Around 10am yesterday my flat had a power cut. I was out at work, of course, but I know this because when I got home I found my microwave needed its time resetting and my computers claimed only to have been up for a few hours. (Also my alarm clock lost its alarm settings and enabled both of its independent alarms for midnight, which was very loud and particularly startling.)

And my firewall machine didn't turn itself back on again. Investigation shows that the power supply is at fault, so it'll be a trip via Maplin on the way home to pick up a new one.

I'm getting sick and tired of this. I've already spent a week without Internet connectivity at home recently, due to the lightning strike blowing up my cable modem; and I've already had to replace a power supply in one of my computers due to the same lightning strike. Now another power supply has gone, and in the process it's cut me off from the Internet again, and I'm getting cross.

It seems plausible to me that this isn't in fact coincidence, and that the same lightning strike that caused all the recent hassle was also the cause of the current outage. I've had power cuts before and things don't generally go pop when the power comes back on, but this is my first power cut since the lightning strike, and I wouldn't have a hard time believing that the power surge had nearly wrecked my firewall's power supply and that the dropout this morning was the last straw.

It's getting close to the last straw for me, too. If anything else of mine blows up in the near future I'm really going to lose my temper. If I meet Thor in the afterlife, I think I'll taser him.

On Wednesday lightning struck near my house and my main computer broke down, along with my network connection. I repaired the former a few days later (it was only the power supply), and an NTL engineer has just come round and repaired the latter for me too.

The lightning strike occurred just as I'd finished sorting out the software upgrades I needed in order to do a long-overdue backup of my main computer, which made it a particularly annoying moment for it to blow up! Fortunately, the data wasn't lost and now I have backed it up.

And today I booked an emergency afternoon off work so I could be at home between 12 and 6 for NTL, and of course the NTL engineer has now been and gone, so if I'd known that I could just as well have called it a long lunch break.

Finally … the computer which blew up, and the cable modem which also blew up, and the router which lost one of its network ports presumably by means of the surge going right through the cable modem, were all behind a surge protector which I had thoughtfully installed after my last annoying lightning experience. The power surge laughed at my surge protector, went straight through it without slowing down, blew up several bits of kit beyond it, and left it intact and unaware that anything had happened. Clearly I need a better surge protector; but without a reliable means of producing lightning on demand, it's probably difficult to test them!

Murphy has definitely been having too much fun with me this week.

At lunchtime I went to World of Computers and picked up a scanner, which I've been meaning to buy one of for some time and which I ordered at the weekend. When I got it home this evening I found that its USB cable was about four feet too short to reach from the only free surface in the study to the computer I needed to connect it to, so I'll have to go back and get an extension cable tomorrow.

Also this evening I managed, thanks to helpful advice from Ian, to debug the mysterious software crashes I'd recently been seeing on my main home machine. That caused me great relief and a sense of triumph for about five minutes. Unfortunately, the next thing that happened was that an incredibly loud, sharp and nearby crack of thunder and flash of lightning made me jump out of my seat, and when I settled down again I discovered that the machine whose software I'd just fixed had turned itself off and wouldn't turn on again. It just sits there with its power light glowing at half brightness, and does nothing else no matter how often I press the On button. For good measure, the same lightning strike also fried something in NTL's cable network or possibly my cable modem, because the latter is blinking some very unhappy-looking lights at me and not providing me with network connectivity. I'm having to type this from the Gallery.

So, that's two counts of nearly getting something working in one day. I'd probably better not go near another computer until tomorrow.

I just went down to the front door to go to work, and found a small business card pushed through it. This card turned out to be paper spam, and it started with the words ‘HELP! Our natural organic healthcare business is exploding!’.

It was, of course, inviting me to take part in a dubious business opportunity. But reading the first two lines I couldn't help thinking that what they wanted was for me to call a fire engine, or possibly a bomb squad :-)

To continue on the random language use theme: I've noticed recently that I seem to have completed a gradual transition from being a ‘moreover’ person to being a ‘furthermore’ person.

Ten years ago I was a maths student. ‘Moreover’ is part of standard mathematical idiom. You find it a lot in statements of theorems: ‘there exists exactly one thingy satisfying these conditions, and moreover it is the limit of the following sequence’. So, naturally, hanging around a lot of mathematicians and dealing with a lot of theorems and proofs and mathematical writings, I got used to using ‘moreover’ when I had a concept of this nature to express.

