If you need some reading matter to tide you over the post-lunch lull, I have written a piece on Billy Liar for Mostly Film today.
How I learned to love Manchester
This time last year, my only experience of Manchester was a nailbiting three-hour trip to Old Trafford – where, regular readers will remember, Palace beat Man United after extra time in the quarter-finals of the 2011/12 League Cup. It was good, but it could have been in Slough and it would still have been good, and I wasn’t bowled over by Old Trafford itself, which looks a bit – well, it looks a bit like it might be part of Milton Keynes:
It’s better inside, but in the thrill of the moment I seem to have forgotten to take any photos inside.
Anyway, my next trip was back to the same part of the city, more or less, for last October’s Radio Festival, held at the Lowry Centre at Salford Quays, where I was delighted to find art and music and the fantastically interesting and thoughtful Daniel Libeskind-designed Imperial War Museum North all crouching greyly by the waterside. But apart from the inside of Piccadilly Station I hadn’t seen the city proper until I went there a few weeks ago with work, and now I have seen it, I’m cross that I spent 36 years not visiting it, because Manchester is brilliant. Whenever I visit a new city* I end up deciding I would like to live there, but the feeling usually wears off within a few hours, and certainly by the time I’ve spent a day back in London, with everything London has. But Manchester has quite a lot of what London has, and more besides – a compact, walkable centre; space for buildings to breathe and be viewed from all angles; thriving, mixed-use canalside and dockside areas in the city centre; a strong and convincing sense of civic pride – and the tallest residential building in Europe, the faintly terrifying-looking 46-storey, 169-metre Beetham Tower:
I became a bit obsessed with the Beetham Tower, and eventually figured out how to get at least partway up it to take some photos of the view – which you can see, along with the rest of my photos of Manchester, here. I even went and had a look at a flat for sale there, not because I was going to buy it, but – well, just to make absolutely sure I wasn’t going to buy it. (I’m not going to buy it. It was 75% amazing, but the bedrooms were poky and the service charge is THREE THOUSAND POUNDS A YEAR, though as at least some of that goes towards window cleaning I had to grudgingly concede that I’d rather pay than do it myself.)
The city is a mishmash of buildings old and new, just like London, but – at least partly thanks to the nineteenth century red brick, which really is everywhere – the contrast looks intended and appealing. And it has lively and unique arts, technology and gay scenes and a genuinely diverse population; all prerequisites for a great city. Every Londoner I’ve spoken to about it since has said “I didn’t think I was going to like Manchester, but actually it was really nice!” – and perhaps its middling reputation with other parts of the country is why it’s so proudly and distinctively itself, in which case please forget everything I’ve said and go back to thinking of it as middling. In the meantime, I’ll be planning my next trip.
*Exceptions to this rule include Norwich and Edinburgh, leading me to believe that perhaps I just don’t like hills.
Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!
…or Happy St. David’s Day, if you don’t speak the language. St David’s is the best of the saints’ days that we take notice of in the UK (not counting St Nicholas), because he has daffodils and leeks, and daffodils and leeks are both brilliant. So in celebration, here are my five favourite Welsh things (not counting people I know):
5. Glamorgan sausages, which are the only vegetarian sausages nice enough that when you cook them, the meat eaters get jealous.
4. Bonnie Tyler (who narrowly won a close-fought battle with Shirley Bassey and really I love Charlotte Church the best, but I wanted an excuse to make you watch this again).
3. The Brecon Beacons. Every summer for ten years, from my early teens until my early twenties, I went camping in South Wales. We camped in the field of a farmhouse that belonged to friends, a farmhouse so remotely-located that its address wasn’t even a street name, but just the hopeful-sounding “Hillside”. We were so high up that clouds would often form below us in the green valley at the bottom of which nestled the village of Crickhowell, and across which loomed the Sugarloaf and Table mountains – not quite the height of their Brazilian or South African counterparts, but a sturdy day’s climb nonetheless. I think there’s a great deal to be said for being able to see mountains every day, and even more for being able to climb up them whenever it takes your fancy.
