I’ve been thinking about the habit of labelling or categorising food and behaviour as good or bad. The other day I blogged about how I love sushi (yum!) but the rice isn’t that great. There I was, the great-hater-of-labelling, demonising my favourite food because of the dreaded C word … CARBS. For years I demonised peanut

I was late in from work tonight. There was a beautiful clear blue sky and very little wind. The trees in their new leaves were luminous and green, fidgeting casually in the quiet of the spring evening. I had pasta and garlic bread for tea. About seven thirty I heard Hugo beginning to saw. He sawed for about twenty minutes. I

The disease seems to have originated in the Far East and to have made its way west along the trade routes. It seems to have arrived in the Mediterranean and from there to have spread throughout the rest of Europe. In time it is said it killed half the population. At first explanations tended to rest

It rained this morning for the first time in a while. The world was soft and grey. Mandy, Mr Zee and the kids were in reception when I arrived. Mr Zee was in his full brown as peat regalia - mask too - and standing in his characteristic legs astride, taller than a tree posture. He

Yesterday I went to another meeting in Morpeth. Well, actually, it was the same meeting that I’d gone to the day before, but on that day I had the wrong day in my diary. One of the people at yesterday’s meeting was my old boss Gilmour. He and I have had some serious disagreements in

It’s been a curious week. Hugo has installed an elaborate Heath Robinson device above his pond, which presumably functions to keep the water pure. It is an arrangement of square black plastic tanks and gnarly white plastic pipes with a bewildering number of ninety degree bends in them. Any noise it makes is masked by the

Some time today three part-worn car tyres on grubby black steel rims took up residence on the gravel beneath Hugo’s railings. They do not look to me like Mercedes wheels, and I therefore assume they are not for the Alligator. I suspect it may be a long time before Hugo discovers their true purpose. I rang

The trespass went badly to all reports. Afterwards Margaret was particularly taciturn and disgruntled. ‘Just don’t ask,’ she replied when I asked her about how it had gone. It was obvious that the red girders of the Winter Palace had probably not been stormed. As the week went on I gleaned a little more about the

Read this post. It’s not very long, it took me less than five minutes to read it.

I hate it when male friends kind of stop wanting to be my friends cos they got a girlfriend and are worried she’ll be jealous. This most often happens if the guy in question made out/slept/where in love with me before he met the girl in question. I haven’t ditched ANY of my male friends, not