A calm moment

It's New Year's Eve; I'm alone. Outside the wind is screaming, carrying rain by the bucket load.

Inside is calm, completely free of worry, a puzzle.

Our social infrastructure encourages us to think it's sad for people to be alone at this time of year. Trust me here though. In this corner and on this day, alone is simply the most glorious moment of peace.

This is my moment. I get to spend this one how I like. Well, I choose to spend this moment wondering - what you're up to.

If you've ever blogged and you've stumbled on an odd character who goes by the name of Bunnyman then there's one certainty I can offer. I'm raising my glass (okay, beer bottle) to you right now.

I hope you find something of value in the coming year.

Tomorrow, my attendance will be needed, chaos will sweep me away first in body, then in mind, but ... don't doubt that I'll be back sometime in 2007. After all, I have to examine my sanity somewhere.

Meanwhile, take good care of yourselves, wherever you are.

x.

Listening to: Philip Glass, music from The Hours

The Hours

I know it's New Year's Eve, but I gotta post this.

"To look life in the face, always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last, to know it, to love it, for what it is and then to put it away."  film quote

BBC2 has just shown the film, The Hours which I first saw back in 2003. I didn't have a blog then so I couldn't reflect on it ...

On the surface this is a film about the writer, Virginia Woolf and her fight against mental illness and depression; it's about sexuality and conformity explored in the lives of three women. But on another level it's about one character's realisation that her long years of blossoming happiness were merely a euphemism for one wonderful but finite moment in time; it exposes the superficial habits we construct to act out society's stereotypes; and it shows the intense, flawed and lonely people that we actually are.

Woolf faces the threat of her own extinction through madness. A mother abandons her children to leave an American Dream, one that is incapable of recognising her sexuality. A hostess struggles to confront her superficial life, as she sees the only meaning she's known, slipping away.

I can think of no other film that presents society's triviality in such bleak contrast to the intensity of our lives.

I love:

• that Nicole Kidman is virtually unrecognisable
• Philip Glass' mesmerising and hypnotic scoring of the soundtrack
• that everyone in this film acts
• the way these three separate, yet so directly connected lives intertwine
• that at least one reviewer really hates this film

Perhaps there can be no beauty in the absence of death? Perhaps this is a necessary fate, that those who are unable to conform must sacrifice themselves to our collective triviality?

"It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses."  Virginia Woolf

Neither the nut loaf nor the napkin

Well, I hope everyone made it through December.

I went through to Leaf's place last Saturday, dropping by the supermarkets on the way to buy the supplies for Monday's Christmas Dinner. Preparation and pre-cooking were all done on Sunday to avoid a mad rush in her small kitchen on Christmas day.

Leaf's large flat was a renovation when she bought it well over a year ago and she's been redecorating constantly since then. We had to serve dinner in a room where the walls and ceiling are stripped bare, waiting for the plasterer, so we spent most of Christmas morning trying to make the place presentable. She laid down some rugs for the floor while I mounted a selection of oil paintings, watercolours and printed artwork on the walls. We dragged in a huge wood and stained glass cupboard to occupy one particularly bare corner, then she found a set of lanterns that she'd bought in Brighton so I used adhesive strips to hook these to the wall. Although the room was quite dark, candles on the tables and in shelving recesses provided just enough light without revealing too many wall or ceiling cracks. In the end the whole thing had the look and feel of a rustic Italian farmhouse.

During the morning we received reports of minor injuries, illnesses and travelling problems but a very manageable seventeen turned up for a dinner menu of festive fish pie and trimmings. This rebellion against the traditional Christmas fare seemed to go down quite well with her family and of course, the great advantage of fish is that the supermarket's are full of it at this time of year and it's very easy to cook. Rice, couscous and vegetable dishes alongside a couple of poached salmon six pounders helped everyone fill in the gaps and provided nibbles for the late arrivals. Everything was eaten and the emergency sausage rolls, chicken pieces, cheeses and nibbles weren't even needed. Most importantly, Leaf - not an easy person to please - seemed happy enough.

It would appear that my reputation as a chocoholic may have leaked out - click the parcel to see what three young persons heaved half way across the country and up three flights of stairs to present to me.

Quite an honour really.

I'm not at my most upbeat right now but I do wish everyone well, and I sure wish I could hug and squeeze every blogger I know. You each have my very genuine thanks for helping me reach the end of the year intact - and that means all of you, even the quiet ones out there. Take care.

