Advent song for December 1: Happy Christmas, Tom!

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music

This is one of my favourites, and as well as it being a good song to start with, Tom is a good person to start with, because he is EVERYONE’S FRIEND. I have almost never met anyone as kind, open, generous and without side as Tom: when Tom looks happy to see you, it’s because he’s happy to see you, and he’s always happy to see you. He also looks after my little sister like a big brother, and although she already has one big brother, there’s nothing wrong with having a spare.

Happy Christmas, Tom. I don’t know which tune you prefer, so have one of each:

Advent calendar for 2011

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music

Forgive my prolonged absence. I’ve been busy getting married, among other things. Also, I always get lazy about blogging in November in the knowledge that when December comes I’ll be posting at least once a day. Yes, it’s time for the annual Gladallover musical advent calendar!

I ran out of good Christmas songs two years ago, so last year I changed the format and did a 24-day countdown of the best Christmas number ones from my lifetime. This year I needed a brand new idea, so a few weeks ago I asked my friends on Twitter and Facebook to nominate their favourite Christmas songs. I got quite a lot more than 24 replies, so I have whittled them down to my 24 favourites (songs, not people), and this year each day’s entry will be a song chosen by someone I know from either Twitter or Facebook, with a note on the song from me and also, to make it more interesting, a bit about the person who nominated it. Some of the people who chose songs are related to me, others I know in real life and some I don’t know at all.  But I promise to be nice about everyone. After all, it’s Christmas.

See you back here on Thursday x

Let’s talk turkey

On By Laura MorganIn Cooking, Small pleasures1 Comment

I don’t much like turkey. And apart from the beloved, who doesn’t like jacket potatoes so his taste in food is questionable anyway, I don’t really know anyone who does. We all eat it at Christmas because we’re supposed to, but chicken is just as nice and usually nicer, and certainly easier to cook. So what’s the point of turkey?

All of which went through my mind yesterday when I realised with dismay, halfway through marinating it for a stir fry, that I had accidentally bought turkey breast rather than chicken. Oh well, I thought, the beloved will enjoy it even if I don’t. And, feeling rather saintly, I continued marinating it in walnut oil, garlic, ginger, chillies and chives.

(The walnut oil and chives are a little unorthodox, I know: it’s just that unless there’s a compelling reason not to, I put walnut oil and chives in everything, because they are two of my favourite things.)

Later on, with the addition of cashew nuts, mange tout, egg noodles and a splash of soy sauce, I fried it all up and served it with a wrinkled nose and a feeling of resignation. And you know what? It was amazing. The turkey had a richness and a smokiness that I’ve never got from chicken, but was still light enough to carry all the flavours of the marinade without overwhelming them. It tasted almost more like pork than like chicken, and contrasted beautifully with the lightness of the mange tout and the noodles. It was also, contrary to expectations, not in the least dry, but juicy and succulent, even where I’d burned some of it at the edges when I left the kitchen briefly and then forgot to go back until I smelled the smoke.

So there you go: turkey isn’t as horrible as I thought, and it’s worth experimenting with methods other than the full Christmas roast version, because now I have a whole new ingredient to start playing with.

I am still right about jacket potatoes, though.

A shamelessly upbeat post

On By Laura MorganIn Reasons to be cheerful1 Comment

In the same way that it’s worth living in a country where it rains in order to experience the wonder of a sunny day, it’s sometimes worth being (a bit) ill, because it’s so nice to wake up and realise you’re well again. I spent yesterday in a vague haze of back and stomach pain, curled up on a sofa half-watching terrible Christmas films on a movie channel I’d never heard of and will no doubt never see again. I went to bed with a hot water bottle at ten past nine, and woke up at seven o’clock this morning feeling BRILLIANT. It’s quarter to nine and I have already been out for a newspaper and breakfast, made tea for two and solved a problem for my twelve-year-old god-daughter, and before the day is out I shall have been back out to the shops for proper food, recorded a voice demo (technology permitting), dealt with a plumber and a roofer and made – and eaten – dinner* for four. And I’m looking forward to all of it. It’s a shame it’s so grey and gloomy outside – but if it weren’t, the prospect of a sunny day to come wouldn’t be half so exciting.

*Talking of dinner, I made a revolutionary poultry-based discovery last night, which I will share later in a separate post.

Elsie and the Magic Torch

On By Laura MorganIn Communication, Media1 Comment

I suffer from intermittent insomnia. I’ve never had a problem getting to sleep, but I sometimes wake up in the small hours and I can’t get back to sleep. Or at least, that used to be true until I discovered that if I put ear plugs in the moment I wake up, it somehow serves to switch me back off, and I can sleep peacefully again until the alarm wakes the beloved and he nudges me to tell me it’s time to resume consciousness.

So that’s good. But I can’t go to the loo with ear plugs in – it’s like going indoors with sunglasses on: I feel impaired. So when I got up and went to the loo last night I took my ear plugs out, and promptly dropped one of them on the floor. Hmm, I thought as I padded to the bathroom and back. I won’t get back to sleep without that, but I’ve no idea where it went. What I need is a torch.

