When will I learn?

I signed off yesterday with a promise to drink some wine. This involved finishing off the half bottle of Cava left over from the previous day. This might have been all right if I hadn't eaten lots of Easter egg, and Mr G hadn't decided to exhume a home-made prawn curry from the freezer. The combination did not sit well in my stomach and I awoke at 3.30 am feeling like death. The first painkiller I could find in the drawer in the dark tumbled down my throat, propelled by a slug of water. Unfortunately it was a Nurofen Extra and anyone with a stomach ulcer will know that ibuproofen is as lethal as aspirin to inflamed stomach linings.

At 5.45 I gave up, got up, fed cat, made tea, couldn't get radio to work (found out later that Mr G had plugged his rechargeable torch into the socket that is hidden round the side of the boiler). Put on TV - that wouldn't work either. Still don't know why. It appeared to have detuned itself from every station during the night. Cat has a limp. Frightened the life out of me last night by leaping from the dark garden onto the kitchen windowsill in pursuit of something invisible to the human eye. Fat, heavy cat, narrow windowsill. Result, one limp. Cat now sunbathing in pool of light on kitchen floor.

At 7.30, I took a cuppa up to Mr G in his attic bedroom, where, unlike me, he is not disturbed every dawn by the magpies that nest outside my front bedroom window. He had the duvet over his head. I thought he was dead. I stood there hovering, straining eyes and ears in the gloom for signs of life and eventually detected a faint, regular breath. Phew! He keeps telling me that he is bound to have another stroke and depart this world. I feel as if I am living in A&E.

Now, 9.40, bleary but headache-free, I am contemplated the finishing of Chapter Seven. Last night, I left my heroine at a party. I am in the mood to give her a hangover!

5.28 pm. Book word total - 30, 783. Two pages into Chapter Eight.