You can never get enough.

The most tumultuous relationship I have, tumbling from want to need to obsession easily, even naturally, is the relationship I have with cereal.

Oh, cereal.

So fast! Instant gratification! So filling! All those carbs mixed with all that milky protein! So good. Just, so good.

I let so many important nutritional opportunities pass me by: slow-cooked stews, veggie lasagnas, five-green salads with home-made dressings, caught as I am in the wicked web of cereal.

I make plans, great plans for myself and my stomach, but then, well, I get hungry, really hungry, and cereal's right there for me, quick, easy, delicious.

One of these days I'll work up the courage to kick it out of my house, if not my life, at least for a week or so. But right now, I'm just so hungry....

Shooting the Sky

I really had nothing against Guy Fawkes before I moved to the UK. True, I found it a bit strange that there's a holiday for a guy who tried to blow up parliament, but, well, whatever; Halloween's pretty weird too, when you think about it. Not to mention groundhog day.

But now I'm less than impressed. Thanks a lot, Guy. Thanks to your political persuasions, there are gun-shots outside my flat, right across the street, every night

every night

for a bloody month a year. Starting now. Going until a month from now.

Or at least they sound like gun-shots. Which is what groups of overly-celebratory and underly-supervised kids setting off fireworks on a golf course sounds like. For the first few nights I'm terrified. Checking the window after every bang just to be sure there's no blood, no sirens. In a month's time there could be orchestrated machine-gun fire and I wouldn't notice.

Just saying:

1) it's annoying. It's 1am. My cat is terrified.

2) if you want to shoot someone, try this time of year, and don't bother with a silencer.

I'm a maybe not genius

So. I had a brilliant idea the other night. For the artwork on the Cedar's ever-so-close-to-ready next EP. See, I teach (approximately) a million children a week, and very often while I'm teaching them, their siblings are just sat there. Watching. Making noise. Drooling*.

So, why not put them to work?

The album sleeves we get are originally blank, white, and then you print whatever on them. What if I just kept a pile of them with a pile of crayons and had all these children draw whatever they wanted all over them? No two alike!

Brilliant?

Or, perhaps, as I've been thinking a bit more, recently, probably a really bad idea, and a bit too much like child labour for comfort?




*Dependant on age.

Oh, Tom the Toad. (aka Bub the Slug.)

My job (one of my jobs) requires me to cycle for about forty minutes down a thin little path to the university. Despite the rain, despite the early hour required, despite the large highway right next to it, this would be lovely, I think, except that it's Autumn in the UK. And Autumn in the UK is

slug season.

They're everywhere. Brown-grey. Green-yellow. Black-brown. Blue-white. Every colour, every kind of slugs. All over the bike path. This dampens the cycling experience twice over:

Firstly, because I can't help but agree a little bit with J. K. Rowling's in-Potter hypothesis that an important part of a person, a part of their soul or essence or humanness or whatever you want to call it, dies when they kill something else. Any kind of killing, be it bug, bee or slug, feels intrisically wrong and I don't like to do it.

Secondly, because of the sound. The sound of a slug being crushed by a bicycle tyre. First the gentle smoosh, then the louder-than-you'd-think pop as the outsides let the insides out. Over and over again, this sound. My getting-to-work soundtrack.

I'm looking forward to winter. (Although that means it's almost snail season....)