Last weekend I stayed out until early hours of the morning, then went skiing on 3 hours sleep, then went out again.

Then I got bronchitis and spent most of the week feeling pretty bad.

This weekend has been quieter. Today, I cooked risotto and bread and butter pudding with my mother; I went hunting for Monarch butterflies; I heard talk of Eric Carle, the collagist and natural historian of the preschool crowd; and I experimented with soy egg creams.

Just now I watched Abre Los Ojos, which was remade as Vanilla Sky by taking the Spanish out, putting Tom Cruise in, and leaving Penelope Cruz exactly where she was.

The results are as follows:

1. This bread and butter pudding recipe is very fine indeed.
2. One tree in Woodham Park is festooned with a few hundred butterflies. I found nothing at Risingholme, Abberley Park, or the Ruru Lawn Cemetery.
3. Egg creams are the quintessential New York soft drink and involve neither egg nor cream — just soda water, milk and chocolate syrup. Perhaps they only work in New York. I have yet to master this drink, soy or otherwise.
4. Abre Los Ojos is better if only because it's the original. What a shame to go to all the trouble of remaking a movie and barely change anything.

That's definitely my loathed word of the day. I hate the way it is so popular in advertising as if appreciating decent food is giving into some kind of weakness or being sinful and — ooh aren't we being naughty! It's so damn juvenile. I feel like it is a word used by people who are not particularly discerning about food and don't realise that eating well is not overeating.

Stop the press — I forgot about "eatery." Oh I hate that horrible vulgar word. It's so cheap and cavemany — apparently "restaurant" is too confusing as it doesn't actually include the verb in there anywhere. This word makes me not want to eat. Ever. Where did it come from? Is it American?

I wonder why I'm so cranky today. Perhaps food websites are annoying me as I've mostly only had orange juice since Sunday. 

You have to hand it to these words. In this era of simplification, they're hanging in there. "Beverage" has two needless syllables and it's not a pretty word, probably because it's a French word pronounced as if it's not.

"Concession" is bizarre. Why do cinemas put signs up advertising "concessions"? Perhaps once-upon-a-time they offered concessions to independent refreshment dealers to work in the cinema? But if the cinema is selling the candy then nobody is conceding anything. My guess is that the cinemas probably make nearly as much from their candy as their tickets — and they'd hardly concede that.

The UN in Lebanon says the Israeli air force destroyed the post, in which four military observers were sheltering.

It said the four, from Austria, Canada, China nd Finland, had taken shelter in a bunker under the post after it was earlier shelled 14 times by Israeli artillery.

A rescue team was also shelled as it tried to clear the rubble.

"I am shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defence Forces of a UN Observer post in southern Lebanon," Mr Annan said in a statement from Rome. [BBC]

Dan Gillerman, Israel's UN ambassador, reacted furiously to Mr Annan's comments last night, describing them as "premature and erroneous". [Guardian]

I wonder if Dan feels a little embarrassed when he accuses others of being premature, while ignoring the fact of his own army's targetting of UN personnel — for if that action was a mistake then that is surely a far more grave example of "premature."

On Saturday, the inhabitants of the tiny border village of Marwaheen were ordered by Israeli troops - apparently using a bullhorn - to leave their homes by 6pm. Marwaheen lies closest to the spot where Hizbollah guerrillas broke through the frontier wire a week ago to capture two Israeli soldiers and kill three others, the attack which provoked this latest cruel war in Lebanon. The villagers obeyed the Israeli orders and initially appealed to local UN troops of the Ghanaian battalion for protection.

But the Ghanaian soldiers, obeying guidelines set down by the UN's headquarters in New York in 1996, refused to permit the Lebanese civilians to enter their base. By terrible irony, the UN's rules had been drawn up after their soldiers gave protection to civilians during an Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon in 1996 in which 106 Lebanese, more than half of them children, were slaughtered when the Israelis shelled the UN compound at Qana, in which they had been given sanctuary.

So the people of Marwaheen set off for the north in a convoy of cars which only minutes later, close to the village of Tel Harfa, were attacked by an Israeli F-16 fighter-bomber. It bombed all the cars and killed at least 20 of the civilians travelling in them, many of them women and children.

I was interested to hear the female antagonist character in Steppenwolf commenting to Harry (the lupine character) that he seemed to have focussed on the hard things in life and forgotten to do the easy things. That's me too. Typical obsessive perfectionist. So I'm trying to learn to do the easy things with the help of friends. Better late than never.

Sirocco the kakapo, renowned Don Juan, ocean swimmer, and 1.2% of the entire world population, is meeting his adoring public on Ulva Island. This may well be a once in a lifetime opportunity (OK so I've met him twice but I consider myself lucky). I'm thinking of going down. Sirocco loves people!

I think it's a great idea though and I'm interested to see how it goes.

Well I'm 35 now and spending all my money on toys like shiny new mountain bikes and digital SLRs (to be fair: I've only bought one of each). Perhaps that's not so bad — just a reflection of my life sans obligation at the moment.

Looking back, I think I could have valued freedom more. It seems like I might give it away too easily, replacing it with commitments and obligations.

I think we are all free all the time. We just create prisons in our heads.

Last weekend I drove up to Porter's Pass where bigger kids were sliding down the snowy hillsides in toboggans and smaller kids were complaining about the cold while pulling their mittens off.

Not for me though, I turned uphill and climbed Foggy Peak. It was hard going at the bottom with snow drifts coming up to my waist in places. I passed a number of people coming down and carrying ice axes. I didn't have an axe but I had my fleece, my boots and Tom Waits singing "Hold On" in my ear. The snow thinned out higher up due to the blasting winds. It was a 2 hour / 800 metre climb and a 25 minute / 800 metre descent (running, sliding, falling, whatever worked) -- I was quite abominable by the bottom.

This weekend I took my brand new second-hand ice skates up to Lake Ida. This is a neat spot — hemmed in by hills, the lake sees little sun. There are never too many people there (perhaps 40 today) on account of so few people actually owning ice skates. As the afternoon proceeded the lake melted until the ice was coated with a sheet of water. But this wasn't too bad as it smoothed out the surface somewhat. It just made falling rather splashy.

My skating technique is more enthusiasm than talent but that can get you quite a long way. As with most endeavours, the secret is to fall either gracefully or comically. I took my new Canon EOS 20D out onto the ice and practiced not landing on it.

This is interesting stuff — pieces of yellowish green glass weighing several kilograms concentrated in corridors between dunes in Libya and elsewhere. The glass is thought to be the result of melting by atmospheric meteor explosions.

Interestingly, Trinitite, the radioactive glass material found aroundd the US Trinity nuclear test site is the same greenish yellow.

And finally from my interesting fact file, Libyan desert glass was incorporated into artifacts found in the tomb of Tutankhamen excavated by Howard Carter in 1922.