Invading Europe 2.0
New adventures in Bristol and also recipes for some reasonArchive for November, 2008
Off Topic: Crazy Snow Video
Saw this on the Telegraph site. It will likely interest the snow folk among you. I love it.
Madness.
Link Round Up
The new job starts next Wednesday. In the meantime I am trying to find replacement flatmates (because I really am that nice), book a haircut, rent a van to drive to Bristol, drive to Bristol, get approved for a lease and James is trying to get a store transfer.
All these things are boring.
So instead… Here are some semi-pornographic tabs I have open.
The Guardian has discovered slow blogging. Baaah… Not having anything to say isn’t a creative movement. I barely write at Small Screens for that very reason. They’re just excuses for not having any readers (trust me).
A couple got caught cheating in the toilets of a sports game. This is gross and horrible and an awesome link.
Proving that ‘moving to Bristol’ was clever and strategic on a global scale, here are the 25 best US cities in which to find a job. I would only consider living in two of them.
Ten reasons you’re not getting sex at the office. 11 needs to be ‘because I haven’t been in an office for several months.’ 12 needs to be ‘You ming like a vase.’
The Torygraph is reporting that Batman is going to be killed off. What’s weird about this is that the recent spate of comic movie have seen a second boom time for graphic novels. There is no need for such a tawdry marketing lie. Bruce Wayne is not going to be killed off. I will eat my fucking hat if that sticks.
Speaking of comic movies, Robert Downey Jnr let slip some awesome news if you are my kind of nerd. Actually, speaking of… Tan… Can I have my graphic novel back before I move? You better have finished it.
And finally… You see that cowboy picture at the top of the post? That’s actually an inflatable horse/rider costume. That you can buy and wear. There’s a demonstration video.
I covet the crap out of it. I’d buy it as a celebration gift for myself but I haven’t quite mastered that guy’s expression yet.
See The Fireworks?
I have been sitting on this news for a few days now.
But the time has come!
Gordon finally has a non-crappy job.
As this person:
But for this BBC magazine:
Typically, of course, I am bedridden by a crazy virus which means celebrating involves blankets and tea (a British rave, basically).
Points for guessing what this implies for our living situation.
It’s Snowing Again!
Because I am the loser that still gets up early on a Sunday morning I got to see this from our back window
The rest of the boring photos can be found here.
Guess that rules out walking along the canal to Camden markets (don’t judge me! I may have a legitimate use for pointless goth tat) with my parents.
Astro Boy Teaser Trailer
I can’t understand why I am not offended by film companies mining my cherished childhood memories now that I -and those of my generation- are of an age where we have a large amount of our own disposable income to spend on… Say… Movie tickets.
But I’m not!
It’s fucking awesome. Who isn’t going to see this? Check out the teaser trailer here.
Impressions of London 4
Another classic impressions post -except this one will cover significantly more time and thusly leave out significantly more detail.
Settlers of Catan
We played this at Abbie and Tan’s a few weeks back. I hadn’t ever played it before but won convincingly -something Tan wasn’t too suprised about.
All I will say is that I wouldn’t recommend playing against an Australian in a game that involves the exploitation of mineral resources and some mild racism.
We’re quite practiced.
More Favourite Pubs
We appear to be building quite a cosmogram of favourite pubs.
There’s the White Hart in town -which is the oldest pub in London (that is still a pub) and the likely origin of the phrase ‘on/off the wagon’.
Apparently it refers to the fact that condemned prisoners would be taken here on the way to the Old Bailey for a drink and a roll with a whore. So one would say “he’s on the wagon (to a gaol where he will be hanged)”.
Oh! And then there’s the Island Queen.
Now, I assumed this place was named after Karl but no, it’s right by one of the canals near our place. I LOVE it here.
Urban Foxes
Speaking of the Island Queen, we took Tam there a few weeks back and on the six minute walk between the first pub and this one we saw our first urban fox.
Right in the middle of London in the middle of a bright Autumn afternoon.
Nocturnal, my ass.
Avenue Q
Went and saw this production with/courtesy of the lovely Adele. It was an absolute blast -due in no small part to the company I kept- but if you’re only seeing one musical in town make sure it’s Wicked.
London Canals
James and I now rank amongst the world’s foremost authorities on the London canal system.
Or at least we should given the amount of time we have spent wandering along them.
We’ve even been to the London Canal Museum. I will just point out that charging 3 pounds to see a bunch of pikey crap hanging on a wall and a large model horse for some reason is a bit rich in a city where the British Museum -the greatest collection of antiquities anywhere on the planet- is free.
(Actually, it’s by donation but donate THIS.)
Little Venice
What a crock. This place is so shit.
