- thus Small Hare, seeing Tony Blair waving on the steps of 10 Downing Street on the news today, and waving back.

A 'tishy' is something that is small and good to eat. Strawberries and grapes are tishies, and so (curiously, for such a little boy) are Bran Flakes, his current favourite breakfast. It took us a while to work out what a tishy actually was, but clearly there is a need for such a word (or there is as far as Small Hare is concerned ( Read more... )

A very happy birthday to land_girl! I'm glad the sun is shining.

Purple sprouting broccoli in this week's vegbox! Lots of it! Mmmm.

I have flu. I haven't had flu in years, and had forgotten quite how vile it is. I spent all of yesterday in bed, apart from the couple of minutes it took me to ring land_girl to cancel our coffee date, and only emerged at one o'clock this afternoon. I seem to have lost three-quarters of a stone since last time I weighed myself, which was less than a week ( Read more... )

Found in the oven this morning: a dish of parsnips, prepared last night for serving with sausage and mash and roasted to perfection with olive oil, honey and rosemary, but quite clearly forgotten about when I took the sausages out. I am so not a domestic goddess.

... the feeling you get when someone offers to lend you a book that you have neither the desire nor the time to read, especially when it's someone you like and you're too polite to refuse.

A lovely present from bopeepsheep this week, in the form of a copy of How Babies Think, and the inimitable Charlie and Lola. How Babies Think contains a perfect description of a two year-old who will go and pull a wire that he really knows he shouldn't pull, while all the time calmly and gravely watching his mother for her reaction. Sounds like someone I know ( Read more... )

Seamus Heaney, “Scaffolding ( Read more... )

For exiles from the North-West, an article in today's Guardian about pies. The line about Wiganers putting a pie between two slices of barm cake reminds me of the time in a French lesson about favourite foods, when we were about eleven, when one girl asked the teacher what the French for 'pie sandwich' was.