Gosh! Wow! It's finally happened!

Not the SMBC thing (I hope). Nope. I finally finished my paid work. And I don't know what to do with myself. Usually there is more work arriving before the last work has finished and that's great because it keeps me feeling (financially) secure, but it's nearly August and I've been winding down for the summer. I've got a job next week and a job the second week of August and spaces are available for anyone who wants to stop me blowing my entire fortune on a month at the Fringe (~20 tickets already purchased at huge expense) but right now I have no reports to write, no legislation to research, no courses to prepare, no nothing. I could do housework (it's been a hard year and a half), but I alphabetised a third of my books last weekend and I want to keep something fun to do. I could start preparing for my CEnv interview but they reckon it'll be at least 3 months. I could, I could, I don't know what to do.

On the other hand, it's going to rain all day tomorrow so I can stay in and do some marketing. And perhaps pick another lot of raspberries right now and drop them into my jar of vodka. 

The Season Changes

This week Jeph Jacques, he of the wonderful Questionable Content, found that he couldn’t draw his usual Thursday cartoon because of a deep and debilitating depression. He notes that this often happens to him at the changing of the seasons. I find myself wondering at this. I find season change deeply delightful.

The change from autumn to winter brings the anticipation of lighting the woodburner, drinking the raspberry vodka, the return of the stars (even in Sheffield), lights, decorations and christmas. From the end of December there’s the wonderful moment when the days start getting longer again and there’s the new chances provided by the new year.

By the beginning of spring I’ve usually had quite enough of those things, except the days drawing out. The first brave snowdrops, the expectation of warmer days, the promise of seedlings growing in the window, the return of colour to a grey world fill me with hope.

The transition from late spring to summer is probably my least favourite. I love late spring; fresh mornings, the darling buds of May, English asparagus, nettle soup, long warm days. 
Summer comes anyway. The garden (such as it is) is growing and I can move into sleeveless t-shirts and lose the quilt. And the lovely soft grey rains of summer are simply delicious. Not this year of course. Long term dreary deluge gets wearing after a while. And the swifts! Shrieking and diving through the deep canyons of our terrace-lined streets, amazingly distant crescents skimming the high sky.

The change of summer to autumn, though, is glorious, even as the swifts desert us for warmer climes. There’s a refreshing chill in the air. There’s a return to school feeling, the other new year, and I love it. English grown winter squash start to appear. The leaves begin to turn; a bounty of gaudy beauty. For me it feels that autumn begins after Sally’s birthday on 10th September. 

This year she was 21 and I begin to have to admit that my own transition from summer to autumn has pretty much gone. Over the last few years I’ve lost suppleness, strength and the elasticity in my skin seems to be fading. The things I’ve gained don’t seem to be that positive, mainly weight. I am loving my increasing invisibility however. Never having been backwards at coming forwards I can overcome young men’s inability to notice me if necessary, but there is something deeply peaceful about merging into the background. The hurly burly of the chaise lounge has been gone for some years now and I do occasionally look back with a certain wistfulness at the excitement, but only occasionally. I’m finding work increasingly rewarding, friendships of greater importance and I wake up far too early looking forward to each new day. Of course, getting out of bed takes longer and it takes a good few minutes for my feet and knees to loosen up. But then the lure of the early morning mug of tea encourages me to stumble down two Sheffield-steep flights of stairs to the kitchen. I’m currently mainly avoiding intimations of mortality and enjoying the days.

This week, leaning out of the Velux way before dawn I saw Orion above the horizon, faithfully accompanied by his hound, or at least I could see Sirius shining above the brightening horizon. Taurus and the Pleiades hung above him. There is not a glory of stars in Sheffield, and I miss that, but it makes the old favourite constellations easy to see. I guess the winter sky is so lovely to me because as an amateur astronomer of eleven it was the only one I got to know well. I was packed off to bed before the summer stars could be seen. It has the comfortable familiarity of many things known and loved in childhood. It’s been a gorgeously bright and blustery week. On my way to work this week I saw the local hot air balloon rising above the Botanical Gardens and some young guy, possibly not entirely sober, greeted me with the words, ‘Hiya darling. Have a blessed Wednesday!’ Of such things are happiness made. 

On a much, much darker note, this week the Hillsborough report was finally released. So many lives cut off horribly in the flower of their youth. So many lost so early, so many parents, lovers, friends with their lives blighted. I’ve always thought the lines, ‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.’  was poppycock; a brave attempt at comfort. The end result of growing old may be weariness but it is a privilege to have the opportunity. It would be churlish to whine.  

