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Today's tweets are ( behind the cut )

Today's tweets are ( behind the cut )

Golly, this weekend was a bit action-packed!

On Friday evening I went to the Swedish Sankta Lucia festival at St. Paul's Cathedral with some Swedish friends from ex-work. The order of service booklet commented on how odd it is that a protestant country like Sweden is so attached to the veneration of St. Lucia. Well, let's see... her name means 'light', she wears a crown of candles and her feast day was considered the longest night of the year. Which, in Sweden, is very, very long. Just a teeny, weeny hint of a pagan midwinter festival, no? Or maybe St. Lucia really was a young girl who was martyred by Diocletian for being a Christian, and who wore a crown of candles to light her way through the catacombs when carrying armfuls of food for Christians-in-hiding. Or not. Either way, the service was beautiful, partly in Swedish, partly in English. Afterwards we found a very pleasant wine-bar - not a rowdy modern one but a cosy cellar with comfy chairs - and had a bottle of fizz and some nibbles. And then discovered that two of the party had just completed on their house, so we just had to have a bottle of Bolly! Cue one rather tipsy Peril!

Much of Saturday was spent with The Beloved being snuggly and then shopping for a new bra (amongst other things) due to increased boobage. Bra was purchased along with some new make-up for the evening and a couple of bargain buys from Wallis (dress: £5!) but entirely failed to find any suitable Christmas presents AGAIN!! We consoled ourselves with sandwiches and slabs of cake in Costa, washed down with Creme Brulee Latte, which I have discovered I quite like despite not being a coffee person.

Saturday late afternoon it was off to a hotel at Heathrow for the work Christmas Party, which was rather fun. It's the sort of place where people are happy to let their hair down and have a good time; nobody worries about being drunk in front of the boss - in fact I was bodily dragged to the vodka luge by the most senior person in our office! Have to admit though, I opted for the Archers rather than the vodka. I think I swallowed *most* of it, but ended up with a fair bit in my hair, in my eyes and down my neck. Plus ca change... Anyway the food was better than is usual at these events (shame about the wine though, bleurgh) and the disco and live band were funky. Pretty much everyone got down with their funky selves and probably a few others too. I'm not entirely convinced that steel-boned corsets are designed for disco-dancing, but somehow I managed ;)

Dragged myself out of bed this morning, surprisingly sans hangover due to zero alcohol consumption (see wine, above). Drove home and decided to tackle the garage monster: a monster made of unfiled belongings, soggy and slimy cardboard boxes, and spiders, that lives in my cold, unlit, frequently flooded garage. Christmas decorations were located, boxes opened, soggy, slimy things evicted. And I was VERY brave about the spiders. Eventually it became too dark to carry on, but at least I can now a) get in through the door and b) pretty much access each box. And the Christmas trees can now go up (a bit earlier than usual since I didn't have any last year)!

By that time (about four-ish) I was cold and hungry. So I put the fire on and breakfasted on hot bacon and cheese panini and soup, and then fell asleep on the sofa. Zzzzz.

• Iggy in the study http://flic.kr/p/7mq62E #

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Mirrored from the Tribe.

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We set off bright and early (for us, anyway – about 9.45) for the South Cave farmer’s market. It wasn’t a patch on the Humber Bridge one, so we won’t bother again, but we will visit the Humber Xmas Special market – they had some beautiful venison loins last week, and I fancy one for New Year’s Eve.

We did buy a pork pie, about 5″ across, with black pudding in (£3.50) which has gone in the freezer for Christmas, and two steak pasties at £1.10 apiece, and a red cyclamen for £1.60, a jar of marmalade for £1.50, and four fish cakes at £1 each.  All the stallholders were happy to stop and chat, and the quality of the local food is terrific, as are the prices.

Next off we went to the nursery nearby, and picked up sage, rosemary and thyme plants – I miss my herb garden.  I have planted oregano, basil and coriander seeds in pots on the kitchen window sill, and I’ll pot these new herbs up tomorrow.  We had a cracking breakfast there – local sausage and bacon, gorgeous black pudding (which came from Makro!), mushrooms, egg, potatoes, tea and toast for a fiver each.  We picked up a pack of bacon and some sausages from their shop.

