shadows of echoes of memories of songs

A challenge for the cartographically minded among my readers:

What's the most efficient route for visiting all Oxford's colleges?

Method of transport: bicycle. No other restrictions except that you must pass the lodge of each college. Doubling back on yourself is allowed (despite the title of the post!).

A reminder of the location of all the Colleges can be seen on this hopefully accurate map from the University website.

ETA:

I do realise this is a hard problem (Owen says it may even be an NP-hard problem) but thought it might've been the sort of thing that you clever people had already done... like the "visit all the underground stations in a day" challenge, kind of thing...

Husbands: 1 (v.v.g.)

I'll write about the ceremony and the reception properly when we're back from honeymoon in a couple of weeks but, in a nutshell: everything was lovely, everybody was lovely, and I spent most of the evening in a sort of delighted daze. I'm so glad so many people could make it, sorry to have missed the people who couldn't, and sad that we couldn't invite everybody!

This afternoon, in the queue at the Co-op, addedentry suddenly started quietly singing "Wife, wife, wife, wife" to the tune of the Monty Python spam song, and I keep grinning every time I think about it. :-)

Happy New Year! 2008 was a bit rubbish, though, wasn't it, on the whole? I feel like I spent most of the year hiding under a rock and being stressed. No more! 2009 is a year for being calm and sorted and efficient and productive.

Some people seem to see New Year's Resolutions as a big pressure on themselves, a thing to set yourself up to fail against. If they're not the right tool for you, don't use them: silly to use a screwdriver if what you really want to do is knock a nail in. But personally I see them as a way to clear out some of the little lists in my brain, a good starting-point to count from if I want to try something new (whether it's running, reading, or remembering the milk) for a fixed period of time (long enough to give it and myself a chance, but a fixed-length commitment rather than an open-ended thing which is more likely to fail or fizzle out). NYRs are, for me, the mental equivalent of a brisk walk to shake off the New Year's Eve hangover: the direction isn't really that important, but the sense of going somewhere and doing something and focusing on one thing gives my brain a bit of a kick in the metaphor.

I didn't begin this year with a hangover. I began it curled up on our friends' futon in a warm and welcoming house, after an evening of drinking (but not to ridiculous excess) and playing Singstar (probably to slight excess) and talking. I didn't manage the New Year's Day walk, either, but only because said friends had got us BIG PRESENTS so we had to get the bus. The bus turned up on time, and we were just in time to use the end of the 24-hour DayRider that had got us there the day before, so the year's spending started with a saving of about a fiver. Also, I'd put the laundry on and hung it out just before leaving the house for NYE festivities; in retrospect, I'd definitely recommend this: as soon as I woke up on New Year's Day I knew I'd already done the laundry. I then spent most of the rest of NYD reading Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, which is thoroughly excellent and I would recommend it to anybody reading this.

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Can't put this off any longer by rambling... let's have a look at last year's resolutions (I reiterate: this isn't really a question of "win" or "fail", it's more like "how did my predictions pan out, and did I end up going in the direction in which I thought I was going" -- more like planning a walk and then looking at the GPS reading afterwards): ( last year's troubles )

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So! This year's resolutions:

• Reduce my/our carbon footprint

This is addedentry's resolution too; like him, I've got a carbon account (but unlike him I haven't patiently typed in the historical readings from the last year, so my figures are probably less accurate; so a sub-resolution is to fix this either by a) typing them all in by hand, or b) asking the people who do the Carbon Account about the possibility of a one-off import of historical data...)

On the other hand, we live a fairly low-carbon lifestyle anyway (we don't drive or fly, for a start), so I do rather feel as though I'm whittling away at something I can fix while other people are happily burning tyres on the deck of the Titanic. What I really want to do is try to do something to try to influence other people's behaviour as well, but preferably without making everybody hate me. On the other other hand... we are on a sinking ship. Time to worry about making everybody feel fluffy, or time to start bailing and building rafts?

