Hello? *Waves*

I'm sorry I've been AWOL.

What have I been up to? I've been to the UK and eaten quite a lot of cake - most of it wheat free but not all of it. Sorry body. It was my Dad's 82nd birthday and Daughter and Sister made him a 'light chocolate cake' from Harry Eastwood's Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache book. It was quite simply the best cake I've ever eaten.

My sister taught me to make tzatziki and I cooked quite a lot; most out of character.

I raced like a maniac around the countryside seeing people and doing things but people drove and trained around England to come and see us too. Thank you people. Several things got cancelled and we weren't able to reschedule and other things didn't get arranged in the first place. I'm so sorry to people I didn't manage to see.

We got back to Bangkok just in time for Sister in Law and her family to arrive. They had a week in the city and then we all set off for a week by the sea - Koh Samed. I'll skim over the fact that I had what I think might have been flu while there. At least I could look at the sea while I felt crap.

And then the kids went back to school and it felt like we'd never been away.

I feel very 'start of a new term' though. We've started planning for our Melbourne Cup hats - I am feeling very excited about these. And I've bought myself a food processor (both Husband and I bought food processors to the relationship. We both had them as students and bits had broken off so that nothing fitted together in the end. They were judged too falling apart to make the trip to Thailand. Both were twenty years old which I reckon was pretty bloody marvellous and is why this week I bought a new Kenwood.) I've continued to cook quite a lot - tzatziki, hummus, leek and potato soup, guacamole. I'm failing to buy sweet potatoes in Bangkok at the moment so I can make Leon's sweet potato falafel. Leon says it must be the ones that are orange inside. Somewhere else it said there are Japanese sweet potato and the internet said that what Americans call yams, often aren't. Or something. So I keep going to gaze at sweet potato shaped things in greengrocers, wondering if they're the right thing to buy.

And I'm writing. I've had five days of storming writing or rewriting to be accurate. I appear to have worked out what needs doing with the novel and I feel a bit floaty about it.

I'm beginning to think the fairies might have dropped in and exchanged me for a slightly better model.