I find it hard to believe that in my early twenties I managed to blog around three times per week. These days, due to time-restrictions, I barely manage once a month. What did I do back then? The trouble with blogging this sporadically is that when I write a blog post, I feel that I really ought to be writing about something of monumental importance, rather than just, well, a blog post.

Anyway. I’m going to write about something that isn’t monumentally important, in order to take the pressure off.

Yesterday evening I played at a ceilidh. Prior to the gig, there were a couple of setbacks. Firstly, the accordion player’s knee was badly damaged in an incident which apparently involved the concertina player and a towel. Then the guitarist, who’d organised it (the ceilidh, not the knee-damaging incident), phoned the rest of the band at about 5pm to say that it was a 7pm start rather than 8pm. Minor panic ensued. However, despite both of these things, we got to the venue almost on time, set up and played the first half, as usual.

Then there was a break for the buffet. [At this point a slightly scary man admired my new spats (yes, those are the actual ones, and I am possibly more pleased about them than any other item of legwear ever), spent the rest of the evening making comments about them and possibly may have winked once. But this is a digression.]

On the buffet table, [insert fanfare here] there were two little bottles of hand sanitiser! Somebody had clearly thought this through. At ceilidhs, the formula is usually dance, eat a buffet, dance. (Generally overlaid throughout with drinking.) During the dances there is a great deal of hand-contact, often with quite a lot of people (especially if there’s a grand chain involved, or if it’s a progressive dance in which dancers change partner every time through). That’s potentially a lot of free transport for germs, immediately followed by the potential-transporters eating a bunch of food.

Quite a few of ceilidhs that I’ve played at serve a hog-roast in the middle, eaten in sandwiches. That means eaten with your fingers, which have just been holding lots of other fingers – and I don’t see lots of people queuing up to wash their hands before the buffet: they go straight from the dance floor to the food. And there isn’t usually any hand sanitiser. Yikes.

So: hand sanitiser is definitely a good thing for ceilidhs, especially if, like me, one has buggered up one’s immune system by having ten serial colds over winter. I urge all ceilidh bands and also normal people to suggest it to anyone they know who might be organising one: if it becomes standard practice we could collectively save the NHS what will probably turn out to be a really small amount of money, but, you know, it’s still something…

(Also. While you’re there. Tell them that Standard Ceilidh Organising Practise is to provide the band with some nice Australian Shiraz, a good quality cheesecake, interesting salads with decent vinaigrette, assorted delicious proteins and carbohydrates, heated seats, disco lights, and a party bag to take home. But mainly this is about the hand sanitiser.)

This is the state of the alley between my house and Sainsbury’s supermarket:

In a word, eek. Getting across this is like crossing a very bad, lumpy ice rink. It is snow-that-was-just-starting-to-melt-and-suddenly-refroze, which I don’t think there’s a word for. I have found a nice Wikipedia article on different types of snow, but disappointingly the type pictured above seems only to fit under the term ‘ice’. I was really hoping it would called something exciting.

Next time I make it across the rink to the supermarket I am considering making an extra purchase of a large bag of economy salt, and gritting myself a little path down the middle.

.. I forgot about the seven hours or so in Minneapolis Airport on the way back.

In Minneapolis Airport, on the balcony which is reserved for quietness [and quietness can indeed be achieved, apart from the fact that it's open to the main concourse, so the sounds of people and piped music make their way up quite easily] there are deep, wide, armchair-like leather seats, which, if placed facing each other, can be made into a little boat-shaped nest to sleep in. I did this for quite a long time, alternating between sleeping and reading a book, with occasional breaks to wander about and buy more food to relieve the monotony of Still Being In an Airport.

In the middle of bout of book-reading, I saw, out of the edge of my eye, what I perceived to be a very fast moving small brown thing come flying out of the adjacent corridor along the ground, and disappear under my seat. I jumped up to see what it was, partly due to the notion that I might be so tired that I was now hallucinating, and wanted to prove to myself that there really was a Brown Thing. I couldn’t find it, but a man several metres away looked over at me scrabbling frantically and said, ‘I saw it too – a little mouse. It’s gone under my seat.’

So a) I wasn’t hallucinating, and b) it wasn’t a bomb or anything – just a mouse. Good. Settled back down, but we observed the same mouse (well, either that or one that looked very much like it, anyway – don’t know how many lived there and whether they had some sort of relay system in place) descend from a hole in the seat of the man’s chair and run backwards and forwards between chair and corridor several more times. It must have been the official Airport Mouse – seemed quite well-established, anyway.

I can’t remember much else, apart from that we ate Mexican food, and one of the airport shops was full of merchandise covered in Uplifting Slogans™, which made me feel quite miserable.

Anyway, that’s the end of my writing about the trip [except for passing references that will possibly occur in future], because it was several months ago now and I’m starting to feel my age.

Normal complaining will be resumed in due course.

Here’s a mixture of a few more pics from the trip to the USA:

A very nice bar we visited in Portland - the Barley Mill, serving McMenamim's beer

Some water in Seattle. I particularly like the 'no wake' sign; expresses both my sentiments and level of linguistic skills first thing in the morning.

The Pho Soup place also did some very nice frozen yoghurt...

..which we ate next to the Google building. Why is the Google building not white, clean and shiny?

I liked the quotations marks here, on a small supermarket in Newburg. Maybe it is secretly run by McDonald's?

And finally, a pretty river near Newburg.

Just signed up with Ha Ha Bar and Grill’s online club because they’re offering a £10 discount voucher when two or more people spend £20 or more on food. Which sounds good to me.

I didn’t create my own password when I signed up, so they emailed me one that had been ‘randomly generated’. I think. It was really quite surprising: ‘dinner69sister’.  I have decided to change it to something else.

The other day I read a newspaper article which reported that sales of processed ready meals were way down, and people had started buying actual ingredients with which to cook. Astonishing.

If it had been the Daily Mail, the article may have gone on to speculate that maybe the recession was not caused by irresponsible banking after all, and was entirely and cruelly engineered by Jamie Oliver as part of his quest to improve everyone’s health through eating better food. However, it wasn’t, so it didn’t. Even so, this is at least one good thing to have come out of it all.

It went on to report that sales of frivolous little office toys for adults are at an all time low, and that this year’s most popular Christmas Present For Grown-Ups is a woolly jumper. I don’t think we are quite returning to the traditional ‘everyone’s auntie knits them a really tasteless one that has their name knitted into it and doesn’t fit and is itchy’ state of play, but if frugality is now, out of necessity, extremely fashionable, you never know. They’ll probably be next season’s must-have. So if you do receive one, don’t wear it once out of politeness and then use it to line the cat basket. Keep the wrapping paper and ‘to/from’ label, and put it on eBay as ‘brand new with tags’.

Sauce: made from tomato ketchup, balsamic vinegar and chilli powder.

With stir fry made from noodles, eggs, prawns, peas, olive oil and soy sauce.

[Plus glass of whisky because I was in a foul mood about not being able to play a really quite simple rhythm in time to the beat.]

Wrong, yet right.