Chris (Cwol) is coming round to visit any minute now, so I've been preparing things for his visit. Accordingly, there are freshly roasted coffee beans I did last night, and bread is baking even as I type. The plan is to have a steak sandwich at around midday.

I've rearranged my bedsit so two of us can sit at the table, and I have to say I like this arrangement a lot better. My easy chair is stuck in the corner. I'll see how it actually works in practice for day-to-day living, but for having someone over it's much more pleasant and open.

I've even hoovered. It's exactly as much faff as I remember, even with the tiny Tescos hoover that's so easy to move around. Now I know why I don't do it very often. I have to admit, it does make a real difference but I can't exactly see it being a weekly event. Anyway, it's done and I am pleased with the results.

My to-do list for today:

Post a letter
Buy steak
Make coffee
Drink coffee
Make a steak sandwich
Eat a steak sandwich.

The letterbox is right next to the butcher's, and the butcher is about eighty yards away, just to give some perspective.

I've been roasting my own coffee. I've learned, through dreadful experience, that you have to pretty much roast it until it all looks hideously burned. But there's a fine line between that and it actually being hideously burned. Too little roasting or too much and the end result is not coffee. And you have to roast the coffee for your morning cup the night before, to give the roasted beans the 12 hours they need for the flavour to develop.

This morning, on my third attempt, I ended up with actual COFFEE! Unfortunately, I over-brewed it so there's a sour tannic note, but other than that it's delicious. Millions of complex flavours and all that. Tomorrow, I know not to try to fire up the computer while the coffee is brewing, since I get distracted.

As to whether all this faff is actually worth it, even with my over-brewed cuppa I have to say yes, yes it is. It's like the taste difference between really good chocolate and Cadbury's. The Cadbury's is still nice (well, to those who like Cadbury's) but it's less complex.

It's been a busy weekend, and ya boo sucks to people who only have house viewings on a Saturday. Anyway, a skip has been and... actually is still there, though it was supposed to be picked up this morning. Scrap gatherers keep pausing and going through the rubbish for useful items, so rather than it being overfilled, it's emptier than expected.

ccooke's and ruthi's items increasingly have homes to live in, rather than places which they have been put. Also, ruthi found the most adorable card covered in watercolour painted little cartoon mice. It's next to me now.

I feel crap. I overdid it yesterday, I have sinus pain and tonsilitis and I am hungover from getting rather drunk on good whisky. All in all, no complaints at all.

So, Simon wanted to meet up in London and the place Eric suggested was Federation Café in Brixton Village. I've not seen Brixton Village before. It's astounding. The bright colours of home decor and clothes punctuate the busy ribbons of every form of café and small restaurant possible. It's impossibly crowded and incredibly friendly, especially if you're used to the idea that Londoners are stand-offish.

Federation Café itself actually hides in this background, with plain wooden tables outside, stencilled in black. They do fresh cakes, baked often enough that we ended up viewing two different selections while we were there. There's a limited, tasty selection of savouries. And they roast beans once a day, throwing out what's unused, and they grind beans every half an hour. The coffee is the best I've ever tasted, anywhere. I saved my morning caffeine dose for their coffee and had a little cup of miracles, and then the decaf turned out to also be amazingly tasty, which is a new and lovely experience for a decaf drinker.

The actual social experience was the same as these things always are - nice people chatting about general subjects and a very pleasant way to spend the afternoon. A bloke who was trying to read his paper ended up part of our circle, brought in I know not how or why, but kept there by being passed food. We were sharing our cakes - salted caramel millionaire's shortbread, rosewater and raspberry sponge, blackberry and almond cake and goodness knows what else.

On another subject entirely, we watched Horizon last night, me and ccooke and ruthi. The subject was domestic cats, which have been tracked and had cameras put on for a week-long survey. It was great. The talk about how cats are evolving was less so, but honestly just seeing cats' home ranges, and how they cover different shifts, and how cats in a multi-cat household genuinely are social, that was brilliant. I hope this becomes a regular thing, like Springwatch.

I went looking at houses with ruthi, and today was a really good day for it. One house we went to see was at Ascham End. In that cul-de-sac, and the streets leading up to it, none of the gardens had flowering shrubs or any sort of ornament, and very few even had their garden walls - the most common boundary was an inches-high smear of broken rubble. The house front had been vandalised, as had the 'for sale' sign, and when we looked though the ivy-buckled window, there was damp inside. We cancelled that viewing.

The next house viewing cancelled on us, but by then we'd been spending the between-time picnicking in Tottenham Marshes. Behind us was a gas storage tower, some warehouses and a broken factory. In front, a horse-shoe shape of trees, hawthorn bushes covered in May blossom and flat ground with waving flowering grass punctuated by bees and other insects. It was really very lovely.

We walked around to a quite nice bridge and played pooh-sticks.

I'm getting better again. From the depression and, surprisingly, from the M.E. relapse too. I *think* the stomach bug may have stopped me absorbing my drugs. I do know already that not taking my drugs for three days causes an entirely predictable M.E. crash. I hope I'm right, because if so I'll keep on improving back to where I was, pretty quickly.

