The Battle for Bread

AM

Least: Just after 11:00pm, I listened in horror as the music of the rubbish truck faded into the distance. With no stinking bags of garbage left on the street it was clear that I had missed my chance to get rid of mine. Missing a 'household garbage' pick up can often mean having to live with a bag of food scraps and paper festering for a few days. Thankfully, in one small mercy, the tiny blue bin downstairs was empty, so I filled it.

Most: At 9:20am, I was struck by the cool temperature of the water coming out of the bathroom tap. For months, the water had been tepid enough to allow me to shave straight from the tap. I think the time has now come to return to filling the basin with warm water from the kettle and for some reason there is no hot water tap. I just want to know why they installed all the pipes in this building on the houtside with no insulation.

PM

Least: Some time around 4:00pm, Rosie and I began watching the Detroit Metal City movie based on the manga of the same name. The story centres around a young man who lives a double life between a complete dork and a crazed death metal vocalist. While the comic is very confronting, with shocking language, violence, male-male rape and treatment of women, the movie was simply painful. The shrill voices of the actors and the bad use of janglish swearing made it almost impossible to watch. In fact, I couldn't watch it any longer and had to evacuate.

Most: At close to 5:00pm, I decided to salve my pain from the Detroit Metal City movie by baking bread. The process was an experiment, because I was unsure as to the properties of Japanese flour and that I don't have a real oven. I chose a very basic recipe to minimise any disasters. After about and hour of kneading and rising, I shaped the dough into rolls and sent into the infernal reaches of a toaster oven (right). as I stared into to red glow, I could see the bread rising and browning, then blackening. I rescued the bread and realised that my experient had been pretty successful. We ate the bread with pasta topped by a simple tomato sauce. Another small victory in the battle for bread.