Souper star

The soup month got off to a good start on Monday with a vegetable noodle soup that did for two days. My stock pot hadn't been started, but I had a way round it: the tinned asparagus I got came with plenty of asparagus-stocky liquid, so I made the roux from that. Some cabbage leaves, some leek, a handful of mushrooms and the asparagus, a simmer and then into the blender. Back into the pot with some vermicelli, boil and serve. It was lovely, too.

We had seconds last night before going out to the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall to watch Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and Chris Barber playing scratch jazz sets whilst we drank red wine at £3.80 a glass.

For tonight, it's mushroom broth. I usually make cream of mushroom, so this is a departure. I'm also making it differently to the usual ways of these things, by frying off the onion and the mushrooms together to get the flavour out. I've got dried mushrooms that I've made a mushroom stock out of, and I'll build the roux from the mushroom-onion stuff with that stock. I've also bought a broth pack - a bag of oats, lentils and barley that the greengrocer does - to make it "hearty", as they say in the commercials.

Meanwhile, my satellite dish plan has ballooned a tad (in space terms, 93 million miles). I haven't watched any live television since Being Human went on hiatus. And that was the only programme I'd watched since Doctor Who finished on New Year's Day. Which suggests I only watch programmes with Russell Tovey in them, which is more true than is comfortable.

But Doctor Who and Ashes to Ashes are both back over Easter. And both are on BBC HD. My plan had been to get a standard box and attach it to my standard TV. With a bit of DIY, that's £90. And then I started following the "other people who bought X also bought Y" links. Now, this is why I don't watch QVC or Bid-Up TV. I'd see what other people were buying, throw rationing and financial caution to the wind and just get shopping. And I'm a Green socialist!!

But, if you buy the dish kit, there are special offers on the set-top boxes. And that makes HD boxes affordable. But that means a HDTV. And if you're going to spend on an HDTV, you might as well spend on a big, 42" one (size does matter. Yes, it does. Yes). And you'll need that stand they've got on offer. And some F-connectors (no, me neither, but it suggested a bag of ten would be useful).

For fun, I like to add stuff to my basket and walk away, because the capitalist scum might notice and feel the pain of a lost sale. What we need, at this point, is a futile gesture. Curses, then, to a certain large internet retailer who are on to me and have got round the problem by putting a large discount and a long interest-free offer above the "confirm order" button.

So now I'm getting my dream HDTV and satellite and don't have to pay for it... until next year, but that's, like, forever. But I'm still putting the dish up myself. Except that I'm paying the guy who put our wooden floors in to drill the holes in the wall. But otherwise I'm doing it myself. So all's well.

I'll put a red flag on the top of the set and sing The Internationale before I switch it on each day. So all will be well.