desperance

Now that was my idea of a shopping trip. I headed into town with no thought in my head beyond wanting yet another look at my yearned-for laptop; by the time I was halfway there I had thought of Useful Things I could shop for - a new colander, a new sink drainer, like that.

I did of course shop for none of these; but I came home with spaghetti and a book and a frying-pan.

The spaghetti is actually spaghettoni, and it's Valvona & Crolla, and I was very glad to find it. That goes in the store cupboard, for the next time I fancy carbonara (who was it, which of you, who sent me their remarkable recipe with the separated eggs &c? - because I can't remember, but I am abidingly grateful) or just oil and rosemary and chilli...

The book is preservative, and will consequent all my Xmas gifts this year. [This is a new formulation, I think; it means, of course, that all my Xmas gifts will be consequent upon it, but this way around it is so extraordinarily ugly, I thought I ought to commit it to the web.]

The frying pan is (a) gorgeous, (b) ridiculously cheap, (c) reduced even from its ridiculous cheapness, (d) accompanied by a Free Tool, a flipper-overer which is itself gorgeous and ought to be expensive. And (e) the pan is a genuine replacement, and I am genuinely going to throw out the old one instanter, so that balance is maintained and I will still have no more than fourteen frying pans. If you don't count the woks or the spice-roaster.

In other news, the ghost story haunts me. As usual, we are still waiting for the ghost, but we have chocolate. Nay, more: think, when I speak of chocolates, that you see them printing their proud hoofs i' th' receiving earth...

Well, no. Not that. But we have subtext. Chocolate as analysis. Art can aspire no higher.