Roll on the spring so that we might get some half decent weather and get rid of all the many viruses and lurgies which are going about at the moment. For entertainment we have been juggling the common cold virus, its started when Jack brought it back from school and generously shared it with me. Then his cleared up within three days, but mine took five or six days. Now it’s back with Jack with a vengence (or maybe it’s something entirely different) and it doesn’t want to leave him so he’s on antibiotics. He started taking them today but I also made chicken soup today, so surely he’ll be better soon.

Unfortunately it was half term in Fife last week so the holidays were wasted as we didn’t get further than Boot’s the Chemist, such is life, at least we hadn’t booked up to go away anywhere. But it seems like ages since we went anywhere different, in fact it’s nearly three weeks since we went to South Queensferry for a walk, and that’s hardly exciting. On the upside – our broadband connection has been sorted out, the chap who came around to replace lines obviously didn’t connect ours properly. As ever it was a case of – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

I’ve been following all the news about horse meat in supposedly beef burgers and beef lasagnes and the like. Quite happily of course because we don’t eat beef, but even if we did eat beef I doubt if I would have been eating the things which have been found to contain horse. It’s interesting that we don’t even have a word in English for horse meat! I don’t really know why it has come as such a big shock to people because we’ve all been commenting for years – things like – God knows what is in those pies! Why it took them weeks to get around to testing hospital food and school dinners is beyond me as it’s obvious that institutions scrabble around to get the cheapest food which they can. It’s heartening that the British sense of humour came to the rescue again though, and it’s amazing how many horse references you can fit into everyday life. You can view some images here. You can see some jokes here.

Going off at a tangent – What did you think of Hilary Mantel’s comments about Katherine Wales aka the Duchess of Cambridge? She claims they’ve been taken out of context but I can’t imagine why she felt the need to make comments like that at all. She sounds like a bitchy 13 year old talking about a fellow student, rather than a successful author. Why would anyone want to be so mean? I feel like telling her to play nicely now! Apart from anything else there’s a lot of nasty things which could be said about Mantel, but I’m far too polite to say anything.

You can hear some of her speech below.

Mantel seems to be firmly in the Diana was a saint camp. Oh dearie me!