Anita, our cleaner, handed in her notice a couple of weeks ago, which was a bit of shame because she's really nice, and Daniel really liked her. We long ago decided that paying someone else to do the cleaning was money well spent, so put a card in the newsagent's window.

And now we have a new cleaner. He's a young chap. Which is kind of peculiar. There seems to be, no matter how cool and egalitarian you think you, some kind of inbuilt sexism that tells you that men can't hoover. Nat had to conference with all her friends before she decided to take him on. There also seems to be some kind of definite difference between getting a bloke in to fit a radiator and getting a bloke in to run round with the mop. Cleaning's more intimate somehow. Anyway, he seems to be working out ok. He spends most of his time caring for his mother, who is disabled, and he also, it turns out, does some carework for Mohammed next door. He's keen enough and seems to take instruction well, so I'm sure it's all going to go ok.

There is still a bit of a problem. Cleaning man. Just sounds peculiar, doesn't it.

The wonderful Boing Boing pointed to a gallery of "geek" tattoos. I'm not sure about geek, but nonetheless some of the tattoos pictured are really rather lovely. The rest make you wonder about the wisdom of making indelible marks on your own body. I'd draw your attention to this tattoo, followed by this one, this one , this one, this one and this one.

As Jim Ross says on the wrestling, this is, er, very unique.

Crimbo will shortly be upon us and one of my concessions to the season is making a Christmas pudding. It's really rather satisfying to serve up your pud at the end of a large festive feed and it's really quite easy, so why not have a go?

A Christmas pudding is basically a big ball of dried fruit and a bit of binding. The fruit can be more or less anything you like, and the stuff to bind is normally flour and breadcrumbs with maybe some ground almonds or something like that. A lot of recipes use eggs as the glue and sweeten the whole thing with a ton of sugar. All that dried fruit is pretty sweet anyway so I leave the sugar out and I glue it all together with a mixture of dates, milk, and treacle. Sounds ghastly, but it isn't.

Anyway, here's my recipe. It makes enough to fill a 1 litre basin. Feel free to substitute anything you don't like. This pudding comes out reasonably dense, so throw in a bit of grated carrot or apple to lighten it up if you want. Like I said, it's got no eggs so if you use oat milk and vegetable marg then it's vegan.

You will need

• 500g of dried fruit - raisins, sultanas, some currents, a few glace cherries, some mixed peel, anything really
• zest and juice of an orange or a lemon
• 125g flour
• 125g fresh bread crumbs - white, brown, light rye, whatever
• 125g ground almonds
• 125g chopped almonds
• a teaspoon or so of nutmeg
• teaspoon or thereabouts of mixed spice
• a teaspoon of ground ginger
• 150ml of milk, soya milk or oat milk or half and half milk and brandy/rum/sherry
• 200g butter or marg
• 250g dried dates
• 2 tablespoons of treacle

1. Put all the dry ingredients, bar the dates, into a big bowl. Give it a jolly good mix. The flour and ground almonds will stick to the fruit, so keep going until it's all evenly distributed.
2. Roughly chop the dates. Put them in a saucepan with the milk. Heat gently, stirring now and again, until the dates breakdown and it goes all mushy. Stick in the marg. Carry on stirring until it's all melted. Add the treacle, and give it another good stir.
3. Pour the date mixture onto the dry ingredients. Add the zest and juice. Stir it thoroughly until everything is really well mixed - it will look brown and puddingy
4. Pack the mixture into a greased pudding basin. Cover with a layer of greaseproof paper and then a layer of foil over that. If you're feeling keen, put a bit of a pleat in it. Tie the paper and foil tightly round the basin with string (you could get away with a rubber band, so long as it's really tight). Trim any excess off.
5. Steam the pudding for four or five hours. A steamer is, obviously, ideal, but if you don't have one then just stand the basin in a large covered saucepan which is half full of water and simmer it as gently as you can.
6. Stash the pudding away in a cool cupboard until you want to eat it. It'll keep for weeks. I've kept one for over a year with no ill-effects.
7. When you're ready, steam it again for a couple of hours. Remove the paper and foil, put a plate over the top and then turn the whole thing over. The pudding will (should anyway, and I've never had one stick yet) drop out with a rather nice little sucking noise.
8. Eat.

