It's not often I start a review of a Surrey venue by discussing the toilets but I think, in this case, it's only fair to warn you about the ones at Mike's Kitchen, in Carshalton. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with them: they are easily accessed from the cafe and, when I visited them, they were extremely clean. It's just...THEY'RE THE SMALLEST CUBICLES I'VE EVER SEEN!

There's very little better than a crisp autumn morning walk through stunning fields and woods to blow the cobwebs away and stir up the imagination, before setting up your laptop in a cosy corner of a National Trust café and warming back up with a hot drink.

The problem with writing this part of my blog (apart from how much money I'm having to spend on cappuccinos) is that I sometimes feel as if there isn't enough time to get round all the lovely cafés and coffee shops that we're lucky enough to have in Surrey.

There are lots of lovely cafés in Surrey (I plan to visit ALL of them to review the cake - I mean - to review the working opportunities for freelancers) and I'm sure their owners really do care about them but every now and then you come across one where you can just feel the passion the owners put into it as soon as you walk in through the door.

When I'm working (i.e. writing for profit), having a speedy connection to the internet is invaluable. I often need to research certain topics or check a tricky grammar point and if I'm away from home then the web is obviously the quickest way to do this. No type of electronic wizardry will every replace books for me but if I had to physically transport copies of every tome I might need when writing for a client then I probably wouldn't get past my own driveway.