My main complaint was the food, however, described in the blurb as “fine dining”. Whatever one’s opinions on the gastropub revolution, you at least expect to get something edible. I opted for the “sausage and mustard mash with onion jus”, this unnecessary violation of innocent gravy being on reflection a very bad sign indeed.

It’s hard to cock up sausage and mash with onion gravy. If one were to try, however, the Prince Albert provides a handy tutorial. First, select overspiced, under-meated sausages with a rusk content higher than the average kindergarten and the texture of insulating foam. Then bake the crap out of them until they form a thick, impermeable coating of gnarled casing that goes “bonk” when you hit it on a table, and resists being cut like a tortoise wearing kevlar. For the mash, eschew actual potatoes for the main part, preferring instant mix with Coleman’s mustard powder added. It can be challenging to get the right lumpy consistency with mix, though, so you may want to have some elderly chopped potatoes on hand to lend the necessary gravitas to your meal.

Finally, as any fule kno, onion gravy is exactly like a strip tease - less is more. Indeed, if you provide sufficiently little “jus”, your victim–sorry, “customer”–will have no idea how good it was, and will give you much benefit of copious doubt (they have already been wowed by your prowess with the humble potato). Serve at a tenner for fun and profit, perhaps using said bill to blow your nose in the customer’s face. After all, your establishment has bestowed upon itself a “new, more refined role” - these peons should be grateful for your benevolence in not having them roundly thrashed.

In summary, I give the Prince Albert three out of ten, this being the number of times the urinals overflowed in our presence.

Not being keen twitchers might be considered by some to be a disadvantage, but for us the opposite was true; being blissfully unaware of anything resembling a bird-related fact merely increased the breadth and implausibility of our sightings. In just one afternoon we spotted seventeen species on the endangered list, not to mention eight officially extinct ones and three that were new to science (puffins in particular owe their ability to fly solely to a cartoonesque ignorance of physics).

Starting with the arctic skewer (a bird rarely sighted off any British coast, but apparent to us in suspiciously seagull-esque numbers), we moved swiftly on to yet more exotic finds. At great remove we unquestionably spotted a Madagascan Serpent Eagle, and while for most people the Gunnison Sage Grouse is only to be found in a remote part of southern Colorado, we were blessed with several.

Emboldened by these early finds we were delighted to find lowland gorillas lurking in the mists of the Western Isles, even if the freshening breeze did tend to alarm these timid creatures, causing them to flee on our approach. So successful were we, in fact, that I was able to derive an empirical law of wildlife observation, which I share with you now:

The further away it is, the rarer it might as well be.

Most people subjected to my conversation over the last few years will have come away with the impression that I’m obsessed to an almost monomaniacal extent with beards. This may not be an entirely false impression, but never let it be said I don’t let my interests branch out. Today I would like to draw attention to an under-appreciated part of the human facial anatomy: the eyebrow.

Frequently neglected to the point that many people submit themselves to full eyebrowectomies (opting instead for a sort of trompe-l’oeil arrangement that satisfies neither aesthetics nor function), the eyebrow may in fact be the most important part of the face save for the eyes themselves. As the Dude’s rug did for his room, they tie one’s visage together, and while the data is not conclusive, their removal may well increase the risk of being mauled by a marmot. No less an authority than Wikipedia claims:

Eyebrows also prevent debris such as dandruff and other small objects from falling into the eyes, as well as providing a more sensitive sense for detecting objects being near the eye, like small insects.

We can thus see that not only are your eyebrows protecting you from groundhogs in your bath, but from beetles and small meteorites getting in your eyes, hence the phrase “beetling brows”. It has to be said that I’ve never noticed my eyebrows exhibiting some kind of spider sense in the presence of nearby bugs, but then I’ve never really paid any attention, a failing which is all my own.

As well as these practical considerations, eyebrows have been heavily involved in some of the great politics of the last hundred years, none more so than those of Denis Healey (pictured above), who on special occasions would allow civil servants to twang his magnificent brows in exchange for mint toffees. Reaching the rank of Major during WWII, Healey was greatly prized by his comrades due to his eyebrows’ ability to detect Germans through up to three thicknesses of plasterboard or a thin sheet of lead. But it was only after his honourable discharge that his eyebrows truly came into their own, delivering several hustings speeches when Healey himself was incapacitated from fatigue.

Finally, a great number of entertaining facial expressions would be completely impossible without the humble brow. Even their latin name, supercilium, hints at a whole class of withering expression that would otherwise be unknown to humanity. Napoleon attempted to render his armies immune to the element of surprise by ordering the wholesale removal of all hair above the bridge of the nose, achieving great initial success as his armies rampaged, expressionless, across Europe. In the end, however, he merely hastened his own downfall, misinterpreting as approval the sarcastic reception accorded to his Waterloo battle plans due to his advisors’ inability to appropriately arch their brows. The rest is a matter of record, but the crucial role eyebrows played has been sadly plucked from the forehead of history.

