Category Archives: Life

We’ll probably think of a reason to celebrate the sixth anniversary too

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What I love about (a) fandom and (b) the modern age is that you can casually bump into someone in Oxford that you last saw in Montreal 9 months ago without batting an eyelid, and then not have to waste time with catch-up chat because you’ve already read their blog anyway.

You can also have conversations like:

“Ben, have you met Geoff?” (That would be Geoff Ryman, founder member of the Mundane Movement, amongst his many other strengths.)
“Yes, I last saw him having breakfast at Résidences universitaires UQAM, 303 boulevard René-Lévesque Est, Montreal when we were both staying there in August, and I wondered if his choice of meal would trigger another mundane movement.”
Maybe I didn’t say that last bit. I said that we passed on the escalators in the convention centre.
The occasion being the fifth anniversary celebration of the Write Fantastic, a thoroughly deserved pat-on-the-back event in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Centre of St Hilda’s College. The centre has a distressingly sports centre-like vibe, all modern brutalist bare brickwork and large plate glass windows. Thankfully it lacks the smell of chlorine, sweat and fear and instead has a rather nice, cosy auditorium for thepanel sessions. The stage includes a small little statuette of du Pré + cello which I wanted to have on the panel sessions too, but was over-ruled.
Chaired by Juliet McKenna, “Politics and Genre – fantasy conservatism vs SF radicals” started (once Juliet had explained what it meant) with everyone rightly disagreeing with the perceived trope of “sf = cutting edge and incisive, fantasy = cosy”, citing counter-examples, and then getting into the realities of how politics, economics and other real-world factors would be in various imagined worlds. En route discussion touched on the infinity slappability of the ever-whinging Starbuck, having separate kitchens for the winter and summer in parts of Canada, and the different points at which The Phantom Menace really lost it for various viewers. (For me: the bit where Liam Neeson’s Konky Jonky or whatever he’s called carefully explains to Anakin and his mum that even though he is a very powerful Jedi Knight and can do just about anything he likes, he can only take Anakin with him and his mum will have to stay behind as a slave because that’s the only way the plot will work … and they both calmly accept this.)
“Reflections on a life in writing” was meant to be me effortlessly moderating by pointing Chaz Brenchley, Liz Williams, Geoff Ryman and Ian Watson at the audience, pressing the “go” button and letting them entertain us with anecdotes of their writing careers. It was a bit harder than that because, again, no one was quite sure what the session title meant, but the audience seemed to be entertained anyway. Earlier, Kari Spelling had shared the fact that a reviewer once said her characterisation wasn’t as good as Mercedes Lackey’s. Now I was on stage I could trump this with the Amazon review that said the characterisation of His Majesty’s Starship isn’t as good as Rama II‘s. The audience’s resident IP barrister offered to put me in touch with a few defamation experts that he knows.
So, good fun, the required level of silliness, seeing old faces, putting old names to new ones, and books to buy. And may I mention, cudos to the Cape of Good Hope pub on the corner of Cowley and Iffley Road for managing to serve the 50-odd guests who turned up without warning, mostly within the allocated 90 minute lunch break.

Occasional recipes: chicken with brown things

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I must credit Teresa Nielsen-Hayden with this one, but her version on Making Light provides three full meals. Here’s how to make one meal for three people.

Take:

