I would have thought Fate would have rather better things to do with its time.

Despite the absence of any rigid belief structure in my life, I have a tendency to claim absurd things like ‘I, like, really believe in fate, you know?’. And it’s true, the idea does have a certain appeal to it. Stuff goes wrong? It was fated to. Not my bad. Stuff goes right? The Fates are smiling upon me. Yay. It’s a nice, relatively harmless way to live my life.

Sometimes, I use it to my advantage. If I want to do something, like go miles out of my way to a gig, but can’t really be bothered to do the organisation, and am not sure if it’ll actually happen or not, I leave it up to fate. If I’m meant to go… I’ll end up there somehow. Sometimes this is followed by offers of free tickets, places to stay, and me having some of the best times of my life. Sometimes, the ticket remains lost, I get a headache, and I remain home, satisfied that I would probably have had a rubbish time anyway.

I’ll often forget about it for ages at a time, much like the game. Then I get a sudden epiphany of ohhh, maybe it’s Fate, maybe that’s why this trial is being put before me. For example, today, I suddenly thought that maybe it is down to Fate that I sit next to a chronic complainer at work, and I am supposed to be learning something from the experience. How not to be a fucking annoying whining bitchfaced cow, for example.

I’m still working on that.

And then I thought, maybe this goes even further. Some time ago, I had a problem with caffeine giving me the screaming hab dabs, so I cut down on it. Maybe that was Fate. Can’t think why it might want to do that, but heh. Now, I am having major problems with alcohol. Two glasses of wine is enough to give me a day-long headache and a worrying amount of nausea. Maybe Fate wants me to cut out the booze. Fair enough, I’ll cut down, if that’s what you want.

The point at which I start to get annoyed, however, is when Fate decides it doesn’t want me eating full meals. I mean, wtf? If I dare to eat a full meal at the moment, my stomach swells to a point which feels as though the only thing stopping me exploding is willpower. Ouch. And when I say full meal, I don’t mean a pigeon stuffed into a duck stuffed into a chicken stuffed into a goose with lard-roasted potatoes and a flagon of ale, I mean a curry. A sandwich and some raw vegetables. Pasta and fucking sauce. I’ve had to split my lunch into two sittings so I don’t end the afternoon waddling around like a whiny penguin.

So yes. I’m not sure what part of Fate’s big ol’ plan requires me to be incapable of eating more than 300 calories at a time, but I hope to find out before I die of starvation or am forced to get all my nourishment intravenously.

Baking the blues away.

That’s not a football reference. In case you were worried.

I was hit by a sudden attack of the lonelies last night. In these situations nothing cheers me up more than baking – and even this baking took until this morning to fully take effect. Nice biscuits though. I shall share*.

Ginger Biscuits
Makes a tray of 12, which is 1 serving for a grumpy female.

4oz self-raising flour
2oz butter/marg
1/2 tsp bicarb of soda
1/2 tsp ground ginger
2oz soft brown sugar
1 tbsp golden syrup
1/2 tsp water**

Rub the butter into the flour, soda and ginger. Add the sugar, syrup and water and mix well. Roll into walnut-sized balls, place on a tray with room to spread and flatten. Bake for ten minutes. Leave them on the tray to cool.

*The recipe. Not the biscuits. I ate all them pretty quickly.
**The original recipe didn’t call for the water, but it’s so hard to mix it nearly made me cry. Add the water.

Today is a nice day.

In fact, it’s a very yellow day. As such, Quant had her first outing, and received an unprompted compliment from a colleague. Here’s the pic, for non-ravelers:

And I heard an interview with Delia Smith on the Today programme which made me feel really bad for hatin’ on her in the past. She’s lovely and I totally forgive her for specifying eighths of teaspoons of ingredients in her recipes.