Feelgood veg of the autumn. Oh, and HIV.

I have this theory: you cannot roast too many vegetables, and you cannot mash too many vegetables. However much you make, if you make it right, it will get eaten. There will never be enough for tomorrow's lunch.

Tonight we had sausages (veggie for me and housemate C, Freedom Food for M), and I made potato, celeriac and garlic mash and roasted carrots, courgettes and shallots. There was some celery soup left from last night, and I did something with veggie Bisto and a blender to create gravy out of it.

I made tons. I used half a big celeriac, eight potatoes, five carrots, four courgettes and a big handful of shallots. I felt sure it was enough to feed six. But no, we ate it all. And how can vegetables be bad for you? This is like intravenous V8 juice, no? We'll be winning awards if we carry on like this.

And *then* we had M's blackberry and apple crumble, in front of Stephen Fry's HIV & Me. I'd like my colleagues in South Africa, Zambia and Malawi to get the chance to see this programme. I think they think HIV is a non-issue in the UK. It's nowhere near as prevalent, but it's still having a massive impact. The young gay guy who had voluntarily had sex with five HIV+ 'gift givers', who then stuck a butt plug in him to maximise the chance of infection... now that I don't pretend to get.

But... there are lots of things I don't pretend to get about *straight* unsafe sex: I do, after all, come from the generation who saw the 1980s tombstone advert (aside: it took all my old-school, and considerable, web searching skills to track this down: you still need archives, if only for when YouTube doesn't deliver) just as we were thinking about getting down to it. I couldn't swear to the fact that I've never taken a risk, but I can definitely come closer to swearing that than most.

We had a little drink, and we shed a little tear. And we snuck into the kitchen one by one to steal the last little bits out of the roasting pan.

joella

The Blue Peter blues

Another week, another two days off. I really must get my arse in gear. This week though I drew the joella mela to a close by managing to go out for dinner with three ex-schoolmates simultaneously. Which was quite good going as one of them was supposed to be in Australia and one of them was supposed to be giving birth.

We reminisced about being teenagers in Blackpool for about 30 seconds, before remembering that it didn't have a whole heap to recommend it beyond the fact that you could buy single Cocktail Sobranies from Smoky Joes in town to coordinate with your outfit. We pre-dated alcopops, so to drink it was Blue Bols, Campari, Pernod and black or Midori, depending. I feel a bit ill just thinking about it.

We are altogether more sensible these days of course, *and* have better hair. It perhaps wasn't the best idea to squelch back through South Park, but the view was nice and the mud will come out eventually.

It was all a bit anticlimactic yesterday though (well possibly not for ex-housemate S, but haven't heard anything yet). I waved Australia R off, put the laundry on, ate posh chocolates, sprayed WD40 round the place to loosen things up, but still felt edgy and weird. M settled me under a blanket before I could cut through any live wires, and turned on CBBC.

On came Blue Peter, which I can't have watched in the last 20 years. They have a presenter from Northern Ireland now, who'd have thought. They showed us some footage from Andy's trip to Malawi, where he has been visiting children living with HIV. Apparently 300 pairs of shoes make a bicycle. I remembered lying under another blanket in another place when I had been visiting people who were, largely, failing to live with HIV. Big fat tears rolled out of the corners of my eyes and splotched onto the cushions.

I guess I've just been too bouncy recently. It's going to catch up with you sometime. Now I'm going to send all my shoes off to save the world.

joella