Diary 2010
Gok Wan
I'd never heard of this dude but his taste in music, apart from a couple of lapses, is pretty good. This was his Desert Island Discs selection (and if you don't have any of them, go and buy them!):
1. Eurythmics — Thorn in My Side
Composer: Lennox/Stewart
Eurythmics: Greatest Hits, RCA, PD74856
2. Billy Joel Billy Joel — Uptown Girl
Composer: Billy Joel
Billy Joel: Greatest Hits, Vols 1 & 2, CBS, CDCBS88666
3. Bryan Ferry Bryan Ferry — Jealous Guy
Composer: John Lennon
Bryan Ferry + Roxy Music:The Platinum Collection, Virgin, BFRM1
4. Tracy Chapman Tracy Chapman — Fast Car
Composer: Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman: Collection, Elektra, 7559627002
5. Lou Reed Lou Reed — Walk on the Wild Side
Composer: Lou Reed
Different Times: Lou Reed in the 70’s, RCA, 07863668642
6. Muse Muse — Supermassive Black Hole
Composer: Matthew Bellamy
Black Holes & Revelations, Warner, 2564635095
7. Soul II Soul Soul II Soul — Back to Life
Composer: Hooper, Law, Romeo, Wheeler
The Best Summer Album in the World – ever!, Virgin, VTDCD140
8. Tracy Chapman Tracy Chapman — The Promise
Composer: Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman: Collection, Elektra, 7559627002
12th February 2010
Dizzee Rascal and Lily Allen
Good God! The contents of my chest were ripped out through my ears by Dizzee's sound system. If you closed your eyes and pretended that it was a new, invigorating sort of massage, it was actually quite soothing. Apart from that, it was completely unintelligible. The tinnitus isn't so good this morning but that isn't down to Dizzee, rather to the somewhat challenged young lady sitting immediately behind me whose sound box produced a creditable rival to the main event but rather than being 100 yards away was about 9" from my right ear
Lily told us this was her last concert, and she blubbed a bit but was generally enchanting. Only trouble was she forget to turn off the Dizzee base biddy, boom, boom so it all sounded like Dizzee doing a Lily Allen impression. One tip though, Lily: stay away from politics: "We had an election in America and Obama won, so that was good. Now we have an election coming up here, so here's a song for David Cameron!" - long pause filled with nervous applause - "It's called Fuck You" - more nervous applause. Rock audiences don't like politics
7th March 2010
The Blues
I think I've finally got The Blues. I've got a few blues records: Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolfe, Siegel/ Schwall Band, John Mayall - quite a few others actually. But I'm not often thrilled by the songs: too much repetition, too little melody - basically, no melody at all if you discount the standard blues melody. Sometimes, I am thrilled: John Mayall singing Broken Wings or, bizarrely, Bob Dylan's Blind Willie McTell, which really does thrill me. But watching BB King playing his set in Zaire in 1974 during the music festival that preceeded the Ali/Foreman fight, it struck me that you can forget the melody and forget the lyrics. The Blues is just a feeling, a massive, pent-up, desperate ocean of emotion dancing on whatever instruments or whatever voice you choose to give it expression. That's all, but that's enough
20th March 2010
Emily Frances ten Kate
I think this is known as a Googlewhack - where searching for your name produces a single result. Does this mean the omens are good?
22nd March 2010
Memory
Hmm. I have a small notebook and, when moved, I jot down stuff. This is supposed to help me when I get around to adding to this diary. So, what do we make of this entry:
"Cliché, tried to restrain, really did, I wasn't dead but I was in heaven"
My God! I have NO idea what that refers to, and it wasn't that long ago. There it is tucked between "She's as thin as a matchstick with the wood shaved off" and "Decade". I have no idea about the matchstick either (sob...) but the decade, oh yes. You idiots: don't you know that a decade ends at the end of the tenth year, not the end of the ninth year? There was no year zero. So the new decade will begin on 1st January 2011, just as the new millennium began on the 1st January 2001
23rd March 2010
Younger daughter's dinner party
Younger daughter has asked several friends to dinner - very pretty, all of them (even Louis). But Citroen gets in the way; two yearly service has to be done on time or else they invalidate the warranty (and, believe me, with a Citroen you need all the warranty to which you are entitled). They promise me 17:00: "Come at 5 and you'll be well covered". I come at 17:15, and I wait, and wait, and finally get the car at 18:10. OK, that will do it; back by 18:30, dinner on the table at 19:30. The car goes 300 yards before the oil pressure light comes on: STOP! Round the block, back into the garage, GRRR. Incredulity all around; they show me a broken oil seal as though that's supposed to mean something: Citroen's service, Citroen's warranty. Grab younger daughter on the phone: if we're going to have dinner at any reasonable time, we're going to have to do some of this by remote control
"Take the langoustine sized prawns, wash and dry them, leave the heads on. Leave two centimetres on the spring onions, discard the rest, pare off the roots, wash and dice them. Peel seven large cloves of garlic. Cut a five centimetre section of root ginger into little pieces. Wash and chop the coriander leaf. Wash two green chillies, remove the stalk, cut in half lengthways, remove the seeds, cut roughly. Measure two cups of brown rice and four of Hom Mali fragrant rice into two pots. Just cover with water; I will adjust the water when I get back. Wash all the vegetables: cut the broccoli, string the sugar snaps, peel the "bark" off the lower sections of the asparagus, cut the ends off the fine green beans, cut the carrots into thirds and then quarter the pieces lengthways. Pretend you like the baby corn. Chop the plum tomatoes ("grown for flavour" - I kid you not!) into quarters. Take the stalks off the mushrooms. Put out star anise, cumin seed, Thai seven spice powder, tomato ketchup (oh, yes), dark soy, light soy, sherry and corn flour. With the pestle and mortar, grind up a large teaspoon of cumin seeds and two star anise. Have you got that Em? That's my girl!"
