Category Archives: Ramblings

Problème technique

While we were on holiday in France last week our time was bugged by euphemistic “technical problems”

The first was in the ferry. We’d done an overnight crossing without a cabin, because they were fully booked when I bought my ticket. So we had spent hours on uncomfortable reclining seats that it’s not really possible to get comfy on, and just wanted to get OFF the boat and get on with our lives.

But then there was an announcement saying that a technical problem would delay our departure. In the end we waited around for at least an hour after docking before we could continue.

As we left, all cars leaving the ferry had to go through a police cordon and have boots and luggage examined.

So in the first case we think the technical problem was probably a euphemism for “the boat is being held by the rozzers.”

We later found out that their caution was due to the G8 summit being held a little down the road in the Normandy seaside town of Deauville.

Our second technical problem was eating out in a little Relais in the middle of a forest. We were drinking my favourite sweet Norman cider, which comes in champagne bottles and is only barely more alcoholic than apple juice, and we’d ordered tartes flambées, and were waiting. And waiting. And eventually the waitress came out and said there’d been a technical problem and it would be another few minutes, sorry.

In this case, I think the euphemism was easily explained in the kitchen: the chef had burned our dinners and had to start again. Or maybe forgot to turn the oven on?

In any case we minded a little less than on the boat and just had another bottle.

The other reason the meal was memorable was for the huge Alsatian dog that was around – either resident at the auberge or had come in with some of the patrons who seemed to know the owner. Anyway, this dog pricked its ears up mightily whenever the cheese plate came out and when it was our turn for cheese, it sat there and begged for crusts. Silently at first, and then by actually barking, which made us jump the first few times. For ages we didn’t give her anything, and then her owners did say that it was fine, clearly enough for us to understand, and we relented.

The final technical problem has been one of blogging. I’m now co-hosted with LDV which had some serious non-euphemistic technical problems over the time we were away which involved a third change of host in as many years. This blog was down for a couple of days before returning, and although the automatic stuff here, the tweets in particular, have been churning out regularly, I haven’t been able to log in and post new articles or approve comments.

It’s strange, for days I have been thinking “ooh, gotta blog that. But I can’t!”

And now I’m back looking at the “post new entry” screen the enthusiasm is draining out faster than David Fisher’s embalming fluid.

Shoulder pain

My shoulders hurt – and they have for years. There are good days and bad days, but I usually get up with painful shoulders, go all day with a dull ache, and go back to bed with it too. I can recall pain for at least the last 7 years – I distinctly remember it from learning to drive, seven years ago, because some days, doing over-the-shoulder checks caused me real twinges.

Well, technically, probably not my actual shoulders but the muscle that joins my neck to my shoulders. A quick google suggests this might be my trapezius muscle. Since I’m pretty sure it’s a muscular problem and not a skeletal one, I think that it must be something I am doing (or not doing) routinely, not an injury or anything like that.

In the last few days there has been no shortage of suggestions about what the cause might be, and how I fix it.

Whilst bellringing this afternoon, it was my “sloppy, lazy” technique that was being blamed. I mostly ring in a tower where I’m the only man, and I’m a bit taller than all the other ringers. The ropes are too long for me, and what I should do is tie a knot in them to shorten them. But I mostly don’t. With too much rope in my hands, I tend not to ring to the full extent of my arms over my head, as you should, but use a shortened technique that rarely sees my hands get higher than my face.

So solution #1 – tie a knot in it.

P has long suspected that my home office is to blame. And he’s right – from a ergonomic perspective, it’s a nightmare. I have a cheap desk and a cheap office chair. And it doesn’t meet any of the guidelines for a good workspace. The monitor is not at eye level. The chair doesn’t rise high enough and the desk is too low. And I spend far too much of my time there as I do a lot of work at my desk, responding to email, surfing the net, doing basic graphic design, and blogging. And then I also spend a lot of my leisure time at my desk too, watching DVDs on my second computer, responding to email, surfing the net, blogging… An unkind person might point out there are not clear distinctions between my work and my leisure, but the upshot as far as this post is concerned, is that I spend far too long sitting in a poor work environment.

Solution #2 then – invest in a better chair, desk and monitor stand.

That’s rather more expensive than tying a knot in a rope. I briefly visited a shop in Sherwood, down the road from me, where they sell back-friendly work equipment. And it’s all rather scarily priced. And there’s also the unimaginable faff of having to tidy my office enough to get new furniture in.

