Thank you!

Thank you, darlings, for the lovely birthday wishes! I will have to thank a few of you personally tomorrow because I am falling over in a bundle of sleepy, but I have been having a delightful day and you have all made me clutch at my pearls or the tile pendant I am wearing in place of pearls with emotion!

I had a fun ukulele lesson, and then played the great game of Why Does No One Sell Actual Food Items in Sydney when I tried to buy a cake or pavlova in the CBD. I ended up with something called a marshmallow cake, which wasn't at all bad, though I will probably have to donate some slices to others in the local area. Deense? sinden? pollymel? kaedhlin? Cake AND mad cats! Right near the station!

Presents from Mr B were fab, including tickets for the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (again! YAY!) and an amp for my tenor ukulele, which has seen me cracking out the collected works of Mr David Bowie and a spot of Edith Piaf all evening. Je ne regrette rien! I really need to get my act together and record some uke. And a podfic. Maybe I could just do the incidental music for the podfic?

The other fab present is an oilskin riding cape, which looks exactly what would happen if Barbour started making outfits for Hobbit cosplay, with a spot of high-vis tape across the arse. Well may you giggle, but those sorts of details are lifesaving in the wet! I have a terrible urge to wear it around while walking as well, as between it and a pair of wellies, I would be mostly covered, though I should mention that the rain did finally stop this afternoon. It has no slits for hands, which I think would be an advantage, as I could just keep a little bag beneath, or hide all my bits in my pocketses and be forced to use my nose to press the walk button and shrug helplessly at people who want me to sign things.

And I keep surprising myself as I had a haircut and now I have a fringe and a Malfoy blonde stripe instead of a hot pink or red or blue or purple or any one of the dozens of other colours I have had striped in my hair over the years. This was a product of indecision as I spent so long looking at the colour chart after bleaching that my brain decided 'sod decisions, let's go with that!', but it is seriously weirding me out. My blonde moments have always been transitory and usually bearing the remnants of something punkish down the ends of the lock. I blame all the kids with bubble-gum pink hair in Newtown, as I had almost decided on that being my next choice. Now I keep seeing it out of the corner of my eye and thinking it's something white on my head. IT IS MY HEAD.

The fringe is a whole other story, and began as a sort of Veronica Lake sweep a few years ago and has been morphing ever since. It's now gone for something that is a bit 1950s schoolgirl, a bit 1960s Audrey Hepburn. My hairstyle is post-punk meets post-War. Sigh. At least it rolls up beautifully into a Victory Roll … I asked my hilarious and fab Northern Irish hairdresser if it wasn't too mutton dressed as lamb. 'No, you're fine,' she assured me. 'Until they get really close everyone assumes you're 12 anyway.' She does like me, she's just using my ego to fight a subtle series of revenges for Cromwell.

The cats have been very good for me on my day and even sent a lovely card. I suspect they had a ghostwriter. Moushka seems to have made it through the day fairly unmolested, aside from a dose of flea goop from us, but Cookie and Monster came to blows over a tower war, with Cookie pushing Mon onto the cat tower in defence of her prized ironing board territory, then deciding that she owned the tower, too. In all the excitement, they completely forgot about Moushka, who was able to come out and look at them quizically before looking at me as if to say, 'Thank god you don't have children.'

It's come to this: 46 and being judged by the cat who lives behind my sofa.