Winter brings many grey days. Perhaps there is a quota somewhere that has to be satisfied. Who cares. No day is every truly grey - you just have to find the brightly coloured bits and enjoy them.

Today was spent cleaning the pantry cupboards and assembling a new can rack designed to roll the cans down into one's eager hand when required. Of course it doesn't - the cans are always in the wrong sequence, soup arriving instead of beans, and the wrong soup at that. The damn thing was designed not to fit together properly and then lo and behold would not fit in the cupboard without some severe persuasion. Still, after a few suitably multi-coloured utterances, it did and now awaits the inevitable collapse at some inconvenient time.

Having solved the puzzle of the can rack, I then remembered that I needed to collect a load of shirts from the laundry. What a brilliant place the laundry is. I have tremendous admiration for the way it manages to produce both clean and ironed shirts in a large brown paper parcel for a very reasonable charge with unfailing regularity. How it does so is a complete mystery and frankly I don't care if it transports them half way around the world and back just as long as I don't have to be involved in the process.