Runny Thoughts

Hello Sweetie

Regular readers will know that I am not afraid to tackle the big subjects on this blog.
Politics, classical music, literature, food, ecology, social networking, technology...the list goes on. You name it, it’s probably been subjected to my ill-informed and unthinking scrutiny.

But I realised the other day that I have been remiss. There is one burning issue that remains undiscussed here.

Reader, I apologise.

All I can do is rectify the situation without further ado.

It started with an innocent tweet in my timeline.

The mere mention of the word ‘curly’ in conjunction with its natural rhyming partner was enough to send me down memory lane. I don’t know why, but some sweets belong firmly in my childhood. It’s almost as if they stopped making them in 1979. And even though the taste of curly-wurlys (wurlies?) eaten in my innocent youth remains with me still, I would no more buy one now than Sarah Palin would conjugate a prefixed imperfective verb of motion in Russian.

Or English, come to that.

Why is this?

They are still making them, those cheeky monkeys who call themselves Cadbury UK. They’ve been making them since 1971.

So why did I stop eating them about seven years later?

It’s got nothing to do with ‘growing up’, a pernicious process that I have managed to avoid with dextrous ease for forty-five years now. Oh no, I still eat confectionery on a quasi-daily basis: Mars, Twix, Wispa (plain or Gold), Crunchie, Kit-Kat (don’t get me started - just bring back the foil), Flake, Maltesers and on and on and on. I eat them all with a childish relish that makes my five-year-old boy’s innocent pleasure at the sight of a party pack of chocolate buttons seem debonair and sophisticated.

(Obviously I don’t let him have chocolate very often. Bad for your teeth, you know. Now pass me that King Size Twix.)

It’s just one of those mysteries of life, I suppose. I may have to try one soon, just to see what I’ve been missing.

Now, time for some interactivity. What I’m about to do will no doubt please some people, while enraging and alienating others. (I have already discovered, to my cost, the folly of extolling the virtues of cre*e e*gs in certain quarters.)

The fact is, people take their confectionery very seriously. Yet impassioned debate is entirely missing from the public forum. National news outlets, obviously, have to shy away from any accusations of product placement, which is why Charlie Brooker never writes his 800 words on ‘Why I Hate Lion Bars’.

Food bloggers, by contrast, probably could write about individual candy bars or brands, but are too busy doing vertical comparisons of single-estate Argan oils or writing impassioned and purple prose on the subject of their favourite root vegetable.

So to fill this gap I present below a vaguely categorised list of chocolate-based confections (there is one exception, but I couldn’t leave out Caramac, could I?). It is an entirely personal list - so even though you may disagree with me I will come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who says I’m ‘wrong’ or ‘deluded’ or ‘in league with Satan’. But I give it to you in the hope that you, in return, will embellish it with vigorous and informed debate.

As long as you don’t diss my creme eggs.

The Classics - Timeless, irreplaceable
Twix
Kit-kat
Toffee Crisp
Mars
Crunchie
Flake

Great When I Was Ten, But Inexplicably Don’t Eat Them Any More
Curly Wurly
Rolo
Caramac

Good Solid Stuff, But No More Than Once A Month For Some Reason
Minstrels
Galaxy
Aero

‘Modern’ Pretenders, And Pretty Darned Good Ones At That
Yorkie
Wispa
Wispa Gold
Dime

Down In One
Smarties
Maltesers
Buttons

Not As Big As You Want Them To Be, But Any Bigger And You Would Probably Feel A Bit Sick
Milky Way
Milky Bar
(Finger of) Fudge
Creme Egg
Ripple

‘Grown-Up’ Chocolates That You Just Wanted To Cram In Your Mouth But Were Only Allowed One At A Time
After Eight
Matchmakers

Passed For Sophisticated In The Seventies But We All Know Better Now
Bournville

Nice Try But We’re Not Falling For Healthy Stuff In Our Chocolate
Fruit ’N Nut
and especially
Whole Nut

Always Somehow Disappointing
Revels
Club
Penguin

Just Somehow Never Fancied Them, You Know. Perfectly Nice, I’m Sure, But...
Topic
Picnic
Boost
Twirl
Time Out
Double Decker

Can’t Imagine Why Anyone Would Want To Eat Them
Lion Bar
Drifter

Sorry, Repulsive
Walnut Whip
Wagon Wheels
Bounty
Marathon (and no I will not call them Sn*ck*rs even though that’s been the name for at least thirty years)

Reading My Writes

Good evening.

