I have a second piece on the Pod Delusion today – explaining how polling day works from the perspective of the countless thousands of Council staff who administer the secret ballot and of the political people who are keeping a watchful eye on them.
Listen in if you’d like to know what we’ll all be getting up to next week.
And don’t forget I’ll be on BBC Radio Nottingham from 1201am on Friday, 8th May for their results programme.
My name is Alex, and that puts me near the top of the phone book in most of my friends’ mobile phones.
This means that when my friends sit on their phones, or put them in their handbags unlocked or leave them where their toddlers can get hold of them, it’s me that receives the call or text message.
I can’t tell you how many blank texts and silent calls I’ve had as a result. Strange long messages where all you can hear is muffled chat. Phone calls on Christmas morning from Lib Dem campaigners talking to their mothers. Pre-verbalisations from very small people who’ve learned how to use phones before they’ve learned to talk. To bowdlerise a phrase from the King, text messages straight from your arse.
So here’s my top tip. Please put a fake number in your phone book ahead of the top named person there. A short number that won’t terminate in a call or a text message if it’s dialled by accident.
And all the Alexes, Anns and Abigails you know will thank you.
I have a piece on this week’s Pod Delusion talking about the ins and outs of election addresses, a very specific type of leaflet the political types get to use during general and euro elections. You can hear it here.
I thought they were a top secret scary organisation of highly sceptical people, and that I’d need an invite or something before getting involved, so I was a bit nervous about approaching them with material. Turns out their lead guy is really nice and welcoming and was really happy to have stuff sent to him. So if you’ve been pondering contributing, go for it!
The other thing to record, I suppose, was that I tried to do that speaking from notes thing – plan roughly what you say, then sketch the notes out, then speak. I’m not very good at that. I prefer to write things out in full then do an almost cold-read of that. I have found – from Librivox – I’m reasonably good at putting meaning into a text on a cold read. One day, I’d love to have a go at an autocue. Mind you even if I could do that, I’d still have a face for radio!
Hopefully there’ll be another piece from me on Pod Delusion before the general election concludes on the ins and outs of how Polling Day works.
I’ve a little bit of a thing for interesting facts that have an obvious connection once explained but seem a little weird at first hearing.
For example, the smoking ban means that the drains need cleaning more often. The reason? Much of the smoking now happens outside. More cigarette butts are dropped into the gulleys than were before, and those butts fill the drains faster than you’d think. And, also, apparently, don’t rot down as fast as you’d think either.
A recent episode of QI talked about how the Chinese civilisation developed porcelain and fine china very early on meant that they didn’t need to develop glass to hold hot or dangerous liquids and consequently didn’t discover lenses, which meant their scholars all had to stop reading in their 30s and 40s, which had a repercussion to their entire society. Fascinating.
So I’m intrigued to find out all the various ramifications of the ash cloud from an Iceland volcano that’s stopped all commercial air travel into the UK and most of Northern Europe.
There’s the very obvious. No travel. My brother probably didn’t get to a wedding in Dublin. Thousands of returning package holiday makers are stranded in accommodation that isn’t being needed by thousands of holiday makers who can’t depart. And Whitney Housten, who was in Nottingham yesterday, is having to make her way to Ireland by ferry.
Then there’s some slightly stretchier but still obvious ones: the Channel Islands have run out of blood for medical reasons, so the the RNLI are helping out. Lots of our fruit and veg is air freighted, so we might have few weeks when bananas and oranges are unobtainable or expensive. Apparently, a lot of our cut flowers come from Africa, and the bottom has fallen out of that market. And there’s been a massive saving in CO2 emissions.
There was also the reports of the delay to the Polish commemorations. One air disaster has devastated the top of Polish political society, and another air incident has delayed the state funerals because other world leaders cannot get their to pay their respects.
Once the airlines are allowed to fly again, there will be a huge adjustment to the schedules to try and get things back on track. It was complicated enough to do that after the various strikes, with a need for empty flights to get the planes back in the right places. This BBC story gives an indication of the complexity – I’d be intrigued to be a fly on the wall of offices full of people trying to sort out the mess of getting the crews and planes back in roughly the right place. It will be weeks before all the schedules are working properly again.
But these are all still fairly foreseeable consequences of the three day stoppage of air travel. There must be some really weird ones out there too – so what have you heard?
