Thursday, March 17, 2011
The Lord is with us!
Over our St. Patrick's Eve stew, we wondered why one always used neck of lamb, rather than neck of pig or neck of goat or neck of anything else. This led onto a discussion of the number of vertebrae in the neck of your average animal. FIL was quite confident that all respectable animals have seven cervical vertebrae; the giraffe just as the pig. I thought that this must make the brontosaurus disreputable as I was quite sure they ran to more than seven. Dim memories of the dinosaur hall in Kensington were that there were lots. Maybe even seven times seven.
To be on the safe side we checked in our elderly Romer - probably still good for facts of this sort, not that susceptible to the wafts and whims of fashion. Which is not quite the whole story as it turns out that there is room for debate about which vertebrae are cervical and which are thoracic and so on and so forth. Not always as clear as one might have hoped. Nevertheless, Romer does confirm that while birds, fishes, amphibians and reptiles are a bit relaxed, proper animals, that is to say mammals, pretty much all have seven cervical vertebrae, with the small number of exceptions including tree sloths and manatees. But certainly not giraffes or pigs.
Now it is a well known feature of intelligent, that is to say human, life that seven is a magic number. There are seven ages of man, seven hills of Rome and seven layers in the ISO reference model for digital communications. In the beginning, before the rot set in, there were seven electors for the Holy Roman Empire. Not to mention the seven dials near Leicester Square. All kinds of important things come in sevens.
Which clearly demonstrates the presence of the deity at the time of the design of mammals. The deity being intelligent is into sevens, just as we are. Whereas if it had been left to natural selection we could have wound up with any old number. So OK, the deity was out to lunch when the trees sloths and manatees were on the slab, but that does not detract from the argument as a whole. He is present and correct!
Having sorted that one out we then moved onto a piece by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian about how it is not a good thing that the difference between top pay and bottom pay has got so large and is continuing to grow. Most unhealthy. A line I agree with, but then I thought you are a presumably decently paid journalist and you are chairman of the National Trust. So you are copping a fair packet yourself and see fit to bang on. So I go to check my handy copy of the National Trust Annual Report for 2009-2010 where I was pleased to discover that the large numbers of national trustees are not paid. They collect a very modest amount of expenses and that is it. The only fly in the ointment is their director general - one Fiona Reynolds - who appears to be on something like £150,000 plus final salary pension scheme. The pay of a senior civil servant. I suppose the trustees would argue that they are a serious organisation which needs a serious person at the helm, for which one has to pay a reasonable salary. I am inclined to agree.
But it would be interesting to do some work on the way in which the public servants in devolved bodies of various sorts have managed to whack their salaries up big time over the last twenty year or so; how bosses in local government, bosses of educational enterprises and bosses of hospitals have managed to transform their pay scene. From being the Cinderellas of public service they have become the Snow Queens. Much better paid than the heads of departments, the god calls me god lot (aka GCMG, but not the Greater Covina Medical Group), who used to be top of this particular heap.
PS: and if you are bored, you can ponder on the two rather different anatomical uses of the word 'cervix'.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Culinary faith restored
Yesterday was the day of the fatty lump stew, more properly a Lancashire Hot Pot made with neck of south downs lamb raised on organic grass. Usual drill with onions, water, lentils and potatoes. Very good it was too, although I thought that a budding vegetarian might have found it a bit challenging. All very anatomical with lots of interesting bones, tendons and pipes on display. A very fat tendon running down the back of the neck and a very fat pipe (nearly 1cm in diameter) running up front the neck, in particular. Did all the meat in a sitting; the remaining broth will serve for supper today. Big decisions to be made about whether to liquidise or not and whether to scrape off any of the fat or not.
Serious bit of music consumption brought on by heavy lunch (roast shoulder of south down lamb etc) followed by TB the other day. Part of the current trend of almost obsessive listening to the same piece over and over again, until that particular itch has been scratched out. On this day it was the turn of a Mozart violin sonata, K304 in E minor to be precise, executed by Pauk & Frankl, refugees, I think, from the Hungarian uprising back in the 50's of the last century. Violin sonatas do not seem to get many outing in London concert halls and so I have heard this one live just once. Executed on that occasion by Goldberg & Lupu respectively. Discs refugees from the aforementioned Oxfam bookshop in Tavistock. Great stuff, although slightly shocking for some reason to be get so much out of something so old. One wanted to make time stand still, a bit of a nonsense in the case of music. Can't stand and gaze at it in statis like one can at a picture. A repeat phrase button on the player would not really do the trick.
The odd thing was, that after this serious, indeed intimate moment, I thought to retire to bed with Finnegan's Wake. Funny indeed it was, but, at the same time vulgar. All this cleverness and noise, the product of a life time's learning, but it clashed, or cloched as the French seem to say, with the Mozart. Had to consign it to the nether regions under the bed and go to sleep. Must have some screw loose that I thought that one might reasonably follow the other. Like trying to drink cold white vino from Chile with fruity blue cheese from Portugal.
An interesting letter in last week's TLS. From someone who gives as his address: 'Bourne Hall, Spring Street, Ewell, Surrey'. Which sounds all well and good, but as I happen to live near the address in question, know it to be that of the public library and community centre. Almost what the French would call a salle polyvalent. So polyvalent that it was the place to where I delivered my application for a free bus pass. So why would someone write a letter to the TLS from there? I don't suppose they even take the mag. there. And, one might of thought that most people who bother to read the thing would want to read it in the comfort of their own home rather than chiselling the £2.70 cover price in a place full of seniors and benefit hounds.