Culprit number three for causing my shoulder pain is poor posture. Watching myself on telly last week was eye opener in just how bad my normal standing posture is. Thinking about, people have told me over the years that I don’t stand straight enough, and I spend a few days squaring my shoulders and making a conscious effort to stand more upright, and then return to my previous round-shouldered slouch. I think I also poke my head forward too much as well.

Solution #3 – well I don’t know. Stand up straight? Is it really as easy as that?

On to number four. The gym. I went back to the gym yesterday when the weather was just too awful to go leafleting. I’d had four months off from gym, four months in which the Council benefits from my sub without the expense of me turning up. Writing about gym-going is probably another whole post, but my basic activity is 10 mins tread mill, 10 on the rowing machine, 10 on the cross trainer, then two lots of 12 reps on three weight machines: the chest press, the vertical traction machine and the leg press. Then, if I’ve got there early enough, ten minutes sitting and sweating in the dry sauna – the health suite closes before the gym.

There’s no doubt that my shoulder pain is worse when I’ve been at the gym. It doesn’t appear to be related to how often I go. I do end my routine with some stretches, but I feel more self-conscious about that than any other part of the routine and possibly don’t spend as long doing that as anything else. All the advice is that you should stretch after exercising, and there are posters around the gym explaining it. And yet I never see anyone else stretching. Why ever not?

Solution #4 – better stretches? give up going to the gym?

Then there’s bedding and how I sleep. I sleep on two pillows, because I just don’t feel able to sleep if my head isn’t quite elevated. It also helps with my reflux disorder. I was fascinated to read, a few weeks ago, Alan Fleming’s account of how changing his duvet helped relieve him of some of his pain. I’ve never had the accidents he refers to so I have no rotator cuff injuries. And an excuse to buy a down-filled duvet would certainly be good – I’ve only ever slept under one for a short time, staying in the house that featured on the back of the Elgar £20 notes and working at the Worcester Three Choirs Festival in 1999.

Solution #5: replace duvet?? Have to consult with the husband and cats who share the bed…

Then, if some of my leisure time is spent at my desk, other hours are spent on the sofa sitting in front the telly. We have two sofas, both hand-me-downs from friends and family, both very tired. The cushions need restuffing, and they collapse as soon as you look at them. Neither is very comfortable. Neither can be terribly back friendly. So, we need new sofas. We’ve been to have a look at various furniture shops and haven’t yet found anything that actually feels nice to sit on, and we also feel very wary about investing in new sofas simply because of what the cats will do them. They’ve already helped destroy the ones we have.

Solution #6: replace sofas – we’re not in any way racking up the cost needed to be spent on fixing the problem, are we?

Finally, an initial google suggests this muscle is one of the first to start hurting if you suffer from stress.

Solution #7: reduce stress. In an election year. Highly likely.

With some issues like this, you never quite know how seriously to take it. Is pain like this something pretty much everyone my age and weight ((another phrase from that same outing at the Worcester Three Choirs. I spent an evening with Kit and Widow, and escorting Kit back from a gig around the cathedral at night, we found a gate barring our way. Rather than retrace our steps, we first tried to climb it, which led to him referring to the lyrics of Mad about the Boy, “It seems a little silly / For a girl of my age and weight / To walk down Piccadilly in a haze of light.” I missed the reference entirely until it was pointed out to me)) experiences? Is it an inevitable part of getting older? Or can it be fixed?

Is it something that’s serious enough to raise with my GP, or would that be wasting valuable NHS resources? Should I go straight to an ancillary health professional instead, and if so, which one? A physiotherapist? Surely not – they’re for sportsmen and injured people? A chiropractor? Aren’t they “alternative” ? An osteopath? What’s the difference? A masseur? But how do you tell the difference between real, trained masseurs and prostitutes dressing it up a bit for newspaper ads?

Your thoughts and solutions to shoulder pain – warmly welcomed in the comments!

Come Dine With Me: Anxiety dreams

Most people get anxiety dreams. I’ve never had the ones about being naked in class or at work, which are apparently common, but I get in spades the ones about not being properly prepared for something.

Most commonly, it’s about sitting a French degree exam on novels I had not actually read – and there’s an element of truth in that, because I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what happened towards the end of my degree.

Another one that pretty much happened is the dream about being in a university G&S show, standing in the wings in baking hot costume and full makeup, hearing my cue, walking on stage, and then not being able to remember my lines. The closest I got to this actually happening was in Pinafore, when I totally dried when, as Sir Joseph Porter KCB, I was supposed to be singing the patter song. We’d had fewer than ten weeks of rehearsal, and no-one in the chorus knew the words either, so they were grateful when I managed to stutter out enough of a verse to give them a clue as to what their next words were. But not ideal.

