Remember, remember...

...the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

Today's note actually has no connection with Papistry, Protestant martyrs or plots of any kind, but I could hardly let the day go past without some acknowledgment. Mind you, I thought at one time yesterday afternoon that we had brought forward the bonfire celebrations by 24 hours. There seemed to be an awful lot of smoke coming from the kitchen, as well as a disagreeable smell. I was rather surprised, as the Old Bat is a pretty decent cook - in fact, she is a very good cook - and I have never known her produce smoke and smells quite like we had. It turned out that it was all to do with the new cooker we had delivered yesterday morning. It seems that the smell will disappear once the cooker has been run in, as it were.

While we were eating, the fan in the oven was whirring exuberantly, but the OB assured me that she had turned off the oven. In fact, she said, she hadn't even used the fan oven, just the top one. But, she explained, the top oven has a fan to cool things down.

Cool things down? And there was me thinking that ovens were supposed to heat things up. But I was forgetting. Not only did the cooker come with an Irish telephone number for the help line, but three of the OB's great grandparents were Irish, which makes her three-eighths Irish and it is bound to show sometimes.

Which reminds me: I haven't heard a new Irish joke for a long time. Could it be that the thought police have finally got to us?

I love the one about what they put at the top of ladders on Irish building sites.

"STOP"

Mind you, I bought a ladder in France, and three rungs from the top is a sticker which says in both French and English, "Do not climb any higher". So perhaps it's not just an Irish thing.

With apologies to any Irishman or person of Irish descent who might by chance stumble across this.