Proper Christmas Decorations

Here is a picture of my Christmas tree. It was tastefully decorated by Dr K and then I put a few finishing flourishes on it.

Can you see the bit's I've added? Ignore Deadpool at the top. 

Here's a closer look:

Is that...? Why yes. Yes it is. 

It's a bauble that I made, featuring that beautiful, christmassy moment when Hans Gruber fell to his death at the Nakatomi Plaza, from the classic christmas movie Die Hard.

And because I'm a kind, and generous blogger, here is a version of the bauble that you can print off and cut out and put on your own Christmas tree. 

You're welcome. 

Rasher

My brother was having a bacon sandwich. What more excuse do I need to mock up a bacon themed tabloid rag?

Admit it... you'd subscribe.

A Tiny, Tiny Tardigrade video!

How would you like me to use my smooth, silky, soothing voice to read you an extract from The Tiny Tiny Tardigrade? You would?  Well you're in luck!

The Badfinger Swearing Chart

As any seasoned writer* will tell you, one of the most important things about writing a book is having a complete understanding of the number of naughty words in it. And what better way to enhance one's understanding, than to break it down in a chart or two?

This is one of the exciting new charts that I produced for Badfinger. It breaks down the usage of naughty words used inside the book, Now, if you're a prude, you can make an informed decision on whether or not you want to read the book. Huzzah.

In other news, Dr K is proof reading the latest, and hopefully last proof copy. Assuming she doesn't find any horrific problems in there, I should be able to submit the book to Amazon really, really soon!

Also, for old-time's sake...

( *Of which I am not one.)

Cover Art

Fancy a sneak peak at the cover art for Badfinger?

What we have here is a pie chart. I counted the words in each section of the book, so each slice is an accurate representation of the content.

I like pie.

Incoming Badfinger

Not content with having one book listed on Amazon, I have been secretly preparing a second awesome literary masterpiece. It's going to be called 'Badfinger' and it is a compilation of some of the best posts from this here blog.

Here's a sneak preview of it:

Sweet, huh?

It still needs a little tweaking, and then there's some proof reading to do, but you will be able to hold it in your grubby little hands very, very soon!

Tardigrades

Here is a picture of yours truly reading The Tiny, Tiny Tardigrade to my niece.  I think she liked it.

Merry Christmas and all that jazz

Here's a quick Christmas post for you. If you're reading this on Christmas morning, I'll be in my car heading North to visit people that I'm related to. I expect to eat a lot of food and be given many presents.

More importantly, I'm going to be giving my niece her new cuddly tardigrade and accompanying book!  I hope she likes them!

Merry Christmas!

The Tiny, Tiny Tardigrade

As of today, the children's book that I wrote with the lovely and clever Dr K is available on Amazon for you to spend your moneypounds on. It's full of delightful pictures and also some words. But mostly pictures.

Here's the blurb:

"It's never too early to start teaching your child about some of the amazing things that exist in nature. THE TINY, TINY TARDIGRADE is a book about tardigrades (also known as water bears or moss piglets) for inquisitive pre-school children. Large, colourful pictures help children and their parents learn about these fascinating creatures.

This book was written and illustrated by Darren Morrissey and Karen Verrall, at least one of whom is a real scientist.

Available now on Amazon in paperback and for Kindle."

As you might expect, there's an odd little story around how this came about.

I have a niece. She's nearly two. In order to avoid horrible stereotyping, I have made sure that most of the gifts I have given her over the course of her short life are completely gender neutral.  Hence the cuddly Batman toy and the cuddly Spider-Man toy and the outfits with skulls on and so-on. Completely gender neutral (ahem).

So when I saw a plush tardigrade for sale on eBay, I couldn't resist. After all, what self respecting (almost) two year old wouldn't want a cuddly tardigrade?

And then I thought... her dad isn't too bright. He's a Morrissey, after all. There's an outside chance that he won't know what a tardigrade is.

So I wrote a book to explain it all. Obviously.

