750g is not the same as 75g. If only I knew that before I’d spent half an hour finely dicing almost a kilo of the stuff, then stirring it into my finely sliced leek, carrot and pepper. And then putting it in the pan. Fortunately I did some careful holding of the loaf tin beside the pan overflowing with vegetables before stirring in the lentils and split peas, which had already had 40 minutes in another pan, and diagnosed the problem.

It took even longer to try and separate 675g of fennel from the mess in the pan, but I think I got away with it. Mum and Andrew came around for lunch, and the whole non-meat loaf was eaten in one sitting, plus salad and then syrup sponge for putting.

They were around to pick up Paul and my clothes for Sal’s wedding on Thursday. I can’t believe come around so quickly. It seems like only three or four months since she called to say Dan had asked her to marry him, but I see from looking back that it was 16th November 2003; the night we went out to celebrate her birthday at a Chinese in London.

Must remember to take the reading I have to do.

We went for a walk around the less salubrious parts of town and then came home to sort out this year’s trip. We were planning on Budapest to Athens and back, but the trains around the Adriatic are still a bit messy. The German rail site, which I always use for that kind of thing, was routing us via Moscow on a route that took 89 hours to complete.

So, it looks like it’ll be mountains instead. Budapest to Munich by way of Vienna, Salzburg and Innsbruck, hopefully doing the Budapest to Vienna bit on the hydrofoil along the Danube.

It was all going so well. Until the German rail site went down…

I have wanted to see Nikita for years. It was on Sky Movies the other day, so we Plussed it. It is very good.

It’s a simple story about a woman who is part of a drugs gang that kills three policemen when they are caught raiding a pharmacy. She’s sent to prison for 30 years, but the government fakes her death and trains her to be an assassin, convincing her that it’s better than the alternative: execution.

How plausible it is, I don’t know, but none of it seemed beyond the realms of possibility. That’s probably because once she has graduated from the training school, the story stops being so much about action and switches focus to show how her violent government job interferes with her private life, and the love that develops between her and the cashier in her local supermarket.

It takes some effort, of course, being in French with subtitles but, as with any foreign film, you quickly forget that you’re reading as it goes along. Just as well, as the French was spoken so quickly that it was only with help from the subtitles that I was able to follow it. I don’t think I’ve yet developed a French-tuned ear.

Overall, though, I’d give it a nine (the film, not my ear), which is more than it gets from the IMDB readers, who award it a 7.6 and warn you not to bother with the American remake starring Bridget Fonda. What is it with American media moguls who insist on remaking everything for the local audience and generally screwing it up?

They’re showing the American version of The Office on BBC3.

It’s dire.

The back is much improved. In fact, it was almost back to normal the next day and today – Saturday – it feels fine. It’s strange, but I’m not the only person on the team to have suffered with an immobile back last week. Perhaps it’s the change in the weather, or just the fact that we were all at the end of a schedule, so working particularly frantically.

Today, then, was a day of tidying up odds and ends, and for me a big shopping trip this afternoon. Never having bought it before, I had no idea it would be so difficult to find fennel. They didn’t have any in our enormous Sainsbury’s, so I ended up having to do Tesco, too. The difference is stark. While Sainsbury’s isn’t exactly deluxe, if you go from there to Tesco the latter feels downright grotty. Fortunately, though, it redeemed itself, having all the bits that were missing in Sainsbury’s.

That’ll serve me right for deciding to cook from a Delia book.

I should have gone earlier. It was already evening when I got back. Too many of those tidied up bits and pieces involved sorting out my Linux. I decided to upgrade to Fedora 4, and switch from the desktop to the laptop. It was all remarkably smooth, and now I have an (apparently) completely glitch free install running nice and fast – even on the Wifi.

Now for the long job of tracking down all my plug-ins again.

It’s not yet eight and I’m already at work. Dedication? No. Back pain. It slowly came on last night, and woke me at four this morning. There was no chance of getting back to sleep. I hobbled to the bathroom and sat in the hottest bath I could muster in the hope of freeing things up, but after listening to over an hour of the World Service, then Radio 4 waking up, I was still barely able to stand up or bend down.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard Radio 4′s 05h30 start-up. Lots of friendly hellos, followed by what they call the Radio 4 UK Theme. It’s a dreadful mash of nationalistic cliched tunes. Rule Britannia, Greensleeves, that stupid pipe thing that sailors dance to. Ugh. All it needed was a tinny drum beat to be truly awful.

I gritted my teeth and made it through the nasty music and the shipping forecast and eventually got up half way through the shipping forecast, got dresses and made my way slowly to work, eventually getting on the 06h13 train when it deigned to turn up – four carriages short – at 06h39.

Delays and missing carriages conspired to fill the train, and I got one of the last two seats, of which I was very grateful.

I could have been in by seven, if things had run to time, but the tubes were delayed by points problems, and were crawling with police – far more than there have been since the first bombs. They did say on Radio 4 that police are bring particularly cautious today. Whether that’s because they know something they’re not telling us, or it’s just that today is a Thursday, and both of the attacks so far have been on Thursdays, I don’t know. It was good to see them around, although I think I’m getting terror fatigue. It was actually quite nice to see different headlines for the last two days, focusing on the shuttle launch rather than the bombings, arrests and mindless police shootings.