Incoherent bookish thoughts

I don’t read books as much as I used to. I think I might have mentioned this before. Ian and Julian have infected me with the need to read the internet until I’ve finished it. Ian knows he’s read it all when he resorts to DefenceTech. I’ve never reached the end.

This compulsion to finish things has affected me for years. In a strange way. Years ago, when I was a graduate trainee, they did a psych test on me which came up with the stunningly accurate insight that I do an excellent job until I have completed 95% of a project and then I abandon it and move on to the next new and interesting thing. That’s why I treasured my ex-colleague Catherine, a completer/finisher. Given that the very last thing I do on a project is send out the invoice, this could be a very bad thing for an independent consultant. These days I have a little spreadsheet whose boxes are coloured green when I have completed a project, when I have invoiced and, much more rarely at the moment, when I have been paid. Requiring enough money to live focuses one’s mind remarkably. Of course, being paid in advance short circuits this useful mechanism and, as I write this, the one outstanding project for April is one I was paid for in advance. Must finish that this weekend. Still, those don’t happen very often.

Anyway, I’ve meandered away from my point, which is that I like to finish reading a book. When I first went to a convention I shared a room with a German woman who stated that she always finished any book she started even if it was awful. I’m not that driven, but I feel a mild sense of failure when I don’t get to the end.

There are, of course, some books that I want to fling away rather than put down and just neglect to pick up again. Angel of Death was one of these. It came free in a convention bag some time ago. It was the only book I took when I spent three days in Coventry last year. The blurb was good; the book itself was not. Something about an angel of death who used a mass murderer to effect the required deaths. The murderer cut off the hands and head of his victims and masturbated into the head. The angel fell in love with the woman detective investigating the murders. Blech! I felt no urge to finish this book even though the writing style was engaging. It’s somewhere in the bedroom awaiting disposal.

In these apocalyptic days, when Julian Headlong has stopped buying books (an obvious sign of the end times) I have decided that I can attempt to change my habits. This whole line of thought crystallised when I was reading the comments on a Suzanne Moore article about hoarding. The comments generally agreed that hoarding, whilst many of us have a tendency towards it, is not a good thing. Until, some way down the comments thread, Mrs Moose chimed in with, ‘But having lots of books is okay. Isn't it? I mean most of them (not all) are on shelves. And I don't have two copies of that many things. The children's books might come in useful if there are grandchildren. I'm sure I could make myself stop. I gave a book away to a charity shop once. I think. Yes, I'm sure I did....’ My thoughts exactly! But is this right? It made me think. I have some books that could be categorised as trashy that I’m almost certainly never going to get rid of. Ring of Fear by Anne McCaffrey comes to mind. I have some classics, lit and SF, which could certainly go; I’m never going to read them again. They might be landmark works of the genre but they’re just not that good and, with no interest in academia, why give them shelf space?

I hesitate though. I’ve regretted disposing of the Chalet School books, I’d quite like to have all my Cadfaels back. It seems that every time I get rid of something I need it the next day. Samuel Delaney’s Tides of Lust is a case in point. I was never going to finish reading it. The writing is gorgeous, the subject boring in both senses. I hid it among some less salacious books and took it to Oxfam. And then I found I wanted to quote from it in a fanzine article. I mentioned this and within days a new copy arrived from a friend in America. Sigh. I guess it’s a keeper, or at least, a returner. Maybe one day I’ll attempt to read it again.

Anyway, coming back to the point, I’m giving up the guilt. If I don’t finish a book I’m going to get rid of it. Sometimes. There are those that don’t get finished, not because of any flaw in the book but because of circumstances. I forget to take my current book when I go away and have to buy a new one that sets me off on a different train. Or a new Gail Carriger, Mike Carey or Tanya Huff book comes out and all other books fall by the wayside.