Incidentally, scientists recently endorsed my views on the optimal nature of the Jennifer Connelly eyebrow, and I believe this is only right and proper.

I appear to have monkeys on the brain at the moment. I blame King Cricket.

Me: “Hello?”

Them: “Hello.”

Me: “Yes, hello.”

Them: “Hello?”

Me: “Yes, we’ve established that.”

Them: “As’salaamu aleikum?”

Me: “That’s pretty much ‘hello’ again, isn’t it? Are you going to tell me who’s calling?”

Them: *click*

This happens about five times a week despite my resolute refusal to become a Mr Islam (about once every fifth call they at least tell me who I’m supposed to be). Mr Islam is presumably a man who used to have my phone number, but emigrated to Nicaragua to avoid being pestered by people with the communicatory grace of howler monkeys. Unfortunately for him he will now be having to deal with actual howler monkeys, but howler monkeys are at least diurnal creatures, and do not call then rudely hang up at half past bloody midnight. They can also be temporarily silenced with a well placed banana, a technique which so far has merely made my telephone somewhat sticky.

And yes, this entire entry is just a flimsy excuse to put that picture up. He deserves something rather better, but never mind.

The EU is expected to rule next week on the certification of mountains (to be available at first in powdered form only), and on the broader question of whether import tariffs should be imposed on transatlantic weather systems.

I don’t know; aren’t the government trying to ban anything at the moment? That’s usually good. Has someone given Max Clifford a ring?

Never wanting to be seen to let The Public down, the BBC gamely tried to wish news into existence, but its efforts only highlighted the global shortage:

Rupert Murdoch is believed to have secretly assembled a crack team of news-creating professionals, working in secrecy to concoct a global pretext for newpaper vending, but the effort was abandoned when it was pointed out that this was the plot of the awful James Bond outing Tomorrow Never Dies.

Indeed, all fresh newsmaking efforts have thus far been in vain, and the assembled members of the press are currently reduced to asking each other for comments in between running repeats of past glories. In one particularly upsetting incident, a confused Michael Buerk had to be turned away from a central London drinking establishment after he stormed the bar and demanded to know where the Ethiopian infants were being kept. He was last seen heading north on Charing Cross road, berating pedestrians with an unplugged lip mike and a heavily-gnawed fried chicken thigh. Members of the public are advised to phone their local news bureau if he does anything particularly outrageous.

First you get the borage, then you get the power. Then, you get the bees.

It was something like that, anyway.

Let’s back up a bit. Despite having lived at our current flat for over a year now, it’s only recently that I feel we’ve started to take full advantage of its best feature, the Most Overlooked Balcony In The World™, and this feeling is owed almost entirely to vice. A wall planter-based herb garden may seem an unlikely place for a hotbed of sin, but so it has transpired.

Having read recently that borage is “much beloved by bees,” and bees being much beloved by me, I decided to plant me some borago officialis (none of that cheap knock-off rubbish). Being of confident mind, I decided to start from seeds, and duly sowed, feeling faintly filthy as I impregnated our flowerbeds. Vice-y, but hardly Miami.

After a month or so of faithfully watering the bare patch of soil (which I was beginning to suspect of mocking me), sprouts appeared! A hit rate of only 50%, granted, but still sprouts. There followed two months of paranoid counter-slug activities, stopping short only of applying Agent Orange to the neighbours’ ivy, suspected of harbouring the intruders. But now our borage is glorious, slug-proof in its enormity, and most importantly, ready to be much beloved by bees. And boy, howdy, is it ever beloved.

Mere minutes after it flowered, our borage was, well, deflowered. As I watched from the doorway, a fine apian fellow set to beloving our plant in as comprehensive a manner as I’ve ever witnessed. Proud though I was, however, I couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable as hot bee lovin’ continued apace in front of my eyes. Impressive stamina for a little guy, but a bit much before my first cup of tea. “Get a room,” I thought, then went looking for one on eBay. No point attracting bees if you’re not going to keep them.

The other addition to the balcony is complementary in a sense - a shisha purchased from down the road that is pleasing to eye, ear and lung, and doubles as a handy smoker when the bees get too frisky. A line in apple-smoked honey will be available from all good Kentish Town stores* very soon.

*Okay, Woolworths.

The old site is still available as usual and I’ll crosspost things to both places, because it’ll make me feel as if I’ve been twice as productive. These little insights into the mind of a layabout, eh?