Unequal Provision

Shops seem to offer a much wider choice of clothes to women than to men. Also there are more shops catering exclusively for women than there are for men. There's also far more jewellery for women, and cosmetics are almost entirely for women.

Does that all indicate unfair treatment of men, or does it arise from a difference between male and female attitudes that might also explain other apparent inequalities?

Usually, around Christmas, I send people a long letter reporting on my recent activities. When I tried to send this year's letter the attempt provoked one of those unintelligible error messages that are so annoying.

That gave me time for reflection, and I realised that this year's effort was a very long winded way of saying that I'd done much the same things as the year before, but a little less energetically, and that I'm quite happy being lazy., so I haven't tried to re-send the original.

Anyone desperate for information about my doings may ask.

Runny Honey

I use honey only rarely, just occasionally spreading a little on my bread at breakfast time. Only thickened honey is suitable  Runny honey runs off the bread to make inconvenient sticky puddles, so when someone gives me some I struggle to use it. Some people use it as a very expensive sweetener in tea or in cakes, but I don't sweeten my tea and haven't baked for several years. I did recently use honey to sweeten some stewed fruit, and am wondering if it would work in jam. If  I'm bold enough to experiment I'll report the results here.

Beware of Pretty Food

I was feeling lazy when I pottered round the supermarket, and the 'melon medley' offered at a reduced price looked very pretty, so I bought some. Alas one of the constituent melons was evidently unripe with little flavour and a texture between  cardboard and plywood.

Timing the Seasons

In the media people refer to today as the first day of Winter.

We used to treat the twenty first of March, June, September and December as the first days of the four seasons.

As 21 June was often referred to as Midsummer, it seemed odd to treat it as also the first day of that season, but much of June is often quite chilly and more Spring like than summery and much of September is still as summery as it gets in our cool climate, and seriously wintery weather rarely starts before late December.

If seasons are all to start on the first of some month, it will be hard to date the start of Spring.  The first of March is much too early as most of that month is decidedly wintry. Yet if we start Spring on 1 April and Summer on 1 June, there'll be only two  months for Spring. Perhaps that would be justified since Spring is a transitional state.

What abut four months each for Summer and Winter, with two  months for both Spring and Autumn ?