I stayed over at lady s’ on Sunday, and we rounded out our evening with trying out the worst jokes and puns we could think of. The puns in particular got more and more laboured and tortured, fuelled by YouTube videos playing in the background. Inspired by a brief piece that mentioned the extinction of Moa birds, I piped up with “Moa, Moa, Moa your boat, gently down the stream…” and got covered in the mouthful of drink she’d been swigging at the time. It’s the little sillinesses in our shared weird little humours that I love – even as we have to endure some bloody awful jokes along the way.

By way of contrast, there’s a building I work in that has had ongoing problems with leaks; but today a new wrinkle presented itself and I’m very glad I’m not working there at the moment. A colleague had noticed an odd smell, and discolouration near a wall, and on investigation found that the underfloor heating was flooded. After joking among ourselves that we now had not only a built in spa at the library, but hit and cold running damp, the hysteria was firmly muffled and the engineers called in.

We’ve established it’s nothing as simple as the local river rising – and therefore ruled out that it was a hitherto unknown vampire defence – and now await the reports and recommendations on how best the building can be rescued.