I've forgotten to go 'hooray' here over this story from a couple of weeks ago: Food labels advice change over Palestinian territories. I am happy to eat food grown in Israel. I am not happy to eat food grown in the occupied territories but sold as from Israel. As there has previously been no way to tell which was which from the label, this has meant not buying any of it.

This last bit hasn't got through to the Israeli embassy – at the moment, people like me don't buy any food from 'Israel', and far from this change playing "into the hands of those who are calling for a boycott of Israeli goods", it means we can now support goods produced in Israel proper while continuing to boycott the ones from illegally held land. Hooray. It'll be very interesting to see how much stuff was from the latter…

We came back to London yesterday. Normally, we check the traffic news before going on a long journey, but with the final leg being a simple Cambridge – M11 – London trip, why bother? This is why: earlier that morning, a lorry full of pigs overturned between two junctions of the M11 with no other good route between them. If you didn't check the traffic news, cough, the only warning was a sign that the road was closed about a mile or so before one of the junctions. This meant a big queue of vehicles turning off to go another way.

We could see the two most plausible routes were solid, so elected for a tour of the narrow wet roads of the Essex countryside, including the delightfully named village of 'Matching Tye'. Overall, the journey took us about four hours, twice what we had expected. The story doesn't mention why there was no indication of this closure earlier on the M11, at a point where sensible alternative routes existed…