Nik lives in Essex, UK and works in London as the editor of MacUser magazine. The posts and comments on this site do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or values of his employers.
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In the late 1920s, having packed her daughter off to boarding school, the divorced crime novelist Agatha Christie took a train from London to Baghdad. Iraq wasn’t in such a mess back then as it is right now, so perhaps the journey was not so unlikely back then, but still it was a major undertaking for a single mother approaching 40.
It was to be the start of a life-long love affair with the Middle East, though, which saw her spent a large part of every following year in the sands of the desert, mucking in with her second husband’s archaeological digs.
Andrew Eames stumbled across the story of her journeying almost by accident on a trip to Syria, and returned several years later to follow her route right into the heart of Baghdad on the eve of the US/British invasion.
It’s little surprise that this book has won awards. The style is flowing and natural, and the prose peppered with unusual but highly appropriate similies that give the book an extraordinary sense of life. Incidental facts around which other authors may have built long tracks demonstrate the depth of his research, and the whole thing carries you along at such a pace that you have to keep reminding yourself how long he must have been away from home doing his research: this is no small undertaking.
It is obvious that Eames has great affection for Christie’s work, and indeed he even slips into her style of snipy reportage in the closing chapters, once his journey takes him across the Iraqi border and his solo travelling is curtailed, and he finds himself a member of a larger coach-based group of intrepid explorers from the west.
Chris of the Phin was less enamoured with the ending, but for me that was the highlight – certainly once he’d got beyond the parts of Europe I’d already visited myself. The fact it took just a week and a day to read, should also say something about its style and the demands it makes on your attention.
On a related point, an audiobook version of Christie’s book The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which introduces Hercule Poirot for the first time, can be downloaded from Librivox.
It’s the last weekend of the month, so time to get out the oven gloves. Today it was ginger biscuits. Again stolen from my grandmother’s hand-written cookery book, and again rediculously easy.
Ingredients for 20 – 25 biscuits
170g (6oz) self-raising flour
Three quarters of a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
70g (2.5oz) of sugar
1 teaspoon of ground ginger
70g (2.5oz) of margarine
115g (4oz) of Golden Syrup
A pinch of salt
In it’s natural state (as it comes out of the can or bottle) Golden Syrup is too gloopy to mix, so pour your 115g into a small glass, and put this in a bowl of hot water so that it is gently warmed. This makes it much more runny, and easier to work with later on.
Put the margarine, flour and salt in a large bowl and rub them together with your hands until they form find breadcrumbs. It feels like nothing’s happening to start with (apart from your fingers getting greasy) but after a few minutes it suddenly works. Once you have the crumbs, add the sugar, ginger and bicarbonate of soda. Mix them in.
Now add the warmed syrup and stir it all together. It should be a gentle caramel colour and be holding itself together quite well.
Lightly grease a baking tray with some butter or margarine, and make small balls of your biscuit mixture. When cooked these spread a long way, so make the balls about two-thirds the size of a golf ball, flatten them slightly and then lay them on the tray with a lot of space between each one. Generally they seem to spread to about 8cm (3in) diameter.
Bake them in a moderate oven (160
Nicky and Gordon
I have known Gordon for as long as I’ve worked in this industry. I met him on my first day as a journalist. He set up my email account. Since then, we’ve always worked together, although not always on the same magazine, been on countless matching press trips, and of course we presented The Lab together for two and a half years at LBC/ITN.
On Thursday, though, he left the country, emigrating to New Zealand with Nicky. They’d been talking about it for years, and it always seemed like it was such a long time away, so there was a slightly surreal feel to the night as we all gathered at the Market Porter pub beneath London Bridge to say goodbye on Wednesday night. (Probably not helped by the fact that it is the Leaky Cauldron in the Harry Potter films. We were upstairs, in the room where Harry took refuge at the start of The Prisoner of Azkaban).
Unbelievably, Nicky was still heading into work the next day – the day they flew off to Buenos Aires – to complete her last day of notice, leaving Gordon in a flat now devoid of clothes, furniture or any kind of gadgetry, to await the point of departure.
It was a great turn-out. Almost like a reunion of the most recognisable faces of five years back, with even Ursula and Mike taking a night off from being parents. It was Mike’s first time on a tube for about two years, he said.
All told, though, it was a very civilised affair. Nobody falling down drunk, nobody being sick on the stairs. It all flew by so quickly, though, that I’d barely spoken to Gordon and Nicky before the bar was calling last orders and it was time to say goodbye. They promised they’d be back to visit in the summer, and I offered them a spare bed for a night or two, but while we didn’t see each other more than once every couple of weeks it’s going to feel very strange having Gordon right over on the other side of the planet from now on, and for all our chats to be by iChat or VoIP.
I guess it’ll be a good test of technology, though, which somehow feels highly appropriate after all this time.
The new Intel-based Macs have built-in cameras, and all run Photobooth, a snazzy little app for taking pictures for use in iChat. Naturally, when testing them, we needed to spend a good part of the day checking out the various filters and effects, just to be thorough.
Well, if it proves anything, it’s how lucky I was to get all my stuff off it in the 24 hours during which my PowerBook briefly sprung back to life. Without any warning, it booted up, not looking quite right, but at least letting me grab everything out of my mailboxes and Documents folder and back them up on an external drive.
Now, though, it’s as dead as dead can be. It won’t boot. The drives won’t mount, and they can’t even be formatted or partitioned for a nice clean wipe.
