John's Quavering Pencil

Today I made a batch of garlic bagels. The poaching of the dough rings, followed by the baking in the oven, is perhaps a bit of a palaver but the end result is delightful. I ate mine with smoked salmon and cottage cheese, although I believe New Yorkers take cream cheese.

Home-made garlic bagels

While things seem to be going ok in the kitchen that is far from the case with regard to my piano playing, about which I have not one single good word to say at present. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

It is 4.45 pm and I am waiting for the sun to drop below the yard arm. Except I am not on a boat, it is winter, and more or less dark anyway. I am to be taken out for a meal as a birthday treat; an annual event that becomes incrementally filled with foreboding, as the years tick on by. I always have a couple of G&Ts before I go out for my birthday meal. Always. Habit, tradition, call it what you will, it is an essential ritual. Today, regretfully, there is not a single lemon in the house. Lemons can sit in my kitchen for weeks on end, being of bugger-all use to anyone, but the very day I want one there is none.

My daughter, who last autumn went to live in another country, sorted out shipping for a stack of belongings she put into boxes when she visited at Christmas. Today, the shippers delivered their cartons to my house and I have packed them. Somehow, the passage of stuff out of the house makes it feel permanent, makes it definite. To be honest, it makes me feel old. Its impact is heavier and deeper than the mere occurrence of another birthday. It provides a physical marker of a new personal era, a next step along the path of life. It gives rise to a pause for thought, a moment to consider intimations of mortality more broadly.

I feel this all the more keenly because for the past six months I have been writing my autobiography. At first it was a half-hearted attempt which I thought I would tire of quickly. I didn’t really believe I would seriously address the task, but I have done so. I am now so far sucked into it I have to keep going until I finish. In my manuscript I am at the point where I have left school and have been working in various jobs for several years. I am in my early 20s and about to get married. I don’t want to speak about personal details relating to my first wife and our marriage, but I have to find ways to talk about that period of my life and clearly she did feature in it. It presents a very interesting challenge in terms of writing the book. Writing an autobiography is very similar to writing fiction; the only difference is that the plot has its feet in history and real life, whatever that might be. However, the final manuscript will be merely one way of telling the story of my life; there could be many variations in the tale. Just as in classical music, the main events provide the notes and pattern of the theme, but I could embellish that theme in many ways, messing with cadences, emphases, tempo and crescendo. In music, silence can be extremely telling and important. In my autobiography, I choose those things about which I shall remain silent. In part, my decisions about what not to say will affect the temperature of the prose. I could decide to blurt out a lot of stuff and produce a vitriolic tome, or I could ease back and offer an altogether gentler tale. My inclination is to do the latter. By definition, it is the case that I shall be the hero (obviously I shall in my autobiography). I have to decide how I wish to portray my hero. Do I allow myself to boast a little? Should I avoid being too self-deprecating? These are fascinating questions.

I would like to say a few words to my Second Life blogophiles who come to my shows… let me reassure you that I am hoping to extend my repertoire over this coming year in 2011. It was one of my new year’s resolutions. I am hoping for a minor breakthrough with my piano playing. I do work hard at it. Paradoxically, I feel it is my guitar playing that is improving, yet I do much less work on that! I have been satisfied the way the gigs have been going though. I know my music is not to everybody’s taste and some feel that it is a bit of an acquired taste. Still, I feel I have made progress over this past year. I have now played around 650 gigs in Second Life over the past three years, so I definitely have a reasonable amount of experience. I’m looking forward to the coming year. I have a feeling it could be good, musically speaking. Ok. Talk to you later, and bye for now 🙂

I am now writing a daily quota of words for the first draft of my autobiography. I don’t want my blog to go dead but it may mean that I can no longer postlong entries here.

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to cook something new each week. Yesterday I made a Sunday lunch with wood pigeon and a medley of vegetables. I cut the breasts from the birds and pan fried them, last thing. I made a casserole of the vegetables with stock flavoured with a few bits of the pigeon carcass. I also shredded some English greens and wilted them with butter in the same way that I do spinach. I boiled some waxy potatoes, sliced them after they had cooled a little, and then fried them, too. I should say that the meal was a success.

Wood pigeons to be pan fried

The finished dish

I am getting on less well with my resolution to sketch something each day. I have interpreted this to include drawing from reference pics and I shall be happy to do the sketching either on paper or using the computer to draw digitally on the Wacom pad. If I am to illustrate my autobiography, I must practice, to keep my hand and eye in training. I seem to have the equivalent of writers block as far as my art work is concerned, and so far I have not been able to get through it. Hopefully, things will improve soon. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

This will have to be a short blog because I have to get ready to play an internet gig in about 10 minutes time. I went to Newcastle today and returned some library books to the Lit & Phil. I didn’t take any more out because I don’t want to have to trape over there if it snows again. I’ll wait until the spring and meanwhile read some classics on my Kindle.

