I can see the wood in the trees

With cellulose X-rays.

I've noticed recently that my posts are degenerating into little more than tweets; thin dough leavened with the occasional yeast of dirty music I have banged together with music hammers in Garageband.

I have an oldest and dearest friend, with finely tuned sensibilities, and a horror of amateur musical twiddlage, who would be disgusted by my attempts at harmonious hoo-har. But I get pleasure out of it, in the same way I get pleasure out of doing bad DIY. I have built my house over a number of years: heavily over-engineered; brutalist with ogees; Le Corbusier in frills.

I did architecture for a moment in the early eighties, at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University, because the word polytechnic got associated with sixties socialism and, well, brutalist architecture, and that's not good marketing).

There's a thought: socialist marketing; there'd be top billboard campaigns.

I have a kind of affection for all that nasty concrete architecture that sprouted like things that sprout, but in a bad way, all over the Britain in the sixties' white heat of technology.

All that utopian optimism pissed away on cheap materials and local government corruption. Little people trying to deal with big ideas, and penny-pinching them down to a size they could understand.

Anyway, flapjacks: nearest you get to something that sounds slightly rude, yet oat-based.