Looking Out To Sea

It was Helen’s birthday last week and, as per tradition, she took cakes to work her tutorial group at university.

She was too busy studying so I made the cakes (this was okay, as in recent years she has ended up making cakes for me to take to work on my birthday, so this was repaying the favour), and had a bit of fun with them.

I had been following one person’s escapades with baking cakes inside cakes, such as brownie inside muffins (really) and thought I would take a first foray in that direction. I made some fairly plain cupcakes but buried some chocolate balls (slightly larger than a malteser) inside each one. The chocolate balls were Hallowe’en treats that each came individually wrapped in “eyeball” tin foil. Then when I was trying to work out how to ice them Helen suggested using icing pens to write on them. Then she went to bed and I sat down to work some words out.

My first thought was to take Word of the Day for Helen’s birthday for the last ten years (I had ten cakes to decorate) but I couldn’t easily find a list going back that far. The easily-searched sites (like wiktionary) weren’t established long enough to have ten years of archives!

My second thought was nonsense words, and this was even harder. I would have to look through the published works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in order to find some really good ones. Good nonsense words, ones with a nice feel and pleasing sound, are harder to find than you might think.

In the end I settled on cake words. What I actually did was search the installed dictionary for some nice cake words, and then fill in a few more from memory. (I didn’t like griddlecake or coffeecake and thought the latter should probably be two words.)

$ grep cake$ /usr/share/dict/words
cake
cheesecake
coffeecake
cupcake
fruitcake
griddlecake
hotcake
pancake
shortcake

Once I had my words I removed the cake part and iced the remaining prefix/suffix onto each bun. So I had a bunch of cakes with the words “pan”, “beef”, “short” and so on.

Now Helen tells me that when she opened the tin on the following day no-one could understand what these words meant. They sat and thought and came to no good conclusions, until someone finally said:

Well, I’m going to have the “beef” cake — oh

I was glad to have provided a little bit of mystery. :-)

We’ve been doing this book group thing for over a year now and one thing that’s become really obvious is the way that potluck events don’t scale. Or at least, the way we do them ends in tasty tasty disaster.

The problem is that each person brings a dish which is enough food for more than one person. Nobody wants to supply enough pasta salad for only two or three people if there’s eight people in the group. So each person caters for their own conception of the group. (Last time I made a dozen pretzels, because I didn’t want anyone to go without. But there’s a good amount of eating in a pretzel…)

If there’s three people and each brings enough for three people it works out fine. Each person eats a small portion of three different dishes. If there are six people each person will attempt to get six different portions onto their plate. Now a portion has a reasonable lower limit, and so people just end up piling their plates higher. They just have to eat more if they want to taste everything. Then there might be things which are just very tasty, and so people go back for seconds. I mean, it’s just sitting there in front of you, it would go to waste otherwise, starving children in Elbonia, etc.

And then you realise that some of the group brought chocolate cake, brownies, fruit pies and you haven’t even seen that stuff yet. Your stomach is folding around the edge of the table and you’re worried about being charged for two fares on the bus home.

So you have to exercise terrifying self-constraint with portion size or — gasp — not taste some of the dishes. Potluck events are a menace to waistlines and dignity everywhere.

D: Did I send you the link about the woman who was blogging everything her husband said as he fell asleep?

H: No! Did he say something about being hacked by 2012…

(About leaving first thing in the morning before I am awake.)

H: I see you there all asleep and not even moving and I worry that there’s something wrong with you and then you open your can of Coke…

D: Buahahaha!

H: What? Oh. There wasn’t a security barrier either, was there? :-(

H: I see what you’re doing there. I see what you’re gathering.

D: What?

H: You’re going around gathering … recipes …

When we moved to the flat we bought a biiiig television because biiiig televisions are what all the cool people have. We mostly watch DVDs on it but occasionally we use it as a useful backdrop while we watch iPlayer on Helen’s laptop, and feel slightly silly about the whole scenario.

Anyway, the telly is plugged into the hi-fi so we can turn up the audio as loud as we need without the television vibrating its minuscule speakers out of their fixings. At the time I didn’t have an adequate cable so the I had a lead plugged into the headphone socket on the television, which went to a 2-phono lead at the amplifier end. Very silly but it did the job.

