Video Thursday

I've been singing Puttin' on the Ritz for days, then came across this video of the great Fred Astaire. Truly amazing, especially the last section.


I think I might make this a regular Thursday feature. We'll see.

A very social week

K-Bear, Matt (known as Cookie to precisely no one) and Yuddi at the send-off

Whew! This week has been crazy, and it's not over yet! We've had houseguests, a boys' trip to the cinema (I was invited, but took advantage of an empty house to have some quality girl alone time), and a damn fine birthday party/goodbye party for the lovely Yuddi, who is moving to Germany for a year today. Bon voyage, Yuddi!

Tonight, The Boy and I are off to a Malaysian Curry Festival by Liverpool Street. We get free curry, and all we have to do is give the dishes marks out of 10. Such a chore!

On the cooking front, I've got chickpeas soaking in the kitchen to make hummous tomorrow, using this recipe. I occasionally get serious hummous cravings, and drive The Boy mad until I find one that satisfies my tastebuds, so here's hoping that this one hits the spot!

Weekend round up

The weekend was very quiet for The Boy and I. He'd had a stressful week at work, and just wanted to relax. The whole thing can be summed up in two words: food and films.

Friday night was fish pie and Ocean's Eleven (the George Clooney one) - Fish pie better than I'd feared (you should have seen the colour of it when it went in...), Ocean's Eleven quite entertaining, but not as much of a romp as I'd been expecting.

Saturday was our usual poached egg on toast with awesome coffee, leftover fish pie and a day spent pootling round the kitchen making muhammara, mutabal, and tabbouleh (lots of charring of vegetables and frenzied chopping!). Films watched were Antitrust (truly awful, and woefully dated) and Catch Me If You Can ( LOVED this, I think it was when Leonardo DiCaprio started to shake off the teen heartthrob burden and become awesome)

Sunday was the scoffing of food made on Saturday (with massive amounts left for weekday lunches), and watching The Incredibles, Toy Story 2, Die Hard and the new Sherlock thing for the BBC. I liked it, though the plot was ever so thin. Maybe now I'll have an excuse to fancy Benedict Cumberbatch...

So much relaxing over two days, so why was I tired when Monday came around?!

Tea with Fergus, or why I love my friends

I had the most decadent day on Friday! I spent the morning watching an old BBC adaptation of Wives and Daughters, then tootled over to West Hampstead to have tea with my friend Fergus.

Fergus isn't one to do things by halves. This was the table when I arrived:

(That's homemade cherry cake, along with still warm scones)

And that was before we got on to the green tea, the shisha or the G&Ts whilst watching Beautiful People... I had to send The Boy a text saying, "I am a terrible slattern, I am drinking gin and not making fish pie".

I also had the opportunity to admire the tapestry he has been working on for months. He embroidered funny things that have been said by him and his best friend and flatmate Tristan over the years, in all the languages they speak. I spent ages looking at it, every time I glanced over I spotted something new

(I love the 'People like us don't use mugs' in the bottom left corner)

Several hours later, I wobbled home and proceeded to rustle up Nigella's fish pie from How to Eat. I find that in all of her recipes, there's always one error. This time it was the amount of liquid needed to make the sauce, but after I subbed and tweaked, it was very tasty.

All in all, a perfect start to the weekend. 

Argh!

Anyone who knows me knows that I am terrified of wasps. Just thinking about them makes my skin crawl. I'm lucky enough never to have been stung, largely because I either freeze or run for the hills at the first sighting.

Imagine my horror, then, as I noticed a steady stream of the little blighters coming and going to the eaves above my bathroom. No doubt about it, we have a nest up in the loft. Hundreds of them, waving their antennae in that menacing fashion. Probably plotting how to make me join the "I was stung once, it was horrible" club. (As a separate point entirely, why do people, as soon as they hear you're terrified of waspies, then launch into their top 3 stinging stories? I don't tell my sister about sharks, or my mother about snakes!)

I've been looking up nest removal companies, who all seem to suggest that poison outside of the entry point will do the trick. But that still leaves a dead nest in my loft, which frankly makes me feel ill. I want them gone!

Post edit: The Boy poisoned the nest last night, all on his own. I hid behind the door, pointing at the spot I saw wasps and whimpering. He let me swoon over this new (to me) talent of his for a moment, then sat me down to talk "expectation management". It will take a couple of applications, and there'll be dead and dying wasps a-plenty to deal with in the next week. Bet you can guess what my nightmares last night were about...

Quote of the day

"If Helvetica is Julia Roberts - pretty enough - then Univers is Uma Thurman - really cool."