Oh, one last thing – this ash cloud is all but invisible from the ground and doesn’t appear to stop the sunlight getting through. I bet some people are having a hard time believing there’s actually anything up there at all. Has anyone seen any nice conspiracy theories about why the authorities REALLY want to ground all commercial planes? 🙂
– Taken at 8:24 PM on April 08, 2010 – uploaded by ShoZu
Jonathan Calder has been writing about William Mayne, who, in the words of his obituary was “an award-winning children’s writer whose career was ruined when he was jailed for sex attacks on children”
That infelicitous phrase and the issue of whether an author’s works can continue to stand as worthy in their own right when the author has become linked with the worst possible of crimes have just reminded me of my own brief entanglement with similarly career-ruined writer Alick Rowe.
Alick got in touch with my school when he was writing a young-adult novel, and a group of high achievers who could spare the time from English classes, me included, got to work with him on a regular basis. He would write a chapter, send it to us, and then meet us as a group to discuss what we thought, and what we thought would happen next. The theme of the story was bullying, which was pretty germane to my school career, although probably what happens in the story is worse than what happened to me at the second of my three secondary schools.
My recollection is that we didn’t much change what he was writing, and I’m not sure how useful the sessions would have been to him.
The timetable of his writing ended up taking us outside of the timetable of school, and the last few chapters ended up being ready in the holidays. And Alick invited the whole group of us from school, boys and girls, to read the last chapters in his flat on Aylestone Hill and then to go out to lunch at what was then, probably, Hereford’s only Italian restaurant, Ristorante Firenze, subsequently closed.
It was this invitation to this stranger’s home that deeply troubled my parents at the time – they had been slightly uncomfortable with us meeting this author at school, but to visit him in the holidays in his own house was a step too far. I was ultimately allowed to go just because of the safety in numbers thing – there were plenty of us invited.
Nothing untoward ever happened. I think in the end I missed my train, or somehow or another way got there late, because I spent hardly any time in his house, and then felt guilty for joining in the expense of the meal out. And when I got there, I ordered my first spaghetti carbonara and was completely fazed by how filling it was – so my abiding memory of the whole thing is my own embarrassment at ordering something I wasn’t able to finish.
The book was finished and published, and is now out of print, but old copies that presumably have been doing the rounds for some time are still available on Amazon. It was called The Panic Wall.
In the time we were in conversations, we covered an awful lot of ground. We learned about his writing career. We spoke about his other books, and I went out to the library and borrowed Boy at the Commercial, his own autobiography. He was also a prolific screenwriter and dramatist and radio playwright – which lead to his retelling of the old anecdote about the amazing possibilities of radio drama over TV: with five cheap sound effects and some story telling, you can describe an enormous lake, fill it with custard, and helicopter in a cherry to drop on top. Doing that on telly would be pretty expensive. While we were meeting, a TV drama that he had written was actually on TV, and it involved some sort of military campaign, because he told us the importance of keeping the MOD onside whilst writing. If you were nice to the Army, apparently, they would help you find character names for your fiction that hadn’t ever been real soldiers who might be offended by what you had written. This was probably Friday on my Mind, for which he won a Welsh BAFTA.
Perhaps his most famous radio play – certainly the one that still gets a regular seasonal outing on BBC Radio 7, is the Sony award-winning “Crisp and Even Brightly” – a hilariously funny piece looking at the carol Good King Wenceslas from the perspective of the Good King’s Secret Service. An extract of that can be read at this website.
A few years after my involvement with Alick, my parents’ fears proved better founded than I thought at the time – and he was caught in flagrante with an underage choirboy. He had long been associated with Hereford Cathedral – as a choirboy himself in the 50s, and with the Cathedral School, and you’d often see him at choral evensong. He had paid for an endowment for the choir. He was arrested, convicted and imprisoned.
I wrote to him in prison, and even had a reply at one point, but I never met him again after 1994. Eventually, presumably after serving out his licence time in the UK, he moved to Thailand. Which. Erm. Seems to be a thing people in his situation do.
He died there on October 30th last year, and had an obituary written about him in the Hereford Times almost a month later.
Further reading
EDIT 4.i.11
Since I wrote this, I googled the name again, and a set of photos from his funeral showed up. As I write, pretty much everything in that flickr account seems to be about the funeral in Thailand, despite only two of the photos being in the official set.
A number of us are going to visit our friends for an Easter weekend lunch, so a big pudding was called for.
This Eric Lanlard recipe is fairly simple and should look a little spectacular. Basically shop bought puff pastry with a frangipan and rum filling. It’s a traditional French recipe which is eaten around Epiphany. So only a little late for us.
I had two goes at making it.
For the first, it was ever so slightly burnt, had a disappointing rise, and the filling leaked out.
For my second attempt, I tried a different shape.
I still had a bit of leakage, but hopefully, most of the frangipane is still inside the giant pillow of puff pastry. It came out of the oven enormous, but sadly sank quite quickly. Just how we’re going to transport that to Long Eaton tomorrow is another question!
