Dear Diary

I am aware that my blog has hardly been full of sparkling repartee and Noel Cowardesque wit recently.  I am coming over all Pooterish, but without the amusement levels.

This is, I believe, due to the constant presence of the CLD ™, looming menacingly everywhere I turn.  I have not wanted to blog all week. This is virtually unheard of, and has worried me alarmingly.  I have however, used my strong sense of Catholic guilt, to push me onwards in an ever more mundane catalogue of things wot I dun.

Today, when faced with the fact that the children and I have spent all day cleaning the house, except for the times we went to the tip, the charity shop and the chip shop, and the hiatus for cake and consolation at granny’s house, I was tempted not to bother.  My blog entries at the moment remind me very much of my diaries from when I was ten.

I got up. I brushed my teeth.  I watched Saturday Superstore.  I wish I could go on the telly.  Donna at school went on Saturday Superstore singing as Annie. I hate Annie. I don’t want to go on if I have to sing Annie, but I expect they could find other stuff for me to do.  I am wearing my red, Liverpool tracksuit today. I hate football, but my tracksuit is cool and if I say I support Liverpool the boys are less mean to me at school because everyone supports Liverpool, even though we don’t live in Liverpool.  I love Adam Ant. I played his record ten times today until mum asked me to stop.  I also wish Tucker Jenkins from Grange Hill was my big brother.  That would be ace.  I had seven Party Rings this afternoon while I was watching that weird black and white film on BBC2.  It made me cry. And I felt a bit sick.  I think that was the Party Rings. I don’t care. We had spaghetti bolognese for tea and watched Dr. Who.  I didn’t hide behind the sofa this week.  I hate my brother.  I am sure he got a bigger portion of pudding than me.  I wish I was sixteen and could stay up all night long. It would be ace.  I spent my pocket money on a Mars Bar and a copy of Jinty.  Did I mention I love Adam Ant? I am writing this under the bed covers with my brilliant torch that shines three colours.  If mum finds out she is going to kill me.  She says I will go blind.  I hope she doesn’t realise I have concealed a cheese sandwich and some mini meringues under my pillow for a midnight feast.  Midnight feasts are ace. I feel like I am at Mallory Towers. I wish my mum and dad would send me to Mallory Towers.  I bet I would love going to boarding school.  I hate ordinary school.  Would they make me do cross country at Mallory Towers, or could I just swap it for double swimming in that excellent natural rock swimming pool by the sea? I bet I could.  That would be ace.

etc.

(The thing about the cheese sandwiches and meringues actually happened.  She did find out.  This was mainly due to the fact that I put them under the pillow with no protective wrapping. I then fell asleep, forgot they were there, and woke up with pillows sandwiched together with mashed cheese sarnie and melted meringue.  It was not a good day for me. Or the pillows.)

I always used to mention that I had brushed my teeth when I wrote my diary as a child.  I am not sure why.  I think it is because if my mum ever read it, she could at least be sure of my dental hygiene.  This might, theoretically have bought me brownie points for all the other things I had written that she would not have approved of.

Unlikely.

I don’t think she did read them, and if she did she either gave up after slipping into a coma of boredom, or laughed herself stupid.

I would never read my children’s diaries, should they ever take up keeping them.  I would rather not know about anything at all.  Ignorance is indeed bliss in these situations.

I sometimes wish I still had my diaries.  I kept them sporadically from the age of eight until I was in my mid twenties.  I then lugged them around in a huge cabin trunk for many years until I decided that I needed to make a break with the past and had a huge bonfire, on which the diaries, and many other incriminating documents went.  I think I kept my letter for being a runner up in the Blue Peter silver jubilee competition (signed by John Noakes, and paw printed by Shep, no less), and everything else went into the inferno.

I remember snippets of things I wrote, but I think I would actually quite like to have the early years back.  I was so utterly rubbish then, they would be hilarious.  I’m not sorry I burned everything from the age of 14 onwards. I think it was a wise move considering how much Sylvia Plath I was imbibing at the time, and the fact that those were the nervous breakdown years.  Some things are best sent into oblivion.

 

Cake and Books

I was meant to go to London today to meet up with the delightful Betty.  Sadly her water pipes exploded (this is not a euphemism) and instead of meeting me for tea and buns at St. Pancras she had to sit at home in a puddle, waiting for Dynorod.

I could have gone to London anyway. I had a ticket for the train.  But I am still feeling ill, and the thought of spending the whole day alone in London just did not appeal.  Yes. That is how ill I am feeling. Tragic, non? Normally I would jump at the chance of spending a whole day in London.  I want to go to The Courtauld Gallery.  I want to see the new exhibition at The British Library.   I want to go to the John Soames Museum.  And that’s just the first three things I can think of. There are hundreds more.

