Category Archives: Ramblings

RIP Reginald Hill

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.

French word of the day

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!

This year’s Christmas newsletter

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.

German New Year’s Eve

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.

See also my mulled wine blog post.

Bleigießen

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).

So we played my games: Carcassonne and Nacht der Magier

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!

Happy new year!

Draw a painting from a description

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:

Drawing a painting based on a verbal description. Can you guess what it is?

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.

I’m a little bit obsessed with tiny houses

Eg this, recently, a tiny hotel bedroom made out of cement drainage pipes:

epic win photos - Drainage Tube Hotel WIN
see more WIN – Epic Win Photos and Videos

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:

I so want to replace the shed with one of these - think It's a camping pod.

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?

How about an eco-pod-home? Or a 3m x 3m x 3m bachelor cube (I once saw a suggestion that something similar would make good student digs)

The nec plus ultra though, must be these Tumbleweed Tiny Houses. Aaaaah, so cute!

Not of course that I could ever throw enough stuff away to live in 90 square feet!

Solar panel performance – 2010

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!

Solar panel performance 2010

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.”

Photos: third attempt at pear and chocolate tarte

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.

Third attempt at this tarte. Prettier than first, but not as pretty as second.

IMAG0414.jpg

Tarte borguinione

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 (*)
  • Chicken liver mousse topped with parsley jelly with home made bread
  • Pulled pork with mustard mash and green veg (*)
  • Pear and chocolate tarte
  • Coffee with home-made after dinner mints, earl grey truffles

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.

Product endorsement: corn on the cob forks

Not letting unemployment get in the way of shopping, last week, I bought some of these off Amazon.

We’ve been eating a lot of corn on the cob since I found them in the freezer aisle. I’d previously thought of them as a summer only, barbecue type of thing, and bought the loose corn in frozen bags, or occasionally in tins (for making sweetcorn chowder or sweetcorn fritters, in theory, although I can’t recall ever actually doing so). But the mini-cobettes from the freezer bag taste really good, microwave really quickly at the end of cooking time, and are just slightly annoying to eat using standard cutlery.

So to overcome that eating annoyance, I had been looking out for corn picks for a few weeks, and just not seeing them in any of the old familiar places, so I resorted to the internet. And the ones I chose are lovely bright colours, make the job of eating corn on the cob much easier, and most cleverly of all, they clip together to keep the sharp prongs safely concealed when they are stored in the cutlery drawer.

The Amazon reviews all point out that they are good for toddlers too, although I cannot really comment on that.

Ooh, lovely

Yesterday I bought a new fountain pen from Andy’s Pens along with a bottle of green ink. The idea is that I will use it for marking if and when I get into teaching, but there’s always the chance I can use it to write mad letters to politicians.

As before, Andy was super quick in replying to emails, and got the stuff in the post the same day, with the consequence that it was with me this morning, less than 24 hours after I ordered it. It writes lovely, it does. And now my fingers are a little green-stained, as my hands are not steady enough to fill a pen without spreading the ink a little further than intended. Still, bottled ink and permanent cartridges are so much cheaper a way of buying ink than plastic cartridges.

Andy has some lovely vintage pens which I sometimes look at enviously, but rest assured my new pen was a little more budget conscious.

Now all I have to do is not lose it!

I also took the time to treat myself to a nice new journal for writing things in – these Penguinesque note-books are things of beauty – but they are much smaller than I imagined. Almost but not quite small enough to fit in a back pocket, they also have a little pockety thing of their own stuck into the back page. I bought The Invisible Man; regular readers will recall I made a free audiobook of the H G Wells classic for Librivox a number of years ago now. (Since I recorded it, nearly 200,000 people have listened to it, and it has received many kind reviews. Also one or two not so kind reviews, mostly about the background noise. I have invested in a better microphone since then)