I made baked beans today: pancetta, tomatoes, onions (SOM), garlic, thyme from the garden, plenty of flageolet beans and a little seasoning. Really, really good.

The top patio's cleared and I've moved that bloody lion twice, and three of the enormous buxus-es. There are occasions when one craves a helpful boyfriend: this was not one of them. I am actively seeking out things I can do that are physically difficult, at the moment. I want to get better, and I'm not going to get better by magic, I'm going to get better by work. That lion might find himself relocated with monotonous regularity, until I'm up for something heavier.

This garden's not perfect. There's no destination, with a garden. It's all journey.

( Come on, then. )

If you haven't seen "For All Mankind", you might want to watch it - it's a superb film made of footage shot by the astronauts and their support team, when they went to the moon.

You can see the whole thing here.

Yanno. Unless you were fortunate to have been given a copy on DVD as a gift.

***

Classically attired (which is to say semi-naked) lady statues - very indistinct and mossy. I would have thought this was perfectly SFW.

( but just in case your boss is Ned Flanders )

***

As if that were not enough excitement for one evening (and so close to bed-time too!), I give you ( the aquarium )

My garden now has two half naked stone ladies, one lion and five unspeakable squirrels. The ladies and the lion are much bigger than I had realised. Consequently, being the size queen that I am, I am much happier than I had planned to be.

GDD is coming 'round tomorrow. I am not entirely sure why.

He really is a very beautiful cat.



I mean: each of them is, but each of them catches me afresh several times a day, as if I'd never seen them before and they were someone else's cat that I'd met in someone else's house, and I want to stuff them into my handbag. Except I don't have to, so I just bend over and give them the kisses of loving, yes, because they are always right beside me.

I feel happy. That is all.

Just wanted to mark the occasion. xx

This is great - link courtesy of jm_kaye. Single shot, and a lovely bemused pedestrian at the end.

Happy Monday, people. x



/edit: have realised that "bemused pedestrian" is actually the song's author, James Rado.

I went to Sainsbury's this morning to return something: left home at 10am, bright and early, got there at 20 past only to discover that their tills are unmanned (in the non-Victorian sense) until 11am. And that at about 10.30 a little chap emerges from the back-room bakery with a tray of piping hot, freshly fried jam doughnuts, covered, as is right and proper, with caster sugar. Not some tedious glaze that makes the surface of the doughnut soggy. Not granulated sugar, which has grains too large to adhere in satisfying quantities to the hot surface of the doughnut.

No. Caster sugar. Sainsbury's are the last bastion of the properly-made doughnut.

I wish I hadn't seen it. But I saw it.

I prowled the aisles, wasting time. I bought venison for me (I had some last night, slapped on the plate without benefit of a formal introduction to the pan, bloody and soft and unspeakably, deeply, redly satisfying). Some good quality mince for the masses, who won't condescend to be fed with loaves and fishes but prefer loves and raw beef. What else? What else? Some pancetta. I peered at the fish counter, knowing that nothing on it would appeal. 10.55.

10.55 ... and I find myself surprisingly close to the doughnuts. They're on a 3 for 2 offer. I was only going to buy one, but it's too late now. I'm excited. I eschew tongs and slip my hand into a flimsy bag. Using it as a sort of prophylactic, I select the roundest, the ones with the most sugar on them, and as gently as a crocodile mother I scoop the three into the bag and invert it around them. They're as warm and soft as a baby's head in my palm. They must be eaten right away.

There's a small queue: one woman and a lively little boy ahead of me. He's dressed in a karate outfit and makes experimental kicks every so often. Come on, come on. One of the kicks gets a little close to my basket, and with vivid anxiety I picture him falling on the three most perfect doughnuts in the whole batch, squashing them. I know the mother would apologise. I know I'd go and get three more. But they wouldn't be these ones, the best ones, the plumpest, sugariest ones. Back off, kid, I think. It's not enough. I pick up the bag with the doughnuts in it and cradle them softly.

I dash through the tills (I shouldn't be doing this) and onto a bench outside. I soon attract a crowd of supplicants - starlings, lining the bench beside me and the ground between my feet, looking at me one-eyed and splay-toed. I eat a doughnut, ignoring them for the first two thirds: the slight crunch of the sugar, the dreadfully wonderful, warm, cheap jam that bears only a homeopathic relationship to fruit; the fried outside of the doughnut brown and so, so subtly crisp; and the soft, pale inside, sweet and just a tiny bit salty. I share the final bit with the starlings, making sure everyone gets a piece.

This entire episode is wrong, but happy.

