It's very difficult filling a day with doing nothing. Recently, I've found that I've had quite a lot of nothing left over which spills into the next day. I'm very busy indeed.

I popped over to Brian's at lunchtime as I was in Marval doing bits and pieces and he's only a couple of minutes away from there. He was entertaining his friend Steve who's on a temporary vacation from programming and is generally filling his days with nothing as well. Flopped around and had some coffee and stuff before wandering home and off to the supermarket in Piégut.

Philip arrives with his mother on Thursday so I'm making sure that there's lots of nice stuff in the house for them when they arrive. Tomorrow I will be doing tidying and things, but today I was getting started on shopping. Simple things - all the fresh stuff will come in from the market in Piégut on Wednesday. I'm stocked up on stuff like pasta, wine, butter, juice, a copy of It's raining men... that kind of stuff.

I managed to be around just as a fresh batch of bread was coming out of the oven, so I bought a huge big pain which was still warm by the time it came to be eaten for dinner later. Very nice.

Brian came round in the evening for dinner, which was another of my fabulous experiments. I had some chicken in the fridge which needed to be used as it was going to go off tomorrow. There were some vegetables lying around as well which were quite useful.

Chicken on a bed of sweet mushrooms

• Chicken breasts
• Finely chopped onion
• Finely chopped mushrooms (wild if possible)
• Courgette cut into long strips
• New potatoes
• Honey
• Butter
• Red wine
• Olive oil

Pan fry the chicken breasts with the onion and mushrooms in a generous amount of olive oil. Season and herb to taste but make sure there's a nice helping of Tarragon. Melt butter and honey in another pan and fry the courgettes. Put the courgettes aside to keep warm and add the mushroom/onion mixture to the honey/butter mixture and cover, stirring occasionally. By this time, everything should be about ready. Strain the potatoes and add butter and parsley to the pan before slooshing around really quickly to cover them. Take the chicken out of the frying pan and pour in a slosh of red wine to make a glaze.

Whilst the glaze is reducing, arrange the mushroom/onion mixture in the middle of the plate. Add the chicken breasts on top and drizzle the glaze over the top. Arrange the courgette strips and potatoes around the plate. Consume with vast amounts of red wine and warm crunchy bread.

It was very yummy, actually. The sweet mushrooms were declared a triumph! Brian had brought today's catch of wild Parasol mushrooms which we roasted in butter with salt and pepper as a starter. They were incredibly nice and I think they'd be marvellous with strong horse/beef and a red wine sauce. I will wander out and see if I can find any now that I know what they look like. No success in our cepes hunting yet, although we've stumbled across quite a lot of those lactating mushrooms. No blue flashes yet...