We are in Bath. By my reckonings, this is the 19th place the DE & I have lived in the seven years we've been together. By "lived" I mean we have no other address, and we've unpacked. I suppose that means I could also count the six nights we spent on the Queen Mary 2 last summer, but even I'm not daft enough to claim that I lived on the QM2.

I have vague ideas of writing a little bit about each place I've lived as an adult, though some of them barely warrant a sentence: I have nearly nothing significant to say about my first apartment in Somerville, MA. Autobiography through accommodation. I like the idea.

Sometimes when we travel our digs are a step down: we had a good summer last year in two tiny cottages, one in Burnham Market in North Norfolk, and one in Scotland. Both were miserably small when it rained. This year, we seemed to have stepped up in the world, and are renting what the agency called a "maisonette," two floors of a townhouse. The back windows overlook allotment gardens pitched up on a hill all Grant-Wood-like, half flowers, half...not flowers. Vegetables, I suppose. Right now someone is whistling expertly while he tends his plot. Look at that: I assume it's a man, it's a whistle con brio, but I wonder, Are all the great whistlers of the world men?

The trip to North Norfolk this year was lovely: we went to Pudding's beach, and Gus stripped down and got in the ocean, the only person there brave enough. He laughed and laughed at the waves. Then we went back to Edward's parents place, which was very nice, too. Really, the only dark spot so far was when Matilda was sitting on the lap of a crazy old lady friend of my in-laws, and I had to stop crazy old lady from giving Matilda, 7 months old, a sip of Pimm's Cup. Which has ALCOHOL IN IT.