New distractions

No.3 Cat, who prefers (at present) to spend much of his time at unnatural angles, makes writing difficult - and almost everything else, too! After the much lamented death of No.1 Cat in May, just short of his nineteenth birthday, we felt there was a cat vacancy. No.2 Cat, it has to be said, does not feel the same way about the situation, particularly as No.3 Cat creeps up on him while he's eating - I think he's just trying to work out if he himself will ever be that enormous, or that ginger.

The house seemed very full of both people and animals yesterday, suddenly, and I ended up writing on the stairs for oh, a full ten minutes or so until someone came to tell me that No.3 Cat had mistaken the degus' dustbath for a litter tray, and the degus were telling him what they thought of it. Ho, hum, and out with the disinfectant again.

I'm on Chapter Eight but I'm supposed to finish Chapter Twelve by the end of this month. Unfortunately there are many things other than writing that I'm supposed to be doing, too, as usual, but I must get the writing done because September is always a complete whirlwind and I really want to get this one out for Christmas, so I can't fall behind!

I'm giving a talk this week on Regency Aberdeen: there will, at some point, be a time when Murray comes to Aberdeen (I think it's 1819) so it's as well to be prepared! At the moment I'm fretting very slightly as I have 28 slides on a Powerpoint and I have a niggling feeling that the equipment where the talk is taking place is Mac, while I'm PC. Fretting is about all I can do - I shall leave the technical side to someone more competent or the wheels will definitely fall off. A friend of mine once gave a talk in Sussex. He had a full carousel of slides, and opened his mouth to speak, when a woman in the front row moved to take her jacket off and the whole lot spilled on to the floor in complete disarray. I was halfway through a talk at the university with about 80 slides on Powerpoint a few years ago when the whole system shut down - it was half past eight at night, after all, and all the systems shut down then unless (crucially) you've remembered to override them for an evening talk. The trouble is, you have to wait for everything to cool down and then boot up again before you can restart! Why on earth do we bother?