I managed to buy a couple of good metal pencil sharpeners at the art store. It is amazing but I have found it extremely difficult to get good ones in my city and the ones I got from W.H.Smiths I just did not like.  I then had a great cup of coffee in Cafe Nero and a wonderfully tasty apricot croissant – mmmmm….

I have been thinking some more about the filme Julie and Julia. It obviously got under my skin. I have devised a way of combining my New Year’s Resolutions into one over-arching framework and I am going to bring all the different threads from food, music and art into on place. To this end I bought a very nice diary for 2011. The main problem is that if you make things too complicated, you just get fed up with it and don’t bother any more. That was the beauty if Julie’s scheme… 524 recipes, all specified in the Julia Child book, in 365 days; neat and simple. My scheme is like a cross between a wiring diagram and a bowl of spaghetti. Still, I have started to break things down and make some notes in the diary.

I am out of time. Talk to you later, my dear blogophiles.

It is now around 1 a.m. and I have been asleep for a few hours. In fact, I just woke up. Yesterday was my birthday and as part of my enjoyment(s) – I do put them in the plural – I watched a DVD version of the Meryl Streep and Amy Adams film, Julie and Julia.

This film is about the life of the American, Julia Childs, and her obsession with French cooking while she lived in Paris in the late 1940s. Julie is an American who subsequently cooks the 524 recipes of ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ in 365 days, this being the entire contents of Julia Child’s masterpiece. The point of the film is that Julie writes up her culinary experiences in a blog.

My blog often contains entries on food, and my experience of cooking it. I also wrote a book (The Psychology of food and eating), although this was an academic monograph. In my book, I did write up some of my experiences of cooking. I just want to say that I have never been influenced by the Julie/Julia film. Of course, I cannot guarantee that I shall not be in the future.

I suppose I feel a little pissed off by that film. I am obsessively engaged in various projects, some of which include cooking. I have, in the past, set myself goals to do recipes covering the various aspects of cooking, such as eggs, bread, meat, fish, soups, sweets, etc. I have had goals to work through new recipes within each category. But I have never done anything as focussed as cooking my way through a specific cook book.

The reason why I am talking about this is that the Julie/Julia thing sounds like a New Years Resolution, and we have just been making those things. My problem is that I am split across several domains,not just the culinery. I have resolutions relating to my autobiography, my song writing, my guitar and piano playing, and my sketching (whether digital or not). And, of course, I want to keep the house and garden in good order. I have some resolutions about taking photos, too.

I do share Julie’s early fears that I am putting all this out onto the Internet and maybe nobody is reading it. But then, that has always been a possibility, even back in my early blogging days for the Sunderland Echo newspaper. Talk to you later, my dear blogophiles.

I seem to have been rather busy over the festive season but things are settling down now. Today I spent some time making a vegetable cobbler. I can assure you that it tasted a lot better than it looks here. I think it will take a while to get the blog momentum moving properly, but at least this is a step in the right direction for 2011.

Vegetable cobbler

I was saddened to learn of the death of scum threebeards, the barman at the Ragged Edge venue in Second Life. I shall be playing a gig there tonight, as usual on Thursday, and I shall miss having a chat with him while I set up on stage. Of course, I never knew him in First Life. She-who-must-not-be-mentioned suggested it might be similar to when you feel sad about a character in a novel dying. I suppose there is something in that, although in Second Life you know that there is a real person playing the SL character; in a novel there is no such person in First Life. A slightly closer analogy might be to learn of the death of a stage or screen actor who one only knows through the roles they play. Be that as it may, I shall try and sing a song in his memory tonight. Somehow, I think Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing‘ might be a good one.

I read up on haikus in Stephen Fry’s book The Ode Less Travelled. He suggests that the English language is not well-suited to the haiku and, in any case, it is a pretty serious sort of thing for which one needs to be steeped in Japanese culture to have the smallest chance of writing anything deeply significant. Setting that aside, I can see no reason whatsoever as to why it should not be deployed in base form for a bit of fun on twitter.

Tweets have to be 140 characters or less in length. A haiku has three lines with syllable counts as follows: 5-7-5. This approximates to an average of 8 characters per syllable for a haiku tweet.  That should be more than andequate. I have therefore decided to put up haikus as tweets, so do please check me out @ffyrm (there are two f’s at the start of ffyrm on my twitter account).  I don’t know how often I shall do this but I have put three up so far. I must stress that this as a bit of fun, not serious poetry!

Blog prose flows full flood

Character count in twitter

Trickles haiku tweet

Hope you enjoy them. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

I am pleased to report that Christmas went off very well this year. I received several nice presents, including the graphic novel Watchmen and Stephen Fry’s autobiography The Fry Chronicles. Part of me would like to write a short graphic novel and so I shall be looking at Watchmen for possible ideas on technique, style and structure. I am currently working on my own autobiography and so the Stephen Fry book will, likewise, be of some considerable interest.