2. Second place is A TIE between David Edward Hughes, who invented the radio and is therefore directly responsible for both my favourite pastime and the way I make my living, and Little Johnny Williams (he isn’t particularly called that, but he is the same height as me, which for a boy I think is quite little). Johnny plays for Crystal Palace and we love him so much that we sing whenever he comes on the pitch. His song goes like this:
OHHHHH JOHNNY JOHNNY
JOHNNY JOHNNY JOHNNY JOHNNY WILLIAMS.
Maybe you have to be there.
1. This:
Oscars: the hangover
I should have posted this on Monday, but it took me two days to recover from staying up until 5.30am on Oscars night, liveblogging for Mostly Film. But I’m better now, you’ll be pleased to hear, so I’ve gone back and done the maths and I am delighted to be able to inform you that I did beat my 50% hit rate from last year, though not by much – I correctly predicted 15 of the 24 winners, which (I think, I’ve never been brilliant at sums) works out at 62.5%. The joy is tempered slightly – only slightly – by the fact that the beloved managed 19 out of 24, but I console myself with the knowledge that had I allowed myself to change my mind in the moments before some of the awards were announced, I would have done better (it was pretty obvious by halfway through the night that Jessica Chastain for actress, Lincoln for picture and Spielberg for director were all going to be off the mark, though I still wouldn’t have guessed at Ang Lee, even though I am glad he won because he’s so nice).
Anyway, that’s enough of that. On to the dresses! It wasn’t a standout year, I think. There was less beige than usual, but it was mostly replaced by bridal white (click on images to enlarge):
Vampy black:
Or a combination of the two:
Also popular were metallics:
…so popular, in fact, that Halle Berry and Stacy Keibler, wearer of my favourite dress from last year by miles, wore his’n’hers versions of the same dress:
All of which made anyone who turned up in a bright colour look very daring, although it’s far to say that Jane Fonda’s choice was, in fact, pretty daring:
I had two favourites in the end. Jenna Dewan-Tatum is clearly one of those women who looks even better pregnant – look at her literally glowing in that picture at the top of the page! – and I love her dress, even though it’s the same as everyone else’s. But for me the very best combination of dress, hair, makeup and all-out movie-starry stunningness came from Jessica Chastain:
In a non-vintage year not just for frocks but for both the ceremony and the winners too, it’s good to know that there are still nominees who can turn up and knock it out of the park, even if they don’t go home with the prize.
Next year, though, I might take two days off work afterwards.
Oscar predictions, and several shameless plugs
I’ve left it very late to make my Oscar predictions for this year, but since I will be staying up all night tomorrow blogging the ceremony for Mostly Film, I need to have a stake in the winners to keep me interested when energy levels start to flag. I scored a 50% hit rate last year, so beating that is the target for 2013. As always, I have seen fewer than half of the films in contention but I’m not going to let that stop me making wild assertions about them all. Let’s dive in!
Best Picture
Nominees: Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty
I tried to go and see Silver Linings Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty, but in the end my entire lack of interest in them both prevented me. I was warned off Les Misérables; I missed the free members’ screening of Beasts of the Southern Wild at the Ritzy and was too cross to go back and pay to see it, and the poster for Django Unchained made me feel so weary that I decided not to bother with the film. So I am uniquely unqualified to make a prediction this year, except that I have seen Lincoln and Argo, which I think are the main contenders. I didn’t love either of them and they both have bad endings, but Argo’s ending was worse, so I’m going for Lincoln (which also has a good ending, but as always with Spielberg, it’s not at the end of the film).
Best Actor
Nominees: Bradley Cooper, Daniel Day-Lewis, Hugh Jackman, Joaquin Phoenix, Denzel Washington
We don’t need to debate this, do we? Of course it will be Daniel Day-Lewis.
Best Actress
Nominees: Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence, Emmanuelle Riva, Quvenzhané Wallis, Naomi Watts
I think this is a wide-open category this year, and the best-known name on the list, Naomi Watts, is probably the least likely to take it. I’d love them to give it to Emmanuelle Riva on what will be her 86th birthday, especially as the prize will be presented by last year’s best actor, Jean Dujardin, but I have a sneaking feeling that it will go to Jessica Chastain.
