THE LATEST BIGGLES-RELATED SAGA

Yesterday I spent a considerable time toiling upon a new project about which I will tell you very soon. Corinna made us all (me, her and the two folk with whom I have been working on the aforementioned project), a very nice dinner, and at about 9:30 I was overcome by tiredness, so bidding goodnight to everyone I went upstairs with a half bottle of cheap brandy that I had been given last week by Jim Jackson of the Appledore Book Festival.

I had a shower, and collapsed into bed. I slowly drank the brandy whilst watching a documentary about Johnny Cash on BBC4. I then had my medecine, drank more brandy and watched a documentary about Hank Williams as I drifted off into the arms of Morpheus.

Just as we were all just about to learn the sad details of Hank's lonesome death on New Year's Day six years before I was born, Corinna came in looking very worried.

She, by the way, has done her back in and has been in considerable pain for the last few days. However this was not the problem.

It turns out that despite having had a perfectly normal day, and a perfectly normal evening, Biggles had a `funny turn` as he went outside for his night time commune with nature, and was wandering around as if he was drunk. I suspect that he had eaten a toad, but cannot be sure of that.

I rushed downstairs (which is not an easy task when full of brandy, tegretol and amliodipine) and found Biggles hunched up in his favourite chair twitching (and I don't mean looking for rare birds). Corinna and I sat with him until she made me go to bed (I am continuing work on the aforementioned project today, and needed some sleep at least). I slept fitfully, fearing the worst and at about 6:30 came downstairs.

As always, my paranoia wasn't justified. Corinna had stayed up with Biggles on the sofa, and he was a little better. Bizarrely, when she let him out for a pee, he became far more animated and almost back to usual, and when I went back to bed he came with me and spent the next hour snoring loudly in my left ear.

Corinna, however, has - not by any means for the first time - skipped a night's sleep and is refusing to do the "love, honour and obey" thing and go to bed for a while. Instead she is shuffling around the house, still in pain from her bad back (discomfort she says stoically, not pain), with the peevish look on her face usually worn by Tove Jansson's Little My. Goodness me.