Snoo's kitchen

This time next month I would have cycled 250 miles in the Rodolpi mountains in Bulgaria and walked 60 miles along the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. So, how have I prepared for these physically demanding activities? Sadly, there hasn’t been a long, slow build in training. But I joined up for six hot yoga sessions yesterday and have already been once. So by the time I step off the plane in 10 days’ time, I will be mind and body ready, and my downward dog will be beautiful.

On Monday, I got one of those texts from Husband that he hates sending and I don’t like receiving..”Footy is cancelled (sad face emoji)”. Knowing that my Monday night had now been scuppered (although with no University Challenge or Only Connect, it’s usually a cooking programme Fest), I suggested a bike ride. “Yes please (thumbs up emoji)” was the reply. (As an aside, I have taken a dislike to the thumbs up emoji – not sure why but it just annoys me). On the train home from work, the dark clouds started gathering and by the time I got home it had started to rain and was quite cold – typical summer’s day. I don’t like to cycle in the rain and the cold and Husband wasn’t dressed in his cycling outfit. “How about some gardening?” – the words just tumbled out of my mouth. You probably wouldn’t know but I am not a gardener and Husband is even less of a gardener but I have recently started buying plants and flowers to ‘add some colour, texture and interest’ to my garden (yes, I know, a trip to Chelsea Garden Show and I am inspired for a week or two, tops). Husband was a little confused at the sudden change of plan but I threw the supper in the oven and we ventured out into the garden.

The family had been over on Sunday and I had sought their advice as to where I should put a few of the shrubs/plants I had bought and had been watering religiously in their plastic pots for a week or two. My dad suggested digging a bed in the front garden and planting them there.

So, Husband and I carried five plants to said patch of garden and set them roughly in place and, with string, marked out an oval shape. The aim was to dig out the top layer of grass (well, moss really) and then dig five holes to stick the plants in. Hmmmm. I can’t teach what I don’t know and Husband had never used a spade. It was now a lovely sunny evening and I momentarily thought it would be nice to be out on the bike….

An hour later after a lot of “No, don’t throw the soil all over the garden” and “Just dig straight down, not at an angle” and “Shall I do it, now?”, we had a rough circle shape which had five upright plants in it. I had got quite hot but Husband hadn’t broken a sweat at all. I think that says more than enough (see my Hot Yoga blog on the sweat reference). I think gardening does count as exercise but I don’t think this view is shared by my nearest and dearest.

Here’s hoping footy isn’t cancelled next Monday (and that the proper gardeners don’t despair at the scene of slight devastation in my front garden).

So we have all survived 1555km in four days! Car, Husband and I. What a journey. I have learnt a lot about being married. Lots of my friends have been married for years and I admire them all. Quite a few of them are coming up to 25 years of marriage. That needs to be celebrated big time. We shall be in our 70s when we reach that milestone (yes milestone not millstone). I have realised over the past four days that Husband has quite a high voice when singing along to most music. I have learnt that I am going deaf in my right ear or Husband mumbles when driving. I have become accustomed to Husband reading out the signs by the side of the road randomly.

Things that I have found hard to comprehend include: people taking photos of their cars by beautiful bridges (bridges are better on their own?); people taking photos of other people’s engines; driving up to a petrol pump which is on the wrong side of the car; taking photos of random train tracks; liking Living Colour….

Husband is an awesome driver and I wouldn’t have wanted to make this journey with anyone else. He is very good at diffusing my outrage very quickly and I never spend too long seething at some pretty irrelevant matter. We didn’t run out of petrol, we were able to survive a random pullover by the police given his exceptional French, and we laughed a lot.

We have a day to peruse the shops in Cannes, a spa and free breakfast in bed. Life couldn’t get much better.

Writing on Day 2 of the Driving Adventure holiday. Auspicious start what with the car suffering a haemorrhage (thanks spell check) but once that was fixed and the T shirts ironed, we were on our way. Arriving at the Eurotunnel terminal 15 minutes after the boarding time despite breaking the speed of light on the motorway, we were clearly starting off on the back foot. By chance the crossing we were meant to take had been cancelled so we met up with the “team” and were given all the instructions/radio/paraphernalia.

