That's great - I'm stealing that.

Congrats, man. Hope you had a lovely day.

That's a shame. Had been meaning to read that.

“Ain’t she a beautiful sight?” Caulorlime watches out for smokies with a can on his back. Come on! “I don’t know where to start with this” is a terrible cliché. It’s used by lazy writers to suggest bewilderment at the oddness of…

“Ain’t she a beautiful sight?” | MostlyFilm share.google/jWbVv6aZFhmS...

I had, it's fair to say, a slightly less positive take on it when I reviewed it for the late, lamented, MostlyFilm

Yummy.

My grandmother used to call a year a "twelvemonth". She was mental, though, to be fair.

You see this spaghetti, with tomato sauce and parmesan? It's vanilla ice cream, strawberry and coconut. I'm at a fancy brunch. There's very good cheese

Excalibur was not the sword in the stone. Everyone gets that wrong.

Sorry, it's a lovely picture. It's just a particular point of pedantry that I find I cannot ignore. I'm a dick about wyverns and dragons, too.

I love that pic so much. Even more so now that I know what the hidden book is. He's shoring up his base. Shouting out to all his peeps. The blacks, the women, the mice, the queer. The middle classes of post war England. Much to think about.

It is! I've been trying to work out what it was for ages.

I mean, no, that obviously isn't true, but I did have a passing wonder when I first saw the picture. How did you determine what it was?

?

Amusing myself. Not remotely amusing my students.

Ah, kinda. There's a very important local context though, and traditions, even hundreds of year old ones do die hard. There's an argument to be made that party structures owe more to dynastic bureaucracies than to soviets. It's a bit pat and smug, but not totally untrue.

Ta. The salmon is both the easiest and the most impressive Christmas thing.

I don't like this phone camera. It isn't all as yellow as it looks here.

Made the sausage meat for the pigs in these blankets. They're too big, frankly, but shall forbear.

I dry cured and tea smoked this salmon and this mackerel.

A ham. Bit dry looking.

There are lots of things I have to make by hand at Christmas because we can't get them here.

I cured the pork to make this ham. I've wanted to do it for ages but couldn't get the Prague salt to do it, so I thought bollocks do it without, and it worked pretty well.

Desultorily looking for a job and I just got a pre- interview task which asked me what the features of an outstanding lesson were.

Well now. Well, well, well.

That is quite clearly the Ireland nebula.

Bilharzia, I would guess.

They should be fairly easy to find, surely?

Is that Eamonn Homes behind Captain Birdseye? Dressed all in black like the Milk Tray man?

I'm Harry, and it's lucky I'm charming as it might keep me out of jail.

Oh, now that's the one. And it's a couplet.

Oh, except having sung it in my head a few times I've realized it's not a couplet, but line 1 and 3 of a quatrain. Ignore me.

Just for the audacity of the rhyme it is probably

"Look here comes a Ford Mondeo/And she don't even have to say owt"

Fried chicken. Looks really nice, if I say so myself.

You know the video with the Korean guy making fried chicken and the black guy, I assume American, taking notes? He's very funny. Anyway, I made the chicken. It's really good.

To the extent that I now wonder whether *he* was real.