I’m a bit of a shirt addict. I buy shirts in the way some women buy shoes, and I have a wardrobe with.. 60? 80? shirts in it, many of which only fit if I am planning to wear them with the collars open.
When it came to getting married a last year, I knew I had to get a nice shirt as part of my outfit, and started scanning the high street. I’d never been into Curtis and Hawkes before, so I started there. They have sample shirts for you to try on to work out which size fits you and then you can take your pick of the styles, patterns and stripes they offer. Except, as it turned out, they simply don’t sell a size of shirt that fits me. At all. So, sod that. F You Curtis and Hawkes!
I’m not enormous, but one of the things that tells me that I shall have to get to grips with my weight and size sooner rather than later is that I am different size every two years or so, and that most shops I visit do not have larger sizes than the ones I am currently wearing.
So after the embarrassment of C&H, I went on round the corner to T M Lewin to see if they sold anything that would stretch around my 18″ neck.
They did.
Not only did they have a shirt that went around my neck, they also suggested I try their “slim fit” 18″ shirt. I initially poo-pooed the idea that slim fit anything would go around my not insignificant girth, but tried it on, and it was actually a good fit. They have a good range of interesting shirts, they fit, they look nice. They are slightly fancy, with double cuffs that need cufflinks, no shirt pocket, and extra long tails which means they almost never come untucked (except when bellringing, which would untuck thermal undies.)
But T M Lewin are now providing most of my work wear, as, for pretty much the first time in my life, I have to wear a tie every day, so it’s important I have shirts that go all the way around my neck.
Liberal England has the news that it’s been confirmed that US President John Taylor, who was in office from 1841-1845, still has living grandchildren.
It’s one of those strange and unlikely sounding facts, and it brings to mind two further pieces of trivia.
The first is that there is a photograph of Mozart’s wife, which I blogged about here. (It’s also a little bit strange and unlikely that I can have a) blogged something six years ago and b) still remember it!)
The second is a great trivia question that came up as part of my car-share to Mordor last year: which is the only US president to have worn Nazi uniform? The answer is Continue reading →
I read from barely two people on Twitter that ace crime novelist Reginald Hill, auteur of the Dalziel and Pascoe crimefighting duo, has died. M’learned colleague Stephen Tall has a nice post on the subject, bemoaning the quality of the TV adaptations of his work.
For me this was not an issue, for although I was aware of the adaptations I have never seen either incarnation.
I had however read a few of his novels over the last few decades, and so was able to choose his work when I went on my long French road trip in 2005. It is always a pleasure to encounter the first time an author you really like with an extensive series of novels you can get your teeth into when you get time. I have a slight completist streak, mainly when it comes to the unproductive side of life such as crime novels and TV series.
So in 2005, in preparation for six weeks under canvass on my own in France, I bought a crate of Reginald Hill novels, almost all of his books that had been in print some time, and systematically set out to read them in order. I had particularly been looking out for the Ursprungsroman of the gay character Sergeant Wieldy, which is referred to obliquely in many subsequent books. I have definitely read it, enjoyed it at the time, and have no detailed memory of what happened in it.
I ended up tearing through the crate of books, burning up the D-cells in my tent lantern so I could read through the night, and ultimately read the six weeks’ worth of books in only three. The structure of my holiday was such that I took a holiday from my holiday to return to England halfway through for a stag do so was able to ensure that a whole new stack of Amazon 1p special secondhand books was waiting for me when I got there. I moved on to reading all of Sue Grafton’s alphabet books.
My route took in my dear friend, my former French teacher, and conversation there turned to novels, and I found out that despite her northern heritage, she had never read the Yorkshire classics. We ultimately effected an exchange – and my crate of Hill novels was handed over and in return I got a big pile of Georges Simenon novels – the Maigret books – in French. I fear that crate has languished neglected somewhere ever since. I hope it’s in the attic and is OK.
To return to Reginald Hill, it seems such a shame that so few people are talking about it. So few people have mentioned it on twitter, and I haven’t heard officially on the BBC news on either last night’s 6pm bulletin or this morning’s lunchtime headlines. And the Wikipedia pages are somewhat incomplete, with most Dalziel and Pascoe novels not having a page of their own. Which is a shame.
My (French) car started coming up with a weird error message the day after its annual service:
PLIP BATTERY SPENT
I had no idea what it meant and groaned inwardly that it started happening the day after a service.
Was PLIP an acronym for something weird hidden within the car?
A quick google to find out what it means takes me down a linguistic voyage of discovery.
