Today it was cold and foggy. What did we do? We popped out to the supermarket
to get some goodies: cheese, salami, and crusty bread. We stuck some hot water and a couple of bags of Earl Grey into a thermos. We hopped up to the next station on the tube. We wandered to the centre of Chorleywood Common. We had a picnic! It’s nice to see the world a bit differently.

Interested people might like this little collection of
photos from our foggy wander.

I’ve got a lot of things to get “written down” but, as is my continual predicament, it costs me a great effort to get things from my head to “paper”. I’m not going to finish the day-by-day summaries from Finland, instead I’ve been trying to codify a more complete “write up” of the trip into a sequence of words. It grows like a monster! I try to cut down the length and behold, it grows! I seriously lack the art of brevity. Additionally I’m intending to write reviews for three restaurants in Äkäslompolo. I have at least three recipes I need to finish, though they’ll doubtless end up in the folder with 10 or so others that gathered too much dust. I have a couple of entries I need to complete on local produce, local to the Rickmansworth area specifically. The list goes on!

A pile of randomly conceived chains of thought gathering dust. And always the qustion: why bother? Much effort, many ungainly sequences of words, a very small and anonymous audience. Believe me, it isn’t through a belief that I’m improving the content of the ‘net in any way. I really don’t care much for such high minded claptrap. The truth is that it is entirely self-centred, what human act isn’t? I derive an unlikely level of enjoyment from the effort, though I ridiculously feel much angst over the dust gatherers.

This “time of year” may help me a little on this front. What a mess the calendar has made! Both Christmas and New Year public holidays mid-week! So I’ll probably take the unusual, for me, route of just logging it all as “leave”. Although, as ever, work is a self-perpetuating to-do list with variable urgency.

There’s also two (semi)personal “tech” projects I want to get some time in on. It’s going to have to be one or the other, which will win, which lose?

There’s non-tech projects galore… this is the conundrum commonly referred to as “life”.

Decisions!

I’m leafing through “The River Cottage Year“. Inspiring! Depressing! Where is my garden? Where, for that matter, is my cow?