I’ve just been called by my goose-supplier to tell me that they can’t source 3-4 kg geese, and are we all right to take a 5kg one?

Does no one listen to nursery rhymes these days?

It’s my fault I suppose for wanting to stage that crucial Rite of Passage of all housewives… preparing a Christmas roast. Unfortunately my dad (top-notch housewife, when it comes to roasts) has put his foot down and insisted on stuffing his entire clan with turkey on the 25th. So I am left to consider doing something out of Good Housekeeping and entertain my brother and his clan with a goose during their stay. A large one, as it happens. (I was going to prepare a turkey for Thanksgiving, but missed the date and forgot. This is something I think we must all be thankful for. I’ve never cooked anything larger than a chicken).

I have a feeling that goose is healthier for the heart than some meats, but I may be wrong. I will have to ask dad, or assume he remembers to correct me next time I see him.

Given that I have recently discovered a pregnancy aversion to small feathered game and a craving for kangaroo (surely the bounciest and most exciting meat ever), I feel I may need a bigger oven in due course, but Suffolk delis apparently don’t sell it. Something about food miles I figure. How inconvenient. We ship lamb over for Easter all the time from the antipodes.

In other festive news, we beat the rush and bought our tree just before our local tree-suppliers ran out. Then realised that these big trees need more decorating, and had to ask should we decorate the window-side (for the neighbours) or the room-side (for ourselves and guests)? The jury is out, and so is the tree, until the room is ready for it.

We are sending very few cards this year and intend to do a letter next year, by which time we may have thought of a name for the baby (you have to put this sort of thing in Christmas cards). He or she is due at Easter and by Christmas will hopefully be learning piano and harp and playing tennis regularly with a view to Wimbledon by the Olympics. It’s not that we don’t love our friends and family. We just forgot to listen to the rhymes, and by all accounts Christmas is coming.

We all need to talk to our neighbours more, according to the BBC, who no doubt sponsored the Silver Jubilee street parties and appear not to have neighbours themselves (unless you count White City tube station).

I would have put links in that last paragraph, but I am pleading pregnancy again and wanting to be pragmatic.

Pragnancy, if you will.

Back to the point.

I live in a Conservation Area (note spelling) at the front of my house (Multimap Birds Eye view, North facing). The back doesn’t count, which is just as well as it needs a lot of doing doing. Near me and slightly upstream is a house which had a bomb diffused in it two years ago. It had recently been left by an aging brother and sister who were no longer aging to the Gentlewomen of Ipswich, c/o the Salvation Army. It is an old house. A large, old house. It would suit a film set well. Not the kind of film I enjoy. The front garden is overgrown and the whole thing is in a state of disrepair, although we did get ideas for our new front door from it by careful peeking through the undergrowth.

The Gentlewomen of Ipswich (c/o the Salvation Army), politely pointed out that great houses full of maintenance needs and undiffused WW2 bombs were not really what they were after and, being a fussy and persuasive lot, sold it to a property developer in March. The place, not the time.

I have not met this property developer, but I imagine I would not like to. I have not been her friend. She applied to build a new dwelling at the rear of the large house (it does have a large garden, reaching back to the road behind us, which is more than I can say for our garden). I did some pre-pregnancy thinking (the sort that works better for me), and realised that there would be consequences on the Conservation Area if parking were not adequately provided and retained at the back for both houses in the process. I also decided to complain about the number of trees she intended to remove in the garden, which conveniently hide our bathroom and daughter’s bedroom from the gaze of a low block of flats most seasons of the year.

Anyway, the dwelling was allowed to go ahead, with a vast number of restrictions. Including, satisfyingly, my parking objection. But not a lot was said about trees. I fear I may have to get a larger pot plant in the bathroom window. 

In October the developer from March put in an application to have the parking restriction removed, citing a few rather sketchy reasons. I was informed by a neighbour who was unable to make much of a fuss herself and who moved the planning notice to somewhere I was more likely to see it. Knowing my neighbours well enough: several are older, some are very busy with long hours or children, a few are new to the street, I realised that I was the person to get in touch with the council again. Very Wife of Noble Character and not a Threescore type of thing to do at all. I am not a letter-writer by habit and don’t usually complain about anything if I can help it.

It’s good to know your neighbours. It’s nice when they ask you to stand up for them. So I acted on their behalf. 

We heard that we won this week, so the developer cannot have it her way. The consequences would almost certainly have been detrimental to the street view in the long run, so I am pleased about that.

I am dreading the conversation with the neighbour who mentioned this to me though in the first place. She also wants ’20’s plenty’ signs put up along our stretch as we are near a primary school and a dangerous corner. Perhaps I should conserve my energy.

I don’t think pregnancy is catching. But the lack of brainage may be. My surgery just wrote to me, inviting me for a second swine flu jab. This may be because: (a) I fall in the pregnant and asthmatic categories, (b) they have made an admin error or (c) you know when you’re not sure you’ve done something, so you do it again, just in case? Maybe they are pregnant too. It’s not that catching, surely.