The Long Cheese

I'm thinking of writing a crime novel set in Indianapolis. Here's my opening paragraph:

"It was a dark and sporty night. Detective Sporty McSportson took shelter in one of the many sports bars. While he waited for the sports to stop, he watched sports on the grainy TV. Suddenly, he heard a sporty scream, which made him spill his cheese!"

Thriftuary 2014 - Part Four

£80.77.  That's the final tally for our Thriftuary spending.

That's just over £40 per person for a whole month, which isn't bad at all.

Now, there is an important consideration.  For various reasons there were a number of meals that we got for free. Some of them were on expenses or were generously donated by friends in some form or another (Dr K was invited to a birthday party where there was chicken.  She brought me a doggy bag). One of them was a stag do meal that I couldn't get out of. Those haven't been included in the final figure. Nor have the occasional freebies: office cakes, office sweets, donated Twixes and so-on.

If we were to assume that we'd had the scheduled meal instead of the free meal, we would have spent an additional £7.30, which makes the final total £88.07. That's still £9.53 less than last year, and still only around £44 per person. I still haven't included the twix!

There's a few of interesting things that have become apparent as a result of this years challenge:

1. A little bit of planning means that you don't need to go hungry. As long as you like mince based meals.
2. In the event that my boss finally notices that I never do any work and sacks me, I will be able to afford to eat handsomely on just £40 per month.
3. I have a lot of very excellent friends, who wouldn't let me go hungry!

Here's a chart showing the daily totals for the entire month, with 2013's chucked in for comparison.

Date	2013	2014	2013 Total	2014 Total
1-Feb	£2.30	£2.28	£2.30	£2.28
2-Feb	£4.12	£3.79	£6.42	£6.07
3-Feb	£3.08	£2.37	£9.50	£8.44
4-Feb	£0.63	£3.44	£10.13	£11.88
5-Feb	£4.09	£3.52	£14.22	£15.40
6-Feb	£2.21	£3.21	£16.43	£18.61
7-Feb	£3.05	£3.74	£19.48	£22.35
8-Feb	£7.31	£3.96	£26.79	£26.31
9-Feb	£3.99	£3.69	£30.78	£30.00
10-Feb	£3.79	£1.22	£34.57	£31.22
11-Feb	£1.39	£0.88	£35.96	£32.10
12-Feb	£3.70	£1.22	£39.66	£33.32
13-Feb	£4.63	£3.13	£44.29	£36.45
14-Feb	£5.48	£2.88	£49.77	£39.33
15-Feb	£2.69	£3.79	£52.46	£43.12
16-Feb	£5.45	£2.34	£57.91	£45.46
17-Feb	£6.69	£3.26	£64.60	£48.72
18-Feb	£2.38	£3.41	£66.98	£52.13
19-Feb	£1.76	£1.93	£68.74	£54.06
20-Feb	£2.12	£1.09	£70.86	£55.15
21-Feb	£2.94	£2.84	£73.80	£57.99
22-Feb	£6.32	£0.83	£80.12	£58.82
23-Feb	£1.75	£2.13	£81.87	£60.95
24-Feb	£3.25	£3.51	£85.12	£64.46
25-Feb	£2.06	£3.24	£87.18	£67.70
26-Feb	£4.46	£6.70	£91.64	£74.40
27-Feb	£3.92	£2.37	£95.56	£76.77
28-Feb	£2.04	£4.00	£97.60	£80.77

Thriftuary 2014 - Part Three

Another week, another chart!

I know, I know. You've immediately noticed that I've made a minor upward adjustment on most of the days, compared to last week. That's because Dr K made fun of my adding up and felt the need to point out that my milk was all wrong. Consider this a milk adjustment.

Still, it hasn't made a massive difference. At this point in 2013 we had spent £73.80 on food, whereas this year we've only spent £57.99. That's nearly £16 less!  For anyone that cares, our daily average spend is £2.76.

I have a few fascinating observations on how we've achieved that, but I'm going to save that for next week.

I'm hungry...

Thriftuary 2014 - Part Two

Here you are. An updated Thriftuary chart!

Lovely, isn't it?

