Somebody To Love by Ramones
Iona School
Victoria Centre
National Ice Centre‘Nuff said.
- Hippy. http://bit.ly/rDmHr #
- Working my way through the Godfather trilogy. Losing track of who's betraying whom on part II. #
- Slash is my Bitch. On medium. #
- The Christmas cake is now baking, & in about four & a half hours we'll know quite how disastrous it's been. #
- One day somebody will interview Richard Wilson without trying to extract the catchphrase. Thankfully he's bored of it too & he held out. #
- Installing Windows 7, & crossing fingers. Surprisingly have yet to see a blue screen. #
- Hopefully they'll all go away soon & leave us to it. #
- Off to do the ironing. #
- Cake done, now only remains to to feed with sherry(!), decorate & hope to God it will be worth the effort come December 25th. #
- Debs finds hourly cake status updates unnecessary. #
- Chilling in Nottingham waiting for no.2 daughter to finish whatever party activity's on today. #
- The Running Horse is up for sale. Losing that would be a tragedy – anyone got a spare £185k? #
So a callow seventeen year old was sitting in front of the TV in the depths of 1978 waiting for a musical fix from Whistle Test when it was still Old & Grey. A rare event, only happening if the parents had vacated the matching TV chairs because there was nothing worth watching on ITV. Bolstered by a record collection numbering about a hundred this was the one weekly occasion when we could see what was happening in the world of Contemporary Rock Music, and the capitals are no accident. Punk had somehow passed me by & the hundred albums balanced above the Waltham music centre revolved around (the) Pink Floyd, Yes and the occasional Rick Wakeman solo project. There was a smattering of Led Zeppelin and Alex Harvey, with and without his Sensational Band, but prime measures of credibility were the number of keyboards and hair below the arse.
Short term memory filtered the name, I hadn’t heard it before so maybe it was time to make the tea. But there was something about the drum beat which kept me in the chair; basic but urgent, and nothing at all Progressive about the ‘dum dum’ guitars or rattling keyboards that were playing. The piano wasn’t even plugged in. It was undoubtedly a band but nothing like I’d seen before. Fronted by the bastard son of Bob Dylan the lead singer (the only job description I had at my disposal then) wore a blazer and tie but neither fitted properly and both clearly said ‘fuck you’. And he certainly wasn’t singing in any way that I recognized. From the opening ‘Here he comes now’ I was hooked and knew instinctively that I’d never wear flares again. My jaw spent the majority of the next three minutes on the floor while my brain processed the enormity of one single fact; seventy percent of my record collection was now redundant. A new world branched out before me but for now I was content to bask in the glow of what was to come.
If memory serves we were then treated to Kung Fu International with no backing but that was icing on the cake. I was sold, and I didn’t want to be nice any more.
- Measure the butter, sugar, eggs, treacle and almonds into a very large bowl and beat well. Add the flours and mixed spice and mix thoroughly until blended. Stir in the soaked fruit. Spoon into the prepared cake tin and level the surface.
- Bake in the centre of the preheated oven for 4-4½ hours or until the cake feels firm to the touch and is a rich golden brown. Check after 2 hours, and, if the cake is a perfect colour, cover with foil. A skewer inserted into the centre of the cake should come out clean. Leave the cake to cool in the tin.
- When cool, pierce the cake at intervals with a fine skewer and feed with a little extra sherry. Wrap the completely cold cake in a double layer of greaseproof paper and again in foil and store in a cool place for up to 3 months, feeding at intervals with more sherry. Don’t remove the lining paper when storing as this helps to keep the cake moist.
- Someone just broke Twitter … #
- Reserch has shown that six out if seven dwarfs aren't happy. #
- Mr Grasshead, how you've changed. http://bit.ly/25U993 #
- Photo tweet: Taken with SmugShot on my iPhone: lapsedheathenTaken with SmugShot on my iPhone http://bit.ly/wl0j6 #
- Loads of rain, no cars. Who'd've thought? #
- http://bit.ly/iCAPS #
- Martha is 9 & loves giant lollipops. #
- Stage one of the Christmas cake complete, three days or so to soak up the sherry (& the ad hoc scotch) and the cooking proper can begin. #
- Put all the dried fruit in a large mixing bowl
- Pour the sherry over the mixed fruit
- Stir in the chopped orange zest
- Cover and leave to soak for around 3 days
- Stir daily
- Smell periodically
- Anticipate
Oct 162009
I have just consumed my first pea widge in about fifteen years, and I offer the following to allow you to share the experience.
Ingredients:
Method:
Add the potatoes to a large pot with enough cold water to cover them by an inch or so. Add salt and bring the water to a boil. Cook until the potatoes are tender when pierced with a knife (about 15 minutes)
Meanwhile open the peas and cook in a separate saucepan
Drain the potatoes, return them to the pot and cook over a low heat for a couple of minutes to evaporate some of the remaining water
Mash by any method of your choice
Blend in butter and some milk
Spoon the potatoes into the pint glass and liberally cover with the cooked peas
Season with lashings of salt, pepper and vinegar. And then some more vinegar. And pepper.
The experience can only be enhanced by eating in conjunction with buttered bread and tea in a white mug.
Enjoy.
Time to get the Christmas cake sorted, which is something I’ve been meaning to do. Following a trip to Tesco’s (and a to-do in the car park with a mad woman) I now have:
The hardware:
a big new mixing bowl, wooden spoons, wooden spatulas
The software:
175g (6 oz) raisins
350g (12 oz) glace cherries, rinsed, thoroughly dried and quartered
500g (1lb 2oz) currants
350g (12oz) sultanas
150ml (¼ pint) sherry, plus extra for feeding
Finely grated zest of 2 oranges
250g (9oz) butter, softened
250g (9oz) light muscovado sugar
4 eggs
1 tbsp black treacle
75g (3oz) blanched almonds, chopped
75g (3oz) self-raising flour
175g (6oz) plain flour
1½ tsp mixed spice
& odds & sods to finish and decorate:
About 3 tbsp apricot jam, sieved and warmed
Icing sugar
675g shop-bought almond paste
Packet royal icing mix to cover 23cm/9in cake
Can’t you just taste it already?
Oct 122009
You now how when you’re hanging about in a garage waiting for them to finish with your car & hand it back you’ll read anything to pass the time? Well in this case it was an A4 poster about diesel emissions and I saw this:
Looks like someone had the good grace to help though, there’s been more than one attempt to remove the offending apostrophe.
And the Jag passed its MOT as well.
Oct 122009
No, this Twitterfeed way to tweet pictures isn’t working – too ugly & no way to edit the text, and I’m not sure why it doubles up:
Photo tweet: Taken with SmugShot on my iPhone: lapsedheathenTaken with SmugShot on my iPhone http://bit.ly/3LD5bG
Either way, I can’t be bothered to sort it. Smugmug support have got back to me with the unfortunate news that they need to do some work before something like Tweetie can post directly to them, something to do with Tweetie adopting the Twitpic API as a standard & there being no way to include a required album id.
So it’s either back to Twitpic for the moment or a two-stage process.
We will see.
