Today’s invention is Plum Roulette. Place your bets…

The wheel is part of a washing machine I dismantled. It spins very well. No more bets now…

Jake supplied the plums, straight from the tree. They’re not quite ripe yet, but that doesn’t really matter when you’re not eating them.

Yes, the sticker says “25″ with a line through it, and “Are you old enough?”. And yes, it’s a child’s cutlery set, with a knife you’d be hard pushed to slice off a piece of ripe brie with, let alone stab a rival gang member in a dark alley. Let’s have a look at the back:

“Cutlery to be sold to those aged 18 and over only.” What kind of madness is this? And while we’re at it, how about “Cutlery set only suitable for children over 3 years”? Jake is less than half that age, and he finds it perfectly suitable, thank you very much. Is he supposed to wait until his third birthday so I can present them to him in a coming-of-age style ritual? “Son, the time has come for you to cast aside your childish plastic spoon and, like a man, go forth and use this miniature fork emblazoned with a cartoon cow. Oh, and also this blunt knife which you may, if you press hard enough, be able to slice your yoghurt with.”

Since I’m probably already attracting the attention of Social Services by letting a one year old use a fork, I might as well take the opportunity to have another offence taken into account – Mia, age 4, has been using a proper real-life 8 inch kitchen knife for chopping vegetables. For years. Never unsupervised, to be fair, but the level of supervision required is very minor these days, on account of the fact that she’s so good at it.

Apart from vegetable chopping being an important skill (especially for a child that’s mad about cooking) and good because it allows her to actually make a useful contribution, it also means she understands and respects knives for what they are and knows how to handle them safely. If or when, during her childhood, she gets hold of one that she wasn’t supposed to get hold of, it won’t be a problem. I think that’s a far healthier situation than turning them into some kind of mystical forbidden fruit. Having said that, it maybe depends on the child. I can certainly think of other children the same age I wouldn’t trust with one for 5 seconds.

Anyway, I’ve been sidetracked again. I was ranting. It may seem a bit extreme to get worked up about some stupid restrictions on purchasing toddler cutlery, even if they are, by anyone’s standards, REALLY stupid. But it’s not really about that – it’s just that these things are symptomatic of the awful authoritarian nanny state that’s closing in around us every day. You can’t move for rules, regulations, licenses and inspectors any more. Ban this. Ban that. Don’t do this. Don’t eat that. And whatever you do, don’t run in the pancake race.

The picture on the right (thanks to Dick Puddlecote for finding it), incredibly from 1929, portrays a shockingly accurate picture of modern-day Britain, although to be perfect some of the inspectors should be hiding behind CCTV cameras. Oh, and of course, they said “all round” the home, but Ed Balls and his cronies want to send them in too. Not that this is a party political broadcast, since the only alternative to the current mob of meddling social engineers is another lot wearing a different coloured rosette. Very much a preferable lot at this point in time, but hardly much better on the scale of things. It seems to me like the only way to free ourselves from the ever expanding claws of the oppressive state is full scale revolution. As that seems highly improbable, I try to ignore the important things and focus on children’s cutlery.

The above won’t work if you’re using Internet Explorer (stop doing that), and possibly not if you’re one of those Apple types either, though I’m not sure.

Update: I’m told this actually crashes Aurora, Midori and Kazehakase. I can’t help but wonder if that’s exploitable.

For some reason last weekend seemed to be nicer than any we had over the so-called summer, so it was a perfect opportunity to get started on cutting the hedges. I have a crappy electric hedge trimmer that gets stuck on a hawthorn branch every 30 seconds, and I’ve also sliced through the cable three times previously, so it’s all done by hand these days.

Mia had to help out of course, and yes that’s her pictured right, two years old and up a wobbly stepladder with a pair of scissors. And yes, that’s a plaster on her finger, but she didn’t do it with the scissors – that was the day before with the kitchen knife. I guess that when Mia gets to the age where she can use the internet, she might read this blog and then head on over to Wikipedia to find that most other children have ten whole fingers. If so, Mia, however many fingers you have now, that’s how many you were born with and I can produce photoshopped evidence if necessary.

