For my reference, keep meaning to gather each year's RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch observations in one place but that's a job for later ( Read more... )

After making this recipe a few times, it's developed in to what I now call every-flavour stew (after Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans, but not disgusting). The idea is that butternut squash can be a bit bland, so let's try to set off all the taste receptors we know about. So there's tomatoes and onion to give you plenty of umami, lime juice for ( Read more... )

**TODO has been reading Harry Potter recently, and finished book 5 (Order of the Phoenix) last week, so we watched the film at the weekend ( Read more... )

Relevant to my last post: latest death rates from the ONS, graphed for our viewing pleasure.


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"The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity."

So starts The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, set in the C2nd to C3rd CE in China and traditionally said to have been written in the C14th. You could say this is the epitome of a sort of ( Read more... )

I'm fascinated by the way that when you start noticing something particularly, you spot loads of examples. It seems like that thing is really prevalent, when in fact it isn't really any more prevalent than it used to be, it's just that you're noticing and remembering every occurrence. (Although sometimes it can be an age/cohort effect as well - ( Read more... )

"Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea." - Sydney SmithGeorge Orwell, scourge of the right and of the wrong-headed left alike, fought the forces of repression with well-written essays, polemics and books. And even with actual guns bullets in Catalonia. Like most humans, he was ( Read more... )

I'd missed that the PM, Theresa May, had recently expressed full confidence in the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond. That's just three months since he was appointed.

This is putting his position under what I like to call force Major, as a riff on force majeure, after the luckless previous Tory incumbent who almost certainly tops the all ( Read more... )

I have no idea why these pop in to my head, but they do. Many of them have bounced round my brain for decades. I had ones for most of the Notable presidents (ie, the ones I can remember, which is basically WW2 on plus Lincoln and Washington), and I thought it might be diverting to produce a complete set, to date ( Read more... )

I've mentioned before that I have a fascination for performative utterances: They're that particular sort of thing you say that do what they say they do because you said them. They're not just descriptions of how things are, they change how things are because they are said. So, for instance, saying "You are under arrest" makes you under arrest ( Read more... )