And an interesting snippet. I learn that until the middle of the 18th century there used to be a May Fair in Mayfair. Obvious now it has been mentioned but it had never occurred to me. Despite there being the formerly splendid pub 'The Grapes' in Shepeards' Market, in Mayfair. Mr G. reveals plenty of May Fairs, but I did not spot one in Mayfair.
Good news a propos of the bread which made bad sandwiches yesterady. Despite my allegation that its place was with soup or cheese, it went down quite well with butter for breakfast. The chewy brown crust was fine at that time in the morning and the dryness did not seem to matter. The chewy brown crust not unlike that of the rolls which one gets for breakfast in hotels north of Watford. Perhaps, for example, in Belfast. All very odd. But I still do not propose to buy another one.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Up the pan!
I read in yesterday's 'Guardian' that the 'fine dining' end of gastro pubs are into a whole new form of flannel. The idea is that after you have discussed your requirement for wine and water with the chit from Rumania, you summon the salt pan with whom you can discuss your requirement for salt on and off the table, the salt pan being named for the legendary Mr Pan, the founder of modern salt cuisine, who lived in Harbin during the second half of the 19th century. (For some reason my shiny new PC is inhibiting a paste from Notepad so I am able to include Harbin neither in the native script nor in the authorised transliteration. Maybe a setting in IE 8: I have had problems of a similar nature in hte past when blogging from an Internet cafe. Maybe something to be sorted out with my missold support from BT). I dare say that I shall find on my next visit with Mr Sainsbury that he has devoted maybe half on one side of an aisle to various salts. Not, of course, including Epsom Salts which lives with the medicines rather than with the condiments.
Not to be outdone, there is a piece in today's DT about how the Chief Medical Officers of Health are foaming at the mouth about all this and are in urgent consultations with the chaps from Fountain Court to see if the 2006 tobacco regulations can easily be extended to salt or whether it is going to be necessarty for the PM to find some time in his busy calendar for a small bit of primary legislation.
Turning to home cuisine, a couple of very satisfactory and simple dishes over the last couple of days. First, a chick pea (from Turkey) stew flavoured with tomato, onion and tenderloin. Simmer chick peas for a couple of hours. Dice onions, tomatoes and pork. Add and simmer for a further couple of hours. Good gear. Second, a sort of Lancashire Hot Pot. This because our freezer contained a pack of stewing lamb from the Sainsbury's basics range, described as slow cook cuts ideal for casseroles. 1.081kg (are the scales used in their butchery department really that accurate?) for £5.39 (even their cash registers do not attempt the third decimal place). Describing the motley collection of lumps as cuts was rather gilding the lilly: off-cuts would be a better term. Off-cuts from one of the other strange offerings in the basics range. So we had fore arm cut off of a shoulder of lamb so that the shoulder is a nice tidy shape, a couple of slices of neck of lamb and quite a lot of crudely chopped lumps of breast of lamb. All rather off putting. However, pressed ahead and browned it all in some dripping. Added some coarsely chopped onion and a little water and simmered for a couple of hours. Added a couple of ounces of red lentils and some more water. Tastefully arrange some sliced peeled potato on top. Simmer for a further 45 minutes and serve with savoy cabbage. Very good it was too, despite the crude butchery and the quantity of linings.
And then to Orwell to finish off 'Coming Up for Air', an excellent book, sourced I think from a stall outside the museum inside Bourne Hall. Mystery how a chap who was born in India and went to Eton knows so much about the lives of children and shopkeepers living in small country towns before the first war and about suburbanites generally between the wars. Vert funny he is about them too. Shades of Sinclair's Babbitt of 2nd February 2009. Also reminds me of reading, many years ago, about how someone from the communist block in the late fifties was amazed how well Orwell captured the tone and (cabbagey) smell of large blocks of municipal flats in his country in the now more famous 1984. Of which, oddly enough, the present book is, in many little ways, a precursor.
But if I was Orwell I might be a little irritated by the biographical blurbs at the beginning of this 1989 Penguion edition. Orwell gets say 4.5 inches while one Dr. Peter Davison gets 1.5 inches. Orwell writes the book while Davison writes 2.5 pages of introduction. An introduction which is mainly focussed on the near 100% absence of semi-colons. Something Orwell apparently took a deep interest in; he was certainly interested in language if all the newspeak in 1984 is anything to go by.
Not to be outdone, there is a piece in today's DT about how the Chief Medical Officers of Health are foaming at the mouth about all this and are in urgent consultations with the chaps from Fountain Court to see if the 2006 tobacco regulations can easily be extended to salt or whether it is going to be necessarty for the PM to find some time in his busy calendar for a small bit of primary legislation.
