This site is brilliant! I particularly like the fact that there are two different types of whale.

Mr H took Small Hare to Mini Music Makers at Stamford Arts Centre today. The Arts Centre cafe is one of those places where mums with prams congregate before various messy play activities and toddler music groups, and there has been a rash of snotty notices in the cafe about how 'mums' {sic} need to take reponsibility for their children's behaviour. Mr H was talking to one of the other mums about this, and she said, 'Oh, they need to be careful not to alienate people, given the power of the pram pound'.

The pram pound! What a brilliant expression! It is utterly perfect, and captures all those Boden-clad mummies (because most of them are mummies, let's be honest) meeting in coffee shops to eat cake and get away from endless episodes of the Tweenies. I have filed it away, and will tell the Upper Sixth on Monday so that they can quote it in their Language Change paper and stun the examiners with their awareness of the cutting edge of linguistic innovation.

Heard in Morrisons, in Alnwick: 'Ian McEwan to Fresh Produce please, Ian McEwan to Fresh Produce'.

- thus Small Hare, seeing Tony Blair waving on the steps of 10 Downing Street on the news today, and waving back.

A 'tishy' is something that is small and good to eat. Strawberries and grapes are tishies, and so (curiously, for such a little boy) are Bran Flakes, his current favourite breakfast. It took us a while to work out what a tishy actually was, but clearly there is a need for such a word (or there is as far as Small Hare is concerned).

He can almost count to five, now, too.

A very happy birthday to land_girl! I'm glad the sun is shining.

Purple sprouting broccoli in this week's vegbox! Lots of it! Mmmm.

I have flu. I haven't had flu in years, and had forgotten quite how vile it is. I spent all of yesterday in bed, apart from the couple of minutes it took me to ring land_girl to cancel our coffee date, and only emerged at one o'clock this afternoon. I seem to have lost three-quarters of a stone since last time I weighed myself, which was less than a week ago. I have some serious recuperating to do.

What's weird is that I don't know anyone in real life who's has flu recently. I do, however, have several LJ friends who have. I find this faintly disturbing.

Found in the oven this morning: a dish of parsnips, prepared last night for serving with sausage and mash and roasted to perfection with olive oil, honey and rosemary, but quite clearly forgotten about when I took the sausages out. I am so not a domestic goddess.

... the feeling you get when someone offers to lend you a book that you have neither the desire nor the time to read, especially when it's someone you like and you're too polite to refuse.

A lovely present from bopeepsheep this week, in the form of a copy of How Babies Think, and the inimitable Charlie and Lola. How Babies Think contains a perfect description of a two year-old who will go and pull a wire that he really knows he shouldn't pull, while all the time calmly and gravely watching his mother for her reaction. Sounds like someone I know. Charlie and Lola are fantastic. Soren Lorensen! I wish I had an imaginary friend called Soren Lorensen. Sadly, I see someone has already claimed soren_lorensen as a username. Bah.

Seamus Heaney, “Scaffolding”

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints,
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done,
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may have let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

For exiles from the North-West, an article in today's Guardian about pies. The line about Wiganers putting a pie between two slices of barm cake reminds me of the time in a French lesson about favourite foods, when we were about eleven, when one girl asked the teacher what the French for 'pie sandwich' was.

Good old Amazon have recommended Balancing Senses: The Six Senses Spa Book by Kate O'Brien, presumably on the basis that last year I ordered As Music and Splendour from them. The fact that the Kate O'Brien who writes about luxury spas is not the Irish novelist who died in 1974 has clearly escaped their notice, although the idea of a spa is a very nice (albeit unrealistic) one at the moment.

Sometimes, 'ffs' is the only appropriate reaction. If we're talking about 'matters of conscience', then how about placing traumatised children with the families who will be best able to cope with their needs? And why hasn't the BBC bothered to get a representative from the British Association for Adoption and Fostering to say that for some children, there might be very good reasons why being placed with a heterosexual couple would be a complete and utter disaster? It seems remarkably shortsighted that this is being reported exclusively as a debate about sexuality: nobody seems to be considering it from the adoption angle. Triangulate, folks, triangulate.

Am really quite angry about this. Three things:

1) adoption is not a matter of providing 'goods, facilities and services' to adoptive parents, it's about finding families for children who need them;
2) for some of those children, same-sex couples (or single adopters) may well be the best families;
3) Catholic adoption agencies are assessment agencies rather than placing agencies - the hard-to-place children whose adoptions they handle are in the care of local authorities, not the Catholic Church, and could equally be placed with adopters who've come forward through another agency (that's precisely what the National Adoption Register is for).

I'd like to know how many same-sex couples actually approach Catholic adoption agencies to do their assessment: I'd guess not many. Prospective adopters will find an agency somewhere, and if the Catholic agencies do close, all that will happen is that their prospective adopters will go to somebody else. All this emotional blackmail (which plays on the fact that most people don't know have a clue how the adoption system works) is pretty vile.

... not just people in unnecessary four-wheel drives, but people in great hulking silver unnecessary four-wheel drives who loom aggressively close in your rear-view mirror when you're already going at 60, and then cut you up when you're about to pull off a sliproad onto a dual carriageway. I hope you all catch something itchy.

... thus the Small Hare, at five o'clock this morning, lining up the toys in his cot.

Dear Mr Green and Blacks,

I hope you don't think I'm being pushy or anything, but do you think you could make some of your nice chocolate with dried apricots and flaked almonds in it? It really would be rather good.

Noteworthy point from my last batch of marking: one of my Year Sevens has a giant African land snail called, of all things, Passion. I suspect this could only happen on the edge of the Fens.