These days I don't hang around with that many mathematicians any more, and I do hang around with IWJ who tends to say ‘furthermore’ a lot, particularly often (and particularly loudly) when he's ranting about some company being stupid: ‘they made this error, and that error, and furthermore refused to give a refund’. So my idiolect has gradually adapted so that I now say ‘furthermore’ where I might once have said ‘moreover’.

At some point during this transition, a few years ago, I noticed that I was willing to use both words but felt them to have different connotations and emphasis. I would tend to say ‘moreover’ if I was talking about good or useful things (‘and even better…’), but ‘furthermore’ if I was talking about bad or annoying things (‘and even worse…’). It seems likely to me that this derived from the difference in usage: mathematical theorems are good and useful things because they provide you with knowledge, and ‘moreover’ tends to prefix an extra piece of useful knowledge, whereas Ian's rants tend to be about a sequence of annoying things of which ‘furthermore’ introduces an even more annoying one.

I consciously tried to retain this usage once I'd noticed it, because I thought it would be rather nice to encourage a subtle difference between two otherwise redundant words, but it doesn't seem to be happening any more: even in ‘good’ contexts I now find I naturally say ‘furthermore’. Shame.

I've been idly wondering for a while about the circumstances under which people use other people's names while talking to them.

( medium-length musing )

Two days ago, at work, I was relating to my team leader a tale of mild annoyance involving the company sysadmins. I began the story with the words ‘Last Thursday, …’.

It then became rather difficult to concentrate on what I was supposed to be telling him, because some part of my brain started singing ‘Last Thursday, I gave you my heart’. I struggled through my story in spite of this mental cacophony, but within the next few minutes the same part of my brain had managed to prefix ‘Last Thursday’ to several well known phrases or sayings:

• Last Thursday, I gave you my heart
• Last Thursday, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation
• Last Thursday in a galaxy far, far away…
• Last Thursday God created the heaven and the earth.

I'm sure there must be some even better ones of these which I haven't thought of yet.

In a perfectly appropriate end to yesterday's catalogue of errors, I went to my bedroom chest of drawers last night to get out a pyjama top, and the front panel of the drawer came off in my hand. So this morning I slathered it in Araldite, hit it a couple of times with a mallet and left two heavy rocks on top of it, and with any luck by the time I get home this evening it'll be willing to cooperate for fear of more such treatment.

Also last night I went to the pub and drank beer, which is the first time I've touched alcohol in nearly two weeks. I didn't find drunkenness as enjoyable as I used to, and the (very mild) headache this morning leaves me thinking it wasn't worth the effort. Perhaps I'll continue not drinking, or barely drinking, for a while longer after all; enjoyment versus health is a debate that can go either way, but if I don't even enjoy it there's clearly no point in drinking the stuff.

It hasn't been a good day, so far.

I took the day off work so that an engineer could come round and replace the gas meter. Shortly before noon he showed up, took one look, and said it couldn't be done: apparently regulations have become stricter about the minimum distance between gas meters and electric wiring since mine was installed, so that if he changed it in place he'd be breaking the law. Which presumably means some other engineer will have to come round and do a much more extensive job on it at some other point (the word the guy used was ‘re-site’; I am continually amazed at the number of synonyms people feel the need to invent for perfectly simple words like ‘move’) and I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to make me use up another of my days off work for that.

Also today I have stubbed my toe painfully on the sofa, crashed my main home computer so hard that it required an hour and a half of filesystem repair before it would boot again, and thrown breakfast cereal all over the newly hoovered kitchen floor.

Now I'm going to go and spend the rest of the afternoon at the Gallery. With any luck nothing worse will happen to me there than an embarrassing defeat at some board game or other, which I'm pretty much used to by now.

I cooked a big stew yesterday evening, which will probably feed me for most of the week.

I never actually decided to do my cooking like that; it sort of grew over a period of years. When I started cooking for myself a few years ago I acquired a couple of lark_ascending's easy stew recipes I remembered from when we were going out, which were originally intended to serve two; but every time I shopped for ingredients I always came back with slightly more than I needed (‘just in case’), and once the stews started getting big enough to feed me for three days instead of two I thought that was actually quite useful (cooking for myself is annoying, so having to do it less often is pleasant) and started intentionally trying to buy for three days, and then overestimated again… At some point the stews began to overflow the saucepan, and my response was to go and buy a bigger saucepan.

