Working in PR. It’s not all parties, lunches and chasing up journalists’ lost luggage. Someone working in just that industry dropped a mouse in the post to me this week, along with a piece of specially-commissioned research designed to show how important this vitally exciting new product actually is.

‘Computer mouse overtakes partner and pet as most loyal companion’, declares the headline. Why? Well, because apparently 41% of us spend more than five hours with our computer mice, but only 32% spend that long with a partner and 15% spend that long with their pet. Probably something to do with having to work for a living, I’d guess.

Yet despite spending so long with our plastic palm buddies, 80% of mice over ‘get less than £10 worth of accessories, treats and repairs a year’. Mice repairs?? A loved one, on the other hand (no pun intended) can expect to have over £1000 spent on them, and pets £100 or more in the course of a year.

‘We lavish so little money on our mice it’s no wonder they cause frustrations – 39% of respondents got irritated by the mouse lead getting in the way and 27% were tired of having to clean the mouse balls… While some respondents find themselves shouting and screaming at their mouse (19%) or switching their computer off altogether (17%), the clever ones have traded their mouse in for a younger model (32%).’

Are we really such a nation of dunces that less than a third of us would spend £10 on a new mouse to replace a dodgy mouse before it started to drive us insane?

It’s the last weekend of the month, so time to make biscuits. This month, oat and coconut biscuits. They’re a bit like nobbly Hobnobs – or what Hobnobs would be like if they weren’t rolled out flat.

The following quantities make 50 biscuits, so can be reduced as necessary to make smaller batches (half them for two-dozen biscuits).

225g (8oz) porridge oats
225g (8oz) unsweetened ground coconut
225g (8oz) self-raising flour
225g (8oz) sugar
285g (10oz) butter
5 tablespoons of syrup

Gently warm the butter and syrup in a pan so that they mix together as a thick, runny liquid. Don’t let them boil or the syrup will start to crystalise.

Meanwhile, mix all of your dry ingredients together in a very large bowl. Once the syrup and butter are warm and liquified, pour them into the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Start with a wooden spoon as the mixture may be hot, but you will probably find, eventually, that it is best to get your hands in for a thorough mixing.

When well combined, form the mixture into small balls, slightly smaller than a golf ball, and press flat. You will probably only be able to form the balls by squeezing them in your hands, as they will not roll. Lay them out on a greased baking tray and cook at 160 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes, by which point they should be browning on the surface. Remove from the oven and allow them to harden slightly, then transfer them to racks to cool fully.

It’s been such a hot dry summer that the autumn fruits are already starting to ripen, and so today we headed down to the railway line at Margaretting to pick the brambles from the edge of the farmer’s field.

They were cutting the corn as we walked past, guiltily hiding the plastic boxes we’d brought along for gathering our harvest.

We got a good crop. There are still loads to come out – plenty of red and green ones still maturing on the prickly branches – but we got enough to make a big pie, and we’ll head back next weekend to pick some more.

There were apples, too, hanging low and heavy on the branches of a tree, seemingly lost in the tangle of brambles, so we took some of them, too, and laid them in gently with the blackberries.

Picking your own fruit, grown wild on the edge of a field, has to be one of the best things about living out in the country.

There are some wonderful old second hand bookshops opposite the British Museum, about 10 minutes’ walk from the office. I was wandering around there at lunchtime, when I came across these choice volumes:

How to Avoid Being Drowned

Cameos of Vegetarian Literature

Three Weeks of Wet Sheets: Diary and Doings of A Moist Visitor in Mallorca

Dangers to Health: A Pictorial Guide to Sanitary Defects

A Colour atlas of Haemorrhoid Management

Nik and opposite number Mark from Macworld at the Ice Bar

First week back is always busy. It’s Friday already and only now am I getting to the end of the pile of email that needed to be read and answered. It was also press week.

So, it was nice that there were two excuses to go out, and particularly that Wednesday’s party was somewhere I’d not been before: the Ice Bar. It’s a strange place at the southern end of Regent Street, kept permanently 5 degrees below zero so that the ice from which it’s made doesn’t melt. You can feel the cold in your lungs.

It’s as well they gave us big silvery capes to wear as it was one of the hottest days of the year, so a lot of us had come to work in shorts (and some in sandals, mercifully without socks), which was probably unwise when we all knew where we were going to end up. Needless to say, nobody sat on the ice-sculpted stools, although everyone, at some point, cracked the obvious ‘how embarrassing; we’ve turned up in the same silver outfit’ joke.

What I don’t understand, though, is why we didn’t stick to the glasses. Like everything else in there, they were made from crystal clear ice, drawn from the Torne river, 200km north of the Arctic Circle, yet they didn’t freeze to your lips as they slowly melted in your hand. Perhaps it was the purity of the ice, which was strange stuff to touch. The tables had a slightly gummy finish to them where they’d been rubbed smooth by the thousands of fingers that had swept across them, and weren’t white and frosty like an ice cube.

A bigger mystery, though, is how they get away with having furry-hatted people working in there when the whole point of it is that it’s so cold; well below the regulations for working environments.

Would I pay to go there? I’m not convinced. It would be £12 to get in for 45 minutes, with one drink thrown in for that price and all subsequent drinks £6 a pop, which is a lot – even by London prices. It was fun, though, and perhaps somewhere to take a naive out-of-townie to give them a thrill.

The shrine itself is quite peaceful, but the town itself has cashed in on the pilgrimage trail in the most dreadful, blatant manner.

Porto’s Ribeira district is dirty, broken and falling to bits. But that gives it its charm, and is probably why it’s now a Unesco World Heritage Site.

It’s built on the edge of a gorge. Plenty of hills to climb.

It takes some serious wattage to light up Santiago’s cathedral.

The cathedral people walk 1500km to see.