Happy St. Andrew's Day!

I've been exercising this morning. It wouldn't be healthy, except that it was in a good cause. We have a long, narrow kitchen and I've been making the Christmas cake (now in the oven), which means a good deal of skipping up and down: gathering all the ingredients up one end, weighing and mixing them at the next 'work station', then putting the packets and jars of those things that have already gone in on to the following bit of bench, so that I don't get muddled. I'm easily muddled.

I'm a surprisingly organised cook or baker, and I always clean up as I go along - somewhere in my life I have to be virtuous, and I think this is it.

Stuffing also made and cooling for the freezer, and because it's a slightly milder day and the oven is on the kitchen is almost tolerably warm, so I've taken out the compostables, made paper logs for the fire, sorted out the dishes, and cleaned around the cats' dishes (the cats really didn't help with the baking: I was just about to start wrapping and lining the tin when No.3 Cat went wild and climbed the curtains, and No.2 Cat in protest was sick on the floor).

The stack of boxes of books for the book signing is intimidating me in the study, anyway, and the study also tends to be the place where Christmas presents accumulate prior to boxing and posting to distant family and friends. It's now a bit of a challenge to get to the desk, and the laptop there is being eccentric again, so I've brought the more mobile one into the kitchen where it tells me that actually, no, it is too cold to function out here. It's certainly too cold to make yoghurt, which has to sit and do its thing in the dining room. We usually judge things by how long you can leave the fridge open before the thermostat complains - in November that's usually rather a long time!

Ideas buzzing in my head for the next Murray, which I hope to start writing in the New Year. The rest of the plans for the year include a (possibly final) standalone, a third Hippolyta Napier, and a Letho-based novella dealing with those pesky witches! But who knows?