But today it was cold, and windy, and rainy, and my chest hurt and I had no enthusiasm for anything at all.

I took myself home, shelved all thoughts of London into the ‘later’ category in my brain, and spent the day in the warm, snoozing, and reading, and watching television and cooking.

I am reading ‘Luka and the Fire of Life’ by Salman Rushdie.  It is fabulous.

One of UE’s favourite ever books is Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. When we first got together we had six months of trading books with each other and watching each other’s favourite films and listening to each other’s favourite music. It was fascinating.  I loved a lot of the music. I enjoyed a heap of the films. I hardly liked any of the books he held dear; particularly Midnight’s Children, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Slaughterhouse Five.

A few months after this, I was very ill, and UE came over one evening to look after me when I was laid up.  We were still love’s young dream then.  He came bearing treats and a book to read to me.  It was Haroun and The Sea of Stories, also by Rushdie.

I was alarmed.  I was prepared to hate it.  I was petulant.

It was wonderful.  It was everything that I had thought Midnight’s Children would be and then wasn’t.

If you’re ever thinking of reading Rushdie, I recommend starting with it.  It is an absolute delight of a book.  Luka and the Fire of Life is the sequel to Haroun.  Haroun was written for Rushdie’s eldest son when he was twelve.  Luka was written for his second son when he also turned twelve.  I would love to be given such a gift should I ever have the honour of turning twelve again.

I don’t really want to explain the plot too much.  I will say that it is a brilliant, funny, adventure story with bags of charm and character, and although it is written for a child, it is not childish at all, as with all of the best children’s books.  It is a privilege to read it.

I spent the afternoon baking.  We had run out of cake, which was not allowed.  I remember that when I was a child my mum would spend one afternoon a week baking for us.  We didn’t really have shop bought cakes and biscuits.  I loved baking days as a child, although I don’t know whether my mum did particularly, especially on the days when we weren’t at school and could ‘help’ her.  I am thinking of introducing baking day back into my domestic routine.  It’s a lovely idea. It just depends if my waistline can take it more than anything.

I turned to Nigella for inspiration, and so that I could knock a few more recipes off of my list.  So that I wouldn’t eat all the raw ingredients I made myself lunch first.  I had toasted halloumi with beetroot and lime salad.  It was delicious.  The recipe in the book was about as simple as it sounds, so I jazzed it up a bit by using beetroot that had been pickled with juniper (nom) and pomegranate seeds and sweet, baby plum tomatoes, along with some peppery green leaves.

That slowed down the ingestion of cake mix rather.

First I made Devil’s Food Cake. I was slightly underwhelmed.  I could not get my ganache to set properly, despite following her instructions to the letter. It still ended up like chocolate soup.  Also I thought the sponge was rather bland, given all the faffing you had to do to make it devilish rather than a bog standard chocolate sponge.  The chocolate cake recipe in Feast is much, much better in my opinion.

Then I made what Nigella calls blondies.  My understanding of blondies is that they are brownies with white chocolate in them.  This is not what I made.  They were more like flap jacks with chocolate chips in that you welded together with condensed milk.  Nothing wrong with them.  In fact they were very nice, but definitely more flap jackish than brownie ish.

Then I made chocolate chip cookies, which were perfectly nice, and which the children like.  They didn’t rock my world, but as they only take about twenty five minutes to make from start to finish, they could become a staple of my baking afternoons.

For dinner we had savoury barbecue mince.  It had cloves and all spice in.  I did not like this much.  It wasn’t horrible, but I can think of less unusual and more comforting ways to eat mince.

Still it knocked five more things off of my recipe tally, my husband and children love me, and the house still smells of baked biscuits, so it’s not all bad.  Plus it kept me toasty warm all afternoon.

So the whole day was basically about cake and books, and that’s got to be good really, even if I was too poorly to go and trip the light fantastic

A Mondayish post.

After resting on my festive laurels for a while due to not being able to get the CLD (TM)  in the car with me, I finally ventured out today to try and conquer the Christmas shopping I have left to do for Jason and the children.

I only made it as far as my local Sainsburys with my mum, but given the inertia of the last few weeks, it felt like I had hiked up the North face of the Eiger.

We spent hours in there.

I kid you not.

We got kind of overwhelmed by everything, and wandered around the aisles for a while, randomly picking things up and putting them down again.  Occasionally we would go so far as to throw something in the trolley.  Then we weren’t sure.  Every time I felt a bit paralysed with doubt I threw more chocolate into the trolley.  Eventually it looked like a mobile ad, warning people about the perils of diabetes.

