The way the political system in this country works is that it is supposed to be accountable to the public. Painfully few people take enough of an interest in our many public bodies, and many of them work in completely opaque ways. When people are prepared to put the time in to discover what is going on and write about it, often in depth, it should be something that is rewarded, not something that frightens public officials.

When people holding roles in public bodies take decisions, they must expect to be held accountable for them. That includes criticism from informed commentators such as local bloggers, who can be expected to express themselves forcefully.

It cannot possibly be right that Audit Commission has paid several thousands of pounds to solicitors to send a frightener letter to a member of the public who is doing what members of the public are supposed to do: holding to account public officials.

When it came to getting married a last year, I knew I had to get a nice shirt as part of my outfit, and started scanning the high street. I’d never been into Curtis and Hawkes before, so I started there. They have sample shirts for you to try on to work out which size fits you and then you can take your pick of the styles, patterns and stripes they offer. Except, as it turned out, they simply don’t sell a size of shirt that fits me. At all. So, sod that. F You Curtis and Hawkes!

I’m not enormous, but one of the things that tells me that I shall have to get to grips with my weight and size sooner rather than later is that I am different size every two years or so, and that most shops I visit do not have larger sizes than the ones I am currently wearing.

So after the embarrassment of C&H, I went on round the corner to T M Lewin to see if they sold anything that would stretch around my 18″ neck.

They did.

Not only did they have a shirt that went around my neck, they also suggested I try their “slim fit” 18″ shirt. I initially poo-pooed the idea that slim fit anything would go around my not insignificant girth, but tried it on, and it was actually a good fit. They have a good range of interesting shirts, they fit, they look nice. They are slightly fancy, with double cuffs that need cufflinks, no shirt pocket, and extra long tails which means they almost never come untucked (except when bellringing, which would untuck thermal undies.)

I ultimately got married wearing Paul Smith. But that was a frankly stupid amount of money to spend on a shirt that is now discounted to an annoyingly low amount.

But T M Lewin are now providing most of my work wear, as, for pretty much the first time in my life, I have to wear a tie every day, so it’s important I have shirts that go all the way around my neck.

And so it comes to pass that our week of episodes show up on the CDWM Youtube channel.

Here are the links:

• Stephanie (the episode with the hilarious microwave ping incident
• Me – nuff said
• Janice – the costume episode in which I wear a PVC catsuit
• Brian – the super uncomfortably night when I got to make a lot of jokes and where we somehow all get a lot drunker just before the puddings. Off cam tequila drinking games? YMTTICPC
• Barry – final night with the scores, the cloche and gods and godesses costumes.

It’s clear that this interesting experience is going to follow me around for quite a while. Over the past year I’ve been recognised by strangers half a dozen times, the most recent just a week or so ago in Fellows, Morton and Clayton. Several have spoken to me because they knew one of the other contestants – Janice is my beautician, or I went to school with Barry and he hasn’t changed much. And everyone asks whether we’re still in touch with each other. I’m friends with Steph and Janice on Facebook, and bumped into Steph at a bus-stop recently, but haven’t spoken to the other guys since the final night at Barry’s house in November 2010.

It’s one of those strange and unlikely sounding facts, and it brings to mind two further pieces of trivia.

The first is that there is a photograph of Mozart’s wife, which I blogged about here. (It’s also a little bit strange and unlikely that I can have a) blogged something six years ago and b) still remember it!)

The second is a great trivia question that came up as part of my car-share to Mordor last year: which is the only US president to have worn Nazi uniform? The answer is

Ronald Reagan, who wore it as a costume in a movie. There’s a still from that here. And I somewhat fear to think what that google search is going to do to my online ads for a couple of weeks.

So many German words have been on the tip of my tongue when students ask for them, and have to dragged back to the front of my mind kicking and screaming from the recesses of my language learning synapses. But this one was completely new to me. I guess we didn’t have all that many sleepovers when I was at school, but it is now definitely firmly ensconced in the vernacular and social calender of the teenage girls we teach.

Other words I struggled to remember this week, some of which came back in time, others only floated to the surface, esprit d’éscalier like, just too late to be useful:

der Strand – beach
gemütlich – cosy
bequem – comfy

For me this was not an issue, for although I was aware of the adaptations I have never seen either incarnation.

I had however read a few of his novels over the last few decades, and so was able to choose his work when I went on my long French road trip in 2005. It is always a pleasure to encounter the first time an author you really like with an extensive series of novels you can get your teeth into when you get time. I have a slight completist streak, mainly when it comes to the unproductive side of life such as crime novels and TV series.

So in 2005, in preparation for six weeks under canvass on my own in France, I bought a crate of Reginald Hill novels, almost all of his books that had been in print some time, and systematically set out to read them in order. I had particularly been looking out for the Ursprungsroman of the gay character Sergeant Wieldy, which is referred to obliquely in many subsequent books. I have definitely read it, enjoyed it at the time, and have no detailed memory of what happened in it.

