All the leaves are brown.

It's the wrong time of year for brown leaves really. There are a few hanging around, but there are little green shoots just starting to thrust their way out the ground. Today was calm and sunny with just a hint of spring in the air. I've been walking past the flower bed outside our front door for some weeks and being disappointed by the lack of daffodil shoots there, as the ones in the pots came up ages ago. However, on Saturday morning there was finally evidence that my good hour of digging little holes in the hardcore-infested slope might not have been in vain! There are no flowers on either the bulbs in the pots or the bed, but I have hope.

The brown leaves in question were paper rather than natural this weekend. My friend R, who I met as a lowly undergraduate, is a creative chap - forever thinking up games and ploys. He's the inventor of cladding jousting - a fun building site game - and Egg Wars (TM) - a game involving raw eggs and homemade forts. He also holds good parties. The latest of these was this weekend and we were all instructed to come as the first line of a song. Not the title, or the first line of the chorus, but the first line. It took a bit of thought.

My group of friends all studied design at university and, therefore, take fancy dress very seriously. Not for us the hired costume or clever hat. No - for us fancy dress isn't fancy enough unless it takes at least an afternoon to put together and probably involves you wearing something on which the paint hasn't quite dried. We also look down on the bizarre trend for sexy-fancy dress and indeed I have been known to attend a party as one of three Oompaloompas (one of whom was male, but no one could tell which).

So I spent Saturday afternoon cutting leaves out of brown paper and sewing them into a skirt to represent the first line of California Dreaming. It ended up being quite a short skirt, but this was mostly because I ran out of time to add further layers. I do apologise for the dreadful (and somewhat manic looking) picture - we meant to take photos of each other before we went out, but forgot, so this is taken mid-party.

There were lots of excellent costumes, but the punniest was a girl dressed as a can of Heinz Tomato Soup (sporting an Ikea collapsible laundry basket, spraypainted red and with a cardboard sign on the front). She was the song Roll With It by Oasis, the first line of which is, yes, "You gotta roll with it". She'd accessorised with a mini baguette. You may now groan.