Curses

I just heard that Tomb Raider Underworld is not coming out on PS2 (i.e. my only console) until some time (as yet unspecified) next year, not today as I had previously thought. FLAPS! Now what am I going to do in these dark winter months I ask you???

If Will is reading this, what about a Wii for Christmas? Just thought I'd mention it...

Woo and indeed woo!

Was woken up this morning at 5am by an excited Will who had watched the US election declared in Obama's favour. Very relieved as despite all the predictions in the press, I always had a nagging doubt that McCain would scrape in, thus dooming us for ever. I will never misoverestimate the American public again after TWO electoral victories for Dubya, but at last they seem to have come to their collective senses.

The next question being, how can W foul up as much as possible before January?

ACDC on tour

Come see!



I will be buying tickets at 10am tomorrow morning for the London date (14th April) so if you want me to get one please say now!



Still jealous of Neil and Dan going to Maiden, so this cannot be missed. Or I will never be able to hold my head up in rawk circles again (like I have been doing... er... all the time).

"S" is also for "stoopid"

To carry on from Dan's sterling work in naming the best songs by artists beginning with an "S" (see here), je vous propose:

Swine Fever - Rogue Stallion. The best song never written, despite many attempts by Dan and Will.

Smashing Pumpkins - Soma. Not one I listen to regularly any more, but deeply entrenched in memories of being 17 or so. A lot of people can't get over Billy Corgan's nasal voice, it's true, but for me this is just on the correct side of pomp rock. Plus it has the quiet, quiet, quiet, LOUD stuff* I always enjoy. And I reckon Radiohead pinched said format, so there.

Seasick Steve - Thunderbird. A song about everybody's favourite wine, of course! Seasick Steve was definitely the highlight of last year's End of the Road festival. I'm still not sure how much is an act and how much is authentic, but I ceased to care after about 10 seconds of watching him break his guitar and stomp on a box like a madman. Unlike anyone I've ever seen before.

Stone Roses - Sally Cinnamon. I defy anyone not to like this immediately on hearing it. For some reason I never really got into the Stone Roses -Stone Roses until I came to University, though had previously gone to see them in Brighton when the Second Coming was out (minus Reni, sadly). Again, perhaps it's more the time that this conjures up for me rather than the song itself, but that is true of many songs I guess.

Lynard Skynyrd - Freebird. "What song is it you wanna hear?" Obviously I mean the 20 minute or so live version, taped off my Dad's copy off a friend circa 1993, when I actually realised he had the occasional blast of good taste in music (despite years of Rod Stewart trauma). The circle became complete when he nicked my Pearl Jam tape a couple of years later...

* There must be a technical term for this?

I am old.

So I turned 30 yesterday and spent the entirety of today gardening, and going to DIY stores. Shoot me now.

Kate and I went to Longleat a while ago - and the monkeys wrought destruction upon my car; tearing off the rear wash nozzle, so that now the liquid pours down on to the passenger shelf!

Photos!

The Bank Holiday will be a tester. I am not on Court duty or police station duty for the whole weekend (although I do have to go to police station on Monday). As a consequence of this unusual stretch of freetime, I am trying to think of ways of getting drunk. I believe I will be able to persuade someone to buy me beer in exchange for potatoes/ runner beans. Also I know that after Dad's 60th birthday bash, there are two polypins of Summer Lighting and Crop Circle leftover that no one else wants to drink (they are certainly past their best, but I am fairly desperate). By the way - don't think cupboard is bare. There's a lot of potatoes in there, and I haven't had to consider the "Celebrity Meatloaf" or tinned "Meat" balls yet. There's honey, flour, yeast, powdered custard, powdered Miso soup, instant gravy, cornflour, sugar, rapeseed oil - and other stuff - a world of possibilities.

My Mushroom growing kit is finally showing signs of life (See photo)!

Also made a soup the other day out of all the veg that had gone funny (lettuce, peas, carrots etc.) I bunged them all in the pressure cooker and it made a very nice soup. The pressure cooker is amazing - it performs some kind of magic on food - you can pretty much shove anything in there - and it seems to turn out quite well (the exception being the time I tried to make soup using mainly gone-off red wine from one of those boxes).

When will he crack?

We have almost run out of tea and coffee. Marmite finished yesterday. And there is a bank holiday, which could prove the ultimate test (unless someone takes pity and swaps potatoes for beer).

I have failed

Oh no, I hear you cry, how awful. Back to normal food... Will is ploughing on however, and the cupboard is looking bare.

Bumper spud harvest has enabled me to undertake bartering. Have swapped spuds variously for: eggs, artichoke, meat, cheese, tomatoes. Forgot to take fruit to work today - and so will have to miss lunch. More home-made bread and yoghurt made at weekend. My parents-in-law very kindly brought a chicken around on Sunday, which we roasted and ate together. Absolutely delicious! Accompanied with home-grown spuds, A&C carrots and home-grown runner beans. The carcass is in the pressure cooker becoming stock, which I think that I will use to make a pea and bean soup. All redcurrents from A&C went mouldy before I got to them - should've checked them earlier. Having to drink lots of tea at work to stave off hunger.
Parents gave me some sausages for doing some heavy lifting at the weekend - and so that's tonight's supper sorted.
P.S. I think that Kate may have had enough of this quest - so it may be a solo mission from now on.

