On apologising for this slight delay

Please return to your seat. Coffee and biscuits are being served, after which you will be placed in suspended animation for your comfort and convenience This is your autopilot speaking. Please return to your seat
Departure will take place in two hundred and fifty-one pages’ time.
In the meantime, have a lemon-scented napkin on the house.

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On having a Kit Kat.

Unfortunately you will not be writing a blog entry today.
Your Dad lent you the latest Terry Prachett.
No it can’t wait. It was out in June.

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On Baby Bliss.

The other particularly helpful baby book Best Friend gave you was supposed to be an antidote to Gina Ford’s regimentation being the key to happiness. Harvey “I’m a doctor donchaknow” Karp’s Baby Bliss.

Unlike Ms Ford’s stick to the schedule first and think later approach, Dr Karp has a Theory about the first three months of [...]

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On Gina Ford.

Having been very uncharitable towards Jamie Oliver’s Wife’s Book, you feel you should point out the childcare manuals you wouldn’t be without.
It should come as no surprise that you hadn’t heard of Gina Ford before your pregnancy. Or, indeed, up until about seven months into your pregnancy, which was when Best Friend gave you the [...]

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On Jamie Oliver’s Wife.

The dilemma of not particularly maternal women in their 30s who find that the whole biological clock thing is not a myth and has just caused them to throw a lifetime’s aversion to bodily fluids to the winds and get pregnant is that, frankly, they barely know which end of the baby is up, let [...]

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On Bara Brith.

Sometime after you Grandma died, you took it into your head to make Bara Brith.
Now your Grandma wasn’t Welsh.
She didn’t even live in Wales.
She lived, in fact, about 100 metres from the Welsh border.
But her Bara Brith wasn’t an heirloom recipe or anything. She only moved into the borderlands about 25 years before she died.
It was [...]

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On a book meme.

A while (a long while) ago, Reed tagged me with a book meme. Which I haven’t been ignoring, but just procrastinating over. It’s something worrying when you end up writing essays instead of fiddling with the blog, but at least I’ve got my priorities right (I always put off the most important thing).  
Total Number of Books Owned – [...]

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On irrisitable urges.

You should have been reading about the barbarian hordes rampaging across Britain in the 500s. You should have been preparing lessons - this week’s topic is ’love’. You should at least have been scrubbing the bathroom.
Instead you decided to cook a Moroccan feast. It’s from your new cookbook. Arabesque by Claudia Roden. You’ve been staring longingly (and [...]

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On being lost in translation.

Having discovered that you had slightly misinterpreted the setting of the book by a Spanish author – with large chunks of it set in Spain simply because Spain is the centre of the universe, as opposed to somewhere suitably Continentally decedent for odd Art to take place – it got you thinking about the other series [...]

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On activating your schemata.

You can be very boring on the topic of grammar. And punctuation. Particularly commas. The rules are comforting, even if you do treat them as something of an abstract concept when it actually becomes time to apply them.
You are considerably more interested in how we actually use language, though. And the routines we follow and [...]

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