Yet again, the car has weird faults. The dashboard stopped working, which meant not knowing how fast I was going at any given time. The ignition got ropey, wouldn’t always start, and sometimes stalled again as soon as started up. And the key has been a pain for months – you never know whether it will lock or not, and once it has locked, you never know whether it will unlock or whether you will be climbing over the passenger seat after using the emergency key.
The car does have a “lifetime warranty” which is maintained by having an expensive annual dealer service. Last year that in itself cost almost as much as the value of the car, and the latest chunk of things going wrong – apparently it needs a new key and sensors aplenty to make it work again – will easily take me over what WEBUYANYCAR, for example, would pay for it.
So, they’re not doing the work, I’m living with the unreliability, and starting to turn my thoughts to my next car. Boo hiss.
Buying the car last time was a pain. I know nothing about cars, and my criteria are a bit weird.
I feel guilty for having a car at all. City living shouldn’t need one. The buses here are excellent. But having one does make it a great deal easier to do my campaign work, including shifting leaflets about, getting to delivery places and to the secret print cave, which barely has a bus service at all. If I didn’t have a car, a lot of people around me would have to make adjustments.
Last time, at the last minute, I rejected a much smaller car on seeing the boot and thinking, “I couldn’t fit our camping kit in there.” I think this time, I will be more rigourous with myself: we only camp rarely. Most of the work of the car will be small, planet destroying city hops.
Some thoughts: meringues. I need more practice. I can get them to soft peak stage no problem, but don’t think I’ve ever actually got to stiff peaks. The problem used to be not reading recipes and tipping the sugar into the egg whites from the start, rather than whipping them and then gradually adding sugar. But even doing that, and beating the life out of them, I can’t get them to firm peaks.
I “lurided up” the meringues with green food colouring rather than the pink in the recipe (to go with raspberries) or blue (to go with blueberries) because I went shopping late in the day and the co-op only had red or green.
We have a blueberry bush in a pot in the garden, and this recipe used up what will likely be the last of the crop this year. Our friends have not had any blueberries off their’s as they got chickens this year, and watching the chickens climb into the pot and flap around to steal blueberries off the bush proved so hilarious they’d rather do that than get enough chicken wire to safeguard the harvest.
The pink grapefruit jellies – slightly less successful. They didn’t set properly. I made a pint of grapefruit juice into jelly with a one-pint sachet, chilled for two days, but it was nearly liquid when served. Did the gelatine not stir in properly? Does it actually matter that the ground cow-hoof is actually, ahem ahem, a number of years beyond its BBE?
The vanilla cream really made it – even if made with cheapskate flavouring rather than real pods or essence. One 300ml pot of whipping cream, whipped, did the blueberry cream fillings for four pairs of meringues, and splodges of vanilla flavoured cream for the jelly.
The pudding club posts can now all be found on the pudding club tag.
Sometimes you have people in your feed reader – and their feed changes. Their posts stop showing up, and because you have so many feeds, you don’t immediately notice. Then months pass and years pass, and suddenly you find yourself thinking, “What happened to X?”
So it is for me with Dan Savage. I used to read his advice column, then one day it stopped showing up in Google Reader, and I didn’t immediately notice. I have sort of been able to work with Dan’s content because it shows up in other places, mostly JoeMyGod.
But in the last few days, Dan’s new project has a lot of coverage right the way across a whole series of blogs I read and things people tweet about. He’s responding to a series of young gay suicides in the US. Young gay people, he says, have very little access to grown-up gay people. Particularly in the US, normal gay adults are barred from talking to teens by schools, by churches and by society. So some young gay people have such a crummy time of it at school, never have the contrary view put, and end up feeling they have no future.
Dan thought, “Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.” And a youtube campaign was founded.
So, in the UK, the Lib Dems have been talking about homophobic bullying since, like, forever – here’s a link to a 2006 story. Now, as the Lib Dems have an Equalities Minister in Lynne Featherstone, it’s in the programme for government.
And its worth remembering, that whilst LGBT teenagers do get bullied for who they are, the net of bullying of teenagers is not very sophisticated, and countless thousands of non-gay people get bullied for it too.
My own personal experience of bullying at school – well, I’m sure many have experienced worse. A small bit of it around 12-13 was terrible, most of the rest of the years had their ups and downs. I was bullied for being gay from the of 5, long before I had any notion of what it meant. One way or another, I was “different” for my entire school, for any number of reasons. I was bright – near the top of nearly every class. I enjoyed reading. I hated sport. I made no effort to fit in. I was perfectly happy alone. I played recorder until I was 16. I was musical. I did all the theatre stuff. There were years when I was the only boy in the choir.
