Queen Mary’s dolls house at Windsor Castle is the most excessive eccentric frivolity that puts our royal family right up there with the former royals of Russia and France: “Let them eat cake!” I went to see it a few years ago. It’s crazy. Famous authors clamoured to write tiny books for the miniature library. The tiny bottles are actually full of the wines on the label. The lawn mower works. There is water, electricity laid on and so it goes on.  To their credit Elgar, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf would have nothing to do with the display of pointless gross excess, even in miniature, not in the 1920s. Listening to the radio this morning, I heard that even the tiny guns in the house will fire. It’s incredibly mad but not as mad as Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Queen Victoria. What a fruit cake.

One rejection of the short story collection this morning. That’s a great start. And someone had switched off the wireless network switch on the front of the laptop at the weekend so it said No Networks In Range. After dismantling the house to get the hub nearer the PC, I finally discovered that the switch was off.

Also, remember not to order a tonne of loose logs from Longleat because that’s exactly what will appear and it will take till Christmas to move them. A tonne of loose logs is 1000 kg. A bag of logs at a petrol station is 10 kilos, so imagine what a 100 of those looks like. Fortunately before I clicked on Checkout, I realised why they had a photo of a lorry next to a pile of logs. I wonder how many people absent-mindedly order logs on the internet only to get home and find they can’t get in. If you want to annoy someone, it’s temptingly cheap to place an order to their address.

So I tried CPL, the national coal network, now named Coals 2U, on the internet. They ring in advance, and then they do a follow up courtesy call to check that you’re not lying under a pile of logs. They’re expensive. So finally, I found a local man. I rang ten times, but eventually, this morning someone called Alf must have been walking past the office and he said “leave it with me” in a way that makes me wonder how they ever do business.