Work. Moi?

December 16, 2004 Monnow Man Leave a comment

Well, I’m working.

I’ve secured a three month contract as a PC Support Anlayst at a Gloucester company. It’s second line support: fixing software, setting up new PC’s, etc. within a very structured helpdesk system. Not very intellectually challenging or varied but I’m not complaining.

My day now starts at about 6.40 am when I am woken either by my alarm or Amelie shouting “Woof!”, “Baa” or other favoured animal noise. A kiss for a still slumbering K., then a breakfast of Allbran with a handful of almonds then a drive through the damp darkness of three counties: Monmouthshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire for 45 minutes until I reach the “Park and Ride” in Gloucester. There, I park the car and get a free bus trip into the centre of the city. By the time I arrive at work, the sun has risen, but it’s rare that we see it at the moment, thanks to the blanket of cloud. I have yet to perfect lunch, but am likely to settle on a quick dash past the cathedral to M&S for a pack of sushi, thence to the only big bookshop for a browse and a return to eat my sushi at the desk.

The drive back is unremarkably similar, even to the extent that, like the outbound leg, the return is in darkness too.

Little A. had her hearing tested at the hospital in Abergavenny today and it was pronounced in fine working order. We had always thought as much, but it’s good to have the reassurance of a professional.

Reading The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg at the moment. Recommended if you want to know how the English language evolved. I’m surprisd at the extent to which the language was nearly snuffed out by the Scandinavian and Norman invasions. Had it been, we might be speaking a variant of Danish today. Did you know that the words “they”, “their” and “them” are 8th century Danish? Nor did I.

barbados, language

Relocation and linguistic vandalism

December 8, 2004 Monnow Man Leave a comment

Today a moan:

As a frequent user (and sometime manager) of recruitment websites that allow you to configure customised daily emails containing jobs filtered according to your criteria, I have become something of a connoisseur of the technology. You can appreciate then, my exasperation at receiving emails every morning from a particular site which does not allow you to exclude certain words, or more specifically, locations from the criteria. This results in an email containing jobs in other parts of the country to which you can neither commute nor wish to relocate.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is done deliberately to ensure maximum exposure to jobs in the hope that some candidates might be tempted to relocate.

Oh, and another thing. There should be a requirement for the people (agents) usually who write these job ads to have passed a course in written English with stringent demands in the areas of spelling, grammar, punctuation (especially apostrophes!) and clarity. If you read, as I do at the moment, several hundred job ads every day and appreciate the beauty of the English language, as, again, I do, you may understand my annoyance at the numerous daily acts of linguistic vandalism these ads often contain.

Apparently, bad English can lead to delinquency and violence, according to an editorial in the Nation newspaper in Barbados recently, though I may have missed the part where the scientific evidence for this claim is cited.

barbados

Furniture

December 6, 2004 Monnow Man Leave a comment

The UK parent division of Courts, the furniture retailer has gone into administration. Shops have closed and there have been reports of violent incidents involving furious customers who have not received their goods.

It appears Courts will live on outside the UK.

computing, food, radio

Real meat, Spam and Jung

December 3, 2004 Monnow Man Leave a comment

To continue yesterday’s food theme, I found The Real Meat Company after they got an airing on BBC2 last night. They offer meat which has been reared humanely and is properly hung and probably tastes a lot better. When I’m back in the earning way, I’m tempted to celebrate by ordering something nice from them.

Lycos Europe has launched a screensaver called “Make Love Not Spam” which sends traffic to the websites advertised in the junk email we all get. The idea is that the spammers’ bandwidth bills go up as the websites respond to the fake traffic. Yes, we all want to hit back at the spammers, but is it legal and does it only generate more bandwidth, slowing down the net for everyone?

If you are in a profound mood, Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio 4 series on the history of ideas was good this morning. It was about Jung, the famous and influential Swiss psychologist who had a famous spat with Freud. He rocked the psychoanalytical boat by suggesting that sex wasn’t behind absolutely everything and believed that the natural outcome of therapy was a spiritual worldview, contrasting with the Freudian perspective which saw a materialist/rationalist worldview as the ultimate outcome of successful psychotherapy. He also influenced some of the thinking behind the New Age movement and created a branch of psychotherapy, to the extent that if you meet a shrink at a party, your opening gambit can be “Are you a Jungian or a Freudian?” And did you know, he wrote a book on flying saucers? Oh yes.

