Hello! I’ve been busy.

Even now I have a to do list as long as your arm - unless your arm’s longer than thirteen centimetres - but I haven’t blogged in over a hundred years, and I realise how desperate you must be to know what’s going on in my life, so I’m selflessly taking a break from more pressing matters to answer that very question. Not that it was a question, but I’m going to answer it anyway.

You’ll be excited to learn that I had another go at making a bath bomb. This time I used actual bicarbonate of soda and citric acid, and mixed in some smelly stuff, though I still haven’t got anything to dye them with so it was a fairly uninviting colour. I mixed it all up and moulded it into the traditional sphere, then left it to dry. A couple of days later it had collapsed under its own weight to more of a hemispherical shape, and wasn’t discernibly closer to drying, so I stuck it in the oven for a bit. This was where my first effort had gone horribly wrong, but this time there was no danger of caramelization due to the absence of sugar that’s a feature of bath bombs you didn’t make out of sherbet.

Sure enough, when I took it out a few hours later, it hadn’t caramelized. But nor had it dried, and what it had done was collapse into a sticky pool. Never mind - I sort of squished it together a bit into a squat cylinder, so it was more of a bath ice hockey puck than a bath bomb. Then, for good measure, I plucked a little dried flower head from my collection of potpourri, and stuck it on top. Then I left it to dry again.

A few days later it still wasn’t dry, but I was bored of waiting. I put it in my bath.

It kind of worked. It didn’t really dissolve completely - I was left with little lumps floating around in the water. And I don’t think it made much of a smell, though Jess was putting nail polish on at the time and this possibly overpowered it a bit. Next time I’m going to add more stinky stuff, and wait until it’s bone dry before use. It can’t possibly fail.

Elsewhere in the news I’ve been getting my novel ready for hawking to agents. I had to write a one page synopsis, which wasn’t half hard. Attempting to work out which strands of the story you can omit mentioning without the plot collapsing into an incoherent mess was almost exactly like playing Kerplunk, only with murders and remote controlled Daleks and Eeyore pyjama cases instead of sticks, and astrolabes and chandeliers and marshmallows instead of marbles. But I got there in the end, and bashed out a letter to go with it, and now all I need to do is print it all out onto a couple of rainforests, sell a couple of internal organs to pay for the stamps, and then I get to wait for a pile of rejection letters to land on my doormat. Except I can guarantee that won’t be the outcome because, cleverly, I haven’t got a doormat.

Meanwhile our engagement party draws ever closer. Are you coming? If you’ve been invited and you haven’t told me yet, you can expect a stern message on Facebook just as soon as I’ve worked my way eleven and a half centimetres down my to do list. So in about March.