My new 'getting up early' regime started today. I know we've been here before but this time I'm going to try and keep it up. (Even though when H woke me up this morning I told him to go away and that the new regime wasn't starting until tomorrow!)

Anyway, I've decided that it's important to try and continue my weekend busyness (thanks to the Leeds Film Festival) and so far, so good.

I've done quite good housewifery things today like hoovering and shopping and all was going well. Until that is, I embarked on the cooking aspect of a housewife's life. We had some lovely organic chicken and I wrote down the recipe for a 'simple' curry before setting off with my shopping bags to buy some of the missing ingredients.

I started to cook early because I wanted to go to a Friends of the Earth meeting at 7.30pm (well I sort of wanted to go but mostly didn't because I hadn't done everything I was meant to do). Anyway, I started cooking at about 6pm thinking that it would give me enough time - it didn't but I'm not too sad that I'm staying in tonight. I tried really hard to follow the recipe and only made a few slight errors with the spices (OK I read teaspoon as tablespoon but it's an easy mistake to make and I'm sure lots of people do it).

But that was the least of my worries and whole thing quickly turned into a disaster - it had a tasteless (I'm not sure what happened to all my gallons of spices, maybe they cancelled each other out?) and at the same time burnt taste (apparently there is a crucial difference between brown onions and burnt onions). After nearly an hour and a half of cooking it was way too watery which I tried to rectify with a swift boiling-off manoeuvre which the book handily suggested in its 'mishaps' section. It didn't mention that this was a bad idea if you have chicken and so our lovely happy chicken took on an un-appetising leathery quality. Yep, all in all a dinner disaster.

The thing that gets me most is that I did actually try quite hard to make a nice meal, I wasn't in a slap-dash 'we haven't got any onions so I'll just use some garlic' cooking mood. Also, all my recent kitchen endeavours seems to turn out terribly (except strangely enough when I make sweet chocolately things). The other day there was a mushroom soup disaster. Which actually makes today's culinary exercise seem not so terrible as it was actually edible, although to give H his credit he did eat the soup which is more than I can say for me.

And it's not as if this is the only thing I've suddenly become rubbish at. On Saturday, for example, I got in the car and started driving down the WRONG side of the road???! Luckily H was there to point out my mistake, but you have to ask what IS going on in my brain? Or more to the point do I still have a brain?