Listening to: Cocteau Twins, "Persephone"
Hoping: you're all alive and kicking.

Dear Santa's Helper

Do you think Father Christmas keeps up with a changing world? I wonder if he employs lots of little blog readers to sit and chatter away happily while reading all the world's blogs, looking for prezzie requests?

Dear Santa's helper,

Thank you for coming to read my blog. I hope you're tucked in all snug and warm up there in Lapland under the northern lights. Would you please be kind enough to pass my Christmas list onto Santa?

A box of chocolate flavoured tea bags
A small teapot
A teacup
A bunnygirl

Thank you,
Bunnyman

Supermarket Relativism

Popped to the supermarket last night for a few top-up supplies. You'd think we were expecting a nuclear war the shelves are so empty. Shoppers are panic buying and stocking up their Christmas bunkers. My well trodden route past the fish counter and bakery led me to a bread aisle lined with barren shelves. I struck lucky in the mad rush for the last surviving loaf, a shrunken oat-bread affair almost small enough to swallow in one huge bite; then almost missed out on my bag of salad leaves, having to grab for the second last pack.

There are benefits at this time of year mind you - two whole aisles full of chocolate goodies.

Counting 15 things in my basket, a cold hearted assistant rejected me from the "10 items or less" express check out queue, sending me off to stand behind trolleys stacked as high as miniature mountains. Quite mean, don't you think? Feeling quite vengeful, I broke open a pack of Kit-Kats and munched off the minutes while checking my list of milk, bread, yoghurt, leaves and chocolate. I felt like a little basket of annoyance, wedged between families busily unloading supplies.

Now you may have counted my listed basket contents and be wondering how it could total 15 items. Well you see, with two aisles of choccy goodies I couldn't stop at just one pack of Kit-Kats now could I?

---

The next few days will likely be fraught so I'm not sure how much posting will be done. I will try to report on the Christmas day catering challenge though.

---

Meanwhile my head has been buzzing, wound up so tight it feels ready to explode. With thoughts of what to cook, you ask? Where to buy the last few missing gifts?
No.
I've been frantically wrestling with an internal debate involving individual rights, moral relativism and whether society has a moral obligation to legitimize sex as a marketable service. This isn't in response to the recent murders of five women in Suffolk, but is something I've been mulling for a while. In fact since reading this item which presents one argument for sex working.

You know, this Christmas there's an urge to go celebrate one final time with some friendly lemmings.

Listening to: incessant storms of static inside my head.

Threatening the Livelihood of Captive Turkeys

The Goldfish recently posted on one aspect of ethical eating. I was going to leave this as a comment but then decided there was sufficient content to possibly have one or two others accompany me in my state of dietary confusion.

With the option of meat, veganism, vegetarianism, probably as many varieties of these are there are seeds in a pumpkin, and religious observance, choices can be bewildering. I cannot and would not judge anyone else's stance on the morality of their diet. We should be free to make our own choices. For myself, I eat fish (cough, of course not Goldfish, gulp) and almost certainly products made with animal derivatives but I don't eat meat directly. You could say I'm a non-Goldfish, fish eating partial vegetarian.

Perhaps because of the lack of certain key vitamins I'm not always cogent enough to provide an argument on this subject but here are my thoughts anyhow.

As an intelligent, responsible and rational thinking human (these qualities are actually under considerable dispute in my case), I should be able to come to some justifiable conclusion about what I eat, and my fundamental belief is that I must do so and not remain ambivalent. That's not to say I can't change my mind, but there should be a reasoned argument for doing so.

It is therefore slightly galling that my best attempt relies on being comfortable with my own sense of guilt. However in the absence of any actual knowledge about how animals think or experience pain and distress, it's the best I can do.

I eat the flesh of those creatures I can bring myself to kill personally. I took myself out one day and caught, killed and eat fish, therefore although the rationale is somewhat shaky, I do feel reasonably comfortable with the consequence of eating fish. Clearly I can't speak for the scaly ones themselves. I have not been able to bring myself to do this with any other creature, so I don't eat other creatures. That's about it in a baking dish.