The good news is that we're a full £12 below the same time last year (£52.46 vs £40.21). We're also averaging 81p a day less (£3.49 per day vs £2.68 per day). Mostly I put that down to planning our meals out in detail, something we didn't do last year. But I can't deny the fact that this last week has also been a festival of free food (how do you like my alliteration?).

Dr K was away with work for a couple of days, which meant that her meals were paid for by the company. And then I had a couple of working lunches that meant I was able to take advantage of free sandwiches and other goodies. Awesome.

There are no free lunches planned for next week, so it will be interesting to see how that affects our budget.

Thriftuary 2014 - Part One

Welcome to Thriftuary. Again.

 You'll recall that last year, Dr K and I engaged in an outrageous, radical and, some might say* insane challenge to subsist on as little money as possible for a whole month.

You'll also recall that we succeeded in doing for the grand total of £97.69 which was enough to beat my challenger, Ben.

It was not, however good enough. We decided that we could definitely do better then that. Loads better.

And because just trying to beat the previous year is not challenge enough, we decided that we weren't allowed to go food shopping during Thriftuary at all. So, all of our food had to be bought and in the cupboards by February 1st.

This was going to need some serious planning. Spreadsheets and everything. God I love spreadsheets...

Here is my lovely Thriftuary menu plotted out on a spreadsheet.

There are a few unpopulated cells on there, because I hadn't worked out quite how much stuff was going to cost at the time I took the screenshot, but it's pretty much there. Seven days of meals, cycled round 4 times to make the whole month.  We may or may not get sick of some things by the end of this.

In practice, we didn't stick precisely to the menu. Rather then making a stew this last weekend, I served up a rather ill-advised experiment with Szechuan Beef, which Dr K advises me tasted like the arse of a badger that has been dead for three weeks. In a ditch.

Anyway, here we are at the end of the first week (actually it's nine days in because I've been poorly-sick with a cold and am also lazy) and I have a table and a chart to show you. Tables are good, but charts are awesome:

I've plotted this year's figures against last year's for your entertainment. As you can see, in general, we're spending less this year than we did last year. In fact at the end of day 9, we've spent nearly £2 less than last year and we're averaging £3.10 a day (or £1.55 per person, per day), compared to £3.49 a day in 2013. 

There were a handful of freebies: I had a paid-for lunch on Monday as I was at a work conference (and took full advantage of both my own pockets and friend's handbag, to liberate a few items of fresh fruit). By pre arranged mutual agreement, Ben and I took part in an undocumented Nando's on Monday evening in order to facilitate some essential work based networking. Unfortunately we were unable to find a loophole that meant that our boss had to pay for it, but we agreed that it was exigent and unavoidable circumstances.  We have our own loopholes, for stuff like this.

There were a few slightly more expensive items left over from January in our fridge - things like yoghurts and cheese. We've used most of these over the last week and included their actual cost in the figures, which means that next week, where we have no expensive, creamy luscious cherry yoghurts, should be even cheaper.

If this trend continues, we're set to beat last year's figure by around £10.

I'm so hungry...

For anyone that's interested, here's the detail of what we've put in our faces over the last few days:

