I've just booked tickets for me and Lisa to see Erasure at the Brighton Dome in November. They were thirty quid each, and I bought two, so naturally I paid a total of... £67.15. Is it my imagination, or do they just pluck these figures randomly out of the air? Despite ordering the tickets online using a fully automated system which requires no staff whatsoever, they've added a £3 booking charge, plus a mysteriously named "Internet Recorded Delivery Fee" of £4.15. Which is odd, as they say the tickets will be sent by standard post. Frankly they could book a taxi to drive them here and it still wouldn't cost that much.

Anyhoo, I'm sure it's money well spent. Assuming we don't forget to go this time. It's on the 4th of November, which is a bit of a shame. If it was a day later, we'd definitely remember.

To be honest, we deserve a treat. It's been a hard-working morning in the Gardner household. Amelie and I have been out there on the balcony since dawn, harvesting a bumper crop of tomatoes...


It might look like there are only three of them, but frankly that's only half the story. Well ok, it's three-quarters of the story. There were actually four. To be honest though, we've done well to get any at all. Our sunflowers currently look like this...

That's Amelie pointing out the main areas of damage. If you follow her finger, you'll see that she's also wrecked the Winnie the Pooh sun visor in the back window of my car, but I'm less bothered about that. I only invested money in that visor. I put my heart and soul into those sunflowers.

If the experience has taught us one thing, it's that our balcony might look like the perfect plant-growing sun-trap, but it's also the ideal location for an industrial sized wind turbine. Frankly if we had a three foot windmill, we could power the entire block. Every time we have a few calm days of sunshine, the sunflowers flourish, only to be ripped to shreds by the next strong breeze. Anyone would think we lived two floors up, on the top of a big hill, facing the sea. Oh, hang on, we do.

Fortunately, the peppers we planted last month are growing well on the living room windowsill, so having inspected the death and destruction outside, Amelie and I decided to give them a bit of light by cleaning the windows...


It was a decision we soon regretted when Lisa saw what we were doing, and asked us to do the bedroom windows too.

But the good thing about being a soft touch when it comes to hard work, is that your efforts are always rewarded. Although in this case I'd have preferred the fruits of our labour to be a little less literal.

So having watered down the tomato source by sprinkling our plants on the balcony, Amelie and I enjoyed the fruit of the righteous, pretended our dead sunflower was a tree of life, and pulled up a chair for a well-earned rest on the balcony...


I think she's going through a purple patch.