As a townie I know nothing about rats, foxes and chickens. So it was quite an eye-opener for me at the weekend when John Papworth told me that he had lost three of his chickens to foxes...including the pride of the roost - his new cockerel. ‘What do you do?’ I asked Natalia when we were over at Purton House collecting Tempe and some free range eggs. ‘We lock them in at night.’ Apparently John didn’t...but does now. He can see the foxes in the field on the other side of the garden wall. Country folks tell me that foxes are unusual because they don’t kill chickens for food but for pleasure.

Foxes and chickens I knew something about. But rats and chickens were another matter. John’s dog Tempe was away all Saturday and I asked John why. ‘She’s out ratting!’ ‘Ratting? What’s that?’ I wished I hadn’t asked. Natalia filled me in on the gory details. Every week or so Purton House requisitions a tractor to move one of the hen-coops...they are on wheels. Out from underneath swarm hundreds of rats. They set a pack of rat-catching dogs on them...this is ratting. Tempe was being inaugurated into the canine joys of killing rats...for pleasure. Between them the pack finished off 120 rats on that particular Saturday. Tempe slept all day Sunday. In my naivety I wondered whether it mattered if rats ate some chicken feed. ‘No, of course not,’ Natalie replied. ‘The trouble is that they eat the eggs!’

My Nationwide card has developed a crack. Rather than be confronted at a crucial moment with a card that would not withdraw money from the wall I went into my local branch to have it replaced. A two-minute job? Nothing is simple anymore. Half an hour later the order for my new card finally reached card-making headquarters…probably in Bangalore. The problem? Once again it was my address. The Nationwide database refused to accept my PO Box as a good enough address. Delivering the card to the branch was not a problem. My address was not on their postcode database so I could not get a new card. Jennie was nothing if not persistent however. At last she found that by giving the post office an address she could hack her way into the system. My monthly statements will now no longer come out as P.O. Box 36, Rye TN31 7WP but will be P.O. Box 36, Rye Post Office, Cinque Ports Street, Rye TN31 7AA. Of course if I was laundering money I would have a normal street address.

Jo Kirkham is giving a talk at the Rye Museum next Tuesday evening entitled The Huguenots in Rye. Jo is a big fan of Connie’s illustrations and in particular the pen and ink pictures in Rye From the Water’s Edge so I put together a CD with the complete series of seventy five pictures so she could make her slides more interesting. The two pictures Jo had particularly asked for were The London Trader showing Rye’s Strand Gate on the occasion of Daniel Defoe’s visit to Rye in 1724 and The Escape showing Camber Castle in Shakespeare’s times.

One of several tragic aspects of Connie’s sudden death is that many of the projects we were working on together are now unlikely to come to fruition. On the two Rye books for instance…Rye From the Water’s Edge and The Maritime History of Rye…we had planned a series of Rye Tales set in the ancient town through the ages. To enable Connie to draw these tales and place the characters and plots into their proper historic settings we had worked together developing outline plots and inventing our cast of characters. As a result Connie’s illustrations give the impression of being illustrations from real stories. This is a big part of their charm…this and the fact that Connie was a stickler for detail and very thorough about her historical research. The working titles of these five Rye Tales were Chaucer’s Times, Shakespeare’s Times, Defoe’s Times, Henry James’ Times and Modern Times.

I managed to write two weblogs today…between other work…and in the evening finished reading Enigma by Robert Harris. Also a set of horoscopes dropped into my e-mail today. I will lower the tone of these weblogs by quoting them over the next few days. But be warned. I labelled them horrorscopes and questioned whether they may start a new trend of reality horoscopes in our daily newspapers…desperately trying anything to stop their plummeting circulation. Here is Aquarius (Jan 23 - Feb 22), for instance: ‘You have an inventive mind and are inclined to be progressive. You lie a great deal. You make the same mistakes repeatedly because you are stupid. Everyone thinks you are a jerk.’

Anyway these horroscopes amused me so I wasted ten minutes formatting them properly and sending them on their way around cyberspace. ‘These will be all over Sweden within a week,’ I remarked to Tony Payne at P-Hut where I was working at the time. Perhaps I should have said ‘The States’ because the next day an e-mail came back from Susan May in Jackson, New Hampshire.

Susan’s daughter Kristin…a close friend to my daughter during their time at Cambridge Friends School…works in a thrift shop and had come across a little book entitled Sex After 50. Susan had remarked quick as a flash: ‘It's a blank book, isn't it!’ Her e-mail continued: ‘My horrorscope for Gemini (May 23 - June 22) went like this: ‘You are a quick and intelligent thinker. People like you because you are bisexual. You are inclined to expect too much for too little. This means you are a cheap bastard. Geminis are notorious for thriving on sex.’