The fantasy dinner party conversation is one that a lot of couples have when they first get together – it’s an interesting way of finding out someone’s interests and trying to deduce your compatibility. If your prospective partner wants to have Pol Pot round for a pizza, or Stalin round for a sausage stew, you may want to reconsider your relationship.
Category Archives: Nostalgia
Guilty Pleasures
The blog prompt over at BritMums this week is ‘Guilty Pleasures’ and they suggest either a post recommending your Top 5 blogs, or a post describing what you’d do if you got a full day to yourself.
In a slightly loose interpretation of the theme, I’m going to list the Top 5 guilty pleasures that would feature if I got a day to myself. Because, y’know, they’re lovely folk over at BritMums and I hope they won’t mind me bending the rules slightly…
My fleecy dress
I love my fleecy dress. DorkyDad hates it. DorkySon hates it. Pretty much everybody except me hates it. It’s Bench branded, so I thought I might be able to find a Google image to share with you, but apparently it didn’t get pass their ugly-filter. My Mum bought the fleecy dress in a charity shop, about ten years ago. She wore it for a week or two before deciding it ‘wasn’t really her’ and passing it on to me. I’d just started university. I was eighteen, and a size eight, so it probably looked quite cute in a warm hippy kind of way. Now, ten years and one pregnancy later, it makes me look like a blue, slightly lumpy, fleece-wrapped sausage. But I love it. I can wear it over pyjamas when I’m making coffee in the morning. I can throw it over my jeans when I’m taking DorkySon to nursery (that whole school run fashion envy thing that other parent bloggers stress about hasn’t reached me yet…). On winter days it stops me getting that chilly strip around my waist when my t-shirt comes untucked from my trousers. It has survived numerous clothing culls. It will survive many more. I love my fleecy dress.
Chip sandwich
I’m lucky enough to be married to a brilliant cook. DorkyDad does nearly all the cooking in our house. He’s the kind of person who, rather than walking up the road for a fish supper, will buy fresh fish himself on the way home from work, mix up his own spices and flour for batter, heat the oil to exactly the right temperature, and produce something beautifully light, crunchy and tasty. If he is ever out for the evening, I am not even tempted to try and recreate his loveliness in the kitchen. Instead I indulge in one of my guiltiest pleasures: a chip sandwich. There are a few rules with a chip sandwich that must be adhered to. It has to be made with the cheapest, crappiest white bread. They have to be proper fat chips; not silly, skinny little fries. There has to be plenty of ketchup spread on one side of the sandwich, plenty of mayonnaise on the other, and a liberal sprinkling of salt and pepper. Ideally you should eat two of them, punctuated by a cup of strong tea, while watching a reality TV show.
Tumble dryers
I used to be quite green. In fact I used to be very green. I worked for a coalition that campaigned on environmental issues. I stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Scottish Green Party. I even went to the Arctic myself to see the effects of climate change on the ice cap. And, during that period of my life, I dried my clothes on radiators or hanging on a clotheshorse. They always ended up completely stiff. My jeans would stand up by themselves. My towels would leave pink welts across my skin when I dried myself after a shower because they were so rough. And I had to spend hours ironing out the strange creases in my shirts that resulted from them being hung up. But then we moved house… and the house had a tumble dryer. I had warm, fluffy towels in my life. I could wash my favourite sheets and have them back on the bed the same day, rather than having them dripping around the house for a week. I didn’t have to do any more ironing. There is an inverse relationship between my use of the tumble dryer and my participation in green politics; I am pretty sure that’s no coincidence.