Frangipane: 125gr each of caster sugar, butter and ground almonds, creamed and with three eggs beaten in, along with a dash of dark rum. Roll the pastry into two squares the same size. Place a ring on the first and pour the frangipane in. Egg wash around the frangipane and remove the ring. Put the second piece of pastry on top and seal tightly around the filling. Score a pattern on the top – sunrise or scallop or leaves.
Previously on Pudding Club:
– Taken at 9:56 PM on April 02, 2010 – uploaded by ShoZu
Previously on Pudding Club: Apple soufflés / Chocolate mousse / Pear and Ginger cake / Chocolate/Chestnut torte / Beef Wellington canapés / Crème renversée au caramel
Today we were to have gone to our friends in Long Eaton again, but P felt rotten – we’ve both been sneezing and coughing recently, and I spent much of Sunday in bed, and he felt in need of an early night, so we pleaded off.
It’s shame, because I had already made our pudding – and now we have a diet-unfriendly dessert festering in the fridge that no doubt will go the way of all flesh over the coming days.
This recipe was pretty much invented out of the base of something off a jelly packet. I’ve been eating sugar free jelly a lot recently, remembering it as a diet tip from years ago. It has next to no calories and is something sweet to finish a meal with.
So, make a biscuit base out of a third of a pack of butter and a packet of ginger biscuits. Melt the butter, crush the biscuits, combine, and line a tart dish with them.
Scatter about 100 grams of crystallised ginger over the top and press into the base.
NB, you will need to press the ginger in more than that, otherwise it will poke through the cheese layer in an unsightly fashion.
Put the base into the fridge to chill.
Some time later, make the cheese layer. I used real jelly, not sugar free, as should become clear:
Make the jelly with half a pint of boiling water, reserving two jelly cubes to one side for the garnish. Add 250grams of soft cheese to the jelly and mix well. Pour slowly over the set biscuit base and return the fridge to set.
When the cheese layer is completely set, garnish: melt the remaining jelly cubes directly in the microwave with a tiny amount of water. Using a squeezy garnish bottle, make swirly patterns over the set cheese.
VoilĂ !
This was… OK. But a number of learning points. 1pt of jelly/cheese is barely enough to cover the flan dish, and I thought it would be masses. Perhaps individual ones instead? My crystallized ginger poked through the jelly layer and looked unappetising. The cheese mix seeped through the biscuit and made it hard to get out. The jelly garnish on the top was disappointing – and after I bought a squeezy bottle specially – perhaps with some green food colouring it would stick out more.
A few years ago, there was one of those questions at the end of Any Questions? that asked the panel what they would miss most if they went blind. And most of the panellists said things like seeing the faces of their children or grandchildren.
A programme has just started on Radio 4 with two people who actually did lose their sight suddenly and unexpectedly – viral meningitis in one case, diabetes the other – and they actually said it was no longer seeing faces that did bother them most. In particular, it was people ageing they didn’t see. “What does my brother look like, now he’s grown up?”
That puzzles me slightly. Maybe it’s my pragmatic face on life, but what I’d miss most, in order, would be reading, driving and the internet.
I’ve always been a massive reader – everything, all the time. Printed words surround us on adverts, signs, directions. Even if you can learn to read Braille as quickly as reading normal text, there’s an issue about how much text is available in Braille. And surely audiobooks and having text read to you is just so much slower a way of consuming information than scan reading it for yourself.
And without reading, without text, the whole of the riches of the internet and computers and online life fade away. Again, it’s possible to use a computer with text to speech or brail interfaces, but that must be so frustrating compared to the speed of assimilation of information through your eyes.
And driving. Clearly if you went blind, you’d have to give up the amazing freedom that comes from owning a car and being able to go anywhere you want any time you want. I learned to drive very late in life after being a bit of a driving refusenik in my teens. Until I was 25, I entirely got around on foot and on public transport – I still can’t even cycle. And I coped. I could get from one end of the country to the other; go camping in Scotland or Wales by train. So I know I can cope without a car. But I’ve got so used to it now, I know I would really miss the freedom of just leaping behind the wheel, topping up the tank and driving to the other end of the country at a moment’s notice.
The other conundrum that sometimes gets asked is – would you rather go blind or deaf? As someone who sings and makes music, how would I cope without music? But compared to losing reading, losing singing would not be so severe.
Here’s a link to the BBC R4 programme.
The younger woman is now talking about such awful things – boyfriends who stole from her, and got her to sign things by telling her they were something else – a premium bond encashment form instead of a gas bill. And two men who noticed her dog, followed her home and forced their way into her home. I hope they caught the bastards.
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