The steaming times aren't that critical - four hours then three, or six then an hour and half isn't going to do any harm. Do make sure the pan doesn't boil dry while simmering - top it up from the kettle as needed. If you're standing the pudding straight in the pan, make sure the water is below the level of the paper and foil.

If you need to get a pudding basin, you'll want a 1 litre basin to fit all this fruity goodness in. They're not expensive and you can get them from your local hardware place, or from somewhere like Woolies.

Finally decided to let my Demon subscription lapse. For the last few years, I've been routing jezuk.co.uk mail through to jezuk.demon.co.uk and picking it up from there. Nobody but spammers sends mail directly to jezuk.demon.co.uk anymore, I've got the cable modem so I don't use the Demon dial-up, and all my webpages live here, so it's money that doesn't need to be spent any more.

Mail to any jezuk.co.uk address all winds up in the same mailbox. At this end it all gets picked apart, so that Nat's mail goes to her, Daniel's to him, the various mailing lists to the appropriate bots, and everything else ("Enlarge your p'e'n'i's" mostly) ends up with me. While I was fetching the mail from Demon, that was easy because Demon's POP3 setup was especially jiggled to make that kind of thing easy. Now I'm picking it all up from my mail provider, it's a bit more tricky.

My mail gateway will happily grab everything from the POP3 box, and send Nattle's mail to her, and so on. When it sees something from a mailing list though, which isn't explicitly addressed to someone, it packages it in an attachment before forwarding it to the default account (me). Not super.

So I had a hunt around for something else to scrape the mail, and the only real candidate is fetchmail. Happily it runs under Cygwin (virtually all the useful stuff running on my server machine now seems to be Cygwinised versions of Linux programs - I really should move it over sometime), and a small bit of config file hackery had it grabbing mail. And forwarding it all to me. Every bit of it.

To the FAQs. While multidrop mailboxes like mine are really rather common, the fetchmail docs council against them. That's fair enough in an ideal world, but you've got to deal with what you've got. fetchmail's author, Eric Raymond, has written at length about the open source development process, and interesting stuff it is too. He often cites his experience with fetchmail, sometimes holding it up as a kind of canonical project, an exemplar even. I'd only note that while the code itself works exactly as advertised, the documentation is best described as lacking. This is a common criticism of software of all stripes, and is an accusation that can also be levelled at my projects.

For a little while I considered lumping up 50 quid to get multiple mailboxes. I Googled around a bit for an alternative package. All I want is to grab mail from a POP3 box and to forward it based on the To: header. How hard could it be? However, while going mad scanning up and down the man page, I saw a folder option.

folder Specify remote folder to query

Folders. That's an IMAP thing. UKShells has IMAP access. I rejigged the config, and grabbed mail via IMAP. And delivered it all to me. Another microbrainwave. I could use server-side filtering to deliver Nattle's mail into it's own IMAP folder. Then fetchmail could grab the mail from that folder, and forward it to her. Could it?

Ptptptptp! It could. A few more minutes setting up folders for the other jezuk.co.uk addresses, a few more lines in the fetchmail config, and it's all done. A multidrop mailbox gamed into multiple mailboxes.

If you're here via Google, here's the summary you probably would have preferred at the start of this little ramble.