Of course, the major failing here is that I don't personally catch all the fish I eat. I caught fish once (albeit quite a few on that occasion) to prove to myself that I could do it, but now, like most other people, I buy fish, neatly killed by someone else, over the counter. I do feel though, that I could go out and kill a fish tomorrow were it necessary. I don't know that I could do this to a chicken, lamb, pig, cow or even mouse. No need to let you know my stance on humans because I don't much fancy the taste.

So what happens when I am invited as a guest to someone else's dinner party? (yes that's can be taken as a hint!!) Well I don't like to burden others with the consequences of my own dilemmas. We have to realise the world isn't black and white and that sometimes we have to do the best we can in each differing circumstance. So when others cook for me, I eat what they eat, including meat (but no snails, euugh!). When I cook for others, they get fish pie or nut loaf or a napkin forcibly inserted down the gullet, depending on preference. This is excepting the ongoing dilemma of the 26 meat eaters I'm supposed to be catering for this Christmas. I don't have 26 napkins you see.

Now I could extend this to putting myself in the shoes (or scales) of a fish and ask myself whether I'd prefer to be killed and eaten by some vast automated process where my individual opportunity to look my killer in the eye has been denied; or whether I'd prefer to be individually speared, knowing that my killer would be my eater. This argument would however be anthropomorphic (I got to use that word too) and unsound. I can have no idea how an anchovy, tuna or even chicken might judge it's own death. Of course, for any creature death by eating is probably not a desirable option, however millions of years of natural selection have made this outcome likely for many organisms on the planet.

So after all that, what can you conclude? Probably that I am at least as mixed up as many others on this issue. But I have at least satisfied my own need to have decided just what flavour of confusion to adopt.

Listening to: NOFX, "Clams Have Feelings Too"  (a lie, I'm clueless about NOFX)
Hoping: you enjoy your next turkey, smoked salmon, or nut loaf (but not snail, euugh!)

Deader than I've ever been before

Leaf is now working in a different country - albeit a mere half-hour flight away. She only found out last week. "We've deleted your job but don't worry, you can have this new one. It's just across that little sea over there. Get packing, you start Monday."

I had no idea these things could happen so quickly and neither had she, but there isn't much point in kicking up a stink because she's actually a bit better off now. Not so much financially as for her state of mind. She's working in a buzzing capital city full of night-life, bright lights and colourful accents; a real change from the dour, grey excuse of a capital city that so depressed her before.

So that's all been a bit of a shock. She was relieved when I called her yesterday evening because she hadn't been able to phone home - forgetting to preface her numbers with the 44 international dial code for the UK, silly thing.

I wanted to explain about my last minute booking, a Christmas experience on the Orient Express ... which meant of course that I couldn't cook Christmas dinner for her entourage of 26. Unfortunately I'm not a very good liar, "Bunnyman, if you don't turn up to cook, you'll be deader than you've ever been before."

?deader than before? Hmm, golly, that's a threat to get you wondering, isn't it? Just how many forms of death are there? Have I already been dead and not realised? What a puzzle.

Anyway my attempt to get out of Christmas day has so far failed miserably. I wonder whether the local chemist would consider selling me a highly contagious disease?

Listening to: Pink Floyd, "On the Run"
Looking for: well pretty much any old excuse now. Any ideas?

Golden Oldies Against Trident

In the company of a dozen other mature Leicestershire residents, 94 year old Alice Beer has made the news by joining more than 60 people to demonstrate against the Government's decision to continue with Trident, the UK's submarine-based Nuclear Deterrent. Alice and her group of GOATs (Golden Oldies Against Trident) have joined the Faslane 365 non-violent protest for the weekend, just outside Helensburgh. Alice makes pottery, writes poetry and has seen through two World Wars. In Vienna during the 1930's, she campaigned against the rise of fascism.

Unfortunately there's another disconcerting news item from yesterday - 20 anti-nuclear protesters from Leicestershire arrested. It seems the UK government doesn't care much for non-violent protest. I hope Alice wasn't among those arrested.

Listening to: Suzanne Vega, "Left of Center"

A dying movement?

-- Edit: this entry was a bit too long so I've split it into three separate posts, sorry for any confusion --

According to a BBC News article Blogging is set to peak next year and 200 million people have already stopped updating their blogs.

"Those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on ..."

Perhaps then, we might soon be part of a dying movement of bored bloggers?