It almost feels like there is too much food in the garden! The box of potatoes shown is from one corner of veg patch. Also pictured is the bread I made on Saturday (nice, but goes stale very quickly - also had to make it round - as only have cake and not loaf baking tin). Looks like spuds for every meal.

Given the quantity of veg available in Garden (just two potato plants yielded a cardboard box full of spuds on Friday and courgettes coming through fast - see photo), I think that I will move from yoghurt as staple to potatoes - that should firm things up.

Also, went out for meal on Friday night and bought my parents' supper as "thankyou" for taking us on holiday - so that means an extra day on the end. Quest will now complete on 05/09/08.

Have fininshed all bread in house - so I am making my own from flour and yeast that was in cupboard - should be ready by about 16.00.

The Good Life

I dug up some potatoes for my lunch. Felicity Kendal, you have my permission to BITE ME!

Though my stomach is complaining - I too am blaming the yoghurt. But at least I am not suffering as badly as Will.

Interesting: quest of non-purchase of food and drink on track (getting bored of fruit lunches). And possible digestive troubles from excess of home-made yogurt (sp?). Went to Boots height and weight machine again; lost weight (14st 10lb as opposed to 15st last week), however same machine informs me that I have lost height! (5'11'' as opposed to 6' - which is how tall it told me I was last week!) I am not certain that I can trust that machine.

Quest on track. Homemade yoghurt proving very useful. Carrying teabags around during the day, and scabbing hot water for caffeine fix.

Re-start:
I must now re-start the quest, as we had guests down at the weekend and Kate persuaded me that it was unacceptable to continue in quest whilst we had visitors. Quest will now run from the 4th Aug to 4th Sept. However, before they arrived on Saturday I did eat some tinned meat from the back of my cupboard calling itself "Bacon Roll". It was very hard to extract from the tin and it had a worrying texture and colour. I fried it, and it tasted like a very dry Sausage McMuffin, with a leathery texture. It is, however, passable (meaning that I have passed it - rather than it being subject to a "rejection").

I am me!

Failure - last night I failed! As with so many of life's mistakes, this one was made under the influence of alcohol.
Doing really well - was very hungry on return from work, but filled up on toast (the last loaf that I will not have to make myself) and stale breadsticks from the cupboard. Also very passable cup of tea made from "second-use" tea bag.
Later on I started to make my evening meal - a vegetable curry made entirely from veg from the veg box. However, I had just taken a very annoying work call, which threatened to see me working at the weekend and not getting paid for it. That annoyed me. In a fit of pique I hunted out the last non-spirit alcohol in the house; a bottle of Chianti that had been a gift. Opened - very pleasant. Drank almost all of it whilst cooking to compensate for annoying work situation. Ate curry. Then persuaded Kate to come to the pub with me - where I purchased two pints of lager. That constitutes a failure in my quest - a day must be added to the end! Co-incidentally I compounded my errors by purchasing over-priced fags from fag machine and smoking them - and then getting stuck into the Calvados on return home. (It was Friday night). I now have a hangover.

In response to Dan's question:
I understand that the "Curing" or "Leatherising" process is designed to encourage the formation of sugars, in order to stop the food tasting so astrigent. I think that it is a sort of forced ripening. WillP.S. I am quite hungry already

Someone has nicked your idea of the self-purge

A new contender

Compete! I dare you! Mwa ha ha ha (Kate)

Breakfast: Coffee (less strong than usual - as will have to carefully ration it) also black - to preserve milk for ongoing "rolling culture" of yoghurt.

Leftover smoothie

Homemade rhubarb yoghurt - rhubarb from garden - initially tried this last night, was eyewateringly sour - now have added a good deal of sugar, and is now palatable.

Am taking banana and orange to Court (where I will be all day as Court duty solicitor) - no time to prepare anything else.

Photos: check on my potato patch! I may be getting most of carbs from here. Also apple tree (green mass beyond roof) - fruit not ready, but fallers can be made palatable by thinly slicing and allowing to "cure" for a few days, or by pounding, mashing and allowing to dry into a "fruit leather" (according to Ray Mears' Wild Food book).

In the interests of being "Scientific" about this trial I went to Boots and paid 50p to be insulted by the weighing machine. Today I am 6" tall (flattery), 15stone exaclty (insult), and have a BMI on 28.5; overweight (insult). Let's see whether a month of not exchanging money for food and drink improves my stats! Will (Kate joined me as an authour - but I don't know how to sign in - so I'll just sign off with my name to avoid confusion).

In preparation for this food trial - I have successfully learned how to create yoghurt. And I am cultivating mushrooms in a "mushroom kit" - should be ready in about two weeks. I think that I will also dig up all the potatoes from the garden - which should yield quite a few kilos. Tonight is my last night without any food constrictions - and so I am going to Pizza Express.