Dad has had a swine flu jab and says it makes him drowsy. Mine made me stay awake (all the time I wasn’t having nightmares) but I couldn’t say that wasn’t actually the pregnancy hormones.

This is the same surgery that put in a touch-screen for patients to check in not too long ago. I wondered how long that would last before some bright spark put cling-film on it. Until Tuesday, as it happened. It’s the kind of screen that asks you for your gender (not too hard), month of birth (takes a little thinking about these days) and date in that month (well, there’s a 1 in 31 chance of getting it correct by that point). I had often wondered, as many mathematically inclined people do, whether it would ever have to ask me my year of birth as well.

Well, that also happened on Tuesday. I watched furtively from my vantage point to see whether anyone looking like they were born exactly five years after me was going to turn up while I was waiting. I think they did, but hadn’t the nerve to ask.

The chances of this actually happening are quite slim, but not impossible. I won’t go into details here, but I remember studying maths at ‘A’ level and discovering that in order to have a 50% chance of two people in a room sharing a birthday, you only need 22 people. Maybe this is why facebook birthday announcements come in clumps. I have around 360 friends, and am as likely to have two people with a birthday on any given day as none. Although, of course, it is not as neat as that.

Forgive my ramblings again. My brain-to-keyboard connection is on auto-pilot. I have typed a lot of sermon today in preparation for Sunday and as a result  now know more about John the Baptist than I ever thought I could remember (or use). Did you know that he was neither Baptist, nor C of E, for example? And that he shares a middle name with Winnie the Pooh? And that he is celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox church every Tuesday? None of these exciting details made it into the sermon notes I must confess.

However, learning more about his remarkable birth has been instructive. He really was far too Old Testament for the New Testament. That’s what comes of having older parents. And for the entire pregnancy his dad didn’t say a word. I bet Zechariah had a lot of listening to do with Elizabeth running around the house all hormonal and probably illiterate. I expect dinner parties were off the menu for the duration. Was he able to tell her he knew the sex, 2000 years before sonographic scans? Or even the name?

My own little Elizabeth is becoming more and more articulate herself, and is a delight. Today she made me write ‘Lily’, ‘mummy’, ‘daddy’ and then ‘Baby Bean’. It was touching – she has realised that we are expecting a baby at some level. She is very interested in dolls and caring for them at the moment. I never was. And, unfortunately, it is still not that catching.

I was going to blog about the time I lent Jimmy Carter my hammer. Or, as dad points out, his hammer.

“Gee Lucy,”  I believe he said, “can I borrow your hammer?”

I was doing a Habitat for Humanity ‘blitz build’ in Hungary in 1996. It was wonderfully surreal. I only got on the team after memorising a phone number and saving some money from working in London for a year. I use the story when I want to illustrate how unlikely events in life can be. Of the ten houses we built in five days, I was on the same house as Jimmy and Rosalind. What are the chances?

However, hoping for a neat segue into my sister’s very recent HFH building efforts in Kenya proved unbloggable while she was away because I didn’t know how it was all going. Nor is it fair to make comparisons since she has returned. Why? Because now I find I am inordinately proud both of her and of our cousin, the team organiser and person who sacrificed her biythday (sic) while building houses with no straw in the African heat. I saw some photos on facebook of it all. Comfort zones were well and truly abandoned, and valuable lessons in building to Kenyan design and standards were learnt. I also noted there was no cement mixer. Result: a far more convincing and sacrificial effort than my American just-add-water approach in Vac. I see my sister is now offering to build houses in the UK. I’m sure this will wear off, but if it doesn’t, maybe I should hold her to it.

Talking of siblings, my daughter is now at the age I was when I became a sibling, as illustrated by figure (i), a rare glimpse of me on this blog, along with my little brother, taken in 1979.

Figure (i)

Now my daughter and I do share a silly sense of humour, so after going through my baby book with her yesterday and explaining that her uncle was not her cousin, we did a photo shoot. The result is in figure (ii). Note the lack of sibling. That would be explained by the fact that the sibling should not be arriving for another 19 weeks or so (see figure (iii)). Said sibling remains anonymous in all respects, and appears to be healthy and progressing well so we trust we will be thankful for what we get and find a name that suits in due course.

Figure (ii)

Figure (iii)

Having stolen an idea from a friend for the previous post, I now ought to post a link my friend has just sent me to a thought-provoking talk about time-wasting.

Apologies if you do not come from the same background as me, but it is not too difficult to watch and has some ideas to prod us whatever our faith or spirituality. Apologies also if you noticed that Maslow’s hierarchy works the other way round when it comes to triangles. I knew there was something odd about it.

but that is little excuse for lack of blog-material. Maybe I should steal some. I was hoping for another 25 hour day, but the chances are we will lose most of our sleep to the ravings of the little one who is recovering from high temperatures and snotty noses (feels like more than one), so maybe a simpler, 24 hour option is ok really. Like sentences, days should be short enough and to the point.

Please take a look at this triangle (click on it, if you must save your eyesight),

which details some of the digital distractions of modern living. It does look kind of tasty if you are the kind of person who appreciates hierarchical taxonomies (unlike one of my readers.) However, I will be nice to him. He is coming up to three years since the heart attack and I’m not sure what one is supposed to do on such occasions. I was thinking of stopping the blog. However, it may be easier not to. Depending on how distracted I, um…

This is my new theory, stumbled across at lunchtime a month ago.