• If you can access your mail via IMAP, and you can do server-side mail filtering, setting up fetchmail to grab mail for more than one user is straightforward.
• Create an IMAP folder for each user. My mail provider has web interface, and I used that.
• Set up a filter to direct a user's mail to the folder. My provider uses qmail, so
  
  [you@host ~] $ echo ./Maildir/.User/ > .qmail-domain:co:uk-user
  [you@host ~] $ echo ./Maildir/.Otheruser/ > .qmail-domain:co:uk-otheruser
  [you@host ~] $ echo ./Maildir/ > .qmail-default
  
  does the business. Make sure you include the leading . and the trail /. Of course, your setup maybe different.
• Configure fetchmail. My .fetchmailrc looks like

  poll imap4.example.com protocol imap no dns interval 8
  user imap_username password imap_password
  is user here
  folder 'inbox.User'
  
  poll imap4.example.com protocol imap no dns interval 4
  user imap_username password imap_password
  is otheruser here
  folder 'inbox.Otheruser'
  
  poll imap4.example.com protocol imap no dns
  user imap_username password imap_password
  to jez here
  

  Note the catch all entry at the end. Note also that the folder directive comes after user, and how the folder name is specified. I have no dns specified because I can't work out the aka directive.
• That's it. Run fetchmail -v -v to make sure it's ok, then kick it into daemon mode.

In a fit of joejob pique, I fired off a big pile of abuse@... complaints over the weekend. Top marks to foreThought.net - not only did a real person reply to my mail, but he'd done something about it too. Yay for them!

Hi Jez,

I've found out the user who was online with that IP address, and after speaking with him, it appears that his computer was being used as an open relay. He'll be working with a consultant over the next few days to make sure that his computer won't be used for a similar purpose in the future.

thanks,
jason

I believe the other bounces also indicate people unknowingly running open mail relays - probably as a result of virus or trojan infection. This is a minor anti-spam victory, but a victory none the less.

Primary schools admission policies are generally along the lines of
- siblings of existing pupils
- remaining places allocated on the basis of how far you live from the school
How far the catchment radius of a school extends depends on the number of applications in a given year, and the proportion of siblings with in that. For the schools near us, in some years the catchment hasn't extended even half a mile.

For religious schools there are normally an extra couple of layers
- siblings of existing pupils
- members of the schools particular religion
- members of other religions
- remaining places allocated on the basis of how far you live from the school

There are eighteen primary schools with a mile of us. Of the five nearest, one is C of E, one is Catholic and one is Jewish. All of them are, it seems, very good schools. All of them would drop Daniel to the bottom of their admissions list, although we don't intend to apply to any of them. We would rather Daniel didn't attend a religious school, nor would we be keen for him to attend a school where the pupils are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly asian or overwhemlingly black. That doesn't reflect the reality of his life.

So if we disregard the religious schools, we're left with twelve schools. As a general rule of thumb, schools in Balsall Heath and Sparkbrook will have a predominantly asian or black intake. That isn't at all to suggest that these are bad schools. Nelson Mandela Primary School seems to be a terrific school - it's Ofsted report glows - but I don't think sending Daniel to a school where 85% of the intake has English as a second language is going to be a terrifically good idea for him. If we, for the sake of argument, disregard those schools that leaves three.

The school we'd really like Daniel to attend is King's Heath Infant and Junior, where he currently goes to nursery. It's got a very mixed intake, both in terms of ethnicity and family income. It seems to be a very friendly and happy school - from my brief visit anyway. It's where we would like Daniel to go. We do have parental choice after all.

That choice is largely illusory. We're nearly a mile from the school, so we'll be down the list when places are allocated. As far as I know, the allocation by geography only takes into account straight line distance. It doesn't take into account where schools are in relation to each other. People living closer to King's Heath J & I are also on the doorstep of Moseley C of E school and King David's. If they're religious they'd be laughing - apply to all three and you'd be prefered by all of them through for reasons of religion and/or distance. As a family who aren't religious - and who arn't prepared to pretend to be - and who can't afford and don't want to move, we're actively discrimated against by a third of the local schools and left to the whims of geography for the rest.

I don't find it at all surprising that some people end up offering either bribes or violence.