Went to Ikea last night to get some stuff for the new cottage. Why is it you ALWAYS have to buy candles in Ikea? We've still got about 500 tealights (and that's not an exaggeration!) left over from the wedding in a combination of colours, but apparently that's not enough! We usually burn 4 at time, so that's going to take us 125 days to get through that lot. Which is a long way away yet!

The new Verve album comes out next week, but they've put it up in full on MySpace so while I've been writing some slides I've been listening to it. It's epic. Proper old school music. It's good to have them back.

My car is in for an oil service today, so I've got a Mini Cooper Clubman for the day. It's good fun, and the interior is still as classy as ever (although I think there were aspects of the old interior that looked more expensive - a fair amount of plastic in this one on the center console.) It's slightly underpowered for me, I drove an old Cooper recently and it was a real rocket compared to this. But then it does have a lot more doors and no more interior space. It's quite funky though, so if I was in the market for an impractical small car, this would be it :-) It does have some very nice alloys on it though - powder coated black JCW special edition wheels, which are at least £1000. I'm so careful parking it, but why on earth would you fit them to a loan car!!!