Invading Europe 2.0
New adventures in Bristol and also recipes for some reasonA Kwanzaa Miracle
I’ve worked out the secret to Christmas.
It’s order everything from M&S, make sure you have access to a 20% discount, then apply heat where relevant!
If you’re particularly fancy (or a gay) then you can combine this with some of Nigella’s easier Christmas recipes. I am talking EASY.
Check this one out:
- Buy some dried fruit (that preferably includes cranberries, etc)
- Pour dark sherry over all of it
- Cover
Then you just spoon it out over vanilla ice cream.
Snap!
By the way, the ‘Steeped Christmas Fruits’ (a term that is ‘ripe’ for gay jokes) is probably the Kwanzaa miracle to which this post refers.
I only know of the word from Futurama anyway.
The rest of the post is about how I fail at things:
So I was waiting out the front of M&S before 7am this morning (proof here) like a pensioner to pick up the last few things on my list for Christmas dinner.
These ‘last few things’ happened to include ‘the giant turkey that clearly escaped from Jurassic Park’ and ‘more than 6 bottles of wine’.
(And apparently the M&S computer thinks 7:15am is too early to buy 6 bottles of wine because it said it was outside their liquor license hours. That was an embarrassing thing to have to get the duty manager to fix whilst the people behind me were trying to buy their breakfast on their way to work.)
What I am trying to say is that there was an insane amount of heavy carrying to get the stuff the mile back to our apartment.
This next bit is where I get annoyed:
I struggle out of M&S carrying five enormous bags and a large cardboard wine carrier. I’m in my work clothes as I had an important meeting with the MD later in the day.
I pass a cab rank with two available cabs but decide that even though I am in excruciating pain it is not worth a tenner. (It’s only a mile but you have to loop back; there are lights and one way bits and all that which makes it pricey. And if I had any change left I would have just pissed it away.)
We’re in a severe recession after all.
So it’s 7:30am (pitch black at this latitude) and I’m struggling through a half-billion pound enormous outdoor shopping mall (like Sylvia Park), sweating like a rapist in my last remaining work clothes.
Then the cardboard wine carrier breaks.
All the wine bottles tumbled to the ground and started rolling in all kinds of crazy and dark directions. (Who builds a shopping mall that slopes in three different directions??)
So there I am, clawing around in the dark for wine in an empty shopping mall on Christmas Eve with my turkey and 6 litres of ice cream sitting on the bus stop outside McDonald’s like some kind of semi-posh pikey.
The wine then had to go in with the rest of the groceries where it managed to crush 4 loaves of bread. (I make a lot of bread sauce.)
Oh, and I had to shower and get completely changed. The only shirt I had left was short sleeved so I celebrated the last day of work by dressing as a paedophile but managed to cover it up with an old, stained sweater. (I’m taken, ladies.)
Gosh I hope Paula doesn’t read this before I have managed to feed her the food I almost destroyed.
Merry Christmas all!
Link Round Up: 16/12/08
It’s that time of the week, again.
Actually I rather like doing a link round up on a Monday.
Yes. I am aware it’s Tuesday but I had the BBC Mags Christmas Party last night. The photos of which can be found here.
So that can be my first link.
- Here’s a fun, festive season online casual game where you help Santa collect gifts that have fallen out of his sleigh. Just draw a line with your mouse that his sleigh can slide along.
- Observer magazine ran an article on Sunday about the cool things you can do over a weekend in Bristol. It’s quite a good write up of our new home town.
- Another game. This one involves kicking Santa in the ass across a winter wonderland. Select the angle and time for meaximum velocity.
- India Knight has some a really good piece on how to make a cheap aspirin mask. I’ve never been closer to actually considering making my own skin care products… Not just because of the poverty but because of the effect the Christmas season is having on my skin. (It’s under the Day 8 post).
- Finally, for the nerd who has everything. Here are plush subatomic particles. I think they’re slightly awesome.
Domesticity Rules
It’s been six months since I have had anything resembling a stable domestic situation and it’s weird.
Coming out of prison weird.
Wiping down benches and having enough food in the fridge seem alien…Like they are something you have to recall from your long term memory rather than your short term.