Recently I was reading Windhaven by George RR Martin and Lisa Tuttle. It’s a perfectly good SF with ‘hang gliders’ book and the characters are mildly interesting however I have premonitions of disaster and I don’t want to read about it. The characters are doing things that will lead to hurt and loneliness. I don’t want to follow them on that journey. John Dowd passed the opinion that if you are not going to read books because bad things happen to the characters you’ll miss many great reads. That’s as maybe. I’ve got enough where that isn’t going to happen. To read Windhaven I would have to spread it out over weeks, maybe months, picking it up again only when I have ceased to care about the characters and putting it down when I start to worry about them again. It might take years. It doesn’t even matter when the characters are vile. I worried about the angel of death in just the same way. I sometimes wonder if I embraced golden age SF because the characters were so cardboard that it didn’t set off my worry reaction. This may be linked with my distaste for the comedy of embarrassment and for watching people do stupid things. Whatever. There are so many books in the world and I have so little time to read them why struggle with something that is not worth it in the end.

It has occurred to me that there is a nuance here. Felix Castor does stupid things resulting in harm for himself and those he loves, and yet I read these books avidly. I think it is because I care deeply about Felix. The people in Windhaven, names already forgotten, and the angel, are not sufficiently large characters for me to need to know what happens to them. And I don’t want to know.

Anyway, back to the point. White Mars is going, despite being signed by Brian Aldiss, because there is too much of it that is dull. Windhaven is going. The Angel of Death is certainly going. It may even be that Gladiator at Law is going. I’ve reread it recently and I’m fairly sure I’ll never read it again. I will make the commitment to at least attempt to read the books before ditching them. Physical Metallurgy and the Design of Steels by Brian Pickering will probably be kept for sentimental reasons. And it’s a cracking good read. Oh yes, and it cost me £27 in 1981.

Don't panic Mr Mainwaring

Saturday evening we were sat chatting about deep and meaningful (frivolous) topics when Ian announced that Standard & Poor’s have downgraded American debt to AA+. It was a chill down the spine moment. In itself it is not unexpected or significant; it is simply a marker, a label on the downward trend. But, goodness, a downgrade for America!

After wobbling for a little while we inevitably came back to a discussion of what, if any, SF books model this situation for us. We have so many apocalyptical books and so few about living through the dull, anxious days of a slow motion resource led collapse. People tend to be excellent at dealing with big obvious emergencies. In the UK we still look back with nostalgia at the way we dealt with World War II. We are, however, rubbish at even noticing the long emergencies despite the fact that these will have a far more lasting and devastating effect on how we live our lives.

I foresee decades of bickering, occasionally escalating into full-scale fights, as we slowly descend into real poverty with no one in power making any effort to make any of the radical changes needed to ameliorate the distress. Already there is the fear that there will be another generation that will never be able to reach their potential, who will languish on scraps of work, permanently dependent on handouts of one sort or another.  This is not a recipe for a settled world. We’ve seen how this has played out in Saudi Arabia.

At the same time, we older people still in work, will almost certainly not receive the benefits that our parents did. There was a golden age embedded somewhere in the latter half of the 20^th Century, though we didn’t notice it at the time. Free healthcare, free education, safe sex, liveable pensions, even, for a short time in the late 60s/early 70s, an optimism that love and peace could actually be achieved here on earth. How those things have decayed.

When I look to what our politicians are doing to lead us out of this difficult situation I see nothing other than a few banal clichés about the Big Society and a refusal to see that we are at a pivotal point where the old solutions of deregulation, growth and controlled inflation will only worsen the situation. Business as usual at any cost appears to be how this government (I include the loyal opposition and the media) fiddles.

One of my least favourite ‘fixes’ that the local council has put in place has been to automate the library. I know people cost money to employ but surely when enough council workers and private sector workers are unemployed the council tax revenues will disappear too. I feel quite strongly that sharing the paid work around so we all have some access to cash would be a better solution. Of course the government has set our system up so that the cost of employing two people part time is much more than the cost of employing one person. This is something that could change. The Netherlands did this some years ago. One of the worst things that could happen to us as a society is polarisation. As the wealth gap increases the safety of us all decreases. All of us being somewhat poorer is much better than a few being wealthy and the rest living off ever decreasing benefits. That way lies tent cities and social unrest. That way lies ‘Shockwave Rider’.

Julian suggested that Bruce Sterling’s ‘Distraction’ was one of the few books that gave us some idea of what might be coming. I suggested Gibbon’s ‘Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire’. This time there’s no outside, no other empires keeping the flame alight.


(The picture of apocalypse is just a storm brewing over Sheffield in July but so evocative I couldn't resist.)

Resilience

I’m doing a college course at the moment and one of the requirements is that I put together and deliver a five-minute presentation on a subject of my choice. It mustn’t be work related. Five minutes is a scarily short amount of time. When I’m training we usually haven’t even got to where the loos are by five minutes. I tend to be garrulous. Crikey!

