Costly cuppa.

I do like green tea, leaf not bag, with a little jasmine added. I have to go to Reading for this. I have to walk past the London Camera Exchange (I know it's Reading, they know it's Reading, but they do have cameras, and exchange them for money).

So as well as quarter pound of tea (that's a eighth of a kilo, really, but some people snigger if I say I bought as eighth of anything) I came back with a Nikon D-5100, a sense of guilty extravagance, and the ideal tool for available light photography. The same people snigger if I say I don't need a flash.

An odd day for technology. I went jogging: my digital watch has frozen at the time I set off, and the GPS route-tracking app on my phone fondly believes I can run 21 km in 79 minutes. I planned the run as a little over 12km, which means I'm around the ten minute mile I aspire to, after panting uphill a bit at the start. Perhaps this has something to do with reading about a wartime RAF bomber crew who encountered a magnetic storm over Belgium on their way to the Ruhr, got lost, mistook the Thames for the Rhine and ended up bombing a village in Cambridgeshire

This evening I have to polish a vaguely Scots accent to say grace at a Burns Supper. Have to consider the delicately rounded vowels of North Edinburgh, crisper Glasgow, or lilting Orcadian I remember from a teenage holiday camping by the old seaplane slipway outside Kirkwall (and being visited by the Special Branch to enquire if I was really an Irishman by the name of Nolan, but that's another story). But then I also recall being told firm that "we're no Scots, we're Orkney", so I think I'll settle for student memories of pubs off the Grassmarket between shows on the Fringe. "Some hae meat and canna eat ..."