Whoops

See what I did there? I missed a day. Just plain forgot to write, which means I have failed my 2026 New Year’s resolution. Accustomed as I am to dismal failure, however, I shall take it on my prominent fuzzy chin and keep pressing on.

Part of the reason I forgot was because we were entertaining, and the food I prepared was especially delicious, so I’m going to share it with you as a treat.

We had puy lentils, which I started off by preparing a little mirepoix (I cooked finely diced onion, celery and carrot until they were all soft and that, but not caramelised), to which I added three little cupfuls of puy lentils.

A splash of red wine was next, I cooked that down for a minute, added some seasoning (salt, pepper, a bay leaf, some dried herbs and a splosh of Maggi when Mrs Burnett wasn’t looking), covered the whole mélange in water and let it simmer a while.

Alongside this I was also preparing some delicious roast potatoes – I like to cut them fairly small, but I do not parboil them. I drop them into a preheated tray with plenty of oil, burning myself several times in the process, and cook the potatoes at 220ºC for as long as I dare, taking them out of the oven a few times during the process to turn them over and make sure they don’t all stick to the bottom.

At the final turn I like to add some salt, a few drops of balsamic vinegar and a little paprika to give it all a little character. Voila, bon appétit.

Not write now necessarily

I wrote this yesterday.

Write here, right now

I was wondering within my own entirely made up rule set whether it would be OK to write a post ahead of time and schedule it, but thought that this would perhaps be cheating.

I mean, no worries at the moment, I’m writing this right now as it were. But given the fact that by definition you’re only ever going to be reading this after the fact (hello), does it indeed matter whether it was written live?

A timely thought might be interesting – at the time – but becomes increasingly irrelevant the more it ages. We crave novelty, which means we’re always chasing after the newest thought, so perhaps there’s something to be said for a bit of studied timelessness?

I was disproportionately pleased with myself when I thought of the title for this post, incidentally.

A drop of the good stuff

I'm a bit sad (not actually, but it works for the purposes of this blog post) because I've already drunk my two cups of coffee for the day. 

I'm not one of those people who will lie awake staring at the ceiling if I have any caffeine after 2pm, but I have found it useful to have a hard ceiling on my daily intake of the good stuff for no other reason than I'd end up drinking five cups a day and shaking about the place like one of those little pagers you get in a food court to tell you your food is ready. 

It's a bit the same with alcohol – though unlike coffee I've never particularly found that booze takes that nice, I have to have a strict limit (none) because otherwise I would be likely to partake a little too enthusiastically. There are three exceptions to my rule, however, because they do taste delicious and it would be incredibly rude to pass them by if they were waved in front of my nose. 

Number one is the dangerously drinkable Clairette de Die sparkling wine from the wherever region of France – I'm talking the sweeter doux version and it has to be made by Jaillance because I'm refined like that. We always end up buying a load of bottles on our trips to France and it's a great accompaniment to a celebration. Or lunch. 

Number two is a delicious Normandy cider, and again it has to be a sweet tasting cidre doux. This is the sort of thing they put in a child's packed lunch in France (next to the cigarettes) and this genuinely is very tasty with lunch, and opening a bottle is in itself a cause for celebration. The Normans are rightfully proud of their apples, though I would only rarely buy a cidre doux because there would be a danger that I stop drinking anything else. Except my two cups of coffee, of course. 

Number three is a mild exception to the exceptions to the rule – I love a good mojito, it's one of the extremely rare alcoholic drinks that I think taste delightful. The problem is that a good one is very hard to find, and also that they're very expensive. And also that I've usually offered to drive ("c'est Sam, c'est celui qui ne boit pas") wherever mojitos are served. The other problem (so many problems) is that the gold standard mojito by which I judge all others was imbibed in a little bar in the charming German town of Wangen in the Allgäu. It was both long ago and probably terrible, but a prince among drinks in my hazy memories of yesteryear. 

Time for a cup of tea, I think.

On fitting in

See what I did there? I nearly failed completely on day two of my New Year's resolution. I can't really say that anything interesting has happened since I last checked in with you – some days I just spend the whole time tip-tapping away at my keyboard. And working from home full time you have to actively carve out some moments of interest, I find. 

I've actually noticed the same hip and knee twinges coming on that I felt during the COVID-19 lockdowns, a humiliating reminder of the onset of old age if ever I needed one. It struck me back then – and still does – how quickly our bodies can degenerate if we're not feeling purposeful. 

My purpose currently revolves around being able to fit into my suit again. You see, I got a nice Hugo Boss number when I got married with the strict agreement with my future self that I would continue to wear the outfit when occasion demanded. 

Back a few years but post-lockdown at this point, trying on my suit I tried to fasten the waist and heard the thing starting to come apart at the seams. I'm not quite back at those indulgent days of porky inflation, but there are certain clothes in my wardrobe that make me look like an overproven sourdough loaf as I wrestle with buttons. 

Think I'm going to pop out for a brisk walk. 

A New Year’s resolution

I have finally decided on my New Year's resolution for 2026 (or maybe I should get ahead of 2027's?), and I have decided that I should try and write something every day on here. 

That does sound massively ambitious, but starting in April does take the pressure off somewhat. And no one really reads this anyway.