I must admit to finding blogging a challenge and that'll probably still be the case in 2007, but Little Stitches will still continue - even if I'm unsure where it's going to be hosted in the medium term.

Technocrati is still a puzzle - apparently it tracks more than 57 million blogs, although that doesn't include this one because I haven't listed it there yet. I have a conflict, you see, between liking the idea of increased exposure, but not wanting to be 'found' by a tiny minority of people I know personally. I'm hoping that one or two changes in circumstances might make this less of an issue next year.

On this blog's visual front, I have been wondering how many dial-up modem minutes it must take to load ten of my scribbled entries, together with background and sometimes post images. Displaying ten posts on the front page is quite useful for catching the eye of passing newcomers but I wonder if this visual paraphernalia is a headache when all you've got is a telephone line? Usually I try to provide alternate text for pictures so hopefully it should all load and still make sense for those who prefer to disable images in favour of faster downloads.

I also wonder whether anyone out there quietly smoulders about reading light text over a dark background, something I sometimes find difficulty with on other sites.

You would tell me, wouldn't you? I'll even share one of my dried dates (sorry, the larder is a bit bare today) if you tell me at least one thing that doesn't work or doesn't look right about this blog or is even downright annoying.

And no, no, that doesn't mean you can say the content is annoying, just the look ;-)

Okay, that's my blog ramble done for the day.

A book tag - something the matter with my brains

A book tag from a highly respected Goldfish

1. Take the nearest book and go to page 123.
2. Go to the fifth sentence of the page.
3. Copy down the next three sentences and tag three people.

The nearest book is a three volume set of The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh with Volume III being closest. Page 123 contains a letter written by Vincent to his friend, A.H. Koning, thought to be from January, 1889, only one month after the loss of Vincent's earlobe to a razor.

"I received your postcard in the hospital at Arles, where I had been quartered following an attack of something the matter with my brains, or otherwise fever, which had nearly passed off already.

And as for the causes and consequences of said illness, I think I shall be wise to leave the solving of these problems to the fortuitous discussions of the Dutch catechists, that is to say whether I am mad or not, or whether I have been mad, and am still mad, in some imagination of a purely sculptural nature.

And if not, whether I was already mad before that time; or whether I am so at present, or shall be so in the hereafter."

If you feel mad enough, and you're not all tagged out then I'll point this at Sketches, Library Faerie (if you're looking) and RomanScandle but everyone else is welcome to join in.

Listening to: Pink Floyd, "Speak to Me", from Dark Side of The Moon
Wondering: whether I have a sculptural imagination ...

Not enough sleepsies

I finally managed to nod off at 5:00 this morning but then woke an hour later, drifting in and out of sleep until the alarm clock started its daily altercation at 9:00. Tried burying the pesky thing under a pillow and pressing the sleep button every five minutes but in the end staying in bed seemed pointless. Throwing off the duvet, I caught the alarm before it tumbled onto the floor then sat up and managed to bang my head against the wall. Ouch! A slightly shaky start to a fresh day.

Outside is a wonderful, strange world of daylight - not a cloud to be seen. After a week of short days filled with gloomy wet skies, it's a reassuring change to see the Sun and feel a cool Winter breeze.

Is this the last Sunday? The last one before the Christmas and New Year Bank Holiday madness, I mean? I guess it must be. You know, if I hadn't written this post I would probably be blissfully unaware of just how close it all is. This business of blogging, of making you think, it's not always a good thing.

A dream

I was walking through small cobbled streets in a place that wasn't familiar though I'm now thinking it had similarities to Hradčanské Square in Prague. It was a warm, gloriously sunny day and the place must have been set on a hill because the streets were all sloping at a constant gradient, although in different directions. Glancing between buildings to my left, I spotted a massive pale-grey bull, loose and trying to wreak havoc in a street café. I was with someone I didn't know, and the bull hadn't seen us yet.

We ran over and climbed onto a sideboard that suddenly appeared as the streets shifted and morphed into a maze of winding but sharp angled hallways, the sort you might find in a large hotel.

Then I was running through corridors, alone, the sound of violence and chaos somewhere behind me. I leapt onto another work surface but this one was quite rickety so I had to hang off a wall cupboard to avoid falling.

