So here I am, idiot of the day, finally ensconced on my hotel room in London. It’s been a long day and I have not helped myself.

My trip of 250 miles from home to office didn’t go too badly. In fact, despite missing a connection because of a delayed train, it went fine really – when you travel outside of peak hours it’s always better. Then a couple of hours in the office, a trip to the hairdresser where a really gentle and kind young Korean man cut my hair and told me that for a hairdresser, London is the best place in the world to train.

Some would say that it’s ‘incomers’ (of whatever type – whether from elsewhere in the UK or overseas) who push up prices in London for accommodation and therefore stop youngsters getting on the housing ladder. To me, that’s a pointless argument when you consider what fabulous things they bring to this city. (BTW – this ‘rant’ has been prompted by a letter in a local Cornwall newspaper at the weekend stating that locals shouldn’t welcome incomers there for exactly the same reason. Pah to that – it’s not a Cornish problem any more than anywhere else – it’s a symptom of a modern society with too few houses to go around. I wonder how many people who feel like that are happy to think that their own children, moving to London to experience big city life or to earn loads of dosh in banking or advertising or whatever, feel that they should just stay at home because they’re taking away homes from Londoners?)

Anyway, I brought with me Jackie Moffat’s new book, which was bought for me by my folks and has just surfaced to the top of my book pile. I have raved in these pages before about her last one, Funny Farm, which helped me recover from a virus a couple of years ago.

This one really reminds me of home. When I left this morning, as I do every time I leave, I found myself hungrily drinking in the sights, sounds and smells of home, knowing that I won’t find my way back there for a few days.

The book is about a part of the country that has many parallels with Cornwall – for a start, it’s sheep farming country so her stories about ewes with red bottoms because they’d been ‘served’ by the tup reminded me of when I wrote about that very thing, not knowing the reason for the red bottoms!

Jackie has become one of my cyber-friends, not through pbase, but because I looked her up on google and wrote an email to her after I’d so thoroughly enjoyed her first book. She emailed me only a couple of days ago and hence the book finally finding its way into my handbag for this trip.

It’s a good job I had her friendly, comforting tale of living ‘the good life’ with me because I have made my own life bad today by getting mixed up about where I was staying, causing me an hour delay and a couple of walked miles that I didn’t need when towing a suitcase and baggage for a few days away. I pitched up at the hotel I thought I’d booked myself into and discovered that in fact, I was in another hotel about five miles away and that I’d passed on the train half an hour earlier……stooooooooooooopid!

So, she has saved me from being morose and sorry for myself. On the way to the hotel and thinking about how I could depict this, I picked myself a few flowers and bits of twig to remind me of home. It doesn’t make up for the comfort of snuggling up with DM at night, but at least it’s something green!

Last year - tomatoes!