There’s a website out there in Internet-Land called ‘I Write Like’, and, if I may make so bold, I would like you to visit it: http://iwl.me/.
If you feel so inclined, cut and paste the last email you wrote (let’s say), and come back here with the results. I’m sure we’d all be very entertained if you were to paste them into the comments below (be warned, the link is VERY small - damn you, Typepad).

Then I’ll show you mine. (NB Nothing will self-destruct if you don’t do this. This isn’t Mission Impossible. Just thought it would be fun.)

All done?

Ok. So apparently I write like (in no particular order):
Joyce, Christie (Agatha, not Linford), King (Stephen, not Billie Jean), Fleming, Nabokov, Twain, Carroll and Shakespeare.

Which is all very well, except those are the results from a children’s book I’m writing.

I’ve come to an unpleasant conclusion: it’s entirely possible that my use of language is a little too sophisticated for the age group at which I’m aiming (although I am encouraged by Joyce and Carroll in a weird kind of way).

The real killer, though, came when I entered the last two chapters. I wrote them in a hurry, desperate to tie up loose plot ends, and haven’t edited them.

In short, they are, frankly, pants.

In fact, if you’ve got a moment, they are the biggest load of unfeasible bollocks written by anyone since someone thought to themselves “I know, I’ll put an albino monk in there - that’ll be realistic”.

I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that, on the basis of those two half-baked, feeble, raggedy-assed, insultingly dimwitted, semi-literate, downright unpublishable, please-for-pity’s-sake-and-for-the-good-of-humankind-never-write-anything-again, miserable apologies for chapters, I write like...

Dan Brown.

I am sure you will draw your own conclusions.

I, meanwhile, am going into the garden to eat worms.

Collective Useless Numpty Transference Syndrome

It is about 10pm on Sunday 27th June, 2010. At about 6.00 this afternoon, I had the beginning of this post all worked out.

This is what I was going to write:
"Today saw a dismal performance from an over-rated team full of their own self-regard, crowning one of the most inept sporting displays on foreign soil since the passing of the Inept Sporting Displays Act of 1853.

But that's enough about the Australian cricket team."

I hope you see what I was trying to do with that.

If you don't, you are clearly not an English sports fan.

Congratulations on both counts.

Anyway, regardless of whether you are a sports fan or not, I'm sure you'll be interested to know that this afternoon saw the first known occurrence of a phenomenon I am choosing to call Collective Useless Numpty Transference Syndrome (you can work out the acronym yourselves, I'm sure).

I invented it, so I get to name it, OK?

Briefly, what happened was this:

England (football) were, to quote the magnificent Malcolm Tucker, about as much use as a marzipan dildo in their footballing contest with Germany.

England (cricket) on the other hand, were, as is their recent wont, progressing quite nicely against another 'old enemy', Australia, who have performed as disappointingly in the last week as the perennially under-achieving Rain Gods of Wimbledon.

They then contrived to turn a facile victory into a cushion-munching, finger-slicing-while-chopping-onions, beer-all-over-the-kitchen-throwing near-defeat that had me, well, you know, munching cushions and so forth.

I have a theory. And it's one that makes those no-hopers at CERN look like amateurs.

The footballing no-contest in Bloemfontein, South Africa ended at approximately 4.50 our time.

England (cricket) were playing in Manchester, England and started imploding at approximately 6.00.

The distance between the two towns is 5934 miles.

Until 4.50, the England football team had possession of the Mantle Of British Sporting Ineptitude.

At the final whistle, no longer having use for it, they tossed it aside like a used up tube of toothpaste, whereupon it pricked up its ears (yes I know mantles don't have ears), sniffed the air (yes I know that even if mantles had ears they wouldn't use them to sniff the air), and hot-footed it (yes I know etc) to Manchester with all possible speed.
84 miles per minute, to be more or less precise.

Speedy buggers, these Mantles of Ineptitude.

Upon arrival in Manchester, the Mantle headed straight for the England (cricket) dressing room, where its mystical powers caused them to lose six wickets for eighteen runs.
Rumours that exceptional pace bowling from Shaun Tait and Dougie Bollinger were also involved are scurrilous and not to be believed.

Luckily for the spirit of English sportiness, Tim Bresnan, who was batting at the time, is blessed with the elusive ingredient that is crucial to any sporting over-achiever: Self-Belief. This is not to be confused with Self-Regard, for which see England (football) above.

Bresnan's Self-Belief gave the Mantle Of British Sporting Ineptitude a withering stare and told it to sod off, enabling Bresnan to hit two of the last three balls for four and secure a series-clinching victory.

