Lunch
As part of my new regime of austerity (turns out having two flats and getting married at the same time as you take a pay cut is expensive), I have taken to bringing a packed lunch to work every day. Some days – the good days – I bring in leftovers from the previous night’s dinner and microwave them. Today I have jambalaya. Today is a good day.
On other days, though, when I have to make something from scratch in a hurry, I have found myself to be sadly lacking in inspiration. I’m not wild on sandwiches, although I will make a cheese or an egg mayonnaise sandwich every few days. (The trick to egg mayonnaise, incidentally, is to make it the day you’re going to eat it, boil the eggs for five minutes so the yolk is set but still glutinous rather than fluffy, and use more salt and pepper and less mayonnaise than you think you need.)
I also sometimes have jam sandwiches, but I’m not going to mention that.
So far, the simplest and cheapest packed lunch I’ve found is some sliced cheese or chicken or both; some chopped vegetables (carrots and cucumber and baby tomatoes, mostly); a handful of Ryvita or similar bread-substitute and a cheeky chocolate chip cookie, served with a carton of juice and a cup of tea. It’s nice, but it’s a bit boring and eerily reminiscent of the sorts of meals I ate a lot when I was six, so I am appealing to you, wise reader, for some alternative suggestions. Here are the rules:
– I don’t really eat red meat
– although I do eat sausages and minced beef
– it needs to be cheaper than buying lunch, and quicker than cooking a proper meal
– there should be some vague sort of a nod towards a balanced diet
– I don’t count fruit as food
There. I will give a prize for the best idea posted in the comments (or, as is quite likely, the only idea posted in the comments).
Postsecret
Do you know Postsecret? You write your secret on a postcard and send it to Frank, who publishes a long list of them every Sunday. It’s funny and sad and scary and always worth reading. Yesterday’s post starts with this secret:
I stopped and looked at it for quite a long time, and not just because Marilyn is so gorgeous (though partly that, obviously). I think the message is quite important. If I tell you that I hate my nose, I’m telling you that there’s an acceptable and an unacceptable way for noses to be, and if you’re the kind of person to worry, you may well start to worry about your own nose. So body criticism is an aggressive act, even when it’s directed inwards. I must try to remember that.
Plus one
I don’t often, by which I mean ever, write about work-related things here. I want to say it’s because I don’t have the time, but there are plenty of people with tougher jobs than mine who nonetheless manage to write about them regularly. Maybe it’s because although I think my work is interesting, I can see how other people might not.
But today I want to talk a little bit about Google Plus, the new social tool from Google which launched a couple of weeks ago, so this post is in the nature of an experiment. Feel free to skip it; there’s bound to be a post about kittens falling over soon.
Still here? Excellent. So, first impressions. It looks a whole lot like Facebook:
(You might need to click on the image to see it properly.)
As far as I can tell, the main functional difference between G+ and Facebook is a feature which, actually, Facebook already has, but which it doesn’t make much of. Facebook calls it “lists”; G+ calls it “circles”, but the idea is the same: you divide your contacts into groups so that you can target what you share at particular sets of people.
So, for example, I might post a picture of my new baby niece and share it with my “Friends” and “Family” circles, but not with “Work”, “Following” (I use that one for people I don’t know at all) or “Public” (if I mark a post as “Public” it means anyone who looks at my profile or has me in a circle can see it). Likewise, if I want to ask a technical question or share some thoughts on the latest radio industry news, I might just share it with my “Work” and “Following” circles.
What that means is that I can now get my tech news, my music news, my media news and my friends’ news all in the same place; I can decide what I want to share with which people, and I can dip in and out of it just like I do now with Twitter or Facebook.
So that’s one positive. Another is that you can easily make connections with people you don’t know, in a way that allows much more and easier interaction than Twitter does. Let’s say you and I are both big fans of Limmy. Limmy writes a post (that’s what I’m calling them for now; they may end up with a different name) on G+ and you and I both read it and comment on it. I see your comment, click on your name and see that we have things in common, or I just like the sound of you, so I click “Add to circles” and stick you in my “Following” circle. You get a notification that tells you I’ve done that, so you check out my profile and can decide whether to add me to one or your circles. We’ve never met and we live thousands of miles apart, but now we can share ideas, photos, video, music and more. That’s kind of exciting.
I don’t think G+ will replace Facebook, because they serve a different need. I have 271 friends on Facebook (all but one of whom I know from real life), and right now Facebook is giving most of them everything they need from a social network. Some of them will join G+, but Facebook can copy any feature that G+ has in a matter of days or weeks, which is always going to be a shorter time than it takes the majority of people to be persuaded to move elsewhere.
I don’t think G+ will replace Twitter, because again, they’re very different animals. The 140-character restriction on Twitter and the super-fast stream of information it can provide when you follow enough people mean it’s the best place for breaking news and terrible one-liners. G+ won’t change that.
As I said elsewhere on recently, I think Tumblr is probably going to suffer the most from the launch of G+, because it doesn’t have a USP that distinguishes it from the competition. But we’ll see. G+ is only a couple of weeks old and isn’t fully rolled out to the public yet, so the story has barely begun. We knew Facebook had made it when instead of saying “I’ll send you a friend request on Facebook”, they started saying “I’ll friend you”, and we all knew what they meant. So for now, I’m just waiting for someone to tell me: “I’ll circle you”.
A Glastonbury-inspired quick supper
It’s been so long since I posted that I’ve got too many things to write about and I don’t know where to start. I could write about the Hop Farm Festival, or our trip to Dorset, or my brand new niece:
(I know!)