The most interesting/hilarious aspect of the return to domestic stability is the uncontrollable narcolepsy it brings on… Which I suppose is understandable given the amount of sleep I have lost due to hardship, stress and other viola-related issus.
It’s like I am beginning to fall asleep from the second I walk through the door. (Admittedly this is because it was far too hot on the first day we got the heating done and we may have inadvertently cooked ourselves to the point of dehydration.)
Last night I genuinely wasn’t sure if I would be able to make it down the stairs before collapsing straight into an uninterrupted delta wave state. I was holding onto the railing like I was in a submarine under attack from a giant squid.
Clifton
This is the tickets (definition for non-Australians: see point 14) part of town up on the hill looking down on us ghetto folk. Below is a photo taken in Clifton with my delightful new phone.
You can see a higher res version at my posterous blog.
Everyone with a web-enabled phone should get a posterous blog. You can post to it via email and it can send a notification that you have new images/text/video up to twitter, facebook, other blogs.
It’s neat, basically.
Back to Clifton: This is the part of town I am going to show first to my many (ha!) visitors.
We were up there doing Christmas shopping and eating a disappointing lunch. Because of the hills and exclusivity of the suburb and the high percentage of young people (the university is up there) it sorta reminds me of Vaucluse-meets-Kelburn.
(Hmm… There aren’t too many people who know both those places. Possibly just me. Well suck it because I’m not changing it. That’s what Clifton’s like.)
Oh!
And we have a new local!
It’s run by a couple of gays (Not surprising. Here is a map of Bristol’s ‘gay scene’. We live between 2 and 7)… I can see it from my window… and it serves giant paninis (with chips) for 3 quid!
It’s not as fancy as the crown but for the cost of a serve of bangers and mash at the crown I can get three giant paninis and a half pint of ale.
I only mention this because I’m thirsty so I’m off.
Peace.
Tomb Raider 2
Firstly this hilarious stat shot from the onion.
In other news the heating still has not been repaired in our semi-subterranean/tomb like apartment meaning I am still sleeping under a pile of blankets like a Viking king.
Link Round Up: 08/12/08
The date is almost a palindrome…. Almost.
So without further ado here are a few more awesome/terrible things that the internets have thrown up.
- Firstly, here’s the gift for the strange Star Wars nerd who has everything. Please note that you have to be a millionaire or, at the very least, a successful car thief to be able to afford to buy this for someone.
- Staying with the lego theme…. Behold Osama as Lego. That’s a little mental. Especially as clearly you have to build the cave and the dialysis machine yourself.
- Oh! This one is really fun. A 3D realtime Twitterverse. And because Twitter still has a few months before it is ruined like blogs, myspace and facebook have been ruined, you can actually get some interesting/useful information if you watch it for long enough.
- Here are 100 ways to organise your life. You won’t use any of them but if you feel just belligerent enough to prove me wrong then I think the event planning/ticket ones are the most interesting.
- A Lost City has been found in Peru. I include that because it’s awesome and I’m a Lost City nerd.
- Finally, His Holiness Stephen Fry talking geniousnessnessly about the short stories of Oscar Wilde. It’s worth keeping an eye on this because the short story project I think is going to be quite good.
That’s all for now.
Peace.
Parsnip Gratin
Another vegetarian one.
I cooked this tonight… It was the first meal cooked in our new kitchen.
Note this is probably only a poverty meal if parsnips are in season… Which they are over here.
The original recipe is here… Because naturally I wouldn’t come up with this on my own. Mostly I just stare at parsnips in the supermarket and say “I love you! But I just don’t know what to do with you other than roast you with other vegetables!”
If this is you then get amongst this recipe fast.
I only made two changes.
The first was to add more parsnip (around 700 grams because it was a main for two fatties). Note that this doesn’t affect the amount of cream that goes into it.
In fact, I think it would possibly be too sickly with only 500 grams of parsnip.
The second was to top the gratin with cheese rather than butter. This was risky but it seems to have paid off.
I will say this is extremely rich and though I cooked it for a main it’s probably better used as a side for four rather than a main for two.
Actually, given that it’s all wintery… Grilled (non-Irish) pork chops with some moderately expensive apple sauce would definitely team with the theme.
