Looking Out To Sea

You see, this is why you should never announce intentions, never announce that you’re going to do something imminently because the only possible outcome of that kind of promise is that (a) you then find life carries you away to do a million other things and you have no time to do the last few things you meant to do or (b) you realise what a horrible mess you’ve made and dive back into the project in order to fix it.

I have been suffering a little from (a) and a little from (b) this weekend. Thankfully I’ve got Monday and Tuesday off work in which to make some amends, though really I’m using that time to whip the house into some neater shape for The Student, and tomorrow we’re away to Glasgow. I’m managing to snatch minutes here and there and I’m slowly getting close to something I’d be happy to release.

Last night was the final night of the Edinburgh International Festival, with a concert and firework display above Princes’ Street Gardens. We had Kate and Ben around for dinner and we peered out the window at the fireworks, listening to the performance streamed from the Forth One website. Unfortunately there’s a row of chimney pots that block a good chunk of the view, so we could only see the top half of the higher explosions. (So we couldn’t see the waterfall, but it’s always rubbish I think anyway.) Hilariously the radio stream was several seconds behind the display. At one interlude the radio commentator was still talking while the first fireworks exploded in the distance. I wonder if that was a special delay for those using the intarwebs or if the radio was also slightly behind.

Meal was good though and we had good chat. Kate and Helen had a knitting session while Ben and I looked on, slightly aghast. For the first time that I remember we managed to get everything prepared ahead of schedule and weren’t fretting as people arrived. We must be grown-ups now. Maybe I should start keeping stamps in my wallet.

Busy weekend. On Friday night I left work and went straight to The Shore for a pub meet — Greener Leith and Green Drinks teaming up, and we took over the largest chunk of the pub. It was fun and though I didn’t meet many Leith people it was a nice evening.

On Saturday we had a very slow start. The plan had been an early rise and get a final coat of paint on two walls in the living room, and make a start on walls in the turret/alcove. But the previous night’s revelry slowed down things a bit, and then lack of planning (ie, not enough paint) meant we didn’t start until after we’d eaten lunch. Also, I saw a bush-baby in the peeling paint after we removed the curtain rail. That beats seeing Cthulhu in the Nutella, I think.

We did get some good stuff done round the window though the walls are looking as patchy as ever. On Sunday morning we did the biggest wall and then went out to Roseleaf to meet Gemma, David and Graeme. Spent the afternoon wandering from pub to pub. The Halt and Mops Malt and Hops and then Sofi’s, then up the hill to La Favorita for takeaway pizza which we ate in the flat. Naturally, we have no photos cos we’re dead organised innit.

This post has been some time coming. But now it’s here — the tale of Aisha and Lanny’s wedding in Glasgow!

Wedding Day One: Registrar Ceremony

On Friday morning we took a train to Glasgow in the glorious sunshine. Helen constructed a fascinator on the train from wire and paper. By the time we arrived it was raining, of course. We’d intended to walk from Byres Road to the apartment we were staying in but the rain and the heavy luggage dissuaded us. Kilts are really heavy. Taxi!

The apartment was really nice, and in a beautiful area of town. It was also incredibly cheap compared to hotels, B&Bs etc. I don’t really understand why it was so cheap when the only difference is you have to organise your own breakfast. Is breakfast worth that much to people? Personally I thought it was much nicer to head into town and have our pick of places to breakfast on Byres Road.

Anyway, it had stopped raining by this point. We got changed and headed to the Glasgow registrar buildings in another very nice area of town. Helen finished constructing her earrings in the taxi. Never leave home without your wire cutters and needle-nosed pliers, ladies! We arrived as the tail end of another wedding party was milling around. I couldn’t tell if we were supposed to know these people or not…

Inside I was introduced to some of the friends that Helen had met on the hen weekend. The building was really impressive inside. (I somehow imagined a registrar wedding would be quite dowdy, but I don’t know why.) There was a lot of whispering about whether Aisha’s conservative father was likely to turn up, though in hindsight this was foolish, as 2pm on a Friday is also an important Muslim prayer time. He was never going to turn up.

I think everyone gave a little gasp as the bride came in. She looked significantly different from her usual self. Lanny and Aisha said some vows and we all cringed as the official consistently got both of their names wrong. Surely it’s the one thing you’d check, that you know what names the couple use, and how to say them?

After all the photographs at the registrar office and a nearby park we went for a meal at a restaurant, and at a large amount of fine Moroccan food. We went back to the apartments to sleep off the food and met everyone on Ashton Lane later on. I don’t think our bride and groom were the only couple still in their wedding clothes in the pub that evening!

Wedding Day Two: Day off

The newlyweds were staying in the same apartment complex as us. Helen got up early on Saturday morning and delivered them breakfast of yoghurt, figs and a drizzle of honey.