You can’t just say something is like something else when clearly it isn’t. Otherwise I would be known as Strepsor; the Crown Princess of Awesomia.
We walked for miles to get to this place last week. Past Camden, past London Zoo… All the while going “gee, I can’t wait to get to Little Venice. I’m sure it’s great.”
Baaaaaah.
Keith Richards
James saw Keith Richards stumbling around Selfridges while I was off on yet another interview.
I’m a little bit jealous because that’s our best celebrity sighting so far.
Greenwich
Loves it. Finally a pub that thought ‘gee, I wonder if we should have some of our windows facing onto this enormous and alluring river’?
This particular pub (the Trafalgar Inn) also boasts illustrious former patrons including Dickens.
The food looked good but all the items were at least a tenner so we just drank at a lovely old wooden table right in the middle of the main set of bay windows.
It’s weird thinking that you are sitting in exactly the same place as Charles Dickens once sat. Like exactly. It’s clearly the best table on the ground floor… Surely he would have sat there at least once.
Ale
We drink ale now… Me more than James. It is definitely a taste worth acquiring as the weather gets colder.
It’s just that in Summer thick, warm, flat beer doesn’t really turn my crank.
Ale also seems to suit day time drinking. Or at least the moderation of day time drinking… Because you can kinda nurse one for longer than a cool drink.
And that’s all for now.
Leave comments, dammit!
I spent a whole day putting this blog together after getting literally fives of complaints from people wanting to comment on the old one.
Peace.
Semi Veg
I’m not sure if it’s the poverty, the fear of mad cow or just a refusal to eat a bird that has been left hanging for several weeks in a larder (wood pigeon) but James and I (my instigation) have reduced our meat intake by around 90%.
And that’s not an exaggeration.
Part of it is clearly that we arrived in late summer -when everything is being harvested- and I got to have a crack at a bunch of new ingredients as well as some old favourites that taste completely different here.
And yet… And still…
These are just a few of the parts. They don’t add up to the whole.
If you’ve known me for long enough you know I’ve gone vegetarian a couple of times -and each time lasted at least 18 months.
Back then it was for spiritual reasons. I view spiritual reasons as far more valid than ‘ethical’ reasons (specifically the belief that it is unreasonable for any animals to have to die as part of a human’s caloric intake).
In fact I don’t even think ‘ethical’ reasons are even remotely valid. It’s just the same as saying “little baby jesus doesn’t want me to eat meat” but trying to dress it up as somehow scientific. It’s not scientific. It is still making preposterous and unsubstantiated truth claims without having the bollocks to say “yes, I recognise my fluffy beliefs are silly but I am hoping the Flying Spaghetti Monster will forgive me.”
Ethical reasons are the Intelligent Design (just read the first quote) theories of the critical vegetarian debate.
At the moment the compulsions are different. Going vegetarian for spiritual reasons is like being hurried down a hallway by a sudden crowd of security guards.
You’re standing there chatting -thoughtfully taking on board a few new ideas- and then BAM! You’re buying expensive fake-on (say it out loud. It’s the nineties sitcom way of saying ‘mock bacon’) and serving an endless slugefall of ubiquitous brown mush before you’ve even had a chance to catch your breath.
These compulsions have more to do with utter disinterest.
I just can’t even pick up a meat tray in a supermarket without hallucinating all that carbon dripping down my wrist and ruining my Primark shirt.
Living somewhere like London after living for five years in NZ -where you can drive half an hour from central Auckland and see where some of your livestock comes from- makes you acutely aware of just what it takes to get fresh dead animal to this many people.
Honestly, it gives me nightmares.
As a result I am actively -and drastically- reducing the amount of meat we consume in the same way I am actively not using shopping bags, stealing SUVs and driving them to Vienna, etc.
And this way there’s no sense of loss or hardship.
For me, the trick is to say that whilst you will cook almost exclusively meat-free food at home you are willing to accept that seafood or chicken could be an ingredient in a meal you eat out.
You just don’t choose Alaskan King Crab, Swordfish, Dolphin, Unicorn or Yeti.
Alternatively you could just give up meat entirely for environmental reasons. Environmental reasons are perfectly valid. They’re based on sound science.
If you’re wondering, this post came about because exactly two people asked why the last poverty meal recipe was vegetarian.
There will be more. Many more.
Brizzle in da Hizzle!
Oh how I love Bristol!
It’s my new Wellington.
It’s arty/musicy, just like Wellington… It’s hilly/viewy, just like Wellington… It’s a bit grungy, just like Wellington.
Plus it’s a university town. So the people are extremely attractive.
And because the university is at the top of the hill (nice planning. Hats off.) both the males and the females have disproportionately nice ‘upper thighs’ (just like Wellington).
