I am quite skilled at optimising my consumption of coal…the most personal warmness for the least burning. This would be easy if I spent 6pm to 8am on the boat each day. But I sometimes want to work at three o’clock in the morning…and some days I want to return to the boat at midday. Fuel disappears quickly or slowly depending on whether the bottom of the stove is open or closed…a rather crude regulatory device. Stoke up at 10pm and the stove is out by morning. But wake up at 3am and you can stoke up the fire and keep it going.

Today I did just that...although this meant clambering out onto the poop deck in the freezing cold in my pyjamas to tip the ashes from the ash pan into the river. This is the first time I have bothered to do this…so of course it was all I vain. In Llangolman the ashes from the wood-burning stove were recycled and used in the composting toilet so it felt rather extravagant to send them out to sea. But short of putting them in an envelope and posting them off to my daughter there was little else I could do.

One of the reasons I go to Jempsons Coffee House in the mornings is because a cup of coffee and a desk costs only 30p more than a daily newspaper which is offered free to customers. So on a bad day I might get through The Times, Mail, Mirror and Express by the time I leave for my one-hour library session. This week they all had the same photo of Prince Charles in the Royal Box watching the Cheltenham Gold Cup. And they were all agog at the presence in the box of Prince William’s girlfriend Kate Middleton. Here is the picture…that’s her on the far right.

Every bit as interesting to me was seeing Zac Goldsmith up there next to our future king. The only mention I saw of this interesting fact was on the back page of the Sunday Times. None of the other papers thought it worth mentioning.

My day started 'on message' with a swim and a shower at Rye Sports Centre and I was still 'on plan' by mid-morning which meant doing some shopping at Budgens when they opened at ten and then putting two 25kgs sacks of coal on the boat when Sea Cruisers opened for two hours at eleven. But then I got a text message from Francoise de Naillat to let me know she was back from her travels and would love to see me. So much for my planned quiet afternoon on the boat reading The Sunday Times from cover to cover, section to section, glossy magazine to celebrity chatter. A rare treat.

I hadn’t seen Francoise for three weeks and in that time she had spent a week in New York, sold her house in Rye, bought another in St Leonard’s, changed her mind, backed out and bought another one across town...and arranged the delivery of a new kiln for her glass-making. I made myself useful unpacking the kiln and was rewarded with lunch. A friend of Francoise's daughter is doing her medical training at St. George’s Hospital in London. Their Professor of Cancer Angus Dalgleish…a world expert on immunology…was in the papers commenting on the Parexel Disaster mentioned in my Friday weblog.

Dalgleish reckoned that the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) should have consulted a specialist before approving the study. ‘I can’t understand it. They are normally super-cautious. I would have told the people doing this trial not to do it because the dangers were so great,’ he said. Apparently the data that should have raised the alarm were presented at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology last May. An engineered antibody developed by a team led at America’s National Cancer Institute and using the same pathway as TGN 1412 had produced severe side effects in about half of a group of patients dying of cancer.

Francoise has taken to calling me Ingrid’s ex-husband since I introduced her in my Monday 16th January weblog as having once run a restaurant in Étaple with her ex-husband Anton. Since Ingrid is now Dr Ingrid Lundell and one of Sweden’s leading microbiologists I have decided that I rather like it.