Then off to Makro for a couple of bits.  Um.  £258 …

• 48 tins of cat fud, 2 bags of cat bikkit, a duck for tomorrow’s dinner, a big gammon to cook up for the holiday.
• A bottle of Bushmills single malt for medicinal purposes.
• onions (red and white), satsumas, apples, cashews with chili
• 2 big boxes of Maltesers,  Elizabeth Shaw mint chocs, a big Toblerone, a christmas pud (didn’t get time to make them this year).  And Twiglets, of course
• cheese – camembert, smoked Austrian, Port Salut, Philadelphia, mozzarella, and milk and double cream, 5 packs of unsalted butter, and a huge tub of Stork marge for baking. And some good vanilla ice cream
• pate, a pack of Italian antipasto meats, a big pack of kabanos (which Pete loves, and Costco stopped doing some time back), and a huge hunk of the black pudding we had for breakfast – I love black pud
• 4 pairs of fluffy socks for me – my feet get so cold in this house
• 3 kgs of plain flour, and some Yorkshire Tea for hard water – it’s like iron here
• a 3kg tin of rhubarb, which I am going to turn into wine
• oh – and a colour printer/scanner.  As you do.  Actually, we did need one, as our scanner was hateful and horrible and we binned it before we moved.

Broke now.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

Rather belatedly, I made our christmas cake last night; I’d normally have done it in November, but what with the move and all …

I use a variation on a tried and tested Nigel Slater recipe, and here it is:

Prepare a 20cm deep cake pan – grease well, line with a double thickness of greaseproof paper, with the sides lined to above the top by a couple of inches.

Amass 1kg of dried fruit – I used figs, prunes, apricots, dates, raisins and sultanas, as that was what was in the baking box, and cut it into small pieces.  This is tedious, but I didn’t bother so much last year, and it wasn’t as nice.

Cream 250g butter and 250g brown sugar together – I used about half and half dark muscovado and demerara.  Beat until it’s light and fluffy, or as light and fluffy as it can be with muscovado in it ..

Add three eggs one by one – don’t worry, it will curdle, probably.

Add 65g of ground almonds, and 100g of shelled hazelnuts, 3 tablespoons of alcohol (recipe says brandy, but I generally use whiskey, and this year I used good bourbon!), zest and juice of an orange, half a teaspoon of baking powder, and 250g of plain flour.  And the fruit.

My mixer always gives up at this point and I have to fold it all together by hand.

Put it in the tin, cook for one hour at gas mark 3, then 1.5 hours at gas 2 – don’t open the oven to prod it until the end.  Leave to cool in the tin, then wrap tightly in foil, and feed it with more alcohol every few days.

We eat as is, as we don’t much like icing.  Merry Christmas!

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

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Apologies for the lack of cameras for a few weeks – we needed to wait till the Tribe had found their favourite places before we installed the photographic equipment.

Two catcams are now online, and the other two will follow real soon.

Mirrored from the Tribe.

We've gone back to work now, as things were piling up, and cash is running out, so not much happening at the moment.

Progress is also impeded due to the fact that I suddenly realised that it was bin day on Monday (after 11 years of it being bin day on *Thursday*) and hurtled out to put the wheelie bins At The Front Of The Property. The black one was very heavy, and I called up to Pete that he would have to move it, then decided to have another bash and somehow dropped the edge of the sodding thing on my left big toe. Excruciatingly painful. Have cracked the nail, bruised the toe very badly, and am still limping four days later, and am unable to put a shoe on. Bah. Don't do this at home, peeps.