It’s also where Leondom and Monique wisely live.
So James and I went and visited them the other weekend which was awesome.
Seriously, this is my kinda town.
- It’s on the Avon river -which I like because I am a nerd
- It’s in a region that is older than England
- It’s Wales-adjacent
- It has some of the earliest evidence of human life anywhere in Western Europe
- Parts of it were once owned by the Templars and there are still ruins that attest to that around town if you can be bothered finding them (I was)
- It’s equidistant from Merlin’s birthplace (in Wales) and King Arthur’s (in Cornwall)
- It only need cost five pounds (on a pikey bus, admittedly) to get there
And like another city beloved by me for bizarre reasons, it has strong historical connections to the slave trade.
Not only are some of the large houses on the hill built with slave trade profits, but there is a pub which James and I spent hours getting hammered at that is associated with the very beginnings of the Abolition Movement.
Whilst there, Monique kindly road-tripped us to a place I have wanted to visit for more than twenty years. Avebury.
One of the things that interested me about moving to Britain -indeed probably the single determining factor- is that I wanted to go somewhere where I was Maori.
I never wanted to ‘go to London’. It’s just a city. They have great galleries and you can buy heaps of shit there. But if I wanted that I never would have left Sydney for NZ.
Instead, what I wanted was a cure to the weird little mindfuck that is learning history in the colonies.
In both Australia or NZ, you go two hundred years back -then you jump cultures- then you carry on learning. Now, I frikking loved learning Aboriginal history/prehistory at school. It’s one of the great stories of human migration/colonisation.
But there was a sense -I hope people understand what I mean here- that Aboriginal history was “real” and mine was somehow… imaginary? It was quite jarring to stand on the soil and know that you have a cultural relationship with it that is only a couple of hundred years old and then it switches to someone else.
It’s dislocating.
Somewhere in the back of my brain there is a piece missing out of my ‘cultural identity jigsaw’.
And if I’m completely honest this sense that there is a ‘piece missing’ has informed a large part of all the adventures of my life… Shooting a documentary about a vanished culture… Forcing another country to ‘adopt’ me, greedily and wholeheartedly consuming it’s own cultural story… Then this particular move…
Avebury is important because it’s part of that.
And the fact that the whole area (South Wales/Severn Valley/Cornwall) have evidence of occupation going back 700 000 years.
Well I’m well and truly Maori there.
What I am saying is that the trip was brief but… Important.
And that I’m still processing it.
There’s video of it and other Bristolean things but that will have to wait.
There are also some more -potentially quite exciting- stories I want to tell about Bristol but can’t at this late stage.
Ha.
How do you like that?
If you’ve read this far I started off talking about 18 year old asses -then got borderline racist- and finally ended up demonstrating my connection with 700 000 year old early paleolithic remains.
Who rocks you like I do, baby?
Poverty Meal: Chickpeas alla Nigella
So many of my poverty meals are based originally on a Nigella recipe. But with this one I am just going to copy it out wholesale cos it’s the shizz.
It doesn’t have a name so feel free to make one up.
I was thinking about calling it Vicpeas because sherry reminds me of vicars but it turns out that is a really fucking lame attempt.
‘Vicars balls’ is thusly the current working title.
Ingredients
- Wok oil (or use a mixture of sesame, garlic and vegetable oils. Or whatever fruity combination your brain comes up with. I didn’t have wok oil or garlic oil because not even I am that gay.)
- Cumin seeds. It says two teaspoons but I use so, so much more than that. I clearly have yet to grasp the concept of spices. Why are they sold in such large quantities? At my market you can buy them in sacks. Sacks!! I am going to say “discretionary amount” of cumin seeds.
- Two cans of chickpeas. Rinsed and drained.
- One pack of rocket leaves.
- 60ml of cream sherry. Clearly I use more than that amount as well. Then I drink the sherry. It’s so coming back in… Along with port. Trust me. I can feel it.
Nigella includes salt as an ingredient but that goes without saying. ‘Air’, ‘a kitchen’, ’some ability to judge depth perception’ are also required.
Method
- Heat the fruity oil and the entire sack of cumin seeds in a wok.
- Add the chickpeas, rocket leaves, sherry and ’salt’ (depth perception required) and cook until the liquid is gone, the rocket leaves are wilted and the chickpeas are heated through.
That’s it!
Nigella lists a poached egg on top to serve but I’m too lazy. I suppose you could add the egg during the cooking phase like you do with fried rice. Whatever. Let me know if you do and I will begrudgingly make the changes.
We eat this on its own (not for nothing is this a poverty meal) but it also works as a side salad for anything Moroccan or ‘Araby’.
