We bought a new teapot on Saturday. It works a bit like a cafetiere but with tea leaves. Anyway after making several damn fine cups of tea we noticed that the pot produced rather a lot of “tea scum”. This got me thinking and wondering what tea scum was and whether it can be eliminated from the tea brewing process. The internet being what it is, surely the answer was only a few clicks away, so armed with a cup of tea (complete with scum) I set off on a voyage of discovery.

The general concensus is that tea scum is 15% calcium carbonate and 85% complicated organic chemicals. The calcium carbonate is formed by the combination of calcium and bicarbonate ions. The “complicated organic chemicals” are a family of polyphenols and are anti-oxidants that are generally regarded as being good for you by removing oxidising chemicals from your body. This work came from a study by chemists Michael Spiro and Deogratius Jaganyl from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London.

The other main theory put forward by Ralph A. Lewin from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, California is that tea leaves are covered with a waxy waterproof fat that dissolves in the hot water forming the scum.

So how do we stop scum? As most of the tea scum is to do with the calcium - it can be reduced by brewing with soft or distilled water and by not adding milk. Acid also reverses the calcium carbonate reaction, and so the addition of lemon juice should make a scum-free cuppa.

This is why I use linux.

Last night Billy and me were in the bath playing with water pistols. We had great fun recreating famous gun moments from the movies including “Hasta la vista, baby!”, “You talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here.” and my favourite was Billy’s version of Dirty Harry’s quote that went “Are you feeling mucky pup? Go ahead, make my day.”

A Japanese company has invented a device to understand cats. Apparently Meowlingual translates the cat’s emotion into phrases such as “I can’t stand it”. This is a follow on from Bowlingual for dogs. I am waiting for the Barnsley version (By-Eck-lingual).

Last weekend we visited Molly’s grandparents in Wales. They live in a lovely house on the edge of Llangorse Lake. It has a brilliant garden that the kids loved playing in, and we all had a fabulous time.

Saturday afternoon we went to a hot air balloon display, and Billy and Molly had their first proper go-kart race. Billy seemed a natural at overtaking by cutting up the car in front and forcing them out on the bends. They both did a grand job at entertaining the masses resulting in them being allowed to stay on in return for a couple of lager shandies.

We had planned to do a spot of trout fishing, but in the end ran out of time. Billy, of course, was still adamant that we went fishing on the lake; so we headed off with bamboo canes, lengths of string and two safety pins. The only bait we had were a couple of raisins, and needless to say the fish weren’t particularly interested. This didn’t matter to Billy who was quite happy catching ’seaweed’ and was convinced he had in fact caught the raisin after forgetting we put it on in the first place.

All in all a wonderful weekend and thanks to Roger and Roseanne for their generous hospitality (and of course summer pudding and sloe whisky).

Yesterday was Billy’s 4th birthday. My little boy is growing up…



The day began with a rather rapid unwrapping of his presents. It reminded me of Edward Scissorhands cutting hair - but with strips of wrapping paper flying everywhere. He then moved onto opening cards which began in a rather civilised way with Billy saying things like “…oooww a cat with a fishing rod” and “…aaah a cuddly bear”. This soon ended once he realised some of them also contained fivers - we then moved into a truly capitalist hunt for money with scant regard to the birthday cards containing it. All the cash he got was notes making the hunt trickier. When I was a kid any money I got for my birthday was always coins and so you could tell before opening whether the card in question would be financially rewarding.



At 3.00pm eight of Billies school mates arrived for Billy’s party. All parents left at 3.01pm leaving us to keep the unruly four year-olds under control for two hours. The party went really well with the kids generally doing what they wanted in the garden. This was punctuated by a couple of preplanned games.



We started with a “pin the patch on the pirate” game won by Freya (4) - who also helped entertain us adults by singing American Pie in Billy’s microphone - sure makes a change from the usual Wheels on the Bus and Wind the Bobbin Up. Next came the obligatory pass the parcel won by Ben. We finished with a pirate treasure hunt with several clues, each leading to the next. One hidden in a sand castle another under a slide, you get the idea, culminating with a box of treasure full of necklaces, jewels, badges and dozens of chocolate coins. I would highly recommend this as a way to finish a kids party as everybody wins and there are no long faces from the losers.



We managed to survive the party and I really enjoyed it too! I must brush up on my childrens magic for next year.

Fancy running your website off a Commodore 64? Contiki is an internet enabled operating system and desktop environment for very constrained systems, such as 8-bit homecomputers like the Commodore 64. Apparently it includes a web-server, telnet client and web-browser. Or would you prefer to use an Atari 800 web server? I feel a mini-project coming on…

Apparently the bearded one has now managed the astounding feat of absorbing a Jaffa cake with his mind.

This comes courtesy of Seabass 7 a spoof news stories page that I find quite amusing. The site is in the style of the Onion - but is more UK based. It just needs to support RSS and my day will be happier.