I’ve been watching some South Park for the first time since… well, since the movie, I think.

When did they stop killing Kenny?

I have just heard that the £20 note is to be replaced, removing my claim to fame.

I once stayed in the house on the back of the Elgar £20 note, which pictures the back of Worcester Cathedral and the huge, gorgeous house next door to it. In 1999, I volunteered at the Three Choirs Festival there in return for board and lodgings and free access to all concerts and events, and they put me up in the famous house, which had just been renovated to a fabulous standard.

It was there that I met Kit and the Widow, who had also been billeted there. Well, I say “met,” more meant, “sat on a sofa listening to them for hours.”

Elgar must have been in circulation for ten years, I suppose. Instead he’ll have to make do with the statue of him in Hereford.

After playing with a friend’s iPod nano, I was bowled over – such a great user interface! So I got a blue one for myself a few weeks ago. What with all the leafleting, and the slaving over a hot printing machine, there’s plenty of time I get to use it.

Except… the first time I took it out leafleting, the thing froze up. Froze solid as the screen merged from one track to another.

It wasn’t till I got home and had access to Google that I figured out the key combination to reset it. (Press and hold middle and down)

Then last week, I started leafleting, plugged in my ears, found what I wanted to listen to… strained… and couldn’t hear it at all. Somehow, every track on the device was too quiet to hear.

I think iTunes had changed the volume on everything. Again, getting home, googling, found an answer (basically, go to iTunes, select everything, right-click, Get Info, and use the boost volume setting for every track you have) – but it was another leafleting session without access to my choonez.

Except, as you may already have guessed, I’m not actually listening to music. Mostly, it’s podcasts from the BBC. I started downloading them almost as soon as they were available, more to encourage them in a good thing rather than because I wanted to listen to them. Now I have hours worth of various programmes to help me on my way. This evening, whilst printing, I had two hours of From Our Own Correspondent. The Now Show has been an old favourite. The Today Programme 8am slot has kept me going for a few extra rounds.

Shame there’s so little comedy.

Well, yesterday’s Nottingham blogmeet ended up a marked success, I thought.

I turned up at the Broadway rather late. I’ve not been there since their refurbishment, so it was a bit of a shock how swanky the place looks now. The bloggers were easy enough to identify, sitting in a corner, so I went and got a beer and came to sat down at what turned out to be the non-blogger end with a rather sweet couple of pretty young men who were there as part of Mike’s coterie. And they said Hi, and asked what my blog was about, and I said, politics, and they asked which flavour, and I said Lib Dem, and they asked, so what do the Lib Dems have to offer, then?

I ought to be used to that question by now. It comes up whenever I tell new people what I do for a living. And yet so often in a social setting I get blindsided by the question and end up fighting fire – no we’re not in favour of nuclear weapons, no, we’re not about to jump into bed with the Labour party, no, etc.

I should really just parrot those words from the constitution at them:

The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair free and open society in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance and conformity.

They’re printed on the membership card, and I can almost recite them without having to cheat and look at the card again. I particularly like the “none shall be enslaved by conformity” part.

Time and time again, though, the best answer I can come up with on the spot is

The Liberal Democrats exist

which doesn’t really cut the mustard.

Still, the initial sticking point passed, the conversation flowed more freely as I had more to drink, or at least it felt like it did. It turned out that several people had beefs with the City Council in ways I can probably help fix if they send me the details, so I dished out business cards here and there.

And eventually, moving on was discussed, and the gay end of the table relocated en masse to the next door gay bar the Lord Roberts, where more beer was consumed, and the conversation took on a more scurrilous nature.

At various points in the evening, Mike left and returned, Alan phoned for reinforcements, James quizzed me about incinerators and Miss Mish, erm. Miss Mish, erm, talked about all sorts of things that cannot be repeated. And lent me her pashmina and hat.

Far too much alcohol was consumed.  I arrived at 3pm, left shortly before 11pm, and was drinking all evening.  I’m out of practice for that sort of thing.

There is a Nottingham blogmeet this Saturday, as Alan reminds me.

It’s in the Broadway cafébar from 2pm until early evening. Further details care of Troubled Diva and Rullensberg Rules.
I plan to be there, but… well…

Thing is, we have a delivery day that day.  So I will definitely be out pounding the pavements in the morning, and I probably ought to be doing so in the afternoon too.  Which means being busy til about 3, then being all hot and sweaty and smelly, so will have to go home and shower.  Then it will be a bit late.

And I worry that all these people will know each other, and I won’t have been able to find the time to read any of their contributions at all, bar the occasional dip in at Mike over at Troubled Diva on days when he’s not writing erudite things about pop music that I know nothing of.

Although the world of political bloggers seems quite cosy and well known to me, and many people know me through the various political link exchanges and aggregators, the bloggers of the Real World seem quite remote to me!

My aunt, my mother’s sister, died last week at age 49, from a cancer that first seemed beaten, then was discovered untreatable in her spine.

The family rallied round at the crematorium on Friday. My mother’s family all share a distinct sense of humour that’s obviously very similar to my own, so such events, whilst still being very sad, are underscored with hardly stifled laughter all the way through.

A few years ago when we all gathered for Grandad’s funeral (at the same place, I think) the service was taken by a preacher who didn’t know him, but who had come to meet my aunts and hear about him. The resulting service was odd, partly because none of us could quite work out whether the preacher was a man or a woman, partly because s/he misunderstood some bits, and partly because s/he mixed up her/his notes, and gave the eulogy meant for someone else’s Grandad. Se referred to recent holidays in Benidorm and Cyprus, which didn’t sound like our Grandad at all. And she misunderstood his “interest in glass” – he was an academic physicist, and the author of “The Physical Properties of Glass” – she thought he liked looking at stained glass windows. I mention this to highlight my families’ response – which was to joke about it rather than to complain or get upset. So much so, that when planning my aunt’s funeral, my uncle even considered feeding the next minister more misinformation – or even the same misinformation – just to make us laugh.

The sense of humour also shows through in merciless teasing of each other. Which means it’s very unfortunate that my brother programmed his sat-nav wrong. He should have been headed for Newcastle (under Lyme) Crematorium. He ended up well on the way to Newcastle upon Tyne. Text messages about the progress of his journey up from London worried me a little, but it wasn’t until he said he was stuck in traffic outside Sheffield that I twigged what was wrong. When he eventually arrived, there was lots and lots of mickey-taking.
More about my aunt. She had a marked Potteries accent, like most people in Newcastle. So much so, that just hearing her work colleagues talk like that in the pub after the service really reminded us of her. A family anecdote has me, meeting her when I was wee, noting her pronunciation of “book”: “Oh, auntie, I could have sworn you just said ‘b-euw-k'”

She like frogs. On the day she died, this hopped into our lean-to at home:

Another year, another Shrove Tuesday. I have once again forgotten to buy the various things needed that are not in stock until the day. Previous years have seen a desperate attempt to procure last minute maple syrup from various different supermarkets, but this year, Co-Op came up trumps.

This year I will be trying an American pancake recipe I heard on Woman’s Hour this morning. Apparently you need to separate the eggs, and whisk the whites before combining them with the batter. This gives a thicker pancake.

Not sure what, if anything, I will give up for Lent.  Lie-ins?  Late nights?