Clowdy. NNW westerly gusts. Temp, 19.

Cockatoos can be heard on the wind as can same in rafters. I am undoubtedly being covered in microscopic mouse poo, as it descends through the cracks in the ceiling lining, which is of wooden planks, (as are the walls and the floor. Indeed there is an obscene amount of timber in this house, and every join wants filling).

I know that’s not how to spell cloudy, but that’s how Cap’n Cook spells it. He also spells persuaded--perswaided, which I find endearing. I like Captain Cook and have been having something of a Captain Cookathon in my absence. I haven’t learnt anything of any great import, but as I hadn’t read a thing about him since I was an eight year old, inspired as I was by a program on Georg Forster on the radio, I thought it time to ‘brush up’ and acknowledge my indebtedness to the man. He was a Scorpio—and had a whole pile of planets lined up in same, which makes me wonder that he mightn’t have left some little cookies on his beloved Tahiti—which to Cook always looked nice.

However I suspect he was an austere man, impressed no doubt by Quaker friends, and whilst austere not terribly sartorial. The famous portrait of him, of which we are all familiar has, on closer inspection, him either being too portly around the midriff to do his shirt buttons up, or else he couldn’t be bothered.

Did you know that two black Africans frozed to death aboard the Resolution as it skirted around Antarctica? No, neither did I. They were undoubtedly slaves and I wonder how strange it is that while their families probably never got learn of their demise, some hundreds of years later the whole world can.