Bruno Maag, managing creative director of typeface studio Dalton Maag, on the BBC News site this morning

A good day

Today has been a good work day. One where I actually feel like a curator. There's some new stuff in the pipeline, which will really stretch me, and deepen my involvement in my department. I don't want to jinx it, so for now I'm just crossing all of my fingers and all of my toes.

And today, as with most days, I am struck by how awesome The Boy is. On our way back from the tube, we had a good discussion about feminism, and the difference between one's personal beliefs and law. I am so proud of his outlook, and so so proud that he is mine.

Weekend and Friday pic

It's been a wonderful end to a nigglesome week.

Today I met Michael, friend and former colleague (he's one of the amazing curators behind this exhibition), for coffee at Loafing by Victoria Park. As we drank our (very tasty) flat whites, he used his gingerbread man to tell me about Francois Ravaillac, the fanatic who assassinated Henri IV of France. The picture you see above is of the torture he experienced before his execution (quartering, with the sugar cubes doubling as hot coals). It was hilarious, seeing such a mild mannered chap breaking up his gingerbread man with glee. The looks we got from other customers as they overheard snippets of the conversation!

On the subject of Henri IV, I recommended one of my favourite films, La Reine Margot. Have you seen it? It's indescribably beautiful, and Isabelle Adjani, who plays Margot, is stunning.

And so to the weekend! What are your plans? I'm helping my friend Heaths shop for furniture tomorrow, and there will be some more anniversary celebrations with The Boy at some point - probably Malaysian food at Makan by Portobello Market, unpretentious, cheap and seriously tasty (it's one of my favourite secret spots for food!)

Have a great weekend, all!

Good news, bad news

The Same Love - The Same Rights with the Same Name

Originally uploaded by blmurch

First up, the good. Yesterday, Argentina legalised same-sex marriage. All married couples now have equal rights in inheritance, benefits and adoption. See the clip here for the jubilation when the vote was passed.

(I strongly believe that the UK should allow gay marriage, and not just civil partnerships. Supporters of civil partnerships claim that it allows the same benefits as marriage. Why not, then, call it marriage? And if, as the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, the term marriage is "intimately bound up with the question of religious freedom", why allow heterosexual couples who have a civil ceremony to refer to themselves as "married"? Are they not also in a 'civil partnership', having married solely under civil, and not religious, law? Until the law is changed to allow same-sex marriage in the UK, there can be no equality on this matter. It truly is one rule for one group in society, and another for everyone else.)

Next, the bad. In continuing its opposition to women priests, the Vatican has issued a decree which makes the attempted ordination of women as serious an ecclesiastical crime as paedophilia. Both the woman and the bishop who performs the ceremony will be excommunicated.

I was raised a Roman Catholic. I also consider myself a feminist. The more time I devote to thinking about my faith, the more I wonder if the two aren't utterly incompatible.

Supper last night

The idea, at breakfast - something healthy and full of vegetables

The reality - post-hospital

Wenchy McWench does not have malaria, or anything worse, just a nasty chest infection. Poor chicken, she had seven vials (she insists it was pints) of blood taken, and is now crammed full of antibiotics that make her sick. The only thing that cheered her up was the rather yummy doctor who talked us through her results. I get the feeling that he was just glad to be talking to someone young and friendly...

Care package

There are times I'm very grateful that I work part time. I can be there to provide support to others when they need it. Time is the one luxury I can give sometimes.

A good friend, Wenchy McWench (obviously not her real name, but she answers to it!) was taken into hospital a few hours ago with breathing difficulties. She's just come back from a month's digging in Belize, so her concern is that it's something nasty. I'm putting together a waiting room package, as many issues of Vogue I can find, a pack of cards, a drawing pad for doodles (she's forever mocking my total lack of drawing skills, and requests doodles just to make her laugh), and a big bottle of water. That should do it, right?

Oh, and cash. Nothing worse than being stuck opposite a vending machine for hours on end with no change.

One year

One year ago today, I was counting down the minutes to drinks with a boy. We'd met at a party a couple of months before, and then again outside the museum, where we'd agreed to go for a drink in the near future.

I was at that horrible 'outwardly fine but really not at all over one very long relationship and a couple of flirtations' stage, and truth be told, I wasn't even sure it was a date. But I liked him, and he interested me, so off we went. Drinks turned into dinner and amazing hugs goodbye, followed some days later by cake, cricket watching and first kisses at Earls Court tube.

And still I dragged my feet, didn't take it seriously. I didn't want to be the girl who rushed headlong from one major relationship to the next. I spent months being unbelievably happy when I was with him, and plagued by doubt as soon as I was alone.

