When are beans on toast?

RENTING a cottage, like this one in Devon, introduces you to the strange objects other people live with. Like the frying pan with a ludicrously long and heavy handle that refuses to sit upright on the range. Or the thing that looks like a chopping board but is marked "not suitable for chopping." And who invented these bathroom taps which are a shiny silver ball, impossible to turn on or off with soapy hands?

BUT at least the cottage's sinks and baths have proper plugs on chains instead of those new-fangled plungers that never properly work. You may recall a few years ago I launched the Campaign for Reliable Authentic Plumbing which never really took off. Doomed by its own initials, I fear.

A YOUNG lad, seeing my tackle bag and rod, stopped me in Beer high street and asked how the fishing was going, and whether I had any tips. I told him it was going much the same as usual. I offered him the tip, based on 40 years of fishing down here, that if there are mackerel in the bay you will catch them, but if there are no mackerel in the bay you will not. I'm not a very good angler but I'd be a brilliant angling consultant.

IT occurs to me, squeezing between the obesity-epidemic victims on the beach, that some roly-polys may be deliberately increasing their bulk because the greater your surface area, the more tattoos you can have. Eat up, Elsie, there's almost room for another butterfly.

THE continuing fad for restaurants serving food on anything except a plate marches briskly on. So far we have seen steaks served on slabs of stone, bread served in flat caps and full English breakfasts served on shovels. You might think something as simple as beans on toast is immune from such fashions. Think again. The "beans on toast" I had for breakfast in a Devon cafe yesterday comprised four slices of toast with the portion of beans served separately in a china ramekin. So were these beans "on toast" in any meaningful sense? The lawyers would have a field day.

EIGHT thousand bank workers are to be sacked at the flick of a computer switch. The redundancies at HSBC remind us that, while banks may treat us customers with indifference, they reserve their real nastiness for their own loyal, hard-working and long-serving staff.

AFTER last year's beach holiday, I packed my fishing rods away in a big cardboard tube and left them for a year. Down here in Beer I tipped them out of the tube and a great cloud of what looked like confetti erupted over the yard. During the winter, in the quiet of the garden shed, a mouse had found her way to the end of the tube, chewed up the rod bags to make a nest, raised her brood, sent them out into the world and then vacated the premises. Do you ever wonder if, in the great, intergalactic scheme of things, our entire universe is no more than a cosy cocoon at the end of a big cardboard tube?