Library Closure Difficulty

There is plenty of news about the potential library closures at the moment, which leaves me torn. On the one hand, I love books and I don't want people to be deprived of their access to a ready and cheap supply of reading material. However, on the other hand, I suspect that there are a fairly small number of people actually using most libraries, and as someone who doesn't use them myself, I don't really feel it's my place to demand funding for a resource which may be better spent elsewhere just to support my right-on ideas about what a community 'should' have access to.

My main concern is that if enough people like me oppose the closures without actually being users of the service, we may be doing so out of a misplaced sense of what is important. But at the same time I don't really want to be someone who says 'I don't use the library, so I'm not going to oppose its closure' if there is a genuine need for the services it provides.

In an ideal world, the consultation process would be thorough enough to weed out people who oppose the closures on idealogical grounds, but because the public perception of these exercises is that they always support the government's preferred choice of outcome, it is difficult to ascertain whether there is any validity in the results at all. So how do I tell whether to lend my support to those who need it, or whether I should butt out to allow the number of real library users to be accurately assessed. What do I do?

Lovely Mum Ladies

Some women manage to make me feel as though they are like someone's lovely Mum -the lady at Budgens who always calls us 'Darling', Linda Robson and Alison Steadman. Something about lovely Mum ladies makes me feel that all is right with the world.

Charity Shop Guilt

For some reason, even though I am quite diligent about what I will and won't take to charity shops, I still always feel a little bit guilty whenever I take stuff in there. This is in part due to the fact that by the time I actually get round to taking things down to the shop, they have been piling up in the house for weeks, and I'm thrilled at the idea of not having to look at them any more. However, I think it's partly due to the fact that I always half expect them to take a glance through the stuff in the bags and shout 'But this is just a load of old crap that you don't want!' and make me take it all home again.

Because of the way I was brought up (saving milk bottle tops to buy guide dogs, cutting out used stamps to buy...well guide dogs again - heaven knows what the damn dogs are doing with all the stamps and foil, but my guess is mailing some kind of robot to the moon) I am quite fastidious about recycling wherever possible. When the zip stopped working on my coat, I just held it together for two years on the grounds that 95% of the coat was still doing its job perfectly well, and it seemed a shame to get rid of it. So the charity shop only ever gets goods of reasonable quality that could offer plenty of use to someone else, but because I don't want them I feel as though I am using the charity shop as a way of palming off my poor purchasing decisions on some other poor fool who has to store it until someone equally misguided comes along to take it off their hands.

Despite the fact that last week I saw a multi pack of women's knickers in the shop, I still feel as though a box full of unused stationery, some barely-worn clothing and an old picture frame is in some way inappropriate. Fortunately, my desire to de-clutter, when it does rear its ugly head, is so overwhelming it compels me to forget this source of potential awkwardness and sends me off undaunted to the shops complete with bags full of my crap straining at their seams.

Things I have learnt since having an open fire

1. Although corrugated cardboard, of the kind widely used to package products for delivery, makes an excellent substitute for newspaper, it is mysteriously easier to tear it across the corrugations than along them. I assumed they would form kind of 'easy tear' lines, but instead they mostly form paper cuts on your knuckles.

2. The bags that you get medication in from pharmacies contain something magical (or possibly copper based) which burns green and are therefore to be saved for special occasions.

3. You can (or rather we can) put sparklers on the fire to add a festive touch to the flames - don't get carried away and just light outdoor sparklers indoors without a fireplace though or your smoke alarm will go off for ever.

4. Cream crackers are surprisingly flammable and if you put a whole packet on the fire, you will be impressed, then terrified at the results.

5. Dryer fluff is also surprisingly flammable, although collecting enough to replicate the 'cream cracker' effect is more likely to end up in a drier fire.

6. Fortunately for us, the huge pieces of coal which sometimes get spat out of the fire are generally not that hot, but don't assume that's true of all of them and pick one up with your fingers.

7. Holding something over the fireplace to make it draw is a much more effective way of getting things going than flapping at it ineffectually with a piece of cardboard which will do little more than cover your and the entire room in ash and smoke.

8. Just because you can burn almost anything doesn't mean you should e.g cheese rind will make the whole room smell of burning cheese, chewing gum will stick to something and sizzle for hours etc

9. Paper is surprisingly hard to burn unless you're not trying to. Many's the time I have tried in vain to coax a piece of paper into flames only to have it repeatedly put itself out, but if you drop one vital receipt anywhere near the fire it will get sucked in and vapourized before you can even weigh up the merits of jamming your hand in to get it back.

