amplify your life!
Happy New Year!
What are you up to this evening? We’ll be spending the evening at home with the furry peeps, enjoying slow-roasted dead baby lamb and some fine New Zealand Pinot. There may be scrabble.
I feel SO ROCK N ROLL I may explode :)
video post inspired by the Very Awesome Ms J. Caron
Get up nice and early. This may necessitate having breakfast on the train. Do not dawdle (or allow companion to to be distracted by the WIDE AND AMAZING selection of newspaper 6 minutes before train is due to depart).
Arrive at Fun Day Out Seaside Destination!
Rally against pissy misty rain that soaks into EVERYTHING. Including freshly straightened hair. Resolve to avoid all reflective surfaces for duration of day.
Visit pier. Contemplate the irony of the ‘Unique Wedding Experience’ available on pier. So unique that a pergola and ‘just married’ seaside comedy photo props are also available.
NB: winning £4 on poker machine does wonders for ones state of mind.
Allow several moments of conversation to ponder if this is where dreams come to die.
Or perhaps that Victor Hugo was right: ‘everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left’.
Wander through slippery cobbled lanes. Resolve to not fall on arse.
Resolve to find somewhere nice for lunch instead of soggy fish ‘n’ chips in rain with squillion damp shoppers.
Discover glory of Riddle & Finns Champagne & Oyster Bar in tiny corner of lanes. Order champagne. And seafood chowder. Allow loveliness of candles and flavours and company to soak in as deeply as sodding rain.
Breathe.
Wander through streets as if renewed; warm and full of noms. Discover awesome second hand bookshop. Browse in the quiet basement. Spend £4 winnings on ‘The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1918′. Allow self mental fist-pump at literary discovery.
Get early train home.
Make hot cup of tea.
It is on the only street in the United Kingdom where vehicles are required to drive on the right; peach melba was first made in the kitchen in honour of Nellie Melba; Churchill often took his cabinet to lunch there (its air-raid shelters were ‘the smartest in London’). And today the Savoy Grill will be hosting me and him for a five course lunch. SWEEEEEET! By tea-time, we’ll be taste-testing some of the 104 absinthe cocktails in the American Bar (for research purposes you understand).
I wish for you all a joyful Christmas, however you spend the day.
ps: this is my Christmas pressie for Science Guy: a portrait of our little family by the Serious Fabulous Sam Wedelich of Dwell Deep.
pps: if I am honest it feels a little like a Claytons gift because I love it SO much!
Its still bloody freezing and the snow continues to cause havoc. People have been stuck at Heathrow for days, and passengers have gone a bit feral: there has been reports of LOUD TUTTING and FIST-SHAKING. The whole country is on the verge of a complete social collapse.
Above this atmosphere of abandoned hope, this morning the earth cast a shadow over the moon, and today is winter solstice in the northern hemisphere (note for nerds: the last time these two events coincided was 1638: the next time will be 2094). Huffpost and NASA have more details and The Big Picture is typically awesome.
But it is an especially auspicious day as one very smart and funny Lisa of Doorways Traveler celebrates her birthday (she brings a wheat-grass shot filled, mung-bean shaped, organic unicorn-riding, Californianness to proceedings).
The images below depict the occurrings of winter solstice around these parts, and me phaffing about with my iphone camera. Right, I’m off to open up a photography Etsy store before the world ends.
Happy Solstice Lovely Peeps!
‘It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; a candle burned’ ~ Boris Pasternak
This photo sums up Rex’s entire weekend. Essentially an inside-in-Winter cat, Rex wanders outside only for essential purposes; the furry pudding is not used to snow. He was not best pleased and having to trudge through wet white stuff that reached his belly. I love his little flat pissed-off ears.
We slowly wandered up to the Supermarché yesterday, via Villandry for The Best Hot Chocolate Because Its Made Mostly of Chocolate. On the way back I slipped on the icy pavement and fell on my ass. My ass is now a little bit broken.