Apparently, un plip is the onomatopoeic French word for remote key fob. Makes the English word seem staid by comparison.
Unhelpfully the car’s manual suggests that the replacement size of battery is one that doesn’t appear to exist – CR0523?? For now I will resort to using the spare key – a bit of a novelty given this is the first car I’ve ever owned that has a spare key!
Well, I have finally written all my Christmas cards. I got most of the inland ones into the post slightly before Christmas, but delayed still further the overseas one, and since I will have to take them to the post office to buy stamps, they won’t even get into the post until Tuesday, and probably won’t arrive before the 12th day of Christmas.
As is my wont, I include a little Christmas newsletter with one or two snaps and snippets of my life this year. Here is a copy for 2011.
I see uploading my newsletter to my blog as a way of preserving them for posterity – another symptom of my almost pathological hoarding problem. I see on reviewing previous years’ postings on this topic that the links have not survived the most recent change of hosts. So much for posterity. (Actually, whilst writing this, I have discovered that all of the files are still there and are just fine. It’s just that the new host has put them in a different folder, so I will have to go back and find all the posts and rewrite the image URLs… #bohof)
This sort of newsletter is increasingly widely derided these days – there was even a programme on t’wireless about how awful they are, but I quite like receiving them and I know mine was warmly received in at least one location this year.
And, interestingly, or perhaps not, I think this is the first year I’ve barely even taken my SLR out of its case. All of the photos I drew on were taken on my mobile.
For the last ten years and more I’ve spent every NYE with the same group of friends. This year, as more of them have children than before, it was hard to arrange something that went to midnight so instead we had our traditional murder party during the day, leaving us free for the evening, and so instead I went and spent the evening with new friends from my teacher training course.
A traditional English New Year celebration doesn’t really include very much, does it? Auld Lang Syne and fireworks, and is that about it? Because most of the participants are training to be German teachers, and one of us was German and two of us had recently been in Germany for Christmas, we ended up with a German-themed NYE celebration.
Some components of this included:
Feuerzangebowle
You start with mulled wine (Glühwein) and you garnish it spectacularly. You take a six inch cone of sugar, soak it in rum and place it on a special grill tray over the pan of mulled wine. You then set fire to the rum-soaked sugar so that the rum burns, there are Christmas-pudding style flames coming off the punch and the sugar caramelizes.
I half surprised myself by dragging the component parts of that word out of my long-dormant German vocabulary. Gießen means “to pour” and Blei is lead, as in Bleistift (lead) pencil and Bleifrei, lead free as in petrol. So Bleigießen is a fortune telling game where you have a metal spoon and small, hollow lead moulds of things like hearts, coins, etc. You put the lead moulds on the spoon and hold them over a candle until they melt. Then you quickly tip the molten lead into a bowl of water and match the shapes it makes as it quickly sets with a table of shapes on the back of the packet.
Dinner for one
This is a famous English music-hall sketch that is widely watched in Germany on New Year’s Eve. Despite being aware of it and having seen a few clips, and despite it being only short I’d never seen it all the way through before. The version I’ve got above from Youtube is not the one we watched last night, but it will do for elaboration purposes.
German board games
In the last few years there has been an explosion of new “Eurogames” – boardgames that take participants beyond the old traditional range of Monopoly, Cluedo and Mousetrap. Monopoly in particular is a horrible game. It takes ages, it continues after some players have been eliminated, most people play a version of it that isn’t in the actual game rules, and I’m glad I haven’t had to play it for years!
I’ve been playing new German boardgames, ironically with my old English friends, but they made a nice addition to German New Year’s Eve. And they count, because they’re made by Germans, even if they don’t have German names!
One of our friends brought Settlers of Catan, and unfortunately I still have never played it. It has a formidable reputation, but I fear it might be a bit fiddly, and not entirely suited to not entirely sober company (see Feuerzangebowle, qv).
I can’t rave about Carcassonne enough – it’s a simple game, with only three or four basic rules – but its simplicity belies a complex strategy game with lots of scope for competitiveness. You have a bag of tiles and a small stock of man-shaped wooden pieces called “Meeples”. The tiles depict aspects of mediaeval life: cities, roads, farms and monasteries. Every go, you must play a tile and you can choose to play a meeple. Roads and cities span more than one tile and each tile you play must fully line up with the existing tiles – cities must match to cities, roads to roads. You choose to play a piece, if you have some left, onto the tile you have just played, to claim ownership of a feature, and features are scored once they are complete, so when roads start and end and when cities have walls all around them and when monasteries are surrounded.