Then there’s the occasional dream about getting to the end of a term at university and discovering, far too late to do anything about it, that there was an additional module I should have been turning up to for the last 10 weeks that just completely escaped my mind.

And even though I successfully completed two degrees many years ago, I still sometimes wake up in a cold sweat thinking, “If I don’t get this in to the office I won’t pass!”

The guy who writes XKCD gets it too, as do most people on the planet, I assume.

Since going on CDWM, I’ve started to have a new anxiety dream, and this one is just as vivid as all the ones about academic neglect.

In this dream, I spend all day cooking with the camera crew, entertain my guests, and finally put them all in taxis by the end of the night. I let the camera people derig, and I make the first tentative steps towards sorting out the bomb site of the kitchen – maybe even going as far as setting the dishwasher going.

Exhausted, at 4am, I finally lock up, turn lights off, brush my teeth and turn in, hoping for a long lie in the following day.

Just as I’m finally drifting off, the doorbell goes, so I haul my dressing gown on, pad downstairs… and it’s the film crew again.

“Didn’t we tell you?” the producer says, all big smiles and friendly like.

“You’re cooking two nights running this week!”

Back again II

This blog has now moved host and is hopefully with a more attentive provider who knows more about how WordPress works.

In doing so, we identified a 300 MB error log that the previous host hadn’t mentioned I should look at. Unfortunately a log of that size is simply very difficult to open, so the only thing we’ve done with it is delete it. If it starts to get large again we’ll have a look to see whether it’s anything important.

I’ve been very impressed at how easy it was to transfer hosts, once I’d divulged my cPanel login details to my new host. There was a “copy everything” tool that works on two website backends running cPanel, and one cPanel can switch everything automatically behind the scenes from one host to the next with just a single script running in the background. Then DNS needed restarting, and voila, the site is moved.

Since we’re now relocated, I have turned everything back on, so the automatic reposting of things I write for libdemvoice.org (should there be anything; at the moment I am allocating my time to uploading other people’s posts and struggling a little to write about politics) and my daily tweet post should keep things ticking over when I’m I’m too busy and disorganised to post.

It is controversial and I know not everyone likes it. However, I have had comments – mostly in person – from people who are not on twitter and like keeping up with my twitter witterings. It does strike me that those that like it least are the ones that have an opportunity to read them already because they are twitter members.

I’ve been looking for a plugin that allows readers to select which version of the site they like – sans, or avec tweets. I have found plugins that automatically exclude entire categories based on the host’s settings, but nothing that allows the readers to make their own choice, or set up a feed for one or the other.

Unless you know different, as they say?

New additions to RSS reader

Over the last few days I appear to have stuffed a whole bunch of new things into the “Funnehs” category of my RSS reader – I use Google Reader.

Funnehs is by far the largest single category, although “Nottingham” probably gets the most post, half down to the high amount of traffic in the Nottingham Flickr photos group. I like reading that, because it gives you a flavour of some of the most beautiful bits of the city, as well as some of the most striking for whatever reason. And it’s a great tracker for seasonal events – there are always a flurry of photos showing how Nottingham marks its year, from the winter ice rink in Market Square, through the February big wheel, down to events over the summer and culminating in Goose Fair – a magnet for photographers wanting to show off what they can do with a long exposure in the dark.

But back to the Funnehs – I have a strong liking for sites that take the mickey out of everyday things. It plays well to my extremely sarcastic sense of humour. Several of these links involve swearing.

Most recently, we have:

Awkward moments with Ed Miliband

Find it: here

Why: Ed Miliband, like Cherie Blair, seems to be a difficult person to take a good photo of. There was some suggestion that for a number of years, newspaper editors were deliberately choosing the ones of Cherie that made her mouth look big. Are people deliberately publishing the embarrassing photos of MiliE ?

Wackaging. It’s packaging and it’s wacky.

Find it: here

Why: Don’t you just hate some of these packets that overemphasise their cute homely origins and yet still read like they’ve been in product development with a team of copywriters for months? Yes? So do these guys.

The Monkeys you Ordered

Find it: here

Why: This is the New Yorker cartoon, stripped of its satirical caption and in its place, something more descriptive. The result is weirdly compelling and hilarious.