We tried to have breakfast ourselves at Kember and Jones (the place where I bought Dough in the distant past!) but were stalled and didn’t get out in time. It gets very busy very quickly. We found somewhere else — Café Cinnamon, I think? — and spent a few hours there. A number of the other guests joined us over that time.

After the protracted breakfast/lunch Helen and I went for a walk in the Botanic Gardens and along the Kelvin. It was a beautiful sunny day. The Botanic Gardens also had a hothouse with a carnivorous plant exhibition. I never knew Venus Fly Traps were so incredibly small. But hothouses really sap the strength, so we didn’t explore further rooms.

In the evening we picked up some pizza to eat while making our way to see the Òran Mór to see Duke Special. See my previous entry for more on that. After the gig we went back to Aisha and Lanny’s apartment, where they had a projector set up and a handful of the other guests were mutilating contemporary music playing Sing Star. I did not get involved because I didn’t hate anyone enough to submit them to my singing.

Wedding Day Three: Cake or Death?

On Sunday there was a more traditional wedding reception affair — a rented hall with guests distributed among the tables. The food was mostly of Pakistani origin, though Lanny’s family had their own pork-based starters and chopsticks. I wouldn’t have minded some of that myself, but honestly there was more than enough food anyway.

We finished off the meal with Kashmiri tea, which is quite pink in colour. Apparently it’s green tea boiled with milk and various flavourings, which turns pink in the process. It smells of rice pudding and tastes a bit like evaporated milk. A lot of people loaded the sugar into it but I didn’t think it needed sweetening: it was quite creamy enough to do without sugar too.

The wedding cake came from the Sicilian Pastry Shop just up the hill from our flat. They’d made two, one of which was to have no chocolate because one of the best men is allergic to chocolate. Unfortunately it turned out that this requirement meant they forgot about the other request not to put alcohol in the cakes. So, one cake was flavoured with chocolate and the other with alcohol, but from the outside they both looked the same so there was a bit of “excitement” at the cake-cutting point as to whether they were symbolically cutting into a boozy cake. I will let you draw your own conclusions from the photographs.

Also, Aisha pushed the cake in Lanny’s face, which was good for a laugh.

After the meal we all had to pretend to leave to get rid of the family. We went for a walk round the block, stood around in the cold at a playpark for a while to intimidate the locals, and then went back in for the best men’s speech, a ceilidh and more food. Part of the speech involved an invitation to the couple to do the first dance. But rather than do some ordinary couples dancing, two local hip-hop dance instructors did a demo and showed them through a few steps.

Also there was more food mid way through the ceilidh. I can’t imagine how much food I ate that day. Later on they also had a monkey-shaped piñata, because that’s what you can do if you’re getting married — anything you want!

We got home about 1am though I understand that other people went on from the wedding party to other places. I don’t know how they had the energy. I was drifting off to sleep on the way back to the apartment.

Wedding Day Four: Returning home

We were both a bit done on Monday morning, but luckily it was a public holiday and we didn’t have to hurry home. We got back to the flat and slept for a while. Then we went out to La Favorita and had a great evening with pasta and prosecco, toasting the happy union of Aisha and Lanny.

Just back from a cracking night at Calistoga, Californian restaurant hidden in a side alley of Rose Street. You know, just down past the ‘sauna’.

We’re away tomorrow and for the long weekend, in Glasgow for a wedding. It’s going to be a bit new. Ostensibly a Muslim wedding but with certain obvious heresies — the groom’s family are Chinese, so there will be pork or chicken’s feet at the meal, possibly both. Because that’s tradition too.

Well, whatever happens the bride and groom are lovely people and I wish them all the best. I hope the events go without a hitch (apart from the obvious one). Here’s some Bell X1 to see you out, extolling the virtues of tea to a Boston audience and singing Flame.

We just got back from Bex’s flat. She had a Potluck and Prose evening, which is like a book group except you don’t have to talk knowledgably about a book. You take a dish and a book, everyone gets drunk to some degree, and you swap the book. I gave Richard Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn (worth it for the shortest-short-story ‘The Scarlatti Tilt’ alone) and received from another guest Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons.

I haven’t finished the book I’m reading at the moment, but I’m looking forward to this new one because many people have said how much they enjoyed it. (Indeed, several other people were inspired to read it again after it appeared this evening).

We have volunteered to take the next group in a month’s time. Which gives us some motivation to get our living room in order and our bookshelves attached to the wall.

Last week I saw Bat for Lashes at the QMU. Amazing. The new single’s not the strongest on the album, unfortunately, but it’s the only one I have a video for!

Helen was away at the weekend and I spent the time making too much bread. But I’ve discovered that Lidl sell bread flour half the price of anywhere else, so that compensates a bit.

Yesterday we saw some old friends and flatmates. They were visiting Scotland for a bit from the uncivilised hinterlands (London). We went to Calistoga and basically had the place to ourselves. It was a Tuesday night but still a bit eerie at first. Some dishes did go through to the other room, so we weren’t the only people in.

