John's Quavering Pencil

I have been playing a song called The Rose at my SL gigs, just lately. Be that as it may, I today picked a red rose as the subject of my sketching practice. The flower of a rose is a very complicated thing to draw and several times I found that I had lost my place in terms of which petal I was currently on, as I shifted my gaze from object to sketch pad and back. I found the rose to be more beautiful than the orange or the trainer (see previous blogs)and I think I enjoyed drawing it more than I did the other two. I certainly became totally absorbed in my task.

Pencil sketch of a red rose

This evening I shall play an SL gig at my Terra Fyrmusica venue. I keep fussing with my sound levels. Ideally, I should twiddle with the mixer knobs to get the levels and settings right for each track and also modify them slightly for when I play digital piano, as opposed to guitar. In practice there just isn’t time for that sort of thing, so I go for a good average sound overall. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Looking for a subject for my daily sketching practice, I found an orange in the kitchen which I halved and then made quarters of one of the halves. I present the result below. I have not drawn the sizes and positions of the component elements correctly, although they are approximately where they should be. Ideally, I should take a break and then go back to it with a critical eye and to correct my outline. However, this will not now be possible, since I have eaten the orange and it is in my tummy. I tidied the pencil drawing up a little in my digital drawing program; I am currently trying to move more flexibly between pencil and digital drawing.

Still orange: pencil sketch

The orange quarters reminded me of half-time in important hockey or football matches when I was a kid. We used to be given a piece of orange while we rested up for a while. I always thought that the orange moment was the best part of the game. I generally regarded playing athletic sports as the most crashing bore imaginable and I could never work out why school teachers who were generally thought to be moderately responsible adults  forced me to waste my time in that fashion. I am fully aware that sporty types might well regard making a pencil sketch of an orange as an awful waste of time. However, I don’t make them or their children do it. That is the difference. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Adrian Hill in his lovely (1955) book Adventures in Line and Tone advocates sketching more or less anything, just to keep your eye in practice and to hone the skills. So, here is a sketch in pencil of one of my trainers. I think it was about 20 minutes in the making, but I put the border and signature on digitally. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Sketch of one of my trainers

Today I made my usual trip to Newcastle on the Metro in order to change my library books. I go roughly once every couple of weeks and usually take out three novels and one non-fiction book. Here is the entrance plaque to the building.

The entrance plaque to the Lit & Phil

Today my ration of non-fiction was in instructional book on line drawing, published in 1955. I am very much looking forward to reading it. I already started one of the novels on the journey home.  The library looks great inside. I have several photos of this sort of shot.

A view of one of the main reading rooms, from the upper stacks

I know Toby sent me a link to somebody else’s blog who has put up some pics of the Lit n Phil, but I can’t put my finger on that link right now (I don’t know the person concerned).

Ok, well, I think I’ll dive into my new novel. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Today I was given the challenge to prepare a Sunday lunch, going easy on the calories. For this reason, I did not bother to open the pages of my Julia Child book. Rather, I turned to a Cranks cookbook, since a preference was also expressed for something meat-free. I chose to make a spring onion soup, including a hefty presence of chick peas. I then planned to follow the soup with some dressed leeks and new potatoes. I have assembled most of the ingredients in this photo.

Ingredients for spring onion soup and dressed leeks

The soup was very straightforward. I cooked some young asparagus shoots in the soup.At the end, I lived things up with a good squeeze of lime, and then served it hot with a bread roll. The leeks only needed to be blanched for about five minutes. The dressing was the most interesting aspect of that dish. I used a yoghurt base, into which I put chopped basil, chives and corriander, along with some crushed garlic and a dash of tabasco. The new potatoes were… well, new potatoes. I put some mint in the pan while I was cooking them. I have to say that it was a very tasty meal. Personally, I should have liked a grilled chicken breast on the plate with the dressed leeks, but it was fine as a vegetarian dish.

Dressed leeks with new potatoes

Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

I set out with my friends Tom and Terry for one of our country walks. Today we headed for the Esh, Quebec and Langley park area which is located about six miles west of Durham. The walk is a circlular route and is published on the Esh Parish Council web site at http://www.eshparishcouncil.gov.uk/AboutEsh/parishwalk.html.

