For those of you asking after pictures of tortoises. He is not always this helpful with the weeding.

The candidate literature is strangely unbalanced. On the front of one flyer they tell us all about why not to vote for the other guys, because of x,y,z big central government actions (cuts! fees! privatising one's grandparents! etc). But on the back, where it says why to vote for this candidate, it's all local issues - fixed a bollard, arranged cycle parking and fought for improved bus timetables. They broke the NHS! I mended a pavement! I can see why they do it but it does feel off-balance.

Books read (30-34)
The Non-Statistical Man, Raymond F Jones (1953-57, 1964)
Locas II: Maggie, Hopey and Ray, Jaime Hernandez
Guardians of Paradise, Jaine Fenn (2010)
The Seven Daughters of Eve, Bryan Sykes (2001)
Evil Women, Graeme Larmour (2008)

Films watched (45-56) 3 at the cinema, 8 DVDs, 1 tv
The Skin I Live In
In Bruges (rewatch)
The Lovely Bones (rewatch)
Battle Royale
Spinal Tap (rewatch)
The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists
50/50
The Shining
The Cabin in the Woods
Avengers Assemble
Penny Serenade
The Ghost (watching as I type)

Gigs (3-4)
Jesterlarf Comedy Club (Cambridge)
Avenue Q (Cambridge)

Books incoming 12 (10 bought, 1 gift, 1 loan)

VG: The Skin I Live In, The Shining.

Doing an online course, with regular quizzes (which seems to be the US version of "Tutorial problems"), but there were some questions which needed knowledge of a concept that hadn't been covered in the lectures or the reading.

And what concept was that? Why, it was that to use some advanced concepts, you needed prior knowledge of, um, other skills and concepts...

I've cleared out the big built-in wardrobe (big for Britain, a teeny tiny closet for Americans) and getting ready to put things back in. I'll need to if I'm going to get to bed tonight. I wonder if ordering clothes by when they were last worn will have an invigorating effect on my clothing?

There was a book exchange today, T and I went along with a couple of big bags of books (and I returned later with another couple) and came home with five new books each (including a Michael Chabon I've wanted to read for a while). The remains from the exchange go to the Amnesty bookstore up the road. Nice idea, it was a bit sparse when we turned up just after it opened, but an hour later the tables were fuller.

I went to Cho Mee grocery looking for some sort of wheat-free sauce to go with crispy duck (got plum sauce), looked plaintively at the chilled mochi and fish balls (contain small amounts of dairy), and went delving in the freezers at the back of the shop for the first time. Frozen mochi and fish balls have no wheat or dairy and I am nomming on red bean paste rice balls. Goopy. Delicious. Nom.

Instead I spent my lunch hour (working from home) moving furniture with the cleaner to have a bit of a War On Moths. They do like the dark, out of the way corners.

I might go back to wearing a watch. The clamshell dumbphone would sit happily in any pocket, or inconspicuously on a desk, the time display was always on so it only needed a quick glance or at most the same effort as hitching a sleeve up. The smartphone doesn't fit comfortably in my trouser pockets, and the screen is generally off unless you press a tiny fiddly button (yes I could make it be always on but it would eat batteries) to show the time.

After thirty issues of angst, horror and tragedy, the Sergio Aragonés page in the Orpheus book made me giggle.

Twenty year-old comics. They were one of the focal points of my social group; each month we would await the new issue and eagerly discuss it and pontificate. I'm reading this time with an eye to connections; keep your eyes open, Ethel X the incidental character in issue 3 might turn up 40 years later as Ethel Y in issue 17, married and name-changed and mother of some other person important to the plot, but we might not find out they are the same until issue 23. With a clever author, and a limited number of words per issue, nothing is wasted, he doesn't stick in a random Joe without thinking, so connections riddle the book. On the other hand, why choose this path? Why not instead create dozens, hundreds, millions of new named individuals who we meet once and never see again? Life is a lot more like that. And the author could celebrate the vastness of the world he has created. Maybe I'm beginning to find the scale of conectedness a little claustrophobic, that there are ultimately so few independent agents in the story.

The horror doesn't get to me as much. I'm older? It's a reread? I've seen so much more that it has less effect? When "my uncle used to rape me when I was a boy" is presented almost as prurient entertainment in magazines and tv shows, it has less ability to shock as it did the first time. And the pictures are just pictures now. I nearly stopped reading after issue 1 as the brain-splutching deaths were so gross.

44 to go.

Six months later, I'm out the far side of the exclusion diet. The dietician has signed me off, happy that I can feed myself a varied, nutritous diet on what is remaining (everything except dairy and gluten, lemon in small quantities), and given me a few handy hints such as CoeliacUK's book listing okay foods (like woolymonkey's earlier reassurance that many ordinary cornflakes which contain barley malt aren't a problem).

Six months, blimey. I am looking forward to spending the future eating the right sort of things and not getting unexpected flareups, and feeling much better for it. And if a bad thing does sneak in, I can just wait it out, and not have to worry that this spoils and delays my next reintroduction.

Hello, carbonated beverages!