I’m roasting my chestnuts as I type this.

I like roast chestnuts. And there are few things more satisfying than eating food that you not only prepared yourself, but which passed through no other hands between yours and Mother Nature’s, so a few weeks ago I came up with a plan to collect some chestnuts from beneath the nearest chestnut tree, roast them over an open fire - or possibly in the oven - and eat. What I didn’t know is that eating-chestnuts are one thing, and conker-chestnuts quite another, and whereas the first are healthful, tasty and entirely non-toxic, the latter ought to have a skull and crossbones stamped on them and wouldn’t be much worse for you if they’d been injected with arsenic.

Fortunately I didn’t get round to doing it for a few weeks due to laziness, and then I happened to off-handedly mention the plan to my mum, who quite possibly saved my life by informing me of the above. And before anyone jumps to conclusions, Jess doesn’t like chestnuts, so this wasn’t another attempt to do her in.

My chestnuts will be ready soon. I got them from Tesco.

Speaking of cockerels, just down the road from us is Cockerill - The Potato People. I’ve driven past it most days for the last year, and I rather like it, because it always reminds me of my former life, and thus how much better my current one is.

The reason it reminds me of my former life is that I used to work with a chap called Ian Cockerill who looked exactly like a potato. I presume that’s where they got him from.

I hope he never googles for his own name.

So our neighbour keeps chickens. They wander around in the big field that is our shared garden, climbing in our window box and clucking a lot.

Then a couple of months ago, a great big cockerel turned up. No one knew where it had come from - my neighbour discovered it one night hiding under a car, and attempts to coax it out were unsuccessful, but come the morning it hadn’t been eaten by a fox so he adopted it.

It never really fitted in with the rest of the chickens. It’s about twice the size of them, for a start - it looks like something out of George’s Marvellous Medicine. But that didn’t stop the others expressing their displeasure by pecking at it, which possibly isn’t the most effective form of protest but pretty much your only option when you’re a chicken. Anyway, they learnt to tolerate it eventually, and it soon asserted its position at the top of the pecking order. It now struts about like it owns the place, but I don’t think it does, or I’ve been making my rent cheques out to the wrong person.

That person, incidentally, is our eighty year old landlady, who I was told the other day has broken her hip and will be in hospital in Kuwait until after Christmas. Why an eighty year old lady suddenly decided to go to Kuwait and break her hip I don’t know, but it’s very inconsiderate of her. We want new carpets.

Oh, and the cockerel’s a zombie*.

*It isn’t really, but I thought I should weave a Hallowe’en theme in somehow.

Well it’s Hallowe’en and once again I’ve failed to do a pumpkin carving competition. We’ll do one next year, I promise. But don’t start carving yet or it will turn to slush.

But Omally has persuaded me to do a special Hallowe’en dressing up game, so be in the chatroom at 8 if you feel inclined to participate, or just if you want to watch those of us that do making fools of ourselves.

You know how Hallowe’en is also known as All Hallows Eve? Well that must make November 1st All Hallows Day, right? So what are we supposed to do on that? Is it something good? Have I been missing out on cake?

While I was here I was going to take the opportunity to do a proper blog, but I’ve got to go and get ready to take Jess out now, so that will have to wait. I’ll try to do one later. I might tell you about our neighbour’s enormous cock.

So you know that thing I said on October 25th 2005? That’s right, the thing about how I was working on the plot for a novel with a view to serializing it on m’blog? Well it’s taken me three years, but I’ve finally got the plot worked out. I’m slow, but I get there.

The trouble, of course, is that I don’t blog much these days, so a serialized novel would rather eclipse my other ramblings, though I suppose there are ways around that. The other problem is that my plot’s rather brilliant and I fully expect publishers to be throwing themselves at my feet, and I have no idea whether their enthusiasm would be dulled by its previous publication on the internet, though I suspect the feedback I’d get from the comments would be useful enough to outweigh that concern. So it really comes down to whether my public would react with a rousing “Hurrah! A fantastic tale of murder, tramps and astrolabes for me to read while I’m supposed to be working!” or a less enthusiastic “Oh god, here he goes again with the stupid stories". In any case, I want to get a decent head start in case I get lazy later on, and I’ve only written four scenes so far, so it’s going to be a month or two before I’ll have to make up my mind.

Actually, while I was looking for that link up there ^ just now I found myself reading through a fair amount of my blog from that period, and couldn’t help noticing that a) my life really was fairly depressing then; and b) my blog was actually jolly good. Nowadays I get round to it so infrequently that I tend to stick to diaryesque updates, which is stupid, because let’s face it, who cares what’s happening to me? It was much better when I just talked rubbish. I might try to start doing that again. I don’t think I’d find it difficult.

It still won’t be any more frequent, of course. I’ve got a novel to write.

Right now I don’t have much else to say, but we’re at Jess’s mum’s house and I forgot to bring either the book I’m reading or the one I’m writing, and Jess is messing about on Facebook, so I might as well keep rambling. There was something else I’ve been meaning to bring up, if only I can remember what it was. Hang on, I’ll have a think.

Nope, it’s gone. I’ll go and read some more of 2005 instead.

Goodnight!

The other day Jess decided that it’s all very well having a laptop, but there’s one significant drawback in that they give you very little incentive to ever get out of bed, so she resolved that she should get a desktop PC. But first she’d need a nice new desk to put it on, so we went to Staples.

We picked a lovely desk, its price reduced by 20% because they’d been discontinued and it was on clearance. Unfortunately, it transpired that it comes as a self-assembly jobby in two packs, and while they’d got plenty of pack two in the back, they couldn’t find any pack ones. They tried phoning a couple of other branches, but the nearest one had exactly the same problem, and the only one that had both packs was miles away.

Aha! I thought to myself, I can put my amazing bargaining skills into play, and I suggested that they let us have the display model, along with one of their pack twos, so I could replace whichever bits were in it. There were a couple of scratches and dents, and the nice man wasn’t able to tell me which pack the affected parts came in, so it was a bit of a gamble; my hope was that on this basis we could get a massive reduction, and then with a bit of luck the parts in poor nick would be in pack two after all and we’d get a good-as-new desk anyway.

Unfortunately I couldn’t persuade them to knock off more than another 10%, and the top of the desk - which had a little chip, the only real damage on the whole thing - wasn’t in pack two, so it turned out to be less of a fantastic deal than I thought it might. But I’ve put a bit of polyfilla in the chip, and I reckon it will blend in perfectly with a bit of paint, so we haven’t done too badly.

Then we went and got her a PC. She expressed a liking for the operating system on Macs, but we’re far too poor for that sort of thing, so as a cheaper (i.e. free) non-Windows alternative I started looking at Linux, and before I knew it I’d gone and installed it on my own PC alongside Windows. Now I’m hoping to switch for good, though I’ve yet to decide whether the available graphics editing software is proficient enough for a full-time career as an illustrator. If it is - and early results are promising - then I’ll be able to run my business on entirely free software, which would be awfully satisfying. Then all I need to do is work out how to run my car on entirely free petrol and my house on entirely free rent payments, and I’ll be sorted.

(Clicky for the full gallery)

Well, Daniel’s mural is finally finished. It took a fair bit longer than we’d anticipated - just over ten days, with two of us working on it - but then we’d never done anything like this before so it isn’t really surprising that we got our estimate wrong. I’m pleased with the result - it’s come out far better than I’d dared to hope.

I don’t have anything else to say about it, I just wanted to show you the pictures.