A Thursday Toddle around Scriptor's Mind

Irrespective of whether it's a frosty, placid morning or a wet one with a battering gale our resident Robin sings his little heart out before dawn each morning. He parks himself inside the hedge adjacent to the conservatory window and burbles and chirps contentedly. Since we have our first cup(s) of tea in the conservatory it's a lovely sound and almost makes up for getting up in the dark.

The BBC have decided, as part of their cuts, to axe the best programmes they have - “Something for the Weekend” and some of their Formula One coverage. “Something for the Weekend” finishes in March and I'm very sad. Simon Rimmer's recipes are among the best, easiest and most cleverly explained on TV and I shall miss the Sunday morning banter between Louise Redknapp, Tim Lovejoy and him. I shall also miss their gadget round-up in which they look at some of the latest gadgets on the market – from the wonderful to the truly wacky. This week's included a cookie catcher.  That's both wonderful and wacky.

If you dunk your biscuits the cookie catcher will ensure you don't end up with biscuity tea if you leave it in too long. It can also be used to retrieve tea bags – a great little idea.   I like dunking ginger nuts but some people allegedly like dunking digestive biscuits and hobnobs.  If you are one of those folk I have to be honest and say the one word that comes to my mind - weird!!  Who would dunk a digestive?

What I hadn't realised until I looked for a cookie-catcher image was that those paper fortune-tellers that we made as children – or were subjected to by our girl friends – were also called cookie catchers. I know we didn't call them that as children because the word cookie didn't enter my vocabulary until the 80s when my girls started watching television and one of them asked me what a 'girl scout cookie' was. We didn't have Google in those days so I had to ask their mother. To me a biscuit was a biscuit and it will always remain so!

Talking of biscuits, I have managed to acquire some coconut rings.  What happened to them?  They were once the most popular and cheapest of the biscuits in our UK supermarkets and then all of a sudden they disappeared.  It's been about eighteen months since that happened but now they are back.  Hooray.  (And P.S. I don't dunk coconut rings either).

The third issue of We Love This Book has just arrived (not long after the second one, which was decidedly late – teething troubles, I presume). I can strongly recommend it. Anyone who doesn't get a TLS weekly or a regular Sunday paper with book reviews can catch up with what is going on in the book world as well as enjoying some good articles at the same time. I have now acquired another long list of books I want to read.  That's really the last thing I needed.  I don't normally bother with short stories in a magazine but Sophie Hannah's 'Something Untoward' was brilliant.


P.S. I haven't been paid to advertise We Love This Book (or the cookie catcher). I thought I'd mention that since so many blogs nowadays are just an excuse for advertising. Not that I blame folk for trying to make money however they can in these hard times. Good luck to them, I say.

Roy of the Rovers - aka Steven Gerrard

Son-who-watches-films and I were delighted to see King Kenny (aka manager Kenny Dalgleish),Captain Fantastic (aka Steven Gerrard) and the tireless Craig Bellamy pull Liverpool F.C. through to the Final of the Carling Cup.

They will meet Cardiff at Wembley on February 29th. Craig is from Cardiff but I don't think that will stop him celebrating if he scores again.

Apart from a slight but momentarily worrying health crisis in the family – not me for a change – which seems to be over for the moment there hasn't been much else to report.

I'm still without my laptop so I blogged this using mind power - are you impressed??