the Government's new 'Dig up the Road plan for congesting traffic Scheme'

It must be summer. The city is slowly filling up with tourists, heat, smells and roadworks, not necessarily in that order. I may have to spend the next two months lying on the cold stone floor of my bathroom in a doomed attempt to get away from it all, writing book updates on the adjacent computer by a combination of telekinesis and foot contortions while the cats bring me cooling draughts alternating with actual Earl Grey tea for the necessary motive power.

In other summertime news, we are having a bad outbreak of Mad Neighbour, who has resumed her tendency to shout "Filthy pigs!" over the garden wall whenever we have the effrontery to actually (gasp!) socialise in our very own back courtyard. I'm spending happy free moments between mass assaults on Italo Calvino in composing a brief, dignified and very very rude letter to her, pointing out that she has absolutely no grounds for complaint and we wouldn't listen to her even if she was capable of couching said complaints in an adult, reasonable fashion, which she isn't. Still considering whether to add a rider to the effect that she is a laughing-stock and byword to our immediate social circle and a select portion of Teh Internet. Also, the Friendly Psychologist thinks said Mad Neighbour is simply a sad person with no actual social life of her own whose attacks are motivated by jealousy, although I probably shouldn't add that to the letter in the interests of World Peace. Actually, it just occurred to me: next time we braai out there we should orchestrate co-ordinated bursts of singing in retaliation. I'm thinking "Always Look On the Bright Side Of Life", scored for librsa, thumping and military spoons.

Memo to self: must stop reading four Goon Show scrips immediately before going to bed. Apart from infiltrating my subject lines¹ and generally degenerating my language to the level of thing, it's giving me extremely trippy and rather scurrilous dreams².

Now off for elephant soup and squodged spuds (or, possibly, a less heating sort of lunch) with the highly esteemed and pressed khoi_boi, partially for purposes of uninhibited Miyazaki-swopping. Somewhere in the last two years, amid the whimpering of my credit card, I've actually built up a DVD collection worthy of borrowage. Go figure.

¹The above from "The Red Capsule", a direct rip-off of "Quartermass and the Pit", of early cult BBC sf television fame. (2005 remake [of Quartermass, not the Goon Show] co-starring the same David Tennant who is shortly appearing as a Timelord in a big blue box on a screen near you if you happen to be in Britain or friendly with me, proud possessor of³ the first two serieseseses. The man clearly does sf somewhat wholesalely. Approval.)
² Involving bizarre erotic encounters at high speed on the back of a moving vehicle on a highway at night, all of above being transmitted live online for the delectation of a whole flock of interested light-flecks. Cameo appearances by certain individuals not unknown to these pages, although wild horses etc.
³ Well, Amazon promised they dispatched Season 2 yesterday, although my Amazing Mother, TM, will only haul the loot hence in mid-December. Anyone know where I can buy her a Bag of Holding for Christmas...?^4
4 Nested Footnotes R Us. If anyone's actually read down this far, is the smaller font too (a) academic, (b) pretentious, or (c) difficult to read? Thought so, she says gloomily.