in which Ms Baroque returns from the seaside, culturally enriched and somewhat tired out

Well! The adventures! I'm back now, and am disgusted to learn that you lot have not been hanging around in Baroque Mansions reading all the back numbers as instructed. Though Mlle B did have a sleepover here on Saturday night without telling me, which is not what one had in mind. Is it really enough that her father, who does not live in this home and therefore has no jurisdiction over it whatsoever, and who in fact never telephoned me to make sure we were all joined up on the point, knew where she was? No, I thought not. But the girls did tidy up beautifully, and made the beds and washed the dishes.

In the past few days I have been to the impressive Holy Trinity church in Blythburgh, ("the finest church in Suffolk"), and learned that the little carved figures on the ends of the pews (in this case, shaped like little people committing mortal sins) are called 'poppyheads'. I've visited the beautiful and tragic parish church of Walberswick ("one of England's most fashionable watering holes, still cheaper than over-rated Southwold across the river"), sacked by Cardinal Wolsey's men and then again by the Roundheads. I've walked through the churchyard of the Church of St Edmund, King & Martyr (with its stone figure over the doorway of the rope-bound King Edmund, who fought beside King Alfred and chose a terrible death over capitulation to the Vikings), at night. (OOOooo-ooo-OOO...)

It's a fresh surprise to me always, the way these churches dominate the countryside and seem to accommodate the life of the countryside itself, somehow. The air in them seems to breathe with the breath of the people who have worshipped in, and lived around, them for centuries. If that doesn't seem too poncey.

I've tramped around Dunwich, the village that's falling into the sea, in a blasting gale with my eyes streaming and the collar of my coat flying all around, and managed not to get sucked off the cliff. I've seen the remaining buttress of the medieval church that did fall off the cliff. I've eaten a slap-up dish of mussels in a pub called the Anchor in Walberswick. (Annoyingly it turns out to be run by Londoners and to have a sort of Cath-Kidston - if that's an adjective - website; but we loved it there. And I also learn that it has a poltergeist! but it was neither seen nor heard, whcih may be a good thing given the Baroque fear of poltergeists.) I've eaten fish & chips in the Lord Nelson in Southwold, a posh meal in The Swan in Southwold, and a Stilton cheeseburger in the Red Lion in Southwold. I've shared some chips and cold quiche in Dunwich. I've had fish pie and tramped on the pebble beach in Aldeburgh, and I've drunk more bitter than in the past several years put together: it's Adnams country, of course.

I've written two probably-unpublishable poems, read a lot, and prised 640 useful words loose and onto the laptop.I've not bought anything in a secondhand bookshop in Southwold that smells musty and has about a gallon of condensation on its windows, even though they had a book I could have used; and I've engaged in other artistic and literary activities too numerous and arcane to list here, though I have yet ever to attend a single screening in Southwold's charming Electric Picture Palace.

The weather was glorious, high blue skies and blazing sunshine, but the gales yesterday were something uncanny. Whipping - and icy. (and no, not like cream!) And we drove past two pig farms; I love pigs, and they are wonderful when they run. Later, they seemed confusingly to have turned into a group of very sedate horses, but I think that was probably a different place.

I have not seen a newspaper or TV since Friday morning. I have just checked, read, deleted, replied to, etc, 51 emails plus spam, and read (okay, but this is about it) two Guardian blog pieces on the Arts Council funding fiasco, with comments. And now I feel as if it were midnight; I might go to bed and have a lovely sleep.