The children will be happy.  They love sweets with a passion and are only usually allowed one sweetie time a day.  Christmas and Easter are much more relaxed and they actively fantasise about large quantities of chocolately goodness coming their way.

They will not be disappointed in this respect at all.

We got things done eventually, but I would say that I have made a blip in my list rather than a sizeable dent, or even complete annihilation.

This is a bit disheartening to say the least.

It was nice to spend some time together.  It was nice to feel I was only dying a little bit.  I might actually be getting better, which would also be nice.

After yesterday, when Andrea ferried me to London like she was my carer, and I was an elderly lady with an ear trumpet, I really needed to start feeling better.  We ended up skipping our plans to go and see an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum because I was too ill.  She drove up to London accompanied by me clutching a hot water bottle and emitting plangent moans.  I fell asleep in the first half of the play (Juno and The Paycock at the National) and only managed to stay awake in the second half because there was a lot of misery induced shrieking which stopped me from nodding.

Andrea is very patient with me.  More patient than I would be.  I’d have abandoned me at the side of the South Bank to die.

I almost wish she had. It would have solved the shopping dilemma.

Because, of course, I still have shopping to do.  Oscar and Tallulah have both requested items from the Build a Bear workshop for Christmas.  I am putting it off.  My only consolation is that I can shop online.

Tilly wants another interesting cardigan.  Tilly and her interesting cardigans have haunted every festivity for the last six years.  She loves them, but trying to find something she will find interesting becomes more of a challenge, year on year.

Really, since announcing I was going to make this festive season easier, it seems to have become harder by the day.  I have never spent so much time worrying, fretting, thinking, testing, planning and making time for things.

I am now heartily sick of everything to do with Christmas, and it is not even December yet.  I usually start feeling like this about half way through advent, but this year it has come early.

I have decided that unless you are way more organised than me, and unless you start rifling through charity shops in April, and crafting in May, you are pretty much fucked unless you want to gift everyone a lot of nylon and some badly constructed decoupage.  If you want things that are beautiful, and you are as inept as me, you are truly lost.

Truly.

Give me three years to prototype my plan, and a following wind, and a significant drop off in the number of friends and relatives I have, and I might just crack it.

This year I might be losing more friends and relatives thanks to total gift breakdown, which would help.

Maybe that’s what it is.  Maybe people who craft lose friends until they either become craft geniuses or have so few friends left that they can spend all year making one half way decent present.

Really, I should just have you all over for dinner.  In small groups rather than all at once.  There is no safety in numbers as far as my culinary skills are concerned.  My food though, is actually winning accolades from the family at the moment, whereas my craft skills are certainly not.

We have no cake left. There were hysterics when the last of the refrigerator cake got eaten and I hadn’t got anything to replace it.  I have orders from three different branches of the family for more.

Then today I did baby, Indian style roasties with aged rump steak and a steak sauce Nigella calls barbecueish.  It was good.  I LOVE the roasties, which taste heavenly dipped in mayo.  Everyone else loved everything else and Jason even moaned with appreciation.

I feel I can get no better than a moan, except maybe a swoon, face first into the dinner.

It was a great accolade.

It could be the one thing that redeems me this yuletide.

Like a Spiral within a Sweater, Like a murder victim without a face

Jason scootled off earlier in the evening to play poker.

He has been looking after me for the last 24 hours, like the devoted husband he is, and is also letting me bugger off to London with Andrea for the day tomorrow. When he said he wanted to go and play poker I, of course, said yes.

It’s checks and balances in this house. Constant testing.

He had only been gone a few minutes when the warm glow of my utter and selfless (ahem) kindness towards him had worn off, and I suddenly realised that Saturday night is The Killing night.

Then I got the arse.

I did not want to wait for The Killing.  I wanted to watch it right then (even though it wasn’t on right then).  I did not want to be denied, even though I have six million other things to watch, forty seven small projects on hand, a filthy house, and up until that point I had completely forgotten all about it.

Five minutes after that I was burning with resentment so bright you could have powered the entire road for a month.

Nobody ever said I was fair.

Or nice.

I rang him to remonstrate.

His phone went to answering service.

I stomped about, fluffing up cushions and sneering at the cat.

I wrote rude things about him on Twitter.

Then he came back through the door bearing sweets (toffee chocolate eclairs, nom) and ready to watch cool Danish thrillers featuring knitwear with me.

I love he.

I didn’t tell him about writing rude things about him on Twitter.

I may confess later, but only after I have eaten all the chocolate toffee eclairs.

All will be well.

I am off to watch it in a moment.  I am very excited.

