Strictly Come Dancing, Margaret Thatcher and sandals

"To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

This is one of my favourite Bible quotes and always seems appropriate at this rather melancholy time of the year as we start to move towards winter. Autumn is finally, definately here. I know that officially it started a few weeks ago but for me it has now undeniably arrived.

You might be wondering what has brought me to this realisation. What were the telltale signs that drew me to this conclusion? Maybe I should have realised sooner: the leaves changing colour and drifting to the ground like golden confetti; The Great British Bake Off ending (go Nadia!) and Strictly Come Dancing re-starting; the sloe gin is steeping so that it will be ready for Christmas; the mornings and evenings getting darker; Halloween goods appearing in the shops; going to a cafe and fancying hot chocolate instead of iced tea; getting a flu jab and buying some Lem-sip just in case; people firing up their central heating and lighting their log burners and the general drop in temperature should all have given me a clue. For me though the definite sign that summer is over is that I bought a pair of sandals.

The rest of the northern hemisphere is probably buying boots at this time of year but like the fashion magazines I always plan for a couple of seasons ahead. It's not that I am organised but rather that I am a cheapskate. I wait to buy my summer sandals for the following year till right at the end of the sale so that I know that the price isn't going to be reduced any further and that way bag myself a bargain. So ok this does mean that I occasionally have to jam my feet into shoes that are too small if they've sold out of my size and yes I am always wearing last years styles in some unusual colours but as I am not exactly a fashionista I don't care. So for me Spring starts when I buy next winters boots, summer begins when I get the following Easters pastel Mary-Janes and Autumn begins with the purchase of flip flops and sandals.

I've been thinking a bit about time passing and the cyclical nature of history recently. Not just because of my bargain sandals but because of the new job that I've just started. You see I've got a job back in the secondary school I attended when I was a teenager. It seems really strange to be back there, its familiar in many ways but also so different from how I remember. The basic structure of the building is the same and familiar, there have been some new additions and some of the rooms have moved around, but most of it is as I remember.

It's the people who have all changed. I walk around the corner of a corridor and expect to see my friends waiting to meet me after lessons, but there are strange young people there, kids waiting for their own mates. Teens wearing blazers and ties who look way smarter than we ever did. When we attended the school the uniform was much more lax and as long as you wore something vaguely blue you passed inspection. They also now seem so much more confident and assured than I ever felt, maybe this is down to bravado but I hope not. These pupils are noisy, enthusiastic and so full of potential and looking back I think that I was probably like that at their age too, what happened to that energy and passion I wonder.  I remember sneaking into the 6th form common room after lessons one day to put up CND and anti Reagan and Thatcher posters, convinced and passionate about my political beliefs. This year in contrast I had trouble deciding who to vote for in the General Election. So maybe it isn't the school that has changed, maybe it's me.

So Autumn is here, a time to reflect and take stock. A time to make soup and stews and buy t-shirts and sandals, a time to remember being young and to try and resurrect some of the passions I felt then, a time to put on wellies and walk through the woods kicking up leaves.

I started this post with a quote from the Bible and I'd like end it with another quote, not the Bible this time, but Elton John via The Lion King.

" From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun
There's more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There's far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found
But the sun rolling high
In the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round".

Autumn is here but I have sandals ready for next summer, thus the circle of life goes on.

St Francis of Assisi, kilts and optimism

Another new month, that means another new job, how time flies. This week I was going to write about the changing of the seasons and the passage of time but events on Sunday have put paid to that. Maybe I'll write about Autumn next week.

I stayed at my Mums house on Saturday night, she lives about 20 minutes away from me. Sunday morning Mum and I met bleary eyed in the kitchen, at the kettle, both having been woken up by the desperate need for a cup of tea. Ah, the first cup of tea of the day, there can be no finer drink. The first sip, maybe still just a tad too hot, but delicious and reviving none the less. So we stood at the kitchen counter, mouths drooling in anticipation, as we waited for the tea leaves to perform their magic, and Billy dog sat expectantly on the back door mat, drooling too as he waited for his breakfast, when Mum remembered that the church she attends were holding  a pet service that morning. She wondered if Billy and I would like to attend.