Books
It’s a bit of a cheat to include this, because I don’t actually feel very guilty about it. For some reason books are the only things I can spend money on without a hint of remorse. DorkySon has cottoned onto this pretty quickly, and knows I will rarely refuse him a new book. Three-for-two offers, and Amazon’s one click ordering have made it even easier than it used to be, but to be honest there’s not much I like better than going into a proper, old, independent bookseller and paying full price for a hardback that has never been opened. I suppose I justify it as being in some way educational. That doesn’t really account for the copies of the Loose Women book, Jeffrey Archer’s Prison trilogy and David Beckham picture autobiography that are currently sitting on my shelves… but hey, I have a degree in English Literature. I’ve actually read Ulysses. Sometimes you need a break from all that literary merit nonsense.
Expensive Wine
As a student I used to drink some awful stuff; three quid bottles of wine that would have been better used as drain cleaner; 50p shots of vodka and tequila from the student union bar; supermarket own brand cider; whatever shockingly coloured alcopop was on offer in the clubs that weekend. I don’t know how my liver survived. Then I met and married a man who really knew his wine… so now I still feel guilty about my drinking, but only because I like the really, really good stuff. I am a sucker for a nice, oaky Californian Chardonnay. That said, I am not a wine snob. We went to a tasting once and I almost got thrown out for giggling (‘Oooh,’ I said, holding my glass up to my nose and trying to think of something appropriately pretentious to say. ‘It smells like rolling in hay on an autumn day.’ The serious-faced men and women around the table nodded along with me in agreement…). I feel like I am betraying my Bacardi breezer past slightly, but nice wine really is, erm, nice.
So I guess (in an attempt to stay on theme), in the unlikely event that I had a full day to myself I’d sit on the sofa in my fleecy dress… drinking wine, reading trashy books and pausing for the occasional chip sandwich. The soundtrack to the day would be the constant clanking of my tumble dryer. Don’t ever let it be said that I don’t know how to have a good time.
What I Know About London So Far
When I posted the other day about moving to London, it sounded like I’ve never even visited the place. That’s not entirely true… so in order to prove that I’m not a total hillbilly I’ve been trying to remember the dozen or so occasions that I have been to the city, and recall some of the details. I contemplated sticking up some pictures to accompany this post, but really, no one needs to see me standing in a Harris Tweed skirt, clutching a bottle of water and pointing excitedly at the Camden Town tube sign. You’ll just have to take my word for it on the existence of that classic shot.
At some point, soon after finishing high school, I went down for a weekend with my Mum, and stayed in the spare room at my brother’s house in Ealing. My abiding memory of that trip is that he had a noise-activated clock that lit up and projected the time on the ceiling if you clapped your hands. Unfortunately I had a cold, and every time I coughed during the night it also activated the damn thing and flooded the room with light. Between that and the flat’s location directly under the Heathrow flight path, it was not the most restful of holidays. Other than that, all I can remember is having my photo taken beside all the street names that I’d hear of, like Covent Garden, Leicester Square and the aforementioned Camden Town. Probably a habit I should drop if we’re moving there.
My chronology might be a bit off, but I think the next time I was down was a year or two later with my lovely friend Katy; we were both on a mission to do interviews with writers for Fest magazine. We shared a room at a hostel in Bayswater and then she headed off to interview Alain de Botton at his house near Paddington, while I headed off to interview Howard Jacobson at his flat in Soho. She came back disappointed that Alain was prematurely balding, and not as attractive or youthful as the picture on the back of his books had led her to believe. I came back disappointed than Howard had been a prickly and awkward interview subject, and deeply un-cooperative with the Fest photographer. His flat was lovely, though. Katy and I consoled each other on the South Bank, sitting in the sun and drinking several large glasses of wine.
The longest I’ve ever spent in London was three weeks around Christmas 2004 when I was doing an internship at a national newspaper. I split my time between the arts desk – calling John Berger for his reaction to Susan Sontag’s death, trying to track down Paul Rusesabagina, the inspiration for the film Hotel Rwanda, and contributing to numerous end of year highlight lists – and the news desk, which was full of people frantically trying to keep up with the stories coming in about the Indonesian tsunami. It was not a jolly time.