10. Chimney sweeping is a surprisingly lucrative profession - ours is constantly rushed off his feet and although his charges are perfectly reasonable as far as I'm concerned, he still must be coining it in. He also has what I consider an unhealthy interest in wood burners.

11. It's apparently lucky to have a chimney sweep at your wedding, meaning he is as much in demand for social functions as he is for professional engagements.

The Good Life

When I was growing up, a combination of constant Radio 4 and a limit on what we were allowed to watch on television left me with a peculiar lack of exposure to pop culture and the 'in' things in entertainment, but has left me with a lasting affection for certain shows which were probably incongruous with my age and other interests.

While the sound of the shipping forecast makes me feel like I've been hypnotised and Allen Bennet's voice reminds me strongly of times spent in the airing cupboard recording my own books on tape, The Good Life still holds a vaguely titillating thrill for me which is at once comforting and risque. As a child, I was allowed to watch The Good Life because it was a relatively harmless comedy, but as a programme clearly written for adults (what else could possibly explain the fervour with which Felicity Kendal's bum has been admired ever since it was first seen in dirty work trousers?) it also contained occasional oblique references to adult themes. Off the cuff remarks about the pill, the state of other people's marriages and vague references to extra marital affection still make my inner child say 'Ummmm!', and I think the fact that both couples were child free made for an exciting departure from the lives of my parents and their friends, all of which seemed very glamorous and exotic when I was younger.

Whenever I see repeats of the Good Life I find myself compelled to watch, enjoying the magnificent outfits sported by Margot, the reassuring contentment of Tom and Barbara and the exemplary use of the word 'bombastic' by Margot when being shaken by the elbows. As feel-good comedies go, The Good Life really does the job and I only hope they continue to show it on UK Gold forever.

What's going on

Recently we have noticed a spate of peculiar programming, partly because it's Christmas so we've had more spare time, but mostly because the Boy Wonder is ill and we haven't really left the house for a fortnight. This has lead to the discovery of some of the weirdest programming we have even come across, and some of the highlights have been:

Liza Tarbuck and Huey Morgan in 'Liza and Huey's Pet Nation', where this pair who clearly are unlikely to have met under normal circumstances host a sort of clip/talk show about animals. For some reason.

Celebrity Parents SOS , which we only discovered this afternoon, featured Jonathan Ross's mum and Vinnie Jones's dad helping a couple to sort out their house, tidy up the garden and learn basic car maintenance. I'm reliably informed by the listings that this show will also include Jeremy Clarkson's mum, Sarah Beeny's dad, Charlotte Church's stepdad and Ben Fogle's mum, coming to the rescue of feckless people without the wit to solve their own problems nor the money to call in a professional - who came up with this?!

Pineapple Dance Studios, in which Louis Spence prances around being entertainingly camp whilst the tragic Spinal Tap-esque Andrew Stone deludes himself about his potential pop career and sexuality for the amusement of the viewing public all with peculiar staged dance routines carrying on in the background and increasingly unlikely scenarios in which the other members of the 'cast' are required to perform peculiar activities for 'publicity' etc.

New Year's Resolutions

As the Boy Wonder languishes through his second week of lurgy and we contemplate a quiet new year's eve together, naturally my thoughts have turned to what I hope to achieve in the next year. It's going to be pretty tricky to be honest, as we have had a totally awesome 2010 what with our extended sojourn in the States, the arrival of our niece and the implementation of our plans for self-employment, so it's going to be pretty hard to top. However, I have managed to scrape together a few ambitions to attempt over the next year, and in case I've forgotten what they were by the end of January I might as well record them for posterity:

1. Channel the slightly compulsive tendencies I have into something useful - rather than obsessing over whether the bottles in the cupboard are all facing forwards, I will try to spend that time achieving a basic level of cleanliness about the house. Living in a giant dust bunny, however beautifully aligned the condiments may be, suggests a substantial flaw in my ability to prioritise, which I intend to correct.

2. Make some inroads into our long term plans to try and live a dual life between here and New Orleans.

3. Write something which has the potential to be published i.e complete any writing project to my satisfaction.

4. Spend less time buggering about on the internet and more time getting gigs for the Boy Wonder.

5. Move the bloody fence to where it's supposed to be after all the stupid admin work that needed doing, paperwork, solicitors and faff the fence will be moved to its correct position!

I think that's about it - hopefully there's nothing on there which will prove insurmountable, but you never know, now that we have cider shelves a lot of things seem more challenging...