Living out west

We visited some friends on the weekend at their new place in Sydney's south west - around Ingleburn to be exact. Or right next door to Macquarie Fields, scene of some riots not long ago.

The trip down was pretty quick - about 45 minutes, but they told me that on weekdays, the traffic heading into town on the motorway starts banking up at 5.30am and is gridlock not long after. No thanks - that's not for me.

They're on a biggish block in a gated community - 880 square metres, which is a bit under the old quarter acre, but they have a park next door which makes it seem much larger. It's at least double the size of the block that we are living on at the moment, so one can't complain. Our whole house and block could fit into their backyard.

Their house is big and new, but it's definitely not for me. I didn't like the brick finish, nor the interior finishes, or the design. It just wasn't me. It's an off-the-plan design by one of the major builders, and the whole suburb looks very much the same - new, shiny and predisposed to date very quickly.

What got me is that none of the houses in the entire development had any eaves. No one bothers with keeping out the sunlight anymore - they just install massive air conditioners. Instead of installing the biggest model of home air conditioner, they had gone and bought the smallest commercial unit. It was the size of a small Hyundai. It's a sensible choice, but I hate to think what the power bills will be like next year.

The suburb comes complete with two tennis courts, a 25 metre swimming pool and a golf course (got no idea how many holes). You get golf course membership with the block, but still have to pay green fees. To date, they haven't used any of the sports facilities as they've been too busy laying grass and building retaining walls and the driveway and a huge fish pond.

Call me a location snob if you like, but I hope to never move out that far. Yes, the place is free of hoons and graffiti and noise, and there is plenty of room in the backyard and all that, but it just failed to grab me. We could move out there, have an affordable mortgage and a big block and house, but I still prefer to have a horrible mortgage and a smaller house and block and live within coo-ee of the city.

Why is this? It sounds like mad behaviour to me.

Westies

Another day, another ride out west to try and find the route to Parramatta. This time, I managed to get lost going around Homebush Bay and ended up riding past Silverwater Prison. I don't know how I ended up there. I got home and had a look at the area on Google Maps and it took me five minutes to work out where I ended up. I was seriously off course. I really need to take a GPS with me. I am crap with directions.

Once I got back on course, I did manage to find the turn off to Parramatta. Like all good government efforts, it was well disguised. You actually had to ride past the sign that marked the route to Parramatta, and be a good 50 yards beyond it before you could read it. I would like to find the idiot responsible for that and beat some sense into him with his own sign post. The only way I found it was to stop every time a bike path crossed the main route and turn to the right (North) and see where it went. That meant a lot of riding up dead end routes, turning around and trying again.



Here is the sign in close up, as viewed from the bike path. No, it is not blurry because I took the photo from a distance - it is blurry because there is nothing intelligible written on it. I got right up close and personal with the sign and it made no difference. It is simply a blank sign.



Here is the view of the sign as you are zooming down the bike path. At this point, I was doing about 35km/h, and the sign is on the far right - almost, but not quite obscured by a huge concrete pylon. The dumb bastards should have actually put it next to the bike path, not 50 yards off to the right. Imagine if you were driving down say the Hume Highway and the sign marking the off ramp to Goulburn was actually 500 metres down the off ramp, and the only way to find it was to drive down the off ramp to see if you had driven off at the correct ramp. It seems that when road engineers get hooked up with a cycle project, they lose all common sense and rationality.



This is quite off topic, but it is the back of Terry Shields Toyota, which is a big time car dealer over here. Check out all the graffiti on that wall. Would you buy a used car from a man that can't be buggered to keep his premises spick and span?




This last photo is just of something plain odd. There I am, zipping along underneath the motorway when I spot this guy sitting in the grass off to the side with his shirt off. His clothes were neatly folded nearby (just out of shot). I have no idea why he stopped here like this - but I was so intrigued, I did a U turn and took a photo of him.



All in all, the ride was a bit of a screw up. I misjudged the temperature, and just about damn well froze as a result. I had to keep my tempo up to a ridiculous level to keep warm, which just about killed me. Next time, I am wearing my jacket. Getting lost also added a bit of distance, and of course once I took the turn off towards parramatta, the signs marking the bike path just died out entirely, and I never did find my way there. But I did see a bit of Harris Park (I think), so I am setup for next time.

44km covered in 1.5 hours. Not bad going for an old fart.

