Last week, I was sick. This weekend, I’m also sick, though with something completely different and about as bad a bout since 2005 (though at least this time, I’m just wasting a weekend and not having to carry out an interview whilst trying to hold my insides together). I am hopeful that I’ll be better by next weekend, where I’ll be flying on three different planes and three airports for more chances to catch any bug that’s going around.
But! Miami! New Order! 26ºC! The total oddness of staying at South Beach! And who knows, by Monday, I may work up some needed enthusiasm for the trip. But right now, I’m lying on the couch in full ‘manflu’ repose. Helvetica is soaking up John Wick and given her interest in Casino last week, I’m a little concerned that my cat might be a little bit evil.
Oh! I also subjected an American to The Story of 1989. As a result of that, I discovered that Airwolf was not as popular here as it was back home. Multiple people in my age bracket did not remember it. I had to show the titles to indicate how exciting they were to a six-year-old that didn’t really care that, pilot aside (which I think was rated 15 in the UK?), only had the one plot and five different bits of stock helicopter footage.
As a result of that, I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and discovered that Donald Bellisario actually met Lee Harvey Oswald during the time when both of them where in the Marines, and those encounters made it into the Quantum Leap JFK episode. So there’s your surprising fact for the weekend. I will be hanging out here on the couch for the rest of it.
Jan 5, 2020 · 2 minute read
june 4th 1989 Golden oldies, Rolling Stones, we don't want them back KLF NEXT TIME
This is one of my favourite times of the year., when the BBC archive gets mined and either Mel or Sue narrates The Story of:, or “we’re about to show a lot of Top Of The Pops from this year, so we should probably put it into some context whilst we’re cutting out all the Mike Smith bits — _wait, is that Gary Glitter?_” Anyway, we’ve reached 1989. Soul II Soul, Happy Mondays, S’Express…and The Bunny That We Will Not Speak About. Oh, and The Reynolds Girls fleetingly glimpsed in the Fall of SAW montage, which is normally a cue for me to launch into a stirring defence of I’d Rather Jack. But it has been a long week and I’m alone on the couch shivering with a mild fever, so it’s more of a wistful watch as people talk about how 1989 seemed to be heralding a promise of a better world.
The President interrupts, threatening to bomb cultural sites and other war crimes.
And this is why I’m watching the first episode of Time Team. Escape to the past. Hence all the contemporary documentaries reporting on the Three Day Week and Militant, plus all the new (old) books lying about the house. There’s no way out, and no future except for what we can excavate from the past. A nice bit of flint and a regeneration programme for the masses. Against the classes.
Dec 31, 2019 · 2 minute read
so so old but a lot happened and a bunch of other things
Firstly, let me just say that I was promised this:
(though Marvel seems to be having a stab at trying to make Iron Man 2020 happen, perhaps without the part where he’s responsible for the destruction of Los Angeles)
Rounding out the decade, then. A partial list:
Got married in a Pac-Man costume
Moved to the US
Worked at Activison Blizzard HQ
Moved house more often than in the preceding 30 years
Bought two houses (but I sold one!)
Having moved 4000 miles, went 800 extra miles north
Became a US citizen
Heard another song that’ll mean something
Watched many, many TV shows from before I was born
Got divorced, though not in a Pac-Man costume (we missed a trick there)
Went to Alinea. And Next. And The Aviary
Saw many brutalist buildings
Went back to Manchester to see how things have changed
Wrote a book!
Made new friends that will hopefully be around for many years to come
Got increasingly insane planning desserts
Continued overcompensating for a small bedroom to the point where it now seems to be a complex
Obtained a black cat and outfitted her with batwings for Hallowe’en
[REDACTED]
Voted many times in two different countries. Can’t say I had much success, but maybe next year, eh?
Spoke at multiple conferences
Built up a bourbon bar that probably rivals most outside of Kentucky (and even some there). It’s…an issue
CHAMBER VACCUUM SEALER
Gave Allo Darlin’ and the SHUX team chocolates
Participated in two DIY projects that didn’t involve me being sent away to make tea
Went to Singapore. Still not actually sure why I was sent to Singapore, but I went!
Reached the age where it is acceptable to be excited about ordering a chest freezer…and ordered one
Became a fan of board games…and it got out of hand…
Lost more hair
Gained more psoriasis (though the light therapy is helping!)
Went to San Francisco for the first time, and the second, and more
Saw Los Campesinos! enough times that I’ve actually lost count
Accidentally ordered 111 copies of an LC! album that saw me being rescued by Gareth
Obtained a complete collection of B.S. Johnson books
Watched so much Law & Order
Made chocolate from cocoa beans
Got to the point where I only curse the French once or twice whilst making macarons
Recycled so much cardboard
…and probably a lot more besides…
A rather interesting decade. Also, I’ve almost been writing on this blog for 20 years now. So, so old…but hopefully still much more to write.
