• Last week with the children away I ended up working instead of having some time off. We did manage to get to London and have some rather impromptu beers in The Market Porter, as well as stay the night in a hotel in Richmond. Heartening, but not the three or four days off I'd wanted.
• I intended on taking some time off over the weekend or maybe even the Bank Holiday Monday, but ended up working that too since nobody was using $contract's production system (ideal out-of-hours time really).
• This week is the final stint on $contract so I'm in Marlow on Thursday hoping to hand over, but there's still "this is really really important" stuff being thrown around so I'll probably end up working into next week too.
• In between all of this I'm trying to arrange what I'm going to do next: while there's promising things on the horizon stuff's still moving way too slowly for my liking so I'll probably take the first thing that comes along.

1. Before making this, ensure the bowl from your ice-cream maker has been in deep freeze for a day or two otherwise it won't freeze it properly (it needs to be really cold!).
2. Pour the milk and cream in a saucepan and slowly bring to boiling. As soon as it starts to boil properly add in a splosh of Calvados.
3. While that's coming to heat, whisk the egg yolks and 50g of the caster sugar in a bowl.
4. Pour the boiling milk/cream mix over the egg yolk/sugar mix, whisking all the time.
5. Return the mix to a pan and add in the chocolate broken into little bits, whisking again to make sure it all merges together.
6. Add a little splosh more Calvados!
7. When it's nice and creamy and the alcohol has boiled off (important or it won't freeze), take off the heat and pour into a bowl to cool down.
8. Now we need a meringue type thing to make it a bit more chewy - use an electric whisk to mix up the remaining 2 egg whites and 100g caster sugar until the mix stands in stiff peaks (but isn't too dry).
9. Take a dessert spoon and while whisking the chocolate-cream mix, add in three dessert spoonfuls of the meringue mix to the now-cooling bowl.
10. When that's merged, use the electric whisk to remove any final chunks in the chocolate mix and put in the fridge.
11. Once cooled, pour into the ice-cream maker and leave it to churn.

Long-term back pain can be relieved through encouraging sufferers to adopt good posture through the Alexander technique, say UK researchers.

Recently the verb "Wyatting", named obviously after Robert Wyatt, appeared in some blogs and music magazines to describe the practice of playing weird tracks on a pub jukebox to annoy the other pub goers. The name was coined by Carl Neville, a 36-year-old English teacher from London, because one of the favourite LPs for this effect is Dondestan.

Robert Wyatt was quoted in The Guardian: as saying "I think it's really funny," and "I'm very honoured at the idea of becoming a verb." However, when asked if he would ever try it himself, he said "Oh no. I don't really like disconcerting people. Although often when I try to be normal I disconcert anyway."