Author: richard

At the time of writing, it’s not yet available, but this is going to be a Must Have for me: The Salmon of Doubt — fifty pages of Douglas Adam‘s unfinished novel.

When you work from home a lot, sometimes you need to get out of the house — even if it’s just for ten minutes — to stop yourself going mad. Human interaction. Air. That kind of thing. So, I’d popped out to the closest coffee shop (yes, it’s a Starbucks) to get myself a tall skinny latte and I’m walking it home up our street. At the bottom of the street there’s a small white van, and inside there’s a big happy dog, probably a Golden Retriever or something like that. The kind of dog that ‘s inquisitive and doesn’t seem to know how strong it is: heavy tail wagging away and big paws jumping up onto anything interesting. Outside the car was a man with a coat hanger, trying to angle the coat hanger through an open window to lift up the door latch. Hmmm…. I don’t think I’d choose to break into a car that has a dog in it. As I got closer I was wondering whether this was a 999 (911) situation, when I overheard the guy talking to the dog: “this is all your fault that you’re locked in…”. And you can just see it: big dog jumps up at the window, paws slip down onto the lock and… “clunk”.

On Friday we spent part of the evening jumping on bubble wrap. Oh yeah… we know how to enjoy ourselves. I recommend large-ish bubbles. Try it with shoes on or off. You’ll like it.

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There’s a protest going on today against what some people describe as an enormous seafront development which will obscure views out to sea. I dunno, we’ll wait until we see the full plans and the alternatives next month. But the protesters appear to be having a jolly time… see the pictures

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Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, so we treated ourselves to a meal from leapingsalmon.com. This is the “gourmet meal kit” service: you pick the meal you want, and they send you all the ingredients… all of them including little tiny bottles of olive oil, little tubs of sugar — the only ingredient we had to add ourselves was water.

Of course you can buy the ingredients and make a nice meal without help from Leaping Salmon, but it’s a nice treat to have everything delivered in one package for you to prepare. Believe me, we don’t usual start a mid-week meal with tatin of cherry tomatoes (mmm… yummy). We also had the roast salmon with nori and pine nut crust. All very tasty, easy and quick to make.

It even ended up looking like it was supposed to look (more or less):

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The only downside is… what to do with all the packaging.

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After only recently getting into “Stargate: SG-1”, today we learn that there’s going to be a movie (Stargate II) featuring the cast of SG-1. Hurrah. But… they won’t be making any more SG-1s after series six. Boo. But there will be a spin-off series, called Stargate Atlantis. So all is not lost, and anyway… as we’re only just watching series 1, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

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Congrats to my neice, Sarah. She gave birth to her second son — Jack William — yesterday. For a while there he was Baby Without A Name, and his brother, Reece, had come up with a choice of either “Scooby Do” or “Bob The Builder“…

A couple of days ago I had my first fall from my bike. I was cycling with Paul along a route we’d done before, and we were going down a very muddy patch in a lightly wooded area. For some reason my front wheel had become a mud magnet and it was collecting leaves and mud and all sorts until it clumped together at the fork and stopped my wheel from turning. Paul found a quick exit from the muddy area via a short steep slope. I decide to follow via a similar route after first clearing some of the junk from my wheel.

With hindsight I probably should have really made sure my front wheel could turn before going down the slope… but in truth the slope was a bit too steep for me. I started the decent and my front wheel slid rather than turned. My instinctive reaction was to slam on all both brakes (for the record, this is what we call a mistake). It was at this point that my bike went left and I went over the handlebars to the right. In my minds eye I looked a bit like superman — hand out front — but my fall probably had more in common with flailing than flying. My thoughts were: “Hmm, I’m heading towards the middle of a clump of brambles. This could hurt”. And by hurt I had slashing and blood in mind. In fact it was quite a soft landing, but a bit of a tangle. I’ll have no hesitation in diving into brambles again. Should it be called for.

So, first fall and nothing really bad happened. My lesson from this one is: never cycle alone (thanks, Paul, for pulling me out of the brambles). Paul’s suggestions: next time we’re out, we should maybe bring a first aid kit and a disposable camera.

On the way to the airport to fly out to Malta we listened to the first half of Rolf Harris‘s autobiography, Can You Tell What It Is Yet. When we got back I discovered that Rolf has (or had) a club on Malta. Spooky. If only we’d known when we were out there…. ”