Sunday 20th February 2011

I have had a pretty busy day today.

I was supposed to go to Hertfordshire to see my sons, but as it is half term the elder son has gone to his Nanny (goat) and Granddad's house for the week. Typically, his Granddad had something planned for the day I was hoping to go down to see them, which would have been only the second time I have seen them this year. So I decided to clear out the spare room. When I say 'spare' room, I really mean the bedroom that used to be one of the boy's room and, since they left, has been a dumping ground for (a) all the stuff that their psycho mother left behind when they went, and (b) any other stuff that would normally have been dumped in the loft, but I couldn't be arsed as I had a room that already had loads of 'loft' stuff in it.

But, seeing that I need to create an office at home, this room is the obvious choice. And, after the best part of the day clearing stuff, it is now reasonably empty. Only trouble is, now I have no drive left as I have 'temporarily stored' about six skips of rubbish on it. Fuck knows how it all fitted in the room in the first place. And fuck knows where my new car is going to go when I get it later this week, I'll have to park on top of all the boxes and bags I suppose.

Just made tea. It's in the oven. It's like a Cottage Pie, but made with Quorn, so I have named it Quorttage Pie. Apparently when Quorn was launched in America there was uproar. It was all due to the fact that the makers of Quorn claimed that it was a derivative of a mushroom. The only link that it has to a mushroom is, in fact, that the mycoprotein used to produce it is extracted from a fungus. It's actually made from a soil mould and is grown in continually oxygenated water in large fermentation tanks. Glucose is added as a food for the fungus, as are vitamins and minerals to improve the food value of the product. The resulting mycoprotein is then extracted and heat-treated to remove excess levels of RNA.

RNA is one of the three major macromolecules (along with DNA and proteins) that are essential for all known forms of life, so why they have to remove some of it, I don't really know. Maybe if we ate too much of it we would turn into superheroes with superhero powers. It could lead to a new film, Quornman or somesuch crap, where the lead character flies around saving animals and choping pieces of himself off as a substitute before flying back to his water tank full of oxygenated water to regenerate.

I'm off now, gonna ring Spielberg.............