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 recovers from Monday and considers pigs.

It feels like the clearout was two days ago, since I've slept twice since then, finally emerging today at 3pm in an unenthusiastic effort to go back to being productive. I've changed the duvet cover for the sitting room nest, to a nice new embroidered and sequinned one in white and a beige old gold, a horrible colour on its own but one which looks nice with all the 'light oak' panelling all about. I've also put a white load in to wash for clean bedding later, and started folding a red load.

I'm definitely very sore. Since I had a few naproxen left over, I've taken one of them this morning, but what I would really have liked is some basic aspirin. It's sore muscle pain from doing too much while unfit, and it's very, very different from the fluey ache of doing too much while MEish. In my experience, M.E. pain only responds to opiates for some reason. If I want to do things, I can, it just hurts. With M.E., I can want all I want, my muscles aren't going to do as I ask. Trying hard isn't enough and nor is a positive mental attitude. Whereas, by contrast, today I am getting by on bloody mindedness and drugs.

I watched television - mostly what I paid attention to was a Discovery programme from 2005 on Hogzilla, a monster hog killed in the swamps of Georgia. The whole point of the programme was whether or not Hogzilla was really 12 feet long (about 4m) and weighed a thousand pounds (450kg, give or take). Naturally they took an hour to answer this simple question, with lots of scaremongering about packs of wild boar poised to overwhelm Texas and Britain, breeding massively and probably eating children. If they're going to be supersized wild boar, then we're all doomed! Doomed! So, was it as big as claimed?

The answer after digging the corpse up, was no. It's still a very big pig, seven and a half feet (2.3 metres). It's more like Rooter and Tusker from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather than the little piggy that went whee, whee, whee all the way home. It had huge tusks and hair, but features of domestic pigs too. And now it's dead.

Today's foodstuff is pork. Pigs exist almost everywhere humans have been, and the feral ones are a menace to wildlife, eating bird eggs, animals living and dead and digging up plants with their incredibly powerful snouts. If you have feral pigs nearby, introduced animals, not native wild pigs, then it is your solemn duty to eat them.

Pork fillet is very nice sprinkled with some olive oil, with a little black pepper ground on and a sprinkle of sage and very little thyme, and baked in foil in a hot oven for about fifteen minutes.