08:00 this morning I’m walking down the Parkland Walk (an old railway line now converted into a ‘linear park’) when Milo gets spooked by two very large, elderly and inoffensive dogs who are not interested in playing with him and growl politely at his attempts.

Suddenly he bolts. He runs up onto the footbridge spanning the old line; I hear his claws scrabbling for purchase then silence. ‘MIL-OH!’ I shout.

Silence.

‘MIL-OH! MIL-OH! MIL-OH!’ Calm now. Shout every 30 seconds. I walk up to the bridge. Little alleys snake away to the backs of housing estates, old paths to the station. No sign of him. No sound.

I circle the area for 15 minutes, calling every 30 seconds. He is fully chipped, has a collar with both Harlech and London addresses and telephone numbers. He will be fine. But I don’t have my mobile with me, and all the time my heart feels like mercury, my stomach roils and I keep gagging. I walk anxiously home.

‘I’ve lost the dog.’ Von leaps up in horror. ‘The phone rang but I didn’t get to it in time.’ That was a huge relief — it means someone must have found him. But the phones are patched through to Moneypenny, our secretarial service. We won’t get the message till 09:00.

I go back to the derelict station, still calling, out of habit by now. I accost other walkers, none of whom has seen a golden retriever. I have to explain what that is to one woman. ‘Oh, a dog!’ she suddenly realises.

At 09:01 there’s an email from Jenny at Moneypenny. A man called Darren has found a dog in Crouch Hill, could it be yours? I start to dial the number when Yvonne calls. She’s already spoken to Darren. He was driving up Crouch Hill when a dog came sprinting across the road — he had no chance of avoiding it. He hits the dog. He jumps out of the car. The dog picks itself up and leaps into Darren’s arms. He puts it into the car and drives to work in Ally Pally.

He’s going to bring him home. I start walking back. My heart is still thumping. Apparently there’s a cut on his cheek. I can visualise his eye hanging out over the jagged rip in his face.

I get back before Darren arrives, and frankly I’m sweating. I take a shower, and downstairs Darren arrives with Milo. He is wobbly but intact. The cut on his face is smaller than a pea.

The little bastard. He’s fine. But there goes at least another month off my lifespan.

The number of ghost sightings per household has dropped dramatically over the past century with the general introduction of electric light. No more dark corners.

Has anyone heard of a pet with a microchip travelling hundreds of miles over many months or years to get home to its owners?  I ask because the chip would positively identify it as the same animal that went missing.

Earlier tales of such incredible journeys may sometimes have involved mistaken identities. A French friend of mine lost her cat near Toulouse, and two years later it turned up at her flat in Paris over 400 miles away, footsore but none the worse for wear — in fact even better, for it had regrown the eye it had earlier lost in a fight.

Le Gros Matou. Hmmm.

Yes, I remember Adlestrop
The name, because one afternoon of rain
The express train broke down unwontedly
It was damn cold.

The wind hissed. Someone slammed a window.
No one left and no one came
On that wet platform. What I saw was
Adlestrop — only the name.

And rain, and thick grey clouds, and drizzle
And gusting litter on the weed-stained track
No whit less lovely then the penalty fare
Or the graffiti round the back.

And, in that moment, a magpie croaked
Close by, and round it, hoarser and soggier,
The only birds in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

—with apologies to the spirit of Edward Thomas

Every day I tread the same journey. Yesterday I drove down a road I’d never driven down before.

After writing 5 books on follies and having been driving for 45 years I’ve pretty much covered the British Isles.

When you drive down a new road, you tend to look around a bit. This was Botley in Oxfordshire, and I had to slam the brakes on when I realised I was about to burst through an ancient tollgate.

I stopped and rootled around in my pocket for change. I only had 20p. The toll was 5p. I handed it over, apologising, “I’ve never been down this road before, I didn’t know there was a toll.”

“That’s all right sir,” smiled the tollkeeper. “Would you like a receipt for that?”

For 5p? I burst out laughing. “I think I’m OK with that, thanks!”

“You’d be surprised how many people ask for one, sir.”

My jaw dropped. What kind of person would ask for a receipt for a 5p toll? What are we coming to?

Later it occurred to me that some sorts of people might require evidence as to where they’d been.

I feel a novel coming on …

Update on Delicious Library — nothing yet heard from their Support people.

OK, it’s addictive. And now they’ve taken it away from me I’m completely at a loss.

I don’t suppose they’re doing it deliberately, but when I launched Delicious Library (what a frightful name!) yesterday it said it could find no data. Fine, it has a back-up archive, so I’ll launch that. Then it said ‘Decompression failed’. Bad news if you’re a diver. And it felt like worse news after I’d spent a month hand-entering 2,403 books, as most of my books don’t have barcodes, and many even pre-date ISBNs.

ARRRGGGGHHH!

So I sent a message to their Help Desk. It’s not like fotoLibra support; they haven’t got back to me within 24 hours. But I shall wait. And report back.

The reason I’m relatively placid about the whole thing is I am sure that the Mac’s Time Machine will have automatically backed up the necessary data somewhere. I just have to find what it’s called and restore it. But why did it go missing in the first place?

More bad news — I’ve been immersed in dusty tomes for a month doing this cataloguing and as a result my skin has become reptilian and scaley because of the embedded dust. Bathing doesn’t get rid of it. It’s the loofah, pumice stone and Intensive Care Lotion treatment for me from now on.

I watched the middle set of the Federer / Murray final of the US Open last night. Obviously I was rooting for Murray, the Brit. And he played breathtakingly well in patches. But he’s ugly, graceless, dull, humourless, monotonous of voice, unsmiling and arrogant, the Kimi Raikonnen of tennis. What’s to like?

Federer is handsome, charming, elegant, and one of the greatest tennis players of all time. And there I was, whooping when he made an error and groaning when the stroppy punk in grey lost a point to him. Funny how strong a grip mere nationality exerts on us.