Vegetables and stuffing prepared on Xmas Eve

I spent most of Xmas eve preparing the vegetables and the stuffing (well, except for the egg which I added on Christmas morning – it is balanced on cling film in this picture). The parsnips went into a soup stock made with herbs and the neck of the turkey. I added cream and chopped chestnuts after whizzing the parsnips and this resulted in a very tasty soup.

Table set for Xmas lunch

After I got the soup under control, I laid the table. This was my own table, that I made about 10 years ago. It comes apart and gets stored in my garage. It takes around 20 minutes to assemble and in the summer I put it up on the patio if we have a BBQ. I like the sense of anticipation that goes with a table set out for a formal meal; I find it satisfying and strangely full of promise.

The turkey, I served with traditional accompaniments: caramelised carrots, roast potatoes, brussels sprouts, cranberry & orange relish, and gravy. The turkey breast carved well.

The remains of my home-made Christmas pudding

My Xmas pudding had been maturing for about a month. I put it in a large pan to steam for about three hours and then served it with the option of clotted cream, brandy butter or custard. I went for the custard and thoroughly enjoyed it. I  feel that it is definitely worth taking the time and effort to make your own Christmas pud, even though some of the ones you can buy in the supermarkets are not at all bad. When I had the pudding at table, I did the flambe thing and set it alight with brandy.

So now it is all over for another year. I had hoped to play a selection of seasonal songs on my Korg electric piano after the lunch was finished, but I did not manage to learn them in time. Maybe I’ll do that next year.

I was relaxing in my sitting room when I decided to go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Automatically, my hand extended to the brass handle and levered it downwards. Imagine my incomprehension as I felt no resistance at all as the handle was depressed. I tried again and again; it was not connecting with the catch. The door should have opened in, towards me. Suddenly, the fact dawned upon me that I was potentially a prisoner in my own sitting room!

A series of possibilities flashed through my mind. I thought about   kicking through one of the door panels or smashing a window in order to make my escape, but both of these options would have been expensive. Then I mentally kicked myself and remembered that there was a second door that we keep permanently shut, behind a large armchair. I squeezed round the chair and managed to open this door, moved out into the hallway, and finally forced the recalcitrant lock from the other side.

I fetched a screwdriver and took off the brass surround. On inspection, I found that the square metal spindle barely protruded through to the handle section on the inside face of the door and that the corners had become worn down with repetitive use over the years. At first I could not think of a way to fix this.

Spindle protrudes insufficiently

I tried pushing the square bar more fully into the inside handle mechanism and turning the lever; it worked, the spindle rotated. If the door was less thick, I could get the handle to work again, but I didn’t want to start digging bits of wood out of the door. The focus of the problem therefore switched to the length of the spindle, not the thickness of the door: how could I make the spindle longer?

Sawn dowel peg as extender

I went out to my garage workshop and pottered about. In the back of my mind I was thinking about a ball bearing or a small metal nut. Unfortunately, I could not find one that would fit the cavity of the outside brass handle. I then hit upon the idea of dropping a sawn off bit of a wooden dowling peg down the hole. In other words, I was not going to make the spindle longer, but I would force its position to change in a fashion that would be functionally equivalent to its extension. I sawed the peg, dropped it in the hole, gave the mechanism a squirt of WD40 for good measure, and reassembled it. My dear blogophiles, it worked! I felt very pleased with myself. Speak to you later.

A functional handle, once more

I unlock the car and start the engine. The external temperature reads minus 4 Centigrade. There is only a small amount of frost on the windscreen, I suppose that there is not much moisture in the air today. I notice that the sun roof is half raised. I realise that I must have touched the control yesterday evening when I was reaching up to put on the internal light, to look for something. I must have driven all the way back from the airport in the cold with it open!

I drive through the crush of parental automobiles as kids get dumped into the nearbye school gates, and head on through the city towards the coast. I park the car by the Bungalow cafe and look out to the harbour. It is a beautiful, crisp December morning and the sun is glinting on the brickwork of Roker pier. Every now and again a roller hits the wall and a cloud of surf sprays up into the air with the grace of an ocean ballet dancer. Tom arrives and we go for our breakfast.

View of Roker pier from Bungalow cafe

By the time coffee arrives we have started on the exchange of the week’s news. I am well into my sausage and bacon before Tom tells me about the purchase of a very nice Fender gig bag from a Newcastle guitar shop. When it comes to the fried egg on toast, munching is intermingled with talk of 13th chords and the complexities of jazz guitar. The second cup of coffee is concluded with good wishes for the festive season and a resolve to meet once more for the Friday full English early in the new year. But don’t worry, my dear blogophiles, I shall talk to you again before then. Indeed, I look forward to chatting with you as I stumble through the joys, trials and tribulations of Christmas and all that that entails! Speak to you later.