This week I went somewhat out of control in the Sainsburys vegetable section. (I find it easy to overbuy vegetables because there's no guilt pressure working against it – after all, veg are good for you, right? So more veg must be better than less.) When I came to cook the stew I discovered it wouldn't all fit in the saucepan – and this was an enormous 4-litre casserole pan from the top end of the John Lewis range and if you can buy a larger one anywhere short of institutional-catering suppliers I don't know about it. Fortunately it all fitted in the pan once the veg had reduced a bit, but it was touch and go.

Well, they say the first step in kicking a bad habit is to admit you have a problem. So I hereby confess that I am a compulsive overcaterer and cannot be trusted to buy vegetables in manageably small quantities.

I think that perhaps it's time I abandoned the practice of judging veg quantities in the supermarket by instinct, and started setting myself a weight guideline and sticking to it. This is getting beyond a joke.

It's now been about nine and a half years since I started a private diary in the form of a set of heavily encrypted text files on my computer. The intention of that diary was to facilitate my learning from experience, by recording any experiences I thought might be useful in future and which I might plausibly forget. Over the years it has proven its worth again and again, for this and other purposes. When I started it I had no particular intention to confine it to any specific subject area, but it's turned out to be almost entirely full of my love life, not because that's the most important thing in the world to me (it isn't) but because it's by far the most significant aspect of my life which isn't basically sorted.

It occurred to me recently that I seem to write more in that diary when something either bad or difficult is going on in my life, because that's usually when I need to do a lot of thinking (and hence writing). When things become good I record it, but if they stay good for a while I generally don't need to say much about it; for example, at one point there's a nearly complete lack of entries for a year and a half while I was going out with lark_ascending. (Mind you, this isn't universal: there's also a dearth of entries in late 1998, not because my life was good but because I was suffering from RSI at the time…) So I then wondered, what would happen if I plotted the frequency of my private diary entries against time? Would I see obvious peaks clearly attributable to specific events in my past, or would the highest points turn out to be conjunctions of several things, or would it mostly be random noise, or what?

So I've been having a go at this, on and off, for the past few days. The biggest problem is choosing a granularity at which to break the graph down: too fine and you get a huge number of tiny spikes with no clear pattern, but too coarse and two meaningful spikes merge into one and you start to lose interesting detail. Lacking any particularly clever means of picking a granularity, I eventually resorted to plotting the graph at a wide range of granularities and paging back and forth until I found the most meaningful-looking one. (Which turned out to be a standard deviation of about a month; I wonder if that in itself says something about the scale on which I perceive meaning in my life.)

As it turns out, at that resolution I do indeed see clear peaks which are nearly all attributable to specific incidents (and, given the predominant subject matter, in many cases specific people). There are a couple of exceptions (the second highest peak on the entire diagram, in particular, appears on close inspection to be a group of unrelated minor incidents all occurring around the same time for no obvious reason), but most of the major features on the graph are clearly identifiable.

It's quite tempting to start measuring the relative significance of the various incidents by the relative heights of the peaks, but it turns out that this is a granularity artifact: dial the granularity down and the highest peak divides into smaller ones and a different peak becomes the winner, but dial it up and the highest peak becomes shorter and squatter while several smaller peaks in a different area merge into one big one and collectively overtake it. I suppose each peak must be at its highest when the graph granularity is roughly equal to the duration of the incident that caused it. So probably what I should really be doing to measure the impact of each incident on the diary would be to measure the overall area under the graph which it caused, but that's not so easy to read off from the peaks and troughs.

If anyone has any useful input on the problem of plotting a usefully informative representation of a data set like this without needing an intelligence-guided choice of parameters, it would be welcome. In case it's useful to know, I'm currently plotting the graph by replacing each data point with a Gaussian (effectively a convolution, if you consider my original data set as a sum of Dirac deltas) and summing, rather than plotting a conventional histogram with fixed dividing lines between blocks (I was worried that a peak might look very different depending on whether it crossed a dividing line, so I picked a strategy which didn't run that risk); so ‘granularity’ means choosing the variance of the Gaussian appropriately. I'm vaguely considering the idea of picking the variance of the Gaussian for each data point differently, according to some metric related to the surrounding points, but no particularly sensible-sounding idea has come to mind yet.