Me and the cupboard were in what seemed to be a kitchen kind of corridor. In an adjacent passage through a doorway was F, my girlfriend from over fifteen years ago, dressed only in her nightshirt and ironing her skirt for work. She was wearing copious amounts of thick, ugly make-up. Just for a moment I had the tiniest echo of that terrifying dream feeling you get when someone is in danger, and no matter how hard you try, you can't shout to warn them. A second later it had gone as though it never existed. Although I was still listening out for the bull and hugging the wall cupboard, it seems the threat had receded leaving a peaceful silence. I looked across at F in her nightshirt, then she seemed to see me so I quickly shifted my gaze to the white emulsioned wall directly ahead as if I'd been looking at this all along. Well it's just impolite to look at someone ironing in a state of undress isn't it?

She looked across and laughed her usual cheeky and friendly little laugh. By now I was standing on a dangerously wobbly washing machine.

Just at that point, while studying the white-washed hallway, clinging to the wall cupboard and balancing precariously on the wobbly washing machine, I woke up. I haven't remembered a dream like this, nor woken up in the middle of one, for ... well it seems like years. I knew I had to write it down immediately otherwise it would disappear so I grabbed my blogging notebook (the bedside one) and began frantically scribbling, rifling through memory, coaxing out all the small details that were about to fade. There were other dream-fragments too but I couldn't stop to examine them without losing this thread. Those other fragments though, they were part of a much larger dream that had almost completely gone by the time I came back to it.

That larger dream had flashes of a much bigger hotel with a small and very crowded restaurant occupying part of the foyer and part of the street.

I was sipping a very small drink in the company of a stranger and we were looking for somewhere to sit. While the guests were comfortably sat on chairs and stools, the only thing available for me was a miniature bean bag. Unfortunately, because bean bags are quite low to the ground, my knees were poking out and it was so crowded that I had to scrunch up to avoid knocking into anyone else. Then suddenly the stranger disappeared and it was just me, the beanbag, my knees and the guests. I don't remember feeling self conscious at all, but suddenly all the guests disappeared and I was standing in a curious small cobbled and bricked alcove just off to the side, looking back on the now empty hotel entrance, and up to its balustraded balconies. The alcove appeared to hold some significance but I've no idea now, what it may have been.

Unfortunately I can't remember anything else although I'm sure this was the very tail end of a much longer dream, one which feels reminiscent of a completely different dream from several months ago that I also couldn't remember at the time and which, until now, I'd completely forgotten about. Oops, I think I got a bit lost there.

Anyhow it's later now and I'm typing this off my blog notes. Haven't got a clue what I'm rambling on about seeing as all these dream threads have completely faded from mind.

Funny things, dreams.

The 2006 Geminids

This morning was a morning to savour shooting stars, in particular, a meteor shower comprising a collection of space rocks called the Geminids

Image © George Varros

The image shows the view as it may have looked, somewhere above the grey blanket rain-cloud that's wrapped itself around Bunnyhome, here in the North-East Atlantic. Under this dark, featureless murk I can only dream about the brightest meteor shower of 2006. Maybe the sky will be clear when these space rocks visit us again at the end of 2007?

I was able to simulate the shooting star effect, by pointing a torch directly upwards into the rain, resulting in a damp display of shooting water droplets; very pretty but quite annoying when they land in your eye. This whole shooting stars, standing out in the rain thing, was actually part of a self-deluding conspiracy to avoid thinking about, the thing I've been trying to avoid thinking about.

The thing I've been trying to avoid thinking about being Christmas day.

This Christmas I had been hoping for a quiet unassuming break, free of greetings cards, family visits and habitual gift swapping. This year more than any other I have a whole queue of internal debates and troublesome thoughts to ponder.

Unfortunately when I saw Leaf about three weeks ago, she gave me an invite to dinner on Christmas day with "two or three" of her friends. Foolishly I didn't flush out the truth while I had a chance to do something about it. I saw her again [last week] and discovered that "two or three" actually means twenty six members of her family. She's invited them for a full seasonal dinner and she needs me to cook. Leaf isn't a kitchen person, you see.

Almost the same thing happened last year, though on a smaller scale. Leaf had invited me over for Christmas dinner with her family. What followed was a frenzied evening that saw me cooking turkey with all the associated trimmings for eleven people, and fish pie with brussel sprouts for yours truly, the sole non-meat eater.

So yes, I should know better. Well at least I have a blog now which wasn't the case in 2005.
note to self: remember to book a holiday abroad - somewhere with clear skies - for Christmas 2007!!

