Week 240: bottle of Flash

I’ve been practising Vernon Kay’s figure-of-8 mopping technique. Completely unfoundedly, I make up that Kay makes a meal out of doing a bit of mopping now and then, and thinks that’s his fair share of the domestic duties. More troublingly, Kay says he doesn’t trust floor cleaning liquid products – because he thinks they’re communist spies or something? – and instead recommends making your own by mixing bleach with some other ingredients. That’s bad advice, and if I didn’t know better I’d wonder if he was deliberately tricking his fans into asphyxiating themselves to death with chlorine or chloramine gas. Just buy a bottle of Flash.

It says “🌱 with plant based ingredient” on the label of my floor cleaning product, as if that’s supposed to mean something to me. It’s weird: did it use to be made out of animals, and is the plant-based ingredient … palm oil???

First mince pie of the season, and a locally sourced mince pie. From Suffolk, which explains why it was so bad, whether heated-up or room-temperature: the pastry was soft and limp and too thick, and the filling wasn’t good enough to compensate. Merry Christmas.

I made an apple pie from scratch on Saturday. A small one, about the size of a big rat, two apples with the bruised bits removed–worth. I should not have decorated the lid with the leftover pastry, because it made it too thick. Next time: latticework.

Cold- or flu-like symptoms for most of the week. Snot city. I had some chesty cough mixture left over from the last season, but the cough I had this time was more of a dry or tickly one so it didn’t help as much.

Improbably I recovered, and the flooded railway lines dried out, in time for me to spend another <24 hours in Glasgow; that’s not boring enough to write about at any length here.

(Last week the phrase “how many arseholes it takes to fill the Albert Hall” was staring me in the face and I didn’t think of it. Pathetic.)