A couple of months back I posted a couple of long and serious musings about what programming is all about and how you learn to do it. Today I'd like to talk about a more frivolous topic, which is what verb you should use for it.

Among actual programmers, the nearly universal usage is that what you do to bring a program into existence is to write it. There are a bunch of other verbs you might use if you want to emphasise particular ways of doing it (‘hack together’ or ‘hack up’ if you did it messily or in a hurry, ‘grow’ versus ‘build’ to indicate something about the development methodology, and so on), but if you're not saying anything in particular about the way you did it, you talk about writing a program. You might have ‘coded it’ or ‘coded it up’ in a pinch, but I think in general you wouldn't have ‘programmed’ it, because when ‘program’ is used as a transitive verb its object is the thing you're instructing, not the things you're instructing it to do. You program a computer, or a VCR.

It's always faintly bugged me that not everybody knows this; non-programmers will occasionally use startling other verbs such as ‘making’ a program, or perhaps ‘creating’, or (as I heard today) ‘manufacturing’ one. This used to really annoy me when I was an arrogant teenager; but since then I've been gradually becoming more tolerant of this terminology, because it seems to me that it's just reflecting a difference of viewpoint between the programmer and the user. A programmer knows in their bones that what they actually do to bring a program into existence is to type in a large amount of text, hence ‘write’; but a computer-illiterate user just knows that they receive a consumer product ready-made from someone, and doesn't particularly want to have to distinguish it from any other consumer product, so they naturally use the same verbs they'd use for a physical object. So although this usage still jars me and grates against my intuitive sense of the appropriate terminology, I tolerate it on the grounds that there's nothing actually wrong with it.

(Also, I might do more than tolerate ‘make’ in some circumstances; a modern big-budget game, for example, probably involves at least as much graphic design and music recording and voice acting and 3D modelling and scriptwriting and other non-coding activities as it does actual programming, so I might plausibly feel that the correct term for the creation of the game as a whole was not in fact ‘write’. Given that, ‘make’ would probably be as good as anything.)

The verb I occasionally hear and can't justify on those grounds is inventing a program; this one is definitely inaccurate. ‘Invent’ describes the process of coming up with an idea, of working out a good way to do something. Many programs require no particular invention at all, and even when one does, you don't really invent the program, you invent an algorithm or a design or a structure or a game concept or some other high-level abstract idea which ends up embodied in your program but might also be embodied in somebody else's. Also, the process of invention only covers the formation of the idea: invention leaves you knowing how to do something, but having invented it you still have to actually do it, and that's where ‘write’ comes in.

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of Programmers for Linguistic Pedantry. Thank you for your attention.

Addendum: Whoops, I left out ‘develop’, which is another entirely acceptable term used by the people in the know. It's a particularly appropriate term when the program in question is especially large, and/or the product of a big team rather than one or a few individuals, and/or was substantially put together from existing parts so that it wasn't literally written afresh for the purpose, and/or took a particularly large number of trial and error cycles to get to its eventual state :-)

Also during my busy weekend I drove lzz, a friend of hers and drswirly to Emmaus for random shopping. I came back with a big pile of books which is making me a little worried that a shelving problem might be looming in my near future. My lounge has little remaining space for new bookcases, the existing ones are nearly full, and I fear my book collection might have to overflow into the study soon.

During this trip I managed to buy two copies of the same book by mistake: I saw one copy on a shelf, debated whether or not to buy it, and eventually decided yes and added it to my pile. Fifteen minutes later I spotted another copy – same edition – on a different but nearby shelf, and I assumed that it must be the copy I'd seen the first time, that I must have forgotten precisely which shelf I'd seen it on, and that when I debated whether or not to buy it fifteen minutes earlier I must have decided no. Having made these three wrong assumptions, I then decided I'd changed my mind and would buy it after all, so I added it to my pile. Imagine how silly I felt when I unpacked my bag of books at home and found two copies of it, particularly since (as was required by the nature of the error) it wasn't even a book I'd been entirely sure I really wanted! Oh well, it's fodder for my giveaway books pile…

This weekend was the ‘Party to End All Parties’, at the soon-to-be-vacated Suite.

I had originally planned to go to this on the Saturday only, but a bit of schedule-squishing allowed me to find time to go to the Friday evening as well, albeit not drinking, and I was glad I did because it was a good fun evening involving several people I would otherwise not have seen.