I can't concentrate on anything at all though. I don't understand the rules for the Empire LARP, I can't keep my accounts going, I've stopped doing Latin and the other stuff. I can't even put a decent letter together. So, I've been playing Secret of the Magic Crystals which is a banal game in which you look after, train and breed magical ponies.

Meanwhile, I have been massively fortunate to have phone chats and texts and things from some of the loveliest people on this planet. You know who you are, and I am so very lucky to know you.

Oh ye gods! Being at work is so much better than not being at work! I'd been in a complete slump, and was hoping that being at work would kick me out of it. I'm now knackered, but my mood has shot up.

I spent the entire day, more or less, standing up steaming clothes, but I was asking about how items are priced, and expressed a desire to take on bric-a-brac as my 'department'. Upshot it, I showed myself not to be an utter numpty, and now I am learning how to price things. So one day I should end up coming in, sorting out the bric-a-brac and clearing the old stuff, under my own initiative. Having something to aim for is a mood boost. Also, I actually like steaming; it's warm, repetitive and takes no thought at all. When my head is full of post-illness cotton wool, it's really nice.

Job hunting is scaring me at the moment, I think because I've just had a week off ill, and the current job market is such that people can't take a week off to be ill. Also, changing my CV to fit individual jobs seems overwhelming atm. I am hoping that's another mental health thing and that I can do it now I am back into work mode and not in sit-around-putting-things-off mode.

Plan for this evening is to finish the amaretto and milk I am currently enjoying (I put this off for two months! Why?) and go to the supermarket and get some real actual food. Easy food, because right now it doesn't interest me very much. The fact that it's been a week and I still have no appetite to speak of, says that I was doing the right thing not risking spreading this bug to people. Anyone who knows me knows that lack of interest in food is not one of my personality traits.

Moving into a room which got jemmied open less than a month ago might not have been the most sensible, but I've done it now. I like it better than my old room. It has a garden, and a little not-really-a-kitchen as a separate room. I'm fitting better bolts as soon as possible, as well as other security fixtures (like, for example, an alarm). Meanwhile, I'll be keeping my one valuable item, my laptop, with me as much as possible, or stored elsewhere entirely. Supposedly, this house and street don't see much crime. Except this year. So far both break-ins have been during the day.

Pol is helping me with my CV. I'm now at that stage of job-hunting. With ten years of bugger all, it's quite daunting. But if anyone can help me polish the turd of my work experience, Pol can.

The first thing I did after getting all my stuff into the room was to clean the kitchen. Then I went to the pub. Then I cleaned the kitchen some more.

Actually to be honest I only started playing because I was already having a crap day and wasn't going to get anything done. I like it, but find the controls rather stiff and unreactive. And then, as the chill set in, so were my hands.

Right now I am sitting waiting for the Chinese food that Random is about to order and pay for, so we can have a meal. I can answer the door while she has a bath. Synergy! Ccooke has outlined to me an entire new world, and I've told him about the Reddit worldbuilding forum. There are sciency news stories, but my fingers are too stiff to cut and paste easily. Nipping downstairs to sit in the sauna I accidentally created by putting the gas fire on and forgetting has helped.

Pol's off to his friend's wedding, as planned. I'm hoping he has a good weekend.

That's it, really. Slow day.

The air patterns in this bedsit are very odd. If I turn the gas fire on, the room gets colder, though if the gas fire is full on then the room does eventually warm up. And this morning I've discovered that if the gas fire is on and I open both the windows wide, the room gets warmer, though the area immediately by the window is cold.

I do half an hour of reading Latin every day, and the Latin I am learning is starting to get more complicated. I still refuse to learn grammar, because then when translating in my head, I get so stuck on the grammar, I forget what it is I am trying to translate. I'm hoping to learn it as I did English and Spanish grammar: through sheer usage. I really like this method of learning: starting off with very simple Latin phrases, which gradually add in new vocabulary which you eventually figure out from context and illustration.

The new daily self-improvement habit is press-ups, which I've never yet been able to do even when fit and strong and well. Oxfordgirl showed me a method of getting there gradually, so I'm doing, at the moment, a few reps of wall-pressups before breakfast. Nothing challenging, but even so my arms already do not love me. This means progress, right?

The other thing I am doing is reading old magazines. At the moment, it's Britannia and Eve from October 1936. There's enough dense reading matter in this one magazine to keep me reading for a couple of weeks. They literally don't make them like that any more. Articles are all novella length in very tiny print. The later magazines, which were published during rationing, are much slimmer. It's amusing to be reading the exact sort of adverts detailed in Dorothy L Sayer's 'Murder Must Advertise'. Also, the stories are surprising: single women could be alone in their bedroom with a man, even several men, of an evening and nobody batting an eyelid. One always gets the impression that pre-War society was incredibly strait-laced. Also, there was a nice article on travels around Leninist Russia, before Stalin took over and led to the privations and hardship we associate with the USSR. I want more old magazines now.

The magazine from 1945, which I've glanced through but not properly read, is really saddening. The articles are about making do and mending, but the adverts are particularly heartbreaking. 'There is no Ovaltine, but there will be soon!' 'Our lamps are helping our boys abroad, but one day you can enjoy their superior light!' sort of thing. And the one from the Ministry saying please don't steal rations from your children, in the nicest possible way.