Huh?

I'm currently sitting in a cafe in Canary Wharf being all corporate. But woo, free wifi!

Is this not just the oddest sentence, though?

From the Guardian:
"I didn't know any women who were working at that time [the 1970s], unless they were childminding or starting up a nursery."

Whose children were they minding then?

I love...

... working from home.

For lunch today, I had pork chops braised in red wine with caramelised onions and herby-garlicky-ness, with a wee French-sized glass of red wine, followed by a few slivers of cheese and a pot of coffee and a home-made nutty brownie.

So civilised. =)

Heehee

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I just go into the other room and read a book."

I'm not sure 'educating' is a word, but otherwise this Groucho Marx quote will be used to drive Nik to distraction for the rest of our lives together. Muahahaha.


Edited to add: Of course 'educating' is a word. (Depending on how you define word. Now, there was something I thought I'd never have to spend 1500 words debating and then concluding I couldn't do again.) I mean, I'm not sure 'educating' can be used in that sense. We had a word. It was called 'educational'. It was a fine word, that served its purpose very well.

Mmmmm, sloe gin.

Mr Ramsey

Okay, I kind of see where he's coming from, I think people who eat imported strawberries or asparagus in November are mad and I'd certainly never want to pay through the nose for them in a restaurant... and go for it with the bitch-slapping that turncoat Delia... but really.... he's suggesting criminalising serving out-of-season produce. Even I think that's a bit strong.

Linky.

Curly-haired with yoghurt

Well, for the first time, after dalliances with every kind of live yoghurt Waitrose offer, wasting countless pints of milk, and results ranging from the unpalatable to the unchanged to the verging-on-ricotta-cottage-cheese-type-thing that was okay in pasta, or at least better than wasting it, I have actually managed to successfully make yoghurt that looks and tastes pretty much like yoghurt. Woo. The exercise was largely financial (although the challenge of making something new was also welcome) - now we get the veg box and buy meat in bulk, I found I was going to Waitrose just to buy milk and yoghurt and also ending up coming home with 40-odd things I didn't need (special offer crisps are my biggest downfall), so, since I also date my good, fair food obsession roughly from when we stopped getting milk delivered and started getting the watery, homogenised pap from Tesco and have always hankered after the reusable glass bottles, we've taken the very retrograde step of organising a doorstep delivery, which is much more convenient and works out financially if I make yoghurt instead of buying it. After a month and a half of failing miserably and allowing another six months or so to make back the cost of the thermos flask (I'm tempted to use the word 'capex' here), I expect it to pay dividends by Christmas. And the satisfaction I get from being able to make yoghurt (and the thought that if feed prices rocket, the economy crashes, our just-in-time food system breaks down and the milk from the local dairy delivered a short distance to my door continues to be viable, I will be the only person in Wokingham with dairy products) are just a smug foodie bonus.

Barbara Kingsolver (in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a wonderful book, you should read it) has now inspired me to make proper ricotta and mozzarella, and she's lactose intolerant so it must be good!

The latest batch of bread, however, was a disaster - flat, burnt and incredibly dense.


I had my hair cut yesterday. What is it with hairdressers? Why can't they just leave well alone? I gave her a very clear brief (hack off the split ends, leave it easy to manage without an arsenal of styling products, a Level 3 NVQ in hairdressing and the intrinsic advantage of someone else's head being in front of you) and halfway through she said, 'Your hair's really curly, you know?'

Curly? My hair has been described as many things, from 'flat and lifeless on top' via 'so easy to straighten' to 'a total mess, darling, please get a haircut', but never 'curly'.* Curly was new. So, foolishly, swept away by the experience of a stylish stranger massaging my head and paying me compliments, I somehow agreed to let her put some squidgy stuff from a blue bottle on my head, twist my hair painfully through the drying process and then shunt me out onto the street (maybe so she could have a cup of tea before her next client) by telling me it would be much better to let it finish drying naturally.

It didn't really take. Nik, bless him, came home from work and gave me the standard must-remember-to-notice-girlfriend's-had-a-haircut line of 'it looks nice', but when he actually looked at me, he agreed it was somewhat peculiar.

And then he brought a friend home for dinner, whose overriding impression of me will now be as a straw-haired, muddy person who sits upstairs listening to five-second segments of audio over and over again and can't make bread rise.


* Though I did go through a phase at school of sleeping with mini plaits in and having it frizzy in the morning.

Do they not WANT me to vote for them?

We had local elections yesterday (lucky us) and being a good little democratic citizen I trotted off to the polling station, where I was surprised to discover that we did, after all, have a Lib Dem candidate and a Labour candidate.

Now, I'm a bit of a leftie. I don't really ally myself with any particular party, but I general fall somewhere between what Labour should stand for and what the Lib Dems stand for, with the caveat that they can say whatever they want cos they'll never actually get elected. I readily admit that the kinds of changes I am looking to see in the country are waaaay more radical than what any self-respecting candidate would be prepared to actually put in their campaign literature, but I'm pretty realistic and would be happy to be swayed by a convincing candidate of general leftie persuasion, especially in the local elections: in a general election, although you aren't really supposed to, I would tend to vote for a party and a Prime Minister, but in the local elections I would tend to vote for the candidate I felt most confident in. Overall, I generally believe that public services are in principle a good thing, I think we need to do A LOT more for the environment, I think the gap between the rich and the poor is too wide and I'd love to completely overhaul the education system. And I'd vote for anyone who promised more allotments.

So, I had been looking forward to all the candidates coming around and asking me what issues were on my mind so I could grill them about their ideas for making Wokingham a more sustainable, resilient and environmentally-friendly place, about how they would follow up on the suggestions Friends of the Earth (of which I am a member) gave them last month and if they would please stop concreting over everything and get rid of all the cars, please, if it isn't too much trouble, thank you. And can I have an allotment before 2015 please?

Now, I work from home and am usually in of an evening, so if anybody had come round canvassing, I would have known. We had leaflets shoved through the door by the Conservatives, UKIP and the BNP, but they ran away immediately afterwards and didn't want to talk to me. Labour and the Lib Dems didn't even bother to do that, let alone actually try and talk to me. It never even entered my mind to vote for UKIP or the BNP (despite the hilarious reply UKIP gave to an email I sent to various MEPs about biofuels), and I didn't really want to vote for the Tory candidate because a) his environmental policies were rubbish (basically: environmental issues begin and end with waste and recycling, and we couldn't ever have alternative weekly collections, never, never, never, never, NEVER, although had he come and asked me what I thought I'd have shown him my bokashi bin) and b) all the material we've ever had from him has contained a big whine about how little funding the Borough gets from central government compared to..... councils where there are lots of poor people. Now, there is a genuine issue about how basing it on averages means the worse off in overall richer areas are even worse off than they would be in poorer areas where there was more central funding, but do they talk about this? No, it's just 'poor us, aren't we hard done by?' never mind that that's how local government funding works or that the reason we don't get as much is because we're all well-off and don't need it - it's like saying, 'Oh, poor stockbrokers, they have to pay more tax than nurses and bin-men.'

So I didn't want to vote for him either.

And so since I knew nothing about the candidates representing the two parties I might have swung between or their policies, I was damned if I was going to vote for them.

So, ladies and gentlemen, since people died so that I could have the right to vote and I did not want to dishonour them by allowing apathy to win the day, I am ashamed to say that I spoilt my ballot. I voted for all the candidates and drew a silly face at the top of the paper for good measure.