So, if not work related, what? There’d be too much setting up required to talk about science fiction, my abiding passion. I’m not sure a knitting demonstration is what the tutor had in mind, and I’m not allowed to talk about climate change. Then I had an epiphany. I’m going to talk about resilience. It is related to work but, although I touch on it in relationship to environmental issues in some courses, it isn’t something that is central to my job and it is something that I’m concerned about in my personal life. Here’s the first draft:

I’m going to talk today about resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from a shock. I think the opposite would be brittleness or fragility. It is a concept that can be applied to all sorts of things, from a material to a civilisation. Hands up those who think our current civilisation is resilient.

You might guess that I don’t. The fragility of our modern British civilisation first impacted on me in the early 70s. I remember it vividly. The family was watching Star Trek and some horrid black blob beast had battened onto Spock’s back when, Bang! The lights went out. This, our first power cut of the miners’ strike, dropped us from the far galaxy spanning future directly into the cold dark scary past.

At the time we lived on a modern housing estate. When it was built a large underground oil storage tank had been provided to serve the heating needs of the whole estate. Oil was pumped through to the central heating boiler of each house. No electricity, no light, no heat. In my grandparents’ home there would have been warmth and some light from the open fire. There’d have been hot water from the geezer and the gas cooker would work for a while until the gas pressure fell. And, coming from the generation that lived through the war, they had a healthy stash of candles.

Our modern and efficient house contained exactly one candle, the advent candle. By the time the lights came back on there was only a dribbly red stub left… And there was a run on candles the next day in the village. None available, not even for ready money.

I think the experience had a salutary effect on me. That and the extensive reading of disaster SF. It’s not at the forefront of my thoughts all the time but the awareness of fragility squats at the back of my mind. I’m convinced we haven’t learnt from our experiences. Our systems are terrifically efficient and terribly brittle.

What could possibly go wrong? Drought in Russia, floods in Australia, land used to grow biofuels, a growing appetite for grain fed meat in the new middle classes in China and India, speculation in commodities; all leading to escalating food prices. Not immediate enough? We’re all rich enough not to go hungry after all.

We import over 40% of our gas now. Another very cold winter, low gas storage levels, a disruption similar to the one that affected central Europe whilst Russia and the Ukraine squabbled about who was or was not stealing gas. How would we fare? A lot of our electricity is gas powered now too.

Or imagine the same very cold winter, more likely as the climate changes, causing water pipes to freeze and burst. It happened in Northern Ireland this last winter. Weeks with only bottled water.

How about another volcano? A problem with oils supplies? Remember the oil refinery blockade a few years ago? No petrol at the pumps? Very quickly little food in the shops?

Just in Time deliveries are extremely efficient but they are not resilient. We have spent the last several years working to become super-efficient, to trim down to the bare bones. A system without fat is fine if there is no famine. Resilience is all about redundancy though. When the main system fails a secondary system takes the load. If that fails there is another backup. That’s not efficient. Efficiency is fine as long as everything goes to plan and nothing breaks down.

OK. Given my awareness of the dangers have I organised my life so I am safe from these failures? I have candles, I have a newly installed woodburning stove, I have a decent amount of food storage. I feel happy that I could weather a week’s disruption without pain but more than that? Water would be a problem in my urban environment, and a build up of waste. In reality my life can only be resilient in the context of a resilient society and not only do we not have one of those, our society is getting more and more brittle all the time. 

All teched up

My phone died. Or at least the screen did. Which means that although I can still use it to make calls, as long as I remember how I named the number I want, I can't see my alarms. There is obviously a problem with this. The wake up alarm was set to 5.30 and I can't change it. This is not a good wake-up time for the weekend and it will be too late for Tuesday when I'm going to Solihull by train.


I've had this phone for three and a half years now. It's a Samsung and has always been just a bit rubbish but it has done what was required, made calls, held numbers, very occasionally taken photos and provided three alarms, one with a snooze. I wouldn't have changed it, no matter the functionality of fabulous new phones, whilst it did what I required. Without the screen it doesn't do this any more. 


