10/17 The long white candles on the dining room table – five in all, in the brass candle holders which J found in an antique shop – had slightly tilted over the summer, because sometimes it must have been so hot in here that they had melted just a little in their sockets. J lit them last night, after doing her best to upright them, and we let them burn down, which caused a lot of wax to run down and build up bizarre sculptures before splashing onto the teak tray below them, from which the wax will now have to be, somehow, non-destructively removed.