No news

We're just outside Thaxted, driving along the country lanes just past the spot where the plumes of ghostly smoke are often seen drifting across the road. There's no smoke tonight. I'm actually a bit disappointed. I'd like our friend Tina to experience the phenomenon and it's exactly the type of evening where smoke is most likely to be seen. Crisp. Cold. Clear.

We've been to another quiz. We would have won but for a catastrophic end round on TV theme tunes, where the catch was that if you answered a single question wrongly, you'd lose all your points for the round. Our mistake was to blithely assume that the theme tune to Skippy The Bush Kangaroo was actually Steptoe and Son! Listen to the themes. They're really similar! But who puts the theme tune to Skippy the Kangaroo into a quiz!? And who the hell IS Skippy the Kangaroo?! It was a good quiz, though, and it was really lovely to see the parents and our regular team mates, Sally and Stuart.

We came to Thaxted with Tina straight from craft and cake in Catford. Today's cake was a home made cheese cake dusted with dried raspberries. Sam had bought cheeses from a local fancy deli. Catford, it seems, is on the up...

We had lunch with Sam and Matt in a local greasy spoon (keeping it real in true old-school Catford style.) We're planning a very special trip to the States next year, which we all became very excited about.

Abbie was knitting a lacy shawly thing today, whilst Sam, Julie and Tina all worked on baby ephemera. Nathan cast-on a shawl which he then "frogged" back after discovering he had miscalculated the number of stitches.

I ate cake. Blissfully. Whilst obsessively looking at pictures of Monument Valley at sunset.

What else? Oh yes. I've stopped watching the news. It feels like quite an irresponsible thing to do, but I feel I'll soon find out if something major has happened that I genuinely need to know about. I get bored of media bias. I get bored of watching vox pops of stupid people having opinions about matters they know nothing about. I don't want to hear another bored housewife saying she's worried about the children. I hate the newsmakers' insistence on showing one person with views for, one against and one undecided for "reasons of balance." Recessions happen because of the media. Ghastly words like "brexit" get coined and promulgated by the media. I don't really need to be told that there are more shitty things happening in the world with Isis and certainly don't want to watch politicians using these awful events as a platform for point scoring. I don't want to see the gurning, fat, privileged faces of David Cameron and Boris Johnson any more. Neither do I want to hear journalists delivering pieces to camera in mock "newsy" voices whilst travelling up and down escalators whist half the screen is blurred out as the backdrop for a series of ludicrous graphics because it's assumed that I can't focus for more than one minute without something visually exciting happening. So there. That's why I no longer watch the news.

Night night!