When you drop a lottery ticket on the coals of a barbecue the white paper first turns a dusty pink. Then the numbers vanish, and the logo of the lottery company flashes briefly into view before the paper catches fire.

More than a year ago now I wrote “I’m going to have to see that tree every morning. And that makes me very angry”. But the truth was, I became inured to the deliberate ring-barking that had sentenced the tree, an orange outside a nearby church, to death. In fact, on the few occasions when I though...

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I thought I had solved my bread problem, and had high hopes for my most recent batch, ¹ but it was not to be. The dough was just incredibly sticky. Not slack, sticky. It clung tenaciously to hands, bowl, scraper, worktop; I really felt completely unable to manipulate it. I did, gingerly and with extra flour, manage to form a sphere of sorts and to plop that, upside down, into a little basket I bought at the local plant nursery. Lined with a clean towel and liberally dusted with flour.

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I know all about how lotteries are in general a tax on stupidity, hope, desperation, etc. etc. I also know that Italy’s SuperEnalotto jackpot currently stands at €143,000,000. That’s a lot of money in anybody’s currency. I’m not saying it would make me happy, because we all know that money can’t buy...

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Start: 95.4 Last week: 93.3 This week: 90.5

That’s better; of course a loss of 2.8 kg in a week is absurd. I mean, I trust the scales and all (especially relatively) but obviously that wasn’t all fat. I suspect a good deal of it was, ahem, gut microflora and the rest probably water being rebalance...

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