Date	Item	Volume	Cost	Total
01/02/2014	Tea bags	6	0.06	2.14
	Milk	120ml	0.1
	Chicken	300g	1.2
	Rice	300g	0.2
	Peas	50g	0.1
	Pepper	50g	0.1
	Oxo	1	0.01
	Goat yoghurt	32g	0.17
	Onion	1	0.2
02/02/2014	Tea bags	6	0.06	3.65
	Milk	120ml	0.1
	Eggs	4	0.4
	Onion	1	0.2
	Bacon	125g	0.25
	Braising steak	176g	1.3
	Onion	1	0.2
	Carrot	200g	0.2
	Potato	300g	0.2
	Peas	50g	0.1
	Oxo	1 cube	0.01
	Yoghurt (activia)	1	0.46
	Yoghurt (goat)	32g	0.17
03/02/2013	Oats	50g	0.04	2.15
	Milk	100ml	0.1
	Tea	6 bags	0.06
	Milk	120ml	0.12
	Can of sardines	1	0.5
	Satsuma	1	0.08
	Cream cheese	50g	0.22
	Almonds	X10	0.1
	Sweet potato	170g	0.22
	Cauliflower	1/4	0.22
	Cheese (value)	20g	0.12
	Pork	70g	0.31
	Butter	5g	0.06
	Buffet lunch	Expenses	0
	Nando's	'Expenses'	0
04/02/2013	Tea bags	6	0.06	3.18
	Milk	120ml	0.1
	Bread	2 sl	0.2
	Peanut butter	20g	0.1
	Spread	10g	0.05
	Carrot	100g	0.1
	Pear	1	0.2
	Oats	50g	0.04
	Milk	100ml	0.08
	Almonds	12g	0.1
	Avocado	1	0.44
	Liver	1 pack	0.73
	Bacon	125g	0.2
	Onion	1	0.2
	Potato	300g	0.2
	Carrot	200g	0.2
	Yoghurt	1	0.18
	Biscuits from yesterday buffet	2 shortbreads	0
05/02/2014	Tea bags	5	0.05	3.28
	Milk	100ml	0.08
	Bread		0.2
	Peanut butter	20g	0.1
	Apple	Free	0
	Pork mince	364g	1.4
	Tinned tomatoes	1	0.34
	Onion	1	0.2
	Peas	50g	0.1
	Pasta	100g	0.06
	Oats	50g	0.04
	Milk	100ml	0.08
	Almonds	X10	0.1
	Ryvita	X1	0.06
	Cream cheese	25g	0.11
	Satsuma	X1	0.08
	Egg	X1	0.1
	Yoghurt	1	0.18
06/02/2014	Tea bags	6	0.06	3.07
	Milk	120ml	0.1
	Bread	2 slices	0.1
	Spread	10g	0.1
	Peanut butter	20g	0.1
	Pear	1	0.2
	Oat biscuits	X3	0.1
	Cream cheese	25g	0.11
	Avocado	X1	0.44
	Satsuma	X1	0.08
	Almonds	X10	0.1
	Activia Yoghurt	X1	0.5
	Eggs	X4	0.4
	Bacon	125g	0.2
	Pepper	50g	0.1
	Onion	1	0.2
	Yoghurt	1	0.18
07/02/14	Tea bags	3	0.03	3.67
	Milk	60ml	0.05
	Bread	2 slices	0.1
	Spread	10g	0.1
	Peanut butter	20g	0.1
	Pear	1	0.2
	Carrot	100g	0.1
	Almonds	X10	0.1
	Avocado	Free	0
	Cream cheese	25g	0.11
	Oat biscuits	X3	0.1
	Egg		0.1
	Nuts	Free on table	0
	Beef mince	300g	1.4
	Onion	1	0.2
	Kidney beans	1 tin	0.3
	Tomatoes	1 tin	0.34
	Pepper	50g	0.1
	Chillis	5	0
	Oxo	1 cube	0.1
	Rice	100g	0.04
	Peas	50g	0.1
08/02/14	Tea bags	1	0.01	3.62
	Milk	20ml	0.02
	Chicken	300g	1.3
	Rice	200g	0.8
	Peas	50g	0.1
	Oxo	1 cube	0.01
	Pepper	50g	0.1
	Avocado		0.44
	Greek yoghurt	100g	0.22
	Activia yogurt	1 pot	0.46
	Oats	100g	0.08
	Milk	200ml	0.08
	Almond snickers	Free	0
09/02/14	Oats	50g	0.08	3.19
	Milk	100ml	0.1
	Tea bags	2	0.02
	Eggs	4	0.4
	Bacon	125g	0.2
	Cheese	20g	0.15
	Biscuits (free at a friends)	4	0
	Braising steak	176g	1.34
	Onion	1	0.2
	Carrot	50g	0.05
	Pepper	50g	0.1
	Oxo	1 cube	0.01
	Yogurt	1	0.46
	Apple	Free	0
	Orange	1	0.08

* No-one said it.

