Oh yes. Let me count. I think six times, but I’m probably blocking. The best, by far, was when I dislocated my knee and sprained my ankle while skiing in Nauders in Austria, and they brought me down in the blood wagon, having taken the precaution of giving me just a teeny hit of morphine. Now that w...

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Tunneling hither and yon through the internets I have been learning more and more about sourdough fermentation and why my bread hasn’t been too pretty of late. Advice suggested that I feed the starter with strong flour, reduce the amount of starter to 10% and slow the whole process down by using t...

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Start: 95.4 Last week: 90.5 This week: 89.5

All fine, all good; got to keep going.¹

I recently spent a fine vacation in the United States, a singularly pleasant experience except for the sickening “debate” on reform of health care. That, however, is not my main subject, except tangentially. Fat...

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When you drop a lottery ticket on the coals of a barbecue the white paper first turns a dusty pink. Then the numbers vanish, and the logo of the lottery company flashes briefly into view before the paper catches fire.

More than a year ago now I wrote “I’m going to have to see that tree every morning. And that makes me very angry”. But the truth was, I became inured to the deliberate ring-barking that had sentenced the tree, an orange outside a nearby church, to death. In fact, on the few occasions when I though...

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