Things Real People Don’t Say About Advertising

Find it: here

Why: it’s a regular reminder of the importance of a sense of perspective. When you’ve had your third meeting in a week discussing the content of FOCUS straplines that will be read by few people and digested by even fewer, pop by here to remind yourself what your readers really think.

Interestingly, all of these new blogs use Tumblr, a very simple blog platform that seems to be mainly targetted at people who want to get a lot of photos up cleanly and simply. And what all of them miss is simple “reblogging” buttons – the Cheeseburgr empire always give you free code to reblog their content that automatically links back to their post, thus driving their traffic. The Tumblr blogs don’t seem to do that, unless you’re already a tumblr user.

Eagles – Journey of the Sorcerer

Well, I never knew that – the theme tune from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a shortened version of an Eagles track called Journey of the Sorcerer.

I quite like the Eagles. They’re one of a handful of bands I was introduced to during my time in Germany. As part of my degree, I spent six months living at the Otto von Guericke Universität, Magdeburg, in one of the less-visited-by-brits parts of already unvisited East Germany. I was supposed to spend my time productively in quiet reflection and prayer talking to German people and learning the language. Instead, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing Civ on my laptop, reading Usenet in the computer lab and drinking crates of cheap German beer and mixing my own margheritas.

It’s a wonder I ever passed my year abroad, let alone my French/German degree. And yet, bizarrely, all my anxiety dreams about being ill-prepared for exams, which I still get on a regular basis despite having graduated over a decade ago, are always about the French novels I never read ((years later, I was shocked to learn that – spoiler – Mme Bovary dies. Had somehow missed that whilst studying the book)) rather than my frankly appalling grasp on the German language.

Still, of the lasting things that came with me out of my time in Germany were those handful of tracks. I had my radio tuned to Hit Radio Brocken which changed its name shortly before I left and appears to have changed back subsequently. It was one of those commercial radio stations with a short play list, so a number of tracks came up repeatedly, and stuck in my head.

Towards the end of my time there, never quite having understood enough German to hear from the DJs what the songs were, I emailed them to ask. I then hotfooted down Breiter Weg ((literally Wide Way)) (formerly Karl Marx Allee) to Karstadt and bought copies on CD that I could take with me when I moved to Paris.

So, the link to the Eagles? One of the tracks was Hotel California. The CD I bought was Eagles Greatest Hits Vol.2 which had a whole bunch of things on it I really liked and have listened to loads since, particularly Sad Café, New Kid in Town, Seven Bridges Road, and Victim of Love.

Strangely, it wasn’t until years later, when my driving instructor turned out to be a lead guitarist in a Pink Floyd tribute band that dabbled in Eagles tracks, that I even bothered buying Vol.1
. And I’ve never really got into the tracks on that. I’ve never done what I’ve done with other bands over the years, in trying to buy up the back catalogue and find other songs I like, so I never knew it was the Eagles who came up with the distinctive sound that introduces Douglas Adam’s radio masterpiece.

Other tracks in my head that date back to my time in Germany were: Jonny Farnham with the Human League singing the (actually quite creepy when you think about the lyrics) Every Time you Cry:

Surely in any relationship the goal would be to prevent/minimise your partner crying rather than coming up with a bizarre reason why crying is a good thing? Cf Today’s Teardrops. (“yeah yeah yeah!”)

Another song that stuck was the Hollies The Air that I Breathe:

Now the Hollies *were* a band whose back catalogue I bought up. Everything else was shit.

Strange how none of the songs I ended up liking from my time in Germany actually ended up being in German.

Martin Tod and the QR Code of Doom

When Martin Tod got excited about QR codes a couple of years ago, I got excited too. It looks like an interesting technology that has got to have some fun application that I can do something with ((Newspaper Club is in this category too, but so far, nada))

Martin was initially sceptical that QR codes would ever take off but commenters on his blog attempted to argue him round.

Later, in the general election, Tod produced some posters with a Twitter reference and a QR code in the corner. If I recall rightly, this was more of an in-joke for cognoscenti rather than a large scale production process, and I doubt more than a dozen or so were actually made or displayed. I’m pretty sure far more people will have seen photographs of the posters on the internet than actually saw the posters.

Yet this sorry joke somehow made a Top 10 list of advertisers using QR Codes.

Reading through the list of ten, remembering these are the top ten, all of them seem portrayed as monumental disappointments and missed opportunities for the advertisers who used them. Appearing on ads below ground. Appearing too briefly on TV slots for anyone to scan them. Misunderstanding that any barcode app can read them, not just the Debenhams iPhone tie-in.