Unusually for me, I talked to him about these feelings. How he handled those conversations made me look at him again. So incredibly grounded, and honest, and... sane. Some of it can't have been easy to hear, and at no point would I have blamed him if he'd said "OK, enough of you, crazy wench. Shoo". But he didn't. More than once, he said "you are not going to screw this up, because I won't let you".

Finally, at some point in mid-January, I realised I was taking my relationship with him seriously. First of all, I was in relationship with him. I wasn't giddy, but I had a quiet certainty about him. He was what I wanted. I wasn't "in love", at least not how I always experienced it before, with anxiety and wanting to be perfect for him so that he'd never leave (yeah, I've got me some issues...). I just loved him, and how he made me feel about myself.

I'm not quite sure what happened after that. Within a fortnight, we'd said "I love you", I'd been taken home to meet his folks, and we were really quite serious about each other. Four months after that, I'd moved me, my cat and my books to his house.

Tonight, he'll cycle back from work to our home, and we'll have dinner together. Bangers and mash with wine, my favourite meal, and the first he ever cooked for me. And I'll tell him just how glad I am that those drinks were a date.

Clap your hands

As previously moaned about, I sometimes need help seeing the good things in life. Which is why I have this song on pretty heavy rotation this month:




I've loved Sia's voice since I first heard her sing "Taken for Granted" on TFI Friday (all the way back in the 90s, people!). I remember saying how much I love her voice to a former boyfriend and his father when we were watching footage of her perform at Glastonbury with Zero 7, and getting some very funny looks for it. Unbowed, I really wish I'd seen her at The Roundhouse in May:

Weekend bits and bobs

On Thursday, after a dinner conversation about my non-existent finances, the Boy asked if he could take me up to Birmingham to visit his folks for the weekend, to get me out of London. I happily agreed.

It was wonderful. I spent hours in the frankly enormous garden playing with his dog Suzy, spotting tadpoles with mini legs in the pond, running away from Suzy when she plunged into the water to cool off, admiring the Boy as he climbed up into his old treehouse, and swinging in a hammock (I'd never been in one before!).

On Saturday afternoon we snuck off to see Shrek Ever After, taking advantage of being able to buy two tickets, popcorn AND drink for less than the cost of two tickets in London. I loved it, especially the very short clip of the Gingerbread Man fighting Animal biscuits like a gladiator, but those gnashing skull heads on a chain were scary, and I'm 26! When the lights went up, the Boy pointed out we were the only people our age without children. I said the only proper way to respond to that situation is to look around wildly and cry "Where have the children gone?!" Nothing like deflecting attention...

Saturday evening was a curry with friends, the real reason the Boy was heading up to Brum (and why he was so unwilling to let me duck out of the trip). My food was sadly underwhelming, but I loved the walk home past the university lake in the dark.

Sunday morning was interesting, and I'm still trying to make sense of it. I went to church for the first time in years, and to an Anglican service for the first time ever (my folks are Catholic, my mum especially so). The Boy's mum, Janet, is a committed Christian and very active within her church. She had casually invited us at Saturday lunch to join her, and I decided to take her up on the offer out of curiosity. I wasn't prepared for how strongly I'd be affected by the service, which was a baptism, and found myself really close to tears at several points. I think the whole thing deserves its own post, once I've made a bit more sense of it.

After an amazing Sunday lunch, the Boy and I borrowed his parents' membership card for the Botanical Gardens, and spent the rest of the day lounging in the shade whilst listening to a jazz band play in the bandstand. Highlight was them launching into "I'm the King of the Swingers" from Jungle Book, I was so excited! We also saw an elderly couple who had their arms around each other, looking so sweet. When I spoke to them, it turned out they were celebrating their 53rd wedding anniversary that day! I'm in awe of relationships that last so long and remain so loving. I took some photos, and ran them through my new favourite toy, the Poladroid app:

After ice cream and picking up a dahlia for the garden, we hopped on the train (where I finally finished 100 Years of Solitude) and fell asleep pretty much straight away.

I am a bad blogger

I'm also pretty bad at finding the good in every day, lately. Living to a miniscule budget is hard, and a haircut and a night out (which cost a total of £50) appears to have completely effed my finances for the entire month. Think around £100 for the rest of the month. First world problems, I know, but it wears me down.

What I could also do without is being completely ignored by the new tenants of my previous property, who owe me money.

Money worries are dull.

(And my sewing machine blew up, 10 minutes into first use after having it serviced. Apparently this was caused by the transistor in the motor, which isn't checked at point of service, and so not covered by the service warranty. AND the Polaroid film I bought on eBay has got lost in the post. Seller has been great with a refund, but GAH, I say)