Anyway, I'm trying to avoid thinking about Christmas day.

This evening something quite odd happened. I was randomly surfing - skimming blogs from China, Madagascar and Saudi Arabia, reading some quite funny stories, when a little bubble of happiness floated in from somewhere and latched on to me. I forgot completely about Christmas day and started smiling for no apparent reason, a quite unexpected momentary high. Unfortunately the moment's left now, so I'm back to my usual dreariness.

And ... there's a small fly; an extremely annoying small fly. He's been around here for two days. Each time I spot him, manoeuvring somewhere in my peripheral vision, he manages to disappear. I'm normally quite a peace loving person when it comes to house guests, but this particular pesky fly has an appointment with his afterlife and I intend to make sure he keeps it.

Listening to: Mozart's Piano Sonata in C Minor, interspersed with an intermittent but quite annoying buzzing noise

Exasperation at the Easy Internet Café

A visit to an Easy Internet Café with a £2 coin can prove a challenge.

The ticket machines in this particular café don't carry any helpful instructions telling you which coins they accept. Several attempts with a £2 coin proved fruitless, so after having climbed the two flights of stairs to the floor with the access points, I trudged back down to the Nero coffee shop on the ground floor and asked Mr coffee shop owner - the one with the oiled haircut - if he could exchange my £2 coin for two £1 coins. He sighed and somewhat mockingly told me there was a change machine upstairs at the very end of the room. "Oh", I said and went looking. After climbing the stairs and walking the length of the building I found a slim, grey change machine, read the notice on the front that said it didn't accept £2 coins and said, "Hrumph!". Again, I trudged down to report my frustration to Mr Coffee with the oiled haircut who responded with a pleasant stream of guttural Scottish:

"It's no ma business pal, see we only rent the space, we dinna know how it works. So it's no ma problem.
Here, I'll gie ye two pound coins but am dae'ing ye a real favour cos am no supposed tae open the till, see!

So I climbed back up the stairs and finally, pressed the green button then inserted my pound coins into the ticket machine ... and out they popped again in the reject slot! After the third time I began giggling - I mean what the f£$&!" are you supposed to do?

Then I thought, "Ah, let's visit that change machine again." It claimed to issue 50 pence pieces in exchange for £1 coins, and indeed it did just that. Back to the ticket machine now with four 50p coins. Eureka! A ticket for one hour on the net.

What a palaver!!

Unfortunately now, I can't remember what on earth I was going to post. "Hrumph!" It's just as well that EasyJet airline flights don't have to be paid using a coin machine.

Listening to: conversations in an Internet Café
Wondering: what look to give Mr Coffee on the way out.

Secret Spy Torch

Visited Leaf yesterday in Little Big Smoke. She said, "Bring your electric drill and plumbing tools". I think it's because she doesn't see me that often these days and feels the need to squeeze every last little drop of usefulness out of me.

So the visit to a nice tea shop was exchanged for a traffic laden trip to the DIY store to exchange bulbs and wall fittings she'd bought, which although pretty, were unfortunately completely unsuited for their purpose.

She dangled the promise of a pizza in return for hanging two large wall mirrors and refitting a radiator - Leaf had had a terminal disagreement with her Plumber half way through his work, you see.

The challenge of these little jobs is that Leaf likes to help. Keeping her gainfully occupied while trying to carefully align a water pipe can be tricky but its generally preferable to having an ice cube pinged up my trouser leg or having my scalp examined for imagined infestations.

There was one very interesting little job though. She recently had some of those small ceiling lights fitted in the bathroom - the kind that fit flush with the surface and don't protrude. Unfortunately her Plasterer had short circuited them with his wet gypsum, blowing the bulbs in the process. Replacement means pulling out the unit and disengaging each bulb from its dangling electricity supply wire. It seems either the Plasterer or Leaf - though she denies all involvement - had pushed one of the dangling wires inside the ceiling void and now it was nowhere to be seen.

The holes for these lights are about four inches in diameter so there's hardly enough room to poke your nose in, let alone see up into the dark recesses between the ceiling and the floorboards of the flat above. I tried exploring but could only squeeze three fingers and a pinky through the gap at one time.