So the related resolution is:

• Do something every month to contribute to the global campaign against climate change

Which is fairly vague, and which may well result in throwing money at campaigns because I am generally less cash-poor than time-poor, but if humanity survives for long enough for me to be telling my grandchildren anything, I'd like to be able to tell them that I didn't just carry on selfishly wasting resources and sticking my fingers in my ears while hoping that someone else would sort everything out. And even if there is a Magic Bean made of Clever Science to get us out of the fix we're in, people need support (morale and money) in the process of looking for it.

Right, heavy shit over. Back to your scheduled programme of fiddling while Rome burns -- apropos of which, a reinstated resolution from 2007: ( and the rest of this year's resolutions )

I suppose I ought to include one resolution that I'm pretty much guaranteed to keep, so the last one on the list is:

• Get married

:-)

In fact I don't expect any of these resolutions to start until after the honeymoon, so no nudging me about them until after January!

As a final this-year-is-going-to-be-better-really postscript I would like to note that I've managed to get the New Year's Resolutions post done while it's technically still Christmas, which is probably a record (no, I can't be bothered to check either), and hopefully a good omen.

And to everybody who's reading this: good luck with achieving your aims (stated or unstated) for this year, or just pottering along happily doing whatever you're up to.

fivemack muses on the comparative numbers of mice, humans, rabbits, cows and wildebeeste, reminding me of a pub conversation recently in which the question of how many Magdalen deer you'd have to kill in order to feed all Magdalen's students was hotly debated[*]. This led to me asking AQA "How many venison steaks would you get from one adult deer?", to which they responded: "An adult deer weighs 115-135lbs. Half of that is bones and hide. There's 1 cubic ft of lean venison. It yields 30-40 steaks, depending on their size." So I just thought I'd share that knowledge with the internet.

Yes, I am procrastinating.

[*] for "hotly debated" read "amicably discussed over a post-theatre beer".

I was quite perturbed by the idea of SF Chicken, though I suppose if you cross a chicken with something tentacled then everybody gets a drumstick. However it all made more sense when I remembered these adverts.

Today was Buy Nothing Day, a kind of general holiday from consumerism. I was going to say that I didn't "succeed" in spending nothing, but to say that makes it sound like a test of "willpower" rather than a choice; as if it was physically impossible to prevent me picking my own pocket, lifting my wallet out and handing over cash in return for something I'd deliberately picked up in a shop and taken to the counter.

To be fair, I did refrain from acquiring any more stuff, and at the moment I'm more concerned about reducing the amount of things kicking around than not spending money. So, in the interests of full disclosure, today I paid money for: several cups of herbal tea; a spicy muffin; a stilton and mushroom bagel, and a waffle with ice cream (the latter two were our evening meal, at G&Ds); and a concert by the Cherwell Singers of Catholic music from Latin America (which, incidentally, was very good. I had reserved the tickets for the concert before realising it was Buy Nothing Day, but had to pay on the door, so there was no getting around that one; the rest of my expenditure was just the result of trying to make the best use of the time between things. I had a choir rehearsal from 2:00-4:15pm, and then had to be back in more or less the same place (20 minutes' bike ride from home) for 7:30, and didn't want to spend 20% of the time between the two cycling to and fro in the cold. And if you want to find somewhere to sit and write in central Oxford in winter (in warmer weather I'd've been happy to sit on a park bench somewhere with my bottle of water) then you pretty much have to pay for it. I could have gone into work (and did, briefly, to pick up some stuff) but I knew that if I was in the office then I'd've got distracted by the internet.

I've found it's surprising how much I can get written if I don't have an internet connection there to hoover up all my concentration. To be honest, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to pay £1.50 or so (the approximate cost of a cup of herbal tea) for a convenient, warm place to sit for an hour and for the distance-from-distractions necessary to get things done. I know that reasonableness or otherwise of expenditure isn't the point of Buy Nothing Day; I'm just making an observation on the usefulness or otherwise of spending money in cafés.

