Today’s the day…

I am currently sitting on a patch of grass next to the Thames somewhere enjoying a picnic – the first of the year, no less.

It’s one of those moments where life is good. Amazing how many of those moments involve me scooping hummus into my mouth now that I think about it.

The sun is beating periodically down (gosh it gets cold when that thing disappears behind a cloud), the insects are flooding the blanket and the birds are a-twittering. Not so much the red kites, which glare from a height and seem to have their beady eyes on our homemade sausage rolls. Joke’s on them when they find out they’re made of Quorn.

There’s something particularly British about this form of picnic. You wait for nice weather and once you’ve decided on a moment then you grit your teeth through whatever comes your way. No rain though today thank goodness, just the odd threatening cloud that’s happy enough to float on and ruin someone else’s day later on.

There are certain rules to these picnics – there are vegetable sticks, hummus, crisps and curled sandwiches. Tiny plastic cups to hold whatever luminescent fizzy drink you’ve squirrelled in the oversized picnic bag. A scotch egg if you’re feeling particularly fancy. My mum used to bring cold sausages on every picnic, though I’ve never seen that repeated.

And then there’s the other rule – the one that guarantees you getting a light sunburn at the first picnic of the year. I’m feeling a little overexposed on my sparse head… must remember my hat next time.

I make some soup

We had some bread to use up this evening so I thought (well, I was told to by my wife) I’d make a nice bit of soup it could be dunked into.

I settled on a tasty leek, potato and carrot recipe that seemed to deftly straddle the seasons – you don’t want to be too hearty in spring, it all gets a bit heavy – and started cooking.

This one just involved chopping all the vegetables and cooking them in a pan before adding some stock and then cooking some more. The recipe said to add milk at this point, but I’m allergic so I chucked in some coconut yoghurt instead.

The final effort was blitzed up with the stick blender, though I was fairly convinced by this point of the dish’s blandness.

I chucked in a splosh of Maggi and some salt and began hoping for the best. Whether that was anything to do with it or not I was delighted to taste the soup and realise that it was actually pretty decent.

No interesting moral to the story I’m afraid, just me having dinner.

Birthday celebrations

Today was (and indeed remains) Mrs Burnett’s birthday – an unfortunate clash of professional requirements (I was working) meant that we didn’t get to spend the day together, but I did get to hear her crashing through the house while she got ready to go out.

They’re funny things, birthdays, especially the older you get. I’ve never cared for them particularly – just sitting around getting older doesn’t feel like a particular achievement, and we all have enough of a sense of self-preservation that there’s no skill in having done so. There are any number of people older than me, though I guess if I hung on long enough I might find myself in that excessively exclusive club where you’re the single oldest person on the entire planet.

Not that I would want to be, mind, but the odds aren’t exactly stacked in my favour, not the way I eat. I don’t mind my age as a number as long as there’s some reasonable consensus that I don’t look as old as I actually am. While I type Mrs Burnett is engaged in a passive aggressive fight with the cat over the space on her side of the bed (the cat’s), which is proof if it were needed that age brings you no privilege.

I'm on the train

I just had to pop down to London to pick up my passport because some embassy only went and stuck a piece of paper in it.

It’s amazing the power of that piece of paper, the amount of work that many people have poured in so that this piece of paper could be glued in by an anonymous bureaucrat on a completely random page that’s hard to find (near the back).

The resources expended, the boxes ticked. The heads scratched, frankly. I’ve never been that good with administration and I’m a disaster at filling out forms. I’ve had to scan things, ask for documents, I’ve had to make up find out important information. It’s been a mission.

Despite all that, I think what swung it for me was the fact that a hidden but powerfully influential figure in the concealing shadows of a far flung foreign ministry was persuaded by another powerful friend of mine (I’ve not met them yet mind) to put a little pressure on the right place. I don’t think I mean literally, but you never really know. It pays to have friends in high places, I find. Mostly from my experience of not having friends in high places.

I shan’t tell you where I’m going, because it’s more interesting and mysterious that way. Unless you have access to my work calendar, which is neither interesting nor mysterious.

Put to the test

Today I went to a top secret test track for a shoot with work, it was very exciting. The shoot itself wasn’t particularly secret, in fact the whole thing was captured nicely on video. The place we were at is used by carmakers and manufacturers of various wheeled machines to test them before letting them loose on public roads.

It’s all very sensible, these things need to be checked out before they’re made available to the public. The funny thing about the place is the great emphasis they place on security – stickers on your phone cameras and the like – because said carmakers are very keen for people not to see their new cars being tested in a state of unreadiness.

I’d love to tell you about all the fun things I saw, but I can’t. Not because of the rules, but just because I don’t know anything about anything. Who can tell what a car is once they put a bit of black and white camouflage round the exterior? It’s ingenious really.

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.

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.