Turning to home cuisine, a couple of very satisfactory and simple dishes over the last couple of days. First, a chick pea (from Turkey) stew flavoured with tomato, onion and tenderloin. Simmer chick peas for a couple of hours. Dice onions, tomatoes and pork. Add and simmer for a further couple of hours. Good gear. Second, a sort of Lancashire Hot Pot. This because our freezer contained a pack of stewing lamb from the Sainsbury's basics range, described as slow cook cuts ideal for casseroles. 1.081kg (are the scales used in their butchery department really that accurate?) for £5.39 (even their cash registers do not attempt the third decimal place). Describing the motley collection of lumps as cuts was rather gilding the lilly: off-cuts would be a better term. Off-cuts from one of the other strange offerings in the basics range. So we had fore arm cut off of a shoulder of lamb so that the shoulder is a nice tidy shape, a couple of slices of neck of lamb and quite a lot of crudely chopped lumps of breast of lamb. All rather off putting. However, pressed ahead and browned it all in some dripping. Added some coarsely chopped onion and a little water and simmered for a couple of hours. Added a couple of ounces of red lentils and some more water. Tastefully arrange some sliced peeled potato on top. Simmer for a further 45 minutes and serve with savoy cabbage. Very good it was too, despite the crude butchery and the quantity of linings.
And then to Orwell to finish off 'Coming Up for Air', an excellent book, sourced I think from a stall outside the museum inside Bourne Hall. Mystery how a chap who was born in India and went to Eton knows so much about the lives of children and shopkeepers living in small country towns before the first war and about suburbanites generally between the wars. Vert funny he is about them too. Shades of Sinclair's Babbitt of 2nd February 2009. Also reminds me of reading, many years ago, about how someone from the communist block in the late fifties was amazed how well Orwell captured the tone and (cabbagey) smell of large blocks of municipal flats in his country in the now more famous 1984. Of which, oddly enough, the present book is, in many little ways, a precursor.
But if I was Orwell I might be a little irritated by the biographical blurbs at the beginning of this 1989 Penguion edition. Orwell gets say 4.5 inches while one Dr. Peter Davison gets 1.5 inches. Orwell writes the book while Davison writes 2.5 pages of introduction. An introduction which is mainly focussed on the near 100% absence of semi-colons. Something Orwell apparently took a deep interest in; he was certainly interested in language if all the newspeak in 1984 is anything to go by.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
Lamb
Lovers of neck of lamb stew - aka Lancashire Hot Pot - will be pleased to know that lamb is a lot cheaper than it was a few months ago, with yesterday's neck costing around £10 rather than around £15. It may have been a touch smaller, but still a good bit cheaper the pound. This time remembered not to add the potatoes until 20 minutes before the end - so they were cooked just right, rather than falling apart. Apart from one dodgy potato that didn't seems to cook at all. BH tells me that Mr S. basic potatoes have the odd blighty one which does that.
Celebrated the stew, a little later in the day, with a bottle of Chilean Merlot from Concha Y Toro (flashy web site at http://www.conchaytoro.com. It seems they are the biggest manufacturer of wine in their part of the world), bought from Mr S. at Marsh Mills. At £10 a pop a reasonably dear wine for us but it was indeed velvety as claimed on the back of the bottle. More notable was the very heavy bottle, weighing in at 1lb 13.5oz. Presumably the glass was a bit thicker than usual to hold all those velvety tannins in.
I had thought earlier in the day that I was on course to solve the puzzle mooted on April 17 2009, that is to say, what are the belfry windows of churches called? It still sticks in my mind from my days of O-level art that they have a special name. Now as luck would have it I came across an interesting little book called 'A concise glossary of architectural terms' at our local Oxfam shop. Full of all sorts of fascinating architectural factlets so I parted with the £2.99 being asked so that I could peruse the thing at my leisure. It seems to be a photographic reprint of a heavily illustrated fourth edition of 1876. Illustrations conveniently printed in page where they are wanted and which look like they are some sort of (intaglio) engravings. So I learn, for example, that a lavatory was a place in a church or cloister for washing. Perhaps no more than a stone sink set into a wall. There is a very fancy one in a monastery in Vienna. Obvious once one has been told. That a louvre, properly speaking, is a turret on a roof which lets light into the room below. From the French. Confusingly, I find that louvre is indeed a French word which means palace, nothing to do with light at all. It finally dawns on me that the derivation must be from ouvrir, to open. That flamboyant is some sort of debased decorated which happened in France when we had moved on to perpendicular. Don't think the author was very keen on it. That a broach spire was not what I thought it was at all. But I do not learn the word I want. There are lots of pictures of windows to belfries but they do not get a special name. There is a mention of something called a sound hole, but this is just a hole to let the sound of the bells out, rather than a window to let the sound of the bells out. So the book did not do the job intended but I have got a handy bit of bed-time & advertising break reading.
Another odd book, has been the Newnes Golden Treasury from 1933 or thereabouts. A four inch thick compendium of improving or interesting facts and fodder. A mere £1 from a charity shop in Totland in the Isle of Wight. Arranged in 22 chapters. One, of forty pages, on the mysteries of wireless, then relatively new. Another on the art of public speaking, including models to be used at various likely occasions. A funeral. The annual general meeting of a tennis club. Introducing a speaker to an evening meeting of the W.I.. Another containing stories from the ancient world. Another containing the answers to a selection of the sort of questions you now get in pub quizzes. For example, what is the meaning of foolscap, as in foolscap paper? Another containing stuff for children. Games they might play and things they might make, with the word 'jolly' appearing lots. 1,192 pages of the stuff. An inexhaustible trove. But one marred by a slight whiff of antisemitism, although not as bad as that in say, the books of John Buchan.