In the meantime I thought I would mention that if Danish isn’t your thing, but you still like to be thrilled, we have also started watching the first season of a French series called Spiral.  I know some of you recommended it to me previously. I do listen, honestly, I’m just slow.  Now I have amassed the first season though we’re up and running.

Avec les flics.

Bien sur.

I love it.

Basically, it is sort of like The Killing, only French.

If you’re watching for the sake of knitwear, you will be disappointed in Spiral, and I recommend sticking to the Danish. It’s what they do best.

What is wonderful about Spiral, apart from the fact that it is very gripping, well acted and quite exciting is that it is so very French.

Everyone smokes likes fiends. There was a man in the autopsy room chomping a huge cigar.  The air is permanently blue with the fumes of smouldering Gauloises.

Everyone shrugs and talks at nineteen to the dozen. ‘Hein?’ ‘Quoi?’ etc.

To make up for the lack of jumpers, every lady except the sexy lady flic have fabulous shoes with ridiculous heels that they glide about Paris effortlessly in. They never tread in dog turds (which I know for a fact litter the streets of Paris only slightly less than they litter Belgium), and they never, ever turn an ankle, get their heels caught in a grating, or lean against a lamp post whilst rubbing their ankle bone and saying in French ‘chuffin’ ‘ell. These are killer shoes. Got any Compeed?’

They cannot wear jumpers because this would impede their rate of undress. Yes. It is a fact that you see more naked flesh in one hour of Spiral than you did in twenty hours of The Killing.  So far the naked victim has been shown from every angle except inside out, and despite having her face pulverised with a hammer, all the men are keen to point out that she is extremely beautiful and that if she didn’t have a pulverised face and happen to be upside down in a skip, they’d be happy to give her one.

The lady flic has spent the night with the chap who is supposed to be the translator for the deaf, and the bent cop with a coke habit spends what time he doesn’t have a rolled up ten euro note stuck up his nose, with his hand stuck up his prostitute informer’s skirt.

It’s all sex and shoes and smoking and men with libidos the size of the Eiffel tower driving Renaults up the pavement sideways, usually whilst having a shag and smoking.

It is an immensely entertaining programme. If only it had Gerard Depardieu in it as well, I would probably love it more than The Killing.

But what am I saying?

No.

My loyalty is to the Lund.

Off to catch her sweater.

Laters.

 

The Nigella Report

It’s been a long day of working (yes, I am actually working on something. I don’t want to talk about it yet though. Doing that is usually the kiss of death), cooking and lounging about tending the CLD (TM).

I have to go and get ready to watch The Killing in a minute or two, but while I am here I thought I would catch you up on the Nigella project.

I am still forging ahead with it.

I read somewhere, way back in the mists of time, that there are 190 recipes in Kitchen.  Had I actually stuck to my guns and started this at the beginning of the year I would probably have finished it by now.  As it is, I am definitely not going to finish the entire book by January.  If I even tried we’d be having to have the front doors widened for Christmas just so we could squeeze ourselves in and out of the house.

Considering that a couple of weeks ago I had made one item, I think I have made fairly good progress though.

Here is what I have covered so far:

1. mortadella and mozzarella frittata – very nice, except that nowhere in the East Midlands, including Waitrose (my fail safe) has heard of mortadella. I substituted it with chorizo. Good but we eat a lot of frittata anyway, so not stretching my culinary boundaries here. That’s fine. Not Nigella’s fault.
2. crustless pizza – This, as you may recall, was an utter disaster. Made twice just in case we buggered it up the first time. Nope. Just horrible. Horrible and took ages.  Never again.
3. crisp chicken cutlets – very nice, but wonder why the mix for the breadcrumbs had so many ingredients in. Would make it simpler and do it again.
4. Salad on the side (yes, there was a recipe for this!) – pointless and simple but I made it because it ticked another one off. Perfectly nice salad, but if you don’t know how to make a simple salad dressing this book will be way beyond you anyway.
5. Cheesy Chilli – as discusssed previously. Fine unless you wanted chilli.
6. Chicken teriyaki – made this today. Recipe demanded Sake. We don’t have any in the house.  I bought it specially, so I could  do the recipe faithfully.  Was nice but not exciting.  To be fair it was easy to make and tasty enough to cook again. Didn’t set my pulse racing though.
7. Egg and bacon salad – This was a hit. I used to cook this before I had children after I had discovered it in a lovely restaurant in Belsize Park and realised how easy it would be to make. Glad the recipe here jogged my memory again.  Fab and easy.
8. Speedy scaloppine with rapid roastini.  Nice, and again easy. Particularly enamoured of roasting gnocchi. Have always found them a bit meh until Nigella counselled roasting them with garlic olive oil. Nom nom.
9. Korean Keema – Very good. Rather like the pork larb I made a few weeks ago. Jason and loved this. Children feared it, fearfully.
10. Vietnamese pork noodle soup – loved this. We make this quite often.
11. Thai chicken noodle soup – Good. We love Thai flavours and chicken noodle soup. It works.
12. Flourless chocolate lime cake – This was a disaster. I think it is fair to say it was my fault. I didn’t leave enough time to cook it properly before I had to go out on the school run and it just died in a sticky mess. Shame. The mixture tasted good. Will definitely try again when I am less up against it.  This was supposed to have Margarita cream with it.  I confess that this is where I will not technically finish this book.  I am not buying tequila etc just so I can make fancy cream for a cake that would work just as well without it.  My drinks cupboard is shared with the pegs and the  cat food. Extensive it is not.
13. Buttermilk scones – easy peasy and tasted great. Jason loved them so also got top wife marks.
14. Sweet and salty crunch nut bars – This was amazing. Unbelievably decadent chocolate refrigerator cake with 250g salted peanuts and four Crunchie bars in. About 30000 calories per slice. Tastes like heaven. Everyone loved it. Top wife, top mama, top daughter. Just top. Takes ten minutes to make, four hours to refrigerate and about thirty seconds to scoff the lot.
15. Rice Krispie brownies – Posh name for Rice Krispie fridge squares. Extra choc in. Kids love ‘em. Too sickly for me.