I was in B&Q today and spotted the right lead for the job on my way out. When I got it home and plugged it in I discovered that all along I had been using the correct lead because the “proper” way of doing it results in stupidity.

Picture this. You’re watching telly and the adverts come on so you press “mute”. If it’s just a straightforward telly the sound goes off; if the audio is coming out the headphone socket, the sound goes off; but if the sound is going out the Audio Out socket on the back of the television the sound stays on. Yes, I know. The mute button doesn’t affect the proper audio output, only the speakers or the headphone bypass.

So, having done things properly I’ve now lost the mute function on the telly and I think I’ll reinstate the headphone-socket-kludge. Thanks Samsung, great design.

Among the many advantages of no longer having a swollen infected toe is the ability to do sports again. I know, it doesn’t seem like me, but I have been known to do it in the past.

At the weekend Helen and I went an epic (miniature epic?) walk up the Water of Leith, from Bonnington to Juniper Green. This map shows the extent of the Water of Leith Walkway but we didn’t cover all of it. We started near the firth outlet, about halfway between Craigleith and the docks I think, and went to Juniper Green which is one of the yellow-marked waypoints. It was probably about 8 or 9 miles in total, uphill but mostly on a very slight incline and broken up by lots of down and flat bits.

We passed by the Water of Leith Visitor Centre (why does a river have a visitor centre? who knows) but it was closed. We saw a couple of herons like in the photo on the visitor centre website. I took my new camera and spent the day playing with different settings in Manual mode, trying to get a feel for how things turn out. I’m not confident but I’m much closer than I was, and I’m enjoying it greatly.

When we got to Juniper Green we had tea at Ristorante Al Borgo, which is owned and run by the parents of one of Helen’s colleagues. After a half day walking in serious heat it was a relief to hop on the bus and get back home again.

But that’s not the extent of the new, exercising, Dougal. Oh no! Near to the flat is the Out of the Blue arts centre, an ex-drill hall that’s been gutted and refurbished to include studio spaces, exhibition areas, a cafe and so on. We go to regular art fairs there and I’ve often seen a poster on the wall advertising their capoeira classes. Last night I popped over to the beginners class organised by the Mão no Chão. They were very friendly and the guest tutor was genial and enthusiastic in equal measure. The class lasted an hour longer than advertised: it should have been 8–9.30 so by the time I got home at 10.40 I was completely wiped out.

It was great fun though. I last did any capoeira about 8 years ago so some of the ideas seemed familiar but it’s not like falling off a bike. It can be forgotten!

I’ve just had to defrost the freezer again — just three months since the last defrost — and it’s currently humming away trying to get back down to temperature. This time it was dual-hairdryer action! We discovered the fridge compartment warm and the milk sour this morning. See the story in the previous post to learn why the fridge dies when the freezer is choked with ice.

I think the time between defrosts is so short now because the inside of the freezer, and in particular the refrigerator element, were still quite wet when I connected everything back up. In order to get everything properly dry it really needs to sit for 24 hours. But we don’t really have that luxury when there’s a freezer full of frozen food sitting on the floor wrapped only in towels.

So within the next month or so we’ll try to run the freezer down and, if necessary, have some kind of defrost party to use up random things which we can’t eat on our own.

A year ago we were at a wedding in Glasgow. Six months ago we were at a wedding in Milngavie. Obviously I needed an excuse to get a haircut again so I neatly arranged for my aunt to get married on the May Day weekend — cunning, eh? — and we went down for a great weekend on the south coast of England. My aunt Pamela and her family live in a little town near Worthing, only five minutes walk from the sea. They’ve been together for nearly as long as I’ve been alive but clearly decided it was worth getting this marriage thing done at some point! Their daughter said lots of people were asking whether she was happy to no longer be a bastard, which is a strange question if ever there was one. Does bastardry get removed retroactively? :-)

Unusually I was the only person there in a kilt, which was strange but quite enjoyable. I assumed there would be at least one other Scotsman there but apparently not. Stranger, though, was how unusual it seemed — it’s like the other guests had never seen anyone in a kilt before. Lots of people asked us “so are you Scottish?”.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We flew down on Friday night from Glasgow because Helen was in class until 5pm. The train from Gatwick was easy though I couldn’t help being alarmed at the names of places we passed — are Lancing and Goring-by-Sea quaint villages or ways to die in battle? Pamela picked us up from the station and we stayed in their spare room for the duration of our visit.

