A whole bunch of blogs I read have been trawling their archives for the last few weeks, and since substantive posts here are few and far between, I though I’d join in the archive unearthing.
Come September, I will have been blogging eight years, and there is an awful lot of writing hidden away in these pages. Some days I think I should pull the plug given my career change. But I am generally too proud of what I have written over the years.
It’s coming harder and harder to give a rationale for this blog. No one person would want to follow the mish mash of politics, cooking, cats and lately education. But I still like having a place I can write things.
Similarly in 2007, I had just had the fascinating opportunity to tour a power plant in Lincolnshire.
We got our cats in 2006 and it pleases me no end to see the comment from Rob there when in the last few days I’ve been able to reciprocate on his post about getting a puppy.
I rewarded myself in 2005, after a gruelling election campaign, with a six week holiday under canvas in France, and one of the first posts from the multi-thousand-mile road trip can be found that month.
So, there you have it. Travel, animals, francophonie, politics. A reasonably typical mix of posts from Niles’s blog.
(File this one under “things I should have blogged months ago!”)
In November last year, just over a year after I opened our doors for CDWM, we hosted a supper club in our house.
We weren’t cooking, we were hosting for my vegan chef friend who used to blog here but is presently on hiatus.
I think it was a good evening. We had an interesting blend of people, who enjoyed our chef’s food. Our guests were a mix of vegans and not. For an evening, we had a house full of people who had never been here before.
In order to get the house ready we had spent about a week tidying clutter away, and I spent the Saturday hoovering, dusting and laying tables. Our guests didn’t seem disgusted by the state of our house, but then, as we learned on Come Dine With Me, they don’t usually express their disgust to your face! (And they weren’t allowed in as many rooms as the CDWM guys!)
Some things I learned:
* if I borrow a table and six chairs, I can easily seat 16 people for dinner in our house.
* We already have enough cutlery, crockery, glassware, candles, table linen without borrowing any more (!)
* in November, we need to run the heating all day to get the house tolerably warm
* if you deadbolt the kitchen door and put a camping table up against it you can get an extra prep surface. But it will be uncomfortably low down.
Some things that were hiccoughs along the way:
Boiling enough water to feed gnocchi to 16 people takes a looong time. They had to be cooked in separate batches because some of them were gluten free, so we needed two pans of boiling water. The gnocchi had been made ahead and frozen and needed to be plunged into large pans of boiling water. Getting 20l of water to the boil in a domestic kitchen is a time consuming challenge.
The second thing that held us up was plate warming. This is all the more important in our house because our kitchen is unheated and the cupboards fix directly to the walls. In winter, some of our cupboards are colder than our fridge. Our plates are often icy. There’s no point getting the food good and warm if you then By the time we needed warm plates, the oven was very hot cooking puff pastry, and the sink was full of used pots and pans. We actually warmed plates in the end by wetting them and microwaving them, all the while worrying this might break them.
Two of our guests were the hosts of North Nott’s Clarkies Supperclub (last few spaces remaining at their April event!). We had been worried they might be hostile to competition, but that wasn’t the case at all. It seems there is plenty of market share available for another supper club in the Nottingham neck of the woods – in fact there doesn’t appear to be any other one currently running anywhere in the East Midlands. The Clarkies have said they are keen for others to set up just so they have an opportunity to go and eat out instead of hosting for a change.
They had suggestions for the platewarming problem – buy a hostess trolley. They’re pricey new, but there does seem to be a steady supply of really cheap ones on eBay.
Which leads me to my conclusion. Would I do this again? Is it worth buying a hostess trolley off eBay? So far, I only have experience of hosting and not cooking. At our last event, our chef partner did all the cooking, devised the menu, and did all the publicity, mostly through the very obliging Nottingham Vegan website. I’m not sure I could cook as well as our chef, nor present the food as well, nor work out such an interesting menu.
Certainly working as a teacher I could not run an event in term time, as the prep and publicity would take too long. Do I want to spend half terms hosting a restaurant in my house?
If you do it regularly, it does seem to take over your house a little. In her book, Kerstin Rodgers confesses she’s had to move her entire life into the bedroom of her flat as her sitting room is dominated now by tables and chairs. In conversation with the Clarkies, it seems they have had to give over a spare bedroom to holding the folding chairs, tables, extra dinner services and linen they need.
Do you ever make any money from it? We were on a profit share basis with our chef partner and at the end of the evening divvied up the takings. And we got a nice handful of tenners in return for our efforts. We had incurred some cost – heating, and professional help in cleaning up ready for our guests – so we comfortably broke even. But the temptation to buy ever more things to make the evening go better – cooking kit, serving kit, must mean if you do it regularly, you incur costs. Would it ever get to the point where you made money? I doubt it. I guess most people who do it, do it for the love of food and the interesting times you end up with.
Will we do it again? I have not ruled it out forever, but I am sure as heck going to try and get teaching a bit more sorted out before I have another go myself. So certainly ruling it out for PGCE year and (hopefully) NQT year to summer 2013.