  • a couple of chicken breasts
  • 150g Israeli couscous. [I hadn’t met this before but the grains are noticeably bigger than normal couscous. Couldn’t find it in Tesco: Best Beloved had to get Mediterranean couscous from Waitrose. As I believe Israel is right next to the Mediterranean, this obviously sufficed.]
  • 1 onion
  • 1/2 cup chopped cashew nuts [well, whole cashew nuts zapped a couple of times in the food processor. Teresa goes for hazelnuts but, hey.]
  • 1 small handful mixed dried mushrooms
  • 1/2 cup dry sherry
Soak the mushrooms in a pint of boiling water for at least half an hour. Then chop them up, but keep the water they soaked in. Also make yourself two pints of stock: chicken or vegetable will do.
Lightly fry the couscous in oil to brown it. I’ve not done this before but Teresa said, so why not? Honestly can’t tell if it made a difference, though … Do likewise with the nuts. Also fry the onions. Chop up the chicken and brown well and good in oil.
Whether you do all this in series or parallel is a function of time, cooking utensils and oven top space. What matters is that at some point you have browned chicken, mushrooms, nuts and onions which you can bung altogether with the mushroom broth into a wok. Simmer on medium heat for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, add the couscous and simmer for a further 15.
This is when you want that extra stock, because the couscous soaks up liquid like there’s no tomorrow. In the remaining 15 minutes I got through the full 2 pints. I could maybe have simmered it a bit longer because it was only a little bit sloppy. But not very.
Teresa says season to taste while it’s simmering and suggests sage, oregano, basil, salt, pepper, and a pinch of smoked sweet paprika. I didn’t use any of those because frankly the mushroom broth makes it strong and salty enough. However, shortly before it’s done, add the dry sherry.
Wash down with red wine and Best Beloved’s delicious lemon sponge layer pudding, but that recipe is not mine to share.

What to do on a bank holiday weekend

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You could go on the Sarsen Trail, choosing either the 7 mile, 11 mile or 26 mile option. Any of these would involve getting up around 5am, probably earlier, and paying money for the privilege of walking through most of May’s monthly rainfall and freezing temperatures across Salisbury Plain, admiring the beautiful views you would be getting on a clear, sunny, warm day. Depending on which of the above options you choose you could also get to hang around in the cold and wet for a minimum of one coach trip to take you back to your starting place. (That’s the 7 miles, taking you back to Avebury. For the other two you park at Stonehenge and a coach takes you to the Avebury starting point. If you bail out at 11 miles then another coach brings you back to Stonehenge. And did I mention all this happens in the cold and wet?)

Or, you could not.

We didn’t.

We went instead to the morning service at Sherborne Abbey, for no particular reason except that I haven’t been to a service there since leaving school in 1983, and we had already budgeted mentally for getting up early (just not as penitentially early), and we could drive there in a warm, dry car through the rain and look at the sky to the west and think, hmm, it’s probably still wet for the walkers. And a lovely sung eucharist service it was too, appealing to the senses of sight and sound. The choir were tuneful and skilled and didn’t bang on too long with the set musical pieces; and, despite or perhaps because of five years of compulsory services there, I hadn’t appreciated how lovely the abbey looks. A few centuries ago there was a fire which discoloured the sandstone to a pinkish-red. The place is now decorated with that in mind, subdued reds amidst all the usual ornamental bells and whistles of ecclesiastical architecture, and it works very nicely.

Also nice:

  • being dispensed the wine by Mr David “Billy” Smart, retd: former maths teacher whose rapid-fire Ulster-intonated mathematical pedagogy influenced a generation of boys and makes Tom Lehrer look a little slow, and a key influence in my own spiritual development.
  • seeing in the abbey newsletter that the old school is getting a lady chaplain.

Less nice was the pre-service chat a member of clergy had with the lady sitting behind us, who was obviously a regular. “So, how are you?” Well …” And, unfortunately, she told him, in full symptomatic detail, for about 10 minutes, at the end of which Best Beloved whispered to me, “I don’t want to take communion any more …” She only went through with it after working out that we were sitting in front and so would get to the chalice first.

Then we ate our sandwiches in a layby on the A30 overlooking the Fovant regimental badges cut into a hillside, with the intent of using our temporarily bored-teenager-free window of opportunity to looking around Wilton House. This intention lasted as long as getting through the door of the ticket office and seeing this:


Pardon?

The point of Gift Aid is surely that it augments the price paid at no cost to yourself? So, they expect us taxpayers to pay slightly more than the already high basic rate for the privilege of augmenting their income even further? I think not. Besides, Best Beloved picked up a pamphlet for Mompesson House, only five minutes away and a fraction of the price, so we went round that instead. It’s also a fraction of the size of Wilton House, but even though it belongs to a bygone age it retains the sense of actually being a home that real people lived in, once.

And did I mention how warm and dry all this was?