Frosting balads with a grasshopper's foreboding

There are times when, on a frosty winter morning, I open my eyes and wonder if there ever was a day that wasn't worth getting up for. Those times are few, I'm pleased to say, otherwise I might have turned into a hopeless optimist. Whilst it's not something I'm averse to being, Margaret wouldn't have it. So I think of the pleasantness of such mornings, then turn over and forget it.

Bessy has a habit of frosting chocolate cakes with the shells of ancient crustaceans she's happened upon down on the beach. She will growl incessantly so that the cake goes stale and is never eaten. I think she imagines that the crustaceans think of the cake as a place to rest their ancient and weary bodies. But I may be wrong.

Felix was looking out over the English Channel with a sense of welcome foreboding (that's what he calls it, not me). We had a cup of tea and the bench collapsed beneath us. We laughed despite it being unwelcome.

George told me in the surgery today that he had been welcomed into the elite corps of altruistic grasshoppers abounding with mates in a jelly malange. I asked why he had joined. He looked at me in one of his severe ways and said that to join was to live and that was all he had to say. I was going to ask to see some photos, intrigued as I was by the jelly thing, but there are times to ask and times not to.

Cookie has taken to balancing patients on the end of a dental probe. She greeted me today with Mr Stevens looking rather at ease with the probe supporting him in the midrif at some distance above Cookie's shoulder. Mr Stevens, I should let you know, has a habit of recounting terrible balads about wayward children on London's buses. He has a phobia about buses and has never met a delinquent child, but that doesn't stop him singing about them.

Which is rather pleasant as it brings me on to the optimism enclosed within a frosty lawn. You don't even have to open your eyes to know it's there and it's worth getting out of bed for - whatever your wife says.