Driving holidays are not without their own sort of stresses – weirdly two adults sitting in a car following a designated route very quickly fall out. That’s my experience and it’s only the morning of Day 2. The only soothing voice is the calm English lady speaking instructions from the satnav. I have decided muteness is the best way forward plus I am writing my blog so no need to try and offer advice and guidance… But I can tell you that we are running out of petrol and Husband does not seem to want to tell the lead car… But everyone now and again he keeps questioning the nice lady in the satnav about what she means…and when I try and explain, he says his questions are merely rhetorical. Hmmmm it’s going to be a fantastic day!

More later….

We were discussing the first thoughts that come into our heads when we wake up in the morning a couple of days ago. I explained that my first thought was nearly always ‘What am I going to eat today?’ Husband’s first thought every day is ‘What am I going to wear today?’ Clothes don’t really feature high on my priority list – maybe this has something to do with having hand-me-downs from two older brothers. There’s a famous family story of a beach holiday in Bournemouth when I was about 2 years old, haircut very short, and a nearby family saying “What a sweet little boy!” at which point I removed my bottoms and a cry of “Oh, it’s a little girl!” followed. 

So packing for the anniversary weekend is no big deal for me….throw a couple of tops and my ‘wedding’ coat in a bag, toothbrush and toothpaste, and I’m done. Husband lays out hundreds of combinations on the bed, irons every shirt he has, and then cleans all his shoes before making his final selection about an hour before we leave. I am never sure why he irons stuff and then folds it into a bag? It’s only going to get creased and wrinkled…Oddly, this divergence in our behaviour continues when we arrive at a hotel/villa. I check out where the tea/coffee making is and if there are any biscuits while Husband unpacks everything and hangs it all up. We laugh about it – particularly as there is usually only one hanger left for me to put all my stuff on (that’s if I decide it’s worth taking out my stuff out of the bag)…

We have spent the last three wedding anniversaries in London staying at the St Martin’s Lane hotel. It’s lovely – very central, modern and quirky rooms with enormous beds and crisp white sheets, and white fluffy bathrobes. We drive up in Husband’s car and feel like movie stars when we pull up in front of the hotel and beckon over the doorman to take the car and park it for us. So nonchalantly. This year, driving up the A3, Husband was his usual car-spotting self. Every now and then he says “Oooooohh, Carrera GT3”, or “Targa”, or “911 GT2”. I have slowly come to realise that (a) I don’t need to respond to these comments, and (b) he loves to spot Porsche on the road. It’s a little like his first thought on waking is clothes. His first thought when setting off on a drive is “What type of Porsche am I going to see today?” He also jeers and tuts at lesser makes/models. So when we pass a Ferrari on a ‘flatbed’, he starts laughing and sniggering. 

Pulling up outside the hotel a short time later, the doorman is looking quizzically at the car and comes over, bends down and says “There’s some sort of liquid pouring out the bottom of your car”. Not the movie star arrival I was hoping for and I stepped out and saw orange water flooding down the road looking distinctly like engine coolant. What a nightmare. Husband had just had the car serviced and checked over as we are off on a driving holiday very soon. Googling what to do when orange fluid is leaking from your Porsche was not great reading and Husband might live to regret his Ferrari flatbed snigger. Tomorrow I think he will be accompanying his car on a flatbed back to the garage. Dreams and their realities!

Despite the auspicious start, we had a great weekend. We usually spend hours in Stanfords and buy a map or two (this year, I bought a map of Bulgaria as I am off on a cycling holiday there in June and I almost bought a trekking in the Dolomites book – walking ladies next trip.). A wander in Covent Garden usually ends up in the London Transport Museum where I sit and marvel at the clever way they get an underground sign on the top of my cappuccino and Husband spends a good hour looking at books about old tube stations. Thank goodness opposites attract. This year, we went to Sushisamba for the second time. If you like heights (38 floors up) and Japanese/Peruvian/Brazilian fusion food, then eat here. It’s fantastic. 

I don’t sweat. I think I have a few weird body-related things like I can’t lie down with my palms facing upwards without pain. So the idea of hot yoga sort of appealed to challenge whether I would actually sweat. Husband was really keen – not to see me sweat, I hasten to add- but to give it a go. So when @PureHotYogaUK was running a special deal – 10 days for £25 – he suggested we tried it. I said great – thinking I would go a couple of times over the 10 days just to try it out. But no, in husband’s mind, 10 days free membership meant going every day for 10 days. After a few minutes negotiation, we agreed on 7 sessions with two of them just relaxation/non hot.