The Mantle was last seen on the M1, heading South. It is expected to arrive in South-West London late tomorrow afternoon.

Come on Andy!

I Say Old Bean

DISCLAIMER: Despite the unpromising beginning, this post is NOT about football. Keep going. You’ll get to the bit about food soon enough. If, on the other hand, you prefer football to food, you might want to read the opening paragraph and stop there.

So. Hats off to the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea on a feisty defeat to Brazil in their World Cup opener last night. Funny how the countries that are keenest to show off their democratic credentials in the name of their country are the ones least qualified to do so.

Still, they played as if their lives depended on it.

In fact, come to think of it...

Anyway, their performance was in stark contrast to Spain’s. They seemed to think that if they just kept passing the ball eventually one of the passes would go into the net.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about vegetables.

And before you jump to the inevitable conclusion, I have indeed steered the subject away from football and am not referring to the England team.

Ba-boom-ching. Thangyouveddymudge.

There’s been a certain amount of self-sufficiency in the Runny household of late. Why, only last night, the Flame-Haired Temptress and I partook of our own radishes, dipped in someone else’s salt; followed by our own potatoes, chives and spinach, paired with someone else’s butter, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and raisins.

A veritable feast.

Peas are on their way, too. And we’ve got more herbs than the annual meeting of the Tijuana Brass Appreciation Society.

All of this has appeared from nowhere, it would seem, lovingly nurtured by the soothing hand of the F-HT.

It was different back in the day. When we first started growing veg, I was the instigator.

Our garden wasn’t big. Nor was it accessible, as we occupied a first-floor flat.

So starting a veg garden was not an undertaking to be embarked on without serious consideration.

I sourced, ordered and bought raised beds, compost and seeds, not making much of a fuss about how clever I was being.

And then, with a great deal of huffing and puffing, I planted and nurtured them.

There came the time for thinning out, the process whereby dozens of healthy pre-pubescent radishettes would be sacrificed to the merciless God of Waste in order that the fittest of the species be given a little Lebensraum.

It’s not for the faint of heart.

After several weeks’ consultation with the sage of all things horticultural, Dr. D.G.Hessayon, I took a deep breath, armed myself with tweezers and set about my grisly business.

The procedure was executed with surgeon-like delicacy and accuracy.

For about five minutes.

Then I got fed up and just ripped the buggers out willy-nilly.

Or left them where they were.

Surely, I thought, they can sort it out for themselves? It can’t make that much difference.

You live and learn.

Time passed and vegetables (some of them, at least) grew.

Then, disaster.

Slugs and snails appeared. Puppy dog tails probably weren’t far behind.

The best thing to do, I was assured, was to nail them at night.

Manfully, and again with the minimum of fuss, I donned waders and sou’westers (it was a wet spring) and strode into the fray. Eschewing all offers of sustenance, and protected only by the trusty torch of truth and the kitchen scissors of slug-murder, I dispatched them to all four corners of our small plot.

It only encouraged them.

If you’re not a gardener you may not appreciate the determination and downright evil exhibited by the average group of guzzling gastropods.

Think Simon Cowell crossed with Genghis Khan.

Still, eventually, we had a crop of sorts.

Modestly accepting the loving applause of an admiring throng, I made a very small meal of some very small potatoes with a couple of very small leaves of spinach on the side.

The slugs opened an ‘all you can eat’ buffet round the corner.

The next year we were moving, so the garden went by the wayside.

Now, established in the new place, where the garden is more accessible, we have enough room for the following:

A shed.

A dried-up pond (large enough for frogs to breed, but not large enough for them to hide from Felis Catus).

A vine.

A faux palm tree (Felis Catus likes to think he can climb it. When he is halfway up, he thinks again).

A couple of raised beds.

It is in these raised beds that we are nurturing the stuff of food fads.

You know how it goes. Every couple of years the foodie community rejoices in a new, painfully chic, fashion ingredient.

Never mind that said ingredient has been in plentiful supply and gone unnoticed for years. This year it is the thing.

Delia started it years ago with those blessed cranberries. One moment you couldn’t buy cranberries because nobody stocked them; the next you couldn’t get them because they were sold out.

Pomegranates, blueberries, Alfonso mangoes, rocket, chard, butternut squash, Jersey Royals, asparagus, artichokes, salsify, polenta, pea shoots, carnaroli rice, argan oil, etc etc. They’ve all had their moment in the sun, leading to some truly horrendous culinary disasters as amateur cooks chuck them willy-nilly into everything they cook, based purely on the fact that Nigel did a feature on them in The Observer last Sunday.
Pomegranate risotto anyone?