I have not attended church for many years now except to go to weddings and funerals and I'm ashamed to admit that Billy has never been, but Mum attends religiously each week (pun intended). I suggested that Mum take Billy herself, but she wasn't keen on this idea, so with some trepidation I agreed to go with her. We both looked at Billy and realised that he wasn't looking his best, he was less West Highland White and rather more West Highland Beige, I wondered if we could pretend he was a Cairn terrier but decided that he would need to be spruced up a bit before he could make his premiere appearance in church. This meant the dreaded bath!

Billy loves water, he will happily splash around in muddy puddles, paddle in streams and loves to lie and cool his belly in the sea, but warm water when combined with shampoo is, in Billys mind, a particularly cruel forms of torture. Over the years of trial and error I have come up with a routine at bathtime, its not a good routine but it's the best I've been able to find. First I get undressed, normally I'll take my trousers off and just keep a T-shirt on, then I put Billy in the shower cubicle, close the screen doors slightly and the kneel in the door opening with the dog towel over my lap. This way I don't get too wet, although I am often wetter than Billy, and my body blocks him from escaping. Then its simply a matter of trying to get some water and shampoo onto him as he writhes, wriggles and piteously cries. Once rinsed and towel dried he runs around the house, growling and moaning whilst rubbing himself on accessible furniture and carpets. The final part of the ordeal is to dry him with a hairdryer, although he minds this less as he gets lots of treats during it. I didn't have time to dry him completely on Sunday as we were running late, but he certainly looked a lot cleaner.

Off to Church we went, desperately hoping that Mum hadn't got the date wrong. As we approached the Churchyard I could tell that this indeed was the right Sunday for the pet service as people with animals were all making their way towards the Church, the bells pealing out a welcome and adding to the cacophany as dogs barked, chickens clucked and children laughed and shrieked. I saw a tortoise in a cardboard box being taken in, Guinea pigs wrapped in towels and held in children's arms like babies, there were rabbits, rats and lots and lots of dogs. One little lad who I don't think had any pets brought an armful of soft toys.

Once inside the Church we found that preparations had been made and that at the base of the font were plenty of poo bags and baskets containing disinfectants and cleaning products. A sensible precaution I thought. The service started, the dogs joining in with singing the hymns and generally making their presence known through out the sermon and prayers, but overall the animals behaved very well. A couple of dogs went walk about during the service, no doubt keen brass rubbers or stained glass window fans, a few dogs sat up on the pews next to their owners probably so that they could get a better view of the flower arrangements, but Billy sat well behaved and quietly at my feet through out.

As we sat in the pew listening to the story of St Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals, whose Saints day it was, I was suddenly transported back to my school days. No we didn't have any animals at our school but my memory was stirred because of a particular smell, the girls at my primary school wore red and white gingham dresses in the summer and red kilts in the winter. Sitting in Church on Sunday as the aromour of wet dog rose up from Billy to meet me, it smelt exactly like wet kilts drying after a rainy break time. I can clearly remember the classroom after a wet playtime being filled with the fug of our kilts drying and it smelling rather more like an Australian sheep shearers convention than a primary school. Funny how such a horrid smell can bring back such a warm memory. Yes Billy was clean but he definitely wasn't dry and the smell of his wet fur would have out-ponged any incense, if it had been an incense burning type of Church.

