This morning I rose shortly before 7am and started my day. I do not have a great deal to do today, but it feels virtuous to start with “This morning I rose shortly before 7qm . . .”

It was 6.48, so it wasn’t that long before. This may be the opening line I need for my memoirs. Getting up before 7.00 and blogging makes me look reasonably industrious without necessarily promising too much. This is about right, I am industrious in patches, and have achieved very little. That’s probably why I never actually get beyond the stage of thinking “today I will write my memoirs”. You really need something to write about and a memoir from someone who has done less with his life than most of his readers is about as much use as a novel where nothing happens.

I wonder if you can make a book out of blog posts – The Collected Blog Posts of a Nobody. It would be a true title, but runs into the same old problem. The fact that I woke up, wrote, made coffee for my wife, who spent yesterday morning wood turning, and had high fibre cereal for breakfast is interesting only to me, and even then, I felt my interest waning towards the end. Julia enjoyed the wood turning. We now have a small Christmas tree in oak and something that could be the end of a pull cord, if we drill a hole for it. It’s not bad for a first lesson.

We had soup for lunch. She is, in case I haven’t mentioned it, half pack rat, and had been storing half-used vegetables at the back of the fridge. This is an area where we differ. I tend to use all the vegetable, and if I don’t, I leave it at the front so it doesn’t get old and wrinkly. I have just checked up pack rat in Wiki to make that link. She wants to know what I am laughing at.

They are particularly fond of shiny objects. A peculiar characteristic is that if they find something they want, they will drop what they are currently carrying—for example, a piece of cactus—and “trade” it for the new item. 

And that, dear reader, explains the decor of our home.

After breakfast, we tidied kitchen cupboards to check for duplication and find out what we needed to order for Christmas. We don’t need to order stuffing. I ordered four cheap packets last week as we seemed to have run out whilst making turkey sandwiches last week. At least half the fun of eating turkey sandwiches is in the trimmings, rather than the turkey. I could order a better quality turkey but the cost of a good one always makes me think I should be living in it rather than eating it. I see I can get a free range bronze turkey from Marks for £150. In my youth I used to pay less than that for cars.

After that I made two jars of pickled eggs, then heated up yesterday’s soup and made egg sandwiches to accompany it. The eggs I use are a bit larger than the average pickled egg and I can only get five eggs into a jar. That meant I had several more eggs left over than I planned. Guess what tomorrow’s sandwiches are going to be.

We watched a bit of TV as we ate then Julia started work again and I watched more TV. Then I washed up the mess I had made before remembering I had a blog post to finish.