get in for free so the whole enterprise costs only £1.75.

Last Saturday, Roland went for a pint of Black Sheep round at the Volunteers pub in Waterloo. We nattered about the world and its granny and opera and the inevitable fact of convenience being a strong element of any long-standing relationship - and the world being none the worse for this fact.

I've recently developed an interest in Facebook and have been looking as to who I can link up with. Ross certainly. My colleague, Ian as well. Colin also.

Some people are quite against it. John in Berwick upon Tweed was not impressed seeing it as an inducement to spend even more time online and yet another thing to log into. Roland had never even heard of it and didn't feel that he had the drive to set something up let alone keep it up to date. Phil tells me that he gets loads of requests to join but cannot remember if he has done anything about is and, even if he has, then he doesn't do anything with it! Son Robert was quite curt with me on the subject but then, like me, he does not possess a mobile phone and detests being available.

Ross, however, is using it as another avenue to market himself, his work and his creative services in an organic way. And I can see that the medium lends itself to just that.

I'm only just getting into it myself and then quite tentatively. I have enormous personal reservations and have locked everything in my profile down so that only the few invitees can see it. I'm shocked at the way some (usually young) people - that's in their 20s BTW and so young to me - make the most intimate details of their lives available to all and sundry.

Personally, I just want to connect with people in a more leisurely way. It's got me back in touch with Keith, who is now a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum so it must have some virtues. I've also discovered the irrepressible James who has posted this Edinburgh based billboard within his profile as a mark of self-deprication and anti-marketing.

I've just completed Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain which is a quite remarkable book in many ways and a completely frustrating book in many others. It's set along the banks of the Mississippi in the early nineteenth century among the slave owning classes. The plot turns on a slave who though only one sixteenth black is still considered to be a negro and who swaps her son (one thirtisecond black) with the master's. There's all sorts of issues to do with miscegenation and racial identity here which are fascinating but never followed through. The real, white son disappears out of the plot at about the half way stage of the novel and there's a sense in which the narrative "proves" that bad blood will out. Still it's an intriguing read and a reminder that thinking folk face all manner of moral dilemmas whatever the age.

As a by blow, I found out from this book the origins of the phrase to be "sold down the river". It is quite literal and horrible. Slaves were threatened in more liberal and Northern states with being sold on to less supportive employers in the Southern states down the river.

Ross and I also watched Blood Diamond on DVD from the local library. This film garnered all sorts of praise on its release earlier in the year but I really couldn't see what the fuss was about. The issue of diamonds taken from a war zone and sold onto the West so that nice, middle class people could have fancy engagement and wedding rings is already somewhat passé. The issue of child soldiers continues but is hardly developed within the film and the leader of the child soldiers remains a cipher whose motivation is dismissed as text-book Socialist laced with personal greed. Beyond that we have the rough diamond (our Leonardo sporting a variable Southern African accent) who comes good and the campaigning (female) journalist without whom no-one bad would be brought to account. It was OK but not memorable.

Earlier this year, we posted news of gossip that Wentworth Miller is gay and is dating another TV actor, Luke MacFarlane. Well, last Saturday, the blogs were ablaze with photographs of the two of them hanging out together in Los Angeles.

According to word from the blogs, the pair first avoided being photographed together but eventually walked down the street together with a smile. Wentworth, 35, and Luke, 27, started their day off together by visiting printing store Kinko's, where the Prison Break star surfed the web. Afterwards the pair grabbed some drinks from Starbucks and headed to a small art gallery in Culver City. Finally, Went and Luke went to the In-N-Out Burger drive-thru and called it a day.

The penalty of celebrity status is that people (including me) read, remember, distribute and print this stuff.