Part way through the service, everyone who had brought an animal was invited to take their pet up to the altar rail for the animal to receive a blessing. What a motley procession we looked, all shape and size of dogs queueing alongside Guinea pigs, chickens, rats and rabbits. I had to keep Billy away from a certain Chihuaha, who I knew from previous encounters really hated Billy, and from the other Westie present who was beautifully groomed and would have shown Billy up, but other than that it all passed off without incident. Billy sat reverently at the altar rail, looking as innocent as any choir boy, and no one was to know that he wasn't actually showing respect as he was in gods house, but was actually hoping for one of the treats I had in my pocket. Put a dog collar on him (again pun intended) and I think he could look like he was a candidate for a papal election.

On the way out of the Church the dogs were given a dog biscuit, Billy did embarrass me a bit by insisting on sitting on the coir mat inside the door to eat his and then triple checking the mat and surrounding area to make sure he hadn't missed any crumbs. The trouble is now, I suspect, Billy won't want to walk past the Church as he will expect to go in and have a biscuit.

I'm not a very religious person, but you've got to admire the church for being such optimists to lay on such a service. It could have gone very differently, there could have been fights, wee and poo everywhere, animals escaping and a real hullabaloo. I do think that if you expect things to turn out well, they probably will do though. So maybe it was the churchs' optimism that made the service a success, maybe it was us all having well behaved pets, maybe it was because there were no c, a, t, s present and maybe there was intervention from a higher level. Billy doesn't care, he had a biscuit even if he did have to suffer the ignominy of a bath to earn his treat.

Caravans, birthdays and Lilliputians.

I went away this weekend with family as it was Mums birthday and also a belated celebration for my nephews birthday. I'm not sure that they would want me to say how old they are, so let's just say that my nephew is in his early twenties and Mum in the late squillions (a squillion and eight to be precise). We were five adults and two dogs staying in a small caravan in the Blackdown Hills. As I've mentioned in previous blogs I love a caravan holiday and we had a really good time. The caravan was comfortable, modern and clean, if somewhat compact, but had a few strange design foibles.

The first is the fact that the living room led into a narrow corridor with one bedroom on the left, the other bedroom at the end and the bathroom on the right. The issue was that the hall was so narrow that only one person could walk along it at any one time and also all the doors opened into it. This meant that if someone was coming out of the bathroom you couldn't open the bedroom doors and if anyone was in the hall they were liable to get a black eye when a door opened unexpectedly into their face. This meant that everyone getting up, toileted and showered in the mornings was a bit of a logistical nightmare and likewise at bedtime. Not to mention the added complication of two excited dogs getting under feet.

The second quirk was in the dining area. Like many caravans the table was a rough triangle shape with bench seats on two sides and a stool on the other. The strange thing about this caravan was that the bench seats were too low for the table so that when seated your plate was rather nearer your chin than etiquette traditionally demanded. I guess the bonus of this was that there was less chance of spilling food down your front but it did feel like we were Lilliputians eating at a giants table.

Another slightly weird design feature was that the fridge was to the right of the kitchen, near the back door. Nothing too unusual about this, as like I said the caravan was small so we're not talking about it being a long walk from the kettle to the fridge when making a cup of tea, but for some strange reason the fridge door opened on the right hand side. This meant that there were two options to get the milk out of the fridge: option 1 (my preferred method) was to stand on the left hand side of the fridge, open its door and then lean over the door to reach inside and head butting the microwave oven in the process, option 2 was to open the back door, go down the 3 steps outside, turn around, open the fridge door and gain access to the milk that way. It would have been much simpler to hang the fridge door the other way, but that would have made it a bit boring and predictable I suppose.

The other oddity in this compact caravan was in the double bedroom, which my sister and brother-in-law shared. There was a large walk-in wardrobe, in fact it was such a spacious closet, it was almost a dressing room. When space was such a premium, so much so that there was not enough room for a dog to wag its tail without it hitting both sides of the walls in the hallway, let alone being enough space to swing the proverbial cat, why have such a large walk-in wardrobe? Why not instead use the space in the twin room which was so small only one person could stand up in there at a time, and the beds were so narrow it was impossible to turn over without knocking your elbows and knees on the wall. My sisters dog slept in the dressing room area and she probably had more room than the rest of us.