Cafés always seem to be one of the first targets selected in the ubiquitous "how to save money" articles. There's always something along the lines of "cut out that coffee-and-croissant on the way into work, you'll be surprised how much money you save!" -- which is infuriating if you already don't do that, in much the same way that the Motley Fool's endless maundering about how to save money by driving more carefully, driving a slightly smaller car, driving an extra 50 miles to get the cheaper petrol, etc. is infuriating to those of us who don't own a car and would like suggestions on how to save more money. (I did actually write to them suggesting that they write an article about how much money you'd save by not owning a car at all, but they ignored my email.) While we're on the subject of irritating money-saving tips... a survey I filled in recently (prize draw, natch) about the Cr*d*t Cr*nch included the following question: "Will you be doing any of the following to save money on alcohol purposes for drinking at home this Christmas?" with possible multiple-choice answers including "Having sparkling wine instead of champagne" (because obviously normally everybody buys champagne at Christmas), "Going to a hypermarket in Europe to buy my alcohol" (because as we know, flights don't cost anything except the continued existence of the human race) and "Making my own home-brew" (as if making your own wine was actually cheaper than buying a £2.99 bottle of Bulgarian cabernet sauvignon from Tesco ... though admittedly you've got more choice of flavours if you brew your own).

Saving money is a curious thing, though. verbal_tea recently mentioned a conversation on the Money Saving Expert forum where apparently

The posters have reacted to the news that Woolworths is in trouble by sharing tips as to how they can continue to buy from Woolworths, circumventing the stock problems in the shops and the website’s usability failures.

and says

Bear in mind that this conversation is taking place on a money-saving forum where people are supposed to be helping each other buy less unnecessary crap.

Unfortunately the Money Saving Expert site is, as far as I can tell (I didn't get much beyond the first eye-watering page) -- like most other money-saving tips sites, articles and books -- absolutely nothing to do with buying less stuff: quite the reverse! They're all about buying as much stuff as you possibly can for as little money as possible. And it's all about competition: beating the banks, beating the shops, beating the other shoppers, getting something for nothing. If you get nothing for nothing, how can you prove you've won? Compare these two anecdotes: "I went to M&S and I bought this fantastic skirt for £9.99, reduced from £40!" versus "I went to M&S, looked around a bit, and I decided I didn't really need another skirt." How can you tell how much money you've "saved" unless the shop tells you that you got that amount "off"? How can you tell the difference between not buying a £9.99 skirt and not buying a £59.99 skirt? I didn't buy the amazing metallic balldress I saw in the window of Karen Millen; did I "save" the hundreds of pounds it probably cost (I didn't dare look at the price-tag)?

This sort of "saving by spending" makes sense (kind of) if it's something you were going to buy anyway; if you'd already decided to buy that thing no matter what, and there's a special offer today where you get 10p off that particular thing, then hey, yeah, you saved 10p. But if you're only buying it because of the "saving", then it's not a saving, it's a spending. The problem is that without any concrete commitment to buy it's easy to delude yourself that you were going to buy something anyway -- whether to convince yourself that you're saving money by buying it ("I'd've had to buy one eventually so if I buy it now when the special offer is on, I'll have saved money") or that you're saving money by not buying it ("I really wanted it and I didn't buy it, so I've saved the amount that I would have spent on it"). The latter, of course, is fine until you use it as the basis for convincing yourself "therefore I'm richer by that amount than I would have been otherwise, so I can spend that amount now without guilt".

The logical conclusion of all this self-delusion is that only way you can be sure you've made a saving without buying things is by putting money in a separate account or otherwise earmarking it as "savings": by putting a value on your non-spending. "I saved 150 pounds this month [by putting it in my savings account]" is somehow much more convincing than "I didn't buy loads of stuff this month" (after all, how can you tell what you might have bought if you'd been feeling irresponsible?). Fortunately, despite being the logical extension of illogical thoughts, it's a fairly sensible approach to the problem of saving: I certainly find it helps a lot to set up a regular payment into a savings account. And, in the interests of cutting down on the amount of stuff in my life, it takes up less space in an ISA than it would in a box under the bed.

