Week 85

I continue to fail in my duty of care for my foot. I limped a long way uphill, in the rain, and was hobbling by the time I got home. But it it gave the non-foot parts of me a sense of wellbeing, and I was distracted by trying to remember the second item I needed to buy – after dishwasher salt,¹ which I’d bought from the top of the hill. (It turned out to be bin bags.)

Bicycling seems like a better way of enjoying the benefits of exercise without needlessly aggravating a foot. This week I have finally discovered the marvellous bicycle journey planner cycle.travel, which uses Open Street Map data, recognises that paved roads are preferable to bumpy paths, and is easily better than Google Maps or anything.

Last week, for some reason, I caught a bit of Gregg Wallace shouting Inside the [croissant] Factory,² and it inspired me to make some croissants. (Coincidentally, I saw on Twitter that a bookmarking website was also making some croissants.)

Given that I ignored some important aspects of the recipe I looked at, because who the fuck is Paul Hollywood, what does he know, and why does he want me to use so much butter, the croissants weren’t actually that bad and I only threw away most of them. But imagine how good they’d’ve been if I’d followed the recipe.

Watched a bit of Roadkill, in which Hugh Laurie plays a sort of bizarro Chris Grayling named, as far as I can tell, Ian Roadkill. Actually a bit odd to hear Laurie not speaking in an American accent.

Although there some problems with most “personal finance” blogger types, their ignorance of people much poorer than themselves, etc, I enjoy some of the work of Mr Money Mustache, like his amazing insight that folks don’t need big expensive brand new cars – pretty revolutionary in North America. But his latest, “Why you should consider house-hacking” – it would be disingenuous to summarise it as “Why you should consider becoming a slum landlord”, but sometimes it’s OK to be disingenuous. (And it’s good to see some dissenting voices in the comments on that blog post.)

Now, there’s a difference between “improving your city by providing a useful service” and being an actual slum landlord. But is it a slippery slope? I think what I think is this: landlords are definitely all parasites, but parasites do serve an important role in ecosystems.

The most exciting news is that Toblerone ice cream has reappeared – in Morrisons, in boxes of 4 (rather than the 3-pack previously available from Iceland). A S*n article from last year suggests Morrison considers them a special Christmas item, well they are shaped a bit like trees, so maybe some moderate stockpiling is in order.

I was starting to pine for a new episode of The Talk Show, which is strange because they’re always admirably a bit sporadic and there are plenty of other places to hear men going on and on about this and that expensive computer. But now I see the 299th episode has happened and I wonder what kind of holiday party the 300th will be.