Terry had printed off their map. The day started in typical fashion for us; we failed to find the car park at the start of the walk. Eventually Terry stopped the car and asked an extremely helpful couple for directions, which they proceeded to give in some considerable detail and a great deal of confidence. The upshot of this was that we found the car park. We also met them again and got some further advice in terms of how to set off on the walk. After 10 or 15 minutes, we began to doubt the soundness of the advice that we had just been given. True, we were walking in some pretty countryside, but where the hell were we?

A young woman approached us on horseback, and Terry asked her the way. I noticed that she was deeply engrossed in a mobile phone conversation and I had never before seen an instance of that. Tom has just produced a book of photographs of people talking and texting on mobile phones. We both felt that she would have been a good subject for him. I wonder if this practice is widespread. Anyway, she interrupted the flow of her chat to tell us that we had obviously lost our way; she advised that we turn immediately and retrace our steps, setting off in the opposite direction, altogether.

Horsewoman in mobile phone conversation

I don’t think any of us get too upset about these little hiccoughs. Getting lost is all part of the fun of these rambles. As we were walking back, I noticed a field that had a delightfully curvy line to it.

Curvy field

Early in the morning, the weather was a little chilly for a summer’s day. I’m not sure whether Tom felt cold or weather he was making a fashion statement, but he treated us to a view of his hat, which he plonked firmly on his head. I have to say it is a mighty fine hat, although Terry seemed to think he should have some of those dangling corks bouncing from the brim.

Tom and his HAT

Walking through the woods we saw plenty of clumps of willow herbs. I think this one is called rosebay. I very much like the purple flowers, and I have some growing in my garden. Terry and I had a discussion as to whether it should be regarded as a garden weed or not. I prefer to think of it as a wild flower. I suppose it would not be at home in a very formal, cultivated English garden but I can’t see anything wrong with letting it grow in amongst the more haphazard plantings of a cottage garden.

Clump of rosebay willowherb

Wind farms have now become a familiar sight in the countryside. I quite like them but Terry thinks they spoil the view.

Rural wind power

When we got to Esh, we met up with some ostriches on a farm and I must admit I was rather surprised to see them.

The ostrich

Walking on beyond we found some benches to sit on and have our lunch, just by the church. Tom had bought some excellent pork pies from a shop he had visited in Hexham. I handed round some rather unimaginative ham and tomato baguettes I had put together when I got up this morning. We pushed on to Quebec village and by this time we had several long straight sections to the public footpath. Here are Tom and Terry striding out.

Tom and Terry step out along the straight path

We passed through several farms and had frequent close encounters with the cows in the fields. The final leg of the walk back to the start followed a disused rail track along the Lanchester Valley line. The sun had come out, and Terry put the roof of his car down. Although I had sat in the front coming, I sat in the back going home. Here are a couple of pictures I took on the return journey. One is of Terry, at the wheel.

Terry at the wheel, on our way home

The other picture I want to show you is a slightly surprising shot of me and Tom caught in the wing mirror as we sped along in the car.

John snaps himself snapping Tom

As usual, we all enjoyed our day out. Talk to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Today I made Julia Child’s vichyssoise soup. It was very straightforward to make, although I didn’t leave myself enough time to chill the soup. We had guests and I cut the lawn in the morning thinking it would be a nice afternoon for sitting out in the sun. As it turned out, the afternoon was wet and cloudy. However, it would be better if I had made the soup in the morning instead of cutting the grass. I accellerated the chilling by placing the soup in a steel saucepan in our steel sink, surrounded by cold water (which I changed a couple of times); I relied heavily on schoolboy physics in devising this strategy. The ingredients for this soup are potatoes, leeks, stock/wine, cream and salt. After cooking, I whizzed in the processor.

Basic ingredients for vichyssoise

While the soup was chilling, I made up some bread dough and cooked a few bread rolls in the oven for us to have with the soup. It all tasted very good indeed. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

When I have trouble playing a passage on the piano from the music, I sometimes find that it is useful to follow the simple advice of playing the passage, perhaps just a couple of bars, 10 times over. After doing this, I either know how to play it or have a better idea of what the problem is. However, I often forget how many times I have played it and it occured to me that a simple solution would be to install a software counter on my computer. I have a second monitor sitting on top of the piano so that I can easily see what is happening on screen when I play my Second Life concerts. So, accepting that this is taking things to a somewhat obsessive length, I went online to search for a software counter. I found it extremely difficult to find anything. Possibly I was entering the wrong thing into the search engine; be that as it may, I gave up.

