Things you least want to hear someone say...

...as they take down the scaffolding that has embraced my house for these last, lo, many weeks:

"Doesn't even look like they've finished up here."

No, quite.

On being watched

Woke up this morning with both boys packed about me on the bed. That hasn't happened for a while.

Also, they've been keeping close order all day: you could almost call it hot-lapping, one taking over the sit-on-Chaz duties when the other wanders off to watch scaffolders through the window. They're very demanding about it - Barry is graciously pleased to indicate which of my two typing hands should scritch him now - but welcome.

I wish I could remember where this chapter was meant to go. I'm sure I knew, before. Ghân-buri-ghân knew many things, before.

Breeding

I was supposed to be doing a couple of things this weekend gone. One of them was eating the last of last week's loaf, and the other was baking a new bread.

What with one thing and another, neither of those things happened.

Which means that the levain, the sourdough starter I've been cultivating since Wednesday is already more mature than it ought to be, and I'm not going to use it until at least tomorrow. I don't know if it'll get past its best, or curl up and die on me altogether, or just get more and more sour and delicious. I guess we'll find out. I still have fallback emergency yeast if I need it, and I can always start the levain process again... (But I want this one to work: it's got lots of rye in it, and I'm interested. Just, I can't bake one loaf while I still have a good chunk of the previous one. Can't do it. No.)

Dedicame!

My friend the poet Sean O'Brien has written a new poem, Horus Goes to Arvon. (NB, for the unBritish among you: Arvon supplies residential writing weeks, with two professional tutors and fifteen students, at three or four bases across the country. Ted Hughes started it in his own farmhouse, and it is a fabulous institution. I taught a course once; many of my friends do it regularly.)

Sean has dedicated the poem to me. To me!!

And he allows that I quote a small section:

At evening, glass in paw, he mingles. I
Am the god Horus, he says, and I
Will live forever, unlike you, and yet it seems
I cannot write bum on a khazi door.

Hee.

Cheese or font?

shewhomust, I'm looking at you...