Stollen

... ish. The weather has been dreadful the last two days, almost constant rain. Perhaps those clouds were a warning. I have barely left the house. We have been staving off boredom with lockdown activities ... I confess that these days we have breakfast in bed whenever we happen to wake up, and then lounge around browsing social media on our iPads. This morning I was idly looking at Twitter when my jaw dropped open. I follow a British photographer called Marc Davenant on Twitter. He quite often retweets other photographers' photos, and I found myself looking at ... a photo of one of my neighbours, taken just metres from our front door. Given that we live in an obscure village of 300 inhabitants ... how likely is that?

Other activities: we've watched a couple of talks from the Hay Festival; one good thing about lockdown is all these festivals we wouldn't have gone to otherwise. We enjoyed James Rebanks and Helen McDonald this afternoon. Very entertaining, I recommend it (you can register free and watch on catchup). We've also watched a 2-hour programme about the Pyrenees on French TV, to cure S's mal de montagne. And some more of the Talking Heads series.

And, as you see, I've baked a rather clunky stollen using Felicity Cloake's recipe. I started at about 11 a..m. and it's just come out of the oven; she says wrap it up and wait two days before eating, which is somewhat counter-intuitive. We'll see.

This photo is so awful I thought I'd spoil you with links instead. Here's another one: 50 years of Doonesbury. I used to read the strip in the Guardian religiously when I lived in the UK, and later online; it was my way of following US politics without having to read lengthy articles. He only posts one new strip a week now, on Sundays, with archives the rest of the week, but it's still worth looking at.