I close with what ought to have been a rather simpler alcoholic puzzle. Coming back from holiday, not having had any Newky Brown for a couple of weeks, thought it tasted a bit odd. Hitherto the stuff had tasted the same for some decades. Stronger hint of toasted malt than there had been. Was it just me or had the recipe changed? So I thought I would send an email to the Newky Brown people and ask them. Start off at the Heineken web site, Heineken having bought this particular bit of national heritage. Finally fight my way through to their Newky Brown web site. But there is no facility to email them or chat. There are a couple of telephone numbers but they look to be intended for trade enquiries rather than punter enquiries. Perhaps I ought to find some beer fiends' chat room. Don't suppose the CAMRA people would help. Not their sort of heritage.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Consistancy of lentil soup
First thing on Tuesday, around 0930 that is, very impressed to take delivery of a couple of books from Amazon which I had ordered around 1200 the day previous. Given the shennanighans on the postal front, thought I would try for express delivery or some such. Amazon seemed to have various offerings on their front. At £8, it did not seem an unreasonable proportion of the total bill. So at 0930 the day following, a van from some outfit called Citylink turned up with large box containing two books. Both of which turned out to be OK, something one cannot always be sure of buying sight unseen.
Anyway, resolved to take more care with measuring in future, in order to bring some consistency to consistency. Then had the odd thought that the way forward would be to drill a small hole - maybe 1.5mm in diameter - in the side of the soup pan at the desired level. Water in the pan would then find that level, provided, of course, that one had a level surface on which to place the pan. During the cooking operations a plug would be a good idea. Something hard and plastic, the texture perhaps of lego. One of those plastic holders used for erecting candles on birthday cakes in the fifties would be just the thing. Going further, one might have several holes, each marking the proper level for some recipe or other.
On Wednesday, neck of lamb stew, with the large soup pan being repurposed as the large stew pan. Balance turned into soup for supper yesterday.
On Thursday, watched a slab of Wycliff on ITV3 (where the advertisements must be up to a quarter or so of the running time. Not as bad as the US but heading that way). Where the police side use a white board to draw a diagram of their case, with added pictures. Not something that Morse or Poiret stoop to; they believe that it can all be done with the little grey cells without the need for props.
All of which more or less, for once, determined my dream of last night. I was back in Cambridge and my mother was about - not someone whom I recollect being in a dream before. She had the bright idea, that when making neck of lamb stew, rather than cooking the greens separately, one just shoved a few heads of greens down the side of the stew, entire. I was rather shocked by this but did nothing about it, choosing instead to retire to the next room to examine the book which had just arrived. I had been looking for a biology textbook and chose this one from a catalogue. It turned out to be rather larger than I expected. To the point where it was not a book in the ordinary sense at all. One had a display contraption, rather in the form of a triptych, maybe 2 feet high by 4 feet across. The left hand panel (of the three) contained rows of nifty little plastic pockets. The idea was that each chapter of the book was printed on a little booklet, maybe 3 inches wide by 4 inches high, and one arranged the booklets of the book in the plastic pockets of the left hand panel. A piece of blue card in each pocket made it visually obvious when its booklet was missing. A neat little device, but taken as a whole, all seemed rather tedious. Not too sure that I had made a good choice although still trying to maintain denial. Then there were a whole lot of blank booklets, of the same dimensions, in which one made notes and which one stored in the pockets on the centre and right hand panels. There was some way of linking pockets, some sort of cross referencing mechanism, but I don't recall how that worked. Maybe in the dream it was just there, as an idea, without being condensed into a mechanism that stood some change of working. Ribbons or something. Some rather officious person comes to show me how it all works. Getting even more doubtful about the whole business and wake up.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Stew time
I had been about to buy kidneys yesterday, but seeing a sheep's neck on the display, thought it was about time we had a hot pot, something, for some reason or another, we have not had for a while. Despite it having featured regularly in the past. So I get several pounds of neck, chopped at a rate of three peices to the pound and costing about £10. So not the dirt cheap item I remember from the days of youth and breast of lamb - these last coming in at that time for a shilling a pop. Add neck to boiling water which just about covers it. Add a couple of medium sized onions, finely chopped. Add a couple of handfuls of red lentils. Simmer for an hour. Add potatoes, sliced into slices perhaps two thirds of an inch thick. Simmer for a further hour. Meanwhile, prepare cabbage. Serve. Excellent grub and very easy to prepare. Gravy spot on, white and thick enough without having turned into custard. All without the benefit of flour, gravy browning, stock cubes, mixed herbs, salt or pepper. Plus, as it turned out, I was right not to follow the instructions in the book, which I thought I had better consult not having done the thing for a while, but which advised me to add the potatoes at the beginning of operations. I think they would have disolved had I done that. The only real catch would be the amount of fat one is whacking down, given that we finished off what was left of the gravy and the potatoes for tea.
After all this excitement, off to NESCOT (http://www.nescot.ac.uk/) to investigate what they offered in the way of IT training for the retired. Quite a lot as it turns out, and FIL is now signed up for a free assessment of his IT training needs in a training facility near us and, which, as it happens, is a lot nearer our tip. So we will not have any bother finding the place. But much more fun, it turns out that NESCOT includes a serious osteopathic training operation. And, like a hairdressic training operation, they are happy to treat you at very reasonable rates. Provided, of course, you do not mind being attended to by a small herd of students. FIL, having done his time in a related trade, quite happy about that and more than quite happy about his two hour session which came in at the modest sum of £10. About a quarter of what an osteopath on the way to TB charges for a session.