Luckily we all get on well so our snug accommodation did not put a damper on our weekend and we had a good time. Despite the fact that we got charged by a mad cow whilst on a walk, my nephew sunk up to his knees in a bog whilst wearing his new walking boots, the site swimming pool being so shallow that everyone scraped their knees whilst swimming and I even grazed my belly on the pool floor, my brother-in-law having a cough and cold and Billy dog being head butt by a sheep. Sometimes though being together is more important than little luxuries, like being able to see what's on your dinner plate, remembering to open the microwave before opening the fridge to avoid concussion or having to wait your turn to get up in the morning.

Envy, The Amazon and Linford Christie

I'm not a catholic so can't seek absolution for my sins in the confession box but I do feel the need to own up to one serious flaw, in the hope that you, my fellow blog readers, will forgive me.

You see I am guilty of one of the seven deadly sins, the sin of envy. I am not a generally envious person, I don't envy those who are richer, prettier or more successful than me. I don't envy those with better cars, bigger houses or the latest Apple products, but I do suffer from a very specific form of envy. Lunch box envy.

I'm not referring to the Linford Christie type lunchbox (get your minds out of the gutter please) rather the plastic container that fellow colleagues bring to work to sustain themselves through out the day. I suppose that it would be more accurate to say that I am envious of the contents of their lunch boxes rather than the tubs themselves, however I am still impressed by people who carry pretty insulated bags and pots to better display their goodies.

To save money I am making a concerted effort to always take a packed lunch in to work and most days I succeed. However I generally leave it too late to make anything interesting, and even if I have the time to make a nice lunch the contents of my fridge rarely cooperates. So I have to resort to slapping something uninspiring between a couple of slices of slightly dry bread. Last week to ring the changes I bought some tortilla wraps but forgot to get anything tasty to put in them, so ended up with having a rolled up wrap smeared in peanut butter then shoved in a sandwich bag along with a handful of wrinkly grapes.

Compare this then to the people who bring their matching picnic sets filled with meticulously chopped and diced salads, as lush looking as the amazon rainforest and containing tasty morsels, such as perfectly ripe avocado and crispy bacon, maybe feta, vine ripened tomatoes and black olives or grilled chicken and croutons. They then get their separate little container out and pour over the freshly prepared dressing, which always seems to perfectly match the salad, they have balsamic for the avocado, a vinaigrette for the feta salad and Caesar to dress the chicken. Next follows a premium brand yoghurt (in date) then a fruit salad which they eat with a fork. My boring lunch has gone before they have even poured the dressing over their mixed leaves and so I have to sit and enviously watch them tuck into their feast.

If I were to attempt to bring a salad one day it would probably contain rather sad, limp lettuce, some tomatoes (probably cherry tomatoes that would burst and squirt me with juice when I try to eat them), chopped pepper if I'm really lucky, mushy peas (it's all I had, the dish was too empty and I panicked) and tinned tuna. I don't have a little pot to put dressing in, so would add oil and vinegar in the morning which, by the time I ate my lunch, would have made the veg even slimmier and the whole lot would look and smell like the contents of a rock pool. I ask you, who is going to envy that?

Don't even get me started on people who bring leftovers for their lunch. People who smuggly heat up last night's lasagne, stew or curry, filling the office with a cacophony of savoury aromas that has me salivating onto my keyboard. Yes I cook extra in the evening, planning for there to be leftovers for lunch the next day, but invariably I've eaten it all before I've gone to bed.

In my present job you're not allowed to eat at your desk so everyone has their lunch in a little dining area and there is no escape from watching others eat their lunches and in turn feel eaten up by envy. Therefore when I was approached and offered another job last week, one of the reasons I accepted was in the hope that I won't feel quite so envious of my new colleagues lunch boxes. Yes you read correctly, I have once again handed in my notice and will start my third new job in the space of 4 months. Nearly 16 years in one job and now 3 jobs in 4 months, and all because of lunchbox envy (well maybe not all because of envy, but possibly a little iddy, biddy bit). Now I've got to go as I know that I have to scrape the mould off the cheese before I can make my cheese and tinned tomato sandwich, I wonder if I've got any bread?