All in all then, Nigella is coming out on the winning side. I have forgiven her for the couple of disasters and we are moving on.

As predicted, the puddings are where she really shines.  I did feel that if I got a few sterling dessert/cake type things under my belt, everyone, including me, would regain confidence, and it has proved to be the case.

I am feeling more optimistic about the whole thing now, although tomorrow there is nothing doing, as I am out all day, and part of next week will be taken up road testing recipes from a new cookery book that I have to review for Amazon.

Nevertheless I have made my peace with Nigella, and after having spied the fact that there are at least two cheesecake recipes, a key lime pie and a Devil’s food cake recipe in Kitchen, I know I am going to fall in love with her all over again, even if the waistband of my jeans isn’t.

 

Ian Brown changed my life

Oscar is going to a party tomorrow and this morning I realised I had not bought the party girl a present.

This necessitated a trip into the local town, where they have a store full of fluff and glitter and sparkly things that five year old girls love.  I had to practically drag Tallulah from the shop, weeping.

Once I had achieved my goal I popped into the charity shop across the road to have a quick poke about in case they were hiding any Faberge eggs.  They weren’t, but I did get some excellent stuff for the only part of my Christmas plan that is holding together, i.e. buying people stuff from charity shops.  I also got treasure for me, a copy of the Stone Roses eponymous CD for a quid.

I know, I know I should be a woman of the MP3 generation, but I am not.  Eventually I will have to cave, but right now I have a large carrier bag full of cds that I lug about in the car, and that suits me fine.

I have been driving about this afternoon listening to The Stone Roses turned all the way up to 11, occasionally screeching anecdotes to my children and sounding like some kind of deep muso type person by explaining how this album like totally changed my life, man.

To be fair to me. It totally did.

Their album came out when I was 17.  At that point I really didn’t listen to a great deal of music, and what I did listen to would definitely be classified as pop with a capital P.

My boyfriend at the time went to a party and came back very drunk with twigs in his hair, clutching a c90 cassette tape.  He grinned, waved it at me, and announced in a haze of beer fumes: ‘This is your present because you didn’t get to go to the party.’

I said: ‘What is it?’

He said: ‘It’s some music. I found it in a bush.  It’s shit. I thought you might like it.’

Then he passed out.

The cassette had two pirated albums on it.  One one side it featured The Wonderstuff’s ‘Eight Legged Groove Machine’.  On the other ‘The Stone Roses’

He was right.

I didn’t just like them. I bloody loved them.

I played the tape obsessively until it snapped and I was forced to go out and buy the albums.

Not only did they totally change the way about music, but they became the sound track to a summer of discovering all kinds of things teenagers need to discover, sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, or in my case, Indie music.

It was at that point in my life when I decided that I would be happy (as happy as an angst ridden, acne strewn teenager with very bad hair could ever be) if I could just listen to music like this for the rest of my life.  Then music did for me what books have always done, it became something I could immerse myself in.  It became a space in which I could escape from myself and get lost in music (thank you Sister Sledge).  It gave me a type of freedom that I think other people achieve through the liberal use of drugs.

In recent  years it hasn’t offered the same escape.  This is possibly because I rarely get to listen to an entire track without being interrupted by someone falling down the toilet or ‘accidentally’ shaving their head, or stabbing themselves in the eye.  I sometimes feel sad that those feelings are lost to me, but then I read my book and realise how lucky I am to still have an escape route.