Anyway, listen to the programme again here or download it in MP3 format and burn it to a CD for your in-car listening pleasure.

recipes

Wales meets Spain in a wok

December 1, 2004 Monnow Man Leave a comment

Today, I thought I would share with you what I conjured up for dinner this evening. It will probably score points with the low carbs diet brigade as it is substantial and tasty but has no starchy ingredients like potato or pasta. The quantities of ingredients and cooking times are approximate – you’ll just have to adjust to suit your taste or what’s in season. This particular dish came about because I found some very cheap organic leeks and turkey on sale at the cheaper of the two Monmouth supermarkets:

Ingredients

2 Turkey Breasts – you could also use a similar quantity of chicken I suppose – cut into chunky strips
3 or 4 organic leeks – yes, yes, you can use non-organic, but go with the pretentious flow here – cut into half inch segments at a 45 degrees slant. (Leeks are the national vegetable of Wales.)
6 unusually large (I mean an inch across at the bulb) spring onions cut to 3 inches long and halved lengthways
4 or 5 tablespoons of flour
A liberal sprinkling of dried Herbes de Provence
6 er.. inches of chorizo sausage cut on the diagonal into slices
Dry (at least Amontillado) Sherry
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Salt and a pepper mill to hand.

Method

1. Use the Herbes de Provence, salt and pepper to season the flour. Coat the turkey strips in it. Mix the remaining flour with a splash of sherry and a little water to thicken the sauce later.
2. Heat about an inch of the olice oil in a wok and when very hot, fry the turkey in batches until they just begin to brown. Put the turkey aside.
3. With some fresh oil, but only a little this time, caramelise the spring onion halves in batches on both sides and put aside
4. Stir fry the leeks and chorizo. Once softened, lower the heat and add a generous splash of sherry.
5. Throw in the turkey and spring onion halves. Stir gently and cover to allow to braise for about three minutes.
6. Stir in the flour and sherry mixture and allow to thicken for a minute or two. Grind on some black pepper and salt if necessary.
7. Serve with a glass of Spanish red wine to hand.

Note: Be careful about the timing – the vegetables should be softly sweet and al dente, not slimy (overcooked) or crunchy (undercooked).

Instead of sherry, and interesting variation might be to use a dry white vermouth. I can report that this works very well with leeks, so it’s a safe bet that it would be a success.

film, germany, television

Heimat: Happiness is a TV series from your adolescence

November 30, 2004 Monnow Man Leave a comment

I have been excitedly anticipating a DVD release for a year or two now and last week it finally happened. The Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King? The Director’s Cut of Donnie Darko? No. It’s actually a very long German television series from the 1980’s called Heimat.

Heimat was part of the furniture of my adolescent mind for several weeks and was a drama that followed the lives of a family in a small, rural town in Germany between the first and second World Wars. Pretty dry stuff, you might think. Well, it does take some effort to get into, but you soon become so attached to the characters that when the series ends you feel you have lost old friends. A beautifully crafted work of art, it looked good, with occasional use of black and white, as well as being well acted and scripted. Heimat gave us a thoughtful and moving insight into a rarely exposed culture and historical period. Its German perspective was a refreshing antidote to the usual British and American TV diet.

I actually signed up to a mailing list which attempted, a couple of years ago, to persuade Edgar Reitz, its director, to get it released on DVD. I monitored progress on the campaign and eventually it was announced that a DVD would be produced.

I remember my French teacher at Hampton School, a Sudetenland Jew who still bore a German concentration camp tattoo on his arm, telling me that he felt it to be the best thing he had ever seen on television in any genre; and he was not a man given to hyperbole. Did Heimat perhaps give me a sentimental disposition towards some aspects of German culture that would nurture a blossoming relationship with a certain German au pair I met in London only a few years later?

Anyway, after that sort of wait, you can imagine, then, that if someone doesn’t buy it for me as a Christmas present there will be petulant tantrums! Heavy hints have been dropped within K.’s earshot.

And yes, it does have subtitles.

Available on Amazon.co.uk:
Heimat (Slimline) [2007]
Update: May 2008

Apparently Heimat was highly regarded by Stanley Kubrick.

food, restaurants

Curry and an ex-Cabinet Minister

November 29, 2004 Monnow Man Leave a comment

Spent the weekend in London.

We indulged in a curry just off Chiswick High Street. The food was reasonably good. Each dish was actually distinctive in flavour and didn’t appear to have been made by using the “one pot” method of just adding cream/almonds/coconut/sundry spices to a ladleful of curry-ish sauce that forms the basis of all dishes. Maybe, however, that was because we chose the house “specials”, for which the cooks had to make a little more effort.

