Potty pot and the issue with tissue

Blip what you please, said Gill. So I did. This is she, turning to me for one frame only as she tried to watch a film about Queen Victoria. She was not as amused as she looked and neither was Gill. It was touch and go but she just edged out an apple and glassware.

Attempts to blip were not going down so well tonight. But any thoughts of not blipping were abandoned after a good day on the book plotting. I'm going to enjoy researching and writing this one. Spent a pleasant hour this aft with son John on Skype as he showed me various designs for a business card he said he would make for me. Not that I have much business.

A letter came today from a medical friend, Charles, a consultant pediatrician. With the letter he'd included an article from the British Medical Journal entitled Toilet hygiene in the classical era. During our last walk together we'd been discussing the problem of MRSA in hospitals and the perils surrounding hand-washing when skin contact with taps could be part of the problem.

Not that the article shed much light on the issue of toilet tissue (that's almost poetry in motion), but it was fascinating to discover that, without it, the Greeks and the Romans often used pessoi - oval or circular fragments of ceramic that must have proved an eye-watering substitute. So I guess it wasn't just bears that got them.