Dodgy bunnies

I am hoping that, with Christmas safely behind us, Duracell will stop airing their stupid radio adverts.

You know the ones - with the leering voiceover suggesting that Duracell "just keeps banging away - know wot i mean??!!!" (yeah, yeah, ad-boys. We get it. Long-life batteries for your childrens toys / immense sexual stamina). Is this gross, or what?

We won't go until we've got some

Braving the swarms of bluebottles in the kitchen, I made a figgy pudding last night. (I figured that if a few dead flies drop in, no-one will be any the wiser).

Recipe: a load of dried figs, gallons of port, enough sugar to turn it to slurry-like consistency, then thicken up with a whole bunch of breadcrumbs. Not sure how these things can possibly combine into anything even remotely resembling a pudding, but we shall see. It will get its final boiling and ousting on Christmas day. Ha! And not even any shops open for emergency Vienetta if it all tastes like dead flies.

Also made a vegetarian pate log thing out of tinned chestnuts. Looks a bit like brown decorators caulk. Tastes a bit like... well, in actual fact, it was tasty. Although half a gallon of gravy is required to stop it cementing to the roof of your mouth.

Seven plagues...

I must have made some mistake of biblical proportions, for my house is being visited by the seven plagues of Egypt.

First there were the mice in the kitchen - ok, hardly a plague of them (more like a couple), but still rather annoying.

Now it's FLIES. Big black ugly houseflies. I've an appalling suspicion that these have come about from the hastened demise of the 1st Plague visitors. I told him to use humane traps rather than poison, but was overruled (sorry mum). So now I've got maggotty mouse corpses rotting away under the floor somewhere, periodically spouting streams of newly-hatched flies. And if this is making you feel queasy, just imagine how it feels to live with...

I'm not much of a bible studier: is it the locusts next?

Big bang

So it would seem that EVERYONE was woken up by the giant oil explosion yesterday. Except me, of course (my sleep ability is legend). One of the guys at work told of wandering around his house looking for the collapsed wardrobe that he was convinced had caused the noise.

Back in the magic shoes

I came 40th out of 51 yesterday morning. By my standards, that's gold medal territory. A mere 33 minutes behind the winner (who was, as is invariably the case, about 20 or 30 years older than me).

I didn't make it out to the night event on Saturday - I was playing a concert. But apparently GB got lost twice: once between two points 50yds apart in an open field; and again on his way from the finish to the car park. Tragic.