Had the best birthday in years – driven down for a meal at Brewtown so I could enjoy a drink, then home to enjoy a home made peanut butter chocolate cake and bottle of veeery nice wine.

My present, another small step towards being eco-friendly, is a compost tumbler that turns garden and food waste into mulch you can put on the garden. Looking forward to giving it a go!

Perhaps the best part of the day is having The Duchess back to good health, able to do a 10km walk with ease today. Seeing her full of energy again is a great end to a pretty tough year.

The last day before I hit 52 spurred me into making an impulse buy at the Supermarket.

It would have to be miracle cream to sort out the bags under my eyes at this point, which are more like a matching set of luggage these days, but it’s worth a go.

A knock-on effect of the Covid border closures has been a labour shortage, which has led to a new frustrating phenomenon – Teenage Worker Syndrome.

Every few days now I will enter a shop to be confronted by a shiny young person, all smiley and uncynical, and my expectations will immediately drop.

I will then brace myself for 5 minutes of “how do you select soy?” type questions of older colleagues and cancelled eftpos transactions as they fight the till system.

Or a 15 minute wait for them to make a coffee in agonising slow motion, if it arrives at the table at all and not sit on the counter going cold. Or wait while they ignore you to shout across the store to their mate.

It’s all quite exasperating until I remember what a gormless tit I was as a teenager, and accept that I can always catch the next train, or have another coffee made for me (in another 15 minutes). Which, if I’m lucky, may even use soy milk.

Our friend and keen baker Holly gave us one of her recent batch of pork pies, which was so tasty I was inspired to write a haiku to fully honour it.

Oh poor Mince Piggy

Hiding in your pastry yurt

I chew your house down

You can’t me of not living la vida loca.

Only this weekend we had the excitement of watching Dogmobile II (aka the RAV4) roll over the 200k mark. Sooo satisfying.

I needed a lie down after that one, I can tell you.

Some old skool nerdiness – check out this very clever Swede who made an accordion out of Commodore 64s and floppy disks. Looping and genuine 8-bit sounds make it a really usable and unique instrument. Found on Neatorama.com

https://youtu.be/EBCYvoC4muc