Still, we have:

• Organised Man with Van to go and collect the aforementioned fireplace yesterday, as it wouldn't fit in the car. It's 1.85m tall with its hearth, painted white with doric columns either side, and with a real marble hearth and back piece (which nearly killed Pete and MwV getting it into the house) - going to look lovely when it goes in, and I will attempt to limp up a ladder and paint he chimney breast this weekend so that Pete can put up the television bracket, and go to the pet shop to buy some cuttlefish; apparently this is the best way to clean marble. Then I can phone the plumbering chap to come and put it in, and take out the horrible and redundant fire in the dining room.
• Had the Warm Front people out to do a survey for the insulation, and they won't touch it because there are cracks in the lining paper in the bedroom. There are no cracks in the office next door, but ... Daniel the Polish Builder is coming back this morning to fix something that offended him in the loft access he did, so I shall consult him on what to do about it. We are pretty much out of cash right now for building works.
• The bedroom poles, curtains and tiebacks are up, and very nice they look too. Almost floor length, dark blue, on white poles, with leaf tie backs. They make such a huge difference to the room.
• Considered our options re a coat rack. Pete put one up, but after 24 hours it gave up the ghost and fell off the wall onto my head. Think we will put louvre doors on one of the dining room alcoves and use that for storage, and return the coats to the Shed (as we call the cupboard under the stairs).
• Saw a chap cleaning windows in Belvoir Street yesterday, so have organised him to clean ours once a month. £2.50 for the front, a pound cheaper than LA.
• Had our first visitors! Some folk we met at a couple of friends' emigration live in Lincoln, and came up for supper, and to discuss a project they want when they have money. I sent Pete to the butcher for a chicken, and he returned with a free range one, at £1/lb. We had a nice evening, and shall be going down to see them in Lincoln after the New Year.
• Got two of the four catcams up
• Went to the Farmers' Market at Humber Bridge on Sunday - some lovely stuff there. They're doing a Christmas Market next weekend, so we'll go take a look at that, and there's a Farmers' Market at Driffield tomorrow - if my wounded paw permits, we'll visit that too
• Went to see Rob Brydon in Scarborough last weekend - ate (excellent) fish and chips in a howling gale on the sea front first, encountering Mr Brydon at the counter; very rock and roll. He was hilarious, and only really did Uncle Bryn in the encore part. Very much in the style of "an evening with" rather than standup; we enjoyed it enormously
• Went to the inaugural meeting of the Hull No2id group last week - hopefully something will come of that. We went out for a meal with the regional organiser afterwards in the Moroccan restaurant on Princes Ave, as he was staying locally, and had an excellent time putting the world to rights.

To do in the next few days:

• Try to get to the clock hospital in the old part of Hull - sadly, the glass on my wonderful barometer has cracked.
• Paint the chimney breast and the wall beside the kitchen (to put shelves up), then get the television bracket up. Have bought some long SCART cables to aid the installation
• Put the wall lights up in the bedroom
• Put the double glazing film up in bedroom and bathroom
• Clear the living room for new front window being installed on Thursday

I can't quite believe it's only 2 weeks till Xmyth - I don't feel seasonal *at all*.

Onward and upwards.

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So I get an RSS feed from BBC News, and one after the other I see these two stories in the feed:-

Boys 'stamped on deer for laughs'
Three youths killed a two-day-old fawn in a country park in Dorset by stamping on it "for a laugh", a court hears.

and

Boy admits bleach attack on woman
A 16-year-old boy admits pouring bleach over a woman after she asked him to be quiet in a cinema.


/shakes head

Sometimes I wish I lived somewhere where you had to pass some kind of 'decent human being' test to be allowed to live there.....

Today's tweets are ( behind the cut )

Today's tweets are ( behind the cut )

We have some friends coming over for supper tonight – we only met them quite recently, and we’ve never eaten together before.  I asked Linda if there was anything she didn’t like, and she said “I don’t like spicy food – I just like things plain and bland”.

Aargh – I don’t do plain and bland, as a rule.  I tend to tip the contents of the spice shelves and other larder ingredients into whatever I’m cooking, and absolutely none of my stock supper dishes could count as plain and bland.

I asked my friend Moyra, and she suggested a roast chickie! – perfect.  So there’s a 5lb free range chicken in the oven, with half a lemon inside it, the other half squeezed over it, liberally sprinkled with sea salt, ground black pepper and good olive oil.  I put three bay leaves in the roasting dish from my beloved bay tree, which accompanied me from Somerset, and now lives outside the back door.