Anyway: #reverb10: the daily prompts are lovely and stuff but I think the whole point (for me) of having a blog is that I can capture my reflections in ‘real time’. And with the necessary time required to blog every day, I have just been regurgitating previous posts. So I am just going to write to the prompts that spark something original. Frankly, I can’t be reflecting and reverberating and stuff when we have FOUR INCHES OF SNOW OUTSIDE!
On Saturday afternoon I listened to the afternoon play on Radio 4 and baked The Best Carrot Cake In The Known Universe and promptly transmorgifurated into my Gran. I can’t take the credit for the recipe though I have no idea where I found it and I just make it from memory now. It’s moist and light and very moorish:
Grease and flour a 20cm cake tin and preheat the oven to 180° C. Mix up everything except the carrots, pineapple and walnuts. Fold in the carrots, pineapple and walnuts. Bake in the oven for 45-50mins. For the icing use 200g of fat free cream cheese, the juice of a lemon and enough icing sugar to thicken. Grate the lemon rind on top for fanciness.
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Despite having the atmosphere of an abandoned primary school, Bletchley Park is a brilliant way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Particularly if you are a maths, engineering, or computer nerd. Or you just love the history of the WWII codebreakers and Alan Turing’s genius. The Enigma machine was used by German forces to trade cryptic messages. These were intercepted by listening stations and sent to Bletchley Park where attempts to decode the raw information used increasingly sophisticated technology, leading to the creation of Colossus; the earliest digital computer.
I loved the stories of the young women who worked at the Park. There were about 400 Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service) who worked in shifts so information was fed to Bletchley 24 hours a day via a teleprinter. The breaking of the codes is credited with reducing the number of casualties at sea from German U-boat attacks and the work at Bletchley Park is thought to have shortened the war by at least two years.
Churchill referred to the Bletchley staff as ‘My geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled’.
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Remember the nearly-brother-in-law? This weekend he was chatting to the Herald on Sunday about being a man.
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Also: the defnitive list of awesome has been updated. You’re welcome :)
for the first coffee of the day, my knee-high brown leather birthday boots, my £2 woolly gloves. The coffee beans from Monmouth that Nic & Leonie left, laughing until my belly aches, the leaps of faith, the smell of Mum’s ginger cake baking, feeling my heart breaking, feeling unbreakable. The existence of Leonie, Sus, Pen, Jo, Emma, Mighty Meg and Lisa: my teachers. My love of literature, my curious brain. Mozart flute concertos, water on skin, the smell of freshly cut grass. The weekend papers in bed with Science Guy, lying in the sunshine in a London park, the duck pond in the Wellington Botanical Gardens. That night I stumbled upstairs out of a fire-exit and finding myself on a roof staring at Turkish stars. That breakfast in which I met Tor & Marianne. Little Brother at Brisbane’s arrivals gate. The strength and rhythm of my body running. The lessons in everything. The particle physicists and philosophers. New friends. Old friends. London Underground’s sense of humour. The clarity of understanding that he isn’t my problem to solve anymore. The Divine Ms G, Ms Megan’s bravery (hello ‘twatcockery’), the existence of Bea. An open fire and a glass of red wine. Sitting in a cardboard box aged six. Spooning in bed, giggling in the dark. The sound of the rushing waves on Warrington beach deserted, reading in bed while it rains with Badger purring beside me. Dreams and plans with Science Guy. Mum dying so young, the rage, the sadness. Skype. Our wedding plans. The colours everywhere: the sheer joy of being human.
If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you’, that would suffice ~ Eckhart
Its been weeks and weeks and weeks of different work times and bed times. Travellytrips for holidays and workdays. Texts and reminder notes on the fridge, the online calendar, on the edge of reasonable.
We have hosted travelers, waifs and strays; one after another. In the flurry of excitement at seeing everyone, we did not anticipate the hours in between would be used to change sheets and hoover and put on our best smiles.
At once both awkwardly polite and conspiratorially bound; we are adrift from each other, hovering apart. A little weary, tired, fraught.
We miss each other.
Now the house is ours again, (and even though you are sporting a bushy movember effort) I want to crawl into bed with you for days, and find us.