I was thinking about the problem while I was having a cup of coffee this morning. It occurred to me that there might be a non-computer solution. I had once before used a pile of ten coins but I found that altogether too fiddly. Staying with the principle of the pile of coins, my thoughts turned to the abacus that my daughter had when she was a little girl. I suppose I could have gone to a shop and bought a child’s toy abacus but they are usually rather large and clunky; I want mine to take up very little space. I then gave myself a bit of a talking to, since it felt I ought to be able to come up with something myself. I therefore pottered off to my workshop.

I did what I usually do in these situations; I wandered about with a blank mind, letting my eyes roam around, searching for je ne sais quoi. I opened some draws, checked the contents of a few tins and boxes, and generally ferretted about. This is what I found: a couple of wood off-cuts, a few metal eyelets, and some wooden BBQ skewers.

The raw materials

I figured that the skewer could become the bar of the abacus, the eyelets would be the counters, and I would make the supports from the waste bits of wood. And here is the result!

My home-made abacus

I have to get ready for my show in Second Life now. Talk to you later, my dear blogophiles.

This dish is also called beouf à la bourguignonne

(beef stew in red wine, with bacon, onions and mushrooms).

I have completed the first part and the casserole is now simmering in the oven; that is where it will stay for the next three hours.  I shall have to sautée some onions and some mushrooms in butter, of course, but that can wait a while.

What I am doing, in cooking my way through what will hopefully be a large number of Julia Child recipes, does not have the creativity that lay behind Julie’s project in the film Julie and Julia; after all, it is her idea. As for originality, I have been thinking about the claims relating to the Julia Child book being the first English language book on French cooking. Mastering the art of French cooking was first published in the USA in 1960. I would simply point out that English cookery writer, Elizabeth David, published her first book, Mediterranean Food, in 1950. David then went on to publish French Country Cooking in 1951 and   her French Provincial Cooking in 1960, so Child was certainly not the first into the English language with books on French cooking, even though she may have been the first American to write one.

I have still not worked out precisely why I have launched into the Julia Child project. I think it has certainly pulled this blog away from music and Fyrm Fouroux’s gigs in Second Life. For the time being, I shall let things ride and see where they go.

Boeuf bourguignon

So, I completed the dish. It was wonderful to eat. The mushrooms browned and retained a delightful firmness. The bacon lardons were gorgeous. The new potatoes were perfect with the bourguignon sauce. The onions retained their shape yet were sensuously silky to the tongue – the lingerie of the dish, without a doubt. The beef fell apart at the touch of knife and tooth. In sum, it was a peak gustatory experience. Now that I have practiced the dish (and there were a couple of near catastrophes so practice is essential in these endeavours) I shall have to invite some meat-eaters to enjoy it. This is not as easy as you might think. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Today I ticked off another Julia Child recipe, this time an easy one: scrambled eggs with herbs.

Oeufs brouillés aux fines herbes (scrambed eggs with herbs)

I am half-way through cleaning up the house. I have washed the kitchen floor, and wiped the bathroom surfaces into a state that resembles sparkling. I am swigging a cup of coffee before attacking carpets with the vacuum cleaner.  I can hear the rain pelting down on my skylight window; regrettably, there will be no sitting in a deck chair on the lawn after I have completed my domestic travail.

It was with sadness that I learned today of the unexpected and early death of one of my old academic friends, Prof. Noel Sheehy. We met from time to time on university business and, once we had dealt with that, it was our habit to sit in deck chairs on my lawn and drink lots of red wine while chatting about matters psychological, parenthood, and the affairs of the world. Sometimes, when I had to fly over to Belfast to meet with him in order to complete some examination business in the morning, we would repair afterwards to a delightful bistro for lunch; these sessions would go on all afternoon, with similar relaxation, chat and multiple glasses of red wine. I would then totter back to the airport to get my flight home in the evening, still chortling over some of his very funny remarks and analyses. Somehow, I imagined that these sessions would go on happening ad infinitum.  Indeed, he mentioned in his Christmas card this year that he might be coming up my way a little later in the summer. Bereavement, by definition, does leave one bereft.  Although our friendship manifested itself on a relatively infrequent basis largely in relation to examinations, conferences, and committees, I shall nonetheless miss him as a good friend with a wickedly delightful sense of humour.

On that rather sombre note, I bid you farewell, my dear blogophiles. I shall speak to you later.