Category: Mystery items
Not necessarily mysterious – it just sounds more interesting than ‘miscellaneous’.
Porridge Bread
My Latest Baking Effort
Sloe Progress
God of the hosepipe
…and some tin birds
Tin Flowers
Tiles and Flowers

We had some roof tiles (Acme brand, of course, suitable for dropping on the head of Wile E Coyote) left over from our recent building project. I thought I might try painting some with the kind of flower design that is the traditional decoration for narrow boats.
I drew out the design, traced it onto the tile, and filled in with gesso to provide a decent surface to paint on. Once painted I used a stencil to spray varnish on the painted area. It all worked OK, but I think the fact that I was copying meant I didn’t quite get the free, stylised look, and the colours are a bit light. Still, I quite like them!
Father’s Day
Food books
Our new kitchen has one cupboard door which merely covers a piece of wall. So I have covered the wall with shelves of fake books, all literary classics except the names have been changed into food puns.

The full list, if you can bear it, is as follows.
| The Handmaid’s Kale | Atwood, Margaret |
| Mansfield Pork | Austen, Jane |
| Wuthering Bites | Brontë, Emily |
| Burger on the Orient Express | Christie, Agatha |
| Tart of Darkness | Conrad, Joseph |
| The Red Batch of Porridge | Crane, Steven |
| A Christmas Carrot | Dickens, Charles |
| Barnaby Fudge | Dickens, Charles |
| Grape Expectations | Dickens, Charles |
| Martin Chorizowit | Dickens, Charles |
| Olive Twist | Dickens, Charles |
| Leek House | Dickens, Charles |
| Silas Marinade | Eliot, George |
| The Grated Gatsby | Fitzgerald, F Scott |
| Lord of the Fries | Golding, William |
| The Crumpet Major | Hardy, Thomas |
| Cress of the D’Urbervilles | Hardy, Thomas |
| Food the Obscure | Hardy, Thomas |
| The Bun Also Rises | Hemingway, Ernest |
| The Old Man and the Brie | Hemingway, Ernest |
| To Ham and Ham Not | Hemingway, Ernest |
| Finnegan’s Cake | Joyce, James |
| The Trifle | Kafka, Franz |
| Lady Chatterley’s Liver | Lawrence, DH |
| To Grill a Mockingbird | Lee, Harper |
| Cider with Roasties | Lee, Laurie |
| One Hundred Beers of Solitude | Marquez, Gabriel Garcia |
| Loaf of Pi | Martel, Yann |
| Life of Pie | Martel, Yann |
| Scone with the Wind | Mitchell, Margaret |
| The Cabbage in the Rye | Salinger, J.D. |
| Beans and Nothingness | Sartre, Jean-Paul |
| Midsummer Night’s Cream | Shakespeare, William |
| Much Ado about Stuffing | Shakespeare, William |
| The Taming of the Brew | Shakespeare, William |
| The Winter’s Ale | Shakespeare, William |
| Of Mince and Men | Steinbeck, John |
| Vanity Pear | Thackeray, William |
| Banana Karenina | Tolstoy, Leo |
| War and Peas | Tolstoy, Leo |
| Fried Bread revisited | Waugh, Evelyn |
| Vile Butties | Waugh, Evelyn |
| The Island of Doctor Merlot | Wells, H.G. |
| The Thyme Machine | Wells. H.G. |
| The Pitcher of Durian Gravy | Wilde, Oscar |
| Salami | Wilde, Oscar |
(The shelves are not correctly alphabetised, I know. That’s just realism.)