On Saturday morning the house was transformed for the post-wedding reception. My mum and her other sisters and brother came in and everybody swept and mopped and made sandwiches and so on.

The ceremony at Worthing Registrar was in a fairly small modern room. The readings were lovely and the couple looked incredibly happy. Back at their house we drank champagne and the weather blessed us with a warm sunny afternoon. Stood in the garden talking nonsense to various people who wanted to know why I was wearing a kilt…

After the best man speech and the cutting of the cake and consumption of more sandwiches we all trooped out to a cafe on the beach front for a meal and live jazz and dancing. The food was excellent and the band really good too, and I think everyone really enjoyed themselves.

We left at the same time as my mum who was driving back to the cottage they had hired in Arundel. I don’t know why we departed at that point but realised when we got back to the house we were staying at that the people with the keys were still chatting back at the party. We sat on a bench near the front door in the darkness, drinking whisky from a hipflask and enjoying the silence. It’s such a strange quiet place: no traffic, no street lights. Just darkness and silence.

Next day we sat round the kitchen table in the conservatory while the rain lashed the windows. Mid-afternoon it had died down a bit so a bunch of us trooped out to a restored 18th century windmill which was really good if you’re a bit of a nerd like me, though the weather was crap for it. They didn’t have any wind-milled flour in the visitor centre shop because it had all sold out. They only mill once or twice a year but clearly we arrived at just the wrong point.

In the evening Helen and I took the train into Brighton to see some friends who were also in the area for a few days. We forgot/left behind our phones so had to wait around in the cold at the arranged meeting point wondering “is this how things were done before mobile phones?” and being a bit miserable. The rain had stopped but the wind was bitter. Some guy was skinny-dipping in the sea beside the pier and quickly turned from pink to blue when he came back out. Then his friends — loose term — proceeded to slap him with his leather belt while he tried to get dressed again with numb hands. I don’t think I’d be sticking my neck out to suggest alcohol was involved.

There was a restaurant that came recommended (“English’s”) but was full so went next door. I think this place was called The Gallery. Food was quite nice though we did end up with a green-dye-swirled meringue as the base of the Pavlova. We later discovered that there is a Brighton shop which sells meringues swirled with a variety of dyes, though why they chose the St Patrick’s Day meringue to build a Pavlova around is anyone’s guess. Eating was made difficult through laughing at the colour.

We spent Monday back in Brighton again with our baggage this time. Absurdly enough, Brighton, tourist town that it is, has decided that left luggage is the work of the devil and they’ve removed every trace of it from the public facilities. We know this for certain because we asked at the bus station, the train station and the travel centre. This curtailed our day as we couldn’t really wander comfortably around with several bags of luggage. We cut our losses and went to Gatwick early. Checked everything in and had a nice meal at Cafe Rouge in the secure area while watching the board for our gate to open.

We got back to Edinburgh on time but sat on the runway for a while because our berth was being occupied by an EasyJet flight that wasn’t moving. Don’t know why. We got in eventually, though I didn’t mind because I had my book with me. Aeroplanes are much more comfortable on the ground, without the noise and the juddering and the earache. It helped that the plane was mostly empty.

There should be some photos of all this to come but they’ve not been sifted and cropped yet. I’ll put up a post later on with photos when they’re ready.

On Saturday afternoon I felt pretty crap with a cold but we went out to Pilrig Park just behind the flat to take part in the Pilrig Park Clean-up organised by Greener Leith.

We were given latex gloves and those trigger-operated litter pickers and as many black plastic bags as we could hope to have a use for, and went forth to clean up the park. This was our first time on a clean-up so we’ve learned a few things:

• It’s not a very sociable job as there’s generally several hundred metres between you and the nearest person. I wouldn’t say bringing an MP3 player was a bad idea
• Holding open a black plastic bag in a windy open field is quite tricky. I wonder how we might improvise some kind of hoop or holder to keep the neck of the bin bag open.
• The rich pickings are to be found in the perimeters of the park, amongst the trees and bushes.
• Glass bottles are a pain because they’re so heavy. Something like a wheelbarrow to cart them to the nearest recycling spot would have been great.