By way of a bonus, while I was waiting, I was reminded of one of the reasons why I am glad to be out of the world of work. That is to say I learned from a wall board that the NESCOT senior management team is made up of a principal, a deputy principal, two vice principals and a bevy of assistant principals. Ladies well represented. Arranged in a natty little hierarchy, the job titles on which did not suggest that any of them did anything so lowly as teaching. Indeed the job titles would have done one of the many government offices which regulate the sector proud. Presumably the place is far too large to have anything like an old-style staff meeting. Perhaps each department has a fortnightly management meeting, attended by its senior management team and supported by a management consultant expert in the latest management wheezes. Rank and file get dealt with in cascade briefings after school.
Good work has continued today with the somewhat delayed delivery and fitting of a new continental rear tyre for the bicycle. Hopefully this will clear the buckled wheel problem - about which so far two people have advised me - and on which the thought was that bulging tyre was the root of the problem rather than bending rim. One person accosting me in TB and the other leaning out of a van window as the van overtook me on the roundabout by St Paul's church, Cheam. No privacy at all in the world of cycles. But refurbished back wheel seemed alright coming back from the cycle shop, and we will see how it bears up on tomorrow's fish run. Odd how irritating a throbbing seat is, and I think it is more than being irritated that a new wheel is not right. The fault irritates in itself.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Scrape the soup
Neck of lamb stew again yesterday, what might be known to some as Lancashire Hot Pot. Not quite enough potatoes or lentils but not bad, just the same. The neck was much more meaty than the last one, despite looking much the same when in neck form. However, for a change, decided to skim the broth before turning it into soup, removing perhaps 40g of fat. We will see if the soup tastes rather thin in consequence.
It was certainly the case with this morning's scrambled egg. I don't usually add milk at all and get a rich yellow product. Today I added maybe two tablespoons of green top (slightly better than coloured water) to two eggs and got a rather thin, palid product, despite the knob of butter it was cooked with. Eatable but you don't get that mainlining cholesterol feeling.
Over breakfast reviewed the review, that is to say this week's edition of the TLS where I came across various matters worth a mention.
First, there was a very solid article about preserving our heritage in a digital age, which included a lot of stuff which would do very well in Private Eye's Pseuds' Corner, assuming that said corner has not yet been redeveloped. Lots of turgid sentences with lots of impressive sounding words which I could not make head nor tail of at all. But he observes in passing that Mr G. in his digitising book project may cut the odd corner in the interests of economy. I had not realised - it is obvious enough after the event - that digitisation mainly takes the form of scanning followed by optical character recognition, a proceeding which is error prone, with not all the errors detectable, let alone correctable, by computer. You might actually need a person to do that. I guess what Mr G. is not going to do is proof read the product, in the way that a book used to be in the (g)olden days of type. Maybe proof reading hardly goes on at all these days with most manuscripts being submitted in digital form in the first place? Except in so far as the author has the discipline to do it himself. And I dare say quite a lot of authors do not; you need to be able to focus on a tedious task for hours at a time. I drift off into musing about the content and lose focus on minor infelicities altogether. But the author of the article goes on to make the more interesting point that once a book has been properly produced it is reliable. You cannot easily tamper with the printed word. You can chuck it around the world without much regard at all without damaging that reliability. If you hold a book saying published by Penguin you can trust it. OK so someone could forge such a thing, but who is going to bother? But this is not true of the digital word, especially the digital word which is online. That can be fiddled with the whole time and you would not be any the wiser. Will we ever tolerate the management regime online which would be needed to lock down an online text in the same way as a printed book is locked down?
The Mormons have faced up to this problem by inscribing their all important family records in plain text on small wafers of silica. These are even more durable than books, it even being suggested that they had been tested in biblical vats of boiling oil, can be read with a domestic microscope or by a computer.
This article is followed by a lighter and short review of a book about deletion. Which makes the interesting point, quite the converse of the drift of the heavier and long article, that being able to forget is a good thing. We now have the ability to store huge amounts of information - the life time sensory input of a human bean is well within reach - and we do not need to forget anything. But not forgetting anything is a dreadful burden. One is unable to move on. I wonder how often film stars come to loathe the productions of their youth?
Then we have the review of a couple of books about the doings in Afghanistan. From which I learn that 57% of the teaching material at Sandhurst is derives from war films. An oddly precise figure, but assuming it is even vaguely right, puts a different take on the claim that war films are nothing like the real thing. Our warriors learn how to be warriors from the antics of the Governor of California in his youth. Not so differant, I suppose, from the Saxons mentioned recently who learned what to do in battle from the stories sung over their cups in the pub.
A propos of Afghanistan, I learned during the week that lots of countries are participating in the task force to sort the place out. Out of the 60,000 troops or so so engaged, about half are from the US. A sixth are from the UK. And so on down the list until at the bottom you get the odd hundred contributed by places like Outer Mongolia. Maybe as many as forty contributors altogether. Must be as much of a swine to command and control as the Roman army was when it started taking in allies and confederates big time. At least now, as then, there is a top language to command and control in.
Lastly I mention a piece from this same TLS about the 'Wild Things', a confection for children from the sixties of the last century. The piece is headed by an engaging picture (about to be posted) of a child riding on a cuddly monster. My point being that it is odd how monsters who are clearly equipped with hard-core teeth and claws for ripping other animals apart should be successfully portrayed in such a cuddly way. Do we not have any instincts about not meddling with such animals? Or does the image revive happy (or happily) infantile fantasies of being such an animal?