I hadn’t listened to The Stone Roses album in years in its entirety.  I occasionally listen to the odd track, but today I listened to the whole thing in one go.  What struck me about it was how fresh the sound still was.  I don’t think it has aged at all.  It doesn’t sound retro to me, where other things I once loved definitely do.

The other thing I loved was that it is such a complete album.  I thoroughly enjoyed listening to every song on it. There wasn’t a single moment where I thought; ‘I’ll just skip this track’ or ‘I wish I had skipped that track’.  It was brilliant in its entirety.

The only other album I can think of that I feel this way about is P.J. Harvey’s ‘Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea’, which is also a totally amazing listening experience. Possibly better than ‘The Stone Roses’, but not so emotionally evocative of a particular time in my life, so I don’t feel the love in the same way.

Listening to it has stirred up all kinds of stuff. It’s been quite weird, she said, in a terribly coherent way!

Any albums do that for you?

Journal of the Plague Year part billion

First things first. I still have a cold. Felt terrible by bedtime yesterday. Woke up feeling like I had gone slightly deaf, and sounding more like Bonnie Tyler.  Good to know I might still get that gig as the celebrity soundey likey.  The upside of the deaf thing is being able to drown out the children’s shrieks.  It’s not all pain.  There is definitely some gain.

Second things second, my period started this morning.  Am confused as my cycle seems to be way off again.  I had a vague feeling it should start on a Tuesday, possibly next Tuesday. I’m not entirely sure.  Nevertheless it has turned up today and probably due to ongoing physical hitches with my cold thingy, it is shaping up to be a bit of a bastard.  This means painkillers are not really lasting the course and I am sore.

Really sore.  Sore to the point where I want to bite people who touch me.

I am turning feral.  I will probably start licking myself and widdling on shredded newspaper soon.

Tallulah is off sick again today.  She had the day off the day before yesterday, as I had to rush off and get her from school on Tuesday afternoon, due to her being in the sick bay looking wan.  She was better on Wednesday. I sent her back to school yesterday.  She came home looking wan once more, and in a foul mood. She complained of a headache most of the evening and night and woke up with it. I kept her at home.

I don’t think she’s too bad, but something is not right, and selfishly, if she stayed at home today it meant I didn’t have to take her to yet another bloody carol concert and another Christmas lights switch on in another freezing cold town centre.  My sense of philanthropy and Christmas spirit is hovering around minuse 240 at the moment, so it was a win for me.

I dropped Tallulah at granny’s house for the morning because I promised Oscar I would go to his first school assembly.  As you know, I am totally unimpressed by all forms of organised entertainment by schools.  I should really expand that to just say any form of enforced entertainment.  If someone wants me to have fun or enjoy myself I immediately want not to.  It’s a polarity responder thing.

I have made a huge effort in the last twelve months to go to things and be supportive.  I can’t say I do it with good grace, but I do do it.

Oscar is really not keen on school.  He likes it when he gets there, but he doesn’t actually want to go at all, and he is baulking when it comes to things like learning to read or doing any tasks which seem challenging in any way.  We are jollying him along, and part of that is me turning up to every event they organise, and being massively enthusiastic about it.  Hence today’s effort despite my deafness, gravelly voice and propensity to bleed like a stuck pig.

He told me the assembly was all about explaining how the mass works.  I was, frankly, terrified.  Especially when he told me that it involved not letting sisters into your bedroom.

I dutifully arrived and took my seat.  It was warm, which was a bonus.  I had my book, which was even better and meant I could occupy myself while the children took twenty minutes to file in and shuffle around, and the staff realised there were major problems with the video camera they wanted to use.

It turned out to actually be about signs and symbols, mostly religious ones rather than road signs etc.  It did range far and wide though, with the children demonstrating makaton, which was rather cute,  and a full spirited rendition of The Wheels on the Bus, complete with actions.

The not letting sisters in bedrooms thing was explained when they were showing their art work, which consisted of signs they had made for their bedroom doors.  There was not a lot of sibling love on display, it has to be said.

Oscar had three different things to do, and he did them beautifully, at the top of his lungs.  He also grooved about like a young Jamiroquai during The Wheels on the Bus.  I was quite pleased with this.  He has announced that when he grows up he wants to be a dancer, and that dancing is his main hobby.  I can clearly see this from the amount of effort he put into doing some fine Stevie Wonder head shakes during ‘The mummies on the bus go chatter chatter chatter.’  He was rockin’ his thang.

