often seen in the street without a hat

Last week's bread held out fairly well until it did a variety of mould-related activity. There were still some rolls left, fortunately.

Friday night supper: Gujerati khichchari (with cashew nuts) which I do not seem to have made for absolute yonks.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple: Light Spelt flour, molasses, a touch of ginger (this didn't really come through, probably overpowered by the molasses): rose like absolute whoah.

Today's lunch: the smoked haddock and pulses thing - smoked haddock loin fillets baked in cream + water with bay leaf, mace and 5-pepper blend, flaked and then layered with bottled black beans (would buy again), some of the cooking liquid added, top sprinkled with panko crumbs and baked in moderate oven for c. 40 minutes, served with baked San Marzano tomatoes, and slow-cooked tenderstem broccoli, finished with lime, some of which seemed less tenderstemmed than one might have expected.

I think this is an absolutely terrible idea, and that they should be giving book tokens, and, okay, maybe recommendations, but letting people choose their books:

30 authors on the books they give to everyone

I am in particular stunned by the choices of Some People, e.g. Colm Tóibín's Christmas Downer:

There is a book I buy as a present that never goes out of fashion. It is The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.... the extraordinary plot creeps up and bites you before you know where you are. The narrative curls and twists; the narrator knows too much or too little. But at some point the appalling and ingenious nature of the treachery – what is called “cheating” nowadays – becomes apparent and you feel that you have been let in on some intriguing and explosive secret. It is perfect, thus, for Christmas.

Much as I love them, I would not press into anyone's hands Middlemarch, The Fountain Overflows, Cold Comfort Farm or The Pursuit of Love, urging that they they must read this.

I am reminded of GB Shaw's rewrite of the Golden Rule, about not doing to others as you would be done by, as tastes differ.

Take it away, Sly and the Family Stone!

Suddenly it seems like Christmas is more imminent than I thought - I was going, oh, it is only the beginning of December, and now we are nearly 2 weeks in and aaaaargh.

Anyway, I have managed to get off the book tokens for the great-nieces and nephews - I was waiting on my sister coming back to let me know that, yes, they are all still readers, and then looked again at her email in which she said, would let me know if not....

So I got on to that and I had clearly erased from memory how immensely tiresome Waterstones site is should you want to purchase physical gift cards for several people, you have to make a separate purchase for each one, moan groan, and quite soon reached point where credit cards went 'we are sending you OTP' as you put in details yet another time.

Am feeling a bit generally fratchy today after a night troubled with resurgence of hip issue - probably due to a certain amount of standing about at Institution of Which I Am Honoured to Be A Fellow's Party yestere'en.

Had a moderately agreeable time and pleasant conversation but am still irked that the email issue remains unresolved.

Also, having determined to ring opticians to confirm appointment for dilation test - after a very satisfactory, insofar as holding one's head in awkward positions and having lights flashed in one's eyes can be thus designated, eye-test on Wednesday, at which it was determined I did not need new glasses, hooray, hooray, person I was dealing with right at the end looked at my notes and asked how long it was since they did a dilation test, which resulted in booking me in for a week's time. However, did not get any confirmation, odd I thought since they had been inundating me with texts and emails reminding me of the eye-test. So I was going to ring them but then they rang, going ooops, we are actually closed that day for training, can we reschedule. So rescheduled.

This is rather news to me - I think of people protesting the enclosure of commons as doing this a) a lot earlier and in more rural parts: Today in London’s parklife: 1000s destroy enclosure fences, Hackney Downs, 1875:

The 1870s were a high point of anti-enclosure struggles in the London area, following on from a decade of (mostly, though not exclusively) peaceful campaigns to prevent large open spaces being developed in the 1860s. Wanstead Flats in 1871, Chiselhurst Common in 1876, Eelbrook Common (Fulham) in 1878, all saw direct action against fences, as part of long-running resistance against the theft of common land.
....
Many of these struggles were characterised by the large-scale involvement of radical movements, as London radicals, secularists and elements who would later help to form socialist groups made open space and working class access to it a major part of their political focus. Radical land agitation, notably through the Land and Labour League, was beginning to revive the question of access to land as a social question, and within cities this manifested as both battles to defend green space, and propaganda around the theft of the land from the labouring classes.

Centuries of hard fought battles saved many beloved places from disappearing, and laws currently protect parks, greens and commons. But times change… Pressures change. Space in London is profitable like never before. For housing mainly, but also there are sharks ever-present looking to exploit space for ‘leisure’. And with the current onslaught on public spending in the name of balancing the books (ie cutting as much as possible in the interests of the wealthy), public money spent on public space is severely threatened.
Many are the pressures on open green spaces – the costs of upkeep, cleaning, maintenance,
improvement, looking after facilities… Local councils, who mainly look after open space, are struggling. Some local authorities are proposing to make cuts of 50 or 60 % to budgets for parks. As a result, there are the beginnings of changes, developments that look few and far between now, but could be the thin end of the wedge.
So you have councils looking to renting green space to businesses, charities, selling off bits, shutting off parks or parts of them for festivals and corporate events six times a year… Large parts of Hyde Park and Finsbury Park are regularly fenced off for paying festivals already; this could increase. Small developments now, but maybe signs of things to come. Now is the time to be on guard, if we want to preserve our free access to the green places that matter to us.

HEIR, the Historic Environment Image Resource:

HEIR’s mission is to rescue neglected and endangered photographic archives, unlock their research potential, and make them available to the public.
HEIR contains digitised historic photographic images from all over the world dating from the late nineteenth century onwards. HEIR’s core images come from lantern slide and glass plate negatives held in college, library, museum and departmental collections within the University of Oxford. New resources are being added all the time, including collections from outside the University.

Dragon’s teeth and elf garden among 2025 additions to English heritage list:

The heritage body publishes a roundup of unusual listings to draw attention to the diversity of places that join the national heritage list for England each year.
As well as the anti-tank defences, this year’s list of 19 places includes a revolutionary 1960s concrete university block, a model boat club boathouse built in 1933 by men who were long-term unemployed, and a magical suburban “elf garden”.

Art history is too important to be the preserve of the privileged:

The act of looking has become commodified as technology companies ‘mine and sell our attention like coal’, as Kee writes. Letting art history become endangered and drift further into elite status is not only unfair, it’s also perilous. ‘Art history gives you tools to interpret the visual world and makes you more of a critical viewer of political messages, advertising and a barrage of social media images,’ says Perry. ‘It’s dangerous if you can’t examine these things critically.’