SNOW! It's always startling when it appears overnight. I'd been thinking it was going to miss us, this time - but when I looked outside this morning, it was ankle-deep. Still didn't cause my 9:30 meeting to be cancelled, dammit, but almost no one turned up so it was peasy.

Now I feel like curling up in a big, comfy chair and reading my exceptionally exciting, slightly silly, but very entertaining book, 'Ratcatcher' by James McGee. It's like a Regency James Bond, crossed with Sharpe. Women swoon over his dark good looks, his boss gives him lots of leeway because he's the best at what he does, and he goes around being grim and scarred but still slightly vulnerable and with a dark(ish) past. There are highwaymen, and London pickpockets, and the finest Toledo steel, and French conspirators, and forbidden duels at dawn. I've picked out the chief villain, because he's been looking at Our Hero with cold blue eyes. Clearly, he's the one with the stolen papers. Also, the woman with the stiletto (knife) under her pillow is going to turn out to be unhinged, or otherwise bad news - you don't get anywhere in these novels by sucking blood suggestively from the hero's finger within ten pages of meeting him.

Oh, work. Why must you get in the way?