When we return from our walk, Raffles often behaves like Brer Rabbit on his most skittish of days. He runs around the living room, jumps onto and off the sofa, goes a bit mad. I really don’t know why he does this. Is it, perhaps, that he’s relishing this final rebellious assertion of his freedom before he settles down to sleep for the next few hours?

When we came in this morning, he found an empty water bottle that I’d left on the stairs ready for recycling. He thought it was great:

Oscar clearly wasn’t keen on all the attention being on Raffles. Much of my shaky camera work was because he was butting my side, wanting me to film him instead.

I went upstairs to put on my makeup for my lunch appointment and came downstairs to find that Raffles had carefully extracted the balls of alpaca yarn that I’d carefully secreted away from his mischievous little jaws in the middle of that coffee table, and distributed the chewed yarn all over the sitting room. He truly is a naughty dog.

So I told him off a little. I didn’t shout but it was clear that I was cross and he went and stood behind Oscar to hide. Oscar looked bemused then guilty for a minute or two and went off to sulk in his bed. Poor Oscar. He always thinks everything is his fault.

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I’ve recently started trying the Hourglass brand of cosmetics and I’ve done a couple of reviews on here. I’m not sponsored or anything, it’s just that I like trying shiny new things. As a premium US brand, Hourglass is likely to produce cosmetics that suit a more diverse range of skintones than European brands, and because I have such difficulty finding a foundation that matches my skintone, I’m always up for trying (at my own expense) something new.

I tried a sample of Hourglass’s Veil Fluid Makeup at John Lewis recently and liked it a lot. It’s so much more expensive even than my previous Chanel Vitalumière but I’ve found the unexcitingly-named Beige to be a really good colour match for me at the moment. This will all doubtless change in April, when I start to acquire a honeyed glow. It’s a lot to pay, yes, but then it’s so rare for me to find a foundation that has just enough yellow in it and no pink. With the wrong colour I end up looking orange or green or grey and we couldn’t have that.

I do like the foundation very much, though. It’s more or less weightless; feels silky on the skin; is a great colour match for me; lasts all day and dries to a mattish finish, which can be enhanced by using one of their finishing powders. Veil Fluid Makeup purports to have a special anti-ageing skincare ingredient. The sales assistant told me that I could use it all the way up to my eyes and it would plump out the tired-looking skin underneath. I’m not sure about that. I’m sceptical about all these potions being included in a foundation. For my purposes it should match my skin; be comfortable to wear and last all days without settling into pores and caking. For preference it should contain a broad-spectrum spf but I do use a separate one of these in the summer.

Delighted with my sample in all different lights, I ordered a bottle from Net a Porter and I used it for the first time this morning while Raffles was ransacking my yarn. Isn’t it always a minor thrill to unpackage something new and shiny? I removed the box, pressed away at the pump dispenser and:

Now, Hourglass are a super-premium brand. Their packaging is sturdy and shiny and a cut above anything I normally see. And yet it doesn’t work. How disappointing!

I tweeted both Net a Porter and Hourglass to alert them to the problem. Net a Porter wanted me to Direct Message them on Twitter but don’t seem to realise that they have to follow me first. I’ve heard nothing from them since I told them this and included my order number and date in the tweet. Hourglass have asked me to email them, and I’ll send them this video. I can still use the foundation, and it’s good, so it’s hardly the end of the world, but when you’re paying well over the odds for something, you expect it to work, don’t you? I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. (Get me, incidentally, Beckenham’s answer to Zoella.)

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It’s always such a naughty, guilty pleasure to have lunch with a friend on a weekday and drink real wine. I don’t know why. I suppose it’s because I always have the feeling that I should be doing something at home and that I’m slacking off the ironing or the cooking or, as is currently the case, sorting out the house ready for the arrival of the builders. That is a side effect of being at home raising a family: your time belongs to them and there’s always something you could, should, be doing for them.

Then there’s the feeling that you should use the time productively. I should be practising my singing, for example. Or knitting that jumper I started for the Boywonder. But today I chose to take a couple (or four) hours out and have lunch and catch up with a friend. Business people call it networking.

***post not sponsored, obviously***