This week I'll be mostly pressing pause

I'm ... pressing ... play.

"Come in, sit down and shut up" was what my Grandad used to say. We'd go round on a Saturday evening and Kojak would be on the telly, or Hawaii Five-O, or whatever. This was before the days of video recorders; VHS and Betamax were just a twinkle in the eye of some electronics engineers. So when it was on, it was on. If you were watching the telly, you would come in, sit down and shut up.

A decade later we had video. Of course you still had all that mucking about with setting the timer and making sure you wound the tape back to the right place, and remembering to switch the thing off - because it would only record if it was off - doh! And then when it was recording you couldn't watch anything else. So videos were really for taping things that you were going to miss while you were out; You could go down to Hammersmith Palais on a Saturday night, nip over to Leicester Square for the midnight showing of RoboCop, come back on the N279 from Trafalgar Square, get home at 3am, watch a bit of Night Network, and still be able to rewind the tape and catch up with Ben Elton and Harry Enfield on Saturday Live before going to bed.

This week I'll be mostly drinking Italian coffee

That's a bit of a small cup.
Pass the half-pint mug please.

Coffee, I've always thought, is bad for you.

I guess it started when I was a kid, when the kind of coffee my mum made - comprising a saucepan of boiling milk poured into a mug over Nescafe granules - would leave me feeling a bit ill. It was quite a few years later before it really properly dawned on me that I was lactose intolerant. Doh!

And then there was that time in 91 when we'd just moved office and I was so close to the drinks vending machine that I didn't even have to leave my seat for a brew. I was getting through more plastic cups of machine coffee than you could shake a stick at. It was only a few weeks later that the doctor sent me to Bart's hospital for a bunch of tests that resulted in some periods of unconsciousness, large quantities of blood being taken, a handful of x-rays, and an inconclusive diagnosis that had something to do with my 'lifestyle'.

This week I'll be mostly eradicating ants

Sing along (to the tune of the
Pink Panther) 'Dead ant, dead ant,
dead ant dead ant dead ant
dead ant dead annnt'

Maybe Bill Bailey has a point when he suggests "the creatures of this earth will rise up and take what is rightfully theirs", and then goes on to sing "Human slaves, In an insect nation!" (If you don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about, see here.)

I've been a bit paranoid about insects invading the house ever since The Terrible Incident of The Donut In the Bin In the Front Room That the Ants Discovered. Although the fear probably stems back to childhood memories of staying in a holiday home (in the Isle of Wight, I think) where me and Steve spent what seemed like a whole week, pouring boiling water down ants nests outside the back door. Personally, I wonder if it actually is all a result of those Killer Ants and Killer Bees movies in the 70s. That's got to have some kind of psychological effect. That, and the Doctor Who Planet of the Spiders episodes from 1974.

This week I'll be mostly pursuing peacocks for photographic purposes

Percy and Penelope at it again.

The peacocks are back. They seem to have decided that our front door step is the perfect place for a bit of peacock how's-your-father.

The day we moved here, there was a peacock loitering by the front door. We named him Percy, and wondered if he was going to stick around. He did for a while, then on and off over the autumn and winter, and a few times this spring. We did wonder if there were two peacocks, because sometimes Percy seemed a bit, well ... different, but we were never quite sure.

This week I'll be mostly watching sunsets

Sun, sea, and ... volcanic dust.

West is best.

Our house looks mostly south and east, depending on what window you look out, obviously. During the winter if you've seen the sun rise, you've seen it out the lounge window. During the spring if you've seen the sun rise, you've seen it out the kitchen window (and it's burnt your retinas so you can't see anything else, like, for example, the cupboard to get a plate out to put some toast on). But you never see the sun set in this house. Yeah, there's something going on over in the west, but there's stuff in the way, like, for example, some trees, and St Helier.

This week I'll be mostly making a compilation cd

Burning a cd.
Not sure if I'm doing it right?

I come from a generation of kids who used to sit in their bedrooms on Sunday nights with a radio and a tape recorder, taping the music off the Top 40 on Radio 1. It was quite an exacting science. I think I speak for most of us when I say that it was incredibly important to not have any talking from the DJ in your recording. There was an art to working out when the record was beginning to fade and Tony Blackburn was just about to start wittering on, or Tommy Vance was going to share more wisdom. You'd hit pause at just the right point - or if you were too late, press stop, quick split-second blast of rewind, then record and pause - then wait for the next song.

This week I'll be mostly watching Battlestar Galactica

Previously, on Battlestar Galactica.

We'd like to think that we're not obsessed with Battlestar Galactica. We'd like to think that...

We first started watching Battlestar Galactica about five years ago. That was back in the days when the kids would go to bed and we'd sit down to watch something on the telly. There were nights where we'd get through 4 or 5 episodes back-to-back.

But we weren't obsessed, really, we weren't.