On Saturday afternoon I found part of the party on Midsummer Common, where I briefly bruised my fingers on juggling clubs and then got inveigled into a game of three-way chess, which is very silly. Then, after detouring via jaylett's barbecue, back to the Suite for the Saturday evening stretch of the party, at which I more than made up for my sobriety the previous evening. I seem to have a mental blind spot regarding large wine glasses; I tend to think that if I've only had (say) three glasses, that surely can't be all that much wine. Oops. I also have a somewhat hazy memory of at least one person taking some things I said or did the wrong way, so when I go to the Calling tomorrow I fear one of my mission goals will be to make sure everyone I like is still talking to me. I'm probably being unduly pessimistic there, but I'd prefer to be sure.

I had been hoping that the Party would fail in its stated mission of ending all parties, but when I got up on Sunday morning I suddenly wasn't so sure it would be a bad thing, because I had the kind of hangover that makes phrases like ‘never drink again’ spring rapidly to mind, along with ‘owowowow’ and ‘oh my god what did I do last night?’. The hangover itself vanished quite suddenly in mid-afternoon, to my great relief, and it seems likely that I won't in fact let it stop me drinking forever (it wasn't the worst hangover I've ever had, although it was probably in the top ten), but I might nonetheless avoid booze for a few days at least…

This morning I woke up when my alarm went off, pressed Snooze, and went back to sleep for another nine minutes. Or so I thought; in fact I'd absentmindedly mistaken Off for Snooze, so when I next woke up thirty-five minutes had zipped by and I was definitely on the late side. I don't remember ever having made this error before.

I think that if I was sleepy enough to get that wrong, it's probably a good thing on balance that I got the extra shut-eye…

It's early in the week, but I doubt I'll beat this in the next few days: yesterday evening I implemented a string search function (equivalent to Perl's rindex) recursively.

( because I needed to work around an LJ bug, and LJ made it difficult for me )

(I described this hack and the reasons for it at post-pizza last night and it got a spontaneous round of applause, which was unexpected and fun :-)

The first time I saw the road markings on red routes in London, I exclaimed ‘Ooh, red double yellow lines’. Then I laughed at myself for uttering such a self-contradictory phrase without thinking; but I later came round to the view that this is in fact a much better phrase than ‘double red lines’, because a listener previously unaware of the concept is likely to naturally infer from it that red double yellow lines are likely to appear at the edges of roads and have something to do with stopping or parking, whereas if you said ‘double red lines’ to someone who didn't know what you were on about then I'd only give fifty-fifty odds at best of you not having to explain that they were road markings rather than double red lines in some totally other context.

(The above paragraph is a perfect example of a curious tendency I've noticed in my writing recently: the entire paragraph consists of one short introductory sentence followed by one absolute monster sentence. I seem to do that a lot. Not sure why.)

Yesterday I checked with Google and was somewhat surprised to find that it disagreed with me:

Results 1 – 10 of about 636 for "double red lines". (0.37 seconds)
Results 1 – 2 of 2 for "red double yellow lines". (0.31 seconds)

I was reminded of this by yesterday's lunchtime trip to Tesco, during which I bought myself a pack of yellow pink wafer biscuits (gluten-free, naturally).

Last week I posted a lateral-thinking question and promised to follow up with a list of the responses I'd got when I previously ran this question in 1998.

Here were the 1998 answers:

• Become the Enemy (Amf)
• Build a third fortress inside the inner one (lovelyoliver)
• When the Enemy get in, show them a big bomb for which you're holding down a dead-man switch, and strongly suggest they go away again (lovelyoliver)
• Call on the power of Satan (lovelyoliver)
• ‘I'd read that the best weapon was the element of surprise. So I started to beat myself up.’ (drswirly; originally from a Paul Merton sketch)
• Perform an inversion with respect to the inner fortress, and then lay siege to them (drswirly)
• Cause the inner fortress to levitate and run away to elsewhere (bjh21)
• You shouldn't have built weapons that can point inwards as well as outwards in the first place (jaylett)
• Fill the gap between the inner and outer walls with glue (stephdiary)
• Flee through a trapdoor or tunnel (cowe and Brock, independently)
• You still have the tactical advantage that you know their new weapons intimately and they don't (cowe and me, independently).