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Food items
My first is to report that McDonalds have started to sell a kind of coffee which contains coffee; an important fact which we picked up somewhere along the way to London yesterday. Which reminded me of the piece in one of the papers last week to the effect that superior people like ourselves like to knock Mcdonalds without giving them fair recognition for the huge amount of food they give you for your pound. In a more sensible world this might be regarded as a good thing; which it certainly would be if they ever get around to spreading into the drier & dodgier parts of Africa. That said, it is a while since I have been in such a place - although I might add that they are best known to some people that I know as having the cleanest toilets in late night central London on offer.
My second, following on from Bertolli margarine yesterday, is that the label on our jar of Sainbury's basic jam tells us that in order to make a better spreading product they have lowered the amount of lump & seed (also a pain with dentures) bearing fruit they put in the stuff. Down to 33g to the 100g, compared with the 100g to the 100g of the home made of my childhood. The arithmetic working because one boiled an awful lot of the water off of the 100g of fruit during manufacture.
My third is to report the first neck of lamb stew of the 2011-2012 season. At £10 a good bit cheaper than those which I was buying in the spring. It may have been a bit smaller and cooking for 2 hours was perhaps a touch too long - although the resultant broth will go down well in tomorrow's breakfast. A new feature was the butcher sawing the neck through longitudinally before chopping across: the resultant lumps were both more attractive and easier to deal with. Served with white cabbage with about three quarters of a small one not being quite enough for the two of us.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Troilus
Troilus and Cressida now turned up from Newton Stewart and pleased to find that I have got a hardback of the 1982 blue series, not a paperback at all. Late of the Department of English Literature in the University of Sheffield and complete with extensive if discrete annotations in pencil. Perhaps the Department of English has moved on from the bard and has no further need for Ardens.
Having finished the current crop of Fred Vargas, moved back to Churchill on Marlborough, volume 2. Came across a pleasant story about life at the source of democracy as we know it. Back in 1701 there was a chap called Henry St John. His father had been fined £16,000 for killing someone in a brawl and he was the right honourable member of parliament for Wootton Bassett (pronunciation Barset). He took after his father and was known for keeping the most expensive lady in town, one Miss Gumley. Miss Gumley was what was then called a demirep (a contraction of demi-reputation), the English not caring to use the French term demimondain. Mr John, when not entertaining Miss Gumley, used to go in for stunts liking streaking in the park while drunk. He was also well educated and a formidable public speaker. Plus he was ambitious. So he needed to pick an issue with which to make his name. So he picked on something called occasional conformity and waxed eloquent upon the iniquity of people in high places who only attended service occasionally. Possibly, even, attended chapel in between times. The issue being a big deal at the time, with the boozing Tories being all for ecclesiastical conformity and the sober, hard working Whigs being more relaxed. All of which makes me think that we have not moved on that much in the 300 years which have elapsed since then.
And then there was the story of Marlborough being captured by someone working in the French interest - as it happens, an Irish deserter from the Dutch service. It seems than when the campaigning season had been declared over, a bit like at the end of the football season, the generals liked to go home. This might well involve passing through land fairly much in the hands of the enemy. So the custom was that generals of one side would apply to generals of the other side for passes for safe passage home. But some generals, like Marlborough, did not like to be beholden to the opposing generals in this way and took their chances with an escort. In this case, Marlborough's escort came adrift and he fell into the hands of the Irishman. But his genius surfaced and Marlborough managed to talk&bribe his way out of captivity. It seems that this lucky escape was the subject of great manifestations of joy in the streets of The Hague.
The day before yesterday another go at the neck of lamb stew. This time with Royal Norfolk Potatoes from the rustic car boot sale in the field opposite our hotel in Old Hunstanton. These potatoes were the easiest to scrape that I remember scraping since I left the parental home: I have never managed to grow or buy potatoes that scrape easy, however new they might be or claim to be. Popped them into the stew, more or less entire, for just the last half hour of the two hour cooking process. Perfecto. An easy and reliable recipe.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Dancing tea
Yesterday we decided to take ourselves off to the tea dance in the Grand Hall of the Battersea Arts Centre, the place I visited recently for a beer festival. Arrived to find quite a queue of mixed seniors waiting for the action. Had a bit of a poke around while we waited and amused to come across a very serious (interior) wrought iron gate presumably intended during the glory days of the Grand Hall to keep the possibly inebriated punters out of the official part of what was the Town Hall. Had a peek inside the Grand Hall which looked much more grand when dressed for a tea dance than when it was dressed for a beer festival, despite the seniority of the attendance. In the end decided that this was not quite the thing for us and proceeded to seek lunch in the rain on Lavender Hill - which turned out to be harder than I had expected with a lot of places not being open weekdays during the say. But our luck was in and we found one of those Portuguese cafe/bar/restaurants - this one called 'Costa do Estoril' where we had a very decent lunch for about £20 for 2. Including, in my case, a plate of sea food rice and a pint of Sagres. Another of those websites where you have to affirm that you are of age: http://www.sagresbeer.com/.
Next stop the Salvation Army charity shop between Clapham South and Balham, so pushed up the splendidly names Wix's Lane onto the common and headed across to Clapham South tube station. Still raining reasonably seriously and happy to shelter for a while in the charity shop. Where, as well as a jigsaw for FIL, we came across an interesting pile of records - presumably the result of on-decease clearings out of some of the once posh mansion flats in the area. So I am now the proud owner of Missa Luba sung by the troubadours du Roi Baudouin, somewhere back in the late fifties of the last century. Claimed to be authentic Congolese music. Rather impressive it was too. Plus some more Schubert by Clifford Curzon.