I feel guilty, and put the other doughnuts carefully back in the top of the bag, where they won't be crushed. There's sugar all over my fingers and mouth. I've licked most of it off my fingers by the time I get to the top of the slope that leads to the bus stop (I'm not catching the bus, I walk past the stop). As I get to the deserted stop, I've licked the sugar off my chin and need only a comprehensive tongue-swipe across my top lip to feel fairly presentable. I do it, in that kind of lush, abandoned way you do when you don't think anyone is looking, just as a man appears around the bus stop and there's one of those uncomfortable moments where you fully engage the eyes of a stranger. I realise it looks as if I just gave him a porn come-on, and start giggling. He looks confused and drops his eyes.

Bollocks. My neighbour just caught me having a right old cry.

I much preferred it back in the days when, if I got caught doing something, it was "dancing like a muppet."

Dear god, I feel like shit. I'm doing that utterly useless thing where I keep trying to pull myself together/upright and do something constructive with my day, but it's like trying to climb a glass slope with oiled feet. I'm going to have to do something completely out of character and take some painkillers.

Which means I'm going to have to go out and buy some painkillers, as I don't keep them in the house.

Fuck.

Being subbed to Jamie Oliver's twitter account is like having a little flap in reality that, when you pull it back, roars DAILY MAIL at you so loudly your hairline shrinks back a full two inches, never to return. viz:

anouther true story a massive amount of uk farmers use human waist as fertiliser on there land!do any other countrys do this? is this normal

No Jamie. No, it's not even normal.

Still, could be worse. A couple of weeks ago he had caps lock stuck on. It was like being shouted at by that old guy in the corner of the pub who manages to be simultaneously angry and pleading, and whose evening is not complete until his bezzie has both consoled him AND smacked him in the mouth.

This is too good not to share - ganked from jdack - a class piece of self-publishing.

...and the reviews! The reviews! Aaaahahahaha!

Inspiring.

A cocktail, you say?

Why, very well then.

I'm sorry, but these two pics make me HOOT. What are they doing (actually, Zellweger is hailing a cab)?

But why are they doing it at such a rakish angle?

Is leading with one's pudendum the new cool thing? Am I getting it all wrong?

I've just watched the final series and it threw up a couple of WTF moments.

1) Lee Adama's increasingly bouffant hair-do. WTF? He ended up looking like he should be singing "Summer Lovin'", having got there via the Lionel Blair route.

2) Bill Adama: whose idea was it to stuff bright blue contact lenses in his eyes for the last series? Absurd, and really distracting. WTF?

3) Some of the graphics were so WTF-liciously bad they pulled me clean out of the story-line. I mean, it was obvious that someone on the team is seriously into colour, but between Adama's fluorescent eyeballs and that whole yellow-and-blue thing, and the spider-cum-dried-flower thing. Oy, what were they thinking? I actually rewound it at a couple of points, murmuring "there's no WAY that graphic could be as bad as my brain's telling me it was ..." and it was. People, take the magic mushrooms away from your matte artists. Or whatever the modern equivalent of a matte artist is.

Other than that ( spoiler )

Is it weird that I feel strangely bereft, now the garden guys have gone?

I bought my fish a new light - one of those Biorb LED day/night seasonal things, where you can give them longer days in the summer and short ones in the winter and a flashing disco on Saturday nights. I might've made that last bit up. I wish I hadn't.

Anyway, they're fish, right?

So I installed it this morning and switched it on and it went through an hour of transitioning from moonlight to daylight (the point of this thing is that it's supposed to be kinder to the fish than just flipping a light on randomly). And you know ... they look happier. They do. I can't explain it.

It put me in mind of an acquaintance of mine who works in large-installation lighting, and who was involved in a project to re-light a huge shark tank at one of the country's larger aquariums. He's out there, bobbing about on the tank in a little boat doing some wiring (there are sharks in the tank); and there's a diver who has to go into the water and do some other wiring. Apparently it's perfectly safe. Predictably - given that there's electrical wiring going on - at some point the lights all go out. There's a bit of a kerfuffle in the dark - noises and alarums - during which the shark keeper (if that's the right term) comes belting in, yelling at them to turn the lights back on! They do so, and discover that the diver has been - to use my acquaintance's words - "a bit bitten."

Turns out sharks hunt at night, and all you have to do to trigger the behaviour is turn the lights out.

*rolls eyes*

Let's try saying it together, shall we? Three ... two ... one ...

HUMANS ARE ANIMALS.

I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.


***





( Abandoned kitten )

Alright, it's TIME FOR LOVE!



Anton uses his powers to levitate a piece of yellow velcro, while his young padawan looks on:



( you want it, you muppet )

My cellar's at a consistent 18 degrees. I was down there last night doing some stuff, and as I came back up the stairs it was like ascending into hell. My place is normally about three degrees cooler than the outside, in summer, but if that thermometer hasn't dropped out of the 20s tonight I'm sleeping downstairs. Even the people are all flopped out, lying quite separately on the living room rug, and occasionally shooting me looks that suggest this is all my fault.



If it isn't cooler this evening (and it won't be), I shall sleep downstairs and spend the night snuggled under a thick duvet.