Cerebral Breeze

(rather sizeable flag by the Duoro river in Porto)


(my pasty knees appreciating a beaching at Povoa De Varzim)

It came to my consentingly ultra-violated attention this afternoon, as I positioned myself spine-to-sand and space-to-face, that I'm not sure why beaches haven't completely ousted spas from the luxury leisure market. It's not as if beaches haven't got economies of scale on their side (given that there are roughly 356,000 km of coastline in the world, at least 2/3 of that must be deck-chair friendly). Although not all of them are accompanied by a glossy minimalist pamphlet or satisfyingly gravelly circular driveway, the beach rivals the spa in all the core credentials - simply trade fluffy bathrobes for charmingly frayed beach towels, flannel slippers for skinny dippers, candles and Perrier for Cornettos and pier-jumps; suddenly spas start to look like a primitive prototype for their sandy counterparts. Especially considering the luxury spa claim of the "all inclusive" notably excludes the smooth, cream-crested cerulean depths, freezer fresh Magnums and invitingly tanned locals called Pedro or something- it's a wonder tourists haven't thrown in their cucumber slices for sunglasses years ago.

A brisk sea wind rolls a soft jostle across my towel, through my toes. Tousling loose hairs, like the reassuring hand of a relative, it insistantly hustles out the pedantic strains and petulent stresses that, drainingly unwelcome, bustle and stagnate in every nerve ending, naggingly sensitive to every touch.

I'm relieved to feel them dusted away; those dredges and bundles of frantic fret that silently leeched from an otherwise sunny dispostion. The seaside is medicinal, purifying in its granular swerves, its blunt unhuman denial of repitition, disregarding of habit and the practical. Not one shore the same, not even the same stretch matches from second to second; but like James Bond's varying but inevitable successes, or Jordan's perennial demises, each more reliably and predictably embarassing than the last , the coastline reassuringly supplies a fret-draining fix at each and every port. Except Weston-Super-Mare, which remains life re-affirming solely for Jeremy Kyle's producer.

Harrow, Goodbye

"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."
— A.A. Milne

Blustered and mingling whorls of heeled up, tanned up, tanked up shadows ebb and flow. Road to road, house to taxi, they lace the wet air with the evenings jokes, amplified by lambrini. Looking out from my attic window, I'm about to go out and be one of them, all sparkles and picture-posing and quid-each-to-Broad-Street-yeah?. I can't wait. But, after tonight, I'll have to wait. The year abroad is so near now I can smell the gelato on its breath; the thrill of change so close, its almost tangible. Glancing back at my old, and someone else's new, room, I remember how it's quietly held it's own this past year.

The blue tack blemishes, pin pockmarks: evidence that it, fleetingly, held up posters, treasured photos, cards, decorations- flimsy projections of a personality that worked, rested, played and shortly stayed in these four walls. Housemates joined me here for the lows and the highs:

There's the high-flying Landan Gal, with a faff here and a Gallo there, she'll make the headlines (literally).
Our forever-birthday Performer Princess is the fun and glamorous star of the show, and the boss of it, naturally.
The Fresher's Choice and all-round bloke's bloke (but don't forget, Cameron's HIS main man) is always there to supply logic, reason and advice, fuelled by Coco Shreddies and Pot Noodle (that is unless it's Forrest'O'Clock).
There's the Main Mod, whose media technology, music knowledge, love of Smiley Faces and upholding of personal style remain unsurpassed.
And who could forget Chef Celtic: he's your man for football, films, cooking up hilarious disaster out on the town, and always for a hug and a glass of Papa Murdie's finest.
Last but not least, honorary member Top Tough Cookie, which I now know is a soft cookie really: together we should make bipolar opposing mayhem, but instead, I'm glad to know that her brusque, stylish self is always on the end of that award-winning phone.

So I turn and teeter downstairs to join them all for a drink and a party, altogether, once more with feeling. See you soon 53, you'll be missed.

xxx

Chocolate Marble Cheesecake- patience is a virtue

So I had a balmy afternoon, a newly spangly-clean kitchen (thanks Shires) and the end of a terms loan dawdling in my debit card. What's a girl to do?