So this morning we arrived in good time for the first hot session. I have a limited gym wardrobe (no surprise there) so wore a short sleeved t shirt and yoga pants. I turned down husband’s offer of a singlet – showed far too much upper arm for public consumption. We both went to the changing rooms (not much bigger than a cupboard under the stairs) and I was ready first, as always, so entered the studio which was like stepping off the plane in a very hot country. Not really knowing where to sit and feeling like the class had already started, I sat down in the first mat I could find. Husband followed in shortly looking very confused – no glasses = no vision – but I directed him towards an adjacent mat. He had started sweating before we had left home. Then the room filled up and the teacher started the practice. Within the first minute I realised that I had seriously misjudged where to sit – as hot yoga virgins, we were sitting right next to the heater which was blasting out hot air constantly. Within about 5 minutes, husband looked like he had been standing under a shower all morning. I remained stubbornly dry. 15 minutes in and my face began to glow. At the halfway stage, there was a puddle where my husband had been, I could see the rest of the class glistening with sweat, two men had stripped their tops off and still I hadn’t broken out into anything that resembled a sweat. My face, however, was now the colour of a very ripe tomato and I was finding it hard to keep up. Embarrassingly I was doing downward dog while everyone else was in cobra….

Afterwards, when recovering in Cafe Mila, I heard the words I thought I would never hear in my lifetime from my husband “I reached the point of giving up. I just wanted it to stop.” He didn’t speak for about an hour.

I’ve been out and bought so more appropriate clothing. We plan to get there early tomorrow and bag some mats near the windows – as far away from the heaters as possible. Am not sure we’ll stay the distance….

There’s something lovely about going to the hairdressers and having my hair washed by someone else – I think it must be some deep-seated emotional flashback to being a child when my mum washed my hair. It immediately feels like I am in a deep relaxation and there is probably a study somewhere that has proved it stimulates the production of serotonin in the brain. I am not the best client at the hairdresser, though. I only go when I can no longer bear the state of my hair – which lately seems to take place around every 3 months. In the last couple of years, I have also starting to go to a “regular” hairdresser; previously, I would just go into any hairdresser that was nearest at the time I was having the “I MUST HAVE MY HAIRCUT” rant. This has led to some very odd haircuts – I would just say something like: “Please just tidy it up” and they would look blankly at me and start asking technical questions like, above the ears? below the ears? how long since you have had a haircut? do you have a fringe? The worst time was when I went into a very expensive “salon” in Canary Wharf one desperate lunchtime and asked for the next available appointment. They had someone free that minute so I sat down in the chair, having been draped in the “shawl” (there must be a proper word for that strange garment you have to wear while having your hair cut..suggestions welcome). A very young man approached the chair and asked me how I wanted it cut – I responded in my usual way and he started to comb through my hair very slowly and appeared to be thinking very deeply. He asked me again, and I just said “do whatever you feel would suit me”….and with that he rushed off and started muttering deeply to the other hairdressers, glancing at me every now and again….My first thought – I must have nits! He must have seem something moving on my head. Maybe I should just get up and pretend I changed my mind. The embarrassment was already excruciating and I braced myself as a different hairdresser came over. “I’m sorry”, she said, “It’s Gervais’s first day and he’s only just qualified, so he doesn’t feel comfortable enough to cut your hair but I would be very happy to”.  I didn’t go back there ever again.

So it’s lovely having your hair washed, but that’s probably the highlight of the hairdressing trip for me. It starts going downhill when you have to sit in front of a mirror and stare at yourself for at least 30 minutes. Thankfully I take my glasses off so I just see some blurry features – but this causes a problem at the end when they hold the mirror up and you can’t see anything but you still say “great! thanks!”. Thing is, you can never see the back of your head anyway, so I am not sure why they show it to you.  My new hairdresser (I have been to the same person about 6 times now, so I reckon he’s my hairdresser now) is really great. He makes me feel great because he doesn’t ask difficult questions about what I want done. He does use “product” on my hair, but not too much – I don’t like it when you move your head and your hair stays still – like it’s some sort of manmade fibre. He knows when I want to chat and when I just want to sit there and almost sleep while he snips away. I am glad we have found each other. Back home, I usually go and wash it straight away, remove all vestige of product and try and dry it the way it was before I had it cut. My hair seems to go into a shock mode just after being cut – it just looks sort of startled and out-ofplace on my head but after a week or so, thankfully, it’s back to normal.