19:10 they've finished cleaning up the car - possibly, we can eat by eight. Bang the bluetooth headset on, hit the button: "Emily". Hallelujah, it starts ringing; thank God for voice tags. "Adjust the water of the brown rice to a first finger knuckle above the rice. Bring it to the simmer. Leave the fragrant rice; I can push that on a bit but brown rice takes an age. Put three litres of vegetable oil into the base of the steamer (don't ask), put in the oil thermometer and don't let the temperature go over 180C. Put a little olive oil into the heavy cast iron frying pan and place the mushrooms cup down. Fry them gently for three or four minutes, then turn them over. When the cups have filled with juice, turn the heat off and leave them in the pan. Run me a bath; I'll cook so you can eat, then I'll bathe"
Back at 19:30. "Em, you're kitchen mtoto". Close the kitchen door: absolutely no tourists allowed. Good grief! Do you have any idea what three kilos of large prawns, with their heads on, looks like when laid out in neat rows in a tiny kitchen? Daunting, that's for sure. The order, the order: OK, gather. Brown rice is doing well; adjust the water level of the fragrant rice and bring to simmer. Meanwhile, let's get the tomato part of the vegetable melange out of the way: wok, olive oil, fry the cumin and star anise, add the tomatoes, turn the heat up full, toss and turn the tomatoes, add more Malden sea salt than you would if you were eating the tomatoes on their own. Put into a separate dish. Don't wash the wok. Re-heat the mushroom, add a little light soy, pour mushrooms, soy and oil into a dish, cover and retain in the oven at 100C. The deep fry oil has now reached 180C; whack up the heat, take a deep breath and shovel in three kilos of prawns to "go through the oil", as the Chinese say. Good decision to use this massive steamer base. After 20 seconds, remove prawns and set aside in the large pre-heated Creuset enamel pot. Retain four table spoons of the prawn-flavoured oil. "Emily, discard the oil and wash the steamer base, wash the mushroom pan". Things are happening now. Don't forget the water for the steamed vegetables. Combine the light soy, sherry, tomato ketchup, sugar and corn flour in a bowl. Grab the wok, put in the left over oil and heat it until it smokes. Normally, the prawns would end up in this but there are too many of them. First in the spring onions, the white rounds dancing in the heat, then the garlic, then the ginger and the chilli. Now, you open the kitchen door. The aroma is absolutely divine. This is rock 'n' roll! All the vegetables except the sugar snaps into the veg steamer. Add the sauce to the wok and slowly simmer to thicken. Full heat now under the prawns. Add the coriander leaf to the sauce, pour the sauce over the prawns and stir over full heat to combine. Add the sugar snaps to the veg. After one minute, decant vegetables into the red-hot wok, add the tomatoes, stir together. Vegetables ready! Prawns ready! Brown rice ready! Fragrant rice ready! Mushrooms ready! Take everything through to the dining room table. 20:10 - result!
31st March 2010
Berlin
The lighting does provide a promise, an intention; it sets a scene, fires memories, arouses. But, whether it’s a single candle, or a hundred, or firelight or soft electric light, it’s not the lighting. It’s not the flush of wine, or scented oil, or music, or things of silk. There is in her face, at such times, a profound, absolute and ageless beauty, untouched by time, a radiance, her skin soft, entirely smooth, rose pink, her eyes filled with love, her lips as perfect as in your dreams
From time to time, this is my world, my Mrs Marrian. I am truly blessed
6th April 2010
Holocaust memorial
I had not expected the laughter. We went there first. I didn't want these shadows hanging over our days. The sky was infinitely blue and in among the slate-grey slabs there was laughter, and squeals of delight, as children and teenagers and lovers chased and hid and jumped and ran. Two thousand, seven hundred and eleven pages the Talmud has, and there is one slab for every page, different in height only and arranged in rows on undulating ground, each intersection a place of hiding before a pounce. I had not expected it but it seemed somehow fitting: the little sparks of light in such darkness
7th April 2010
Listening to:
David McWilliams
Tom Lehrer
Stone Roses
James McMurtry
JT and the Clouds
Tallulah Rendall
17th July 2010
Paella
The trouble with paella is that you cook it in a mother-sized pan so you can't practise the damn thing. You've got to invite a dozen people to lunch and practise on them! This is a sure-fire way of dampening that optimistic feeling you get when you wake on a Saturday morning (or should I say: wake again, given that morning starts at 00:01) and realise that with a following wind, and a considerable degree of good chance, you may end up with something approaching 30 minutes for yourself. Your first paella (well, second actually but I can't remember the first one because it happened more than a very short time ago) is the sort of activity that gives you dreams in which you are entirely naked. Take it from me that if you ever have a dream where you are wandering in a public place without a stitch on, then you are about to embark on, or have even started, an endeavour about which you know seriously bugger all.