I don’t know whether he will be a dancer, but it’s not a bad career path to go down.  His other hobby at the moment is asking me endless questions about the Queen, including: ‘Why don’t we see the Queen going around in her carriage pulled by two horses any more?’ and ‘What school did the Queen go to?’ and ‘How much money does the Queen ACTUALLY have?’

I asked him why he was so interested in the Queen.  He said: ‘I plan on being a millionaire.  I need to know.’

Fair enough.  As long as he doesn’t plan on becoming a millionaire by slaughtering the Queen and stealing all her loot.

My favourite bit of the whole assembly, was when one of the small boys, who was rather fidgety and full of beans, pushed himself backwards off  of the bench he was supposed to be sitting on, and fell off, so you could only see his feet in very appropriate Mr. Bump slippers, poking up into the air.

I’m afraid I utterly disgraced myself, and laughed until the tears rolled down my face.

Luckily he was fine, and bounced back with a huge grin on his face, clearly quite proud at his feat of acrobatic prowess.

It is one of the benefits of seeing the very small children doing things. They still haven’t learned total obedience to the law of the teacher and like Oscar with his grooves and this boy with his gymnastics, are apt to go off piste at any time.

Result.

Short Post – No Brain

I am feeling slightly better.  My throat no longer hurts every time I swallow. My voice is less Bonnie Tylerish.  This has put paid to my tentative dreams of success on the whole Celebrity Stars in their Eyes cabaret circuit, but I am resigned to it.

The main reason I feel that I am getting better is that I no longer want to eat everything in the entire world.  It’s a bit of a shame, as I finally, after months of faffing about, took my brother for his birthday lunch today (his birthday was in August).  We went to a fine local restaurant called Ashfields, which I can highly recommend.  For the first time in a fortnight I was off my food and ate a fraction of my normal portion size.  Still, if it means I am getting better I am all for it.

I am still knackered, but that may be down to the fact that I actually left the house and did some stuff today instead of lolling around poking eclairs into my face and criticising Nigella by whacking a spatula on the front cover of her book.

I cannot say that I am totally on the mend. I thought I was getting better the day before yesterday, then yesterday I felt crap again.  Who knows how I will feel tomorrow?

Actually, I am going to watch Oscar in his first ever performance at a school assembly tomorrow morning so I  can tell you that I will be feeling traumatised, half asleep and like I am doing my parental duty.

Healthwise, I haven’t a clue.

Let’s say I shall not be putting the CLD (TM) into mothballs just yet.

I am trying to be very philosophical about it.

I am able to do this because Mrs. Jones sent me this marvellous picture:

This may not be what I look like on the outside, but it damn well is on the inside.

Chitty Chitty Woolf Woolf

I’ve been catching up on a bit of reading lately, due to being a husky voiced harbinger of deadly germs, and therefore avoiding going out like the plague I am turning out to be.

Over the weekend I read Frank Cottrell Boyce’s new book, the sequel to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  Most originally, it was called ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again’.

I know.  They had clearly thought long and hard about that title.

I am generally quite dubious about sequels or prequels to classic books which are written by other people.  I find them troubling, and there is often an awkward moment where you realise that the author’s voice is strangled by having to write a pastiche or homage to someone else’s voice.  Mostly it doesn’t work and you end up with the literary equivalent of me doing an impression of Tolstoy and nobody laughing.

I chose this book because I have never read the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which if you didn’t already know, was written by Ian Fleming, author of James Bond.  Weirdly, by the age of twelve I had read all the James Bond books, but after that there really didn’t seem much point in regressing to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  I had been sullied.  Also I have a huge fondness for the film, which apparently is nothing like the book and I decided, somewhere in my brain that this might annoy me, so I never read it.

I think after reading the sequel to Chitty that I ought to now read the first one, just so I can see how far apart they are.

I also read the sequel because it was written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, and regular readers will know that I consider him to be one of the finest children’s writers on the planet.  I couldn’t not read it, could I?

I did enjoy it.  I cannot tell a lie.  It was an excellent, fast moving, pacy adventure story which although appealing to both boys and girls, would suit any car loving young boy down to the ground.  The modern family were well drawn and appealing. There were some lovely humorous moments, and yet…

and yet, it isn’t Frank Cottrell Boyce.  Whether it isn’t Ian Fleming either remaisn to be seen, but it’s definitely not Frank.

The thing that makes Frank such a superb writer is that he writes funny that absolutely tugs at your heart strings, so that you find yourself laughing and weeping at one and the same time.  He has such depth of emotion and subtlety of range that it’s like watching a virtuoso performance.  He shares a lot of qualities with David Almond, although where Almond gets deeply spiritual, bordering on mystical, Cottrell Boyce makes you laugh, in the best way.

