Laura, making tea and Transformer

1. Laura got a offered a job today which is fantastic news. She is one of the most talented and beautiful people I know. I agree that I have a certain amount of prejudice here...her creative work always astounds me with its originality, skill and humour. The portrait to the left is one she made for me and it's formed from origami flowers and mounted on canvas. I love this piece and it gives me joy every day. She will find the perfect context to share the wonderful objects she creates with other people and perhaps make a living from it. I look forward to that day, but until then I have the privilege of owning a few of her lovely pieces.

2. James suggested that I should add making tea for my colleagues at work as one of my happy three. A good suggestion because I do enjoy doing it. I think I'd be a good waiter...actually years ago I did a bit of busing at Mothers Cafe on the Kings Road in London. I can't really remember how well that went (or not) but I have thought that I would like to run a bed and breakfast sometime in the future. We have a friend called Jo on the Isle of Skye who has a B&B in Ullinish called Foxwood. She built her house which has beautiful and uninterrupted views of the Cuillins. The rooms are comfortable, the one we have stayed in has a sauna and jacuzzi in the bathroom. The breakfast is prepared by Jo with organic and (where possible) locally sourced ingredients and Jo is a generous and welcoming host. Her business is an inspiring model. I can imagine setting up a business like this in Scotland too. It's a dream for now so in the meantime I practice serving people with cups of tea. Hopefully I'll get the hang of it soon.

3. At the end of my working day I got chatting to Phil about iPod music...thanks to him I got to leave early today, which was a much appreciated kindness. He had accidentally download from iTunes a Bette Midler song...how is it possible to make that much of a mistake? He claimed that he was falling asleep whilst in the process and wasted 79p as result. OK. Whatever. I'd have been happy with a Bette Midler track but then I'm a raving queen...so today's music playing on the pod of joy was Lou Reed's "Transformer". Slightly oddly, the settings have changed so that the pod is playing the tracks of albums at random rather than in sequence. This is OK usually but somehow very wrong with Transformer. This is one of my 'perfect ten' albums that I would be happy to listen to until forever. I think it goes almost without saying to anyone who knows this record that the song "Perfect Day" is a small piece of heaven on vinyl. The drawing of the album cover is from the Flickr page of Jet-pac and is a truly brilliant interpretation of the original. Jet-pac's sketchbooks are phenomenal.