Macaroni cheese, Pit Pads and gerkins.

When I was working full-time I tended to cook up a couple of days worth of dinners on a Sunday evening, now that I work part time I usually prepare meals for the rest of the week on Tuesday afternoon or evening. Yesterday I cooked up a big dish of macaroni cheese, except I didn't have macaroni so used penne and also added brocolli, cauliflower and, of course, runner beans (I'm a big fan of one pot meals) I kept 2 portions in the fridge and froze the other couple of meals. I know its not exactly haute cuisine but I enjoyed making it and the end results should taste good, except for a couple of minor hitches.

The first hiccup was Billy's fault. Billy is a typical terrier and obsessed with cats, chasing birds, trying to climb trees after squirrels and catching flies. I live in a first floor flat with a balcony and when I'm home Billy spends most of his time out on the balcony. There is railing around the edge of it but by lying as flat as possible Billy can get his head under the railing, onto the edge of the ledge so that he can watch the cats in the garden below. He spends hours out there, whimpering occasionally as the cats taunt him by parading up and down.

Well yesterday the pasta was cooking and the cheese sauce was just getting to that crucial stage where it is starting to boil and thicken. The stage where it needs constant stirring to stop it sticking to the base of the saucepan and getting lumpy, when I suddenly realised that I hadn't heard anything from Billy in a while.

I abandoned the sauce and going outside leant over the railing. Billy had somehow managed to get under the railing and was out on the ledge that runs along the front of the building, he was balanced at the end, three flats along from where I live. The ledge gets narrower as it goes along and where he was standing it wasn't wide enough for him to turn around to come back. Cats I know have nine lives and have been reported to fall off 20 storey buildings and walk away unscathed, you don't hear the same anecdotes about westies, so I was worried about what would happen if he fell the one storey. I grabbed some shoes and dashed around to the front of the building where I was able to stand on my downstairs neighbours garden wall and reach up and grab the dog. I swear, to get under the fence, he must have had to dislocate his shoulder blades and would need to take his back legs off at the hip, throw them over the rails and then reattach them, or he wouldn't have fit.

That crisis was averted but back inside my worst fears were realised. I had lumpy and slightly burnt cheese sauce.

The next issue with my Mac cheese wasn't my fault either, I don't think. If I was to blame anyone I would probably accuse Mabelline, the cosmetic company, of producing faulty goods.

 I was grating the cheese to go into my lumpy sauce and I suspect that you can guess what happened next. Often when grating things I manage to graze my knuckles, well yesterday instead of my knuckles I somehow managed to grate my finger nails. So not only did my cheese sauce have lumps of flour and flecks of burnt sauce in, it also now contained flakes of Coral Reef coloured nail varnish.

This got me thinking about a conversation I'd had the other evening when out for a meal with some ex-colleagues. We'd been talking about business ideas,and two friends who'd been made redundant at the same time as me, both reckoned that they had brilliant, new and life changing ideas for inventions. One was for Pit Pads, absobant pads you could stick to the underarm area of your clothes to stop you from getting damp patches when hot. The other idea was to invent edible string for tieing up bales of straw and hay for livestock. Both my colleagues were passionate about their ideas and were convinced that if they were produced they would make a fortune. Unfortunately when I looked online the next day I found that both were already being produced. At that point I decided that everything needed has already been invented, although I am prepared to concede that technology is still coming up with a few new ideas. The human race has been inventing and coming up with new products for centuries, so surely by now everything new and useful has already been made.

