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I’m not completely sure where I got this, but it was almost certainly a street vendor in Johannesburg. These little toys made of old tin cans are common in Africa, sold as souvenirs. This one reminds me of my very first car, an orange Volkswagen beetle, which I called the pumpkin. I bought the car before I had a driver’s license, and drove it for at least a year, illegally. We moved to Canada and I sold it to my friend Silla, who I believe had it resprayed and gave it to her sons to drive.

It wasn’t a great car, and it got me into several unpleasant situations, including two separate occasions when I pressed the brake pedal flat and nothing happened, and a trip to the Drakensberg in which it died, leaving us to spend the night in it, on a deserted mountain road. Still, it was my first car, and that counts for something, I suppose.

It’s a foggy day. I like fog, it is possibly my favourite weather of all possible weathers.

Preston is pretty foggy, and damp overall, which is why it has all the cotton mills. Cotton’s explosive, so you really want to spin and weave it in as damp a climate as possible. Preston is not only damp, it’s apparently damper than all other places in the region, so even though it’s a bit of a schlep from Liverpool (up the coast to the Ribble Mouth, then up the river to the city and the docks), it made sense to build the cotton mills here. The cotton that was spun here was grown in the Americas, shipped here for spinning and weaving, the completed cloth was taken by ship to West Africa, traded for slaves, who were taken to the Americas and traded for raw cotton, which was brought here for spinning and weaving, and so on. Globalisation is not an entirely new phenomenon.

There’s a lot of drinking in Preston. Well, in the UK in general, but also in Preston, and in my neighbourhood. The Lancaster canal seems to be a favourite hangout for [presumably underage] drinkers. It’s pretty secluded, aside from the dogwalkers and people like me walking to work, it has a nice wide towpath, with various benches to sit on, and it provides the inestimable joy of throwing your empties into the water and watching them not bob away, but stay right there, mocking you. Actually, probably not mocking you, unfortunately. I wish they did.

The fact is, the canal would be a much nicer place if it weren’t so filthy, so littered with bottles and cans and cigarette packets and takeaway boxes and used condoms and dog shit. There are no rubbish bins along the canal, for some reason, but there are bins for dog shit, which provide helpful plastic bags as well for walkers. I do see people pick up their dog’s shit, but I can’t help thinking that they must only do it when someone’s watching, how else to explain all the rest of it.

Oh, bottle in English slang is courage, or nerve. Losing one’s bottle is chickening out. I don’t know why the title, I just like the expression.

I tried to photograph the moon, but although it is clear and bright to the naked eye, there is clearly a lot of moisture in the air, so this is all I got. On the other hand, I rather like its graphic quality.

Jupiter’s visible in the sky as well, but I would probably have to stay up to 3am to get them both in one shot, so I’m not going to try. I’d love to do more astronomical photography, but the kit is really expensive. I’d like to get a macro lens as well, and try to photograph the insects in the garden.

In the meantime, all one can do is howl. Wooooooooooo!

This is the first picture from my mobile phone. It’s not a great pic, as you can see, but it was early in the morning, and the light was poor.

The picture is of graffiti I spotted on my walk to work today. It says: Adam Bellemy [sic] is a rapist, and then someone (possibly the same person) has added, some time later, in brackets, the word “still”. The script is quite distinctive, and although it’s either fading or someone has tried to scrub it away, it’s large and clear, and along a main road, close to campus. There’s obviously a story here, and I wish I knew what it was.

It reminds me rather of campaigns in Vancouver to name and shame the kinds of criminals we felt the police were unwilling to pursue: rapists, domestic violence perpetrators, gay bashers. For a while there was quite a lot of graffiti in Vancouver that looked like this, but I don’t know that it worked. I hope whoever wrote this gets what she or he is hoping for out of it, but it seems unlikely, given that they have resorted to writing their complaint on the walls.

We cook a fair amount, and I tend to cook on Sundays. Sundays are routinely spent in the kitchen, full-on breakfast, the one day a week I do that, dinner, and often some baking as well.

