Ersatz M&Ms

I receive a daily email from the Confederation of School Trusts. I can't imagine I've ever mentioned it here before; it's pretty dry stuff. I always have a skim through it, though, partly because I should but mainly because I enjoy the tone of the lady who writes it. Occasionally she drifts off-piste and quotes poetry and she strikes me as an honest soul, not someone who would toe the party line.

She's had her work cut out for her for the last ten months and particularly over the last few weeks, always doing her best to guide her audience through the shitstorm thrown up by the government, and she surpassed herself today as she had to comment on Public Health England's decision to pause the testing in schools that I was ranting about yesterday.

As I think I might have done in her shoes, she quotes PHE's statement, leaving her audience to digest the non sequitur between the paragraphs saying there has been no change in policy and the decision to pause testing because of "the higher prevalence and rates of transmission of the new variant".

Speaking for myself, I didn't have that much to do today, except sit at the dining room table, doing some work, and watching people walk past. The actual work I was doing - filling in a 'standard form', which changes every time I see it - seems to bring on a desire to snack. And happily, I do have a variety of low carb snacks in the house, including these somewhat over-priced M&M substitutes. If I'm honest, though, what I really fancied were the scones sat in the kitchen.

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Finished reading: 'The System Expert's Brother' by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which was, in fact, recommended to me by my own brother, Wol.



I used to read a lot of science fiction in my youth but then didn't read much more than Iain M Banks' novels for many years. Since he passed away, I don't recall reading any apart from revisiting his books.



I really enjoyed this, though. Although I haven't read it more many, many years, it reminded me a bit of Brian W Aldiss's 'Hothouse'. If you enjoy really imaginative fiction, you might like this. (And, as my brother pointed out, it's fairly short!)