So now I’m setting it up all over again, this time installing the OS to an external drive and using that as my boot disk. I must admit, though, that a snazzy new MacBook Pro is starting to look decidedly tempting right now. I must be well behaved, though, and hang out for a possible Intel-based Mac mini before too long.
Since the July bombs on the tube, the police have been out in force every morning and evening at Liverpool Street, always with a perky-looking spaniel that seems to appreciate the attention.
I
James Bond: The Man and His World didn
This was my fourth trip to Berlin, I think, but it was easily the best. It was cold, and as we came in to land it looked like we were coming down in a very barren, sun-scortched country. It was only when we saw that the river was frozen from side to side that we realised it was snow, not dusty earth on the ground.
Fortunately we spent a lot of time being ferried around in either buses of branded taxis. We did go out walking yesterday afternoon, though, and after heading down to the Brandenburg Gate for the benefit of those in the city for the very first time, we turned left and headed down to the enormous holocaust memorial. The last time I was here, it was still a fenced-off building site, but now this enormous expanse of land is home to 2,711 blocks of concrete, each one marking the deaths of around 2000 of the 6m Jews killed under the orders of the Nazis.
It is a very impressive construction. The blocks are all tilted slightly between 0.5 and 2 degrees, and the ground on which they are set waves up and down. Sometimes they are low, down around your knees, and at others they are so tall that they tower well above your head. The whole thing is supposed to give you a sense of disorientation. Beneath, there is a museum chronicling the unfolding disaster. It’s all understated and very well done.
I have always been very impressed by the way in which Germany does not hide from its gruesome past. I went to a museum in Bonn a few years ago that dealt with the Nazi era in some depth, and unflinching detail. It’s a shame more countries (Britain included) can’t deal with the unsavoury portions of their past in quite the same way.
It put us in sombre mood, reinforced by the film we went to see last night.
It was the premiere of The Road to Guantanamo, a very hard-hitting Film Four production about how four young Britons travel to Pakistan for a friend’s wedding and, through a series of unfortunate events, end up in Guantanamo Bay. It’s based on truth, and their treatment, shown in some detail, is shocking. Although it used only two – or perhaps three – quotes from George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, it was far more effective, and had far more impact, than Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.
While walking in on the red carpet past the small group of press photographers had seemed quite fun, walking out again on the same plush strip felt highly decadent. We sat in a bar well into this morning talking about it all.
We had a city tour this morning. I’m not normally one for bus tours, but Berlin is a big place, and it’s very well spread out, so it’s more relevant here. Our narrator was excellent. He seemed to know everything about the city and its history, even though it’s only his part-time job (the rest of the time he’s a journalist). He told us all about how 20% of every new office building must be residential housing, despite the 150,000 empty apartments the city cannot fill, showed us the remaining parts of the wall and the tacky re-creation of Checkpoint Charlie, and talked us through the ‘politically contaminated’ buildings build by the Nazi Party but now used to house modern day ministries. He took us past the site of the famous Nazi book burnings, and the site of the long-gone palace (backed by the soon to be destroyed Socialist replacement put up while the city was partitioned by its wall) and then walked us up into the dome of the Reichstag, and into a restaurant on the roof, from which we could look out across the low-level city roofs.
Inside the Reichstag Dome
All in all, an excellent flying visit. There was some business, too, of course, but that’s not really the kind of thing you want to be recording on here. It’s certainly made me more keen to head back sooner, rather than later.
Of course, I know that pancake day isn’t until a week on Tuesday, but Mark looked it up on the web, and somehow convinced himself it was this week instead.
So, that’s why we had the annual Tossers Ahoy party this afternoon.
After last year’s disasters it actually turned out distinctly un-messy, despite the fact he’d spread old bed sheets across the kitchen floor to catch any poorly-targetted tosses that send hot wet batter flying across the room. Even Rick, who last year managed to produce something akin to a white dog turd in the middle of a gleaming frying pan, and Ystabub whose pancakes looked like the mask from Scream produced perfectly flat, almost round creations of suspicious quality.
We all convinced ourselves that it was only a bit of flour, milk and egg, and so could be eaten in unrestricted quantities without any feelings of guilt, and so got to the point where we could do nothing but crawl slowly towards the settee, unable to stand up through sheer gluttony.
We worked it all off laughing at a bizarre video of a New Years’ party from 1989 going into 1990, which fizzed out into what had been on the tape before: the Christmas 1973 edition of Top of the Pops presented by Tony Blackburn and Noel Edmonds. It was authentically dreadful. Drummers pretending to hit cymbols that don’t even move; singers who clearly don’t know the words to the songs they’re mouthing along to; Pans People with a tragically literal interpretation of a song that required the presence of 5 dogs on stage to work.
It would have been fine if the fifth dog hadn’t wandered off at the end of the first verse, leaving them one hound too few (or one Pan too many, depending on your point of view).
Slade was at Number 1: Merry Christmas Everybody. I wonder if they could possibly have known back then how much money that would have made them in the next 30 years.
Self-sufficiency- Reviving the rhubarb
- This year’s crabapple harvest
- The nasty death of a naughty chicken
- Struggling to keep the potatoes under control
- Eating the first lettuce of 2011
- We’ve transplanted our tomatoes
- The artichokes are rising… and so are the errant potatoes
- Curing the pecking hens
- Our rhubarb has made it through the winter
- Time to clean the greenhouse windows