Thought not.

You’d have thought that we’d exhausted them all.

I beg to differ.

Broad bean leaves.

Rip them off, wash off the black fly (for black fly there will be), and wilt them in oil with garlic.

They look a bit like baby spinach, but taste like broad beans, which is a little disturbing.

But they are worth a go. At the very least they are more plentiful and require less patience than broad beans themselves, which always look so promising in their plump pods, but which invariably yield a crop barely big enough to coat the bottom of an eggcup.

All I ask is this: if broad bean leaves turn into the next superfood fashion, just remember where you read it first.

The Rewards of Culinary Incompetence

We’ve all done it. Don’t pretend you haven’t.

In a fit of brazen chutzpah (is there any other kind?) you imagine you know better than the recipe. A professional food writer has shared the knowledge and experience garnered over decades of hard work, but you look at their offering and think ‘pah! What do you know, Simon/Hugh/Delia/Nigella/Jamie/Albert/Marco Pierre/Heston (delete as appropriate)? I can do this standing on my head. Where you say butter, I will use sunflower oil. Where you say fifteen minutes, I know very well you mean thirty-five. Where you ask for the juice of half a lemon...well I’ve got all these lemons in the basket and they’re going to go off soon - I’ll chuck three in.’

For this recipe you will require:

Fillet of salmon. For eight. Three of whom are ill and have cancelled.

Some potatoes - neither the same amount nor variety as in the recipe.

Purple sprouting broccoli.

Those lemons.

Garlic. Plenty.

Fat of some kind. Whatever you have.

A chisel.

1. Check the recipes. Salmon wrapped in foil with lemon juice - piece of cake. Grated Golden Wonder potato cake - no problem. Steamed purple sprouting with garlic and anchovies - duh.
2. Put the books back on the shelf. You won’t need them again.
3. Peel and grate the potatoes. Some of them go a bit brown. That’s ok, they’ll be brown once they’re cooked anyway. Add the cloves of garlic, crushed, to the potato gratings.


4. Lay the salmon fillet on oiled foil.


5. Squeeze the lemon(s) over the salmon.


6. Pick the lemon pips out of the salmon.


7. Wrap the salmon parcels.


8. Foil torn. Start again.


9. Once that’s done, turn your attention to the potatoes.


10. They really have gone quite brown, haven’t they? And you haven’t started cooking them yet.


11. Heat the fat and add the potato/garlic mixture.


12. So far so good. Relax and watch a bit of cricket.


13. Shot!


14. What’s that smell?


15. Ah.


16. This is why you need the chisel. Hack the potato from the bottom of the pan. Remove burnt-but-not-actually-inedlble crust and set aside. Put the rest of it back in the pan and return to the heat.


17. Back to the cricket.


18. Got him!


19. Bugger. Fish.


20. Oh God when should I put the broccoli on?


21. Not now.


22. Idiot. You’ll regret that.


23. Potato doing nicely, fish ok.


24. Consider making broccoli puree instead.


25. Realise that success of dish depends on people being at table at the right time. People sadly not in evidence.


26. The potato is burning again. Never mind. Crunchy bits are good.


27. Assemble plates, cutlery, food, wine, people.

It was all so simple. And, despite your best efforts, absolutely delicious. Pat yourself on the back and thumb nose at food writers. Consciously or not, you knew better all along.

The Ten Stages of Writing

Disclaimer: There are, like, 48 gajillion articles and blogs out there entitled either So You Wanna Be A Writer?, Writing The Easy Way or How To Write A Book. The author is aware of them, and has even read the first few lines of some of them, but feels that some of the most important details have been left out, so is moved to offer:

The 10 Stages of Writing

1. Write something. This is harder than you think, but nonetheless the comparatively easy bit. Not as easy, though as:

2. Show it to your mum. She will know what to do. Her opinion, although possibly accurate, doesn’t actually count. But it will make you feel better.

3. Emboldened, show it to some friends. Some of them will like it. Some of them may even read it as well. They will make enthusiastic noises. IMPORTANT: Under no circumstances should you trust their opinion. It is worthless.

4. Buoyed by the positive (or lack of negative) reaction from friends and family, start preparing Booker Prize acceptance speech.