I think my aversion to regular trips to the hairdressers was also a result of a childhood experience – my mum used to go to the hairdressers every week (I am SURE it was every week but it probably was once a month). And it would take hours. Clearly, I had to go along as my older brothers were in school but I was too young to stay at home on my own. I remember the boredom. I also remember the smell of perming lotion – my mum always had a shampoo and set and she sat for hours under that weird large helmet-style hair dryer hood thingy on wheels (probably worth a fortune now and only available on ebay). It was very noisy and hot, and I remember her trying to cock her head to hear what I was saying, but my bored moaning went mostly unheard. She would then sit for another age having the curlers out and her hair brushed and yet more hair drying….until finally the lacquer – tons of it, making the air thick with chemicals that caught the back of my throat. Her hair didn’t really move on it’s own accord all week. Dad used to call it her “Maggie Thatcher” look….

So I am newly shorn and feeling good. And I have just cooked some chicken and rice – one of husband’s favourites. The best thing is that you make it in one pan and put that on the table so everyone can just help themselves. Enjoy!

Serves 4 very well!

175g brown rice (you can use white basmati in your prefer – just cook for 15 mins less)

3 tbsp sunflower oil

8 chicken thighs – bone in and with skins

2 tbsp dried herbs (I use majoram, chicken seasoning, oregano, all spice)

1 onion (chopped)

1 red pepper and 1 green pepper (chopped)

3 garlic cloves (chopped)

1 tsp ground allspice berries

2 tsp turmeric

2 cm fresh root ginger – grated

1 red chilli – sliced into rings (I keep the seeds in as I like it hot)

600 ml chicken stock

3 sprigs of thyme

3 bay leaves

Wash the rice until the water runs clear. Season the chicken with the dried herbs. Heat the oil in a large pan that will take all the ingredients and brown the chicken pieces all over (about 3/4 minutes each side). Remove the chicken and set aside.

Put the onions, peppers and garlic in the pan and cook on a gentle heat for about 5 minutes until the peppers are soft.

Add the allspice, ginger, chilli and turmeric. Give everything a good stir.

Put the chicken back in the pan. Sprinkle the rice round the chicken and pour over the chicken stock – try and wash all the rice off the chicken if possible.

Add the thyme and bay leaves. Bring the pot to the boil and simmer for about 40 minutes. If you have an Aga, stick it in the bottom oven for about the same length of time. It’s ready when the rice is cooked through and the juices run clear when you stab a chicken piece. Delicious!

Like the honour of joining the book club, I also joined up with some ‘Walking Ladies’ which has brought a lot of laughter and some tears* into my life. Our first big adventure was to walk the Pennine Way (from Gargrave to Barnard Castle). Husband couldn’t understand how we could spend five days walking and talking all day, every day. It was one of the best trips I had ever done and has become a regular fixture in the diary. We are off to Pembrokeshire this year – coastal walking so it will be different and there will be the opportunity to take a dip in the sea. Hoping that the pubs en route will come up to the high standards of the hostelries on our other trips – of particular note was a youth hostel in Hawes which seemed to be hosting someone’s 70th birthday party -fancy dress style – bizarre doesn’t get near it. So much so that we were filled with trepidation the whole of the next day as our next booking was a bunkhouse…. Turned out to be a gorgeous barn in Keld with luxury facilities and we were served hot bowls of homemade veg chilli – couldn’t have been more like chalk and (deep-fried Wensleydale) cheese! The last day was tough. I didn’t realise heifers were dangerous. I had no fear of walking into fields of cows before we stumbled across fields and fields of young and very scary beasts. Luckily we had an expert with us who was able to identify the dangers (I looked through the binoculars and saw cows – I obviously needed an eye test or a biology lesson). Eventually, we arrived at our final guesthouse exhausted beyond belief and caked in stinky mud – one look at the beautiful cream carpet in the hall and we almost stripped off completely on the doorstep. The next trip was walking part of Wainwright’s Memorial Walk – many wonderful moments – arriving soaked through in Little Langdale and rushing to get a hot shower and warm, dry clothes on but our bags hadn’t arrived so we had to put our wet clothes back on and sit in the bar drinking… The weather wasn’t our friend on that trip and, on the last day, after a few hours of walking in what seemed to be large circles around a boggy hilltop, we found our way back to where we started and squelched to Grasmere along the low path. The trip was topped off by a welcome sherry in our bedrooms on arrival.