I had an amusing hour looking at some of these inventions and was especially impressed by the:

• Heated butter knife which solves the problem of not being able to spread butter straight from the fridge
• Slippers with lights built into the toes so that you don't have to turn the main lights on during nocturnal bathroom visits. On a similar theme you can also get fluorescent toilet paper.
• Dog umbrellas which fit into the dogs lead, to try and avoid that wet dog smell on rainy days.

Yesterday after my slightly problematic cooking experience I realised that there are still some vital inventions needed and not all of them related to macaroni cheese. The first that I'd like to suggest is grater proof nail polish, think about the gallons of cheese sauce this could save. Manufacturers of cosmetics make claims that their varnish will dry in 60 seconds, will strengthen and condition your nails, but for some reason none have come up with a polish that will with stand a cheese grater. My second idea is for dog food that becomes fluorescent when it exits the dog, this will make it much easier to pick up when the light is poor. Manys the time that I take Billy dog out in the early moning or late evening and I've had to resort to feeling around, hand in poo bag for a warm deposit. Finally someone needs to come up with a jar opener that works, I know that there are dozens on the market, my Mum and I probably have most of them between us, but they just don't work. I have a jar of pickled gerkins in my cupboard, unopened since about 1978, which I just can't get into. 

So any would be inventors out there who are stuck for inspiration please give these a go, and should you end up making a fortune from them remember who gave you the idea. Now anyone for macaroni cheese anyone?

Vultures, adders and adrenalin

So this has been a week full of danger and taking risks for my family.

The first perilous event happened on Sunday when Mum, Billy dog and I went for a walk around a local reservoir. It was a lovely day, the sun was shining and there was barely a breath of wind. We had walked about 3 quaters of the way around the lake and had filled our tub with blackberries, ready to make a crumble, when we met a group of people also walking a dog. They told us that they had seen a couple of adders out sunbathing and to be careful.

Adders are a type of viper that are native to Great Britain. They are venomous but only mildly so and do not present a threat to a healthy adult. However to a small Billy sized dog they can be fatal. Therefore for the final mile of the walk Billy had to be kept on a short lead and was not allowed to sniff around in the long grass which he likes to do. Mum and I spent the walk talking really loudly and stamping our feet to try and scare the snakes away. In fact we were stamping so much I think that we both gave ourselves shin flints, we created such a rumpous that we were probably in danger of attracting the snakes to us, as I imagine they thought a herd of elephants was on its way by.

Luckily we survived this threat but our family wasn't out of danger yet.

On Monday, my day off, I was having a coffee at home and decided to check Facebook. My niece and her husband are on holiday in France and to my horror my niece had posted a picture of herself and her husband, dressed in hard hats and overalls, standing next to a colourful paraglider. The comment she'd posted said,

"Just jumped off a mountain".

That was it! No mention of whether they had landed, why she'd decided that jumping off a mountain holding onto what is basically a kite was a good idea, or if they'd had lessons or anything.

I know that technically speaking her and her husband are adults, the fact that they are married kind of implies this, but how did we get to the point where she can make that sort of decision without consulting her parents, much less her Aunt. Yes she's an adult but it only seems 5 minutes ago since I pushed her on a swing; 10 minutes since she was a toddler and needed help to wipe her bottom when potty training, and it only seems 15 minutes since we were changing her nappy and exposing the multi coloured horrors within. Incidentally I'm sure her husbands nappies were just as bad, it's just I didn't know him then.

Now suddenly she's throwing that same arse over the edge of a mountain, without a thought to the care and attention that has gone into keeping her safe over the years. I can't imagine how both sets of parents felt as they pictured the bodies they protected from nappy rash bouncing down canyons, to be trodden on by mountain goats and pecked at by vultures. I'm not even exageratting, that could happen.