Every paper seems to be trying to outdo itself, with the Express so far plumbing the lowest depths. Its headline yesterday morning proclaimed all of the bombers to be asylum seekers, which is just plain wrong: they were British citizens. That’s not far off the Evening Standard printing up its board on Friday proclaiming that the guy killed by police on a tube on Friday was a suicide bomber. They were still all out on the streets on Monday morning, by which point it had been comprehensively proven that he wasn’t. Now it turns out he might not have even jumped over the Underground ticket barrier or been wearing a bulky coat, as the police had claimed.

If we take it at face value, the whole episode was a terrible accident, but the way the police have handled the aftermath has perhaps done them more harm than good. Sir Ian Blair, who heads the Metropolitan Police first told the papers that ‘somebody else could be shot but everything is done to make it right,’ (like anything could make that right and then sent the guy who had shot him off on a holiday – with his family – paid for by the police.

Fair enough, give him leave, and certainly give him some counselling, but don’t send him on an all expenses paid holiday when the inquiry is under way and his victim’s parents are still in mourning.

It rained non-stop from the time I woke up, until four this afternoon, leaving me prowling the house feeling somewhat frustrated. After so much good weather these last few weeks, it feels wrong being cooped up all day.

So, when the sun finally – briefly – broke through late afternoon, I put on my coat and went out to post some letters for an excuse to be outside. It felt lovely and fresh, and surprisingly warm, and the whole village had a fresh-rinsed feel to it. So much so, in fact, that when I found the nearest post box (they have taken away the one at the end of our road), I carried on walking and explored the village some more.

I learnt five very important things:

1. Allotments cost

The plod through the original printings of the James Bond books to see how they compare to the films continues. I’ve just finished Live and Let Die. (see previous: Thunderball; Casino Royale)

This one is very different to the film. To recap, Roger Moore’s first Bond sees him sent to investigate the murder of three British agents: Dawes at the United Nations, Hamilton in New Orleans and Baines on the Carribbean island of San Monique. In the course of his mission, he uncovers a heroin smuggling operation that will flood the streets of New York with free drugs, increasing the number of users while at the same time putting the competition out of business before jacking up the prices and raking a tidy profit.

In the book there isn’t a single mention of any kind of drug. Instead, the operation centres on smuggling pirate treasure from the island of Surprise.

Beyond the voodoo, and the magic tables that disappear through the floor of the Harlem bar to which Bond follows a lead early on, nothing in the book appears in the film, although two of the key scenes do make it into other screen Bonds.

The first is the part where Felix is fed to a shark, and in the process loses an arm. This crops up in License to Kill, arguably the most violent (and disappointing) of all the Bond films, and the only one to earn itself a 15 rating. It was probably seen as too gorey for audiences of 1973, when Live and Let Die was released.

The second takes place towards the end of the book, when Mr Big determines that he will kill Bond and Solitaire by dragging them through the water behind his boat, so that the sharks and baraccuda will eat them alive. This later appeared in the film of For Your Eyes Only, and indeed, some of the original dialogue made the leap from the book of Live and Let Die to that film, too:

Mr Big had a last look at them.
‘Their legs can stay free,’ he said. ‘They’ll make appetizing bait.’

Eventually, by the time it makes it to the screen in For Your Eyes Only (1981), it is Aristotle Kristatos who watches his henchmen tying up Bond and Melina Havelock, and utters the nigh-on identical line, ‘Leave the legs free. They’ll make appetizing bait.’

The book hasn’t aged well. Although it remains well written and, like all of the Bond books, is a far more relaxing and uneventful work than any of the films, its language is hopelessly outdated, and much of the racial descriptions and assumptions are little short of offensive today.

We do learn two things about the characters that aren’t revealed in the film, though… Solitaire’s real name is Simone Latrelle. She is 25 and was nicknamed Solitaire because she showed no interest in men. And Whisper has so much trouble speaking because he has only half a lung, having been born into the badly polluted streets of a poor New York neighbourhood:

‘Yes, Boss,’ he said softly into his headphone. He couldn’t have spoken any louder if he had wished to. He had been born on ‘Lung Block’, on Seventh Avenue, at 142nd Street, where death from TB is twice as high as anywhere else in New York. Now he only had part of one lung left.

In all, not a bad read. An entirely different story to the film itself, and for that reason alone, worth a go.

Dreadful though this apparent bombing campaign might be, the security services’ gunning down of a person on a tube train throws everything into a whole new perspective. I, of course, know just as little as everyone else about who the guy was, what he was supposed to have been doing, or the reasons for his execution (for that is what it is when you pin a man to the floor and fire five bullets into him at close range). But it was the fact that it happened in full view of passengers that makes this event so extraordinary.

I don’t doubt that this kind of killing will have happened before, but I can’t think of a time when there has been eyewitnesses, and that is what makes the whole thing so shocking: the fact that he was seen to be so serious and immediate a threat that he was killed without any apparent warning with not a care for who else was there.

