It is November, and November brings with it several different things that a man can do. He can publish a blog post every day (NaBloPoMo), he can write a novel (NaNoWriMo), and he can grow a face of hair (Movember). There are other seasonal things too – like, I hear that walnuts are in season – but those are the three major organised events, and I wonder why they all take place in November. What’s so special about November?

Obviously, the choice of month enables Movember’s clever and hilarious name, but there are two competing schools of nomenclature here – the other, more popular choice is to use medial capitals. (I heard that the novel one was originally going to be called, uh, “November”.)

Two years ago, I did the NaNoWriMo. (Obviously the “Na”, which stands not for sodium but for “National”, is silly, because participants in this apparently American project can come from any country, as I do.) You could quite verbosely summarise the wispy meat of the wafer-thin so-called “novel” that I wrote by assembling words from the clumsy alphabet-shaped shavings of pity that can be produced by scraping a rubber chicken with a potato peeler. It was a disappointment. I was a disappointment.

The idea, I think – I know – is to churn out as much as possible, in a strongly forwards direction, and with absolutely no furtive glances in the direction of stupid concerns like making something that is good and that makes sense and that maybe even of some artistic smells a bit like artistic merit. Can I pretend that I was too preoccupied with those rather noble concerns, because my priorities are really better-placed than other people’s? Probably not. And it’s no help to pretend that I didn’t guess that “No” was short for anything, because I didn’t even do “No” writing, just “Not Enough”. We chalk it down as experience, and hope for better luck next time.

I also did the NaBloPoMo that year. Since it’s less firmly tied to the month of November, I chose February, whose shortness was a helpful type of kapok wadding that saved me from damp humiliation. But still it felt like the sort of dangerous commitment that only my younger self could handle. (Some of the worst resulting blog posts got deleted, but enough others linger in the archive, and we all know that nothing is ever truly “deleted” from the internet.)

This month, there’ll be none of any of that, for those reasons. I don’t want my kidneys to explode or something. But that doesn’t rule out the one what I never tried, and so this month I have been mostly growing a moustache. I am a prig.

The words that John F Kennedy spoke in that speech – “Ich bin ein Berliner” – showing solidarity with the people of Berlin did not translate to “I am a doughnut” after all.

Martin Strohmeier points out:

Do English-speaking people think that someone who says ‘I am a New Yorker’ is a magazine?

My question is this, then: what do you say if you really are a doughnut?

It’s a true fact that there is more than one type of olive oil in this world. Sometimes I wonder, why is that? It’s olive oil. I expect olive oil to be oily – you know, sort of warmer and thicker-feeling than water – and it should definitely be derived from olives, but beyond that we’re into the territory of mere implementation details. It’s olive oil – where’s the room for differentiation?

And yet, there’s still a lot of ostensibly different types of olive oil that you can buy: extra virgin or not, perhaps flavoured with different ghostly flavourings, and so on. What’s that all about, eh?

Here’s another area of choice on the supermarket shelf: muesli. And now you know that I’m either going to say that it’s just like olive oil in this respect, or that it’s completely the opposite. It could go either way. Well, no, of course it couldn’t, because you’re no idiot, you know about things, and you’ll have already realised which of the two it is. Because there is a lot of room for differentiation in the field of muesli, in fact. One might think that it’s all just oats and fruit and stuff, but they’d be wrong. Is not just meaningless ink on the label – a few different words in the name can reflect a completely different outlook on life. It’s amazing.

For differences, look to the ingredients. Often, among the oats, there is wheat – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot of it. The most wheaty types of muesli tend to be incredibly dense, sort of like pulsars or volcanic ash or something. The consequence of this is that one can only manage very few spoonfuls each day. And you end up buying less. And these long-lasting carbohydrous black holes are quite easy to find in most everyday shops. To a value-added–preaching businessperson type, it must sound like corporate suicide, but it happens, and that pleases me. It would be a chance to stick it to the man, except it turns out that lots of processed wheat flakes do not make for a very pretty taste in the mouth. Back to the more fast-moving higher oat content it is, then.

So: I took a break from writing this, and happened to see that of all people Peter Preston has been shopping for his grandchildren. Great minds in similar places, fancy that:

Bring on pure, unadulterated Weetabix of childhood memory. Spoon-size or (ugh!) chocolate coated? Perhaps some simple granola? The baked apple with a hint of cinnamon packet? Not sure kids will take to that, any more than to oat bran sprinkles or super high fibre. Try basic muesli instead. The one with “succulent chunks of pineapple, mango and papaya”? With “Brazil nuts, almonds and hazel nuts” or our old chums “tangy cranberries, blueberries and blackcurrants”? Is that the same as “with luscious berries and cherry muesli” or subtly different?

Preston is a columnist, probably one who has to meet a deadline, and it snows, but still it’s a dimly interesting notion. He tries to invoke the eurozone crisis, and stuff, but one clear thing is that he’s not smitten about this “alien, confusing world, a world of infinite, baffling, useless choice”, or at least that it’s misplaced. He’s probably right there, but now here’s my question: if we accept for a minute that there is going to be all of this consumerist choice, is it “better” someone has gone to the effort of making the things all different, “better” or that it’s really all the same?

Also: muesli with mango pieces in it! I have got to try that.

From a recording of Winnie-the-Pooh, read aloud by Alan Bennett.

Jesse Thorn has a sightly, uh, thorny list of rules for male men who wear clothes – which must include me. Here’s one:

Never wear visible socks with shorts.

From an early age, I’ve had the thing about not wearing socks with sandals hammered into me, so that now it’s as deeply primal as the one about running away when you see a tiger. But socks with shorts? I’d never considered that. This is terrible news. (There is something creepy about those sort of truncated socks, so I’ll have to do completely without.)

On the bright side, this is an opportunity for pouring scorn on all footballers whose socks are always eminently visible beneath their shorts. “All” is a shame, because I’m fonder of some than of others, but it’s easy to pretend that any of the good ones are magically innocent. In your face, then, Paul Scholes.

Also, it is a list of more than one tip, right? So, there’s also this one:

Only wear a tie if you’re also wearing a suit or sportcoat (or, very casually, a sweater). Shirt, tie and no jacket is the wedding uniform of a nine-year-old.

This pleases me, and there are still more.