Movie Posters: Seven Salami

Rather than come up with a whole blog post to entertain you today, I've prepared an elaborate movie poster parody based upon a bad pun. Here is the classic Japanese movie Seven Salami:

Thriftuary (Part 5)

This is it!  What you've all be waiting for: the grand finale of Thriftuary. Today, all your questions will be answered*.

It actually ended a couple of days ago, but I thought I would hold off 'til the weekend to get some lovely graphs and statistics ready for you.  Graphs and statistics are ace.

Lets start by getting the spending chart out of the way:

Ahh. Lovely.

As you can see, I spent considerably less than our Ben over the month. £38.09 less, in fact. That's almost a 30% difference.

So what went wrong?

Pizza.  That's what went wrong.  Pizza and then curry.

For anyone planning to subsist on a tiny budget, here's a hint: don't go to Pizza Hut! While you gobble up their lovely pizza, they'll be gobbling up your lovely money! In all fairness, Ben and his missus did go for a relatively cheap pizza - the whole meal only came to £13.  I expect it was the nasty pizza at the bottom of the menu that only students order because it's made with questionable cheese and pubic hair!  Yum.

You can tell by the shape of his cumulative line that he lost quite a lot of enthusiasm for Thriftuary around about Pizza Day.  Even with those two huge spikes though, he still came out at an average daily spend of £4.85, for two people which I think is pretty good!

Enough about Ben, anyway. This blog is my vanity project, not his. How did I get on in Thriftuary? Here are some bullet points:

• Total monthly spend for two people: £97.69
• Average daily spend for two people: £3.48
• Most expensive day: £6.69 (We had a joint of pork!)
• Cheapest day: 0.63 (Hooray for edible Christmas Presents!)
• Cheapest day what didn't involve edible gifts: £1.39 (Pancakes for the win!)

Yesterday, by sheer coincidence, I read that Labour MP Helen Goodman decided to spend a week living on a food budget of £18 in order to protest about how the bedroom tax wasn't going to leave her constituents with enough to live on.  You can read about it here and see her video diaries here.

At the end of the week, she had only a small swede and a can of kidney beans with which to construct a sumptuous meal! In an article here, she is quoted as saying "I had to eat the same food over and over and over again. [...] I made a stew at the beginning of the week, and I ate the same food four nights a week [...] It was completely impossible to have meat or fish; that was out of the question [...] I found myself waking up in the middle of the night absolutely ravenous, having to make cups of tea and eat biscuits. I had a headache for five days in that week, and I was completely lethargic and exhausted by 4 pm."

While her protest was an interesting and well meaning stunt that doesn't seem to be getting the media attention it deserves, I suspect her problems were due more to bad planning and too many midnight biscuits than her budget. After all, I was living on £12.21 a week for a month and had varied meals.  Yes, I was kinda hungry for a lot of it, but not even remotely ravenous, despite my intermittent complaining.

But we had plenty of vegetables and it was very possible to have meat, although I would not recommend they very cheapest frozen mince - I found myself hoping that the news would declare that it contained horse  as that would mean that there was, at least, some meat in it! I soon started cutting it with slightly meatier meat.  My final food list is at the bottom of this post.

Now for some additional bits and bobs.  Dr K very kindly did a few sums for me using a calorie counting app on her ipad.  This gave an approximate calorie count for each day:

• I ate an average of 1382 calories a day. This is a fair bit below the average recommended intake for a big, hairy man like me, but as I am fairly sedentary, it didn't cause any problems.  In fact it had a somewhat predictable and beneficial side effect, which I'll get to in a moment.
• Highest day's calories: 1909
• Lowest day's calories: 805

Of course, all those calories I wasn't eating caused a bit of of weight loss.  Now, instead of being very fat, I'm just quite fat.

