Anyone who calls themselves 'quirky' or "original" is almost guaranteed to be nothing of the kind. There are few people so desperately conformist as the ones who consider themselves "unconventional", or "not someone who follows the herd ( Read more... )

Heat : 40C every day for the last month and next week as well, until the monsoon bursts upon us.

Cyclones : not yet, but I'm watching the satellite feeds with great interest and attention.

Flowers: Indian laburnum, flame of the forest (Delonix regia) in all shades of vermilion, orange and golden-yellow, cherry blossom (heat-tolerant variety from ( Read more... )

One of the more meaningless words in current circulation is "sustainable", which has been stretched to the kind of shapelessness previously only seen in 20-year-old Marks & Spencer knickers ( Read more... )

I put this up on AO3 on May the 4th, but forgot to put it up here.

In which the New Republic thinks for a while that it won, and Leia Organa gets what she deserves.

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I am not from China and have never been there, so I cannot speak to their dining practices. However, when I was being brought up, the mannerly way to take food from a communal dish with chopsticks, in the absence of a serving spoon or serving chopsticks, was to turn your chopsticks around and use the other end, i.e., the end facing you, to serve ( Read more... )

I have regularly advised my minions that boredom is a gift, since it means that they don't have any other problems. It is a privilege to be appreciated. In this current situation, people with nothing else to complain about besides the basic fact of being under lockdown are at the top of the karmic tree, and get no sympathy from me ( Read more... )

A friend of mine caught COVID-19, and while she was in hospital and then in post-hospital quarantine, I took in her two cats. One was 17 and on his last legs anyway, so unfortunately I had to have him mercy-killed, because he was very sick and very messy, and Housekeeper was seriously worried that he had COVID-19 (I don't think he did but he was ( Read more... )

In which Grand Marshal Hux writes a speech and General Leia Organa makes one off the cuff

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Working from home has really made me appreciate my little garden. The garden maintenance company is still sending its staff, so all I have to do is walk around (wearing my mask and keeping 2 metres distance) and make approving noises. Our contract with them is biannual, so at least those staff still have a job ( Read more... )

In a modest demonstration that it is possible to lose weight by diet alone, I have been unable to swim for the last few weeks due to a minor but persistent case of sinusitus. I am now on antibiotics, which will hopefully deal with it, since in the current situation, I don't want to add to the burden on local medical facilites with mere bacterial ( Read more... )