h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sue may be a wee bit late getting home tonight. Her mother has been taken ill, and Sue is going to make a detour on her way home to check on her. It is when Sue's mother falls ill that I best show my true altruistic and caring nature: I tell Sue that it'd be all right with me if she wanted to go and stay with her mum for a week or two, or even longer, to make sure that she's OK, and that she needn't worry about me in the least, as long as she leaves me money. And does the weekend shopping. And leaves me money.

Sue's supper tonight will comprise:

Thinly-sliced (well, as thin as my shaky hands and fidgety fingers can manage) potatoes layered in an oiled dish and covered with fried leek and onions, cream, grated cheddar, blue cheese, parsley, black pepper, thyme and a splash of veggie Worcester sauce. I think that about 20 minutes in a pre-heated oven at 180C should do the job.

On the subject of food, I read the following in Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit last night:

"They walked on with him until they came to a dirty shop window in
a dirty street, which was made almost opaque by the steam of hot
meats, vegetables, and puddings. But glimpses were to be caught of
a roast leg of pork bursting into tears of sage and onion in a
metal reservoir full of gravy, of an unctuous piece of roast beef
and blisterous Yorkshire pudding, bubbling hot in a similar
receptacle, of a stuffed fillet of veal in rapid cut, of a ham in
a perspiration with the pace it was going at, of a shallow tank of
baked potatoes glued together by their own richness, of a truss or
two of boiled greens, and other substantial delicacies. Within,
were a few wooden partitions, behind which such customers as found
it more convenient to take away their dinners in stomachs than in
their hands, Packed their purchases in solitude. Fanny opening her
reticule, as they surveyed these things, produced from that
repository a shilling and handed it to Uncle. Uncle, after not
looking at it a little while, divined its object, and muttering
'Dinner? Ha! Yes, yes, yes!' slowly vanished from them into the
mist."

I worried about Fanny's open reticule, until I looked it up in a dictionary.

The advent of hootoo has been causing Sue problems. It used to take her over an hour to scroll through the day's postings in Mustardland then the Lockin. Now that hootoo is taking off amongst Mustardlanders it takes her over two hours to do her daily update. It's lucky we don't have a TV.

Douglas