Since then I have been in a stupor (for stupor, read first trimester blues) and generally angry and unhappy, against all the odds. I have been making myself a lot of triangular food to cheer myself up, and my conclusion is that the hypothesis is correct. Let me explain, by way of images:

You may have noticed a correlation between food with an acute angle and food which is not advisable after a heart attack. This is largely true, and can be attributed to the way that nature rarely provides these shapes in ready-to-eat snack-packs. Not so clever for fruit to grow in this way (bunches of grapes don’t count, as they don’t have the critical angle on closer inspection). Most of these foods are man-made and deliberately triangle-shaped.

So, what would happen if you wanted to market something in the shape of an apple, say?

If you want it to be a happy feel-good thing, it would probably turn out like this:

Since February I have been tentatively learning the saxophone, although I fear I ought to be practising a little more. I was sent a link the other day, which sums up how I feel some of the time when listening to music, but puts it far more eloquently. I don’t know if I can copy the video link in directly, but I would strongly recommend listening to Michal Levy’s animated short films Giant Steps and One, via this link: http://michalevy.com/giant-steps.

Apologies, incidentally, if you have been checking this blog and getting frustrated when I haven’t been updating it as much recently. I have good reason, as my energy levels are particularly low while they work on supporting an extra little person, who we hope to welcome into the world around Easter time.

Which reminds me, I am starving.

I am the sort of person who does not like being  lied to. I do not appreciate double glazing companies repeatedly calling me and telling me they I’m wrong when I gently remind them of this. I don’t like people knocking at my door and telling me we share the same faith when we don’t. I don’t like people claiming to be able to predict the lottery numbers, and encouraging others to believe them.

Before we go any further, let me predict the winning lottery numbers for the next draw. With absolute certainty, barring the end of the world or the national lottery, I think you will find them in this list:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

A certain Mr Brown believed he could convince people that he could predict the winning lottery numbers live on television last week. If he had come up with a serious explanation, he might have saved his reputation. However, the explanation he gave was mathematical nonsense and just made people all the more sure that he had used clever trickery (read: magic) to confuse and excite his viewers.

I will tell you why he didn’t really predict the lottery numbers.

1. He did not win the lottery himself, and has not done to this date to my knowledge.

2. He has not given a convincing explanation for his ‘winning’ numbers. Otherwise you might find that the experiment is wholly repeatable (i.e. scientific) and this week we would have 9 out of 10 lottery players winning, and sharing a vast sum between the lot of them. Say, £3.65 each or something. The other 1 out of 10 would stick with the numbers they play every week, because ‘you never know’. Quite.

3. A certain Mr Daniels has been quoted as saying that there are ‘99 ways’ of doing this trick. Great. And if he never got round to doing it, it was because there are certain stunts the public just doesn’t fall for.

Admittedly, if one person had the secret power to get the numbers right and did so every week (until they were caught), they could use the money for all sorts of good. But the chances are they might abuse the system. Hmm.

Now although I do not like lies, I am amused by trickery and clever sleight of hand. I just like to know that there is a reasonable explanation, even if I do not know it myself.

I get angry when suggestible people are told that there are ways to predict the lottery numbers when there are not. I have done the maths.

Somewhere in America there must exist a television channel devoted to Etiquette. In the UK, we have Debrett’s. I’m not sure what the rest of the world does, and would not like to comment without taking the right advice.

Recently I was in need of etiquettal advice. Having mislaid the butler, I had no one to ask. I even looked online, but all I found was a page of vegetables in season. This solved another long-standing question of mine, but was temporarily filed in my brain. You see, I was searching what to do in the event that an acquaintance has the misfortune to plant courgettes and discovers, too late, that they are productive little things and can even become productive large things if ignored enough.

This phenomena is something we can no longer ignore.

I cannot think of a good way of refusing another courgette and chocolate muffin. I do not want extra courgettes to go with my courgettes. I love the things usually. I enjoy frying them, steaming them, preparing asian stir-fries, and all manner of savoury meals. However, I do object to being foisted upon. It affects my planning and it upsets the apple-cart (for apple-cart, read ‘veg box delivery‘ who deliver fine - if muddy - examples of all sorts of exciting vegetables in season and start you thinking what a sensible thing to do with chard might be).

There is a certain type of person who grows too many courgettes, and there is another certain type of person that they try giving them to. This may explain why Harvest Festival was invented. It is rude to appear ungrateful or arrogant in refusing fresh vegetables, which means that usually one obliges. Courgette ice-cream – why not? Courgette jelly? Great for kids. Courgette en croute? Deep fried courgette?

I have a better plan. Somewhere, and probably not in America, there must be a way of developing courgette energy into fuel for vehicles. (And I don’t just mean the self-propelled kind). This would use solar energy and the natural climate of countries like ours for a positive ecological purpose. And, perhaps more importantly, it saves us from the scourge of courgette chocolate cake.