Rain easing off, push onto the second hand bookshop at Balham Station where I acquire a decent two volume, Dover edition of Burton going on pilgrimage to Mecca for £20. Neat fit with the current bout of Arab and Islamic readings. Plus, next door there was one of those dinky groceries used by the up market flat dwellers in the posher parts of Balham where I got a very decent white bloomer (sourced from a French baker) and some very decent, but very expensive Montgomery cheddar. All of which made up for the cheapness of our lunch.
Back home, Franklin has learned a new trick. I return from a modest spin to find him waiting in the drive. He hopped up onto the pannier rack from where he allowed himself to be wheeled up the drive into the garage.
And I have a new butcher to play with, to wit the one at the top end of Ewell village. I had been prompted to go there by stories about his excellent meat pies, but actually bought a neck of lamb - something that the butcher in Manor Green Road does not carry on account of its being too expensive - and it certainly is rather dear considering the amount of bone it comes with - which did for today's lunch as a Lancashire Hot Pot. The first time we have had such a thing since last year, not having had access to Cheam for most of that time. Very nice it was too, despite the potato element being somewhat overcooked, having been put in about 45 minutes before the off. Have also bought a brick of stewing steak for slow cooking purposes. We shall see how that does. There is also yet another dinky grocery next door. I shall have to investigate whether it sells bread.
Current betting is that I shall be back in Cheam during the first week or so of March. Maybe 10 weeks after the iced incident.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Dead flies
This week's lentil soup was made from red lentils from Whitworths, via, I think, the new Tesco on Horton Lane. Plus chunks of Danish gammon, soaked overnight and pre-cooked. This in an endeavour to keep the salt content down given the amount being put into bread. Dead flies present in the finished soup, but not very many of them. Must get down to Tesco Leatherhead to find out what their customer services people made of the whole problem (see March 7th).
This week's Irish stew, more properly St. Patrick's Eve stew, will be made from the last neck of lamb to be had yesterday from Manor Green Road. It seems that the other 19 had gone to a local prep. school to make their St. Patrick's Day stew. Very proper of them too. Sign of the times that one has to go to a prep. school to get such a thing; it seems most unlikely that the local primary schools will have time or funds. Although one of our local primary schools had the time and funds to erect a colourful mosaic advertising itself on an outer wall the other day. Must have cost a lot more than a lot of Irish stew.
Yesterday to town to try the carrot juice bar at Selfridges. Which turned out to be missing: the food hall had plenty of fast food franchises but we could not find one which did carrot juice. Thwarted here, moved onto Hyde Park to take a gander at the municipal art there.
The first item was a very large bronze of a decapitated horse's head - maybe 20 feet high - erected on its nose somewhere near Marble Arch. Both ugly and morbid. The head was balanced by a piece which appeared to consist of half a dozen giant jelly babies made out of some kind of translucent, brightly coloured plastic and erected on a tasteful plinth. We then proceeded west, across sundry roads, to get into the park proper.
Into the Italian Gardens where we noticed that the statue of Jenner, some kind of BH great uncle, had not had the bird lime cleaned off very recently. But we did see a couple of very large and handsome brown ducks - probably Egyptian geese - and a very tame heron which hopped about the edges of the ponds trying to avoid the people trying to take its picture. On down the western edge of the Serpentine - which was looking very well on this hazy spring afternoon - to find a couple of brown rats. Across the water from the brown rats was a large metal saucer, erected where I think there used to be a Moore sculpture. The ticket on our bank told us that it was by the same chap who designed the world's biggest April Fools' joke in the Olympic Park - which I am sure I have noticed before but cannot now find. The saucer was not rubbish, but it was not finished either: the man had not properly worked out how to connect the shiny saucer to the ground. A trick which lots of sculptures fail to pull off. A problem, the pictorial arts version of which vexed the Pre-Raphaelites enough that they used to make their own picture frames.
We next come across a sign which explains that the Royal Horse Artillery will be firing a 21-gun salute in the park on the 21st April next to mark the birthday of sprog 1. I shall have to tell him as I do not suppose the Artillery will have bothered with that bit. Might be OK on field guns but admin. not too clever.
Pushed on to the memorial to the late Princess of Wales to find that it is now graced by a large bronze duck. Not as bad as the horse's head but not very good. The memorial was guarded by a rather surly worker from a company called Enterprise, who, it seems, have taken over the maintenance of the Royal Park known as Hyde Park: the parky's have been privatised. No more Queen's Gardener, no more Queen's Parky. The park might still be splendid but it seems a pity that its maintenance has to be a matter of profit and loss. Memorial itself suffers from the same problem as the saucer: idea good but not finished. The important bit is not properly connected with the rest of the world.
The next memorial was to the cavalry of the empire, which looked to have been put up for the first world war and touched up for the second. The important bit of this memorial was a knight on horseback, in full armour, poking a large scaly thing underneath his horse with a lance: St. George and the dragon; a little anachronistic perhaps, but no more so that the whopping great near naked Achilles a bit further up the park. BH thought that we wound up with St. George the Dragon because the Plantagenet family did not think that St. Edward the Confessor, his predecessor, was really manly enough for a people engaged in a reverse conquest of France.