Our hors d’oeuvres were marred by a slightly posh middle-aged man demanding to know why he was still waiting for his take away when another customer who came into the restaurant after him had already received his order. “I mean”, he ranted, “Did I order something that’s particularly hard to cook?”. The put-upon waiter checked and explained that that particular customer had ordered over the phone quite a while ago. Ranting middle-aged man shut up at that point, but three minutes later rejoindered “Now wait a minute: that’s not true!”. So on it went, spoiling the enjoyment of my lamb tikka and K.’s prawn poori.

I know that there is a good book to be written about the peculiarly British ritual of the visit to the curry house.

Walking back to mum’s place through Chiswick, I was nudged and whispered at conspiratorially by K., who insisted that the small, bearded man carrying a takeway in a paper bag a few yards ahead of us was Robin Cook. I’m still not completely convinced but can’t deny that whoever he was, he did look remarkably similar to Tony Blair’s former Foreign Secretary. This put me in mind of the time I followed Kate Adie, the BBC foreign correspondent as she pushed a trolley around Chiswick’s Sainsbury’s. It’s hard to tell famous people from behind.

I have just remembered that blogs are supposed to have links to cool websites, so here’s a site I visit regularly:

World Wide Words

Uncategorized

Gridlock, free dental care and wigs

November 26, 2004 Monnow Man Leave a comment

We made the mistake of attempting to drive to London on a Friday evening.

As we were cruising through the sylvan splendour of the Wye Valley towards the Severn Bridge at Chepstow, heading for the M4 motorway towards London, we heard on the radio that there had been not one, but two crashes on the M4. The first would have caused a half hour delay. The second, involving a coach, had entirely blocked the London-bound side of the motorway at Reading.

As we plotted lengthy detours involving Swindon and Oxford, I took decisive action to preserve our sanity by aborting the trip and turned back to Monmouth. There was no particular reason that we had to be in London tonight, so we avoided the hassle. I bought a bottle of Romanian wine – surprisingly quaffable – and tempers have been soothed.

K and I got cards from the NHS today entitling us to free dental care, prescriptions and wigs because we are claiming Child Tax Credits. On Monday I’m going straight to the doctor to demand Viagra and a brunette mullet toupee, while K is having her teeth fixed up on your taxes.

computing

Ups and Downs

November 24, 2004 Monnow Man Leave a comment

(Preamble to this post: for those of you not aware, I have been job hunting.)

The bad news first:

I didn’t get a job I didn’t really want. Yes, you read that correctly. So maybe that wasn’t bad news after all. I think.

Apparently I was too “senior” for the role. But does that mean to old or too experienced? I’m not sure which is the more flattering.

The better news:

I have officially acquired MCP status. No, not “male chauvinist pig” for all you 1970’s women’s libbers. It stands for Microsoft Certified Professional. Now, to be honest, the actual class of MCP that I got was a distinctly “junior” one: the MCDST, not the coveted (and difficult to acquire) MCSE. The latter will follow in time.

The international news:

Looks like half the population of Ukraine is going to riot after an (allegedly!) fiddled election.

The joke:

Bill Clinton takes his dog to the vet. The vet asks “Would you like him castrated?”, to which the dog replies “Yes, please.”

Uncategorized

Beginnings

November 21, 2004 Monnow Man Leave a comment

Thus begins my online journal, or blog, to those of you more au fait with online English. Now, I hate mission statements that don’t actually own up to what an organisation is really for. I mean, it’s just not true that a company simply wants “to be the best supplier of x product/service in y country”. They want to make lots of money for their stakeholders and, in doing so, provide a service.

Anyway, where was I?

Ah yes: mission statements. The aims of this particular blog are, in descending order of priority:

– to keep in touch with friends and family who I don’t see very often because they are far away
– to achieve a higher state of self awareness (not quite Nirvana, though) by keeping a journal
– to take the promise of the “democratisation of publishing” that the Net affords and speak my mind. If one or two people take note or are entertained/informed, that’s good enough to soothe my ego 😉
– to recommend sundry books/films/causes/websites/ideas etc., that I think deserve recommendation
– to practise creative writing.

This may be a moving target and will probably change weekly, so there. That’s enough. I’ll update as and when I can and have something worth writing. I don’t want to bore anyone.

Stay tuned!

Food, mostly.