Once you have played and enjoyed the base game, there are numerous expansions to make the game just a little bit more interesting still. When I try and introduce this game to other people, I like to play the base game then incorporate the expansions, so that people have a chance to understand the extra simple rules separately to the main game.
We also played Nacht der Magier, a game ideally suited to young and/or drunk people. It has glow-in-the-dark pieces that have be charged under a lamp, and the game itself is played with the lights out. I’ve taken this to a few people to play, and everyone always wants to play it again. You have playing pieces that are witches, red cauldrons with symbols on and a glow in the dark fire. All of the pieces are round, and the playing pieces are surrounded by wooden pieces that replicate trees and discs. All of the pieces sit on an elevated playing board completely filled with the circular pieces. In the dark, you have to push your cauldron into the fire from the edge of the elevated board, but because all of the pieces are circular their movement is unpredictable. Your go ends when a circular piece falls off the board and you can hear it clatter to the table.
I shall now draw this blog post to a conclusion before it goes over 1,000 words, completely unacceptable for a blog!
As part of our seminar on listening skills today, we had a volunteer describe a painting she was looking at, and we all had to draw it ourselves.
Here’s my drawing:
We were aiming for this Picasso painting, with which I was not previously familiar:
Actually, my rendition is not too bad. The clarinet player is almost right. I don’t think the left-to-right aspect was clearly explained as I think most people drew it like I did.
Or what I think of as a pod hotel, but Wikipedia calls a “Capsule hotel.”
I’ve been thinking about camping pods since I first saw one on the front page of the Camping & Caravanning Club mag, and wondering if I can replace the shed with one. Then I saw whole bunch at a B&B in Scotland and liked them even more:
They’re very expensive and only really sold to actual campsites, for thousands of pounds. What exactly would I do with it? I am telling myself that when nephews or godchildren visit, we can get them to sleep in the garden, but that is many years off yet. Perhaps I just want to sleep in the garden sometimes?
It’s a bit rum writing a post about this so many months into 2011, but it is supposed to be an annual thing, after all!
As the yearly data graph shows, despite feeling a little disappointing, last summer, or at least the year as a whole, provided more hot water through my solar evacuated tubes than any previous since the installation was put in.
3,999 kWh of heat is just ever so slightly frustrating. An extra hour of sunshine on Dec 31st and we might have had 4,000…
Nottingham Energy Partnership have an Energy Costs Comparison table. I neglected to look at it last year, so will have to use the data from last month now to estimate the financial value of the heat we got from the sun. At 4.40 pence per kWh, the value adds up to £175.96.
The running total to the end of 2010 is therefore £451.68.
There are all sorts of flawed assumptions being made to come to that figure, so take it with a fairly large pinch of salt.
But if you are considering a solar panel of your own, whether for hot water or to generate electricity, and you live vaguely near Nottingham, do please get in touch with Sungain at Nottingham Energy Partnership, who would be delighted to let you know what to do next. You can also follow them on Twitter, and they also have a very helpful service on their website that lets you compare your electricity and gas tariffs and see if you can save money.
Buckets more information about my own solar panel under this link.
And a declaration of interest: I’m on the board at Nottingham Energy Partnership, where they very kindly describe me as an “energy expert.”
Sadly the middle attempt looked a little better than the first and third, but hopefully our guests will be so blotto by dessert it won’t matter all that much.
Recipe here, and the improvements I made last time were definitely worth repeating – ie make a vanilla mascarpone and rather than glazing the tarte with apricot jam, slightly reduce the spicy red wine used to poach the pears, and paint that on with a pastry brush.
It’s one of the last weekends before term begins, so we are having a little soirée and I’ve gone completely over the top with the food.
Peach Kir royale on arrival
Canapés – roasted tomato tartlets and fig and goats cheese mini-croissants (*)
In a sign of how badly behind with my reading I am, the starred recipes are inspired by September Olive magazine. That’s September, 2010.
The earl grey truffles are recovered from the hateful ganache made to top the awful cake I made last weekend that no-body apart from me would eat. Half of it went into work with P and has been eaten by his colleagues, and I ate the other half myself.
Cooking for dinner parties is so much more fun a) without a camera crew and b) when you can spread it out over several days.
, and unfortunately I still have never played it. It has a formidable reputation, but I fear it might be a bit fiddly, and not entirely suited to not entirely sober company (see Feuerzangebowle, qv).
and 