Inconsistent safety nazis

I have been hassling the local Council to paint 10 metres of yellow paint on the road near our house in order to warn motorists not to park there - Council are treating a bit of road as a cash cow revenue raising venture, and it shits me. Especially when I am one of those that gets given a $173 parking fine.

Council of course are less than dead keen to do so. Why smash up a perfectly good piggy bank unless you absolutely have to?

The last letter I got from the Council about it made it sound like painting yellow lines was the equivalent to pulling teeth out with pliers. If that is the case, why are the safety nazis so damned liberal with throwing yellow paint around the school grounds? They had some people in over the school holidays to lay some asphalt in the playground, and a day or so after it was laid, some more people came in to lay a drain pipe through the middle of it, and of course the drain pipe was not buried deeply enough, or the asphalt should have been laid on a few more inches of sand, so the playground now has a small speed hump right through the middle of it.

This "speed hump" is now of course marked by two parallel lines of yellow paint.



Why is it that they can put down 50 yards of the stuff in the playground without batting an eyelid, but putting down 10 yards in the street is the labor of Job? I guess I will have to start telling them that the kerb outside our house is a "safety risk" - then some fool will come around and splash paint all over it.

The hilarious thing though is the inconsistency of the nazis' approach. Here we have steps with yellow paint across the top step, but the other steps have missed out. If I dared to point this out to the head nazi, I am sure that a full blown inquisition would result and the guilty would be srtung up by their thumbs from the monkey bars.



You walk around the corner, and yellow paint is everywhere. Some safety nazi is going to see the inconsistency in this one day and blow a fuse like a confused Dalek.



The really dangerous stuff of course is entirely unprotected by paint or padding. It just so happened that I walked under this set of monkey bars at speed, and collected them with the top of my skull. It still feels a bit weepy where I made contact, and that was two days ago.

I wish to shoot some Ibis

Our Council, in all its wisdom, has installed bins that are little more than large bird feeders.



Over the course of about an hour, two Ibis managed to rummage through this rubbish bin and extract half the contents and scatter them around the neighbournood. I took one look at it and declined to clean up after them, knowing that they'd be back at it as soon as I had turned the corner and my efforts would be to no avail.



Note to self - must buy .410 shotgun.

Shirts

At last, the search for a business shirt is over. I prowled through the QVB building this week, thinking that such an overpriced mecca of fashion would have at least one store that could sell me a shirt. And it did - Country Road.

It has been a long time since I have been in Country Road - 5 years at least. Last time I bought something there, it was shoes, and although they are a delight to look at, they are a pain to wear. I have not been back since.

Going in there was a last resort, but it worked out for the best. I walked up to a shirt rack, immediately saw two shirts I liked, tried one on for size and then told the very nice gay shop assistant to pick me out some ties to match. It took about 5 minutes for him to sell me $450 worth of clothes, and then 15 minutes to wrap them all up.

During that time, we had a great chat about where the mens clothing business is going. He said that Roger David are now targetting school leavers rather than the 30-40 year old set, and as a result, their clothes are horrible. Oxford are targetting fashion victims that shop at least every month, and sometimes daily. I guess that's why I can't stand them anymore.

This bloke at Country Road was great - he was the kind of bloke that Oxford used to employ. Someone that knows their clothes, is good to chat to and makes you feel comfortable about what you just forked out for.

I am going back to that shop. No question about it.

Go west young cyclist

I am completely shagged. J kicked me out of the house at lunchtime and told me not to come back for a few hours as she needed to work. So I printed out a map of the bike paths near Homebush, marked it up with magic marker and then forgot to take it with me.

I took the now familiar route out to Homebush, and then tried to find my way to Parramatta. Along the way, I ran into a line marking gang. I could have zipped around the cars and gone on my way, but the paint spray was blowing across the road and it stunk. I didn't want to risk ending up covered in white line marking paint from head to foot, and I don't think the bike needs to have that speckled look about it.



The interesting thing is that the paint appeared to dry almost immediately. You can see here a very shiny white line, which is a big change from the almost non-existent markings that were there before. I think that since we are now in a new financial year, the Council is madly spending the maintenance budget.

Once I got to Homebush, I looped around to the north of the stadiums and things (going past the archery park of all places) and ended up on an excellent bike path that goes around the Newington Armoury. The armoury obviously used to move munitions around by a small train, as the track is still in place, and there are signs up where the track crosses the bike path.



I don't think there is much chance of being hit by a train, since the rails have a lot of rust on the surface. If the track is in use, the trains going past scrub the rust off and leave the rails nice and shiny. The Homebush tracks look like they have not seen the steel wheels of a train in years.