Each marbled segment a glistening portal to a peaceful 3 minutes or so- it was worth the wait, worth nearly buying blue food colouring instead of vanilla essence, worth actually waiting the proper time for it to chill instead of just shoving it in the bottom of the freezer. Cheesecake, an enigmatic delight: no matter how much double cream, creamy chocolate, sour cream and cream cheese you cream together and ladle onto butter biscuits, it inevitably results in fresh, soothing forkfuls, like clouds condensed. Oh goody, I can use my cake stand .... but why are there a pair of diamente grills and a stack of frat-party style cups living on it? Selly Oak, how I'll miss you...

Obsessacino to go, don’t hold the crazy foam

So I thought I’d post some of the choicest chat exerts from the library coffee machine queue, which is, quite unwittingly, capable of delivering not only high calibre people-watching, but the latest in close range eavesdropping entertainment.
It’s rather astonishing what people will let slip in public, when no-one around is visibly reacting, which doesn’t however -obviously, one would think- mean that they aren’t paying careful attention. You know how people sometimes say they feel alone in a crowd? Well, not in this one they won’t. If you’re daft enough to talk, we’re shameless enough to listen.
Today’s overheard Star Duo include Nameless Girl- we will call her Shelly, due to her uncanny impersonation of a mollusc, clasping- avid, tenacious and apparently for her very survival- to an inertly oblivious rock, from reference to which, by Nameless Girl, we know to be called Tim.
(Subtitles have been included for ease of translation from HormonalFresher to English).

Shelly: *beams, adhering to arm of Tim, continuing conversation prior to queue* “. . . so I think you’ve got a little admirer! But you know she’s basically a complete psycho” (translation: “Look at me, me, me, I’m attached to your arm so it looks to passers-by like we are togetherrrrrr.”)
Tim: “. . . . . . yeah.”

-pause-

Shelly: “So when did you and Cassie decide you were in love with each other? *giggle*” (trans: “I will not hesitate to stop the circulation in your arm , via intensified clinging, if you don’t dump her immediately and tell everyone that I am an ACTUAL GODDESS.”)
Tim: *long pause, mumble*

-pause, + intermittent smatterings of flirtation from Shelly (“ohmygosh, *giggle* why am I here, I should be doing some work” *giggle*)-

Shelly: “So are you and Cassie having sex?”

-pause, saturated with heated blushing from Tim-

Shelly: “So are you? *giggle*” (trans: “we could get married and I could wear pretty dresses and bake you cookies and we could have a dreamy house in SWI with labradors and a live-in nanny and Cassie has shattered the dream and taken it away WHY WHY WHY, YOU ARE A MALE! WHY DON’T YOU ADORE ME! OVERDOSE ME WITH AFFECTION!!!!”)

-pause-

Tim: “. . . . . yeah, so what do you thinks up with that?” *points at perfectly functional coffee machine*
Shelly: “Are you not, like, seeing other people?” (trans: “AAAAAAAAAARRRRRGRGRGGHHH”)
Tim: *unheard mumbling and glancing around*

-pause, + light vague conversation-

*Tim starts humming a tune to himself, occasionally quietly singing the words*
Shelly: “What are you singing?”
Tim: “The Mariah Carey song, ‘Obsessed with me’.”
Shelly: “Oh yeah” *hums along for a moment* [note: still hard to deduce whether blinding irony was intended, but comic regardless. other apt song lyrics to hum may include Dizzee Rascals’ ‘Some people think I’m bonkers, because I am’ or Bublѐ’s ‘Crazy little thing called Love-me-for-fucks-sake’, or ‘I’m so full of hormones, it’s a wonder they aren’t seeping from my pores and bringing inanimate objects around me to life’. Oh wait, not sure the last one has been written yet. oh yeah, and last but not least:]

Tim: “Shall I get Cassie a Coke?”
Shelly: “Why, to show her how much you LOVE HER?”

University Libraries: where increase in fun is directly proportional to decrease in dignity. Stay in school kids, this stuff’s better than TV.

art that i heart

Below is a new favourite, thank you Duck. And was today excited to find out what Fiona Rae (my forever favourite) would look like with a Y chromasome and slightly oriental/avian leanings. Turns out he's called James Aldridge, and his commisionned piece for the Tate Modern restaurant has been there since 2007, look, there it is up there. Out of touch much?

Les Chats

Both ardent lovers and austere scholars
Love in their mature years
The strong and gentle cats, pride of the house,
Who like them are sedentary and sensitive to cold.

