What I don't do for that car

The Saville Sweepstakes

Have any of the online betting services opened a book yet on who the next celebs having their collars felt might be? I don't suppose you'd've got much of a price on Gary Glitter.

Frankenstorm

Lots of freak weather, a hurricane, and high tides, and much of eastern America is in lockdown. According to the regularly-battered states, there's overreaction. According to the seldom-battered, it's alright for them, they're used to it. According to the airlines, they're not flying into that and everything's cancelled.

Clatten-berk

Look, he drives around in hairdressers' cars and likes his designer clothes. He was a fast-track referee. That's like being the youngest-ever member of the Hitler youth or William Hague or something. Like time and motion studying the dinner ladies when you should be playing tag.

Swimming, Lighthouse, Garlic

I'm back to the Garlic Ballads, a book so brutally bleak in it's description of living in poor, rural China that I had to have a break over the weekend. With Swimming Home and The Lighthouse, neither of which, were they people, would you describe as little rays of sunshine.

They are all brilliant novels.

The Lighthouse is the story of a good and decent man who just doesn't get it somehow.

Instant coffee

I don't know if this is true, but it sounds about right. Apparently the process that makes instant coffee granules involves steps that remove the aroma. So they have to add chemicals to make the coffee smell like coffee.

When 'fresh' meat contains injected water and milk solids, you can imagine the supermarket labs mixing the coffee-smell chemicals.

Needy car

I overheated sitting still in the roadworks for hours today. Well, I overheated because of the delay, and the car overheated in sympathy. I've given it oil (it had little, very little) and water (it was a bit low, I suppose) and filled the washer reservoir (it ran out on the long run this morning).

Ungrateful things that cars are, it will not extinguish the engine warning light, despite all that tender loving care it's just had. Oh, and it got itself covered in mud. It seems you can dump as mud on the highway as you like as long as you put out a plywood and hand-painted 'MUD ON ROAD' sign. If you own a farm. I think you have to own a farm, otherwise you need to wheel-wash or get fined by highways. Farm? Just the sign will do.