Still, I guess some shiny bummed bureaucrat figured that safety warning signs needed to be erected anyway. If they had any sense, they'd tell you to be careful when crossing the tracks, as the skinny tyres of a road bike could be thrown off by hitting the tracks at an angle. I wasn't thinking when I crossed the tracks, and reckoned that if it had been wet, I would have ended up on the bitumen.

The bike path is excellent - wide, flat and well surfaced and there was almost no one on it when I went around. There were only two annoying pedestrians - annoying because as I approached them, I rang my bell to warn them of my approach, and one moved one way and one went the other and they ran into each other and managed to block the entire path! Before I could collide with them, the more sensible one grabbed her partner and pulled her to their left, thus clearing the way.

I meandered this way and that and soon ended up on a bike path that goes along the side of the M4 motorway. Here is a photo of some awful road side sculpture - these things always remind me of sperm.



After a few kilometres, the path takes a new approach and goes under the motorway. It's kind of eery how it twists and turns beneath the concrete columns of the roadway above. This bit is great - smooth and flat, but it is bedeviled by roads that cross it at very regular intervals. You have to stop at each intersection, since the roads are terrible and it would be death to just zoom across without looking really carefully. That annoyed the hell out of me as I was zipping along at a nice 35km/h, and then I'd have to stop, cross and build up to cruising speed again, then stop and repeat the whole exercise.



At some point, the bike path comes out from under the motorway and it then follows a canal. I thought this sign was a classic - cycleway subject to flooding. I never expected to see one of these on a bike path.



The canal itself is a complete festering eyesore, and is a good reminder why no sane person would live in this area. It's a shithole. Graffiti over every flat surface, rubbish everywhere, empty factory units all over the place and a generally rundown, crappy atmosphere.



The canal a bit further along reminded me of T2 and the chase scene with the truck.



The graffiti along the canal is the usual mindless crud. I am at a loss to know why can of spray paint are still on sale. If you need to paint your car, you use a proper spray gun and compressor. It's not like they cost a bomb anymore - you can go to Bunnings and buy a cheap Chinese thing to paint for front gate for not much more than the cost of a few cans of paint. The bloody things should just be abolished.



It was not long after this that I came to the end of the line. It was a sudden stop - I was cycling on a good bike track, then it just petered out in a back suburban street. A big problem with this cycle path is the lack of signage - there are paths peeling off left and right every few hundred metres, but not a single sign to tell you where any of them lead.

When I got to the end, I spotted a path with some unusual "no entry" signs posted on it. I could not work out why you shouldn't be allowed to walk up this path to the structure that I have badly outlined in yellow.



So I went up and had a closer look. If you peek through the gap, you can just see one of those blue emergency phone signs - this thing leads into one of those breakdown bays on the side of the motorway. I guess you can abandon your car and walk down this path, or the NRMA can park in a side street and walk up to the bay.



On the way back, I just had to stop and take a photo of this small factory. It is the stinkiest thing that I have smelt in months. Years even. I don't know what they are doing in there, but it reeks. I tried to get around the front to see if there was a sign out the front, but that would have involved dismounting and carrying the bike over a kerb (twice) and I couldn't be that bothered.



Speaking of railways, this bike path crosses a railway as well. It's some kind of siding for a cement company. The rails looked shiny enough for me to suspect that it is used every now and then, but I felt there was no risk in just bolting across this line. That's two railways crossed in one day.



At one point, I was riding along with no idea as to where I was. Then I looked through the trees to my right and saw the M4 toll gates, and I knew exactly where I was. I didn't know where I was going, but at least I had a landmark that I could work with.



The final photo. This one was taken just outside of Homebush. It shows the cycle path disappearing into a spot where it appears that there is not much headroom under a bridge. As it turns out, the path drops away dramatically and there is enough room to get under the bridge, but there is not a lot to spare. If I sat up straight, my helmet probably would have collected the concrete undersurface of the bridge.



All up, it was a 40km ride, and it took me 1 hour and 50 minutes. A good 20 minutes of that was spent standing on the side of the road reading maps, or taking photos, but that dragged my average speed for the whole ride down to 23km/h, which is about what I normally average going to work (allowing for stop signs, traffic lights, traffic, pedestrians, dogs etc).

