Looking Out To Sea

We’ve been fighting with Virgin Media for about 6 weeks now to get our net access transferred over to the new flat. The entire time we’ve been paying for a service we do not have. This will definitely require remuneration when we finally get a service.

We’ve been surviving thus far with a couple of open WiFi connections that we could pick up. Neither were very close to us — this requires careful positioning of laptops to maintain signal levels — but they were still usable.

Were usable. Past tense. On Thursday night both of the networks we used disappeared. One of them hasn’t come back and the other has but appears broken. I can occasionally get an IP address but it doesn’t forward packets past the router. :-( We are bereft, cast loose in a sea of microwaves, all encrypted… we’ve been really suffering!

We’re currently in Montpeliers, downing cocktails and jealously guarding access to the power socket that is powering my laptop. I can highly recommend their Whisky Sour, which is really delightful, and the Espresso Cocktail, which was apparently made with the wrong ingredients but tasted grand anyway. It’s pouring with rain outside and I feel no motivation to get wet.

Email and blogging may be rather light this weekend because we’ll be snatching whatever access is available in cafés and bars (carrying an Eee around is awesome). Please bear with us!

It’s been a busy few days here. At the beginning of the week I had a birthday (I can’t remember if I mentioned that). I made some cake for work, instead of buying something from Greggs. I got a lot of compliments for the Chocolate Gingerbread, so I’m glad I went to the extra effort. It was also a good excuse to spend Sunday using our new pans and putting the oven through its paces. In fact that day I made:

• Chocolate gingerbread (from Nigella Lawson’s Feast)
• Banana and walnut loaf (from Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course)
• Flapjack (from Katie Stewart’s A Young Cook’s Calendar)
• Pain façon beaucaire (from Richard Bertinet’s Dough)

It was quite a busy but very productive day. I’m just sorry I didn’t think to take any photographs. So instead I’ve posted a photo of the Ice Cream Cake that Helen made. If I was being properly critical I would say the banana loaf didn’t turn out very well (maybe the bananas weren’t properly over-ripe) and the bread looked a bit funny (but still tasted great).

On Tuesday we had our second last BSL class. Alarmingly I have to redo one of the assessments because (typically enough for me) I wasn’t participating enough. This assessment was a three person discussion/debate, with one of the participants a tutor to lead the discussion and introduce the topics. I’m quite nervous about repeating the same mistakes this week. We’ll just have to see.

By Friday we were both pretty tired. All week the weather had been hotter than expected. We spent the evening eating takeaway pasta from La Favorita and drinking wine with Emily. The throbbing sensation in my head the next morning was there to remind me how much more wine I drank than I should have.

Saturday afternoon we were at Lawrence’s for his birthday barbecue. Watched certified-fire-loon Rory set fire to things — marshmallows, slices of lemon, whatever else was to hand. Burning marshmallows quickly move between pleasant sweet, acrid sweet and oh-god-i’m-trapped-in-a-smoke-machine. It starting chucking it down later on, so we didn’t go back out to another party (guilty guilty). Also, we hadn’t put any thought or effort into costumes,

(Fascinating aside: I’ve just noticed that someone found my website by searching for the phrase “robert kilroy silk cannot die soon or painfully enough”. And indeed, I’m hit number two when I search for that without quotes.)

On Sunday Keith and Jo came by on a brief visit before heading back down to London. Jez came round for the afternoon too. I made more bread which was doubleplusgood. Jo also gave me a recipes for her grandmother’s Irish soda bread, which was typically folksy in its details: one loaf has “about 3 handfuls” of flour. It turns out that Jo and Jez, who were both staying for tea, are almost dietary complements of each other, since one is a pescetarian and the other doesn’t eat seafood. This makes cooking interesting, especially cooking from Nigella. There’s a lot of meat and a lot of fish recipes and precious little else.

Those are the highlights of my week. I’m ready to drop now.

This is just a quick post to show off bits of our flat. Nothing very comprehensive, just some random photos. More photos on Helen’s Flickr page.

I made a couple of baguettes and a couple epis on Wednesday night. This is me pulling them out of the oven.

This is my Eee PC on our coffee table, with a tiny wooden chair behind it to add to the confused scale. Also, the name plate for our door that we haven’t put up yet.

Filling the holes and cracks in the front room before starting with the paint. Helen proved to be quite adept at this, but I was crap.

This is how the room started off, with bright pink walls, but it darkened as it dried to something less shocking. Notice the classy “3 Sisters” t-shirt?

