Two mugs in a fleamarket

Sometimes a week flashes by because it was totally uneventful, leaving nothing to show for itself. Other weeks somehow manage to fulfill an entire month's quota of notable events and still be over with in two shakes of a toddler's head. He's been great, the little one; most of the scabs have gone and he's eating like there's no tomorrow, which is just as well cos (of course) Elly then erupted, right on cue to coincide with the first day of the school holidays, with a really quite nasty dose of the same. She's on the mend at last but had it much worse than Oscar, who was pretty much oblivious to the whole bout, and now that her few days of involuntary fasting are over the two of them have ended the week in a piranha-like feeding frenzy. Nothing is safe, especially chocolate anything vaguely resembling dried fruit.

Mercifully, it was a week devoid of pork, apart from the ham which came on our delivery takeaway pizza. Up until yesterday, we'd had no luck finding anywhere decent that also does mopeds, thanks mainly (it seems) to the fact that we live near the hospital. Why, I don't know. We (even) tried Dominos in sheer desperation a while ago; they're based about three miles away in Team Valley and said yes, they would deliver to Chester-le-Street but "not to the end near the hospital"... anyway... this other place we'd been avoiding – again, why, I don't honestly know – turned out a passable quattro stagioni with bonus fifth topping (ffs) and got it here without nary a mention of hospitals, doctors, A&E, none of that. Their garlic bread was a bit cheesy, but we were famished. It was just the job & disappeared faster than a fly-by week in April.

No, instead of a lucky bag of pig we opted for a large piece of cow, all minced up and ready for the pot. We've made Heston's Chili Con Carne before, and it's absolutely brilliant so long as you completely ignore calls for brined short ribs, Devil's Penis chilis, dry ice (?!) and so on, use only ONE star anise, forget the confit – in fact ignore everything except the con carne part – and don't forget to add a square of 70% chocolate instead of the finishing butter. Wonderful, but I'm sure it never used to make so much! It was served up twice a day for three days, and we were ladling it on, but short of having it for breakfast we were just incapable of finishing it.

It must have been the all-beef diet that got me out cycling on Thursday evening. Once me mate Ian had the old bike in for a service it was literally as good as new, so I agreed to go out with the Shop Club for one of their mad twilight excursions into the Land of Mud. The ride takes in part of the C2C route, which I'm all-of-a-sudden mad keen to do in its entirety, despite remembering the hard way that we're in England now: it barely scraped a single degree in the wind, while a light sprinkling of rain came and went and a potent mud-and-straw mixture seized up my brakes... the ride was great fun nonetheless, I managed to keep up really well and tomorrow I might even try & attempt to walk upright again.

The weather's actually not the big deal we thought it would be, even though it looks like it's going to be unsettled (I believe the euphemism is) for the second week of the holidays, which doesn't bode well for the exuberant excesses of our newly carbed-up offspring. As Nik pointed out following an early-morning pop-to-the-shops the other day (and apologies to those without English telly) it's not just cold, it's Marks & Spencer cold. The frankly pointless weather chart is an entire messy drawer of assorted icons and wind symbols, which to the trained eye is clear Met Office code for "Gawd knows, look out the f@#king window like everyone else". We'll be doing just that, by the looks of it, for the next five days.

oh, and I'm offering a prize to the first person who can explain the meaning of this post's cryptic title, as I've completely forgotton what it is.