The big difference is that this ride is really flat. There was one small hill in Auburn, and whilst it was longish, it was not steep. I was happily cranking along at 40km/h in spots, only to have to come to a crashing halt when the bike path ended suddenly at an 8 lane highway. The weather was lovely - 21 degrees and almost no wind. Perfect.

After getting home and studying Google maps and some RTA maps, I think I now know how to get to Parramatta. Todays ride finished shortly after I saw a sign saying "Westmead - 4km". I now plan to make it to the other side of Parramatta.

I hate these signs

I can't stand going past a public school and seeing signs like this plastered all over the fence. It doesn't matter where you go - the bloody teachers union have stuck them up.

I find this one to be at the lower end of the annoyance scale. The ones that really tick me off are the ones that proclaim public education as the only form of education that deserves any funding at all, and that scolds parents for deciding not to use the public system.



I get annoyed because I feel that the Teachers Federation wants all kids to be taught in the public system, and for parents to have no choice about where they send their kids to be educated. I find that to be incredibly offensive. We're lucky around here in that we have some reasonably good public schools and the teachers that I have met seem to be competent and useful. That's good. I also know that this is not the case across all schools, and I'd hate to move to an area where the schools are crap and the teachers useless and for us to have no choice about where the kids can be educated.

If that was the case, I'd go for home schooling.

Yellow snot

I had the strangest experience today of blowing out yellow snot.

I've blown out bright green snot whilst in the depths of the flu.

I've blown out red snot after a blood nose.

I've blown out black snot after working in a shed full of charcoal.

I've blown out brown snot after working in sheep yards.

I've blown out white snot after spending a lot of time driving in limestone country with no windscreen.

But I've never blown out yellow snot. It was almost bronze. I was so amazed, I stopped blowing my nose for fear that my brain fluid was leaking out. It was most bizarre.

It happened after going for a reasonable ride on a cold day, and I've had the flu for months, so I might have finally burst some horrible pus filled sack in my nasal cavity and this was the result.

Either that, or the dust at the building sites at Rhodes contains some nasty stuff.

Stay tuned for more snot news tomorrow.

On the road again - again

Finally, I managed to wring a measly 34 kilometres out of my body today. That involved riding out to Homebush, stooging around a bit and then crossing the Parramatta River to have a look at Meadowbank (and to try and follow the route to Eastwood - wherever that is).

This photo is from the Olympic Park at Homebush. I have just noticed that there is not a single person in this shot. On a weekend, you'd expect maybe 50 - 100 people to be walking along here. The place was dead as can be today.

I took this photo for the paving. Architects seem to love laying down stupid paving bricks in fancy patterns. I have no problem with the use of pavers, but in this case, they have used pavers that leave a large gap between each brick. At each corner, there is a hole the size of a 10 cent piece.

I'm glad I don't wear stilletos. Women in heels would be totally unable to walk down this path. I hate it because riding over it is horrible - it's like riding over cobblestones. This is a park for kiddies and things - not the route of Paris-Roubais.



These next two photos show apartment constructions at Rhodes, which is just across the water from Homebush. Whenever I ride out this way, I always remember that these apartments are built on top of a toxic waste dump.



On the other side of this street, there are a row of these funny little houses. The houses look worse than crap. I don't know why the developer didn't snap these up and flatten them and drop another row of hideous apartments on the site. Then again, maybe that will be the next stage.



This photo shows the bike path that has been laid over the old railway bridge that crosses the Parramatta River (the new rail bridge is on the left). The old bridge has seen better days - it certainly hasn't seen a coat of paint in years (and I don't include the graffiti to the right).

Turning it into a bike bridge was pretty easy - they just laid some kind of fibre cement sheeting over the rail lines and nailed it down - if you look over the edges of the sheeting, you can still see the sleepers underneath (and the water down below).



I put this next photo in to show how wonderfully well bike paths are sign posted in Sydney. The yellow circle indicates the path - half hidden by untrimmed trees and completely lacking in signage. Well, there is a sign, but you only see it after you have ridden past the path - and if you happen to glance backwards to your right.



If any cyclist does in fact find their way onto the path, they'll pass over the traffic counter pictured below. The RTA or local council must have been hoping that zero bikes passed this way, giving them an excuse to further neglect this hidden infrastructure. I turned around a rode over it several times for good measure.



One thing that I do on these rides is look at property. Funny that just around the corner from home, I should find this abandoned house.



I can tell it's abandoned by the boarded up windows, the graffiti on the fence and the totally overgrown garden. It's interesting that even with really high house prices around here, a place is just left to go to hell like this. I would have thought that it would have been demolished and replaced with a McMansion by now.