It isn’t the man or his intentions that should scare us, but the fact that being suspected of doing something, or being about to do something, can be enough to have you executed. Although this man was apparently wearing a large coat, he didn’t appear to be carrying a rucksack (although nobody can vouch for what was under the coat). Sure, it was strange that he should be wearing such heavy clothing on a comparatively warm day, but it isn’t out of the question.

Eyewitnesses say that he hurdled the ticket barrier and then ran down the platform to get onto the train. That isn’t entirely out of the ordinary, either. After all, if someone yells at you to stop after you have just evaded your fare, the chances are that you will just run.

So, the moral of the story, I guess, it that you should now be careful what you wear on the tube. Study the forecasts and pick clothes that match the weather.

No. Perhaps that is flippant, but this whole sorry turn of events is making people think carefully about their appearances. Everyone on the magazine – without a single exception – has an iPod, and as we leave at night we think carefully about where to put it, and how to thread the headphones so that they don’t look like they are wires protruding from a potentially explosive backpack. Now, perhaps, we won’t even be able to keep them in our inside pockets, but should keep them strung on a lanyard around our necks where they can be seen by both the police marksmen and the potential muggers who would steal them.

Still, the blas

It’s surprising how blas

More eagle-eyed Mac users will have spotted the significance of today; July 17th. For those who haven’t, Mac OS X’s calendar application, iCal, always displays that date in the Dock, until it is started for the first time in that session, at which point it updates to the current date. Today, then, is the only day on which starting it up won’t change the design of the icon.

Why it always says July 17th is up for debate. Conventional wisdom is that it is simply the date on which it was first released, or at least the date on which the icon is designed. However, I did hear a story that it marks the unfortunate day on which Steve Jobs ran down a hobo in his car.

No doubt that one was started by a disgruntled Windows user.

The version of iCal that ships with the Mac is, of course, the one produced by Apple. It maintains its own pages on the product here. However, there is a much older calendaring application also called iCal, which runs under Unix and can be found here.

So, that was the weekend. I seem to have spent the whole of it walking. It all started early on Friday morning. Paul was on a course, so we made a special effort to get to the station early. Luck was against us, though, and the trains were running an hour late. He pressed on; I walked around the cathedral graveyard, rearranged the magazines in the newsagents, and after returning an hour later found things were far from improved, so walked 30 minutes home to start working from there.

It would have been nice to have stayed there the whole day, but it was Emilie’s last day on ComputerActive and I’d promised to go to her leaving do. She’s moving to Good Housekeeping, and so inevitably she’s been pestered to death by friends asking to be added to the cake and pie blind taste-test panel.

Things started to tidy up by lunchtime, so I walked another 30 minutes back to the station, rode a still-delayed train to work and put in the usual afternoon’s quota of desk-bound confinement.

I’m glad I made the effort to go to the do. We all met up at the Star and Garter, which I don’t think I’ve been to since leaving PCW almost two years ago. We were upstairs, as ever, where the heat was almost unbearable, in spite of the open windows. It was probably a ploy to get us all drinking more. Pretty much everyone from PC Advisor and the consumery bits of VNU was there, though; past and present, and it was a long, fun night of catching up on what everyone had been doing, followed by another 30 minute walk home from the station. The pictures have done the rounds. They aren’t flattering.

Yesterday was the long walk through the fields, taking pictures of the bees (not a euphemism), after which I flopped around in the garden finishing off the Michel Thomas advanced Franch. The final disc was surprisingly easy, considering how much I struggled through the penultimate one. Whether I will remember any of it next time I go to France, I don’t know, but I do intend to keep on reading and writing French as often as I can, so fingers crossed…

To Mark’s in the evening to watch the Incredibles, after which he played me the first cut of the security documentary for which I did the voice over. It sounds rather good, I think – even if I do say so myself. To be honest, though, a think a large part of that was down to the way that he’d cut it all together nicely, giving me some intelligent, considered pauses, which made me sound far more cranial than I actually am.

And so to today. And more walking. We didn’t start early, which was perhaps silly, as it means we ended up walking through the hottest part of the day. Our one concession to the weather was choosing a route that took us though the forests at Thorndon Park, without realising how quickly we would be breaking out of the tree cover and into open countryside.

It was a fantastic route, though, taking us past 800 year old trees that were expected to carry on growing for another 300 years, along the banks of the old hall pond, across the now barren field that was once full of orchards, dovecotes and a magnificent Georgian hall, along what counts for a ridge in the flat country of Essex, with the countryside dropping away below us, and giving out onto views of London. All the while, the sun beat down and the crickets kept up an almost deafening song in the long brown grass.

We walked for almost three hours and then collapsed in an untidy mess on shady benches by the visitor centre to drink cold drinks and eat chocolate from the fridge. It was only then that we worked out the reason we were so hungry was we’d only had two slices of toast for breakfast and left home before lunch.

Now, as I sit here in a comfy chair typing this and looking back over the weekend, my legs are quietly throbbing. I have had a bath to soothe them, but suspect that tomorrow, when I’d walking to the station again, they may be kicking up a fuss, rather than just kicking up.