Ian did a bit of research and we found that I could have an iPhone from Tesco at the best price. To be honest I don't love Tesco. I don't love any of the standard service providers either. I've been with Orange for ten years but it's really not because they're a good company, just that they're all a little bit shoddy and changing now would be disruptive. The kids both have Orange phones, my free wireless broadband is through Orange and I also have a mobile dongle from them. For me to move would either require Orange to be even more useless than they already are or for another company to be obviously better, provide a noticeably better service at a lower price and make it easy to move. Still waiting. So, despite calling in at O2, I ended up back at the Orange shop.


The young man (Daniel) who served us hid his irritation inadequately but sufficiently that we didn't walk away. The very mirror of Orange's technique. I was either going to buy an iPhone or something cheap as chips and go with the laptop/Touch/dongle combination that I've got at the moment. The cheap option that did what I wanted (flips like a Star Trek communicator) looked like it would fall apart after a couple of months. The iPhone was shiny. Daniel offered an Android. It was also shiny and had vibratory icons. The fact that the iPhone has billions of apps did not sway me, not being a collector, but the familiarity of it did. I've got a Mac and a Touch and have played with Ian's iPad so I already know how to use the system. And the iPhone was shiny. Very shiny.


So now I have a lovely new iPhone4. Apple only provide a 1 year warranty. I'm on an 18 month contract. Something to think about in eleven months. After eighteen months I can transfer to a sim only contract if I can keep the phone undamaged for that long. Given that the Samsung lasted twice the life of the contract that may well be possible. I'll put a note in my diary for a year and a half from now to renegotiate.


And now it's time to organise my address book and choose some new music. Maybe see if there are any actually useful apps available (I want MyRail Lite!) to go with MyBus, TrainSearch and Dropbox. What else would I do with a free Sunday?

Synchronicity

Today has been lovely. I’m not sure why early October is often so nice. The day started chill and misty and slowly cleared to a wonderful brisk sunny day. I had a sales meeting near Shipley at midday so I got to sit in the window drinking tea and watching the day emerge from the fog whilst trying to sort out my diary for the next three months. Yesterday I was horribly surprised to find that I was training in Pontypridd the Monday after Novacon and it seemed sensible to sort travel arrangements out and avoid similar nasty shocks. I’m working away from home three or four times a week up to Christmas so I’m going to see a lot of public transport and be eating way too much uninspired hotel food. I remember scoffing when a friend said, many years ago, that it is difficult to live a healthy life when you are always on the road. I should probably track her down and apologise. Even if you are super-organised (and I’m so not) it is difficult to eat well and take any regular exercise, especially when you are up at 5 to get to the venue and not back until after 8. Actually it is difficult to keep up with the washing too.

So, organisation done I smeared on a bit of make-up and scurried down to the bus stop. I’ve given up on the no. 4 for going to the station; it’s just not convenient any more, so I sat on a crowded 83, popular because Stagecoach is 20p cheaper than First. It was packed with students.

Where I live in Sheffield we mark the milestones in the year by student presence or absence. The difference is quite startling. Over the last few years the kids in the shared houses on my street haven’t been much of a nuisance to me but there is a new lot in infused with the energy of youth. They were still partying outside at 5am during Fresher’s week. I’m hoping they will have calmed down a bit by the time the windows are reopened for next summer.

The boys who sat behind me on the bus enveloped me an a miasma of curry&hangover breath. One hadn’t gone to be d until 5, the other had arrived back from an allnighter in Leeds, done a bit of work on his dissertation and was heading back into town to sleep through his lectures. I vaguely remember being able to do that, back in the distant land of youth. I listened in, unashamed. If they were going to share their aroma the least I expected was to be distracted by their conversation. Apparently Sheffield is THE place for Drum and Bass. Something to do with Tuesday Club? No idea. Having recently read King Rat I was not averse to the idea that D&B is a sophisticated and important musical form, but I haven’t pursued it. I lapsed into a malodorous daydream as they displayed their music knowledge to each other. I emerged back into consciousness when one started extolling the virtues of Eric Bibb. Gosh. I saw him a few years ago at the Robin Hood (RIP) near Merry Hill. He was, as the boy stated authoratively, excellent. This segued into praising the Alabama Three (not 3, not from Alabama). Apparently they are also really good but not likely to last much longer due to their age and unhealthy lifestyles. I’d like to have chipped in but I knew it was unlikely that they would welcome a comment from a frumpy woman considerably older than their mothers. The knowledgeable one veered off to impress his friend with his choice of research subject; biomimetics. Brand new idea! All about incorporating natural living material structures and techniques developed in the harsh environment of evolution into engineering solutions. Fascinating! There was a good TED talk on the subject a couple of years ago. As we debussed I caught a glimpse of their fresh faces and marvelled at how connected the world has become. So much information is available so easily that I could understand much of what they were talking about. How the world has changed! Crafts and skills are being lost or downgraded into hobbies but information that in the past would have been too esoteric for the likes of me is now so casually available that I can appreciate it. Sensawunda!