And as I sleepily thought about where I might find a torch, I remembered that in July we went to the Hop Farm Festival. We had day tickets, but it was the men’s final at Wimbledon and we didn’t leave the house until around 6pm, so we only caught the end of Tinie Tempah, followed by Prince, who was the reason we were there in the first place, so it was all fine. Except that at around 10pm I decided to go to the loo (sorry, I know this is a more than usually lavatorial post. I can only apologise and assure you that it’s entirely pertinent to the story), and it was night time, and I realised I was going to have to pee in a portaloo in the dark. That doesn’t sound like fun, I thought, and then I thought a bit more, took out my phone, found the apps market and searched for “torch”.

If you search the apps market for “torch” you get 801 results. The one I chose is called “Brightest Flashlight Free”, and it is all of those things. It takes what I assume is the flash function of the camera inside my phone and turns it into a beam of white light, which lasts for as long as you keep the app open. I was so surprised that I flashed it into my eyes, momentarily blinding myself.

It was only last night, thinking about where I could find a torch, that I realised that at 10pm on a Sunday night in a field in Kent, by pressing a few times on a piece of glass, I had summoned up a torch where none had existed before.

Well, I mean, really that’s almost witchcraft, isn’t it?

By that time I had found the rogue ear plug without the aid of a torch, but I was so struck by the realisation that my smartphone had made it possible for me to magic up a physical tool which I didn’t have prior to that point that I stayed awake for another hour thinking about it. What a weird and fantastic, in every sense, world we have made for ourselves. And how lucky to be alive now, when everything changes so quickly that my grandmothers would only recognise about half of the things I spend my time doing.

(I never used the torch that night at the Hop Farm Festival, by the way. It turned out the portaloos had little lights of their own on the inside. But still.)

Bert Jansch

On By Laura MorganIn Music3 Comments

I am cross with myself. I am cross with myself because when Davy Graham died three years ago, I decided I would make a conscious effort to go and see all the musicians I love best who I’ve never seen live and who won’t be around forever. High up on that list was Bert Jansch. I could have seen him performing with Pentangle at Glastonbury, but it clashed with something else, so I didn’t. And I could have seen them at the Festival Hall in August, but I had promised to go and see a friend’s band that night, so I didn’t.

And now Bert Jansch has died, and I could have seen him, and I didn’t, and now I never will. What an idiot. Here’s what I missed:

I am going to make a list, now, today, of people to see before they, or I, die. And I am going to post it here, and if you see any of them coming to London, please shout at me and tell me to go and see them. And if I say I’m busy that night, tell me I’m an idiot.

I know

On By Laura MorganIn Football1 Comment

…that the season’s started and I haven’t posted about the football yet. You know when you see a red squirrel or a kingfisher and it’s beautiful and miraculous and you know if you move an inch it’ll run away and you’ll never see it again? Well, that.

But…shh, don’t say anything…and DON’T COME ANY CLOSER! Just – shh – look.

Bad all over

On By Laura MorganIn London, Politics7 Comments

A few years ago, someone published a book called Is It Just Me, Or Is Everything Shit?. At the time I instinctively recoiled from such an ungenerous assessment, and I was pleased a short while later when in response someone else published a book called It Is Just You, Everything’s Not Shit.

(I have never read either book; I think this must all have happened during my bookshop years, which is how I knew about them. I am not wildly into novelty books, apart from One Hundred Great Books in Haiku, which is totally worth the £9.99 even though it only lasts eleven minutes.)

But I am generally in favour of being in favour of things. After all, everything’s not shit. There’s this, for example. And this. I called this blog Glad All Over not only because it’s the Palace anthem, but because I like the sentiment. I even used to have a rule about only posting cheerful things, though that went by the wayside some time ago. You have to be able to rant sometimes, after all.

But today is different. Today I don’t have anything to rant about, specifically. Today I’m just baffled and weary: at the rioters who swarmed and set fire to my city; at what seems to be wilful misunderstanding of the causes of the riots by members of the commentariat of all political persuasions; at the rage and hate that spilled out of Twitter over the ensuing days; at the undignified spat now bubbling away between the government and the Met police; at the sensibility that says we don’t force companies to pay their taxes but we should put a student in jail for six months for stealing a bottle of water; at the endorsement of genuine lunatic Michelle Bachman by the voters of Iowa; at the fact that my season ticket has stopped working for the second time in a week and the man at Charing Cross won’t replace it because it was issued by Southern and he works for Southeastern, and, today, at the fact that I used week-old ingredients to make the salad that I had for lunch, and it was exactly as horrible as you’d expect. It’s all just exhausting.

But there are spots of light in the darkness, even if lunch wasn’t one of them.  For every closed-minded bigot railing against The Youth Of Today there was someone giving a thoughtful and balanced response. There was the father of one of the men killed in Birmingham last week, who has now spoken publicly twice and been extraordinarily measured, dignified and wise both times. There were the people who gave their time to clean up after the riots, and the companies who offered rebuilding and glazing services for free to people whose houses and shops had been damaged. There’s the campaign that raised £35,000 to help Aaron Biber, the 89-year-old whose Tottenham barber’s shop was wrecked on the first night of the riots, and the £22,000 that was donated to Ashraf Rossli, the student whose mugging was caught on camera. For all the horror and the violence of the riots and for all the ugliness of the political reaction, there have been some shining moments of humanity over the last week.

So there you go. It is just me, and everything’s not shit. But I’ll tell you what: I am treating myself to a proper lunch tomorrow.