Statistics; tree relocation; Hip and Thigh

The bunnies’ concerted work on the dining room wallpaper continues – managed to photo them ‘in flagrante’ last week. They looked round briefly when I took the photograph, but obviously decided that I posed no serious threat and carried on.

Went on a day's statistics training last Thursday at Reading's Statistical Services Centre, which proved a useful refresher, and we were able to download the SSC's useful Excel add-in SSC-Stat. I have to say my head does not naturally get itself round such probably elementary notions as confidence intervals, so the occasional refresher is useful.

Saturday morning saw the re-homing of a small silver birch tree from the garden, a job that has been on the to-do list for a while but delayed by necessity to wait until sap had stopped rising and then necessity to wait until ground had thawed enough to get a spade into. I had been keen that the tree should go to a good home and my boss Paul came up trumps by offering it a home in a small patch of local woodland owned by his mother-in-law. Ruth and Ray dug it up and tied the root ball, while I, true to form, made tea and watched helpfully. The tree was then loaded into Ray's van - my estimate of its height as being around 7 feet was pointed out, in unnecessarily blunt terms, to have been slightly inaccurate - and driven to its new location, where Paul had helpfully already dug a hole of just the right size. A seamless procedure.

Last night's Book Group meeting was enlivened by the hostess' having taken up Rosemary Conley's Hip and Thigh Diet, so the table was laden with more chopped raw vegetables than I think I've ever seen gathered in one place, together with Weight Watchers crisps, low-fat dips made with yoghurt and pure air, etc. Luckily there were a few other more tempting offerings available for those of us who eschew diets. Dessert, along with the usual array of chocolates, fondant fancies and mini-Victoria sponge cakes, included Weight Watchers brownies, which caused a certain amount of intrigue - suspected that they are low-calorie mainly by dint of being about the size of a postage stamp.

My only flirtation with the Stepford-esque Ms Conley's hugely successful diet was over 20 years ago, not long after it came out, when Mum and I briefly decided to go on it. Neither of us lasted very long. There's a brief and not particularly complimentary summary of the diet's main features here.