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

I'm baffled. My trusty Morphy Richards breadmaker seems to have given up the ghost. On Monday it was working, yesterday I plugged it in and it failed to give its usual beep and the digital display didn't function.

I've tried all the usual things like checking the plug, testing the fuse, and unscrewing the top to have a quick look but nothing seems to be obviously amiss.

And nothing has happened to it between now and last time I used it. It's a mystery. Any thoughts, anyone?

This is quite vexing. For years I didn't use it, it being too much faff with mixing the flour, yeast, butter, salt etc. But recently I've discovered some great bread mixes at Lidl (of all places) that you just mix with water. So it's been back in use for a good month now - until it did this.

I never quite got the point of a bread making machine, especially when one is surrounded by so many fine bakeries.

In fact until my mother bought one after emmigrating to Canada - these machines are very popular over there by all accounts - I had never actually heard of such a device.

Fine bakeries? In Taunton? Well, there are two branches of Greggs...

The main appeal at the moment was that I get a nice fresh small loaf of low-GI sunflower seed bread to wake up to in the mornings.

And I've got two and a half bags of bread mix still to use!

Knowing my luck, if I had one, I'd probably wake up to the smell of my kitchen burning down.

And low-GI means?

Any American soldier on leave.

B

Maybe low-GI (gastrointestinal tract) is where it starts to give you the squits.

I've got to do something. Since I replaced my two hours a day on my bike commuting in London with a six-minute round trip on foot in Taunton, I'm really tubbing out.

Cycle to Minehead and back at the weekend?

I can't, I've done my achilles! It was getting better until the gig last night...

How about some low-impact limping, then?

God, you don't want to go to Minehead at any time. It's a dreadful place.

Plus if you ride the A358 on bicycle, you're likely to get yourself killed. All those fast bits of, rather narrow somehow, road with high hedges and embankments running alongside them - it's an absolute deathtrap.

One time whilst hitch-hiking and singularly failing to get a lift, I walked from Bishops Lydeard (*) all the way to Williton along that road, and I've never been so terrified as a pedestrian in all my life.



(*) So, do you know how to pronounce that properly yet, without the locals falling over it fits of laughter at you?

Au contraire - I went to Minehead for the 7th Annual Somerset Beer Festival and that was OK...

Mind you, I didn't really spend any time examining the rest of the place.
I'm considering buying a flat in Watchet though. And how *do* you say Bishop's Lydeard?

I'd be more worried about wrongly pronouncing Williton

Liddiard. Where I come from.

That's how I've always said it...

Do you really come from there, McKay, or do you mean that's how they say it where you come from?

Actually, if the first is true then naturally so is the second...

My family come from a place called Cam - near Dursley, and spread out from there across the West Country. All my Aunys and Uncles live in that part of the world.

Me - I'm a Coventrian, but one who was introduced to scrumpy as a lad.