Building loops out of sand and dropping coins on Frenchmen

It is some time since Bessy woke me in the morning to a rendition of The funniest thing a dog can do (or something approximating that) - a piece she composed herself in her spare time. The tune is not bad but the woofs are in a constant loop so that it was midday before I realised the song probably could have finished by now and shut her up (by making a grunt that she associates with the dispiriting one given by a critic at some performance or other when she was a mere puppy. I hate to use such a manipulative means of stopping the music, but one has to get up).

Margaret was in the attic building herself a nest. I've no idea why.

I sat down with Felix and we drank some tea on his bench. He told me there were wondrous things going on at the bottom of the sea as a consequence of a child of nine dropping a coin off the edge of the cliff in the dying days of 1913. It would appear that the coin caused a flourish of improvisation among divers on the seabeds across the globe this year. I asked if such improvisation was likely to continue. Felix said he hadn't planned it to when he dropped the coin and we finished our tea in silence.

George competed to build a sandcastle on the seabed in an attempt to defy the tides. It worked and he got so carried away that he surfaced one day on top of his castle in the middle of the Atlantic. He called out to claim his prize, but everyone else had given up and gone home. This morning he looked as though he was still atop the sand: his eyes were bright and eager and ready to take what was his. Since I didn't have a prize, I left him and went through to the surgery.

Cookie had dressed the surgery up to be a reminder of a Napoleonic war tent. It would seem that some relative was a Napoleonic reader of indigestible facts of which, I hear, the great Frenchman was terribly afraid. When our first patient came in Cookie asked if she was Napoleon. For some reason she said yes and Cookie said that today's indigestible fact was that she would never walk on English soil. And she was right: the patient had spent her entire life hovering two centimetres (it couldn't have been an inch) above the ground.

Funny, these things. People throw things into the sea and wait for the loop to return to the beginning. Or decide that the waiting is too long and get on with building something even if it gets washed away in the big loop. Or get confused and become the loop themselves.