Wednesday, May 23, 2007
A green day
Momentary panic yesterday evening when I couldn't find the red lentils to make tea with. Panic subsided when I found some green lentils - not the big affairs about a quarter of an inch across but little French jobs aboút an eighth of an inch across. So made up lentil soup in the usual way - boil up lentils add sliced carrot towards the end. Fry up some chopped onion and bacon and add that at the end. The green lentils had a quite differant texture than the red, keeping their shape and not dissolving. The bacon worked very well: organic vegan pig dry cured from some butcher in Topsham via Rosemary's. Didn't look that special but thick cut with good flavour and texture. Just the job for the new style lentil soup which was more like a lentil stew.
Found red lentils in the morning.
Discovered a new form of coral on the beach near Dawlish. The strands of red sandstone had lots of barnacles and small mussels and the former appeared to be building up into coral like masses, draped over the South facing strands. The South presumably being something to do with the currents or the lie of the rock. The coral like masses being inches thick, perhaps as much as six inches in places. So presumably not coral, but much the same sort of idea.
Reminded how the TLS does not always contain reviews. Read an interesting article about one Paul Mendes France, a propos of a new biography of same. The article managed to mention the new biography once. So while I now know rather more about Paul M F than I did, I know nothing about the biography should I want to know more. This being a common failing of TLS reviews: the reviewers seem to find it easier to write a short essay about the subject in hand, usually with a bit of grandstanding, than bothering to read the book in hand and tell one something about it. Reviews in the New York Review of Books rather better in this regard.
Had a ride on a long range SouthWest Trains train. The level of in-train announcements refreshingly low compared with that on their short range cousins. But I did learn that we now appear to have sponsored stations. That is to say, rather than having simple, decent signs announcing the name of the station that one has just arrived at, some stations now couple such signs with an advertisement for some sponsor - with the result in my case that one neither knew where one was or who was its sponsor. But then the continentals run advertisements on the platform televisions that we use to tell passengers about trains so I suppose I should not complain.
I discover that the ground loving woodpecker noticed in March might be a tweet. That is to say it was not a green woodpecker at all but some occasional called the Eurasian woodpecker which does indeed graze on the ground and not peck wood at all. DT in TB saw one in his garden and had the tweet of mind to look it up in his book.
Found red lentils in the morning.
Discovered a new form of coral on the beach near Dawlish. The strands of red sandstone had lots of barnacles and small mussels and the former appeared to be building up into coral like masses, draped over the South facing strands. The South presumably being something to do with the currents or the lie of the rock. The coral like masses being inches thick, perhaps as much as six inches in places. So presumably not coral, but much the same sort of idea.
Reminded how the TLS does not always contain reviews. Read an interesting article about one Paul Mendes France, a propos of a new biography of same. The article managed to mention the new biography once. So while I now know rather more about Paul M F than I did, I know nothing about the biography should I want to know more. This being a common failing of TLS reviews: the reviewers seem to find it easier to write a short essay about the subject in hand, usually with a bit of grandstanding, than bothering to read the book in hand and tell one something about it. Reviews in the New York Review of Books rather better in this regard.
Had a ride on a long range SouthWest Trains train. The level of in-train announcements refreshingly low compared with that on their short range cousins. But I did learn that we now appear to have sponsored stations. That is to say, rather than having simple, decent signs announcing the name of the station that one has just arrived at, some stations now couple such signs with an advertisement for some sponsor - with the result in my case that one neither knew where one was or who was its sponsor. But then the continentals run advertisements on the platform televisions that we use to tell passengers about trains so I suppose I should not complain.
I discover that the ground loving woodpecker noticed in March might be a tweet. That is to say it was not a green woodpecker at all but some occasional called the Eurasian woodpecker which does indeed graze on the ground and not peck wood at all. DT in TB saw one in his garden and had the tweet of mind to look it up in his book.
# posted by Jim @ 12:45 AM 
