Guess what? My parish has more native species of amphibians and reptiles than yours.
Sometimes when I take the dog out I pass this little statue of a toad, but I hadn’t actually stopped to look at it properly until the other day. It turns out that it relates an important fact about my local area that I didn’t know until now.
The plaque underneath says this.
Whitehill is the only parish in the UK to claim home to all 12 of our native amphibians and reptiles, including this, the rare Natterjack toad. Only 7cm long with a distinctive yellow stripe down its back, it favours sand and heathland and breeds in shallow pools. It eats insects, worms and small reptiles and can live up to an amazing 15 years.
Twelve. Twelve native species of amphibians and reptiles. Your parish certainly has some of them, it might even have quite a lot of them. But it won’t have all twelve. I don’t know why amphibians and reptiles are measured by the parish, which seems an odd choice of geographic area to use for this, but that doesn’t matter.
What matters is this.
My parish has more native species of amphibians and reptiles than yours.
I was recently reminded that this exchange had happened while Ian and I were talking about gingerbread.
1 May 2025 was three weeks ago and I can confirm with pleasure that it was a fairly normal day. I was at work, where among other things I dealt with some emails about election coverage and logged a call with our facilities helpdesk to have a carpet cleaned following a minor water leak.
As a result I am pleased to confirm that my ability to see precisely five years into the future is working nicely. Or at least it was five years ago. If you want to know whether it’s still working now you’ll have to wait another five years.
This is a new type of post. It is a premonition of an impending Saga. I foresee the beginning of Cabinet Saga.
Don’t misunderstand me. This might be a good Saga, and it’s one I’m genuinely excited to get started on. We’re finally getting round to decorating the living room, you see, and since our house is Edwardian and the living room is the one place with some surviving period detail, we’re doing what we can to restore it to its former glory. I’ve fixed the missing bits of plaster coving and the original window frames. We’re going to find a cast iron fire surround like the one the house would originally have had. And we’re also going to put bookshelves and cabinets into the alcoves on either side of the chimney.
Turns out alcove cabinets are not cheap. It’s just a bookcase, and yes, a Billy bookcase would be very cheap. But if you want a Billy bookcase that is built in, custom-made to fit your house’s charmingly non-straight Edwardian architecture, with detailing that would fit in with the carefully restored features of an Edwardian room, and also ideally has hidden LED under-shelf lighting, that’s not economical. Ikea don’t do it. You have to get a joiner to come in and price it up, and then he quotes you a figure that makes you sit down and concentrate on breathing and dab tears from your eyes, and then when you’ve collected yourself you ask him to leave and never come back.
Luckily there’s an alternative. You can measure every conceivable dimension of your Edwardian alcoves to the millimetre – several times, until you’re really sure you’ve definitely got it right – and then send them off to a company who will design them and supply you with a flat-pack kit of heavy duty MDF parts for you to assemble and install yourself. The cost of this still causes a sharp intake of breath but is much more affordable.
So it was that in March we measured parts of our living room over and over again to pin down its every millimetre, and so it came to pass that on Wednesday a van arrived at our house and unloaded an industrial quantity of precision-cut, pre-drilled MDF.
I’ve been on nights this week, which is not prime DIY territory, but I’m off work all next week and it will be cabinet time. I can’t wait for cabinet time. I like building things – flat pack furniture, Lego, raised beds in the garden, anything really – and this is a big thrilling building project where I get to make something intricate and impressive without having to do the difficult woodwork bits.
This could just be sheer enjoyment from start to finish, but the potential for an impending Saga arises from the need for “scribing”.
Built in furniture, you see, has to be built in to the room. As in, fit it perfectly. Meet it seamlessly. And no amount of millimetre-perfect measuring can achieve that. Instead, wherever your MDF meets the wall, you need to scribe it. Hold it perfectly in position and then trace the outline of the wobbly plasterwork and the skirting board and the extra bit under the skirting board that covers the edge of the laminate floor and whatever else is in the way. Then you need to get your jigsaw out, with its splinter guard on and its high precision fine cutting blade, and cut strips off the MDF pieces you’ve just paid an arm and a leg for. Thin strips. Really precise strips. Really thin, precise strips with awkward shapes and fiddly bits that you need to get right first time on a piece of wood that can’t easily be replaced.
I might be brilliant at scribing. I hope I am. But I’ve never done it before, and there’s going to be quite a lot of it in this project, so while I’m going to have a lot of very enjoyable DIY time ahead of me I’m slightly apprehensive about the potential for it to become a Cabinet Saga.
The internet is full of junk these days, articles promoted into your social media feeds and “related content” links in your news articles. And you want to read it all, of course you do, it looks fascinating. But you’re a busy Executive Gentleman with a busy executive lifestyle, and you don’t have time for all that.
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I thought it was finally over. The terrible CDs had finally run out, and if you’ve been paying attention you’ll have seen that it’s been a full year since we last paid a visit to the Four Word Review Auditorium. But no, it seems my luck ran out a little while ago when a jiffy bag dropped through the letterbox containing Dive In, the 2002 debut album from Popstars and Pop Idol star/idol Darius. Oh dear. Brace yourself, then: we’re going back in.
While we all feel deep sorrow in the Holy Father’s passing, the time is now right for me to throw my hat into the ring and offer the benefit of my expertise for the betterment of mankind. I am officially applying to be the next Pope.
At this stage, I acknowledge that I am something of an outside candidate. But I believe that I’m able to offer a unique package that is sure to turn heads in the upcoming Papal Conclave.
No allegiance to any Catholic faction I am not allied to the Jesuits, Marianists or any other Catholic faction, which puts me in an ideal position to appeal to, and be embraced by, all those of Catholic faith. Having no prior allegiance I come to the role as a blank slate, able to rise above any differences. In fact I’m not a Catholic at all and don’t believe in god, so my neutrality is unrivalled among the other candidates.
Willing to maintain Pope Francis’s vow of a simple life I do not require great riches or a lavish lifestyle. I will lead by example, being entirely content to live in my Apostolic Palace within the walls of my own personal city-state, enjoy the excellent food and wine available in Rome, have a specially created car to drive me around wherever I go and travel the world on a regular basis. I am good at waving.
Looks good in white I wear a lot of bright colours but actually white suits me as well. I’d probably have the Vatican tailors make me some white jeans and hoodies for dress down occasions.
No background of scandal or controversy None that you can prove, anyway.
Happy to wear a small hat As a man who is steadily thinning out on top, I am more than happy to wear one of those little round Pope hats, which will actually serve to protect the top of my head from the 2,538 hours of Mediterranean sunshine the Italian climate will deliver each year. And in any case I think the big tall hats that Cardinals and Bishops wear would be a bit much and probably wouldn’t suit my bone structure.
In light of all the above I would be delighted to be considered for the role of Pope. My message to the College of Cardinals is simple: consider me!
You probably know that, once Easter Sunday is gone, the supermarkets want to ditch their remaining Easter eggs and clear the shelves for something else.
Anyway, it turns out that if you’re a grown up you can do what you want, so on Monday we bought all this.
Then, on Tuesday, we came home to find that each of us had bought some more without mentioning it to the other. So now we have everything you see above, plus three more of the biggest Easter eggs, six more smaller ones, another 16 Creme Eggs, some sort of Creme Egg chocolate bar, quite a lot of Reese’s Eggs, numerous Cadbury’s Caramel eggs and two Toblerone products called Edgy Eggs.
We are now faced with a storage problem that, somehow, neither of us had foreseen.
Anyway, don’t worry too much, we’ll sort it out one way or another.