P.s. the mission does include drink as well

Will is using Kate's blog

Hello,

I am typing into the world of internet ot bring you my story of non-pecuniary related food acquisition in the month of August. I will still be getting the delivery of Small Organic box from Abel and Cole and also milk delivery. The only criteria I have set for myself is not to purchase food from a point of sale in August by means of exchange of money. I can barter (e.g. surfeit of apples for honey), farm (e.g. potatoes from veg patch - see ace pic of Dan - if I can get the photo thing to work), rely on freeganism (e.g. my parents will certainly have more courgettes than they can eat or preserve at this time of year), and forage (e.g. blackberries are beginning to appear).

Will is to hijack my blog

Will is going to be taking us back to the dark ages on some kind of quest to piss me off. I will let him elaborate, as he will using this blog to spread his evil mission. See you in a month.

Croatia = rad

Why did I come back to sit at my desk and watch the rain pouring down my window, why why why??? PS final photo is Will's cousin James (in foreground) with his brand new wife, Tania. At 6.30am the next day. After having been up all night.

List of books that I may have read

OK so now I am copying Neil, Tom and Dan, so here goes with the list (I refuse to call it a meme). Just so you know, I have a bit of a problem with "canonical" works - who gets to choose them? And what bias is there? And how in God's name did Dan Brown get in???



PS: the code is red for those I have read, asterisked for more than once, blue for those I want to read, and green for those started but never finished. 44:13:9, fact fans.



Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22*

One Hundred Years of Solitude*

Wuthering Heights*

The Silmarillion

Life of Pi: A Novel

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Ulysses

Madame Bovary

The Odyssey*

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Eyre

A Tale of Two Cities

The Brothers Karamazov

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

War and Peace

Vanity Fair

The Time Traveller’s Wife

The Iliad

Emma

The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner

Mrs. Dalloway

Great Expectations

American Gods

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*

Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World*

The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

Frankenstein*

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula*

A Clockwork Orange

Anansi Boys

The Once and Future King

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible

1984*

Angels & Demons

The Inferno

The Satanic Verses

Sense and Sensibility

The Picture of Dorian Gray*

Mansfield Park

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbevilles

Oliver Twist*

Gulliver’s Travels*

Les Misérables

The Corrections

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

Dune

The Prince

The Sound and the Fury

Angela’s Ashes

The God of Small Things

A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present

Cryptonomicon

Neverwhere

A Confederacy of Dunces

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Dubliners*

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved

Slaughterhouse Five*

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

The Mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake : A Novel

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion

Lolita

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye

On the Road

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Freakonomics

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Aeneid

Watership Down

Gravity’s Rainbow

The Hobbit*

In Cold Blood

White Teeth

Treasure Island

David Copperfield*

The Three Musketeers

Flange-mounted active probe

Yes, that's what I'm working on. Snarf.

Birthday approaching... fast!

OK, not fast. More like in September. But that's no reason not to come up with a ludicrously over-complicated plan right now!

I am thinking of coming up to London (madness I know) and either hiring somewhere out to put on a Labyrinth-themed 80s Venetian ball*:

* For which I have found a supplier of masks. But no big hair yet, excluding my own of course.

Otherwise I have heard tell of a night called Guilty Pleasures, at Koko, and it has been suggested that with my eclectic (OK, indiscriminate and sometimes crap) taste in music this might be an option.

Thoughts on a postcard please!

Hay Festival - 22nd May onwards

I want to go to the Hay Festival this year, but have heard rumours that it is almost impossible to find accommodation. But I have a tent.

Anyone been/going this year? Advice welcome.

sickly child

So yesterday I spent most of the day lying on my sofa between trips to the loo to be sick. And why? No booze or dodgy food consumed the previous day (the same as Will, who is fine), so 'tis a mystery. Hope none of last weekend's guests have succombed to same.

Also have found potential next stop for pan-European tour, a town in Albania called Puke. I kid you not.

In other news, I am trying to plan a visit to Dubrovnik in the summer, anyone been there?

House = new

So we've moved. Devizes seems nice so far, with a rad deli which sells chocolate faberge eggs amongst other things, and proper butchers etc. Also we have milk delivered in glass bottles(!), something I've not seen for many years. This makes up for the semi-constant drone of the firing range which is apparently very close. Nothing like a chorus of RPGs to help me concentrate on my extra boring work. Or maybe it's not the army, I forgot it was half-term.

Also I have spoken to several neighbours already, thus beating my London score of 3 in 3 years in a mere 3 weeks. I've even invited some round - it seemed like the thing to do. But Will has caused us to be self-exiled from our local, didn't take long.

But it's bastard cold outside the protective smogzone, and I can't seem to keep the fire going. In fact my extreme ineptitude in the face of owning a home is now coming to the fore - I couldn't find the gas meter until yesterday, and have so far managed to change one light bulb and sand down one shelf (piece of timber at the moment, I speak for its future use). I have been looking at the garden hopefully, but not actually doing anything in it yet. Like planting seeds in the enormo veg garden. Or constructing the compost bin rather than using plastic bags which keep it nice and stinky.

Which all begs the question, please can someone with an ounce of sense come and stay and teach me how to be an actual grown-up? No, Dan, this does not mean you.

update

Yeah, yeah, moved house dinni???