“There are no coincidences
but sometimes the pattern is more obvious.”
‘Keynsham’ - The Bonzo Dog Band
And maybe sometimes coincidence just doesn’t come into it.
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
So The Fat Duck is closed because of a food poisoning scare.
I guess it would be pretty galling to get food poisoning after stumping up a hefty amount of dosh to eat there, but it does all seem very odd. I’ve peered into the kitchen in The Fat Duck and it was… a bit dull to be honest, it’s just a kitchen, albeit a very clean and well-organised one, and one that produces wonderful and magical food. I hope they get to the, er, bottom of this mystery.
Despite my cynicism and pessimism, I’ve always rather liked Jamie Oliver. I like his enthusiasm, his recipes tend be tasty and realistic for anyone to make - and they work.
His new magazine Jamie is a beautifully-produced thing, like a really good clothing catalogue. Very pretty, but not much in it for me, I thought, as I flicked through the second issue but then I came to an article called ‘Meet Dennis’ which stopped me in my tracks.
First I thought this man was an artist. Then I started reading and found he was a tramp. I was expecting something twee and patronising, but Jamie’s story of his encounter with Dennis made me stop and think about what is really important to me. Dennis had no home and almost no money or possessions but he was carrying an £8 loaf of bread, a bread Jamie describes as the best bread in the world. He quizzed Dennis on why he had it. He replied “it’s the best bread on the street”.
I wrote to the magazine saying how I thought they’d pitched the tone of this piece just right - and that I wanted to rip these pages out and frame them. The editor wrote back and thanked me and told me not to rip the pages out but I had to wait and see why. Bit mysterious.
This morning a HUGE parcel arrived at our house. It was a large photo of Dennis and Jamie that Jamie’s had on his office wall for five years. He signed it and sent it to me. I am insanely touched.
So my hunch was right, Jamie is a very good bloke indeed.
My oldest friend Bruce Guthrie used to do a fine mock-homily, gently taking the piss out of the Church of England as she was practised in North Somerset in the late 1970s. It always started with him clasping his hands together and earnestly proclaiming “Christmas… is a time for giving.”
And as I’m sitting here watching the midnight eucharist on TV, it’s in the spirit of giving that I give you this story which I will attribute to Claire Bolderson. Apologies if I have misremembered this, Claire.
There was a televised mass coming from St Patrick’s Catholic cathedral in New York. At a crucial point in the mass where the sacramental bread was offered up, the TV director shouted down the talkback for one of the cameramen to “close up on the Host! Close up on the host!”.
The cameraman, who was Jewish, naturally took this as an instruction to zoom in on the officiating priest.
This website reckons it can analyse your personality type from the writing style of your blog.
It took about 3 seconds to decide that I’m ESTP when on written tests I’ve always come out as INTP or INFP. Oh well.
The blurb is hilarious as anyone who knows me will agree, although the cartoon is spookily accurate…
ESTP - The Doers
The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.
(Thanks to Clare’s Diary for this!)
It always amazes me how quickly my children sometimes manage to break new toys. So it cheered me up a bit to learn that the boffins at CERN (they have a web site you know) have already broken the Large Hadron Collider.
Hope they kept the receipt.
Did a security update on my PowerBook today; now it keeps forgetting my wireless network’s name and password. So it really is very bloody secure as it’s now mostly not connected to the internet at all any more. I forgave this behaviour in a £200 (now defenestrated) Asus eeePC but it’s a bit galling in a £1600 Apple pro laptop. Where’s the window?
Home alone and at a loose end, I Googled ‘cool things to do with a Nintendo Wii’ 
(it’s been sitting in the living room not earning its keep) and discovered Wii Transfer. This allows me to stream iPhoto pictures and iTunes songs from the big fat old 320GB iMac in the back room which has all my MP3s on it. I had to shell out £7 for some Wii Points to download the Wii web-browser, but now here I am with a big stupid grin on my face dancing round the living room to the strains of That Petrol Emotion. Doesn’t seem to like long songs, though - the Wii says it doesn’t have enough memory and chokes. So we are spared The Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds‘ for now…
Never mind the possible end of the universe, on Wedneday. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is an amusing typographical error waiting to happen. You know it’s true.
Went on holiday, weather was awful, nearly died.
It is a paradox universally acknowledged that every year when I leave polluted London for the fresh, sea air of West Cornwall, my asthma always gets worse. 
I don’t know if it’s damp or dust or dander in the chalet where we stay, but it’s always prudent for me to pack a few extra inhalers.
This year, though, it wasn’t enough and out of the blue one evening I had the worst asthma attack of my life - I even said (croaked) at one point “this is it, I’m going to die”.
I probably can’t have been that close to death (though it bloody well felt like it at the time) as I was not guided to any lights, my life failed to flash before me - though the last few pictures on my Flickr photostream did. I remember wondering if I really wanted to be remembered by a photo of the back of a VW camper van bearing the slogan “don’t worry, be hippy”.
Rural health services are often denigrated - indeed it took (what seemed to me) a small eternity for the ambulance to arrive, but then I was staying somewhere fairly remote in the sand dunes which is hard enough to find in the day, let alone at midnight in an area with no street lights.
I do have a lot of time for our local Big London Teaching Hospital - they saved my eldest son’s life and my wife’s life twice. But if you have to spend any of your holiday in hospital, West Cornwall Hospital in Penzance does seem like a particularly nice place to do it. Everyone was incredibly friendly, the place seemed to be awash with doctors and nurses. When I’ve visited our London hospital it seems like you can go all day without seeing a doctor of any kind and hours without seeing a nurse, but in Penzance the ward round was a friendly, ambling affair and medical staff were in and out of the ward all morning. 
It may be standard practice in the NHS now, but it was scrupulously clean - in the morning they pulled my bed out to clean behind it and even cleaned the bed itself (with me in it). Even the food was pretty good - I can recommend the chicken and leak pie, by the way - even if the wine list left a lot to be desired.
I woke up this morning - too early but alive, chest clear, back in my chalet bed. And as I type this, the wind has dropped, the sun is rising, the sky is blue - and there is an improbable-looking half rainbow out at sea. You probably can’t ask for more than that.
Hurtling as I am towards grumpy old mandom, I’ve only recently got the hang of text messaging - T9 predictive text in particular. It took me a little while to grasp the concept at all, but now I understand how it works (and I do think it’s bloody clever) I’m still a bit mystified by some of the assumptions made by the people who compiled the dictionary on my phone. (It’s a Nokia 2310, only £19 and surprisingly waterproof).
For example ‘an’ gets priority over ‘am’. Why? Didn’t they look at some sample text messages? Surely most of them consisted of something like ‘am on the train’ or ‘am on the way home’ or ‘am on a window ledge on the 13th floor’ - maybe I’m being egotistical, but isn’t ‘am’ more useful than ‘an’ as a first choice word?
It annoys me that ‘he’ gets priority over ‘if’ but I suppose that’s understandable - the champion texters on my train are all female and they probably have more cause to use the word ‘he’ than I do. My life by comparison must be a whirl of uncertainty if (there we go again) I need to type ‘if’ so much.
Sometimes there are nice coincidences. Try to type ‘kiss’ and you get ‘lips’, for example. Did they notice that somewhere in T9 or Nokia HQ? I like to think a poetical dictionary compiler did.
I had to send a message the other day explaining that I’d made a particularly difficult phone call. I tried to type ‘I have phoned…’ and it came out as ‘I have sinned…’
Yes, well, thank you and good night, Nuance Communications, your irony department has earnt their bonus this year.
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