As one Walking Lady says so aptly ‘A walk and a beer, what’s not to like!?’ So yes, I love walking and talking. And sometimes it’s not just about food.

*tears were shed on Kilimanjaro. That mountain does take something from you but also gives you something back.

I love my book club. I was late to the book club party – I think moving around a lot when the kids were under 10 didn’t really help establish any particularly routines. But I was invited to join a local book club around 5 years ago and I felt really honoured. It was as if I had graduated to some higher level of intelligentsia (had to look up that spelling…), and was now part of a group of like-minded women, struggling with being mothers and working, and juggling everything else, but able to sit down once every few weeks having read an interesting book and discuss it at length. I was nervous ahead of the first meeting, although I knew that another “newbie” was joining at the same time which meant I wasn’t the only one suffering apprehension. The book we had been asked to read ahead of the meeting was not something I would have picked off the shelf, and the blurb seemed quite good. Having had no guidance on what actually happened at the book club, I made notes as I read the book, thought about the style of it, the context, what the author was trying to say – if there was any deeper meaning. It was a strange book about somewhere in Birmingham where this guy kept dogs in his house but never cleaned up after them. So I was a little bewildered on the choice and hoped that I didn’t have to give a detailed critique as an initiation test. At the meeting, there was a lot of pre-chat about how everyone was and it was lovely, very relaxing. Then we got to talk about the book. Luckily, the book “chooser” explained how she had struggled with the book and almost phoned us up to explain that it wasn’t a great book to start off our book club experience…with everyone else agreeing that it was a very strange book. I realised then that my nervousness about not being “learned” enough was unnecessary and that it was more about the getting together than the actual book. I still tried to talk about the style of the language and how the descriptive passages were so vivid I could smell the guy’s dirty dogs, and nobody thought I was talking out of turn, I think….

So five years (or so) later, the book club is still going. We take it in turns to choose the book and it’s my turn to choose the next read. It’s a double-edge sword for me. I love looking at books, reading books, wandering around book shops. But when it comes to actually choosing a book for my book club, I seem to lose all sense of reality. I scour the internet for “10 best books of 2015”; “10 classic books you must read”; “Top 50 best ever books”; you name it, I search for it. I then buy about five books. When they arrive, I look at them, read the first few pages, and then decide to go back online and have another look. I think maybe I could offer up a book that I really enjoyed and would like to read again (given that age is playing havoc with my memory) but then I worry that’s cheating. My choices in the past have met with mixed success (Memory of Love/The Paris Wife/The Tent, The Bucket and Me/Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal/Stoner). This time around I am tempted by one of the Man Booker shortlists but then the new range of Penguin classics look really interesting but would everyone groan if I revealed the next read was Albert Camus’ The Outsider? Would I really want to read that if I had all the books in the world at my feet? I love it when people recommend books to me – books that have stayed with them (if anyone is reading this, then send me some ideas…) And yes, I need to hold the book in my hands and not read it on a screen….

So, having tested the water on an idea with some of my fellow book club members ahead of the meeting (is that cheating?) I still might go with the one I first thought of (bit like shopping for clothes….) although I won’t have to decide until the night before.

Sometimes,  I wish I could choose a recipe book I love for book club and then get everyone to cook something and bring it along. It could be a new sort of book club. But we might all get really fat…This week’s recipe is French Onion soup. It’s a wonderful thing to eat on a cold winter’s day. Like my search for books, I usually search for recipes online, despite having more than 100 recipe books in my kitchen. This one is adapted from The Guardian’s “How to cook the best….” series which always comes up trumps. Enjoy!

French Onion soup

80g butter

4 onions, sliced thinly

1tbsp plain flour

1 tbsp thyme leaves

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

500ml of medium dry cider

500ml of beef stock (best quality you can get – the more jelly-like the better)

1 baguette

Gruyere cheese

1. Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan over a low heat. Add the onions and season. Cook slowly, stirring occasionally, until they are caramelised and a deep brown.  Using the Aga, I cooked them for 15 minutes on the simmering plate and then transferred them to the simmering oven for 2 hours, taking them out every 30 minutes for a good stir. On a regular hob, just keep them simmering for at least 30 minutes to get a good deep colour.

2. Stir in the flour and thyme and cook for a couple of minutes. Add the balsamic vinegar and half the cider, stirring constantly. Add the rest of the cider and the beef stock, and bring to the boil. Put back into the simmering oven for about one hour (or leave to simmer on the hob for about an hour). It should be like a very thick gravy.