It's sunny as I type, which probably lends a different perspective to the decision, and the impending nuclear apocalypse has been put off for two weeks or so. We shall see. 

An irresistible offer, you say

I’m drowning in marketing emails. I look back through my creaking inbox and we’ve got Travel Tuesday, Cyber Monday, take the weekend off, Black Friday, Throwback Thursday. Sorry, Thanksgiving.

It’s like you can’t even celebrate the systematic eradication of an indigenous people group anymore without it being hashtagged and commercialised. My favourite thing about this time of year is that it reminds me what mailing lists I’m on that I need to unsubscribe from. Everyone comes out of the woodwork. I bought a new mesh filter for my coffee machine 13 years ago and suddenly I’ve got 5% off from my friends at wherever. I like a company that rewards loyalty. Although I’m sure we’re approaching the point where the loyalty bonus won’t kick in until you’ve read the email for at least five seconds.

I’ve got really good at knowing how long five seconds is – I can stare at anything but YouTube for five seconds and guess exactly when the skip button is going to pop up. My fear with that is that they’ll start just having it pop up anywhere to slow you down. It’ll begin with it appearing in a random corner of the screen, but then it’ll need you to press your right smart tap in the bathroom to authenticate and move on.

The real skill will be evading capture entirely. My email address will be written rice paper and I’ll eat it before you can get your hands on it. The ones that get through the net? If I swipe right it’s to bring up the little bin icon. Sure, you hope this email finds me well – but first it’ll have to find me.

We have moved house

We have just moved house, so it is with every confidence that I can say I’m never leaving this one again. I can’t conceive of having to lift even a single box full of accoutrements I’ve picked up through my painstaking life that I may or may not look at in any given year.

Like the little roll-y thing from Japan that inks over your personal details before you put an envelope in the blue bin. I had admittedly forgotten the undiluted pleasure of being reunited with things that have been sitting in front of you for the last however many years.

I managed to recycle/take to the charity shop/chuck out a good chunk of my stuff prior to this move, but even that was barely enough to mitigate the horror of yoinking my worldly possessions to a van and driving it several times across most of the country.

Washing your prized vestments within the confines of your own home is an underrated luxury. Not underrated by me of course, now that I’ve heaved – hoven? – the washing machine in and out and through before meticulously hooking it back up to pipe work I don’t understand.

I’m not a handy man to have around, and now I live in perpetual fear of something popping off while my pants are in a flat spin and a tidal wave of lightly scummy water scudding across the kitchen tiles. I barely have the wherewithal to even half arse a domestic task, so it’s my wife who knows where all the screwdrivers are kept. She has an axe now, which worries me slightly.

What is quite refreshing is knowing the house that you’re going to see out your days in, however numerous they may be. After this move significantly fewer than I might otherwise have imagined, because I gather that I’m in no fit state to be lifting things and taking them places.

Do I want to die here? I can categorically say that this was not on my top 10 places to kick the bucket (mental note: write list of places I wouldn’t mind dying in. That fancy chip shop in Cromer?), but if it happens it happens. I can’t really be bothered to go anywhere else now.

A freewheeling, experimental morning

I get very wistful for the good old days of blogging (2005) back when things had a freewheeling, experimental air. It was confessional (as long as you had a secret identity), hilarious (as long as you were funny) but usually compelling (as long as you had work you were avoiding). I keep thinking that I need to go retro on here, but the problem is that I don’t often do anything interesting.

Take today for example. I woke up at 6:40am to a screaming cat (she’s not supposed to start screaming until 7am, which she well knows), but managed to pretend to be asleep long enough for my wife to get up and feed her. I successfully convince myself that I’m helping both of them as I do so.

I have a coffee, followed by a shower, followed by another coffee. This will be all the coffee that I drink today as I try to manage my consumption of coffee. I could probably handle a third cup, but the danger is that I wouldn’t be able to stop, until I resembled nothing more than a jittering ball of static in the corner of the room.

I try and do some work that I need to do, that I should have done some weeks ago, but have cheerfully been able to set aside knowing that the deadline was ages away, until one day I realised that it was no longer ages away. It is nearly 1pm, I shall shortly have lunch.

Two tyred to function

I had some work done on the car the other day. Because I drive cars and write about them for a living people seem to think that I'll know anything about them, but that's simply not the case. 'This car runs on fairy dust' seems about as plausible as any other explanation of the internal combustion engine that my teeny brain can take in. So obviously I can't mention my profession in any form. 

In so many ways I'm perfectly secure in my masculinity – which is probably why I feel comfortable enough writing a blog post that lays bare my utter mechanical ineptitude – but I'm greatly intimidated by a middle aged man in an oil-stained onesie who sputters forth a language I'm supposed to understand and am apparently deficient for being baffled by. 

Which is all to explain why I took my electric Hyundai in to get its wheels rebalanced (they were all pointing in different directions, I'm told. Didn’t really have a problem with it, let them live their truth) and ended up paying for two front tyres on a Ford Fiesta.

Did I go in and challenge the four men standing menacingly behind the counter? I did not. It seemed more or less what I expected to pay, and to be honest I hope that whoever got their tyres paid for had a lovely day. And that I didn't blunder into a scam. As far as I can tell the wheels are all pointing in the same direction now.