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Even more so when, over the weekend Ian forwarded a piece written by Douglas Coupland, via Boing!Boing! He thought it would reflect my pessimistic worldview. How right he was. These are the comments that prompted him to forward the piece:

1) It's going to get worse

No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.

And:

6) The middle class is over. It's not coming back

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day?

That's where all the other jobs that once made us middle-class are going – to that same, magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel-agency jobs vanished, never to return. However, this won't stop people from self-identifying as middle-class, and as the years pass we'll be entering a replay of the antebellum South, when people defined themselves by the social status of their ancestors three generations back. Enjoy the new monoclass!

The ones that made a connection with me were these though:

10) In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness

11) Old people won't be quite so clueless

No more “the Google,” because they'll be just that little bit younger.

32) Musical appreciation will shed all age barriers

33) People who shun new technologies will be viewed as passive-aggressive control freaks trying to rope people into their world, much like vegetarian teenage girls in the early 1980s

1980: “We can't go to that restaurant. Karen's vegetarian and it doesn't have anything for her.”

2010: “What restaurant are we going to? I don't know. Karen was supposed to tell me, but she doesn't have a cell, so I can't ask her. I'm sick of her crazy control-freak behaviour. Let's go someplace else and not tell her where.”

38)Knowing everything will become dull

It all started out so graciously: At a dinner for six, a question arises about, say, that Japanese movie you saw in 1997 (Tampopo), or whether or not Joey Bishop is still alive (no). And before long, you know the answer to everything.

What I find so fascinating is how I sort of expected all this technological stuff to be part of a utopia (ecotopia) where we all lived long and fulfilling lives. How come the sensawunda stuff is embedded so deep in dystopian shit. The one that really hit home was this:

5) You'll spend a lot of your time feeling like a dog leashed to a pole outside the grocery store – separation anxiety will become your permanent state

Yes! All the time that my loved ones are away I suffer separation anxiety. I thought this was just a symptom of getting older. I hoped it was.

Back to work

So it was back to work with a vengeance today. Nose to the grindstone from 9 to 17.30 with five minutes for my PB sandwich and Questionable Content. Still, due to there being little to eat in the house I left on time so that I could get to Wayne's greengrocers before he shut, to purchase eggs and yogurt. I came home and opened the fridge to find half a monster yellow courgette (they get away so quickly if you don't pick them). It seemed a perfect opportunity to make potato and courgette soup. There were enough potatoes under the self-'seeded' potato plant in the garden and a lovely soup resulted from this garden bounty. 


Whilst wandering around the internet after eating I came across this somewhat alarming story about the end of the effectiveness of antibiotics. At work we had been talking about the upcoming wheat problems, and the potential for further recession under the austerity budget/s but had come to the conclusion that the world would not end this week. There do, however, seem to be an alarming number of bubbling problems. We will reassess the timescale for TEOTWAWKI after the October budget.


To cheer myself up I wandered onto Casaubon's Book for my regular fix of Sharon's good sense. She was writing about how few of us know how to cook from basic ingredients any more. I've been interested to see that there are organisations in Sheffield offering basic cooking courses. Many years ago I used 'The Pauper's Cookbook' by Jocasta Innes but in these vegetarian days, when I'm hungry but poor (back from the Fringe way overspent) I look into Rose Elliot's 'Cheap & Easy' which quite wonderfully provides advice on how to cut her family-sized recipes down for two or one lonely person.


All this was just passing time before going out into the dusk on a slug hunt but when I emerged by lovely neighbours were sitting out on their decking eating barbecue with a bottle of wine. I didn't want to interrupt their romantic meal with the squelch of popping slugs so I thought I'd blog instead.


It's very quiet in the house without Sally who has abandoned me and the Guinea Pigs for a trip to see her school-friends and Dad. Before I arrived home she had vacuumed the downstairs and the stairs, cleaned the bathroom and washed the dishes. I was dead impressed. I guess I have to keep it nice now.