What really worries me is that paragliding might be another step along the slippery slope to becoming an adrenalin junkie. Kids start out on swings, urging parents and carers to push them higher and higher, so the addiction starts. Before you know it they are experimenting at funfairs, they ride their bikes too fast, but assure us they didn't inhale. Next they learn to ski and inform us they can handle it. They try a climbing wall, then climb a mountain, stating it's not a problem, they are just social adrenalin users. Then they jump off a mountain and tell us they can stop any time they want to. What's next, skydiving without a parachute into shark infested waters, whilst smeared in blood?

So I request that you stop this dangerous habit now. I suggest that you go cold turkey and cut all risk taking behaviours out of your lives. Maybe it would be sensible to never travel faster than 40 miles an hour, to never have your feet off the ground for longer than 11 seconds and to avoid activities that could involve injuries that require more medical treatment than a sticking plaster can provide. Yes this won't make you popular on motorways and will rule out flying, but there are still loads of fun things to do. There's walking, skipping or even bowling.

This week my niece jumps off a mountain and I walk along a snake infested path. She loves it and posts a picture on Facebook, I hate my adventure and can't wait to get to safety. I am not an adrenalin addict, she's becoming one. So this post is by way of being an intervention, let's stop this young couple ending up as vulture food all because they couldn't resist the allure of adrenalin.

Runner beans, triffids and bank holidays

This week I have mainly been eating runner beans. The wet summer we have had in Cornwall must have been really good for beans as there seems to be a glut of them at the moment. Someone brought a bag of them into work for us to help our selves to, so I took home a couple of meals worth. Then when I visited mum this weekend she also had loads. Over the past week I have had beans with roast beef, cottage pie, lasagne, minestrone soup and in my cous cous salad for lunch. I'm even starting to look like a bean, although admittedly a less green, not so skinny, more hairy and quite a bit larger version of one.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a bean as much as the next man/woman. I like all aspects of runner beans: I admire the vibrant plants that grow even taller than sunflowers, the triffids of the vegetable group; I love the crimson flowers that decorate the plants; I like the plants Latin name of Phaseolus Coccineus; I love eating them steamed, boiled and made into chutney and I enjoy searching among the lush foliage for the hidden beans, as I always feel a bit like a jungle explorer looking for treasure. But I am just starting to wonder if you can have too much of a good thing. I am eating them for every meal, yet still they seem to be taking over my fridge, there's hardly any room in there for milk, cheese or other veg, and I am having to drink warm wine as there's certainly no space in the fridge for cold plonk. I worry that one day I will come home to find that the beans have broken out of the fridge, taken over the kitchen and are planning their attack on the lounge.

Last night I went out for a pub meal for a friends birthday. I was looking forward to seeing my friends, but was also anticipating a beanless meal. Although we weren't served runner beans we did get their Gaelic cousin the French bean, so it wasn't really much of a change. Beans are taking over the world, brocolli doesn't stand a chance.

I love a collective noun (my favourites being a charm of goldfinches and an ascension of larks) and I wondered if there was a collective noun for runner beans. I checked on Wiktionary and the closest I could find was a "hill of beans, well I reckon that I have already eaten a mountain of them this week. I couldn't however find a collective noun specifically for runner beans so I'd like to suggest the following, see what you think;

• a Nike of runner beans
• a wigwam of runner beans
• a race or maybe a marathon of runner beans 
• or perhaps a fart of runner beans

A bit of audience participation would be good here, anyone got any other ideas?

In the brief moments between picking, preparing and eating beans, I have enjoyed the August bank holiday weekend, which incidentally I think should be renamed the Runner Bean bank holiday. I have seen some friends, had a barbeque, been for some good walks, bathed the dog and met up with my cousin and her family. But mostly this week, I've been eating beans.

So the answer to the age old question of " How many beans make five?" is probably about a trillion and not the traditional more conservative response of, a bean, a bean and a half, half a bean, and another two beans. Sorry this is a short post but I haven't got time write any more as I need to get ready for work and I haven't even chopped the beans to add to my porridge for breakfast yet...after all, waste not, want not.