I'd always wanted to try Cheddar Gorge Haiku... perhaps too similar to what we've got going now. I also thought it'd be good fun to write a play one line / stage direction / light cue at a time.

[Knobbly] If you do 'view source', however that works on your particular browser, nested in amongst all the HTML muck you'll see a hidden line 4 and line 5 that occurred to me. Why I didn't use the HIDE tags is beyond me. I must have thought we were temporarily back in 1998 or something.

Back. Ferry apparently headed back towards the English coast in the middle of the night so some poor chap with fits could be helicoptered orf. After all the fuss was over, I got up at 6am and went out on deck with a huge cup of tea and a piece of my mum's neighbour's best fruitcake for breakfast expecting to see the lights on Rotterdam and we were still in the middle of the black North Sea. Quelle disappointment. However, all was well. The customs people didn't object to the vintage stationary engine I had stashed in the boot, and the trousers I bought for the windy miller fit like a charm.

[penelope] You bribed the customs officers with trousers?

we're leaving the mill on Saturday lunchtime and heading back to Blighty via Dover for a wedding near Bath on Sunday. And then dashing back to NL. This time, the windy miller is coming with me - hurrah!

Dat is groot. Veilige reis!

Hi! crEgCiaE

Great, now we've got Klingons as well as Dutchmen.

I believe Klingon is actually a 70-30 mix of Polish and 133t-sp33k

(SM) Can't figure out what 133t-sp33k is. Something to do with teaspoons, 133 of them?

[Rosie] Something along those lines. And good afternoon everybody.

It's a count of the average number of grains of demerara sugar. 133 teaspoons hold 33,000. Obvious really.

That's a mere 225 grains per teaspoon, which doesn't seem quite enough. It all depends on de size of dem grains. Is there an EU standard?

It's a level teaspoonful.

That means about 22 mg per grain, which is probably about right. If it were cyanide or nicotine you be approximately 50% dead.

[Rosie] Interesting coincidence, work today has had a similar effect on me.

It was surprisingly nice there.

... but here in sunny Strasbourg, Christmas is upon us, with the opening of the annual Christmas markets. How are things looking elsewhere in the Morniverse?

Here in the Netherlands, Sintaklaas (December 5) is more important than Christmas. His arrival from Spain, as documented on national TV, was dogged by bad weather, but he is already out and about with his blacked-out moorish assistants, strangely all called Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) and gathering information about how good the children have been. Children leave their shoes out overnight in the hope of having them filled with sweets (snoepjes) if they've been good, and a lump of coal is they haven't. Traditional sweets are particular to Dutch tastes - pepernoten which looks like earwax and tastes of aniseed, and strange crunchy things that look like dog meal and taste of aniseed. I'm not fond of aniseed...

I made some pelargonium cuttings earlier in the year - far more than I could ever possibly use. Enough to start a small nursery, in point of fact. And of course, as I didn't really care whether they lived or died, most of the little blighters have survived. So what shall I do with 'em all now? I've got dozens and dozens! Any suggestions? Anyone want a few pot plants?

Oh, they're Mabel Grey. Small, pretty purple flowers, but their main schtick is that their leaves smell of lemon sherbert.

[Simons] Give them away as Christmas presents or let a a charity market stall sell them? I'd have a few for my purple patch - they sound nice.

OK, it just took me about 45 minutes to cross the city centre on my bike, versus the usual 15. The markets are beginning to annoy me.