Cycling through strawberries and falling from loose planks

Well, there you are: the flies buzzed and the dog barked and the morning got going. Thank goodness for flies or I don't know where I would be at midday on a Saturday. Today Bessy and Margaret had organised that a blue light flash interminably on the moon and got me to work out which crater it was in. I failed, but it was fun trying to work it out, and Bessy got to play God for a couple of hours, which is not an issue in the grand scheme of things.

Felix spent some time on the moon on Friday. His intention was to communicate an extremely valuable idea - despite the partial eclipse - to the fellow mariners he had left behind in 1372 (when he fell overboard on the way to a wedding in Kairouan). As we sat sipping our tea, looking out over the English Channel in its hazy splendour, I asked what he had tried to communicate. There were a number of deep sighs that emanated from his being (I'm not certain he was aware of them) and then a pronouncement: the loose plank is inevitably the safest. I looked at my old tea friend for some minutes before deciding that it wasn't worth asking: why the moon?

Yesterday - no doubt inspired by the darkened sun - George told me he had spent some time during his youth competing to suck as much life from a group of maleficent raspberry growers in Wiltshire, using three straws only. I wondered if this wasn't a terribly antisocial activity in view of the need for fresh-faced farmers of any sort to keep us all going. George looked at me as if there were no end to my stupidity: they had all known full well that it was impossible to denude anybody - misbehaving or otherwise - of their core vitality with only three straws.

Fortunately Cookie knew nothing about raspberries owing to her aversion to all things red (she wears green glasses when we remove teeth). Our last patient yesterday, Mr Pinklepity, is capable of attending us whilst suspending his childhood dreams (mostly revolving around a pink bike with a flat rear tyre) in a fanciful way from the ceiling. Cookie loves these appointments. Yesterday Mr Pinklepity generated for us a dream of some merit: all three of us were cycling pink bikes with flat rear tyres in a near perfect figure of irreconcilable duplicity. No, I didn't get it either, but we had a lot of fun.

Which brings me back to blue lights hidden on the moon. There are mornings when I can't love my wife enough, when her going to the moon just to give me something wonderful to wake up to seems like nothing at all. And it's got nothing to do with flies, and dogs barking.