Then they re-ran the pilot episodes on tv a few months ago, so we recorded them, edited out the adverts, and whacked them onto dvd, as you do. We decided the kids would want to watch it this time round, so we rattled through the pilot in a couple of nights, then got straight onto season 1. We were hooked.

Hooked, but not obsessed, honest.

Avid Battlestar Galactica fans out there will know that the end-of-season 1 cliff-hanger draws you straight into the next season. Then you have to watch the next 4 episodes straight off before you take a breath. Season 2 does the same thing. If you've got the dvds in the cupboard there is no point in hanging about - eject, bung the next one in, play all, eject, bung the next one in, play all.

That's not obsessive, is it?

We'd finished season 2 by the February half-term, then had a few days off, then blatted through 22 episodes of season 3 in about a week. We finished on Sunday evening. Five minutes later I was out driving round St Helier trying to buy the box set of season 4. Everywhere was shut. I came back home with nothing and went on t'internet and downloaded some season 3 music.

That doesn't make me obsessed, does it?

So we've got 4 episodes to go and it's all over. There will be no more BSG. No more getting a fire going, turning the lights out, passing round a bowl of sweets. No more nightly renditions of the special Foster Family version of the Gayatri Mantra title lyrics. What will we do with ourselves? Probably have to start catching up with Caprica I suppose.

Like I said, we're not obsessed.

This week I'll be mostly making coal fires

"Put some coal on the fire
so I can keep my poker hot"
- Peter Green 1968

In January 1996, (when Sam was 1 and Abbie wasn't born yet), there was The Terrible Incident of the Pathetic Coal Fire. We were on holiday in Stow-on-the-Wold, in a draughty old grade II listed cottage with single-glazed windows, and no central heating. It was snowing outside. We were ill and cold and grumpy. There was a complimentary bucket of coal left outside the back door where it was getting nice and damp, waiting for any unsuspecting holiday guests to get so desperate that they might try to make a fire with it. Sure enough, we got so desperate that we tried to make a fire with it. Sure enough, there occurred The Terrible Incident of the Pathetic Coal Fire.

We vowed to never make a coal fire again.

In January 1997, there was The Wonderful Incident of the Glorious Wood Fire. We were on holiday in Penrith, in a fairly cosy barn conversion. It was snowing outside. There was a complimentary wood pile and a saw and axe outside the back door which was getting nice and damp, waiting for any unsuspecting holiday guests to decide it would be quaint to chop some up and make a fire with it. Sure enough, we decided it would be quaint to chop some up and make a fire with it... But the chopping and sawing was a bit hard going, and not holiday-like in the slightest, so I jumped in the car and nipped down to a service station on the M6 that sold bags of wood (on what turned out to be a 40 mile round trip, but that's another story). Sure enough, there occurred The Wonderful Incident of the Glorious Wood Fire.

We decided that wood fires are definitely the way to go.

In October 2005, we moved into a house that needed the wood burner to be running almost constantly to get the heating going. By the time we moved out of there we'd got wood fires down to an art form.

Shortly before Christmas last year, there were The Constantly Irritating Incidents of the Mediocre Wood Fires. We knew when we moved into our current abode that it would be a bit cold in the winter, but were quite looking forward to getting the fire going in the chilly evenings. A wood fire, of course. Now maybe this Jersey wood isn't up to the high standards of our old Devon wood, but the fires have been a bit poor. For Christmas, to be on the safe side, we splashed out on a couple of those instant lighting coal bags that you get down the petrol station. They worked a treat. "Hmmm. Coal. Interesting."

(You'll be pleased to know, we are almost getting to the point now.)

In January this year, we bought a couple of bags of coal to "give it a go". I wasn't convinced, until one evening I came home in the snow and ice and managed to nurture a slightly glowing bit of mostly burnt kindling and a couple of pieces of broken coal into The Most Magnificent Coal Fire There Has Ever Been. Since then, I have been totally won over by the idea of a coal fire. As Andy Williams would sing if he were here: "The weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful."

This week I'll be mostly exhibiting stresslessness

Hypericum perforatum.

You might find it suspicious to find that this is the second "...mostly..." in a row with a picture of me holding a herbal remedy of some kind. You might also find it suspicious to note that it has been three months since I last wrote a "...mostly...".

You're wondering where I've been? I was so totally stressed out for a while back there that I wasn't capable of turning up here and telling you about it. I went to some entirely other level of stress that I've never been to before. Much as I've considered making light of it and turning the whole episode into a witty aside, I realise you can't make light of that kinda thing.

But here's the thing. Our resident homeopathic expert (Sarah) had a stroke of genius just before Christmas. Long story short, we popped into a health food shop in town, and came out with a variety of herbal remedies.

Are they working? You bet. I've gotta tell you, there is still stressful stuff out there, but I kinda don't care about it. It's difficult to explain. I'm just not as stressed out as I should be.

However, I now feel like the judge from What's Up Doc. "You see this yellow pill? You know what it's for? It's to remind me to take this blue pill. I don't know what the blue one's for. They're afraid to tell me."