And I have several separate blog posts to make about Glastonbury, if I ever get around to them, but I’ve just had a look at the searches that have led people here today, and one of them was “chorizo and halloumi recipes”, which reminded me that we’ve had the same dinner three times since we got back from Glastonbury, because it is easy, tasty and just about perfect for a warm summer evening. It’s inspired by a chorizo and halloumi wrap I bought from a Greek food stall sometime on the Sunday, which was by far the nicest thing I ate all weekend, and it goes like this:
Take two large handfuls of green salad leaves – whichever kind you like best, but sweetish ones rather than bitter ones – and add finely chopped cucumber, red onion (not too much) and the sweetest cherry tomatoes you can find (tip: greengrocers have sweeter ones than supermarkets, in my experience). Then take about half a chorizo sausage, the kind you buy folded in two, and a pack of halloumi (I use the whole thing; the beloved, being more of a meat fan, uses more sausage and less cheese), chop into mouthful-sized pieces and fry them together in a splash of olive oil. When the halloumi has started to brown on both sides, tip the meat, cheese and oil on top of the salad. Add some chopped lemon zest and eat with warmed pittas. Serves two.
I don’t have a photo of the recipe to show you, so here’s another photo of my niece instead:
(I know, right?)
“I want them in a basket”
I’m pretty sure this can’t be real, because although I can imagine someone making this video, I can’t imagine them then going on to post it as their actual online dating profile – but it had me crying with laughter at my desk anyway.
And if you need another laugh on a drizzly Friday afternoon, try this neat ad from ENO:
Hello, Sydenham!
A few weeks ago I wrote about not being sure whether to spend my summer swimming at Brockwell Lido or the Endell Street baths. Within a week of that the weather had changed and I found that I had no inclination to swim in the unheated lido when the temperature outside was below 25°. So it was already pretty much moot by the time we packed our bags last weekend and upped sticks to leafy SE26.
I love Herne Hill, but it turns out that almost everywhere else in South London is cheaper to live in, so for the first time we have a nice big flat with an ACTUAL BATH and a SEPARATE KITCHEN and even a SPARE BEDROOM. It’s very exciting.
And Sydenham has cool stuff too! Aside from the unheard-of convenience of a choice of several cash machines, none of which want £1.95 of my money in order to let me at the rest of it, Sydenham has a High Street with proper shops in it (as well as a useful sprinkling of pound shops and takeaways); a corner of Crystal Palace Park as well as at least two more parks of its own; a Christopher Wren steeple in a private back garden; a beast, and direct rail access to almost everywhere you could hope for – London Bridge, Charing Cross, Victoria, Norwood Junction (got to get to those home games), Shoreditch, Hoxton, Highbury and Islington, West Croydon (home of the nation’s last remaining Allders) and Crystal Palace (should we be feeling very lazy indeed), as well as Brixton and Herne Hill. We’ve gone from zone 2 to zone 3, but my commute is suddenly the easiest and pleasantest I’ve ever had.
So I am delighted to have landed in this friendly corner of south London, two minutes’ walk from one station, ten minutes from two others and less than five minutes from my god-daughter and her family and their dog (they don’t know it yet, but we plan to spend the whole summer having barbeques in their garden, even when they’re not there).
I don’t know as many people here yet as I do in SE24, but I have already joined the Sydenham Town forum, and one day I might even say hello to someone in real life.
All stewed in
I’ve just imported all the posts from All Stewed Up, my food and eating blog, back here. Two reasons: firstly, I kept having ideas for blog posts and then not being sure whether they lived here or there (examples: a snitty review of a restaurant; a plea for packed lunch ideas), and secondly, it turns out that, having gotten most of my ranting out of my system, I don’t have all that much to say about food after all. I’ll still post recipes and the occasional rant, but they seem to fit here just as well, and they looked a bit lonely over there in the corner by themselves.
I’m toying with the idea of importing A Long Succession of Thin Evenings, too, but since that has multiple authors and is a bit more specialist, I’m going to leave it where it is for now, even though I like the idea of everything being in the same place, rather than thinly spread over several locations.
I will still mainly be on Twitter.
Dark glasses
I spent yesterday in a pleasant bank holiday haze, watching tennis and old films and eating scrambled eggs on toast. I was so relaxed that unless you’d been looking closely you might not have known I was awake. “This is how bank holidays should be”, I thought, as I briefly emerged from a doze between sets. “I’ll sleep well tonight.”
So naturally I woke up at 4am in a full-body clench of insomnia and anxiety that came from nowhere and has now dissipated, its only after-effects being a darkening of the circles under the eyes that arrived sometime after university and will never leave. I like to think they add character.
But tired eyes give me an excuse to wear dark glasses when it’s not very sunny, and wearing dark glasses when it’s not very sunny is something I love doing. When I am old I will wear them all the time, even indoors. I don’t remember much about my maternal grandfather but I remember that he wore dark glasses all the time, even indoors, and that it made him look kind of cool and a bit forbidding at the same time. Since that’s a look I aspire to anyway, it all falls into place perfectly.
The other upside to insomnia is that 4am is actually quite a lovely time to be awake at this time of year. The birds were singing and there was no traffic or shouting or loud music to drown them out. The only other sound was the periodic honking of someone’s car alarm, but even that came with a silver lining because it woke up the beloved, and if there’s one thing you want when you’re lying awake in a full-body clench of insomnia and anxiety, it’s company.
Glad All Over 