On Christmas Eve, when everyone else in the office went home to their own families, some friends of a friend of a friend briefly adopted me. I went to a church service with a wonderful, kind family I didn’t know, gatecrashed their Christmas Eve dinner, watched the Snowman with their toddler children, and was then dropped me off at a Travelodge near Kings Cross. I drank miniatures of vodka, and paid £12 to watch a bad porn film (is there any other kind?). On Christmas morning an ex-boyfriend collected me, and we spent the day delivering meals to the elderly in Hammersmith. On New Year’s Eve, I sat alone in my brother’s flat, (with that damn light-up clock again), watching the fireworks on television, eating M&S tiger prawns out of a plastic tub and drinking a bottle champagne that I’d bought last minute at Waterloo station. As I said, it was not a jolly time.
I’m very grateful to the London friends who tried their best to take care of me over those few weeks – I was treated to lunch in Covent Garden, pints in Soho, and copious quantities of dim sum in Chinatown, but despite their best efforts it was a pretty miserable festive season. I drank too much, relied too heavily on Big Macs, and got lost on the tube a lot. I went to a pantomime at the Old Vic… by myself. Ian McKellen’s Widow Twanky was wonderful, but there can be few things sadder than being a 21 year old single woman and going to panto on your own.
Fortunately, the next time I was in London for any length of time – early 2006 – I was in great company. I’d been selected to do the Ben and Jerry’s/WWF Climate Change College, and was there with my fellow students for a few days of workshops. We stayed in a funky little hotel in Earls Court, and attended some amazing lectures at the Royal Geographical Society before heading out for food and dancing every night. At the end of the week, we all headed to the IMAX cinema and attended the first UK Screening of An Inconvenient Truth. There is another picture of me somewhere looking goofy beside Al Gore. Forgive me if I don’t dig that one out either.
Most recently, I have known London through quick visits for work (pre DorkySon), and occasional weekend trips with DorkyDad (also pre parenthood!). Here is what I know. There is not one London, there are many Londons – millions, even. Every resident of the city has their own favourite park, and pub, and specialist shop. It is easy to wander down one street and find a tiny wee Italian restaurant, where you can watch the chefs kneading your pizza dough, and then wander down another and chance upon a beautiful public square full of birds and squirrels and people sitting on picnic rugs. If you want to buy a silk tie there’s a place for that, and if you need a particular brand of chilli sauce there’s a place for that. Until now, I have barely scratched the surface of the place… I can’t wait to get there and dig a little deeper. More importantly, I can’t wait to go to the panto again this year… this time with my family.
Perfect Sandwiches
So, can we pause for a moment to acknowledge the awesomeness of sandwiches?
Hugh Fearnley-Whatshisface had an article in the Guardian last Saturday all about them, and while I agree with his assertion that we need to cut down on the number of soggy supermarket sandwiches we eat, I think it’s unrealistic to imagine that we all have time to make the thirteen-ingredient pan bagnats that he includes a recipe for. Continue reading
Food and Memory
My friends Adam and Alasdair have started a food blog called 101 Ways To Cook Mushrooms, and I recently did a guest post for them about food and memory, which I’m now re-posting here. If you haven’t visited their site before, I would encourage you to do so – it is regularly updated with recipes for delicious and affordable dishes. When they’re not busy in the kitchen, they’re busy blogging on lefty, green political things at Bright Green, which is also well worth a look.
It’s a sign of how fond I am of Adam and Alasdair that I’ve added a blog called 101 Ways To Cook Mushrooms to my bookmarks bar, because even the mention of mushrooms makes me feel a bit ill. I usually find myself nodding along in agreement anytime I read anything by either of my culinary comrades, but featuring fungus and blue cheese as your first recipe? Sorry Adam, I just can’t bring myself to try it.
That said, I am very excited to see how the blog develops. Many of the most treasured moments in my life have involved eating, often while surrounded by friends and loved ones. Continue reading
Dorkymum | Stories from Tasmania 