very nice, very comfortable, very good value at 25 quid, from Hawkshead. Just what I need for tramping round delivering electoral leaflets.
I’d have been happier if they hadn’t taken eight days to arrive, mind you, with no warning at all from the web site that this would be so.
a Polite e-mail was despatched yesterday, and lo and behold they turned up this morning :)
every year, towards the end of December, I buy a bag of cranberries. I don’t know why – I don’t like cranberry sauce, and anyway, we always eat goose for our festive dinner, but there you go; it’s part of the Christmas Tradition.
and so, towards the end of February, we generally have an equally traditional Throwing Away of the Cranberries (Mouldy).
but this year, things were different. I found this recipe for Christmas Morning Muffins, and I did indeed make them for Christmas morning, and they were delicious, and we snarfed the lot. And then I made some more a couple of weeks later.
earlier this week, I discovered the last of the cranberries at the back of the fridge, and last night we made *more muffins* with them. And now they are all gone (the cranberries, that is; there are still some muffins left), and I have none to throw away in a week’s time. I’m quite sad about that in a way, but I think now I can move on, don’t you?
An Italian judge has ordered 26 US citizens – most of them CIA agents – to stand trial over the kidnap of an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003.
more from the BBC here.
who *cares* whether or not David Cameron smoked cannabis when he was at school?
no, I haven’t gone (even more) gaga (yet).
last night, we cooked up a vat of Pete’s wondrous chili, which we always cook overnight. It smells glorious, and he brought me a teeny tiny bit to taste. I want it for breakfast.
I just nipped (or popped) to the farm shop at the end of the village (for celery, lemons, bacon, milk and mushrooms, should you care).
and the duck pond is virtually frozen over, and the poor chaps are skidding about all over the shop. It’s not often *that* cold here in the balmy south west; I wonder if we shall get snow …
astonishingly, the only mainland postcode in the UK which is not infested with Tesco is HG (Harrogate). And now Tesco want to build a store there, and many residents would rather they didn’t. More from the Guardian here.
bit of a misnomer, really, because my weekend started on Friday night with the Constituency LibDem dinner (or even earlier with a long overdue haircut). I expect most people would expect such a dinner to be the epitome of boredom, but I enjoyed it; these things are much more fun now that I know most of the people involved. The food was ok, but not great – although most people seemed to think it was. What do they eat normally? Main course was a very indifferent duck dish, which just made us yearn for properly cooked duck.
Saturday saw me up and off to inspect our (as in the branch) newly acquired Risograph printer, which has been found a home in Nailsea. We couldn’t have a play, as it has no paper drum (on order), but it’s quite an impressive beast. I nearly didn’t make it as the SatNav couldn’t find the place, but fortunately I’d been wise enough to print a Google Map. Then off to Costco for some bits – they had ducks on special offer, so I bore one home in order to do Proper Duck for dinner.
I got no Private Eye this week – I’m horribly afraid that they’ve finally noticed that I was on a freebie sub – so I went on a hunt for one. Very few people carry it outside city centres; not at Nailsea Tesco petrol station or supermarket, nothing in our village, nothing in Shirehampton (where I stopped on the way back from Avonmouth). In the end I had to head toward Bristol, but I found one eventually.
then home for a bit of catching up on the computer, and the cooking of the aforementioned duck. It was anointed with honey and soy sauce, then roasted, and served with roast spuds, and cauliflower and brocolli cooked in vegetable bouillon.
Sunday was a bit hectic. Especially after some cat (my money is on Iggy) pissed on the TFT monitor in the server room. This initially took out the power to the whole house, and also temporarily buggered the KVM. And the UPS on the linux server seems to have a shagged battery, and the huge beast in the study clearly needs a new battery, and all that took a couple of hours to sort out.
then perlmonger cooked a nice fry up, then we went off on the monthly Village Walk. A lovely day for it, and we ambled round footpaths for a couple of hours. Home to wrestle with PagePlus DTP (not much fun in a Windows VM), and processed 74 photographs taken by P on Friday night – quick crop, tart with Photoshop, etc., then uploaded to somewhere that they could see them. Then we hurled beef in ale (from the freezer) with potatoes and cabbage down ourselves, and went up to the Legion for the monthly quiz, where we form a team called The Aliens with Pat and Dave (WANOLJ). We came 10th – not stellar, I grant you, but it’s only our second outing, and we are just starting to get the measure of it. That’s my excuse, anyway.
and now it’s Monday, and the whole bloody thing starts again …
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