In which the Rodent ably alliterates about a political porker.

Pol says it always snows on his birthday and outside it is cold enough that all the wheelie bins are frozen shut under a layer of sticky ice.

Yesterday's flute lesson didn't go very well. I got started but was only a few minutes in when migraine struck with shaking hands, loss of coordination and weird visual effects, none of which make for deft flute-playing. Poor Alex is stuck with a very slow student. I got home, dosed myself with the cocodamol Pol so kindly went out and got and was fine thereafter. Thanks to loadsadrugs, pain hasn't crept much over the 8 mark. 8 still has me confined to bed and deeply unhappy, but it's not dangerous. I ran out of cocodamol for a while and had to have 30mg codeine. It stopped the pain excellently well and I got a lot done under it's influence. Yay drugs.

My shopping has all arrived. So much! Part of the expense was a duvet for the spare room so that we can have visitors without it impacting my ability to huddle downstairs watching telly and clutching my HWB in the early hours.

Speaking of which, Moth woke me up at 4am very agitated and insisted on being in my room. She wouldn't go on the bed to her usual place but would only sit next to the bedside on the structural bodge-job that serves me as a bedside table. Coincidentally, my HWB had just started leaking and was making me damp, but luckily not too much escaped and the bed is drying out already. I'll check it in a little while but I think that the top wasn't done tightly enough and I'd been sleeping on it, and because it was cool it had been allowed to unravel from the towel it's usually wrapped in.
Moth's currently elsewhere in the house, ignoring me again.

The bulk of the shopping is food, including a few new store cupboard items like black treacle and rice wine vinegar. I have chicken defrosting from last night, ready to pretend to be the rabbit in the recipe I posted. I'll separate the skins and have them roasted as a snack, because there's nothing I like more than fresh, hot chicken crackling.

I'm not sure whether to cook the Somerset beef today as well, in the slow cooker, or gamble on having enough energy on Friday to do it then. Pol's away for a few days, so it would be nice, I think, for him to come back to a hot beef stew thing, although I don't know how much he'll like the finished result. The other point is that I'll have a few more plastic containers by then from having Chinese food. Most of all of these dishes will be frozen for my bad days.

On a food-related note, there's a rally in London today organised by the National Pig Association or NPA, to protest the falling price of pork. British pork is raised to slightly higher welfare standards than the rest of the EU, which isn't really saying much. (If you buy pork from happy pigs, they were probably doing all right.)

Corn, both maize and wheat, is more expensive just now. According to various news sources I've trawled, lots of maize is being taken to make ethanol in an attempt to green up. Because maize is now worth more, it's being planted in areas that used to be used to grow wheat. Both these grains are used in bulk to make animal feed and that's painfully pinching the purses of pork producers. Hence the protest.

I mention this partly because there's a forecast pork shortage which means fewer bacon sarnies, which is a dreadful thought, and partly because former mayoral candidate Winnie the Pig will be marching alongside the NPA to show her support. She might have been blocked from standing for London Mayor by speciesism, but that hasn't stopped her political career.

In which the Rodent considers battery farming and drugs.

Today has been given over to the full enjoyment of migraines, of which I think I'm on my third so far. At least, it's peaked to 'completely miserable' (8) three times. At this level, I am not up to doing anything at all vigorous and moving makes me retch. I can just about cope with television to take my mind off things. In between the peaks, I washed up, cooked sausages and beans and toasted some marshmallows over the gas ring. Pol polished his shoes because it's interview season again.

I watched Jamie Oliver and his battery farming demonstrations, trying to convince people over toward longer-lived, slower growing, less intensively reared birds for meat and eggs. The MRM demonstration was interesting. I was thinking, as I watched the carcases being squeezed for meaty goo, of a very, very expensive dish produced in only a few restaurants: pressed duck. It needs special equipment, because part of the process is to put the basically raw bones of the duck into a press and crush them to get out the marrow juices. Why is this so rare and fine, and crushed chicken goo so disgustingly horrific? Frankly, I like that we can use every particle of the chicken in this way. If we're going to rear birds, we should use everything we can.