[One of the two posts I started earlier today, restored from draft]

The other day in a charity shop I tried on a pair of size 8 Karen Millen trousers. Lovely black trousers with POCKETS in a smart warm wool mix. They fit perfectly around the waist, but unfortunately K Millen like every other clothes wallah seems to assume that nobody in the world could possibly be shorter than 5'5", so there were a good 4 inches of superfluous fabric sloshing around my feet. I suspect the chances of being able to take up something so subtly boot-cut effectively are small; the chances of me being able to do the alterations are below zero. So I didn't buy them.

But if I'm actually a size 8 now (I mean, what?), or rather if clothes-size inflation has meant that my normal size 12ish has been rebranded as a size 8, does that mean I'd fit into these Orla Kiely cropped trousers? After all, if they're meant to be cropped, there's a chance they won't be too long for me.

Also, why doesn't every shop do what Marks and Spencers do, and offer 'short', 'regular', 'long' options for all their trousers? I always wondered as a kid why my grandma and my mum thought so highly of M&S, a shop which I associated with middle-aged people. But now it all makes sense. See, my mum and my grandma are both about my height... and I'm rushing headlong into the middle age I've been aspiring to for years.

I ran this route at lunchtime and then spent the afternoon feeling all sleepy. We'd planned a 3-and-a-bit mile run, but our running guru changed the route really near the beginning (to avoid flooded paths, apparently) and from that point on nobody had a clue exactly how far we were running. I think that was deliberate on his part, actually, because if he'd told us he was increasing it to a nearly-4-mile run then we'd have whinged. Okay, I'd have whinged.

( running on about running )

A tasty, easy, relatively quick & reasonably nutritious meal based on cheap stuff from the Co-op and storecupboard stuff:

Take 4 salmon steaks and put them in an ovenable dish with 1 fennel bulb (sliced), some crushed garlic, some of a lemon (juice squeezed over the fish and squeezed-out skins thrown in as well) and about half a pint of stock (half a veggie oxo cube). Stick it in the oven for 25 minutes at 180°C. Serve with green beans and couscous.

We drank: Cairn o'Mohr Autumn Oak Leaf wine.

A few notes about prices and availability, for posterity/interest/whatever:

The salmon steaks were £5 for the pack in the Co-op. I was sort of intending it to be enough to do for another day (or maybe for my lunch tomorrow) but we were both hungry and before we knew it we'd eaten the lot (omnomnomnom). Fennel was half price (49p) and green beans were reduced to 99p for the pack (I used about half of them), though I only realised later that they were from Kenya so a bit of a bad move on the food-miles front there. Couscous was in the cupboard and I can't remember how much it cost but it lasts forever and goes with everything. Garlic and oxo are things I always have in; I had to buy the lemon (I wish lemons lasted longer; I do freeze lemon slices for drinks, maybe I should freeze half-lemons for throwing in soups and fish stuff).

I'd forgotten we had the wine, but I found it when I was looking for some white wine & today was definitely autumnal. It was quite strong, dry in flavour but not in feel (if you see what I mean) and while it probably wasn't the best thing for that meal it was certainly tasty.

And some general related rambling:

We had salmon a bit like this when my mum and I went to visit Mémé and Pépé (my grandma and grandad) last week, only with onion instead of the fennel, and potatoes and various salads as accompaniment. That's Mémé's idea of a small quick lunch. (She loves salmon and often cooks it for us when we visit; when I was younger I remember she sometimes used to do a whole salmon with prawns and lettuce around the outside. It was amazing, display food but delicious as well.) After lunch Pépé was reminiscing about how when they were first married, Mémé had made a different meal every single night for a year ("bah, it was only really for the first 6 months", she chipped in). That was in 1950. I don't think I could make a different meal every night for a month without resorting to recipe books (unless you count "pasta and X", for every sensible value of X, as different meals), and I don't have rationing to contend with.

I don't aspire to being able to cook fancy food or invent innovative combinations of ingredients; all I really want to be able to do is what my parents and my grandmother did before me and still do now: make tasty and healthy food with which to feed a family. I'm still learning, slowly.