A new plan

I shall write a book. (All right, it's not that new. As plans go.) It shall be called The Chocolate Thief, and feature a photo of Mac on the cover. (For all his manifold faults and excesses, he is after all quite pretty.)

Five million people will then write to me, to say how bad it is for cats to eat chocolate. And I will tell them that I know this, and suggest they buy the book and read it. Which they will then do, because that is how these things work, oh yes.

[Since you ask, he bust into my hyper-secure chocolate locker overnight and gobbled down the truffles. Which appear to have done him no harm whatsoever, except for blighting his less-than-immaculate reputation for ever in my sight.]

A Seville contract

I am as it happens a great lover of marmalade, but not a great eater thereof. I don't eat breakfast, you see: and it's so much a breakfast preserve, I am so very hidebound about these things, I barely get through one jar a year in cakes and puddings and such.

But. It's Seville-orange season, those lovely bitter things are in the shops, and I have failed to resist them. I shall make marmalade, and if it's any good I'll just have to give it away. Or make more cakes and puddings.

So - because I am after all Oxonian, and I wouldn't say it's the only kind worth eating, but, y'know: Oxford is Best - I went looking for recipes for Oxford marmalade.

And found many: and, y'know what? They're all different. Strikingly different. You should quarter the oranges, or peel them, or both, or neither. You should add lemons, or apples, or bananas, or none of the above. You should, or shouldn't, use black treacle. Or brown sugar. You should use an equal weight of sugar to oranges. Or double that, or less.

Etc, etc. Lacking any useful guidance, I am just inventing my own recipe based on no experience whatever. If it works, I'll record it here. If it doesn't, you will never hear of this again...