Supporting Actor
Nominees: Alan Arkin, Robert De Niro, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tommy Lee Jones, Christoph Waltz
I am still not really sure why PSH is nominated in this category rather than for Best Actor, when he has nearly as much to do in The Master as Joaquin Phoenix. It’s a mesmerising performance and I’d love him to win, but Tommy Lee Jones pretty much steals the show in Lincoln, and gets the film’s big emotional scene to boot, and I think the Academy will give him the gong.
Supporting Actress
Nominees: Amy Adams, Sally Field, Anne Hathaway, Helen Hunt, Jacki Weaver
This should absolutely one hundred per cent be nailed on for Amy Adams, who ties The Master together in a way that is both understated and spectacular, but for reasons which escape me, unless it is because she bravely shaved her head for the role (that is probably the reason, in fact) this one is certainly going to Anne Hathaway.
Director
Nominees: Michael Haneke, Benh Zeitlin, Ang Lee, Steven Spielberg, David O. Russell
Again, I haven’t seen enough of the films to make a properly educated guess, but the further away I get from it the more impressed I am by Lincoln (if you ignore the ending), and I think Spielberg should get this one.
Animated Feature Film
Nominees: Brave, Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Wreck-It Ralph
I’d love them to give this to Wreck-It Ralph, but I feel like it’s too straightforwardly fun to win, so I think they’ll give it to Brave.
Animated Short
Nominees: Adam and Dog, Fresh Guacamole, Head Over Heels, Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Daycare”, Paperman
This is one of the categories in which I traditionally close my eyes and stab a finger at the screen, but this year the knowledgeable folk over at Mostly Film have previewed the short film categories, so I can steal their prediction of Paperman.
Cinematography
Nominees: Anna Karenina, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Skyfall
I can’t see this going to anything other than Life of Pi.
Costume Design
Nominees: Anna Karenina, Les Misérables, Lincoln, Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman
I think this is between Les Mis and Anna Karenina, but since The Glums has chances elsewhere I’m going to plump for Anna Karenina.
Documentary Feature
Nominees: 5 Broken Cameras, The Gatekeepers, How to Survive a Plague, The Invisible War, Searching for Sugar Man
Yeah, I haven’t seen any of these, so I’ll go with the bookies and predict a win for Searching for Sugar Man.
Documentary Short
Nominees: Inocente, Kings Point, Mondays at Racine, Open Heart, Redemption
…and I haven’t even heard of any of these, so I’ll do the same again and go for Open Heart.
Film Editing
Nominees: Argo, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty
This is a tough one! I think Lincoln is beautifully put together, except for that flabby ending, but I think they’re going to want to give Argo a prize, and this seems a likely contender.
Foreign Language Film
Nominees: Amour, Kon-Tiki, No, A Royal Affair, War Witch
With Amour also nominated in the Best Picture category, logically it can’t lose in this one.
Makeup
Nominees: Hitchcock, The Hobbit, Les Misérables
That’s a weird little group of movies to be nominated in the same category, isn’t it? I think they’ll give it to The Hobbit.
Original Score
Nominees: Anna Karenina, Argo, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Skyfall
Can they give Original Score and Original Song to different films? Apart from the theme song Skyfall is kind of boring, musically, so I’m going for Life of Pi.
Original Song
Nominees: Before My Time from Chasing Ice, Everybody Needs a Friend from Ted, Pi’s Lullaby from Life of Pi, Skyfall from Skyfall, Suddenly from Les Misérables
It’s gotta be Skyfall, doesn’t it? <Spends rest of evening singing Skyfall>
Production Design
Nominees: Anna Karenina, The Hobbit, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln
Earlier this year I had to get someone to explain the difference between Cinematography and Production Design to me. I think I understand what they both are now, and if I’m right then I think this might go to Les Misérables.