I might have to check it out - spooky dead bodies and all that kind of thing.

A sport I will be avoiding

I read this lovely snippet today:

"Attaching kites to surfboards has spawned a generation of airborne beach-bums and a gruesome new chapter in sailing injuries (kite-surfers tend to smash at high speed into the balconies of beachfront hotels)."

Wonderful.

A long way for a five dollar part

I managed to track down a supplier for a small bit of plastic for a broken wing mirror. It was up in Vineyard, which is 54km from here.

It was a good excuse to test out the new GPS, so I went for a drive this morning to pick up the part.

I had to go through two tolls ($2.20 each) and the round trip of 110km would have used about 13 litres of diesel, which currently costs about $1.30 a litre.

The part cost $5.17. The transport cost was around 4 times that.

At least I can now seen down the side of the car. It's rather disconcerting driving around with a wonky mirror.

The GPS is fine by the way.

I am so over Missy Higgins

I never want to hear that whinging, nasal whine ever again. Please, go overseas and tour for a couple of years and settle down in France... or Thailand... but don't come back.

I am going to have to ban the use of the radio in the car in case she comes on. It's going to be a long time listening to the iPod.

Local wankers

Here is a lovely selection of graffiti around our suburb.

To start with - "smash the system".

What system? Idiots.



Then there is this knobhead - spraying a tree. This idiot should be hung from this tree by his thumbs.



This is someones house. What I don't get is that this house has been like this for weeks. They have spraypaint on their lounge room window. What type of person doesn't clean it off their windows?



And then there is this at the local skate park - "fuck scooters". I guess the skateboarders don't take kindly to scooters being ridden around this park. Kind of like surfers not liking esky lids, and skiers hating snowboarders.

Xmas in July?

This house is on a road that I have been cycling down for several years now. Each year, this place has a stack of Christmas lights up, but they never manage to take down their big "Merry Christmas" sign. It's been there for at least 2 years now - maybe 3.

These things are worse than political posters for the Greens - they never get taken down.

Get buried elsewhere

I snapped this photo as I was walking past a local funeral home today. I loved the bit about how "we are still able to serve you"...... as if the dead are going to care.

Finding spare parts

Yesterday afternoon was spent in the delightful beer garden of a Balmain pub. The weather was cool, but not wet, and the beer garden was enclosed in a big plastic tent and had a gas heater every few feet, so it was quite pleasant.

The smokers however were banished to a small area outside the tent. Funny that, given that if they continue, they might end up inside an oxygen tent in 30 years time.

There were not a lot of smokers there - 3 or 4 max. Someone mentioned that pub trade has crashed since the smoking ban was introduced. Well, that might be the case, but the slack is being taken up by families with kids. The beer garden was only half full, but everyone there was a family with kids from about 12 months up to 15 years. The pub itself was almost completely empty - even the pokies area was bereft of patrons, which is something that I never thought to see in my lifetime.

Whether this trend continues is something to be seen.

The shitful thing was that when we got back to the car, I found my wing mirror had been half knocked off by a passing car - or a bus more likely. We were parked on one of the main arteries of Balmain, but it was a narrow and well choked artery. It was one of those streets where traffic going one way would have to stop so that traffic going the other way could proceed past the parked cars. A bus must have taken liberties with the space available and banged up my mirror.

It wouldn't matter if everyone in Balmain drove Smart cars - the streets are still too narrow for two Smart cars to pass abreast.

The annoying thing is that the mirror itself is not smashed - it's the mounting bracket that is broken. I decided to do the modern thing today and Googled Landrover suppliers in Australia. I found four, and had a quick look at their web sites.

Their websites were rooted. Absolutely amatuerish and completely lacking in catalogues and useable search engines. I tried searching for "mirror" on all of them and they returned nothing.

One of them said, "If you can't find the part in our catalogue, contact us using this online form".

To start with, I went through the entire site and was unable to find any further reference to a catalogue. There wasn't even a page that said, "We don't have an online catalogue, but if you rng this number, we will post you one".

They did have a "contact" page though that you could use to submit a request for a part. I filled it in and submitted it and got some sort of apache server error. "mail server not found". So I guess my request was never properly submitted either.

Tomorrow, I'm going to have to track down this part the old fashioned way - pick up the phone and start making calls. Some people just don't get this while internet "revolutionise your business" thingy. But then again, a lot of people are boneheads.

