Iced tea, yes. Hot tea gone cold: URHGURHUGHHUHYYEEAEAUURK.

I generally don't drink tea, but regularly drink hot coffee gone cold, and occasionally iced coffee. I hasten to add that if I had milk in my coffee, I would, in all probability, drink it neither iced nor gone-cold.

(Softers, Graham III) No, I meant tea gone cold. Great! Coffee gone cold is just as good. I make a virtue of necessity because having brewed it I get on with doing something and forget about the drink.

Well, I drink tea and coffee without milk anyway.

Once I have made myself a cup of tea, I'll drink it all, even if it has gone cold. Coffee less so. I love iced tea, and iced coffee, and make both at home in the summer. If I'm at home, I put milk in tea and coffee. If I'm in Holland, I'll drink them without milk.

Yeah, what Raak said!

Panna cotta, custard, Yorkshire puddings, macaroni cheese, icecream, buttered toast, cappucino, parsley sauce... [Phil, Raak] I don't believe you.

[pen] I was with you all the way until you mentioned parsley sauce, whereupon Raak suddenly started to make more sense.

[CdM] OK. Switch that to 'peppercorn sauce' for your rib-eye steak.

[pen] Well, I don't like milk, custard, panna cotta or cappucino; but the others are nice.

(Phil) What do you put on your cornflakes/shredded wheat/weetabix? Not syrup, I hope.

[Rosie] As a result, I very rarely eat breakfast cereals. If I do, the milk needs to be as fresh and cold as possible.

[Rosie] I put canned fruit on my muesli. If I ate porridge, which I don't, I'd make it with water.

I stopped taking milk in tea and coffee as a result of trying to reduce my cholesterol count. I like milk and cheese and all the things pen listed, so tea and coffee without milk keeps the intake down without too much pain.

Anyone who was a child in the late '40's will have had it drummed into them the milk was a Good Thing (free at school, off the ration) and as far as I'm concerned it still is, within limits. Nothing could beat slurping the cream off the top of the bottle, and still can't. Fortunately, at the moment I don't have a cat, which would obviously have first shout.

Free school milk nearly put me off milk for life. In summer it was stacked in the playground in the sun for a couple of hours before we got it, so it was always warm and slightly off.
I now only drink skimmed when I have a choice - full cream just tastes greasy to me. However I still eat too much cheese and use plenty of whole milk & cream in cooking.

I went off milk somewhere between 14 and 18, I reckon. I used to drink loads of it before then. The thought of the cream off the top of the bottle makes me feel queasy these days. Oh, and please don't even mention the "straight from the cow" option - yuk!

We have a cat but he doesn't like milk, or cheese, strangely. First cat I've known not to like either or both. We had school milk in the 50s, in 1/3 pint bottles, and a choice of orange juice (which I preferred) and then Jersey milk was very creamy (it's not now due to over processing). I can remember the milkman delivering the milk in churns and filling up a jug my mother used to leave on the doorstep. I think they introduced bottles in about 1956. Then bottles were replaced by humbug shaped Tetra Paks in about 1967.

(Software) Cats shouldn't have milk too often but binge-licking every now and again won't do any harm. Cats are also useful for hoovering up bits of chicken off the floor.

[Rosie] There is nothing useful a cat can do that a labrador and a mousetrap can't.

[Phil] Possibly true, but with a cat you don't have to keep careful track of which one you are petting.

[Rosie] Our cat won't eat cooked chicken either. [CdM} Another advantage of cats is that they don't need to be exercised or groomed regularly.

Ours occasionally comes along and licks the milk at the bottom of our muesli bowls. And she's much better at dealing with the mice than the traps. She also spends a lot of time sitting on the internet, acting as some kind of firewall I think.

[Rosie] True. But Phil might point out that the same is true of mousetraps.

We've recently discovered that there are at least two other cats in the building, which could be why we saw a flurry of mouse activity before we got ours.

I have just discovered that our cat likes icecream. As regards chasing mice he is a pacifist. The other day he was seen lying in our garden with a dormouse nibbling a fallen apple about 30cm from his nose.

My cat presented me with a very much alive and wriggling mouse yesterday. It was a great big ferocious critter, probably weighing well over a quarter of an ounce.

[Simons] And then? What happened next?

Well, I managed to catch it, then popped it in a cardboard box for an hour or so to give it a chance to calm down, then let it go, ready for the cat to catch at some other time.

(SM) The cat is turning into an angler, then?

(flerdle) Me too. It's a lousy August here. The temperature is staying mostly below 20 and my home-made sundial is getting very little exercise.

[Rosie] Your sundial doesn't enable you to dial up any sun?

As August fades into the past the promise of a new season is enticing my olfactory senses from their hibernation. A pleasant hour and a half of practice at my local bowling club (after which I was accepted as a member of the Hat-Wearing-Volvo-Driving Geriatric Club) combined with a beautiful and warm day (maximum 18.9ºC) has contrived an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity within the castle known as 'Dujon's Folly'. Oh, happy days.