This was clearly a job for my secret spy torch - a small reading light with an LED bulb mounted on a thin stem connected to a clip at the other end - the kind that attaches to the side of a book so you can read on a dark bus or train. The kind you buy from one of those revolving wire displays in airport accessory shops.

Anyway, it was perfect for poking up into the hole in the ceiling. I felt like a spy, sneakily poking a miniature camera on a stick through the air conditioning grill at the office of the Kremlin's KGB chief, as he signed his approval for the latest assassination method - ingestion by deadly radioactive toast.

While pressing my cheek and nose to the ceiling - a convoluted exercise involving a ladder and some gymnastics - I poked the torch into the dark void and could just see the loose end of the electric feed wire about a foot in. Luckily, Leaf had a flexible draft excluding strip - the kind that goes round a door frame to stop wintry chills - that could be shaped into a flexible hook. After five minutes of fiddling and getting quite personal with some only recently dried plaster, I hooked the wire and pulled it back out. Voila!

A complex job that would likely have been beyond the capability of your average brain surgeon, completed successfully.

Leaf was over the moon. All her lights now worked and the bathroom was warm again. This meant lots of cuddles for me and the promised pizza, yipee!

Not such a bad night after all.

Listening to: conversations in an Internet Café
Feeling: rushed, sorry I've not had time to reply to comments yet.

BluBlog

I've started to keep a personal diary in the form of a private blog. This won't mean any changes to my blogging here, in fact I'm hoping it will help me with posting.

Keeping a personal diary is a step in a new direction and feels very strange. When I started this blog, I said that I really wasn't able to maintain private diaries or journals so this sudden impulse has come as a bit of a surprise. What may have set it off was that I was having problems blogging recently and felt that I just wasn't writing often enough. After all, writing is a skill and skills have to be exercised or they get rusty, right?

So since then, I've managed to write something most days, even if it's just been gibberish. The process actually feels quite refreshing - which is an unexpected surprise - because I don't feel any pressure to post it, to spend the time needed to tidy it up and re-write it and because of that, it flows more easily. Unfortunately so far it really has all been complete nonsense but I'm hoping the activity will help my writing improve in the medium term.

But, but, but ... this may only be a temporary impulse, I'll have to see how well it goes.

I've called it my BluBlog because it started out with a blue theme, although now it's all greens and yellows. That fish is called Barry by the way and no, I've no idea what he's doing here either. I might occasionally post something from the BluBlog here. I wouldn't hold out any hopes of riveting reading material though, in fact just to prove that it's outright poppycock, here's an excerpt from probably the most coherent entry.

In a house opposite me someone has painted their bedroom wall a two tone colour. The bottom half is a very deep sky blue and the top is cream. If you're a painter, imagine Cobalt Blue perhaps with a tinge of Cerulean cut with Titanium White, and a pale but well saturated Naples Yellow. For some reason the colours make me think of a place but now my memory is in a spate of uncertainty. I can't decide whether the place is St Ives in Cornwall or Lerapetra in Crete.

But anyway, the colours are lovely. I only just noticed because the Sun has to be out and at a certain angle, and I have to be passing a certain window, and looking in a certain direction, and, well, a whole combination of factors have to take place really; in fact this opportunity occurs so infrequently that these pretty squiggles were invented to describe it.

Oh, and I can't paint although I absolutely, madly, deeply love colour. Especially the kind of colour you get from pigment suspended in oil.

Listening to: Chris Isaak, "Forever Blue"
Nibbling: an oatcake

Peek-a-boo

Following Google's strange behaviour as reported in my last post, I've been playing a bit. I stumbled on givemebackmygoogle recently which claims to give "Google™ results without the annoying affiliate links". Taking a little peek under the bonnet, it seems that it strips out links to price comparison sites such as Kelkoo and Pricerunner from your search results.

An example: say you wanted to search for stereo headphones. The first results page Google returns includes places like Comparestoreprices, Ciao and Dooyoo. But what if you're not interested in price comparison websites? All these links can be a real annoyance. Give me back my google, or GmbmG as it calls itself, strips them all out.

What I find interesting is not the site itself which, in all honesty I probably wouldn't use, but the way it works. It uses a known Google search feature called -inurl that simply excludes one or more websites from your search. In fact you can type in your own -inurl keywords. This is a really useful idea because you can use it for all manner of other things.

