… was homebrew kit. Yes, dear reader, in ONLY 12 DAYS, 40 pints of delicious Tom Caxton Real Ale (As Brewed By Monks In The Middle Ages, With Hop Enhanced Extract) will be mine, all mine.

Sterilizing stuff, a fermentation bin, a new bucket for food use, and a homebrew kit were what I lugged home from Wilkos, after launching myself out of the shower at high speed at about 3.15pm, with only 45 minutes to walk the mile into town before the shops shut. I initially set out to by a clothes airer, but Wilkos had run out of those, and I thought homebrew would be a close approximation. Sure, it won’t get my clothes dry but in ONLY 12 DAYS I’ll be well past caring.

40 pints of foul-tasting sweet molasses sludge are sitting right behind me in a bucket sitting in a waterproof crate. My attic office room is the only place in the house to get anywhere near the required 18-21 deg C. I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to check the mix or whether that’s going to allow evil bacteria to get in and spoil the whole damn lot. As if it wasn’t enough having to carry buckets of water around the house to top up the homicidal goldfish in the dining room, I now had to carry 40 pints of clean water in my new food bucket up to my office. I’m still working through in my head the logistics of transporting the mix, transferred into a pressure barrel from the attic room where it’s warm enough for conditioning, down four flights of stairs to the cellar where it’s cool enough for the finished beer to hang out for a few days. Actually, it seems that 40 pints isn’t too heavy to move around carefully, bending the knees as appropriate.

I bought the clothes airer as well, in Argos, after discovering that Woolworth’s doesn’t actually sell anything useful.

Yesterday was the East Mids Lib Dems’ fascinating regional conference and AGM, where a heavily contested battle for regional chair meant a higher than usual attendence from conference reps. The old adage about turnout increasing when voting means something certainly applied here. I went down the night before and stayed in a not particularly nice little hotel to avoid a train journey in the early hours of the morning, since I needed to get there early enough to help set up a little. My laptop contains the only useful list of those eligible to vote, a list being amended by text messages with details of substitutes well into the early hours. Was up until about 1am reading Reginald Hill library book, so not unduly disturbed by two male voices from the room above nattering. And took the time to undetake loooong overdue housekeeping on laptop and move some of the desktop icons into more sensible places, having completely run out of spare desktop. I can now see once again the fantastic landscape-with-dog snap that MYM sent me by Messenger a couple of months ago. Firefox is great, but I haven’t figured how to get it to save downloaded files into more useful places than the bloody desktop.

After I got home yesterday, we sat and watched hours of 24 series II after a few weeks’ break. The last disk got stuck in a DVD player that quite literally blew up a bit back, so we had to make alternative arrangements to see the episode from that disk we still hadn’t seen. Unsurprisingly, the cougars didn’t take their opportunity to KILL KIM BAUER, and the series rollocked on to quite a pretty megaton dénouement. Still plenty more to watch, however.