fourteen cards, a credit card bill and a new bin

Today is my birthday and so the postman gave to me fourteen cards, one credit card bill, a flyer from AA Insurance Services and a brand new kitchen bin.

Top marks for customer service go to SimpleHuman for their generous and friendly approach to, well, customer service.

And the special award for outstanding effort in a pointless and bizarre endeavour must go to the ParcelForce deliveryman who carefully pulled a heavy, yet tall and thin, plant away from the front door in order to hide the bin behind it. The box containing the bin is about three times as wide as the plant so any opportunistic bin swiper would need to be serious myopic to fail to spot the item of his dreams.

As I was lying in bed, wondering how long I would be allowed to stay put, N ran into the room and launched into a spirited rendition of Happy Birthday. She then handed me an envelope on which she had drawn some boisterous squiggles. "It's a man," she said, pointing at the greyer lines. "What's he saying?" I asked. "He can't say anything because he hasn't got a mouth," she answered. "Maybe you could draw one on and then he could," I said.

She looked at me as though I were simple, but in a kind and caring way - the way I hope a nurse might look at me in another fifty or sixty years when I become totally incompetent. "He's just a picture," she said, finally. "His mouth won't open." She is two and three-quarters and already nonsense must be on her terms or not at all - even on my birthday.

We chose the indoor option for my party yesterday. By late morning, it seemed clear that it would either rain, blow a gale or both during the afternoon - which would not be particularly well suited to sitting on grass, drinking Pimms and munching far too much cake. Bad weather gives me no pleasure but perhaps there was a frisson of schadenfreude when the torrential downpour came in the middle of the afternoon. (Okay, it's probably not technically schadenfreude unless you know the people doing the suffering but I thought it was a fair assumption that some poor idiot somewhere was trying to picnic.)

There's plenty of cake left, which I blame on dieting guests. There wasn't a blog posting yesterday, which I blame on Pimms, red wine, friends staying well into the evening and too much clearing up to do because the party was at home rather than in a field. Only the last of those scapegoats is a bad thing.