This subtlety, this emotional range, appears in tiny flickers in the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang book, but it is not there as the bedrock of the story, making it transcend what other authors do.  And that’s a shame.

Also, I didn’t really like the fact that it ended on a cliff hanger, which suggests that there may be more to come.  I don’t know why, because it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do.  It’s just that I didn’t like it.

Mixed feelings then.  Good for what it is.  Not good enough for Frank Cottrell Boyce.  I’m sad that I’ve waited a long time for him to write something new and it has turned out to be this, and that I may have to wait as long again, and it might well be the sequel to this.

The other book that I read at the weekend could not have been more different in every way.  Simply called ‘Virginia Woolf’ it was a short introduction to her life and work by Alexandra Harris.

I loved it.  I absolutely devoured it.

Woolf is an astonishing author, reading To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway in my early twenties absolutely blew my literary socks off, as much as reading Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in my mid teens.  I love her.

I have read all her other works, but need to revisit them as it was such a long, long time ago and they didn’t stick in my mind in the same way as the other two.  This short book reminded me why I really ought to stop pushing them to the bottom of the to read pile and indulge myself.

People can find Woolf difficult.  She was extraordinarily prolific and varied in her output, and not only did she publish a great deal, but she left behind volumes of diaries and collections of letters, most of which have also been published.  I think sometimes people just find her overwhelming and don’t know where to start with her, so that they never do.

And that’s a real shame.

This book would definitely help. Each short chapter deals with a key time in her life, and what she was writing at the time.  It is lucid and compelling without being too scarily in depth, and pitches itself at a perfect level for an introduction to Woolf which is not patronising or aimed at ‘A’ level students.

The older I get, the more important I think she is as a writer, and the more she speaks to me.  Were I to recommend a handful of books that I think you must read if you want to really get to grips with literature, there is no doubt in my mind that Mrs. Dalloway would be on it.

But if you don’t know where to start, this book would be a great beginning.

Chillipocalypse

The Nigella challenge continues apace.

In brief for those of you who didn’t read the memo; I am attempting to cook all the recipes from Nigella’s book Kitchen, mainly because I like to set myself stupid challenges from time to time.

You will never find me scuba diving with sharks, or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro dressed only in a hair net and carpet slippers, but I am likely to do things like read the complete works of Tolstoy, or try to master the difficult art of making Macarons.

I know my limits.

Yesterday I decided that I would cook the cheesy chilli recipe from Kitchen.

We like chilli. It was a cold day, perfect for a warming, hearty meal.  Plus it’s one of those dishes that is best after it has been rested for a while, which meant I could make it earlier in the day and it would taste even better when we finally got round to eating it.

When I got around to properly reading the ingredients list however, I threw my hands up in despair.  I may even have resorted to making some kind of Gallic noise of disbelief like ‘Euh?!’

This chilli lacked certain, what I consider to be key ingredients in a chilli. Namely:

1. onions
2. garlic
3. spices
4. chilli

yes: CHILLI

I am wondering if you are allowed to call a chilli, a chilli when it actually has no chilli in it?

I do not think so.

I tussled with my conscience.

Often when I am making something new I am dubious about the way the recipe is put together, but then I accept the fact that I am an amateur and this person has tested this recipe.  I tell myself that there is little point in having chosen to make this if I am going to rebel at the first stage.  I remind myself of all the times I have been in restaurants and been served things that I thought I would not like only to find that they were bloody lovely.

Generally I knuckle down and follow the recipe as closely as I can.  If I choose to cook it again I often tweak it to suit our tastes more depending on what reception it got from the critics when I served it up.

This time though I could not go through with making a chilli that had no onion or garlic in, no matter how much of a word I had with myself.  It just seemed completely wrong to me.  There is rarely a time when I am making something savoury when I don’t chop an onion first.  It is the bedrock of most food in my humble opinion.

I chopped onions and garlic.

I felt better.

The lack of chilli was probably supposed to be addressed by four different ingredients, namely small chunks of chorizo sausage, some oregano, some Worcestershire Sauce and some cocoa powder.

I dutifully added them and carried on.

It smelled alright.  I was still troubled.

When Jason got home from work I asked him to taste it.  He likes spicy food, so his input was key at this stage.

He said: ‘Hmmm.  It is not at all spicy.  What is it?’

I explained.  He said: ‘What is the point of chilli with no chilli in it?’

I concurred.  We added some chilli.  It wasn’t bad in the end.  Even before the addition of the chilli it wasn’t bad, but it definitely wasn’t chilli.  It was a kind of mince in rich gravy with beans, which is perfectly tolerable as long as you aren’t expecting chilli.

And by the time I had added the things that made it work for us, it wasn’t Nigella’s chilli at all.

Fail.