Live Action Short
Nominees: Asad, Buzkashi Boys, Curfew, Death of a Shadow, Henry
Following Mostly Film’s lead once more, I’ll go with Buzkashi Boys.
Sound Editing
Nominees: Argo, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Skyfall, Zero Dark Thirty
I still don’t know the difference between sound editing and sound mixing – perhaps finding out will be my mission ahead of the 2014 Oscars. Zero Dark Thirty has the shortest odds, which sounds good to me.
Sound Mixing
Nominees: Argo, Les Misérables, Lincoln, Life of Pi, Skyfall
On the basis that it will win for something other than the song, Skyfall.
Visual Effects
Nominees: The Hobbit, Life of Pi, Marvel’s The Avengers, Prometheus, Snow White and the Huntsman
I’d like this to go to Snow White and the Huntsman, because when someone you know has their work nominated for an Oscar you can’t help hoping they win, but I think they’ll give this to Life of Pi.
Adapted Screenplay
Nominees: Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook
Because it has more talking in it than the others, and because it has two good jokes and some great Hollywood-set scenes, I think this will go to Argo.
Original Screenplay
Nominees: Amour, Django Unchained, Flight, Moonrise Kingdom, Zero Dark Thirty
If they want to give each of the films nominated in Best Picture a nod, the obvious candidate for this one is Django Unchained. I haven’t seen it, but I get the impression it’s that same film Quentin Tarantino always makes, in which case it’s as good a choice as any.
So there you have it. Join me and my fellow hardy bloggers over at Mostly Film from around 11pm tomorrow for live updates from the red carpet and beyond. Now excuse me while I go and store up some sleep.
Recipe: borscht with celeriac and stilton soda bread
The problem with working next to Oxford Street is that there is no consumable that I can’t get hold of by leaving the office and walking for five minutes. Need new gloves? Accessorize is right there. Knickers? M&S is just over the road. A beautifully-designed but faintly useless toothbrush? Muji is your friend.
Even worse, I can eat anything I like for lunch, and even worse than that, there’s a place at the back of the always-empty and visibly low-rent Plaza shopping centre called “Pizza Hut Express”, where you can get a 6″ pizza, chips and a drink for £4.69 and eat it at your own four-seater table in the food court. For the first week after I disovered it, I ate there almost every day, because why wouldn’t you?
I offset this, in my mind, with the fact that I walk in to work from Charing Cross in the mornings and back again in the evening: an upside of this location (and there are lots) is that more or less all of central London is within walking distance of here. The station is a mile away and it me takes less than twenty minutes to stride through Soho to reach it; Camden is two miles along the edge of Regent’s Park and barely takes longer to reach than it would by tube; Shoreditch is a bit further but still under an hour away on foot, and rather that than pile onto the Central Line at Oxford Circus in rush hour.
(I don’t go to Camden or Shoreditch for fun, incidentally. I am 36. But I have to go for work sometimes.)
The other way to offset it is to eat well in the evenings, which is much easier to do (or, rather, harder to not do) now we have a veg box. In our Abel and Cole 2013 calendar, February’s recipe is this celeriac and stilton soda bread, which is super-easy to make and tastes amazing (although I had to cook it for about 20 minutes longer than the recipe said), and since they sent me beetroots instead of carrots this week I made it last night with borscht, which is one of the best cheap but exciting things to make. Do wear an apron, because even fresh raw beetroot makes everything red, though not as permanently as the pickled stuff does. This recipe is an amalgam of several, and you should play around with adding and removing things, though I think you MUST add carrots to get that carroty silkiness, and you MUST strain it through a sieve, because it’s the contrast of the rich, earthy beetroot flavour with the delicateness of a strained soup that makes it so nice to eat. If you don’t have caraway seeds you can add fennel, or you can have both, or neither.
