Sep 30, 2012 | Uncategorized
The house is full of the smell of newly made bread again. Over the years I’ve used various recipes and my ‘standard’ loaf these days is very different from the bread I made when the kids were younger. In part that is because I used to use a half and half white flour/wholemeal flour mix and now I don’t but it is also because I settled on a recipe I got from a BBC website (I think). These days I use very strong white bread flour and use a much moister dough than of old. I also used to add honey to the dough to help the yeast and often a little olive oil too. My recipe now is simply flour, yeast and water with a very, very small amount of salt (10g in 1Kg of flour). I also sometimes add milk to the water.
Otherwise I have been catching up on stuff on DVD – particularly Season 1 of Falling Skies. Falling Skies is a series about which I had heard good things but, because it lurks on an obscure cable channel and I never know when it is on, I have never managed to see. So yesterday when I saw the complete season 1 going cheap in a sale in a local supermarket I decided to take a punt. I’m glad I did because I enjoyed it and, for the most part, it kept up a high standard. I was particularly taken by the first 10 to 15 minutes of episode one which were very well written indeed, introducing everything you need to know about the plot and the lead characters with maximum economy and the minimum of fuss.
Although in one respect it is a fairly standard post-alien-invasion-plucky-survivors thing, it is reminiscent of Battlestar Gallactica but, more interestingly perhaps, of another Spielberg production – Band of Brothers.
I also rewatched Stardust for the first time in ages and it was entertaining enough, although I preferred the book.
Sep 29, 2012 | Uncategorized
Specifically Blue Tits, Great Tits and Coal Tits.
Since the really hard winters a couple of years ago there has been a noticable lack of varieties of garden birds around our house. For a time after we moved here I kept a list of birds that visited and it was quite decent. Blue, great, coal and long-tailed tits, chaffinches, bull finches,green ginches, greater spotted woodpecker, etc., the usual gulls and corvids, robins, thrush, blackbirds, field fare, several sparrow hawks and, over flying, kestrels and buzzards. Our neighbour two gardens up had goldfinches and we’ve had linnets and waxwings on the chimney stalks too.
However since the harsh winters we’ve pretty much been restricted to loads of dunnocks (last year) and several broods of house sparrows (this year).
The reason I’m writing this is that I have been heartened after the recent bad weather to have seen something of a resurgence at the bird feeders – mainly tits and finches, but a welcome variety. We have also had a healthy looking male sparrowhawk a few times which is also a good sign. Why? because it is an apex predator and they need a healthy population of small birds in order to survive. A healthy raptor population is a good indicator of a healthy prey population.
Sep 23, 2012 | Uncategorized
It has been a decent weekend so far, a lot of it taken up by making bread and also home-made jam. Nor was it any old jam, I made my two favourites – Mango Jam and Kiwi-fruit Jam. Original quantities were abt 3lb of fruit (once peeled and, in the case of the mango, stoned) and 2.5lb sugar or thereabouts. This turned out 4 full jars of each plus some left over for immediate use.
Although I really like these jams I haven’t made them for a long time – I think a decade or so. The main thing I remember about them was that they were rapidly eaten which is as good a sign as any that others like them too.
Sep 21, 2012 | Legs!, Music
Previous builds
It has been a while since I built a guitar and longer since I built the Octave Mandolin and I have been hankering to build something else if only to keep my hand in. Ideally I’d like to build another guitar and do a better job but I don’t really have the time or the money for that at the moment.
So a wee project for winter is to build a mandolin from a cheap Stew-Mac kit. I plan to build it pretty much as it is but I am giving serious thought to adding wooden binding, probably maple, and using some odds and ends left over from the guitar – notably some strips of maple, to add an end-flash and maybe a heel cap.
The materials have already arrived and are settling in to the Scottish climate in a place of safety. I’m not sure exactly when I will begin building it but I don’t want to hold off too long.
I’ll let you know.
In other news the return to running is coming along slowly. I’m just about at my old pace but building up stamina is hard going. Also, my knees are feeling it and after a good week last week I have largely rested my legs for the past few days. I’ll probably go out for a slightly longer run tomorrow or Sunday.
Spiggie Loch 10K
It all seems like a long time since the wee jaunt to the leftt which was the Spiggie Loch 10K on Shetland in August 2009. I remember that as being quite fun but with a killer of an incline 2/3 of the way round. I’m not sure if I ever got an official time for that when I think about it. My watch showed 56mins 24 seconds and my note of the run reads:
“A fast -for me- first half (5K in just over 25 mins) was spoiled by a sodding great hill in the second half. Still, I enjoyed this and was pleased at the end.”
I do have a particular memory that an inspiration to keep going on the hill was provided by a young woman in front of me running in tight shorts. I didn’t say much about that at the time because the run was on our wedding anniversary and I thought it might be a bad idea to mention it.
Sep 16, 2012 | Books
Although I have the usual accumulation of tools in assorted boxes in the big cupboard off the kitchen where we put things that don’t go anywhere else, I am a reluctant handyman. I never touch Gas, Electricity or Water and, despite being confident enough to build a couple of musical instruments, don’t really do much of any other stuff either.
Oddly enough, one thing which I do undertake, even though it is a job I detest to the very roots of my being, is that every four years or so the old, blackening silicone sealant around the bath has to come out and be replaced. That time has come around again and so I spent a substantial part of yesterday getting it done.
I actually bought the odds and ends needed for the job several weeks ago but only just gathered the mental fortitude to do it yesterday. Or perhaps I just succumbed to Kirstin’s reminders – she wasn’t impressed by my assurances that I would get it done by Christmas suspecting, not without reason, that I meant Christmas 2013.
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I have enjoyed some good books in recent months and only one that I really didn’t take to. Generally I’m anchored within ‘genre fiction’ and particularly science fiction but take an expansive view of what might fall into the SF bucket. The world of literary fiction is not somewhere I venture much because all too often I find the books to be well written but dull. Genre fiction can, notoriously, feature mediocre writing but be entertaining and tell stories that I want to read. And then there are those marvelous moments when you find a writer who both tells interesting tales and knows how to write and the pages start to turn and you hate the fact that it has to end.
Many years ago I was smitten by Bill Bryden’s “Mysteries” cycle with the National Theatre’s Cottesloe Company. One of the staples of that company was actor Jack Shepherd who later wrote of their approach
The line was the line. You just said it. Comfortably. Easily. You didn’t try and ‘do things with it’, or draw attention to it. It was simply an expression of the need to communicate something and as natural as breathing.
If, after the rehearsal of a particular scene, a watching member of the cast was seen shaking his head and muttering ruefully, ‘There’s and awful lot of “acting” going on’, this was a sure sign that things were not right. In other words, if the people watching are aware of ‘the acting’, then you clearly aren’t doing it properly, because your performance is demanding more attention than the play.
I have become increasingly aware of reading “literary” authors only to find myself prowling the edge of their stage muttering “I can see you writing”. Frequently this is enough for me to lay down the book and not pick it up again.
However sometimes I have not engaged with a writer because, I think, I wasn’t “ready” for them in some sense. I am beginning to suspect that this might be the case with John Steinbeck. Long ago I tried to engage with The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men and didn’t get very far. Yesterday on a whim I picked up a copy of East of Eden in a charity shop and am simply stunned by the early chapters – and I can not see him writing.
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