Well, that’s the end of my novel. If you read it, well done! Thanks for the comments, it’s much better now I’ve had all the rubbish bits pointed out. Now I just have to hope agents like it.

But I’d still like more feedback before I start sending it off, so if you haven’t yet, you can read it now! Look, it’s got its very own page, with blood stains and everything. It’s just like reading a book, but on the computer! You don’t even need a Kindle^TM! I’ve updated it to the latest draft just for you, so it’s even better, and half the comments no longer make sense.

And now I’ll stop banging on about that. Until it’s been published (it could happen). Then I’ll be commanding you to buy it.

Instead let us talk about the future. Working from home permits me to live anywhere, providing there’s broadband, oxygen, an ambient temperature between -30°C and 39°C, clean water, a maximum background radiation level of 1000 Millirems per year, no giant mutant man eating tigers, a gravitational pull of between 0.7 and 1.4g, no airborne synthetic T-cells that will activate all my dormant genes and cause me to de-evolve into an Australopithecus, and a Domino’s Pizza within 10 miles. As a result, my location is dictated largely by Jess’s requirements. But where that will put us over the next few years is at present unknown.

Next week she starts her final academic year at York. After that, she’s probably going to do a masters, though we don’t yet know where, and she might first take a year out of education and get a job, though we don’t know where that will be either. But it means that we’ll be moving a couple of times, and it means we’ve got a few more years before she’s saddled with a job that will keep her occupied for forty-eight weeks of the year until retirement. And these facts prompted me to formulate a cunning plan.

Jess has occasionally expressed the urge to Travel, and I like the idea too, but it will become a whole lot more difficult once she’s got that forty-eight-weeks-a-year job, and it seems unlikely that I’ll have saved enough dosh before then that I can down tools for an extended period and See The World whilst still managing to pay the rent and the bills and the council tax without selling several internal organs. So I was trying to figure out ways it might be possible, and it struck me that since we’ll be moving anyway, there’s no reason why we couldn’t put all our stuff in storage for a couple of months mid-move, freeing us from all those unpleasant expenses. And since my income’s enough to maintain our glamorous lifestyle, anything she earns on her prospective year off can go in the bank, which means we’d have stacks of cash to play with in the months before she starts her second degree.

Whether it would be wise to blow those savings on such a venture, or whether it’s practical at all when you take Reality into account, and how on earth, if we do that, we’ll manage to also pay for a wedding, I don’t quite know. At the minute it’s very much in the Mad Idea That It Pleases Me To Toy With But I Haven’t Really Thought It Through Yet stage, which is the stage at which most of my great ideas die.

But you never know. It might happen. Question is, where would we go? I hear Blackpool’s very nice.

On Saturday night Jess announced she wanted a Lush Bath Bomb^TM in her bath. We hadn’t got any, and Lush was shut, but I didn’t see either of those stumbling blocks as insurmountable. “I’ll make you one!” I said.

A spot on internet research taught me three things.

1. The main ingredient is citric acid, which would be unavailable for purchase that late in the evening.
2. The other main ingredient is bicarbonate of soda, which probably would be available for purchase, but only from Major Supermarkets, and I was hoping to get by with a trip to the Co-op down the road.
3. They take 24-36 hours to set.

Point 3, I suspected, could be overcome by popping it in the oven on a low heat for a couple of hours, and I managed to find a web page confirming as much. Points 1 and 2 seemed more problematic until I realised that citric acid and bicarbonate of soda are also the main ingredients of sherbet.

I went to the Co-op and bought fifteen Sherbet Dips.

What we didn’t have was anything to scent them with, so they wouldn’t make her bath smell of anything more exotic than sherbet, but, well, they’d still fizz a bit. So I emptied the sherbet from my fifteen Sherbet Dips into a bowl, mixed in a bit of olive oil, moulded them into a couple of balls and stuck them in the oven on a low heat.

I checked on them every so often and they were doing nicely, up until the time I went to take them out, at which point the sugar in the sherbet had caramelised and turned them into some kind of gooey cake. They’d probably have tasted quite nice, but putting them in Jess’s bath would have only served to make it look like she’d done a poo.

So, there you are - how to make bath bombs, AND cakes, AND fake poos, all in one blog post. You get value for money here.