Summer is here. I am wearing a short-sleaved shirt, sans jacket and it feels good. On Saturday however I got a taste of what London is going to be like in summer - grimey, blackened and disgustingly hot. Winter will be sorely missed, but I shall endeavour to enjoy summer anyway. I bought new sunglasses on Friday, they are big, blind-person's welding glasses. Nothing can get in, only my sight can get out - I feel supremely invisible and comfortable behind my blind-person's sunglasses, I can oggle and stare, walk around in public admiring healthy breasts without any shame.

I cleaned the flat yesterday. That involves taking the recycling downstairs, that means moving bottle city. I had two boxes of bottles to take down. A ceremonious wake for the last week's beverage bonanaza. I deposited my two cardboard caskets, piled high and overloaded just inside the front door of the building. I was sifting through the post on the mantle when the lady from downstairs came in, she startled me and I fell backwards and stumbled over my own two boxes of bottles. I managed a confused 'Hi there' - but she took one scathing look at me and made off as quickly as possible, leaving me to pull myself up from the small mountain of bottles I had fallen over in the first place.

Dollar's Mickey Mouse balloon has been removed, and received an appropriate burial, namely the rubbish bin - after I had sucked out the remaining helium for my David Beckham impression.

Phil came back from his weekend in Brussels. The flat was showered with fitting gifts of proper Leffe beer goblets, the finest truffles and chocolates I can remember eating, maybe ever, and beers that we have not been able to find in the UK (very few people actually know what a real box of chocolates is like - the world has been misinformed by oversized vegetable fat and boiled hoof dispensing corporations like Cadburies, sadly we think of Quality Streets as a box of chocolates)