The best news, in a way, is that summer is very definitely over. We have enjoyed some excellent rain, both thunderous downpours and more gentle soaks and the park is greening up nicely as a result. It is still warm though, so the terrace plants are doing really well. Launched the new season of Eat This Podcast to an uptick in downloads but a downturn in subscribers. Truly, I have no idea what makes sense any more, so I’ll just keep plodding along.

Long ago and far away, the Memsahib of the time, who had grown up on the hills of Mumbai, had a slim, battered cookbook. Sometimes, on a dark and damp afternoon, sat in front of the stove, we would read from the brittle pages, and one recipe has always stayed with me.

“Fill an earthenware pot with limes, salted and seasoned, and leave in the sun for 40 days.”

Get the Alfred Workflow

I write these posts in Byword, and they come to you via the Grav CMS. Each post has a front section that tells Grav how to deal with it. Straight quotes — " and ' — are needed there to enclose certain items. Curly (aka smart or typographical) quotes — “” ‘’ — in the front section break everything. Obviously I know how to type smart quotes, but it is extra work and luckily Byword has a switch that will ensure that all quotes are either straight or curly. The problem is, I often forget to flip that switch, so everything breaks. Pain.

Perhaps I am borderline obsessive,¹ but I’m always struck when I send an email to somebody, don’t get a reply within, say, a week, send a follow up and then get ”Sorry about that! Went to my spam.” My spam filter is simply glorious, but that doesn’t mean it catches everything, nor that everything...

It isn’t a good idea to complain that someone else hasn’t treated some topic in the way you would have treated it. Nevertheless, I want to put down a marker. I listened to two podcasts this week each of which, in my opinion, left a big question unasked.