(Or you could use some kind of winter pork sausages but you get the idea. Shut up.)
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Apartment Woes, A New Phone & A Hobbit Christmas Tree
Right so the central heating currently doesn’t work in our apartment.
This becomes an issue because both bedrooms are technically underground and it’s getting down to 1 degree in Bristol tonight. I am literally sleeping in a tomb.
Also the extractor fan in the bathroom doesn’t work meaning the place practically floods whenever you want to have a shower.
Plus the washer/dryer doesn’t spin properly and boiled a load of our clothes that it also managed to make run.
There are any number of other little things wrong with the place as well. But like the hastily grabbed photo implies: no use crying over spilled/poisoned Chinese baby milk powder. (That last bit is only contentious if you are from NZ or a Chinese baby.)
Still… Not all goes ill.
Our tastefully undersized Christmas tree is up. You can see photos of it here taken with my new phone. (Note that my handset was free rather than preposterously priced.)
Some of the decorations came from the delightful Christmas markets in Bath. Others from Macy’s in New York (by way of my mum) and the rest… Well… I won’t lie. They came from M&S with James’s 20% discount.
Returning to the real significance of the season -my new phone- I’m going to be posting random stuff from it to my Posterous account.
I have been meaning to have a play with it since I joined just after it beta tested. Except I needed a decent phone. Now I have one.
If it turns out that I am doing this regularly then I will probably just feed it into here. Otherwise you will see the posts come up on my twitter account to the right.
(Or you could frikking join. It’s only going to be good for about another 3 months. Then it will get big and shit like Facebook. Don’t say you weren’t warned.)
Impressions of Bristol
Okay so a lot of stuff has happened and I’m going to do another one of these.
Squirrels
Seems like an odd thing to start on but why the fuck not?
There are far fewer squirrels in Bristol -even taking into account that you see less of them in winter than you do in autumn.
I still hadn’t seen one when on the walk to work on my second day I heard a rustling in the bushes and leaned in to see what I thought was a squirrel but turned out to be a homeless man.
Walk to work
The walk to work takes me all of seven minutes… Five of which are spent walking along the River Avon… On nice mornings that is just as magical as it sounds.
Coffee
As I suspected from our first trip here… One of the other things that makes Bristol remind me of Wellington is the comparatively good access to non-disgusting coffee.
By comparatively I mean “within the United Kingdom.”
I have found two places that are far better than anything we ever found in London.
BBC Magazines
I probably love my new job. 90% sure that I do.
In many ways it reminds me of my halcyon print era at the Herald… But without the negativity of (then) poor senior management and a dying medium.
Essentially what I mean is that the people are young, fun, friendly and generally fantastic.
And I know that this sounds like an Emmy acceptance speech but it is genuinely one of the great honours of my life to work for the beeb.
In fact I’m not really sure how I am going to top that as far as organisations go.
Oh! And I arrived in time for the Christmas party! And it’s ‘bring partners’! So, so very different to back home.
My Magazine
I can best describe BBC Focus as a homegrown Wired magazine. It’s sci/tech without being tipping too much into either.
It’s actually a very fine line. If you go too sciency then you only appeal to hardcore nerds but if you tip too far into technology -especially consumer tech- then you end up in the same category as T3 or other gadget magazines… And they are haemmorraging readers.
As it stands, BBC Focus has had double digit percentage growth in readers and mag sales.
Like Wired, it covers a topic area that really needs an editorial team to ‘guide’ you through it. Otherwise there is too much to learn.
Here are some weird facts I read in the last 12 issues:
- Conspiracy theories function as a psychological device to excuse apathy… They relieve guilt. If you think 9/11 was a US government conspiracy, for example, then you don’t have to face up to the fact that the last few decades of US foreign policy have been misguided
- The eye is actually an extension of the brain
- Tequila can be used to make synthetic diamonds
- Fish were the first animals to ’speak’ to each other over 400 million years ago. It would have been a series of grunting sounds
- Pigeons can discriminate between video images of themselves and can differentiate between Chagall and Van Gogh. This makes them as smart as 3 year olds
- If technology in cars had kept pace with technology in computers a litre of fuel would keep the entire UK moving for a year
- The average Brit consumes 2 KG of tea each year
- If you cut yourself in a vacuum you would bleed blue/purple
- Casual games are addictive because they exploit our brain’s desire for order… As a commited Chaoist I assume this is why James likes Sudoku and I don’t
Christmas Markets
Just by work, on the banks of the river is a Christmas market.