• Weight at start: 113.1kg (17st 8lbs)
• Weight at end: 106.95kg (16st 8lbs)
• Total weight loss: 6.15kg (1st)

So that's nice.  Here's another chart with calories and weight and shit** on it:

I gave blood on the final day of Thriftuary. I was actually a little bit worried, because I'd been under-eating for  a month and wondered if this would have any effect on my iron count or my ability to stand up afterwards. It did not. I did, however get some free biscuits, with which I was very pleased. I'm not sure how much a pint of blood weighs, but I'm guessing it didn't make a significant difference to my final weigh in as I was pretty much the same weight this morning.

A final set of bullet points, because bullet points are cool, mostly because they have the word 'bullet' in their name:

• Best purchase: £3.80 for a piece of beef skirt that made two very tasty stews. I initially pooh poohed Dr K for coming home with this, but as always she was right and I looked like a fool.
• Second best purchase: Cooking bacon. 81p for shit loads of bacony goodness!
• Tastiest dinner: Liver, bacon and onions. So cheap and so tasty.
• Nastiest dinner: Chilli made with cheap frozen mince. Even making it bastard hot didn't mask the greasy, horrible taste of Soylent Green made from chavs.

So the conclusion to all of this nonsense is that it seems to be perfectly possible for two people to live on £25 a week. Although we were generally under-eating, I suspect better planning and a bit more experience would fix that.

To celebrate the end of Thriftuary, Dr K and I went to Nando's on March 1st. One meal Nando's cost an entire week's food in Thriftuary. It would have made me pause for though if I hadn't been shovelling hot chicken wings into my mouth as fast and as greedily as I could!

Here's my food list for the final few days of Thriftuary.

25/02/13	7x tea	0.21	2.06
	2 weetabix	0.08
	100 ml milk	0.06
	1 can of sardines	0.47
	10 almonds	0.11
	2 banana cookies	0.18
	Tin of beans	0.25
	Leftover lasagne	0
	slice of Victoria sponge (office cake)	0
	2 yoghurts	0.5
	1 apple	0.20
26/02/2013	2 slices bread	0.04	4.46
	27g cheese	0.13
	Ready salted hula hoops	0.11
	1 small apple	0.20
	2x weetabix	0.08
	100ml milk	0.06
	8xtea	0.24
	Avocado	0.37
	10 almonds	0.11
	2 Finn crispbreads	0.12
	30g cream cheese	0.12
	150ml milk	0.09
	1/3 pack liver	0.71
	150g cooking bacon	0.23
	1/3 bag spring greens	0.33
	1/3 bag green beans	0.33
	100g sprouts	0.20
	379g spuds	0.31
	2 small onions	0.16
	16g gravy granules	0.04
	Knob of butter	0.05
	1x yoghurt	0.25
	2x banana cookies	0.18
27/02/13	2x weetabix	0.08	3.92
	100ml milk	0.06
	4x tea	0.12
	2 slices bread	0.04
	1 apple	0.20
	1 bag hula hoops	0.11
	11g 'meat' paste	0.05
	246g beef skirt	1.72
	Leftover liver & bacon	0.00
	16g gravy granules	0.04
	100g sprouts	0.20
	2 small onions	0.16
	161 g carrots	0.16
	154g spud	0.36
	1 tin tomatoes	0.31
	1tsp chilli powder	0.02
	1 tsp oregano	0.04
	1 yoghurt	0.25
	4x free hotel biscuits	0.00
	Buffet food	0.00
28/2/2013	2 weetabix	0.08	2.04
	100ml milk	0.06
	2 slices bread	0.04
	1 apple	0.20
	1 bag hula hoops	0.11
	11g 'meat' paste	0.05
	Avocado	0.37
	10 almonds	0.11
	2 Finn crispbreads	0.12
	30g cream cheese	0.12
	6 teas	0.18
	100g sprouts	0.20
	1 tin tomatoes	0.31
	Yesterday's stew.	0.00
	Banana cookie	0.09
	2 lotus biscuits from blood van	0.00
	Handful of chocolate buttons from Hannah.	0.00
	2free lemon curd biscuits	0.00

* By 'all' I actually mean few. Or none.
** Not actual shit... just lines and stuff.