Fall falls...

The 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' has begun in earnest (who's he?) and most of my summer clothes have remained on the hangers and in the plastic storage box for the third summer running. They used to get lots of use when I went to Turkey twice a year but now, they are a sad collection of strappy wisps smelling faintly of Ambre Solaire and Hawaiian Tropic. Oh, what memories sniffing them brings back!

My friend Jill has a couple of bags of my cast-offs in her loft and wanted me to do a car boot with her yesterday. But I have a deadline to finish a job and my eyes were glued to the screen all day as I electronically annotated 221 pages of a novel written by someone who had never heard of quotation marks, with the result that all the dialogue was mingled in one huge chunk and I had no idea at all of who was saying what. I am also five pages into the report I have to provide for the literary consultancy.

On Jill's return, she rang from her canalside home in Camden and announced that she had made £45 selling beauty products that she gets as freebies through her work as a health and beauty writer. "How much did my stuff make?" I asked, holding my breath, knowing I had original Betty Barclay dresses and Monsoon skirts in my bags. "Seven quid," was the reply, "and you need to donate £4 of that towards the pitch money." Thank God I didn't make the 25 mile, hour and a half trek by various tubes and buses to Gospel Oak and waste a day when I could be working, all for the sake of three measly squid!

Today, I have the last 100 pages to plough through. And Mr Grumpy has just had a go at me for grumbling because his friend and her children are on their way round and I dared to protest politely that I'm trying to work.

"I spend half my life trying to fit around your work," he groused. Well, what does he expect? I'm trying to earn a living still. I'm a working writer and editor and he is on disability benefit and we have a complete clash of lifestyles. I am outraged when people bring kids round and disturb my working hours, but this is his house, as he keeps on reminding me, and he can see who he wants when he wants. Yet another reminder that if I am ever to write another book, I have to move out.