• The knife-sharpening blocks with the little circular grinding stones inside are very effective.
• Two of the fingers on my left hand would say “too effective”. Ouch, blood, etc.

Last week we started hunting for a new pan set, as we didn’t own any ordinary pans. We have a couple of Le Creuset cooking dishes but they’re not very practical for a lot of things — you wouldn’t whip up a chocolate sauce in one!

We found a nice set in Frasers, but it was the last in stock and one of the pans had received a substantial dent in the side, quite near the base. These things were quite sturdily built so it must have been some serious force that made the dent. We decided that it wasn’t worth the risk, even with another discount added for damaged goods. We found the pans for slightly cheaper online and they arrived through the post yesterday afternoon. (It’s interesting to see who comes snooping when you get stuff delivered to your work address. Some people you never expect turn out to be big cooking enthusiasts!)

The next problem is one of storage. We bought some metal kitchen shelves to store these shiny new cooking implements, but that means drilling and stuff, which I’m not really sure about. I don’t really know how to secure shelves to walls. I am a failure as a man. :-(

I have been more successful in other areas of the kitchen. Despite initial confusion (read: complete bafflement when reading the instructions) we now have two beautiful sliding bins under the sink, for separation of packaging, tins and ordinary food waste. This isn’t just rubbish, this is an Integrated Recycling System.

We also have a dining table and two chairs. I have run out of steam to assemble the other chairs, but with the window seat that still leaves room for four people to sit down together (provided they move the flat-pack boxes of course). If I get my act together I may get some photos of the new place online soon. It’s mostly boxes though…

We’ve been discussing what we would do for a dining table for a while now. The kitchen is a very important place for both of us and so the table has to be something inviting and comfortable to sit at. You might think “it’s a table, what can be wrong?” but there are uninviting tables. I think of these as Formal Tables. You know the kind — smooth and sleek, with expensive dark wood and a gleaming polish. You can’t put a coffee cup on a Formal Table. You certainly can’t put your hands on a Formal Table. Formal Tables have ten types of cutlery laid out on them. Formal Tables are cold even when they’re warm. Formal Tables are not for me.

But the big point in my mind, so big that I didn’t even notice it was there, was the fact that I wanted a normal table. I didn’t want fancy in any way — rectangular in shape, wooden in material, having four stout legs and being flat on top. You know: a table. And yet nothing we did could satisfy such a simple request. It was either legs in the wrong place so someone could be assured of an uncomfortable seat, or artificial aging and distressing, or some other needless change. In the end we found what we needed at IKEA.

This seems to be a theme, and I wonder if there’s something deeper to it. My idea is that people have an archetype in their mind when they go shopping — we were looking for the Platonic table but everybody was selling something that differed from this ideal. It seemed that every time there was something that conflicted with our ideal table it was because the designer had ignored the obvious route (flat table, legs in the corner, etc) and done something “clever”. And wrong.

The same happens when clothes shopping, for me at least. A casual shirt can be perfectly plain and yet have three arbitrarily-placed rivets down the left sleeve. There is no explanation for this, just the strange whim of the designer. Neither is there any way in which this riveted shirt can be considered “better” than a plain shirt. I can only suggest that designers don’t feel they are doing a job unless they can make a mess of something that was fine to start with.

Several years ago I read an article on design called The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes (and other notes on the distinction between style and design) which brought instant clarity to something I had been gently working my way around and towards but ultimately failing to pin down — the difference between design and style. If you have not read this article I strongly urge you to do so.

It occasionally pops into my head when I’m shopping for clothes and all I can find are things which have been styled past the point they were “finished”. This, I think, is why shops like IKEA or Gap¹ do so well — because if there is design it is purposeful and the styling isn’t tacked on. I don’t know if I’m correct in my observation or what the reasoning would be. Crap designers? Boredom? I’ve heard it said that once an object becomes a commodity then companies do their best to create a brand, a lifestyle that people can be persuaded to buy with the object. Hence Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King and so on. I wonder whether these low-level design fripperies are an expression of that — few big companies feel bold enough to sell something unadorned, because you might go elsewhere. And in the end, we did.

So what’s been happening? Since Friday night we have been officially moving out/moving in, depending on what your frame of reference is. The whole time we were at the old flat we talked about “moving out” but now it seems a strange phrase. We moved in! We’re here now.

Nine months ago on our first night in the old flat we went to The Sizzling Scot for food. We ate large meals and got rather drunk on hand-poured measures of fine whisky. We decided a reprise was the best way to finish our time at the old flat. We went out together, ate rather too much, had a pleasant chat with the head waiter about moving house, and got given two whiskies before we left, this time on the house. A fine establishment!