Firstly, people from some fairly major cathedrals have been highlighting when they have spare days for visiting choirs – and there has even been some suggestion of setting up a Facebook Scratch Choir. Which would be hugely fun, even if only to get some po-faced precentor to thank the Facebook Singers at the end of evensong.
Secondly, there was this rather good article from an Australian atheist called Apostates for Evensong that ticks rather a lot of boxes for things I have been pondering lately.
I’m fairly ambivalent about things Godly these days, but I maintain pretty strong links with the church through bellringing. Somehow I’m more into that than now than I have been for years and even my Sunday morning attendance – for ringing if not for services – is now hugely more than it has been for years.
How do you square a fairly strong agnostic position on the whole God front and still turn up week after week to ring the bells? I think bellringing and choral singing, especially evensong, are huge parts of the English cultural heritage. It may be that the church has the monopoly on all the equipment and costumes, but it’s culturally important that evensong and bellringing continue, whether or not it’s to do it just because it’s beautiful or to the glory of God. If God is there and listening, then it’s an expression of human worship. But there’s a purely humanist dimension as well. Hearing the bells and the choirs as an expression of human skill and talent, with no spiritual dimension, is just as uplifting.
I spend a week every year singing choral evensong with a touring choir, and every year think to myself I should a) sing routinely and not just in August and b) I should make a greater effort to go and hear other choirs singing evensong. Heck, on at least two nights a month I ring for evensong in St Peters but never stay for the service. St Peters and St Marys in Nottingham both have strong choirs and it’s not that far from Southwell Minster, which has a choral foundation. And yet in almost every year since I started singing over the summer, thirteen years this year, I don’t think I’ve been to evensong for the rest of the year more than once or twice. (I do remember one particular year taking P to evensong at St Mary’s, only to get lumbered with a Surprise Eucharist, and overly keen meeters and greeters on the door who wouldn’t let us leave afterwards…)
Yes, it’s the half term holiday, and unlike the autumn half term where we had to go back to university for at least some of the week, this half term, we actually get to ourselves.
The week has been looming for all of the last few weeks in school, and I imagine everyone in education has been making mental lists of the things they should finish off, start, and how not to waste the time the system affords us all.
Half term film festival
In particular, I’ve not been to the cinema for weeks, and thought that I could use my neglected subscription to Cineworld to spend all day every day at the flicks, enjoying a half term film festival. Only we’re more than halfway through the week already and I haven’t even looked at the film times. And… it’s half term, so there’s suddenly a rash of kids movies and a whole bunch of things I wanted to see are long gone. And getting diaries lined up with P to go and see the Muppets has been tricky.
Half term beer and wine festival
OK, I have had time to do this – indulge in the luxury of drinking in the week. I’ve really had to cut back on alcohol on school nights because I simply can’t face the idea of ever going into school with a hangover. Not least because the alarm rings at 6am and I have to be able safely to drive by 7am. It’s enough of a struggle to fit in enough sleep to be right enough with the world to get behind the wheel every morning.
Half term festival of housework
Well, yes, obviously, I ought to be doing this. The house is a tip, my bits of it especially, I’ve a laundry and ironing mountain to reckon with, but how depressing to use holiday to catch up with ineffective weekday routines?
Half term festival of lie-ins and Radio 4
Oh, yes, am definitely indulging that. Since I am not car sharing to work at the moment, I can get an earful of Today and PM on my drives in and back, but I haven’t heard WATO or Woman’s Hour for months! And choosing for myself when to turn in and when to get up is great. Although this holiday I am being careful not to allow myself to revert to my nocturnal habits too fully, as I did that over Christmas and getting back into the diurnal swing of things was a real struggle.
Half term festival of catching up with audiobook recording
Oh dear.
Half term festival of applying for jobs and polishing CV
This, definitely, I should be doing. It does feel a little nuts. We are now almost exactly halfway through the course which ends in June, and we all want to line up a proper full-time teaching job for September. But I’m really not sure I feel enough of a teacher yet to be attempting interviews yet! The ads are just beginning to appear, and I have quite specific requirements: I don’t want to move house or drive too far to work; I can only teach French and German, so have to overlook any of the French and Spanish ads that come up. Whilst it has amazed me just how many dozens of secondary schools there are within ten miles of my house, there is still a finite number, and I should be going for any and all that come up. There is a sensational one that just pinged up on the TES job search for an outstanding school and one that would pay for further valuable training as well as help with the NQT year. Really should have been writing the application for that today…
Half term festival of lesson planning
I also have to be ready to return to work on Monday and make sure I can share lesson plans before the weekend with colleagues at the school. So far I have not managed to do more than plan the day ahead, despite ample opportunities to do so. If I can plan 3 days ahead, there will be time to use the school repro system instead of queueing to do my own photocopying at 8am, and also time to run the plans past colleagues for improvement suggestions rather than just getting the feedback after the lesson. Yay, lesson planning.
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!
, 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 