Harry Potter frenzy?

What frenzy? We went down to Kmart at about 6pm last night and bought a copy of the latest book. It was easy to find - it was stacked 20 high just inside the front door, and the stack was about the size of a Mini.

I almost tripped over it of course. Stupid place to leave a pile of books.

There was hardly anyone in the store, so we breezed through the checkouts as well. All up, it took 10 minutes to buy the book, and 8 minutes of that was spent in the kitchenware section choosing which set of tongs to purchase.

We then left the store, and I didn't bump into any Potter-maniacs walking around with their heads in the book and not watching where they are going.

I even managed to read a few chapters of it last night before going to bed as the rest of the household happily shared the book.

I presume they still sold a squillion copies on opening day anyway. It's just that the sales frenzy was nowhere near me. Then again, I did buy it at Broadway, which is very much a University type mall, and Uni students probably think that it would be very uncool these days to be seen as a Potter-maniac. Kind of like being into Dungeons and Dragons.

Success!

I finally managed to get the local Police Station cleaned up. As I rode past today, I noticed this bloke extracting rubbish from the hedges with one of those extendable grabby things. He had a rather large sack next to him, and it was looking pretty full. Just around the corner was his ute - the sign on the door said something like "Property Management Services", so I take it they got a kick up the bum and an order to clean the place up quick smart.



How did this come about?

I rang the Police Commissioner's office and asked a lovely lady there if she had any record of recieving a letter from our useless local member. She searched the computer system for 10 minutes, and could find no trace of it. She gave me a fax number and suggested that I fax my letter direct to her. I told her that I wanted to make my useless local member earn her pay, so I emailed the MP and told her that the Police never got a letter from her, and passed on the fax number that they should send it to.

I hope they are feeling suitably useless.

I then rang the local Council and went through the same exercise. A very helpful bloke searched and searched and searched and could find no trace of a letter from my MP about this problem. So I emailed the MP a second time to let her know that the Council never got a letter from her either.

Sounds like she is good at sending out phantom letters. What I don't get is that when I wrote to her, they should have registered my letter. They would then write to the appropriate department on my behalf (it's called making a representation) and they should have put a flag into their system to follow it up if a reply was not forthcoming within a certain period (say, 1 month). The useless buggers couldn't even be bothered to follow up. If I had not heard back from the Police after 2 1/2 months, I would be wondering why and starting to make phone calls.

I could have sorted all this out a long time ago by using a contact in the Police Force. One call to them would have done the trick. However, I wanted to test the useless MP to see if she really was as bad as I have been told - and I was right. Just a complete waste of space.

Food photos

I stopped for lunch in a Japanese eatery in Chatswood today - a good sashimi bento box for $15. It took forever to make, but it was pretty good in the end.

As I sat there reading the paper and waiting for my meal, I watched a series of dishes being photographed professionally for a new restaurant that the owners are opening somewhere else. The photographer had one of those big umbrella type flashes, and he disturbed my paper reading every time he snapped a shot. Thankfully, he seemed to know what he was doing, so he didn't need to take 50 shots of each dish.

It was worth putting up with it, because the owners offered tastings of the dishes to those of us sitting there after the photos were taken. There were only half a dozen of us in there, so I got to try some interesting things, including a crispy friend sushi roll. It's not everyday you get to see food being photographed in a restaurant - I had always assumed that they did it in a studio, rather than on site.

Pity I did not have my camera with me to photograph the photographer.

Muffins

I tried baking muffins for the first time in my life this week. Don't ask me why it was muffins - it just was.

I tried two recipes - one from a Delia Smith cook book (which is an excellent book) and another from a Donna Hay magazine.

The Delia Smith muffins were good (apple and pear), but they failed to muff. I did two batches, and each turned out flat, but tasty.

The Donna Hay ones turned out much better (chocolate and orange) and they disappeared faster than the other batches. The also muffed up much better.

After re-reading Delia, I found that I was probably over-mixing the mixture. With muffins, apparently all you do is stir it just enough to combine the ingredients, and no more. Trying to get the lumps out will wreck the rising process. I think I am too used to stirring the hell out of everything. I will have to try again tomorrow - they have been such a success that 36 muffins have been scoffed in 2 days.

They're not big muffins though - they're not like the huge, crumbly things that you buy at a cafe. They are more like cupcakes, and they are moist and definitely non-crumbly. They might not be fluffy, but they are delicious.