Friends of learning and sensual pleasure,
They seek the silence and the horror of darkness;
Erebus would have used them as his gloomy steeds:
If their pride could let them stoop to bondage.

When they dream, they assume the noble attitudes
Of the mighty sphinxes stretched out in solitude,
Who seem to fall into a sleep of endless dreams;

Their fertile loins are full of magic sparks,
And particles of gold, like fine grains of sand,
Spangle dimly their mystic eyes.

Charles Baudelaire

Sweet Tooths Inc.

It was bound to happen. In the kitchen, as with everywhere else, what goes up must come down. That doesn't just apply to soufflés. The vanilla-gilded aura that has been beaming out from the cupcake for some time now has, inevitably, begun to flicker.
When once our be-sprinkled friends could do no wrong, there are now those who mock, who jeer their admittedly absurd shoot to fame. Food blogger Sophie Jordan sneeringly dismisses them as, “the most infantile baked goods imaginable”. Even those on the opposite side of the foodie fence cant help but wonder how these souped-up little sponges found themselves, bewildered and Bambi-eyed, in centre stage. Paper cased and showcased, iced to the nines- like daughters playing gaudy dress-up in mummy’s jewellery and make-up.
Entire shops are devoted to these twee-ly glitzy calorie bombs, droves of yummy mummies, lunch-breaking nine-to-fivers, hard workers, shirkers, assistants, maids and managers can all be found frothing at the counters, as if they housed some hybrid of hyper-cute puppies, bred for ultra-adorability, crossed with syrup-dipped Chippendales.

Some cakes are verging on snacks in drag, in sickly yellows, pinks and blues, on the brink of diabetic, glitter-spewing, bright-fright meltdown.
So what’s the fuss? They’re hardly the gastronomic grail. We all see them for what they are, surely? They’re what almost every last one of us used to avidly bodge together as children, whether we were spilling the self-raising onto cracked lino kitchen surface, lurid Ikea wipe-down mats, or lacquered stretches of pine worktop, while the au-pair wiped up frantically as you went.

The only difference is, now, fully grown strangers process them in factory sterility, and demand a fiver a pop for the privilege. These little sugar-nests- they’re our own childhoods gone cooperate, siphoned straight from our fond memories and regurgitated for us in pristine Cath Kidson uniformity. And up till now, we couldn’t snaffle the things down fast enough. And I don’t think, despite the growing bake-hating, doggedly Scrooge-esque blogs such as “cupcakesareshit.tumblr.com” (yes, really), that we’re going to stop any time soon. Even if we do admit the whole phenomenon is a bit daft, actually, and any self-respecting primate, given half a dozen ingredients, bowl, spoon and oven, could whip up a batch blindfold, I’ve got a hunch that we’ll carry on investing in this sweet stuff for a little while yet.

The truth is, they’re not deemed glutinous, but just one packs more punch than necking the sugar bowl. They’re marketed as flirty and feminine, but I challenge you to find a butcher onslaught of carbs that we can chicly, smirkingly, tuck into at our desks. They float like a butterfly cake, and sting like a syringe of glucose shot straight into the veins. They’re what we craved for every time we opened our lunch boxes, and found an apple there instead.

We’re grown-up’s now, right? So we’ll have our sickly sweet, party-bag playground treat anytime we like, thanks very much.

Home on the Trains

“…And behold, as I pull this cloth from beneath the crystal and the china, in a flash! Every piece will stay intact, before your very eyes! And a one, two three…” A grassy gingham table cloth, captured mid-whip, as some vast, ethereal, velvet waist-coated magician performs to an unseen audience. Precariously, the cloth landscape holds its contents in flux, and stands on ceremony, glorious but jumbled, tentatively awaiting applause.

Flexing squares brace interlocking rectangles in a tufty, bird-pecked patchwork. Telegraph wires and electric fences guillotine the view into structure, while, behind, blossoming clouds billow out, like a child’s handwriting, innocently straying outside the lines.

As the speed picks up, eventually only smeared beams slur past the scratchy porthole- charcoal, misty dust, brown, brown, browner, quiet green, musty blue, and finally, bright. A train ride rainbow.

In the mild and towering distance, the audience beams- it’s a decorous ovation. It’s for the crowds of mottled cows, struck parallel like iron filings, it’s for the hotch-potched fields and mismatched walls, it’s for all the smirking quirks, the nonchalant oddities- it’s for our green and pleasantly surprising land.