http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJZb-xmGfq0
You imagine you can live your life without the porcini mushroom. You'd be right. Shrivelled and dry, unscrewing the lid of a jar of the things and sticking your nose in is like rolling around in the hamster cage.
A questionable analogy; I've never knowingly harboured a hamster.
But I'm offered a recipe for a mushroom risotto and one of the two types of mushroom required is the porcini. I head to +Waitrose Kenya. Oh. No I don't, well not to Waitrose Kenya, more to Waitrose Ely. Dhruv's recipe (I think Dhruv rhymes with prove and not with dove but I might be wrong) asks for a handful of the porcini.
In the stocks and gravies and handy things in packets aisle I discover Cook's Ingredients. Helpfully I find a plastic jar, even more helpfully labelled A Handful of Porcini Mushrooms.
Back home I've gathered all the ingredients together. I'm enjoying the Madeleine moment now with the jar of porcini, even if I never knowingly harboured a hamster. Maybe I was a hamster in a previous cage. I dash them into a porcelain bowl and add 150ml boiling water.
Long story short, the boy's going to go far if his mushroom risotto is anything to label him by. Even further when we realise that he's right in saying that making a risotto requires one of those recipes which we really should embed now. Like making tea.
Wednesday, 3 April 2013
Tuesday, 2 April 2013
Forever Bexley
http://bygonekent.org.uk/memories/open-all-hours
Julie's done a lovely job here. It's all too easy to get a little mawkish about the past, to slip it into a golden bubble and to long for it again. Today, it's worth remembering, is the good old days: in another fifty years someone just like Julie will be popping together a set of references to a remembered past and someone else will be going ahh at its light.
And if it's acceptable that these are the good old days then it must follow suit that regret is insubstantial, and cannot exist. We can't change the past, thank goodness, and we have no operation over the future.
Time will tell. And it always tells the truth.
Julie's done a lovely job here. It's all too easy to get a little mawkish about the past, to slip it into a golden bubble and to long for it again. Today, it's worth remembering, is the good old days: in another fifty years someone just like Julie will be popping together a set of references to a remembered past and someone else will be going ahh at its light.
And if it's acceptable that these are the good old days then it must follow suit that regret is insubstantial, and cannot exist. We can't change the past, thank goodness, and we have no operation over the future.
Time will tell. And it always tells the truth.
Monday, 1 April 2013
Mrs Wol
She's trying her hardest to be part of the family. All we know is that as a kitten she was locked away outside someone's house and given little, if any, love. As a result, and after two days here, she's finding it hard to trust us. Not surprisingly.
Inevitably the naming has been tricky. She looks a bit like an alien and mostly like a snowy owl, so we wandered through all the owl names we could find (after ET) and stopped short at Wol, having ignored Hedwig. Jane had to re-read just a little AA Milne to discover that Wol was decidedly male.
So our snowy cat who looks a bit like an alien is now called Mrs Wol. And still she's having trouble trusting us. Hmm. Is there a connection?
Inevitably the naming has been tricky. She looks a bit like an alien and mostly like a snowy owl, so we wandered through all the owl names we could find (after ET) and stopped short at Wol, having ignored Hedwig. Jane had to re-read just a little AA Milne to discover that Wol was decidedly male.
So our snowy cat who looks a bit like an alien is now called Mrs Wol. And still she's having trouble trusting us. Hmm. Is there a connection?
No fool, Jim
http://www.jim-kelly.co.uk/
It's his birthday today, Jim. My first sight of him was at the end of Platform 9 at King's Cross, waiting for the 17:45 to Ely. Like many habitual city commuters he waited for the train in the same way you'd wait for a bus; it's there to do a job, don't get stressed by it, it'll appear.
What set him apart was the laptop, slung round his back like a guitar, and the stillness. His head had already left his workaday world and had tuned in to something else. I often watched his back - all the best actors know how to act with their back; wondered what sort of story it told. What the job he'd left was, what was the job he was going to, or at least pondering.
When his first book appeared and his CV became more public I discovered that my hunches were correct, that he'd worked as a journalist, successfully, for fifteen years at the FT and that during those long commutes he was writing his first book. Philip Dryden was born on the 17:45 to Ely.
While I read, Jim wrote. Now we drink beer together, and neither of us read or write while we're doing that.
It's his birthday today, Jim. My first sight of him was at the end of Platform 9 at King's Cross, waiting for the 17:45 to Ely. Like many habitual city commuters he waited for the train in the same way you'd wait for a bus; it's there to do a job, don't get stressed by it, it'll appear.
What set him apart was the laptop, slung round his back like a guitar, and the stillness. His head had already left his workaday world and had tuned in to something else. I often watched his back - all the best actors know how to act with their back; wondered what sort of story it told. What the job he'd left was, what was the job he was going to, or at least pondering.
When his first book appeared and his CV became more public I discovered that my hunches were correct, that he'd worked as a journalist, successfully, for fifteen years at the FT and that during those long commutes he was writing his first book. Philip Dryden was born on the 17:45 to Ely.
While I read, Jim wrote. Now we drink beer together, and neither of us read or write while we're doing that.
Sunday, 31 March 2013
But not in a religious way
Ken's posted a picture for Easter Day: it's a nod to the circularity of the internet. Ken was in his fifth term at RADA when I was a newbie in my first; he therefore already had the position of lesser god.
The higher gods were those just about to leave - Trevor, Eddie, Doyle et al. I gasped in their wake and accepted their insults with the joy of a flagellant.
More than 35 years down the line I can watch Ken's career with the pleasure of a younger brother whose older paradigm would barely have known he was there. It's a cosy feeling.
Thanks, Ken.
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