Obtaining private selection picks of every single combination of Four Roses’s two mashbills and five yeast strains (ten bottles overall).
Finding not one, but two bottles of the MGP-sourced O.K.I. releases.
Getting hold of every special release that New Riff put out, including the Balboa Rye that sold out within hours. (You should find a New Riff Single Barrel Rye as quick as you can, by the way)
I now have a bottle of ‘Cheesy Gold Foil’ Wild Turkey to be opened on a very special occasion.
And in a last-minute addition to round out 2019, I also got my first-ever limited edition Four Roses edition, which I amazingly managed to find at retail in the UK. So yes, things got a little out of hand. On the bright side, I now have all the ‘unicorn’ bottles I’ve been looking for, so 2020 should be a much lighter year (I completely ignore anything from the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection; it’s good bourbon, but I’m not paying $1000 a bottle (at least) for any of it). In fact, I’m only looking forward so far to three releases next year:
Wild Turkey Rye Rare Breed — should be fairly common in shops and on the basis of their single barrel ryes and Cornerstone, it’ll be something special.
New Riff 6-Year — This is still only a rumour at the moment, but as their first barrels will be six years old in 2020, we’re hoping for an older bottling as their stocks come into their prime.
Wild Turkey Master’s Keep TBA — there’s talk that there’s going to be a final showing of the company’s remaining old bourbon barrels in 2020. While the other two are likely to be released widely, this will be rather hard to come by, given how popular ‘dusty’ Wild Turkey has become.
Oh, and I’ll probably pick up a bottle or two while visiting Japan next year as well!
It’ll be a calmer year. Mainly because I don’t want to buy another set of shelves for the bar…
Dec 22, 2019 · 2 minute read
water water always water surprise philadelphia
Somehow, I managed to get two blisters on one toe. I’m still a little confused how my feet got covered in them during the trip home. Yes, I did walk seven miles on Friday, but I often do that in airports. Maybe they got freaked out when my original flight to Charlotte got delayed enough that I’d have missed my connecting flight to Heathrow. Instead, I got put on a last-minute flight to Philadelphia and a stand-by seat on a British Airways 747 (which I didn’t realize they were still flying). Which I almost missed because they said that they’d call me…and they didn’t, so if I hadn’t overcome my natural British reticence to ask follow-up questions, I might still be in Philidelphia.
But anyway, I am home! And I have seen Rise of The Skywalker, which I’d sum up as exactly what you’d expect from a Star Wars film by JJ Abrams except somehow more bereft of any new ideas and more predictable than the second hand of a clock. I know a lot of people hated The Last Jedi, but at least it tried, as opposed to “look! Five seconds of Ewoks and a space battle that seemed to comprise of 5 X-Wings, three B-Wings, 2 Y-Wings, and an A-Wing piloted by the bloke from Heroes”.
(The best Disney Star Wars film remains Rogue One)
Meanwhile, I’ve very lucky to have Tammy and Robert working on my house this weekend after discovering that the master bathroom has been flooding into the garage. It’s a nice house. But it does give me a headache at times.
Hah, so when I wrote “I’ll be back to writing next time”, I forgot just how much a total and utter defeat tends to reduce the inclination to do anything except wallow in misery. Or, if you’re part of the Labour Party, wallow and join the massive circular firing squad. It’s what we do so well. Aside from losing elections apparently.
I’m still too depressed to talk about it too much; the worst part is that I had priced in a Labour defeat months ago. But this week, with my Twitter bubble in full effect, with people like Owen Jones (who I keep on my follow list mainly to get annoyed every time he retweets a cherry-picked poll from an obscure outfit that says Sanders will win Texas or something) talking up about how something was changing on the ground…only for less than 24 hours later for them to come clean on how Corbyn kept on coming up negatively on the doorstep. I honestly find that maddening.
Almost as maddening as the centre-right, charging in with “I told you so! What…no, we still don’t have any ideas except for a reheated pot of Blairism that hasn’t worked since 2005…” It pisses me off that after, what almost five years in the ‘wilderness’, the right wing of the Labour Party has yet to do…anything except carp from the sidelines (possible exception here for Stephen Kinnock, who at least did some digging) and hope that David Miliband will come back and save them. I would not class myself as a Corbyn fanboy by any means, but I mean at least he had the guts to stand and be counted, not run away in a huff to another continent and deliver a massive blow to his brother’s new leadership literally as it just began.
And then there’s the Left, who have decided that in lieu of any introspection, they’re going to blame everybody else. My favourite group is the exact same people who take potshots at you if you point out that voting third-party in the US is a bad idea for progressive causes dishing out metric tons of vitriol towards the Liberal Democrats. I’m not saying it’s not deserved (especially in the case of Kensington, where Grenfell was used as a cudgel to turn the seat back into Tory hands by the LDs, which they should not be allowed to forget in a hurry), but these people were quite happy to see Clinton fail to feed their accelerationist urges. And maybe, just maybe, don’t write a manifesto that is tailor-made for juxtaposing with 1983. Seems a bad omen, and if you’d had cut it down to just “a shedload of money for the NHS and we’ll nationalize the railways”, you’d have started the push back to the left whilst also not throwing out 500 policies all at once. And I still get people defending Chris Williamson. Still.
