I’ve made the most of not being “on the road” by staying firmly “in the flat”. Personal hygiene levels have risen dramatically, several long-elapsed deadlines have been successfully smashed, my diet has expanded beyond the bread’n'cheese frontier into the land flowing with trout and broccoli. In addition, subtle but effective hectoring from Dicky has led me to abandon my consumption of aspartame-ridden Diet Coke in favour of coffee. I stood like an idiot in the coffee aisle in Sainsbury’s yesterday, trying to choose something that would give me full flavour without inducing palpitations, and ended up with Café Direct Machu Picchu, and I’ve no idea whether that’s any good or not, for all I know Machu Picchu could be Peruvian for Gullible Twat, so if anyone has any better recommendations for my one-person cafetiere, they would be most welcome.

Other developments? I received a £225 mobile phone bill for the last 30 days, which is verging on crippling, but I suppose it’s my own stupid fault. Oh, give me a home, where the mobile phones roam, but you don’t get charged £20 for accidentally leaving the bloody data connection on. Agh. To try and even things up with T-Mobile I went to my local T-Mobile store to get my long awaited free upgrade. My Nokia N70 is falling to bits, so I sauntered in and demanded my rightful upgrade, only to discover that the best Nokia they can do for me at the moment is – you guessed it – an N70. But they gave me a pay-as-you-go-SIM card for free, so now I have two Nokia N70 phones, and if anyone fancies popping round, we can talk to each other from opposite ends of the flat as if I owned a pair of walkie-talkies and it’ll only cost me about 15p a minute. Bargain.

Talking of the flat, I arrived back to discover no sign of demiabeille, which wasn’t totally unexpected as she told me she was moving out in early November. The plan is for my long-cherished partner to move in at some point around the festive season, by which I mean Christmas, but it could just as easily be Easter or Whitsun, at the rate our various home improvements are proceeding. A man isn’t truly a man until he’s been out and bought a carpet, at least that’s what I’ve decided, as I’m about to go out and buy a carpet. At the moments it’s a toss-up between a Windsor Sheraton Saxony, in 100% luxurious polypropylene, or Heritage Gleneagle Twist, also in 100% luxurious polypropylene, which, knowing my luck with home furnishing, is probably some kind of fire accelerant. Still, you’re not a man until you’ve put out a blaze in your living room with 1/2 a cup of Machu Picchu coffee, that’s what I say – not often though, just the once, just then in fact.

Tomorrow I go and teach a horse whisperer to play the musical saw, before learning how to whisper effectively at horses. I’m terrified of horses, and the horse will probably be terrified of my saw-based rendition of “Wichita Lineman”, so it should be interesting, which is probably why the Independent are sending a photographer.