A whole range of things made me smile on the way home:

++ carolling into R's phone, left lonesome at home

++ gazing goggle-eyed at a woman shouting in an Essex-screech (excuse my inner/outer snob) 'you don't wanna come home, that's why you come home so late, you don't wanna and you blame me' yadda yadda. Then the bloke walking past me muttering ' I wouldn't want to go home either'

++ seeing a black cat unfurl itself from a car bonnet, yawn, stretch its tail into an arc then leap off

++ getting very excited about a new idea which might just work

Highlights of the last seven days: baroque crumble in Lecce, risotto with lemon zest and gamberetti, oak-lined and terrifyingly curvy bus journey over the Gargano, wavy seas at Vieste, olive groves and shade, proper pine scents, a three hour wait in a car park, pisspoor Italian, bumpy up from Pescara, mass at a duomo, licky puppy, milky sunrise, apricot sunset, R and seven days in the same place.

Italy -3 days - har har!

No longer a secret pleasure, it's time to come out and admit that Cup a Soups rule. Ah, the purge power of the blog.

Tube ugh. Last night while travelling home, the girlwoman opposite me took out some dental floss then flossed her teeth on a packed tube. Somewhere around Oxford Circus she chucked the used floss on the floor then continued to do her full make-up, before getting off. The man who sat in her now empty seat promptly trod on her dental floss.

Which is precisely the reason I take my shoes off the second I get home.

Tube story: a man wearing glasses, with one glass cardboarded over, stood at the end of my carriage last night after getting on at Holborn. He spoke loudly, 'There are four men sitting down on this side, and one, two, three, four, five men sitting on this side and all these women standing in the middle. You should be ashamed of yourselves! Get up, don't wait to be asked, you're an embarassment to all men. Stand up and give your seats to the women!'

Err, thanks. But in summer, when we sit down, some men like to look down our tops and standing is the preferred option.