We were up on Saturday morning to pack furiously, though I think the only things furious were the headaches. Between one and two o’clock a bunch of friends came with vehicles and we started ferrying stuff to the new flat. It just so happens that most of Edinburgh is closed or diverted at the moment because we’re working towards a city tram system in 2011. This makes moving across town all the trickier.

By about four o’clock the heat and the hard work had everyone else running for home and comfort. We still have at least one more car full of stuff to ferry over before we’ve properly “moved”. Even a couple of heavy bags and a rucksack taken by bus didn’t make much of a difference.

In the new place we are gradually making little safe havens — most notably the kitchen, which looks quite normal. (Apart from the missing dining table and chairs; that is a small flaw.) We spent a good evening yesterday unpacking lots of boxes and putting things in kitchen cupboards. Nothing is in a permanent position yet. We’ll just place everything and see what happens when we need to use things on a regular basis. Some stuff will be moved to easier access places, and other stuff hidden away.

Our furniture buying has been quite unsuccessful — unless you count ruling things out as a success. I think our biggest problem with the “ruling things out” technique is we don’t stop once we’ve ruled out all but one item. So having ruled everything out we have to start looking for more options.

As for successes — I baked bread this evening and Helen cooked stir fry. This counts as proper food preparation, I think, even if we only have one pan. I had some problems with the bread but it was my first time with this recipe and with this oven. Things will fall into place when I’ve had practice and more experience of both.

We’re both on holiday until Wednesday to give us time to get everything sorted — including transporting our old sofa to Helen’s brother and making a trip to Ikea for all those little essentials. More details to follow, when I can think of them.

We spent last weekend painting the front room in our new flat. It’s the first time I’ve painted a room and it shows. Well, it’s not that bad but it could be more evenly coloured.

It was easy to get all the painting done last weekend because we don’t have any furniture yet. This could become quite awkward as we’ll be moving in this weekend. We have no dining table or chairs (though there is a window seat…) and no sofa either.

We haven’t really made any firm decisions about dining tables. I don’t really like formal or “modern” tables — I want something that has character and feels friendly. A farmhouse feel to it, rather than a silver-service restaurant aesthetic. What can I say about my romantic notions that is not apparent? ;-)

I’m looking forward to the new flat with an almost silly amount of excitement. Despite not even having any furniture to eat at, I’m excited about baking. I bought the book Lawrence recommended a few months ago¹ — Dough: Simple Contemporary Bread by Richard Bertinet. I just watched the included DVD and now have to resist the urge to just not bother going to work and baking bread all day instead. The Amazon reader reviews for the book are similarly effusive/evangelical/ominous: buy this book and you will become dangerously addicted to bread-making.

The other cooking we’re doing, the Nigella Express Challenge, is a bit neglected at the moment. We are the furthest behind schedule we have been since we started. By my reckoning that’s about 13 recipes behind schedule, assuming a regular timetable. Moving house will may impact us in either way:

• An excuse to eat a lot of easy food or takeaway pizza. Having La Favorita across the road is a dangerous temptation.
• Lots of food-laden gatherings. Dozens of flat-warming parties!

The more enthusiasm we get for option two the more likely it will happen that way!

But back to the move: we haven’t done any packing either. Our brave friends have volunteered to bring cars on Saturday and haul our various bits and bobs from one end of town to the other, through massive roadworks and diversions. If there are any lone bodies out there who are willing to lend a hand on Saturday or Sunday then get in touch. Getting all this stuff up to the third floor might be more trouble than we’ve anticipated.

I’m standing (yes, standing) in the new flat at the moment. We have no furniture (hence the standing) and no internet (hence the leaching off anonymous wifi connections). I also get a better signal with the Eee on the mantle piece so that’s why I’m not sitting on the floor.

Today we intend to paint the front room. We have paint — Ruby Fountain 2 — and we have brushes and enthusiasm. And primer and polyfilla and rollers and dust sheets and so on. But now that we also have internet things have ground to a halt. I’m blogging, not scrubbing. Oh well.

We finally got our mortgage from the building society confirmed today. At last! Luckily it’s open on Saturday, so we’re going out right now to

• Get breakfast at the farmer’s market.
• Pick up exciting debt from the building society.

Meanwhile my parents will have arrived in Xi’an by now to visit my brother. So I’ve got to keep Skype open in case they want to try some international calls!