I went to three secondary schools: the family moved home just after I started secondary school, and moved me from the local school near one house to the local school near the new one. That one did not work well for me – again because I made no effort to keep my head down and fit in. I ate things in my packed lunch people thought were weird – like hard boiled eggs. I had a thermos flask of coffee. People used to watch me eat, so I’d put on a show. Like dunking the eggs in the coffee. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful.
Things came to a bit of a head one day when someone grabbed my glasses off my face, and bent them in half down the bridge – the bit that is not supposed to bend. I couldn’t bend them back or they would have snapped, so I had to go home like that. They were expensive, I couldn’t see much without them, and it was obvious my parents had to intervene. They went into the school and talked to the staff, and a teacher told them, apparently “These things usually go away in the sixth form. Most parents in your situation move their children somewhere else.”
So we used our church links to get me a place at a school in Hereford where I finished my school days. I was able to do more GCSEs as a result, spent a fraction of my life on a bus to or from school, life got a bit better.
I never came out at school, although I was pretty sure – sure enough to tell my parents – by 16. Maybe two people knew by the end of sixth form college. But I made a point of jumping in with two feet at university – finding the earliest opportunity to tell my housemates, joining the LGB Soc, and, well, putting it about a bit.
I was never suicidal at school, but there were times in my late teens I contemplated walking into the sea or jumping off a flyover under a truck. I got a depression diagnosis at one point, and took prozac – it never had an effect I noticed, either to help or the sorts of side-effects an ex experienced.
Those feelings passed. It does get better. Lasting friendships and relationships are possible. Hell, even *I*’m getting married next weekend, and if I can manage it anyone can.
Some final thoughts:
You don’t have to conform, even within the gay world. Plenty of gays don’t like clubbing or pop music. There are indie gays, there are goth gays, there are thrash metal gays. There are an awful lot of Early Music gays. There are even Cliff Richard gays!
Sign up to gay weekends. If you can manage to go on big gay weekends out with strangers, do it. Find a group doing something you like and string along. I’ve had amazing times and made great friends on gay camping weekends, and gay bellringing weekends.
There should be a third thing. But there isn’t. Lists of three are always a good rhetorical device, but it’s better if the third thing isn’t the blog equivalent of Lorum ipsum. Maybe I’ll write one later, but I was supposed to get an early night tonight and haven’t.
PS Everything you thought about musical theatre is true. All of them!? The whole cast?!
This is what I made last time, and it went down a storm.
You need a pie crust – I tend to make my own shortcrust pastry ((not puff or filo tho)) , but I’m sure a bought one would suffice. Usual amount. Used a cake tin rather than a pie tin for once as I was aiming for a high sided tart. However, I rolled the pastry out, lined the tin with it, added in the baking beans – and while it was in the oven, the high sides collapsed a bit. I ended up trimming almost all of the sides off, leaving not much more than a circular pastry base. Next time I shall have to support the sides better.
The pastry was my usual 8oz flour, 4oz butter, 1oz sugar whizzed together, then one lightly beaten egg added followed by however much water you need to bring it to a dough. I didn’t have time to chill before baking, and the mix was not much harmed for that.
While the shell was blind baking for 20-30 minutes in a 180 deg C oven, I made up the apple part of the tart, by peeling and cubing two huge bramley apples, then simmering on a low heat with a tiny amount water, a good spoon of cinnamon, some sultanas, half a lemonsworth of juice, and about four dessert spoons of sugar. Although you don’t want it too tart to eat, you shouldn’t oversweeten it because the fudge crumble topping is a massive extra dose of sugar.
The crumble topping is roughly a 3:2:1 mix of flour, butter and sugar. 300grams flour, 200grams butter and 100grams sugar will make way, way too much, so scale down to about 200grams flour, 100 grams butter and 70grams sugar.
And when I say “flour”, for a crumble, it gets so much nicer if you add lots of interesting things to it. So end up with 200 grams of flour, oats, chopped nuts and the like before you whiz it with the butter and sugar.
There is no need to clean the food processor inbetween making the pastry and making the crumble topping, assuming that the food processor bowl isn’t actually sopping wet. It’s basically all the same ingredients anyway.
This recipe also called for about 100 grams of fudge cubed small and mixed in with the crumble topping after whizzing.
I had spare apples and spare crumble topping at the end of this, so they went into the fridge and came back out as another apple crumble a few days later.
So, into the now-cooled and baking bean-free pastry case, add the apple filling, and sprinkle the crumble topping on top until it’s good and thick and return to the still hot oven for a further 20-30 minutes until the fudge crumble topping is golden brown.
Serve with cream or custard.
And then debate what to call it. Is it an apple tart with fudge crumble? Apple crumble fudge tart is a worryingly vague about precisely where the fudge is located. Apple (fudge crumble) tart might work in type but is clunky in speech. Hmmm
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