3. Cut the baguette into thin slices and butter each side lightly. Put them on a baking tray in the top of the roasting oven for five minutes (or toast them in a toaster).  Grate the cheese.

4. Check the seasoning of the soup. Ladle it into bowls that can go into the oven, pop the croutons on the top and  mound up the cheese. Pop into the roasting oven, on a baking tray, for 5 minutes while the cheese melts (or under a hot grill). Serve straight from the oven, and remind everyone that the bowls are super hot!.

Hurrah! It’s Friday and the weekend stretches out in all its loveliness. Have made two batches of marmalade this week – it reminded me of when I was planning my wedding. I wanted to give everyone something to take away as a reminder but all the websites I found for ‘wedding favours’ seemed to be full of sugared almonds. From somewhere in the ether came the idea that I could make everyone a jar of marmalade. Despite never having made marmalade before, this seemed a great idea. I bought 80 jam jars from http://www.jamjarshop.com and found a recipe in a magazine. My first batch came out fine but I only filled about 10 jars. The house smelled of marmalade for about two weeks and once I had finished, I swore I wouldn’t make any marmalade again. Equally, I had no idea whether it tasted ok or if my wedding guests would like the idea and be prepared to take a jar home with them or even enjoy eating it. We put a jar on everyone’s place setting and at the end of the day, there were no jars left on the tables. I did say something like “free refills if you bring back the jar” but it was my wedding day and I wasn’t thinking clearly. Luckily only a handful of people remembered so I duly made more marmalade the following January…but just one batch. So, back to this week’s marmalade. My ‘wedding marmalade’ recipe disappeared and I have never been able to find it again. I have adapted a number of recipes to come up with own very special one:

Snoo’s kitchen marmalade

1kg Seville oranges

2 lemons

1 pink grapefruit

2 litres of water

2kg granulated sugar

Peel the oranges, lemons and grapefruit trying not to include the pith. Then slice all the peel into very thin strips. This is laborious but worth it! Cut the oranges and lemons into quarters and put in a muslin (I used an old clean tea towel). Pour 2 litres of water into a big pan. Add the thin peelings and the tied up fruit. I usually just eat the pink grapefruit. Bring the pan to the boil and then simmer for two hours – making sure the bag of fruit is submerged. I stick the pan in the simmering oven in the Aga for a good two hours. Take the pan off the heat and lift the bag of fruit out – be careful as it will be very hot. Squeeze as much of the juice out of the bagged fruit as you can (I always find this very hard but barbecue tongs can help). Add the sugar and bring it back to a simmer stirring until the sugar is all dissolved. Boil rapidly for 25 mins. You can do the ‘set’ test but I have never really worked out whether my marmalade is at the right point – I end up with lots saucers in the freezer or fridge and numerous teaspoons for testing. But 25 minutes on a rolling boil does it for me every time. Let the marmalade stand for 10 minutes (I remove the scum from around the edge of the pan. Warm the sterilised jars (I just put them through the dishwasher) and fill with the slightly cooled marmalade. I put in waxed paper and then cover with the cellophane tops but you can just put the lid on. Pots of gleaming golden-ness!!!

Best thing about Mondays is University Challenge followed by Only Connect. Today was no exception. A completely mad day at the coal face but timings were perfect. Caught the 18.18 from Waterloo; husband was on the same train so we puffed up the hill together. That was my exercise for the day. Poor man dragged his weary body off to Monday Night Football – I went to pick him up once and was incredulous that so many middle-aged men still wanted to chase a ball round the park in the pouring rain. But if it’s ever cancelled, sharing my Monday night is weird. I have friends that feel the same. So, my vegetable fry up with two Aga-fried eggs was ready exactly as the closing bars of the opening theme tune were playing. I got a few right – the potato one and the Picasso one. Always feel clever when I can answer correctly. Only Connect is tougher but addictive. And it seems youngsters start out on UC and graduate to Only Connect…where next? Eggheads? Mastermind? Husband home – he nearly scored but the ball ended up in the river… Best not to ask. Killer freeze on its way. That’ll knock out south west trains (autocorrect had changed that to spout heresy – don’t you just love that thing) so maybe I’ll be spared the wonder that is commuting. Best travel moment today – someone got on the train and unfolded a stool to sit on: worst travel moment – was texting child and hit Siri by mistake in a quiet carriage – pairs of eyes swivelled and tuts resounded…