I ended up tearing through the crate of books, burning up the D-cells in my tent lantern so I could read through the night, and ultimately read the six weeks’ worth of books in only three. The structure of my holiday was such that I took a holiday from my holiday to return to England halfway through for a stag do so was able to ensure that a whole new stack of Amazon 1p special secondhand books was waiting for me when I got there. I moved on to reading all of Sue Grafton’s alphabet books.

My route took in my dear friend, my former French teacher, and conversation there turned to novels, and I found out that despite her northern heritage, she had never read the Yorkshire classics. We ultimately effected an exchange – and my crate of Hill novels was handed over and in return I got a big pile of Georges Simenon novels – the Maigret books – in French. I fear that crate has languished neglected somewhere ever since. I hope it’s in the attic and is OK.

To return to Reginald Hill, it seems such a shame that so few people are talking about it. So few people have mentioned it on twitter, and I haven’t heard officially on the BBC news on either last night’s 6pm bulletin or this morning’s lunchtime headlines. And the Wikipedia pages are somewhat incomplete, with most Dalziel and Pascoe novels not having a page of their own. Which is a shame.

PLIP BATTERY SPENT

I had no idea what it meant and groaned inwardly that it started happening the day after a service.

Was PLIP an acronym for something weird hidden within the car?

A quick google to find out what it means takes me down a linguistic voyage of discovery.

Apparently, un plip is the onomatopoeic French word for remote key fob. Makes the English word seem staid by comparison.

Unhelpfully the car’s manual suggests that the replacement size of battery is one that doesn’t appear to exist – CR0523?? For now I will resort to using the spare key – a bit of a novelty given this is the first car I’ve ever owned that has a spare key!

Last night at Pudding club, I made Osso Buco with polenta.

Normally I would doctor a recipe so that it had no more than half a clove of garlic per finished portion. Last night, my husband was not eating with us so I threw caution to the wind, and made it as per recipe, four cloves of garlic for three people, plus the gremolata. The recipe called the gremolata, a garnish of chopped parsley, lemon zest and raw garlic, an essential part of the dish. Without that warning, I would probably have not made it, because I know that raw garlic almost always has unpleasant effects on my digestion, not least horrible burps, heart burn and the sort of acid indigestion that leads to me waking up traumatically feeling like I’m drowning in bile. My only real cure on nights like that is to trough a packet of gaviscon and spend a few hours trying sleep sitting upright.

I should have trusted my instinct, because that’s exactly what happened! After feeling garlic-sick all evening, I could only finally go to bed without problems at gone 4 in the morning.

At least I now know for certain that I don’t like and cannot eat gremolata!

As for those websites that see raw garlic as a cure for heartburn, well!

I made the osso buco in the first place really only because the butcher didn’t have any lamb shanks when I ordered and suggested this as a substitute, stewed, bone-in, meat.

Not a huge fan of polenta as a side dish either.

In it she recounts her own experiences talking to people whose only impressions of Africa included starving orphans in mud huts, and the dissonance that caused with her own African life. She talks about how her own writing began in homage to her own reading, and that her childhood involved few stories written in Africa.

But as she she was talking of the danger of the single story, it was something a little closer to home that was going through my mind.

I had recently put “Aspley” into the Nottingham Post website to find a story there about a proposed and rejected 20MPH zone on a main road in what used to be my ward. If you do that you get a slew of horrible stories about bad things that have happened. Violence, theft, murder. Smoking, burglaries, tragic death of motorcyclist.

You have to do quite a lot of paging down to find even neutral stories, let alone any of the positive things that are happening in that part of the world.

And there are plenty. The Aspley SuperWarmZone. Fundraising for Motor Neurone Syndrome. The fab solar panel programme that got a photo in The Sun.

Pull the focus out just a little bit and you get Nottingham’s reputation, undeserved, for higher than average gun crime. Things you think are going away a bit until some idiot who should know better brings them all up again.

TED is the awesome, highly regarded website with fabulous videos of world leading speakers talking about interesting things.

TEDx is their programme of running local events, which, it appears are run by volunteers across the globe.

TEDxNottingham brings all the fun of TED really locally to Nottingham on March 17th this year.

So where is the troubling news? Normally if someone gave me this information I would have no qualms about letting people know as widely as possible.

The trouble is I learned about it because the TEDxNottingham twitter account are spamming the heck out of anyone with a vaguely local twitter presence. Which I think is MORALLY WRONG. This is not how you do twitter! Stop it at once!

So I don’t know whether I should be spreading the news because it’s interesting and lots of people I know would like to hear about it, or to stand well back and let the EVIL SPAMMERZ FOAD.

I called them on it, and they apologised, saying they were running their spammy tweets late at night so as not to splurge people’s timelines, but I still think they should not be doing it at all. Still, I’m not PR savvy enough to suggest what they might be doing instead…