etc.

· Ever since we got broadband at home, I have become one of those perpetually online people, you know the kind, the type that checks their email first thing in the morning, a weekday morning that is, between 6 and 7 AM. When we had dialup I’d laugh hysterically if you told me that I could be found noodling around on the Web at 11.30 pm on a Saturday night, not because I should be out being the gadabout, but because I would more likely be found reading in bed.

· We’re thinking of taking up curling. Yes, curling. There is a curling club about 3 minutes and one street away from us and, having curled very recreationally in the past, we think we’d like to become regulars.

· When we were kids, my mum used to make my sister and I eat soft-boiled eggs, the type of thing a child considers cruel and unusual punishment despite all the good-for-you psychology that went with every egg we ate. About 15 years after vowing to have eaten my very last soft-boiled egg ever, I tried one again and Big Surprise, I loved it. I hadn’t tried to cook one at home until this morning at 8am. Given that the success of a soft-boiled hinges on cooking time, and also given that 8am on a Sunday morning is too early to call my mum to ask just how long it takes a soft-boiled egg to boil to that perfect soft-boiled consistency (despite the ebullient rush of joy she would undoubtedly have felt upon hearing this question), I did a quick search online only to discover that there are as many ways to cook a soft-boiled egg as there are people cooking them. The techniques range from labour and time intensive (boil water, pour over eggs and let stand for 10 minutes, drain eggs, boil water again, pour over eggs and let stand for 7 minutes, remove eggs from water, serve) to potentially disastrous (boil water, lower eggs into boiling water gently, if eggs are cold some cracking may occur, boil for 3½ minutes) to just plain wrong (boil eggs in water for 20 minutes). How do you cook a soft-boiled egg?