I feel sorry for The List. It's only ever really seen as a way of shopping effectively or rushing off an answer in an exam if you run out of time, but it deserves so much more recognition that this. You couldn't possibly write down everything ever, so The List really exists to show what is NOT needed - how handy is that?! To help explain, here is a list of everything I can't draw: people, horses, shadows, detail, geometric shapes, odd perspectives, buildings, underwater scenes, food, flowers, fabric creases, flags, lilac, fruit, letters, sports, blurry speedy movement, vehicles, snow, ivy, wind especially wind how do you draw wind, waterfalls, gemstones, extreme melancholy, bridges, headland and/or gorse bushes, whisks, snowflakes, graffiti, hoovers and deck-chairs. See? Writing down everything I can draw would have taken about 50 years of solid dedication, so The List has in actual fact saved me from becoming an empty 70 year old with no friends.
I would naturally follow on to a list themed recipe, but sadly that doesn't exist, so here is a not entirely tangential (think queues...they are sort of like lists and are pretty British) but perhaps off puttingly typical JUBILEE SURPRISE. Try to see past the grimyellowschoolbaglunchcoronationchicken preconception because this is actually a seriously nice sandwich filler:

2 cooked and chopped chicken breasts
1 tablespoon of mango chutney
2 tablespoons of mayo
1 tablespoon crème fraîche (è and î NICE)
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 lemon's worth of squeeze
1 finely chopped red onion
handful of chives
salt and pep

1) Mix it all together
2) Use a medium sized flame torch to brown up the edges. Then hydrogenate it to make it solid at room temperature. Flake some gold leaf and sprinkle over to finish.

For a Jubilee themed song, what better than some classic and resolutely British brass music?
...Well I can think of at least 46 things better than that, so here is a merry world vibe that I cannot really imagine the queen sailing along the river to: Biriya by Mory Kanté. It's got a great drum beat and if you listen to it enough, you can sing along and feel bilingual.
For the novel, I am going to fully indulge in an English classic of, as we do actually do the old Nov quite spectacularly, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Apparently it is the first detective type novel - came before Sherlock an' all that - and it features a huge diamond that is so big it's almost yellow, some really grim quicksand and someone called Godfrey. There are obviously a lot of nineteenth-century-closed-in views, their sentiments on a group of three travelling Hindu priests for example are a bit dubious, but the narrator of the majority of the novel told by Gabriel Betteredge is brilliant and I wish he were my grandfather.


Also, seeing as we haven't had much vegetable in this triangle, and we all know I need to mention vegetables as much as possible, here's a shout out to John's greengrocers on Brunswick Street in Leamington - 1000 splendid grapes for under £2? Yes please.