More seriously, I don’t advocate that anyone lets their toddlers use knives and scissors or climb ladders. On the other hand, I don’t recommend that anyone tries to tell me what my toddler should and shouldn’t do when under my close supervision.

Another weekend task was rot-proofing the chicken house, slightly too late but better that than never. Unfortunately, when I bought the ‘stuff’ I failed to notice something quite important and at no point during the transaction did the shopkeeper helpfully say “you do know that stuff is bright chuffing orange don’t you sir?” Therefore, due to the shopkeeper’s neglect, we have a glow-in-the-dark chicken house that people will probably use as a landmark when giving directions.

Unfortunately there’s still quite a lot of hedge left to cut (I assume that people who call it trimming have a totally different kind of hedge) but in the meantime I can take pictures that only include the bits that are straight-ish and pretend it’s all like that.

To make matters worse, she took ‘her’ train set. And my wife. And the dog. It’s just me, the chickens and that pesky cat. Oh, and the fish – don’t forget to feed the fish. And the tomatoes, don’t forget to water those. Good thing I decided to write this.

Secondly, a more serious use (it’s all relative) of the same setup, namely providing a guided tour of the grapevine:

The camera shoots the video in MPEG format, so I used Riva FLV Encoder to convert them to the more web-friendly FLV format, and also to reduce the resolution and bitrate a bit. This Wordpress plugin made it easy to embed the videos into the post. Although it was a bit more effort, I much prefer this approach to relying on an external service to encode and host the video as I did here.

Finally sunshine is upon us. This means gardening, and during the week the ability to work in the garden, at least when it’s possible to angle the laptop away from the sun so the screen is still visible. The orchard is a mass of blossom at the moment. The apple tree pictured right is probably the best apple tree in the world. When they’re ready, which will be around mid-September, they’re enormous, deep red, and pink in the middle. The picture below is a close-up of the blossom from the same tree, hacked about with using qtpfsgui to make it look arty farty. For once I’m quite pleased with the results.

Having said that, I did the processing in the garden with the sun on my dirty laptop screen, so it might well be hideous for all I know.

While we’re out here, some more garden-related stuff you’re not interested in. To the right, vegetable patches all planted up and surrounded by netting to keep out the cat (thinks it’s a litter tray), the puppy (learning to dig) and Mia (big clompy welly boots). Below, Mia feeding the chickens in the aforementioned boots.

Brimham Rocks has been on my list of favourite places for a long time, so it came as a bit of a surprise when I realised we’d never taken Mia there. We’ve put that right more than once recently.

It was also another opportunity to dabble with some more HDR photography. I’m loathe to use the word photography when I just point the camera and press the button, but anyway, the results are on the left. I think this (arguably overprocessed) stuff looks both nice and fake at the same time, but on the other hand, fake or not, I think it captures a much better idea of what it was like to be there. The main downside is that having to take three images at different exposures means that you don’t want things to move. Fine for rocks, but if you click the image and look at the top-left corner you’ll see that trees sometimes refuse to oblige.

If you’re in the area and hungry or thirsty, I’d recommend The Wellington in nearby Darley. As well as good food and ale, it’s child-friendly, which was just as well as our party on one occasion consisted of 7 children to 6 adults. Mia took advantage of the friendliness by filling all the candle holders with salt, something I’ll take this opportunity to apologise for, since I didn’t at the time.

Sadly, a very important member of the family is no longer with us. Apart from the postman, Mika was everybody and everything’s best friend.

Mika held some very strong and unshakeable beliefs, including:

• Poppadoms are not food
• Chickens are not allowed in the porch
• Nobody is allowed to say “Ginger” or “Cats”
• All postmen are evil

She loved ponds, rivers, sticks, balls, frisbees and baby anythings – from kittens to chicks to Mia, who she was a very special friend to for the last two and a half years of her doggy life. She took immense pride in her incredible catching skills, and could negotiate a floor full of wine glasses without spilling a drop.

In short, she was a very special dog and it was a priviledge to know her.