(pen) Fat chance. I spent a long time getting all the geometry right (it's on a wall) but little chance of testing it. People on the weather newsgroup with actual sun-measuring equipment say that it the dullest August for a long time and scarcely better than January. That's when they're not hurling miss-spelt abuse at each other and generally acting like ****s, ****s and ****s, even. What gets into people? This is a haven of well-mannered sanity.

[Rosie] Can I assume you misspelled misspell on purpose?
What do we think about that university lecturer's suggestion that the 20 most common spelling mistakes should be accepted as variant spellings? (For examples and the lecturer's argument, see article on Times Higher Education website.)

(Knobbly) Did you mean the "miss" or the "spelt"? The latter is an approved form in my C.O.D. 1964. Maybe the "miss" ought to have only one "s". As to the university lecturer, he is either playing Devil's Advocate, a posh way of saying "taking the piss", or is pretty comprehensively ignorant of language. His ideas have been well rebutted in the replies on the site. I see he's a professor of criminology. I'd lock him up and throw the key away. Know what I mean, guv?

(Rosie) Yes, I meant the "miss". One s from the prefix mis- and the other which was already on the beginning of the verb.

The air above about 3000 feet the last few days is very warm and dry and if the cloud disappeared the temperature would shoot up rapidly to about 28°C. But the lower layer of air is cool and moist and cloud can't penetrate the warm air, being cooler and therefore denser. So if the upper air were cooler there'd be some chance of the cloud being carried upwards and evaporating and we'd have a warm, sunny day. Maybe not 28°C but at least 23°C. BTW the sudden rise of temperature as you go up above about 3000 feet (in this case) is called an inversion and is a common feature. In Siberia in winter it can be as much as 25 degC warmer aloft than at the surface, say -20° compared with -45°.

I'm working from home on a Saturday, trying to get stuff done before going on holiday for two weeks in a fortnight's time. But it's an opportunity to go through my CD collection one-by-one as I work. I hadn't unpacked them since I moved here almost a year ago. Right now: CD 3 of the complete collection of Vaughan Williams symphonies.

I turned 50 while on holiday last week. I find it oddly liberating. Can anyone tell me why this is?

[Kim] It's because you know that your next birthday won't be your sixtieth :0(.

[Kim] Because you have realised that, despite the trepidation and build-up, you don't actually feel any different?
I ended up working most of Sunday too. And it rained. What a write-off of a weekend. Never mind. All of this will soon be over.

*complains about the cold. Again.*
Happy Birthday, Kim. 50 isn't that old. Not a lot you can do about it, anyway, other than walk in front of a bus beforehand (too late now).

(Software) Neither will mine.

There's another beer and music festival this weekend at philspub

Love to come, but ...

Since it has been so quiet here for so long, may I just say, a propos of nothing except general boasting, that I have just scored 227 in a single scrabble move? Thank you.

[CdM] Wow! How?

(CdM) Is that possible? 227 is a prime number and I thought scores were always multiplied by various factors rather than added. Apart from that, v good.

[Rosie] Presumably it was 59 tripled plus the bonus 50 for using all 7 letter from the rack.

[Phil, Rosie] The word was EQUISETA, played across two triple word scores on an existing Q, and also making the words ET and SWING. The letters in EQUISETA have a total value of 18 (including the double letter score on the I), which when twice tripled gives 162. ET contributed another 6 points (because it was also on a triple word), and SWING contributed another 9. That plus the 50 point bonus gives 227. (Note, by the way, that the tiles in my hand were worth a grand total of 7 points.)

It was a very high scoring game: my opponent got 417 points and still lost by over 100.

I think CdM has stunned us all into silence with that accomplishment. In other news, I'm about to jet off for two weeks with the windy miller, taking in a road trip to Turin to visit a friend. On Monday, I am working 'from home' to finish off a press campaign (look out for Ancient Tree Hunt news about the 'Acorns to Ancients' seed collecting month hitting a local newspaper near you). And also,if anyone fancies a bosky trip to Hainault, there's a forest festival taking place in Hainault Forest from September 21 onwards - Speed Dating walks in the woods, anyone? Alternatively, learn woodland management, take part in forest art sessions, or take a guided 'Silent Walk' to listen to the sounds of the forest. If I wasn't elsewhere,. I'd go myself.

Well, you live and learn.. "Bosky" is definitely a word I'll endeavour to add to my everyday vocabulary.

(Phil) I'm surprised you didn't know it already, man of your calibre. I came across it as a teenager though I admit it's not used much.

[Rosie] When it comes to expanding my vocab, I'm all ears - which explains why I got called Wingnut at school, incidentally.

Doubt if there's a game in this, but things have been quiet in here just lately, but I as wondering how high one could count with film/book names, particularly using just ordinals, rather than cardinals.. Starting with "First Among Equals".

Forty-Second Street?

The Third Man (oblig)

Born on the Fourth of July

The Fifth Element

The Sixth Sense

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

10

Right up to the minute, we have The Eighth Wonder