And yesterday Greener Leith organised a Leith Commuter Breakfast with free bacon rolls and bike tune-ups for people who commute in Leith on bike or foot. There was a lot of passing trade — many people cycle along the Water of Leith and were drawn in by cries of “free bacon roll!”.

I’m very grateful to Greener Leith for being so active and coming up with new ideas to bring people together. If you’re local have a look at their website and maybe join their social network.

For the first time this year we spent the weekend working and lounging in the garden. The sun was warm and the walls high enough to keep out the wind.

Over the autumn and winter the weeds have come in great force. What few plants were there have been choked. A series of scaffolders, builders and glaziers have made a real mess of the lawn and there’s rubble in the beds. The remains of two windows — frames, broken glass, weights and plaster — were dumped on a bed of herbs in one corner.

On Saturday Helen worked on taking out a large bramble and trying to discriminate plants from weeds. I fought with the gate, which had rusted and buckled hinges. I replaced the middle hinge and removed the bottom one without being able to properly replace it. The rusted hinge is stuck fast to the gatepost and every attempt I make on it just destroys the gatepost further. So at the moment it only has the top two of three hinges, which is a bit top-heavy.

On Sunday we got outside earlier and went to B&Q for gardening gloves and plants. There were no plants but I did get a neat little barbecue. And those gloves. Then we had lunch in the garden, with potato salad and mini scotch eggs and mini pork pies and sweet chilli-flavoured Ryvita bite-size crisps and assorted things. Ella and Ben came and we tracked the sun around the garden and talked of all sorts. It was nice and I hope there will be many more days like it this summer.

When we moved into our flat on Leith Walk there was an arrangement with a man from Penicuik to get the stair cleaned. At each visit he’d post a bill through someone’s door, so each person only had to pay every eighth time. He’s stopped coming — in fact, he’s stopped business altogether — and he didn’t tell us. And because there was always a long gap between bills anyway it took a while to sink in that the stair was definitely getting dirtier.

At the weekend we sent round a note asking people to come in on Monday evening for a meeting to decide what we wanted to do. Helen had done some research and found prices for the council and for a local company to clean, and we were also willing to entertain a bucket-and-mop rota if that was the consensus.

Out of the 7 other flats we had one apology and two shows, which leaves four flats technically unaccounted for. Someone is apparently on holiday for 3 weeks, so that seems a reasonable excuse. Another were only just moving in that day so maybe they’re just snowed under. Overall I’m still annoyed by the lack of communication. As I guessed would happen, we settled on our preferred option. Of course now we have to get people to go along with this — to agree to paying regularly. If we can’t do that where are we? Whatever happens we lose if there are people who can’t be bothered — if the stair gets slowly more filthy that’s rubbish for everyone, but some care less than others; if some of us pay then we’re taking a bigger hit and others are free-loading; and if no-one wants to pay then people who care about the stairwell end up cleaning it themselves, when they can, while others look on. It may be worth noting that the people who bothered their arses this time round are the ones who own their flats.

(A similar issue can be found when you look at the garden. Who uses it? Who cares about it? Who weeds and tends it? Who has a lawnmower or can pay someone to trim the grass? This is made much harder because the dividing fence between our half of the garden and the half belonging to the adjacent tenement has been removed. It’s a bigger, nicer garden, but there are double the number of people to rope into any discussion.)

To help foster the impression that it’s not just me or Helen forcing the issue one of our neighbours is going to write up a wee note saying what we decided and who decided it. Once everyone knows what our decision was we have to work on getting the other tenants of the stair involved. Knocking on doors and such. It’s not the kind of thing I’m very good at or relish in particular but it has to be done and right now there is no real community here. I want to see if we can sort some of that out. Just starting with a core of two or three households that hold a common opinion, and working from there.

And that also leads onto the garden and the issue of the next tenement over. We need to make some friends there too — to even see some faces would be an incredible help. Last summer there were regular barbecues from the other tenement so maybe we’ll be able to build on that too.

I’m sure this is a recurrent problem. The renting tenants in the stair just seem to come and go, and we’ve recently lost two owners who had been for a long time, so we lost a lot of common understanding and knowledge in a short period of time. This happens all over the city, all over the country. But how, right now, do we deal with it?