With very best wishes for a Merry Christmas, and a happy and healthy 2009!
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Merry Christmas!
December 25th, 2008Naughty Nigella
December 20th, 2008We’ve enjoyed Nigella’s series on Christmas cooking this week, even though it does seem very similar to the one screened at the same time last year. She makes it all seem so easy, and the programme gives off a nice cosy and homely glow through its sets, filming, and jazz-style festive music.
The former chancellor’s daughter has always made cooking a little like porn with food, but never so much so as in this very rude but well-edited clip, posted by an enterprising YouTuber:
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The easy way to bottle beer
December 11th, 2008
I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before, it was so easy. It’s only the second time we’ve bottled our home brewed beer, so perhaps the lack of experience played against us last time. Last night, though, we poured our latest batch of the dark golden stuff into its glass containers, learning some valuable lessons from the last time.
In April, we did it the tried and tested way, following the instructions to, quite literally, the letter. That means connecting the drainage tube with the filter on, and siphoning out the contents by way of an airflow into the bottles. Once it starts, it goes very fast and there has to be two of you; one to direct the siphon into the bottles, and one to have another bottle ready to swap when the previous one is full.
What the directions don’t tell you is that you end up with a very messy floor (unless you use a plastic bowl to stand the bottles in as we did), which the cat would delightfully drink up given half the chance. It’s undoubtedly a quick way of doing it, but as we found out, a bit too speedy. Then, it’s a case if wiping everything, and then capping the bottles themselves.
This time the method was a little longer, but much the better (and simpler) one. An initial siphon is given to separate any drinkable liquid from the sediment at the bottom of the fermenter, and any added wood chips which give the beer its ‘aged’ taste. Just the same as when we did the wine a few weeks ago, another fermenter is more than handy at this stage.
Then, rather than siphon the cleared brew into bottles, we used a large glass jug and a funnel to manually pour the beer into our brown bottles, which we’d already put a teaspoon of sugar into, to condition the liquid while it sits for a couple of weeks. And what a difference this method makes. While it may take a little longer, the whole process is much less messy, and virtually hassle-free.
In fact the only problem we had was a shortage of bottles. The home brew kit told us that we would make near 50 pints of ale, and as we only had 27 500cl bottles, we had to pour more than a good amount into a demijohn, and the remainder into one of the snap-top bottles we use for the fruit-tinged spirits. Even the capping seemed easier this time, too.
All in all, after just over an hour (and a little over a week to brew), another success. We had a taste, and our finished Woodforde Great Eastern Ale is very pleasant, and should be even more palatable once the sugar has worked its magic, giving us plenty of perfect brew, ready to be cracked open and drunk over the festive period and beyond.
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Oliver Postgate
December 10th, 2008It is with great sadness that I read about the death of Oliver Postgate yesterday. Creating TV shows for children for over 20 years, he created many of Generation X’s favourite teatime programmes. The Clangers, Ivor the Engine, and Noggin the Nog were created by Postgate and his puppeteer partner Peter Firmin, but it will be for the pink saggy old cloth cat that he will be most remembered.
Bagpuss was my most favourite TV programme when I was a boy, and I have fond memories of the 13 episodes that Firmin and Postage made. And, although I haven’t watched them for years, I can guarantee that they will have stood the test of time. Gentle tales of make do and mend were the order of the day in 1974, which, given the current economic climate, is just one of the reasons why they are still relevant today.
Rather sadly, a whole generation of children has missed out on this man’s marvellous creations and stories. In the modern age, most animation is now created by computer, whereas the Firmin and Postgate team used painfully slow stop-start techniques, which suited their tales well. And, while the rights to some of Postgate’s characters have been sold to bring to a new generation, the mended and fixed versions for the digital age won’t be anywhere near as endearing as those original classics of 30 years ago.
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Russell Court, London
December 8th, 2008
Imposing: the corner of the 1930s Russell Court, London, looking west
There are over 35 Art Deco buildings in London, and while they are sprinkled around, most seem to be in the western half of the city’s centre. Walking to Covent Garden to have our post-wedding breakfast at Upper Deck, the café in the Transport Museum yesterday morning, we chanced upon one of them, Russell Court, on Woburn Place.
My flat in Ipswich is part of an eighteen-strong purpose-built development in three blocks of six built in the late 1930s. I thought that was unique in itself; at the time the apartments must have been quite luxurious – they’re certainly large, quiet, well-made, and eclipse anything modern. But they have nothing on the scale of Russell Court.
A development of over eighty apartments over eight floors, and made of dark red brick, there almost definitely some similarities with my place in Ipswich. Rows of crittal bay-fronted windows give way to two concrete column entrances. Russell Court is certainly obvious, imposing and grand in scale, but yet somehow glamorous, too.
Around the corner in Coram Street there’s yet more flats, just as equally packed in and with as beautifully stylish a façade as their relatives a few yards away. One of the best aspects of the development, though, is the Coram Street car park, which is tucked away underground, and with 90 spaces, provides out of sight and off-street parking for £19.00 per day.
Close-up: rows of crittal windows on the corner of 1930s Russell Court
Now run by NCP, dark and open-mouthed tunnel must be famous for something other than swallowing cars for combustion engine powered commuters. I’d heard about it before, and seen it on the television, but I could turn up nothing noteworthy about it or Russell Court on the internet. The brickwork above the entrance curves around in a gentle fashion, and rows upon rows of tall windows look out onto the sun in the west.
A forecourt and filling station used to reside on the corner of the car park entrance, at the junction of Coram Street and Woburn Place. Well-to-do motorists used to have to drive into the car park over part of the filling station forecourt, and there have been many previous planning applications to change the building just in front of the entrance, all of which have been refused.
Rightly so, too. An underrated and spectacular display of 1930s architecture, Russell Court and its underground car park are more deserving of a more sparkling and less ordinary history that seems to have eluded it. Of course, if you should know of a more glamorous previous life in the history of the development, please post a comment below.
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