[Rosie] There is nothing useful a cat can do that a labrador and a mousetrap can't.

[Phil] Possibly true, but with a cat you don't have to keep careful track of which one you are petting.

[Rosie] Our cat won't eat cooked chicken either. [CdM} Another advantage of cats is that they don't need to be exercised or groomed regularly.

Ours occasionally comes along and licks the milk at the bottom of our muesli bowls. And she's much better at dealing with the mice than the traps. She also spends a lot of time sitting on the internet, acting as some kind of firewall I think.

[Rosie] True. But Phil might point out that the same is true of mousetraps.

We've recently discovered that there are at least two other cats in the building, which could be why we saw a flurry of mouse activity before we got ours.

I have just discovered that our cat likes icecream. As regards chasing mice he is a pacifist. The other day he was seen lying in our garden with a dormouse nibbling a fallen apple about 30cm from his nose.

My cat presented me with a very much alive and wriggling mouse yesterday. It was a great big ferocious critter, probably weighing well over a quarter of an ounce.

[Simons] And then? What happened next?

Well, I managed to catch it, then popped it in a cardboard box for an hour or so to give it a chance to calm down, then let it go, ready for the cat to catch at some other time.

(SM) The cat is turning into an angler, then?

(flerdle) Me too. It's a lousy August here. The temperature is staying mostly below 20 and my home-made sundial is getting very little exercise.

[Rosie] Your sundial doesn't enable you to dial up any sun?

As August fades into the past the promise of a new season is enticing my olfactory senses from their hibernation. A pleasant hour and a half of practice at my local bowling club (after which I was accepted as a member of the Hat-Wearing-Volvo-Driving Geriatric Club) combined with a beautiful and warm day (maximum 18.9ºC) has contrived an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity within the castle known as 'Dujon's Folly'. Oh, happy days.

(pen) Fat chance. I spent a long time getting all the geometry right (it's on a wall) but little chance of testing it. People on the weather newsgroup with actual sun-measuring equipment say that it the dullest August for a long time and scarcely better than January. That's when they're not hurling miss-spelt abuse at each other and generally acting like ****s, ****s and ****s, even. What gets into people? This is a haven of well-mannered sanity.

[Rosie] Can I assume you misspelled misspell on purpose?
What do we think about that university lecturer's suggestion that the 20 most common spelling mistakes should be accepted as variant spellings? (For examples and the lecturer's argument, see article on Times Higher Education website.)