For example, if I want to find information, say on the book, Sabriel by Garth Nix, but I don't want any Amazon nonsense listed in the results, I can type this in the Google search: sabriel -inurl(amazon)

What this does is to exclude results for amazon.co.uk or amazon.com because any link that contains the word amazon in the url is stripped out. I can exclude results for more than one site by separating each word with the "|" character (that's the vertical broken bar character that's to the left of the 'z' on a UK keyboard, or somewhere over to the right on a US keyboard).
So I could do something like this: sabriel -inurl(amazon|ebay)

The result is a better search with fewer distractions :-) So that's good isn't it?

Sabriel and Sweetcorn

Aren't search engines strange?

Earlier, I happened to notice that a Google search for "sweetcorn" and "forks" returned Little Stitches as the third most useful website in the world. It's nice of search engines to consider my blog a key global authority on the subject of eating sweetcorn, don't you think? Pity that expectant visitors will find no more than a pile of nonsense when they get here.

Of course by mentioning sweetcorn and forks again (twice now), your average unintelligent search bot might think this blog has even more to say on matters relating to the cob and is therefore worthy of being classified as the foremost worldwide resource on the subject. I wonder if this will get me a mention at the next global food conference?

So perhaps this will explain why I am adding internet search engines to my list of, "funny things that can't be explained by any useful rationale known to mankind."

I've now finished reading Sabriel by Garth Nix, whizzing through it so fast in fact, that there wasn't even time to update my sidebar reading list. It's a relaxing and lightweight semi-romantic fantasy with necromancers and warriors, oh and a strange kind of cat. It seems to be aimed at a teenage audience and I assume it's similar to the Harry Potter books although I can't be sure; you see I haven't read any of those. I did try once, with Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone but I do prefer my fantasies to be rooted in different ages or places, far from the monotony and insanity of modern life. Well otherwise how can they be fantasies? Anyway, it's a nice refreshing change from more serious fiction.

So I'm torn now over what to start next - either Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts or Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Ponder, ponder ... I'll probably leave Sarah Rayne's Roots of Evil for Christmas.

On the blog front, I've seen a dramatic reduction in comment spam this week - not a single link-ridden comment between the Friday before last and today. This did get me wondering whether 20Six had introduced some mysterious new anti-spam feature but that's probably wishful thinking. Much more likely is that Googles has reduced the ranking of some of my older pages, making them harder for spam bots to find. Unfortunately my moment of peace seems to be over - this morning the bots found one of my newer posts.

Listening to: Dead Can Dance, "Cantara"
Wondering: whether I'll now be the world's foremost authority on lightweight semi-romantic fantasies?

A numerical puzzle

Someone has just been considerate enough to bring me back three cakes, of the small sponge variety, that sit in pleated, little paper cups, and that have icing sugar and other lovely things on top.

They said it was for my sweet tooth, but I've decided to ignore that slur on my hypoglycaemia research project.

Now I would have preferred to post a picture of the thing with a bite taken out, you know provide some visual context. Unfortunately my camera's fastest shutter speed wasn't up to the job of freeze-framing this fast-action, two stage chomp.

This photograph is therefore a valuable piece of cake history. Thinking to offer it to cake historians, I tried an internet search for: "historic pictures of cakes", but nothing was returned. Hmm, this kind of makes me wonder whether I've inadvertently stumbled on my purpose in life, my very own service to the Human Race. Establish a website purely devoted to historic pictures of cakes. I'll give it some though over cake number three, which is not yet history.

I know you'll have read the title of this post and be wondering whether, having removed one cake, and subtly hinted at the possible demise of another, I'm going to set you a complex arithmetic puzzle by asking you how many are left. No, no, no. Of course I wouldn't insult your intelligence this way. In fact, I have a much more complex puzzle to present.

Discerning viewers with an eye for detail will have noted a small blue cylindrical object, perched on that sugary, half-orange slice. Here then is the puzzle. This object is one of what would be called hundreds and thousands (that's sprinkles to American readers) had the cake been sprinkled liberally with similar items. However only one of these things accompanied my cake.

Therefore how do you refer to this object? Is it:
a hundreds and thousands?
a hundred and thousand?
a hundred and one?
a one?
some insignificant blue speck what just disappeared down my gullet?

Listening to: Susan McKeown, "Or Mhle Gr A Thousand Times My Love"
Thinking: that 'sprinkles' seems such a bland word