Doesn’t that disappointment just vindicate Martin’s original contention that QR codes are never actually going to take off?

It is still a shame, and I’d love to be able to do something funky with them… how about giant posters for Lib Dem Voice at Lib Dem conference…?

My new phone

So, a few months ago, I wittered endlessly on about needing to replace my phone, laptop and e-reader. I eventually did all those things and am now revelling in a nest of technology. Some of the things I wrote about, but I haven’t said anything about my phone.

After a bit of agonising over whether my first non-Nokia phone in over a decade would be an iPhone or an Android model, I plumped for an HTC Desire, and I am thoroughly enjoying the phone.

Indeed as someone who (eventually) woke up on New Year’s Day, I now totes consider myself vindicated.

Although, having said that, the alarm is one of the many things that have taken some getting used to. The HTC doesn’t appear to turn itself on to ring the alarm, so my old bed time routine of setting the alarm, turning the phone off and plugging it in, for it wake and sound the alarm in the morning has taken some changing.

Now I leave the phone on overnight, albeit plugged in, and I use Locale to realise that it’s night time and turn the sound off, only to turn it back on again just before the alarm is due to sound. This approach is not perfect, as it means I miss late night calls and texts (mostly from Helen Duffett). I could do with an app that lets me tell the phone to silent from now and for the next X hours. Or indeed, I could return to a phone that turns itself on to sound the alarm.

Starting to use the phone was initially a bit of a pain, but got better. In fact, having now used an iPod Touch and an Android phone, I’d characterise the key difference as follows: if you like it to just work, get an iPhone. If you don’t mind – or positively enjoy – tinkering with it a bit to get it just right, then get something Android based. I eventually got the phone’s 7 screens set up something vaguely useful with all the various apps I use. From far left to extreme right they are:

  • RTM to do list app (not ideal – could do with filling the screen)
  • Full calendar in month view
  • Agenda (the next few calendar entries in list form)
  • (main home) Clock, small agenda, and 4 key icons: camera, gmail, Opera Mini, Foursquare
  • SMS app
  • Battery bar, settings button and Mail button for my Council email app
  • Few more random icons for a few things I use more often

Getting stuff into the phone in the first place had been a bit of a worry. I always used to use Goosync to keep a cloud-based offsite backup of my Nokia as part of my disaster-recovery plan. This meant that behind the scenes, and almost unused by me, Google had my calendar and contacts backed up. As soon as I told the phone the details of my Google Account it started fetching my stuff out of Google and adding it to my phone without me having to do much about it. So thousands of contacts and hundreds of calendar entries are now sitting somewhere in the phone’s memory and bubble up to the surface as and when required.

As I’m with Orange (and have been since 1999 – which is now just about paying dividends in line rental percentage discounts) the phone was pre-loaded with awful Orange apps that are all about making Orange money. It tries to send you to Orange’s own app store and festering pot of expensive ringtones, but eventually I discovered the actual Android Market and installed some apps of my own choosing.

A shout for some of my favourites:

  • Angry Birds. Fun game that everyone is playing.
  • Fix My Street – report broken stuff to your local council
  • Locale – make the phone do stuff automatically based on where it is, like turn silent at work
  • Our Groceries – lovely, free shopping list app than can be shared by more than one smartphone user to have joint shopping lists.

How to use kitchen appliances

I popped into Lakeland in Nottingham the other day and overheard a really frustrating conversation that I ultimately butted into. A customer was asking a shop assistant what sort of food processor she needed, and the assistant’s main reply was “I don’t know – I do everything by hand.”

From the sorts of things she was saying – I need to do a little light chopping, but don’t want cupboards full of useless attachments – it was clear to me that she needed a stick blender, and ultimately, after quite a lot of hemming and hawing from the shop staff, I actually interrupted and told her so.

As a result of that, I’ve had this mini-how-to forming in my head about the inter-relation of different kitchen appliances and what you use them for.

Stick blenders

http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=B000LYSSWW Also known as wand blenders or hand blenders.

I think this is the sort of thing that the lady in Lakeland was looking for. They’re relatively cheap, have fairly few accoutrements, and are essential if you want to make soup. They can blend soup in the saucepan you made it in, thus avoiding decanting it into a bigger blender, and dripping soup all over the kitchen.

Mine is inherited from someone I shared a house with once. I was just about the last person to leave a shared house in my 20s, so I ended up with all the various bits of pots and kit and cutlery that wasn’t actively claimed by someone else when it was their time to leave. As such, I just have the blender, and its mixer attachment, but not the little pots it presumably came with.