Like the name suggests, you can buy all manner of Christmas crap there, as well as German food, beer, mulled wine, etc. Like a community of travelling Germans.
Leon, Monique and I went there for dinner last (Friday) night.
Oddly almost everything was closed.
And a boarded up amusement part beside a ruined church with only the carousel lit up looks very very Buffy. I was most impressed.
Anyway, one of the few things that was open was this large portable German pub… Complete with oddly sounding delicious beer, Bratwurst, etc.
The insides were painted to look all wooden and Ye Olde… It was quite a cute effect.
One of the paintings on the wall clearly showed a Ye Olde fair but in the Summer time.
I deduced from this that the pub folds back into a caravan and spends its year travelling Europe going from festival to festival. I say deduced because everyone who worked there was German with a limited ability to understand any of our accented English.
I will just point out that if the Germans are such fans of this free-spirited, caravan-travelling life then maybe they shouldn’t have put tens of thousands of gyppos to death in camps during the war.
The apartment
I love it but the cleaners our letting agent used really took the piss.
When we did the inventory yesterday the place was filthy. We were all commenting on it and then went to check the water metres. Not a DROP had been used since they last checked when the previous tenants had moved out.
Tell me exactly what kind of cleaning job you can do without water?
Also we accidentally ended up smack bang in the middle of the gay district for gays. This is literally the equivalent of living on K Road in Auckland.
You can’t actually tell from walking along it… It doesn’t look too seedy or boho or anything. But if you google ‘gay bristol’ and click on the map you’ll see we are literally surrounded by about 15 ‘gay friendly’ venues.
Plus we have a spare bedroom: come visit.
Ships Into The West
Ever tried to rent a large van in central London? It takes hours.
The woman behind the counter was typing for about five minutes just to add a sat nav to my order. Beside me was a Frenchman arguing over his bill and complaining that -not only was it double what was agreed this morning- it took the company two hours to actually hand them the keys.
I belabour this point because it’s necessary to understand my state of growing anxiety.
In just one day I had to check out a van (they opened at 8am and no earlier), singlehandedly pack out our Islington house (James was at work), drive from central London -avoiding the congestion charges I couldn’t afford to pay- all the way to Bristol where I was to unpack our five cubic metres of pure crap (got help at that end), drive the van back into central London before the rental place closed at 6pm (it’s 2.5 hours one way) and then hop a train and a bus back to Bristol in order to start work at the BBC the very next day.
Anyway I managed to do all these things awesomely and sweatily. England’s green and pleasant lands were looking especially green and pleasant that morning as well.
Those of you who knew me when may remember that I spent six months basically packing in/out venues and driving vans as a staging tech.
It was very reminiscent of my times at Multi. I also remember how I managed to get so hot back then…. It’s fucking hard work.
The sense memory of driving a large van through crowded streets and motorways was quite beneficial for my rapidly improving mental health.
Thing about being shot down for 30 jobs in an industry that is collapsing around you is -after a while- you start to think you are shit at everything. It’s part of the spiral of temporary depression. You literally cannot remember if you were good at anything.
So whilst I was sore and limping a little on my first day at least my brain was starting to remember that I am, in fact, good at some things.
Pity about the limping, of course. Could be worse… I collapsed in the toilets on my first day at the Herald. The night before my third day my throat closed over and I had to be hospitalised.
Oh!
Now I know that I am looking at this having spent the last five years in a country with truly the worst and most angry drivers in the First World… But British drivers are so polite!
And not just in London where you have to be because nobody knows where they are going.
Even on the motorway.
So now we’re here. And James starts working in Bristol on Thursday. I’m moving all our stuff in and it’s a lovely sunny (cold) morning.
Actually I thought I might take a break and do a bit of blogging… Live from Camelot.
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