On down to Hyde Park Corner where we find that the Commonwealth memorial actually looks quite impressive if viewed from underneath the Wellington Arch. With, for the first time, flames coming out of the black bowls on top of the white pillars; clearly visible in the mid afternoon light when looking east. Pity about the silly little pavilion to one side. Pity about the smell of burning cooking oil hanging around the place.
I close with a planning puzzle. What on earth were the controllers of planning thinking of when they allowed some hotel in Buck. House Road, nearly opposite Buck. House Proper, to drape its elegant, fake Georgian frontage with some kind of green eco-carpet? Quite ugly; nothing at all like the far superior, rather arty and (I think) French effort in Piccadilly.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
London town
From the Strand to the 'Maple Leaf', a Canadian theme pub, the name of which I vaguely remember coming across before. Very crowded and noisy with downstairs toilets decidedly retro.
One of the internet reviews of this establishment commented that the poutine was rubbish, poutine being a word I have come across before. Both blog and google search say that my only use of the word was on February 19th 2007, but my recollection is that it came from reading a Fred Vargas story, part of which was set in Quebec and which Amazon France tells me that I bought in 2009. I was impressed that I was able to get at my Amazon history so easily, but puzzled about the poutine. Maybe the memory connections for this word have got muddled up.
Next door was a restaurant called 'Steak & Co' but which had a number of what looked fancy hams hanging in the window. More puzzled. From there past the 'Lamb & Flag' from where the the crowd was spilling out of the pub, down the alley and almost into Garrick Street. Far too crowded for a non-alcoholic refreshment, although in the dim and distant past they used to do very good bread and cheese at lunch time. So onto St Martin's Lane where I found a nice quiet café, Fernando's I think, where I was able to have a ham sandwich with a bottle of still, room temperature water without mood music. The waitress was slightly puzzled that I should want warm water but trotted off to the store to get one just the same. Ham sandwich came on ready sliced bread, but with the slices maybe half an inch thick. Presumably the factory bread answer to all this baguette and panini stuff - and fine for a ham sandwich. Ham thin but decent.
Onto to the Duke of York's to see 'Jumpy', a tale of angst concerning the response of a couple of middle aged couples to the extravagant doings of a just under (sex) age daughter, the pull being Tamsin Greig as the mother. As it turned out, a rather drab & dreary tale, rather too long, far too much bad language, a lot of thigh and some humour. A minimalist set, decorated in white satin finish emulsion, balanced by loud and unpleasant music between scenes: there may have been significance in this last but it was quite lost on me. Some rather heavy handed gestures towards the femmy movements of the 1970's. Some rather heavy handed moralising. An incestuous play in that two of the adult roles were luvvies. I have noticed before that some luvvies seem to love writing luvvies into their plays and other luvvies seem to love playing the resulting luvvy roles; a love which goes back at least as far as the bard and even our own 'Midsomer Murders' is mildly infected. Females OK (I particularly liked Seline Hizli as Lyndsey), juvenile males OK, adult males somehow rather irritating, not sure why. The experience was not improved by sitting in range of vent blowing out cold air - and I had no scarf to provide comfort for the neck.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Codfail
Today was supposed to be the day when I tried simmering our Friday cod in milk and butter, rather than baking it. Another hot tip from Tooting. However, the Hastings fish man has had the cheek to take off for Lanzerote without bothering to call at Cheam to deal with his faithful customers first. So cod fails. However, all is not lost. It is a dull and miserable day so we shall have a warming hot pot made of neck of Southdown Lamb, on the bone. Cost, slightly more than the cod would otherwise have been, that is to say, not a cheap dish.
Meanwhile, my eye was caught over the breakfast bread and cheese (the Lancashire Poacher from Brighton; a decent cheddary sort of cheese. Good texture, fairly strong) by a letter in the Guardian about the Bloody Sunday enquiry, to the effect that it was a bit like having bought a ridiculously expensive car. You have paid for the thing so there is no point in whining and leaving the thing in the garage. You might as well go for rides in it.
Next stop was Surrey Library where several attempts to find the thing in the catalogue fail. One might of thought that a public interest item like this would be there, but maybe being many volumes it is reference only, in the bigger branches only, and so not visible in the online lending catalogue. I shall make enquiries. Then off to the enquiry website, all very spiffy with the full report available online. But I don't want to read a thing this fat online, rather, where do I get a copy of the report from? Website no help at all on that front. So I shall have to continue to comment on the matter without the benefit of any more fact than has been gleaned from the DT and the Guardian - the Independent having gone missing from our corner shop.
It suddenly dawned on me that Mr Blair, at that time at the beginning of his term, maybe knew what he was doing. Throw lots of money at the thing. Tell the committee to take their time and leave no stone unturned.
The money is mainly a good thing. There are frictional losses involved in pumping it through the trousers of luxury lawyers but a good proportion of it will wind up in Northern Ireland, meeting bills at hotels, restaurants, bars and the like. Helping things along.
It was a reasonable bet that the conclusions would be what they, in the event, turned out to be. Yes, the army lost control on the day, but there was no conspiracy to do evil and there was an armed IRA presence. Armed with arms that were used.
So now, most people think why on earth have we spent so much time and money on all this ancient history? Can't we just put all this away now and get on with our lives? And the few die-hard IRA will maybe be content, if not happy, to bury the hatchet. So maybe it is mission accomplished.
I hope there will be no prosecutions. I think it would be quite wrong to prosecute men who were (possibly badly led) young soldiers facing a hostile crowd a long time ago - particularly given that those who did far worse things were amnestied some time ago.
