Your five-a-day

[shewhomust]

1. My father had a line about an island whose inhabitants eked out a precarious existence by taking in each other's laundry. I spent some time, not long ago, looking unsuccessfully for its derivation (I wanted to quote it in a rant about the impossibility of reviving the European economy by tourism). A letter in yesterday's Guardian attributes it to Plautus: vix vivunt lavanda mutando. Elegantly put, but I'd still like a more exact source.



2. In today's Guardian, Robert Macfarlane goes underground with the urban explorers. It's a world of delightful acronyms: a sloap is a Space Left Over After Planning, toads are Temporary, Obsolete, Abandoned or Derelict Spaces. Synchronicity being what it is, I have just finished reading the third of Ben Aaronovich's Folly books, Whispers Underground, set in much the same territory.



3. Also in today's Review section, Zoe Williams reviews Emily Oster's book about how medical advice is used to browbeat pregnant women on the basis of no real evidence (I paraphrase, but not unfairly): "Some centuries ago, perhaps most enthusiastically in Scotland, the idea of predestination took hold. God had decided in advance whether you were saved or damned, there was nothing you could do. But that emphatically didn't mean you could behave however you liked; in manifesting holy behaviour, you alerted the rest of the community to your membership of the elect. I feel that pregnancy has gone that way – the exaggerated presentation of risk takes the place of this toss-of-a-coin God. In other words, there's no way we can really tell you what's safe, there's no way you can really dodge the wrath of the Lord, but by manifesting acquiescent behaviour you show society that you are a good mother, that you'll win at mothering."



4. In Darlington last weekend we passed a pub - it may have been the Half Moon - which claimed to be a Nano Brewery. Not Micro, Nano. We've been trying to work out what this means. "You, sir, are the lucky purchaser of this week's pint!" ("No," says durham_rambler "they only serve halves.")



5. It is the 200th anniversary of the construction of Puffing Billy (not a real puffin) and there is a celebratory festival in Wylam. We went instead to the Railway Museum in Shildon, where they were having a steam gala and had a happy day admiring shiny metal and paintwork, the perfect forms of the wheels and pistons.

And to prove it, here we are, mirrored in the gleaming flanks of the Duchess of Hamilton (I thought the Duchess of Hamilton was best known for a scandalous divorce case, but that turns out to be the Duchess of Argyll).