Thursday 18 March 2010

Cake of the Day (2)

Today's - ahem - secondary cake is a chocolate and cherry tiffin with lovely biscuit bits. Delicious!

This does mean, however, that there will be no Cake of the Day tomorrow.

Cake of the Day

Today's primary cake is a massive blueberry meringue, four by five inches oblong, and an inch high throughout: 20 cubic inches of eggy sugary fruity froth. Bliss!

Thursday 11 March 2010

Doughnuts are not nice

We cover them in sugar, and fill them with jam to hide this fact. But the dough is stale, heavy, when cold.

File under "best served hot".

Saturday 6 March 2010

Spring, and a Young Man's Thoughts

...turn to spring cleaning, obviously.

Today, I cleaned my car (I know, I know; who am I and what have I done with me?). Panic not, I've not changed so much; I won't be taking up golf any time soon.

In my defence, it was just the inside, filthy from the latest trip to the household recycling centre (that place that used to be called a tip). Certainly not the outside, filthy from a winter full of salty gritty roads (and another 3 or 4 winters before that; the last time I personally cleaned my car was when my father died).

Yes, my car has been cleaned since then. I distinctly remember the time I put the car through the wash at the garage, and wrenched my aerial off in the process (so that the carwash wouldn't damage it, you see).

So what prompted me to this rare act? Spring madness? No, it seems I've discovered a sense of pride. Or at least, a sense or bored frustration with the state of the car. Or because I'm planning on selling it. You decide.

In the process of cleaning, I found stones, more fingernails than I have fingers, and 2 bits of ladybird.

Two bits of ladybird. Well, it is spring.

Monday 1 March 2010

Gu chocs

They say:

"A luscious liquid caramel enhanced with a hint of sea salt encased
in 70% cocoa chocolate"

I say:
To describe them as "grown up rolos" would be largely accurate, but unfair. These are luscious chocolate - not milky - and the caramel is indeed liquid, fluid, runny. They burst in the mouth, spilling their honeyed centre (that could, for my money, include a little more than a hint of sea salt).

A real indulgence; expensive, but worth while. Delicious.

Blogsplash! Fiona Robyn's new novel: Thaw

Ruth's diary is the new novel by Fiona Robyn, called Thaw. Fiona has decided to blog the novel in its entirety over the next few months, so you can read it for free.

Ruth's first entry is below, and you can continue reading tomorrow.

Thaw cover image

These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I'm giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don't think I'm alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.

So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat — books you have to take in both hands to lift. I've had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about — princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.

I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say, ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for,’ before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision. That’s it for today. It’s begun.

Continue reading here