And then there’s the Americans, who of course have to make it all about them. Look, I’m not voting for Sanders, but there’s a subtle difference between him and Corbyn in that he’s regularly ten points above the President in current polling, and Labour have almost always polled below the Tories. People got excited last week about a poll that only had Labour 5% down, for goodness sake! (oh, that’s another thing about the supporters: just because YouGov is run by a Tory…maybe it’s not a great idea to dismiss every poll out of hand because of some magic ‘unskewing’ you could apply to their model. Just maybe) The situation here is different to back home, though maybe we could look at the way moderate Democratic candidates broke through in 2018 and feel that it’s not quite as simple as ‘offer them Medicare For All and everybody will vote Democratic1’.
So to sum up: everybody is wrong and I am right. Excellent.
(I’ll admit that that my preference for going all in on Remain does seem to have been the wrong option, but the 2018 Euro Elections indicated that Labour would have got massacred in London if they’d gone hard Leave, so I’m not sure if there was ever a good choice here)
Anyway, I’m coming home this Friday to the first solid Tory Government since I was 13 years old. Hurrah.
I actually support the concept of Medicare For All because the American health system is completely insane, but the Sanders bill/litmus test is potentially highly damaging. Firstly, by banning private insurance, it hands the GOP an incredibly effective attack line before the battle to pass the damn thing even starts, and secondly, there aren’t 50 votes in the Senate for it, so what are you going to do if you get in and you can’t pass it? Warren is being pilloried by the left here for her suggestion of passing a public option and then moving on to Medicare For All towards the end of her first term, but better that people are helped by an imperfect fix rather than have them die or suffer but we maintain our ideological purity, right? Right? Is this why I get called a centrist melt on some forums?
[return]
Dec 1, 2019 · 1 minute read
so much baking have you ever baked so much that you cannot walk i have and we'll do it all again next year!
72 eggs. 4kg of flour. A quantity of sugar that has been suppressed under the Thirty Year Rule. A very filling Thanksgiving was had, and I remain very thankful for great friends and a very understanding family.
After the madness of Thursday, Friday and Saturday were much more sedate affairs (though somehow even after cutting our order to the bone, we still managed to leave Grace of India with leftovers), even including a cozy watch of A Matter of Life and Death on a dreary, cold Saturday afternoon - definitely the appropriate environment for it. Yes, you can feel some of the damp!
And now, only three week until I’m back home again…
At the time of writing, the dessert count for next week currently stands at 17. Some might cry “lunacy!”, but I’m idly wondering if I can make it an even 20. I cannot be stopped. I probably should be stopped.
However, if nothing else, this weekend has shown me the mystical ways of the induction cooktop. I’ve always been somewhat sceptical. On Saturday, I cooked a sugar solution to 115ºC in under two minutes. So fast that I was completely unprepared and had to scramble to get my hazelnuts out of the oven.1 It’s amazing, and may change my frequency of caramel making up here in the frozen North (it takes over an hour to make a caramel on the electric stovetop I have under normal circumstances).
After the first day of baking, I have pâte sucrée, oreo dough, gingerbread, praline paste, two rounds of croissant dough (two sets of chocolate croissants, but one set will go straight into bread pudding…), toffee with pecan-smoked almonds, a second batch of toffee with a recipe that actually worked, cookie dough, graham cracker-flavoured ice cream…,and tomato-chili jam for the bacon naan rolls we’ll be having for breakfast on Thursday (shamelessly stolen from Dishoom).
I have no non-cooking news. Everything is now baking until the end of Friday. Or until my feet give out again.
For homemade Nutella. Everything is totally over-the-top. Have I mentioned the Black Forest Gateau that I added to the menu a few days ago and now has as many layers as the Heston one? Except they’re all different?
[return]
Bit of a holding week this time around. We’ve finalized the dessert menu for Thanksgiving at fourteen different items (thirteen would have been unlikely, of course!), and next weekend, the baking begins in earnest! Madness!
Meanwhile, it has been a weekend of IKEA, watching Peter Egan shoot himself in the head, a young naked Richard E. Grant playing the flute, and grimy 1970s bars. I pick the best BBC dramas. Oh! I may have also broken the curse of Jubilee by making Tammy watch 24 Hour Party People. Not that it’s a classic…but, it is not something that makes you want to claw your own eyes out by the second reel. I’m getting better! Next…O Lucky Man! Hahaha, no.
(one issue with 24HPP that I didn’t really think about is that so much of the film only works if you know New Order, The Fall, Happy Mondays, Wilson, Alan Partridge, Factory…and…well, Britain in the 80s and 90s. Which is a bit of a tall order for somebody who doesn’t)