5. Realise you have to finish writing book first. Booker Prizes are generally not given to promising opening chapters.

6. Fail to realise how bloomin’ hard it is to write a book. Continue writing book. Finish writing book.

7. Pat yourself on back and pour large drink.

8. While under influence of large drink, reread book. Ignore fact that book is really not very good and contains long sections of incoherent gibberish while congratulating yourself on limpid prose, stunning metaphor, sweeping narrative arc etc. Decide to send it off to publishers the next morning.

9. Having sent book off to several publishers (all 110,000 words, obviously - they’d be annoyed to have to stop reading after three chapters), feel rather aggrieved when they fail to contact you by return offering lucrative five-book deal.Console yourself with thought that at least a dozen publishers turned down J.*.R*wl*ng (NB it is thought that repeated exposure to this name can cause severe damage to the nervous system of aspiring writers, so it has been thought necessary to replace some of the ones most likely to disturb the sensitive.)

10. Days turn into weeks turn into months, with still no word from bastard publishers. Become increasingly bitter about cruel unfeeling world’s inexplicable failure to recognise your true genius. Vow to put things to rights in coruscating exposé of publishing world. Return to Stage 1.

Make mine a slinky arty-fartay

Who would have thought a drink could change so radically in a decade or two?

You’ll be calling me a Luddite and stuck in my ways (the truth always hurts), but what the flarking doowogglers has happened to coffee?

When I were a lad, not only was it all fields around here, but coffee was coffee. You could have milk, or you could have sugar, or you could have both. Or neither. Those were the choices, like telly.

But nowadays to order a coffee is to enter a surreal and arcane world of perturbation, confusion and despair from which you will be lucky to emerge with your sanity intact. It is quite bewildering. You thought The Wire was confusing? Lost in Lost? Try keeping track of coffee in the tenties. The quest for a decent cup of coffee is increasingly becoming as lengthy and fruitless as a boa constrictor.

Let us consider this document.
Yes that’s right. A Wikihow article on How To Order At Starbucks. It has 12 basic points, 13 examples and 11 ’tips’.

Ladies and Gentlemen, there are many madnesses in our modern world. They defy analysis or reasoned thought: The Iraq War; The Continued Employment of Noel Edmonds; Farmville.

But this one really takes the almond biscotto.

Here’s how to order a coffee:

1. Go to a cafe.


2. Ask for a coffee.


3. If you like milk in it, add the words ‘with milk please’.


4. If you are in any way tempted to add any of the following words to your coffee order, seek medical help immediately: skinny, tall, quad, venti, iced, syrup, frappuccino, sham-a-lam-a-ding-u-cino.

Try not to do it in the wrong order or you might confuse your ‘barista’ (although you’d have thought with all those years studying a complex subject like law they’d be able to understand a simple coffee order).

You might want to practice it a few times with a friend before you take the plunge and do it for real. There’s a lot to remember.

Luckily, though, and thanks to some clever Antipodeans a couple of decades ago, you may not have to worry about COPS (Coffee Ordering Paranoia Syndrome) any more, because I think we can now call off the search for the perfect cup of coffee.

Make mine a Flat White.

Apparently ‘invented’ in New Zealand in the early eighties, it has taken nearly twenty years to gain leverage in this fair town, but it is now, so I’m led to believe, the beverage of choice for the discerning cafficionado.

The secret of this novelty elixir?

Less milk than in a latte.

Wow.

Crikey.

Now why didn’t I think of that?

Oh, silly me, I did. It’s the coffee I’ve been making at home FOR THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.

Otherwise known as ‘coffee with some milk’.

I’m clearly in the wrong business.

Now obviously it’s easy for me to stand on the sidelines and hurl abuse at some of the largest and most successful corporations in the world, who have, with no help from me, mastered the art of marketing the bleedin’ obvious. And of course they have very clever and expensive coffee machines that heat the milk to just the right temperature to render your beverage undrinkably hot for forty minutes, at which point (and not before) it becomes undrinkably cold.

I am, however, English.

So it naturally behooves me, at this point, to be a bit embarrassed, shuffle from foot to foot, and offer a peace token.

In the interests, therefore, of international co-operation and compromise, and with the generosity of spirit for which we Anglo-Armenians have become renowned the world over, I offer, free, gratis, and for nothing, my new invention:

The Caffe Arty-Fartay.

Here’s how to make it:

Tinker around with different combinations of coffee and milk, thinking up ever more ludicrous names for them, until you disappear up your own bottom in a puff of finely grated chocolate powder (70% of course).

I thank you.

Next week: Dressing Emperors - A Twelve-Step Plan.