And [whispers] just a bit of garlic into the tray.  Not much, honest.  And there are mince pies and cream for pudding; shop bought, but at least from the local bakery, not a supermarket.

Food price note: free range chicken from the butcher at the top of the road is £1 per lb – amazing.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

He seems to be settling in reasonably well now :)

Mirrored from the Tribe.

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Now, before we start, let's just get it clear - I'm not a scientist and claim no expertise whatsoever in interpreting the results of scientific research.

What I am, however, is an experienced observer of the human race and to mark the start of the Group Hug and Love In in Copenhagen (where limousines have had to be imported from Sweden and Germany to cope with the delegates' requirements), I thought it might be entertaining for the three people who read this very occasional blog if I were just to jot down some thoughts, in no particular order.

The first thought is that, if a number of governments agree on something, that something is almost certainly wrong. That sounds like a throwaway cynical line, but let's face it, the track record of government in terms of foreseeing things and preparing mitigation in advance isn't exactly stellar. Let's remember that, at least in the West, politicians aren't actually good at anything much besides getting elected and usually have never generated wealth or done anything socially significant, ever. They thus depend on specialist advice which is often influenced by the prejudices, ideology and self-interest of the expert advising community, whether Civil Service or the wider scientific community.

The second thought it is that, presuming for the moment that the orthodoxy is right, we have two choices - a. attempt to preserve the status quo by radically changing our approach to production and consumption (ferociously expensive and likely to have entirely unpredictable outcomes) or b. attempt an adaptation to the likely new end state and have a degree of faith in human ingenuity and engineering nous to develop ways of maintaining a comfortable and affluent lifestyle which will continue to spread to encompass more and more of the human race. That's the story of the last 10,000 years or so and, while we're nowhere near Paradise yet, the race in general is much better off (and a touch more numerous, let's not forget that without engineering-driven social structures, most of us are going to die) than it ever has been.

The third thought is that the arguments pro are increasingly shrill and emotional and are beginning to compare "climate change denial" with Holocaust denial, cannibalism and voting BNP. I don't know about anyone else, but, frankly, a bunch of dreadlocked Trustafarian parasites with blue faces marching through London beating drums isn't going terribly far towards convincing me one way or another. It's a truism that sincerely held beliefs are as likely to be wrong as any others and that cranking up the sincerity and emotional temperature of an argument to hysterical levels doesn't, actually, strengthen it one way or another. This is X-Factor politics, where simply wanting something is sufficient to generate entitlement. I've often thought that the 2003 demonstrations against the Iraq War might have been a bit more concerning for the political classes if they *hadn't* been hijacked by the SWP and similar groups and had, instead, been clearly Middle England taking to the streets in concern, rather than the usual suspects blowing whistles and winding up the cops. I know there were probably a million people altogether out on the streets, but it wasn't the normal ones who got the publicity.

The fourth thought is that scientists, whose living in the shape of research funding, depends upon proving that A=B will often find, miraculously, that their research demonstrates conclusively that A does, indeed, equal B. The recent nonsense about emails makes me wonder why, if the argument and evidence are so strong and conclusive, the senior CRU types involved in the various exchanges found it necessary or desirable to administer quite so much spin to their published research, to the extent of (and I'm reliant on the media here) coming close to falsifying figures and working hard to ensure that peer review was restricted to those who were on the team. If the argument is strong, it'll make itself, if it's not, no amount of spin will protect it in the long run.

Now, I'm no closer coming to a view. In fact, it doesn't much matter whether I have a view or not, things are going to happen with or without my informed or uninformed consent. I am curious, though. I'm old enough to have lived through the "Oh My God, we're all going to die!" meme on the basis of, variously, overpopulation, a new Ice Age, global famine and an abrupt running out of oil tomorrow, oh noes, so I am something of a veteran in these matters. Old age and cynicism leads me to ask, every time someone seems sure of something which, if true, will cost me a lot of time and money and inconvenience, cui bono?

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