At the weekend Helen and I were experimented on, and then to make up for it were given cake!

Doing psychology or linguistics experiments is a fairly common feature of the undergraduate lifestyle. There are always MSc or PhD students willing to give you something in exchange for screwing up their experiment giving them useful data.

Emily’s doing some research into the two-stage model of word recall/production. Maybe she’ll actually blog about it at some point, and give the proper details. Until then you’ll have to put up with my loose interpretation of her explanation from Saturday.

• Word recall and production is modelled as a two stage process.
• The first stage calls up semantic details and (crucially) syntactic details. So you know what the word means and how to use it. But you don’t actually know the word!
• The trick is to force people to manage the first step but to stall at the second step — the point where the word is on the tip of your tongue but you just can’t quite bring it forth. Tip-of-tongue state (ToT from now on).
• Once you’ve got your lab rats into ToT you can ask them questions which should, according to the model, be answerable — like whether the word is a mass or count noun.

(Emily’s actual work relates to sign language production too, so all this was being done on native English speakers as a control group. Then the hard work of putting signers into tip-of-finger state must commence.)

The actual experiment involved watching a screen flash up definitions for words, which we then had to write down. The hope was that we’d eventually hit a definition for which we knew the word but couldn’t quite bring it to the fore. In which case there were further boxes to complete regarding initial letters, syllables, mass/count. Out of 60 definitions I only found myself in ToT once. Compared to about 5 occasions when I couldn’t think of a word at all that would fit the definition.

So we did that, ate chocolate cake and drank tea.

We walked around the shops in the Newington and Grassmarket area for the afternoon. Got some lunch in Cafe Luciano (amazing bacon rolls) and took a bus over to Stockbridge for more wandering. We met Sarah (from our old sign language class) and her partner (Steve?) in the one pub that wasn’t completely rugbified to the gills. Then we went over for tea at Sarah and Ferdia’s (different Sarah). I now know what Julia Roberts’ favourite drink is.

I’m heading out this morning to do frightfully grown-up things like look for curtains. So this is just a quick post.

Last night we went to a talk by David Colquhoun in the bowels of Appleton Tower. There’s a building that’s changed! Anyway, Prof Colquhoun was talking about pseudoscience in British universities, and his ceaseless campaign of blogging and letter-writing to get them to stop. There are a remarkable number of universities out there that will give you a Bachelor of Science degree in homeopathy or crystal healing.

After that we went to 56 North, the new name for the Human Be In, still as horrendously overpriced as it ever was. Well done to Ella for post-dissertation hangover. :-) We headed home early in order to conserve our middle-aged sensibilities for the curtain-shopping ahead of us.

Last weekend we holidayed in Galloway. (Actually, it’s now two weekends ago because it’s taken ages to get the photos online.)

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Last night we had a grand Christmas party. We had about 20-odd people in the end, though a few notable exceptions. I’m glaring at you, green jumper boy.

As with all things that happen at the moment, the focus of the preparations was the food. We had a significant list of recipes that we wanted to tick off, and we did fairly well. The only major loss was the mincemeat parcels, but we compensated for that in another way.

Matthew was really kind and agreed to help us out for the preparation work. He came round in the middle of the afternoon and worked hard to bring everything together. It certainly wouldn’t have been possible without his input. If you were there and had any of the mince pies, apple pies or the mulled wine you can thank Mat for them. I don’t know what I will do to repay him, but he certainly deserves our heartfelt thanks.

A few months ago Kirsten emailed me to ask for a cranberry bread recipe to pass to her mother. Until last night I didn’t know how it had worked out, so I thought I would try my hand at a loaf with cranberies in it, because they’re quite the Christmas fruit. I used two of the recipes from Richard Bertinet’s Dough, making something suitably Christmas-party flavoured. I removed the nuts from the Pecan and Cranberry Loaves, and moulded them like Poppy Seed Stars. I didn’t have any proper dried cranberries, but I used the same weight of “craisins”, which is a cranberry-heavy dried fruit mix. The result was very tasty… almost like eating bread that had jam already spread on it.

The mince pies that Matthew made (from a recipe in Nigella Lawson’s Feast, so it doesn’t count towards the challenge) were made with cranberry mincemeat supplied by Nick. I’ve a suspicion that the recipe he used for that mincemeat also came via Nigella Lawson too. There’s something terribly incestuous about it all.

I’m very happy that so many people brought a decoration for the tree. We’ve got wire-basket stars and baubles now, and gingerbread trees with coloured-sugar windows, and jangly-legged snowmen and even a festive red double helix. On top of that we’ve inherited several bottles of wine and many packets of crisps, not to mention all the leftovers of pies, popcorn, olives and chocolate. We even have a 1.5 litre bottle of white wine which is probably too big to be chilled in the fridge.

Thanks to everyone who came, and especially to everyone who helped out in some way or another. You’re all great.