Week 94: egg initiative

Sunday 3 January 2021

• This amazing investigative journalism about the US bucatini shortage. (And here’s a nice radio interview about it.) I’d never heard of bucatini, in fact I was reading it as “bucanti” in my head for a while, but it turns out to be available even here on rainy plague island (sometimes marketed as “bucatini spaghetti”). I look forward to having some.

  I was going to take this opportunity to explete some rage about how fusilli (sometimes known as rotini) is the bestselling and most widely available type of dried pasta, and what a shame that is. But it’s OK.

• I did a long bicycle ride – it started off sunny enough to tempt me out, then turned chilly which was a good motivation to keep moving to get home, cool story.

  Towards the end, I went a-slippery-slide on a manhole cover. I managed to regain my balance by freewheeling across to the other side of the road, crossing the path of oncoming motor cars who where, fortunately, twenty seconds away – but still I’d been seconds away from getting squashed by a car and occupying a hospital space at a time when they’re in especially short supply.

  I wondered if I’d feel some kind of chilling pang whenever I passed the manhole cover again, and the answer is no. I haven’t touched a bicycle since, but that’s mainly about resting my sore bum again.

• Happy new year. Some enthusiasts of the Gregorian calendar set, or is it let, off fireworks in the car park outside, which was pretty.

• I was just watching Seinfeld, in which Jerome says what sounds like “egg initiative” but is in fact “air conditioner”. Now, if cared more I would call back to things I’d mentioned earlier, like how I bought some duck eggs (because apparently I want to be like Willie Harcourt-Cooze) and found the shells quite difficult to crack (I know about using a flat surface), or how I accidentally broke the shells of two of the eggs I bought from farms I’d come across on the bicycle ride (because of careless pannier packing). But I didn’t mention them earlier. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

• Filed my last ever EC sales list. It was never exactly onerous, in fact it couldn’t be less onerous, and it was a quarterly treat to receive a free licky brown envelope with which I could do as I please (as I always filed online). May that be my first tangible ramification of breakfast.