Your main, and not inconsiderable, problem is that your pan is half a metre in diameter whereas the biggest burner on your stove is 20cm. Well, clever clogs solved that problem by building, in the garden I hasten to add, a half metre sized ring of left-over granite cobbles inside of which he lit a 5kg bag of lumpwood charcoal. You can't criticise the size, or the evenness of the heat, but neither can you turn it up or down; you have to balance the mother on extra cobbles for the final ten minutes of "slower" cooking. This problem could be fairly described as: no garden, no cobbles, no paella
What remains is the ingredients and how you combine them. You can follow a recipe or you can read a book on paella, gain a rough idea as to what's involved and roll your own. I did the latter; some ingredients I bought but some I used just because they were in the fridge. I used chicken stock (correctly seasoned), made from the left over carcass. These were my notes (all cooking done in the pan):
Cook mushrooms - reserve
Cook chicken - reserve
Cook prawns (head on, shell on) - reserve
Cook peppers, squid, tomatoes and garlic (until tomatoes start to darken); check seasoning
Add back mushrooms and chicken
Add paprika
Add stock
Check total seasoning
Add frozen peas and samphire and simmer for a few minutes
Add saffron (pan-roasted and ground)
Sprinkle in rice and distribute evenly
Lay prawns on top
PRAY!!!
In the event, the dish was pretty good. The original ratio of one rice to two and a quarter liquid needed more liquid; I suspect the final ratio ended up being more like three or even three and a half to one. The prawns were strange. They definitely contributed to the flavours in the rice but, when eaten on their own, were bland. I think I'll try a dip of some sort to counter their disappointing taste
17th July 2010
Peeing in the shower
There are two kinds of people - those that pee in the shower and those that don't. I pee in the shower. At least it looks like that. Now you're asking: well, do you really pee in the shower? Not telling...
24th August 2010
BBC 6 Music
I am so grateful to the BBC for trying to close this radio station. Until then, I had never listened to it, or even knew it existed. Now, I listen - not good for my wallet, though
The Stone Roses followed by Scott Walker? Yes please! It reminds me of Roger Scott, mainly because he loved to play Mark Germino's Rex Bob Lowenstein about a freewheelin' DJ who played what he wanted not what the playlist required. If you don't own it, buy it!
28th August 2010
Emily Swatton sat on my lap
She must have known I was an Edinburgh virgin - first visit to the Fringe, first show. Got out of bed early for it too: Shakespeare For Breakfast. Made the mistake of eating breakfast beforehand: scrambled eggs that were even more uncomfortable than the hard, rubber pillows provided by the Fraser Suites; a mistake because, wonderfully, each seat in the theatre had a fat croissant placed on top of the programme. Urns of tea and coffee sat in the lobby and you really were supposed to eat breakfast during the show, the show being King Lear as you've never seen it!
I do not do audience participation. I do, however, have very long legs and like to sit on the aisle so I have somewhere to put them. Big mistake! This was one of the two aisles along which the actors entered and exited, and one of those actors was young Emily. In truth there was no contest: firstly, she was playing Cordelia, the one true Lear daughter; secondly she was the prettiest of all the actors; thirdly, she has a singer's voice, rich and honey-soft. So I'm beginning to think this Fringe thing is OK when, out of the darkness behind me comes a voice: is it alright if I sit on your lap? WHAM! Not only is it "the voice" but it comes complete with the rest. Am I going to say no? No I am not! So the spotlight gathered us up and Emily Swatton sat on my lap for an eternity, and then said: you have a very comfortable lap. That, Emily, was a very sweet thing to say but it was also untrue. What you really meant to say was: that was the scrawniest, most uncomfortable lap I have ever sat on. And that sweetness is going to be your undoing because although you want to be an actor, should be a singer, what you will end up doing is moving to the country with an adoring husband, having plenty of children who will play around your skirts, and thinking back, wistfully, but only on occasion, to what might have been
29th August 2010
Listening to:
Harper Simon
Red House
Mary Chapin Carpenter
Cherry Ghost
4th September 2010