A hand blender, plus its pots, is very good for fine chopping of veg, for puréeing fruit, presumably making baby food.

Apparently the gold standard hand blender is the Bamix , but that’s a bit pricey for me. It’s apparently super fast at whizzing and can even make mayonnaise.

Food processors

http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=B000M5D5KKA food processor is the next step up. It’s more expensive, has more attachments, takes up more space in a drawer, and is very fiddly to wash up.

Somehow, I managed to convince myself that I needed a food processor when I left for university, so I got a cheap one for my last birthday at home. My parents didn’t have one, and still don’t, so I think I must have got the notion from some cooking programme on the telly. It did stirling service about once a month for years, until I dropped the lid and the safety catch broke off. Without it, you couldn’t close the machine so that it would run. I tried looking for replacement lids, but ultimately had to buy a whole new food processor. I freecycled the remaining parts to someone who had the same model and an unbroken bowl, but a knackered motor part.

Most of them have a bowl attachment and a blender attachment, sharp knives, and some sort of mixing or kneading attachment. You can definitely use them for chopping a lot of veg finely very quickly, and mine also has a grater and a slicer disk, a blender top, a coffee or spice grinder and still more attachments I never thought I would use that are still in the box in the attic.

Whenever you plan to use it you have to have half a thought about washing it up. Is getting it out worth the hassle of washing it up? It’s fiddly, big, and sharp. It can go in the dishwasher, but it’s so big it fills the dishwasher right up, and there are lots of pockets that also trap dirty water, so you end up having to give it a once over in the sink as well anyway.

The thing I use it for most is pastry and crumble mix. Any recipe that requires you make fine breadcrumbs by rubbing fat into flour you can do by just bunging the ingredients into the bowl and pressing the whiz button a few times.

Keep meaning to use it try and make my own pesto, and never quite get round to it.

You can use it to make cake, but the blades are too sharp for fruitcake – they just liquidize the currents – and the beaters on mine are too weak to get on too well with a bowlful of cake. I found out last time I tried that whilst you can grate carrots for carrotcake in seconds, the bowl isn’t quite big enough to hold enough mix for two 2lb loaf tins, so for that use, you would need a big bowl and a…

Hand mixer

http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=B0016OSC72I actually don’t have one of these – I make do with a mixer attachment for the stick blender, which isn’t ideal, because the ergonomics are totally off, the beater attachments unscrew themselves as you beat.

Use this to make cakes in an ordinary large beating bowl, because it’s quicker than a wooden spoon and a whisk. Use it beat egg whites for soufflé and meringue.

Stand mixer
http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=B000Q7ZCFKI put a Kenwood Chef on our wedding list, not really expecting anyone to buy that – but a whole group of P’s family clubbed together. Wahey! I opted for Kenwood, over the slightly more stylish KitchenAidbecause that’s what my parents have, and because they have a reputation for being very hard wearing.

Stand mixers are for making larger volumes of cake and bread. Kenwoods have a classic “K” beater for fruit cake, a balloon whisk for beating eggs and a dough hook for making bread and pizza dough. They also have all manner of outputs for a huge number of different attachments, including pasta makers, meat and spice grinders, more types of blender, icecream makers and even a sausage-making attachment.

Was having a bit of a think the other day – when the very welcome addition arrives, can I get rid of any of the smaller appliances? And unfortunately, I don’t think I can, as they each have a different role to play. I don’t think you could make pastry in a Kenwood…

The one final big ticket item I do have is the…

Breadmaker
http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=B003922YUUI bought mine for a bargain price in a weekly special from Lidl a few years ago.

Although a Kenwood Chef can make the dough, the key thing a breadmaker does is cook it as well. So you put the ingredients in the night before, taking care to put them in in the right order (usually this means keeping the yeast away from the water until mixing begins), set the timer, and you wake up to fresh bread.

True, it’s fresh bread that’s a weird shape and with a hole in the bottom, but the whole total lack of input from you other than a little light weighing is really rather nice. If you don’t want funny shaped bread, you can use the machine just to make the dough and shape it yourself. The breadmaker can also, apparently, make pasta dough, jam and cake, although I’m really not sure I would trust it with jam, and have lost the instruction booklet. It would certainly not be able to make very much jam at any one time.

Finally here’s a few gadgets even I don’t think I need:

http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=B002P3KCK8   http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=B0014IOB3E  http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=B00028XM50

It gets better

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?!