Ingredients (serves 2)
3-4 fresh beetroots
3-4 carrots, more if they are tiny
A stick of celery
A handful of shallots
A clove of garlic
1.5L of your stock of choice (mine is chicken but beef and vegetable are OK too)
A teaspoonful of caraway seeds
A bay leaf
Method: Peel and roughly chop all the vegetables and put them in a pan with the caraway seeds, the bay leaf and some black pepper, and salt if your stock is not a salty one. Cover with the stock, bring to the boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook for about an hour. Remove the bay leaf, whizz in the blender until smooth-ish, then strain through a sieve. Reheat on the hob and serve by itself or with a splosh of sour cream (Polish sour cream, which you can get in Polish stores, of which there is definitely one near you even if you haven’t ever noticed it, is tastier). Eat wearing a bib, or something you don’t mind getting red on.
Sexy Sherlock Holmes
Via the magic pen of god of games Robert Florence, the best and most likely-to-make-me-buy-it review of a game I have ever read.
On being pro snow, plus what to do with too many parsnips
Even though I had to stand in it for forty minutes this morning waiting for a series of trains that didn’t come, and even though it took several hours for me to regain feeling in my fingers after standing outside watching Palace play out a thrilling 0-0 draw against Bolton on Saturday, I love the snow. It’s so pretty! Here is a photo my sister took yesterday in my parents’ garden:
The dog is always that handsome, but the garden definitely gains from being laden with snow. The other thing about snow is that – like a sunset, or blossom on a tree – it is all the more beautiful for being tinged with the anticipation of its loss. Beauty in nature is impermanent, which is why nature is more interesting than art – and, incidentally, why the French nature mort is a better name than the English still life, because when you paint or photograph flowers or fruit you are trapping them in an airless stasis which snuffs out their vitality at its very root.
Any fictional detective worthy of the title will tell you that snow is very helpful when it comes to finding out what people have been up to, and although I have no reason to believe anyone was murdered on my street over the weekend, I did spend some time this morning piecing together my neighbours’ overnight activity based on the prints they left behind. Someone in pointy shoes left the building before I did this morning, then turned around and came back again (the prints coming up the stairs overlaid those going down in places, you see). More unusually, a fandango of men’s footprints in some yellowish snow at the other end of the street made me wonder if we hadn’t been witness to some sort of Bullingdon-style initiation ritual in the small hours, but on reflection I think it was just a drunk man having a piss and staggering a bit.
I don’t want to leave you with a piss, so instead here is my latest culinary discovery – born, as is often the case, out of necessity rather than invention: parsnip chips. They sound boring, but they taste amazing, and I am not particularly a parsnip fan. But we had loads, so I had a look on the internet and found a recipe, of which this is an adapted version:
Take 1-2 parsnips per person (we had one each, but they were big ones) and chop them into skinny fries about two inches long and a quarter of an inch around. In a bowl, mix them with a big glug of olive oil and some crunchy salt. Heat the oven to 220 degrees, spread the chips out on a baking tray so none of them are overlapping and bake for around 12 minutes, or until the fattest chips are golden brown (it is fine if some of them go dark burnt brown; they still taste good). If your oven heats better at the back than at the front like mine, turn the baking tray around halfway through.
We had them with poached salmon (lightly boiling water with a splash of lemon juice for 5-8 minutes depending on the size of the fish) and green beans (steam in a sieve over the salmon), but they would go with almost anything. Despite my best efforts we still have loads of parsnips, so I might try a spicy version later this week. I will report back.
Were the moon landings hoaxed?
(I would never normally try to make you watch a 13-minute YouTube video, but I promise this one is worth it.)
The cutest animal in the world
From LiveScience, via Animal Planet and Popbitch, comes a list – two years old, but I’ve never seen it before – of the 500 cutest animals in the world. Five hundred! I am not fully on board with all of their choices (the frilled neck lizard? Really?), but I can’t find it in myself to disagree with the winner, despite having never heard of it before today. I give you the North Pacific sea otter:
If you’re not convinced, here’s the killer – they sleep holding hands, so they don’t float apart:
Amazing.
Update: After I posted this on Facebook, my friend Rachel pointed me towards this video, which I guarantee will make you smile, even if you have seen it before, which I hadn’t:
Glad All Over 