Today I made coffee cake, and mushroom risotto. We get a weekly delivery of organic veg, and we had mushrooms, so mushroom risotto it was. I’m not that sure about risotto – it’s nice enough, but it doesn’t seem worth all the effort, in the end. This is very dark because the stock was dark, and the mushrooms were brown. It does taste good, though, creamy and VERY mushroomy, thanks to the porcini and the chestnut mushrooms.

The pan it’s cooking in is a new one, another seasonal indulgence, a lovely Le Creuset pan, deep and accomodating. I predict it getting considerable use, especially sice it’s such a pretty colour.

This is a little cast metal tiger, one of a pair that belong to an inkstand we bought in Delhi. We don’t actually have the inkstand any more, just the two tigers and the back panel, which has three reliefs on it.

The tigers are only a few inches tall, and because they have lost their inkstand home, they don’t have a real home: they can’t stand up on the screws that extend below their feet. This one is balanced on the mantelshelf (yes, that’s the living room wallpaper behind him, and believe me when I say it’s the quietest wallpaper in the house).

We bought the inkstand from an indian antiques and art shop in Delhi four years ago. We went to Simla for Christmas, and had a day in Delhi before we had to fly home. We went for a walk and met a man who escorted us to the antiques shop, which appeared to be some kind of government institution, with some very expensive art. I know perfectly well the man made commission on us, but I don’t mind. We did spend quite a bit of money there, including a painting that cost a substantial amount. I did resist the amazing jewellery, though, which could easily have bankrupted us.

I think I can safely say that at least ninety percent of the days in my life so far have begun with a cup of tea. Real tea, camellia sinensis assamica, fermented, brewed with boiling water and served in a cup with cow’s milk and possibly sugar.

I was raised on tea – from my earliest childhood I remember drinking tea (albeit weak and milky tea with lots of sugar). My mother used to make mugs of tea for everyone in the family every morning, a ritual solid as sunrise, even when she was ill. After she died, my father tried to keep this up, but it soon petered out. Nevertheless, I was old enough to make my own tea, and did. Tea every morning. Probably no breakfast, but definitely tea.

As a teenager, I discovered coffee, and for a few years as a student, I drank coffee in the mornings, like a good North American. I still love coffee, but waking up requires tea. When I went back to Africa, I was back in the land of tea, and returned to it, as to mother’s milk. Sweet milky tea, in east Africa, boiled in a big enamel kettle with tinned milk and sugar and served in enamel cups too hot to hold, served in fine china cups-and-saucers in fancy hotels, mugs of tea made over fires, plastic cups of tea served with the bag still in on trains and in bus stations, tea is everywhere.

This is just a plain old mug of tea, Dilmah Gold Breakfast tea made from teabags (on this occasion – we also have loose tea to hand) brewed for a good five minutes in one of the seven or so teapots we have, kept warm with my handmade tea cosy, milk poured in first, then the tea. Made for me by Martin, and served in one of our new mugs we bought for Christmas this year.

It was only a matter of time before the boys showed up on this blog. This is Giles. He is, as you can tell, extremely elegant and shiny. He is also terrified of his own shadow (seen behind him here).

We adopted Giles as a kitten in Johannesburg, along with his sister, Mabel. Emily, the best cat in the known universe was still with us, but she had leukaemia, and we knew she wasn’t going to live to a ripe old age. Hannah had run away from us in Grahamstown, and moved in with the neighbours, so we had only one cat. We didn’t intend to adopt a pair – we were actually after their older brother, but we decided he was a bully and came home with two tiny little scraps of nothing and fur. Mabel, his sister, escaped the flat and was killed in traffic, two weeks after we got them. Giles once got out, about a year later. We found him underneath the stairs, metres from his front door, crying with fear.

Poor Giles, we’ve dragged him halfway round the world, and he hates leaving his home. He spent four months in quarantine in the UK as well, and hated it. I think he spent the whole time under a blanket. He loves us, and trusts us, despite this, and we love him, even if he will never be a fierce jungle cat, defending us from all comers.