This year's responses seemed to put much more of an emphasis on telling me I shouldn't have got into the situation in the first place; there were a lot of things like ‘of course you booby-trapped the weapons before retreating’, ‘revoke the firing codes for the weapons’, ‘broadcast the self-destruct codes for the weapons’ and ‘you're doomed anyway so you might as well sit down and have some tea and cake’.

Also various people dealt with the problem by positing facts which simply made it not a problem: you might have run out of ammo, for example, or the enemy might be too stupid to use the weapons anyway. Two people independently pointed out that siege weapons and anti-siege weapons aren't the same thing (the former are anti-structure whereas the latter are anti-personnel) so the enemy might simply not have had much use for my weaponry after all. Notable in this category was damerell who suggested (as he put it) a large-corporate answer: the reason we lost the outer fortress in the first place was because none of the heavy weaponry ever actually worked or it was more dangerous to the operators than to the targets, and so if the enemy tries to use it all we have to do is sit back and have a laugh.

cowe had the new and entertaining idea of hiding all my valuables in one of the outer weapons before retreating to the inner fortress, presumably in the hope that the enemy would get into the inner fortress, ransack it, find nothing and go away again.

mooism suggested escaping by means of an enormous catapult, which I'm frankly astonished nobody thought of in 1998 given that at the time my social group had a running in-joke all about enormous catapults. He also suggested calling on the UN for help, which I suppose is a better bet than Satan. Maybe.

So I posted a month ago about the police suspecting me of growing cannabis due to the tinfoil light-proofing over my bedroom windows. Among the responses to that was one from shermarama, who pointed out that hydroponics shops will actually sell you reflective plastic sheeting designed specifically for keeping light in or out, and that this might work better than tinfoil.

In fact the tinfoil, although the best idea I had yet come up with, is not terribly easy to work with due to tearing very easily. I made a couple of biggish holes in it when I put it up, and then there were an enormous number of pinpoint holes which it seems to have been gradually developing over a year by no terribly obvious mechanism. So at the weekend I placed an order over the Internet, and yesterday I celebrated the summer solstice by taking down my ad-hoc tinfoil and replacing it with proper blackout sheeting designed by professionals.

The same shop also supplied a 50m roll of light-proof metal foil tape to fasten the sheeting with. This impresses me in particular because I'd previously bought metal foil tape from Mackays who charge several pounds for a three-metre roll; I had assumed the high price was an unfortunate consequence of the nature of the stuff, but now I've bought 50m for under a tenner I suddenly believe Mackays' price to be an unconscionable rip-off.

Actually putting the stuff up was surprisingly fiddly. The most difficult bit was cutting the sheeting into the right size pieces, because it's so big (I got a 2m × 5m piece) and staticky and slippery that it's almost impossible to lay it out flat and measure right angles and distances on it. I think I know how I'd do it better the next time (start by measuring all the pieces you're going to need, work out the smallest rectangle of sheeting you can cut all those pieces out of, cut that rectangle off the main sheet and then you might have a fighting chance of opening that out flat for subdivision), but this time was quite a pain.

But once you manage to get the stuff up there, it works extremely well; I recommend it. Definitely better than any of my previous solutions. My windows are still not perfectly light-proofed (the main source of leakage is now crinkles in the metal tape where I put it up incompetently), but I've now reached the point where more light is coming in round the bedroom door than through the windows by a full order of magnitude, and that's more than good enough.

And now I've got reflectively covered windows, high electricity bills (well, in winter at least) and a paper trail linking me to a hydroponics shop. The search warrant can surely only be days away :-)

When I walk from the office to Tesco at lunchtime to buy my lunch, I will occasionally also buy some chocolate to cheer myself up, if I'm having the sort of day where I feel I need it.

Usually what then happens is that six hours later I get home entirely un-cheered-up. The reason for this is not, as you might immediately suspect, that chocolate is a transitory thing and any self-respecting source of angst can easily outlast a sugar rush. It's because, nine times out of ten, I then completely forget about the chocolate and so I don't eat it! I suppose the advantage is that I don't bloat like a balloon in times of great woe, but it generally makes me feel somewhat silly later on.

I've just found a pack of Minstrels from one of the bad days last week. I'm actually more cheerful today and don't need cheering up that badly, but I'm going to eat the Minstrels anyway because I know if I don't then they'll only lie there forgotten for anything up to a month or so.