Tasty

When I visited my mum the other day I asked if I could borrow my favourite of her recipe books, which is a blank book she used at school for home economics and has added to ever since.

I love to peruse it, and not just because it has some of my favourite recipes in (my grandmother's doughnut recipe is faithfully recorded, as is my ouma's pannekoek recipe, designed to serve up to a hundred hungry people at a church bazaar). I love to see my mum's handwriting develop, from the straight up and down cursive she used at school to transcribe recipes for things like kidney soup, to the sloppier cursive she used when I was little to write down recipes for funny face cakes, and rice krispie treats. Later the handwriting is more brusque, in capital letters. And now, now it has computer printouts stuffed in the front, recipes googled for and then forgotten.

I love this book, and I have only borrowed it (I'll return it Mum, I promise!). But one day, a horrible day in the future I really don't want to think about, I'd like to say to my sister, you keep Mum's wedding ring and eternity ring. I want her recipe book.

Not safe for children

Train brain

What do you do on your commute?

Heard at Canning Town tube station

Would Inspector Sands please report to the operations room immediately.

Past times

The news comes that someone from the past will be where you are now. And you are simultaneously struck by a wave of apprehension, that in a city of millions of people, they will be the one you run into, and a wave of acceptance, because really, so what?

I walk the line

Mr Pip

A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn't usually announce itself. No. What happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave and you wait.

Mr Pip, by Lloyd Jones

Something to crow about

Doubt

This was entirely made for Meryl Streep. She is just so uncomfortable the whole way through the movie - she fidgets, she taps, she twitches, she is irritable, she acts as if she is suffocating in her habit. She's perfect, and this move is all about her.

Trailer: Two Clive Owen movies are on the horizon - oh happy day!

Washed up

Saw The Wrestler last night, which was really good. Mickey Rourke did a bloody good job with the whole has-been junkie thing. Oh wait, I wonder why?

The most interesting thing for me was seeing the parallels between Randy and Cassidy. They're each washed up in the same way, each faking it in the same way.

The end was unnecessarily abrupt though.

Trailer: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I'm just not sure about this one - it looks very sappy and sentimental, despite the headliners.

I'm with stupid

Last weekend, in a fit of domesticity, I invited some friends over for a roast lunch - beef, veggies, bread and butter pudding. It was all going swimmingly until I opened a packet of sultanas for the pudding. As I started opening the packet with a knife, I wondered briefly if I should use a pair of scissors instead. And then I sliced the tip of my finger off.

PATTOTE: better living through scissors, not serrated paring knives with a bend at the tip

Things I did not expect to hear in London on a Thursday night

"Would you like to make group for to be having the sex with us?"

Blow me up, blow me down

I'm sleeping on an inflatable mattress at the moment. It's pretty comfy. Well it has been except for the fact that it's started to lose rather a lot of air. So now I have to frantically pump it up before bed and then hope for the best. But the pumping has definitely entered my subconcious, because at 3am this morning I found myself pumping up the bed in my sleep.

PATTOTE - better living through sleeptasking.

How many books you say?

70!

That works out as more than one a week doesn't it?

Fun author I'm glad I discovered - Katie Fforde

Author I knew I liked but finally got around to reading more of - Nick Hornby

Promise for next year - read more classics

PATTOTE: better living through the written word, lots of them

The sound of silence

At what point does a comfortable silence turn into an awkward pause?

And what does that mean for us?

Mother Tongue

"We tend to regard other people's languages as we regard their cultures – with ill-hidden disdain. In Japanese, the word for foreigner means 'stinking of foreign hair'. To the Czechs a Hungarian is a 'pimple'. Germans call cockroaches 'Frenchman', while the French call lice 'Spaniards'. We in the English-speaking world take French leave, but Italians and Norwegians talk about departing like an Englishman, and Germans talk of running like a Dutchman. Italians call syphilis 'the French disease', while both French and Italians call con games 'American swindle'. Belgian taxi drivers call a poor tipper 'un Anglais'. To be bored to death in French is 'être de Birmingham', literally 'to be from Birmingham' (which is actually about right).

Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson

I am still here

I promise.

Plumbers

Two interesting things about the plumber who came to fix my washing machine.

1) He had plumber's crack.

2) He was once Mark Fish's plumber.

That made my day, as I'm sure it made yours.

Ode to Ham

Men without Ties

Men without ties don't dress for dinner
Do the Friday night frozen pizza thing
Don't want no wife or no beginner with a knife
You're the Friday night frozen pizza king.
Men without Ties - Paul Westerberg