All quiet on the blogging front...

Apologies for my lack of communication recently. Despite my course requiring little or no work and the Boy being off work for four days, it has been unusually busy around here. This is mainly due to the press and publicity that Mirror Mirror is getting around two particular items.

It is really exciting seeing a business grow, boom and react to the vagaries of the magazine editorial world, but my goodness it's kept me on my toes.



After a 5 hour joint sesh with me on the wrapping with tissue and sumptuous ribbon, and the Boy in charge of box-building, Recorded Delivery Slip filling and box-taping, this was the pile that greeted us in the morning.



The Boy convinced me to trot off to my lecture while he took three bin bags full to the postoffice. Postman Pat was not a happy man.

Today, we drive to Norfolk to *test* out his new wheels, then off to the National Theatre to see Caroline or Change. Will report back on car and caroline.

Jamming

Well chutneying, but that doesn't bring to mind groovy people in smokey bars, now does it?

A mass effort in the face of overwhelming numbers of "What on earth do I get for XXX" to make a range of chutneys, marmalades and savoury sauces.

This morning took me on my faithful two wheels to Whitechapel market to get mangoes, onions and apples, to the Cash & Carry on Brick Lane for vinegar and dried fruits and nuts and then home to a pungent cooking & bottling session.

First, the mango chutney

Just about to disintegrate mangoes...



After 40 mins on the hob with vinegar, apple, onion and ginger...



Then the rather scrummy James Martin's Onion Marmalade








Decorating of rather sticky but pleasantly full jars will begin tomorrow after I can wash the stink of fermenting vinegar out of my hair! I'm stealing one of the Boy's old shirts to cut up as little jar covers and then tie over with string. That's the plan anyway...

The eagle-eyed among you will realise that the recipe I linked to is not the one I used. Those pictures diairise my peeling and chopping of four pounds of onions. Cry me a river indeed.

To have and to hold, to sell or to give...

Another creative day yesterday. Had a bit of a sesh making up Christmas cards from the vintage postcards I bought in Brussels. Unfortunately, at the moment, all I can think about is ways and means to find £2,500 by next November and now I can't decide whether to give out these little numbers to my nearest and dearest or harness the spirit of the season and sell them to my nearest and dearest. £2.00 each?



I feel like Scrooge. Or possibly Fagin.

Channelling Martha, Part II

This is how they should have looked ...

Geeks are brilliant

One of my very best friends has long been extolling the virtues of geeks as a dating and lifelong companion. Geeks are generally more intelligent than most and lack the arrogance and false pretensions of the usual metrosexual-overly-fashion-conscious mid-20s Londoner. They have also demonstrated a degree of longterm fidelity in their unusually strong desire to know as much as possible about something wonderfully mundane. And (last but by no means least) they are grateful for any amendments/adjustments/wholesale reworkings to their wardrobe.

I love my geek.



Look what he did!







I'm back!!

Gobble Quack Cluck ... Munch ...

Not least of all because I found out that my throwaway 'Of course you're welcome for Christmas lunch' to the Boy's parents was taken as a sincere invitation rather than a throwaway 'Of course my hostessing skills are up to it, but you're not seriously going to test them are you' I intended, and because everywhere I look people seem to be discussing turkeys, I can now be found devouring (visually, that is) menus, discussions and blogs on the annual binges that are Thanksgiving and Christmas...

Erin of Dressaday, whom I have previously adulated from these hallowed pages, has brought to my attention the supremely terrifying Turducken... I can only hope she's in jest, but then I feel slightly out of touch with America, having grown up there, but only returned twice for two gluttonous weeks attempting to channel my inner (chubbier) 10year old self. Turducken, for those who missed the 'features' in Food TV Network and Wall Street Journal, is a a semi-boneless turkey stuffed with duck and chicken with layers of delicious stuffing between each bird. The lovely people at Cajun Food also offer the artery quashing Popeye's, which is a deep marinated, slow roasted and crispy fried whole turkey. Can you imagine how much oil you'd need for that?!

As usual, my research has led me to two places: Nigella Lawson and the BBC. I think I may officially be BRITISH. Nigella will be providing the wonderfulness of her gingerbread cake that went down very well last year, and the BBC will be providing everything else. I can heartily recommend their site, where you can scale up and down the six menus that various chefs have compiled, as well as printing out a decorated menu for your guests' perusals. It's a damn clever piece of software at its most basic and very best.

This year I'm tending towards a hot ham. I am, however, open to persuasion...Suggestions on a postcard...

Wires and Whinging

If only our playroom looked as organised as this. I asked the Boy last night (only mildly in jest) if he could find a USB port to upload a picture of our chaos for the blog. There was little need for a reply, but I got one anyway. No. My poor little laptop, bought to type job application letters and occassionally surf the internet has had about 10 versions of SmartStamp, Internet Explorer and Thunderbird loaded onto it and is now being run through to the monitor, printer and ergonomic keyboard of the PC. I came in the room and squealed in delight, seeing a picture emanating from the monitor. I didn't realise you could do that. I thought he'd fixed it.

No such luck.

I fear for my laptop. It's now making the same ominous gurgles and murmurings that the PC made in days of yore...

Death of the Motherboard

The Boy is not happy. Our ridiculously loudly whirring computer box was turned off to accomodate a guest in the spare room on Friday night and it's not turned on since. We (who am I kidding, I have no understanding on the subject) HE believed it was the memory stick, but first checked the motherboard, power supply and RAM. This required two trips to the shop believing one of the elements to be faulty, only to be looked at by the bespectacled and bespotted twerp in Maplin like he was a philistine who then proceeded to demonstrate its perfect working order in front of him.

Gutting...

I just asked him to explain in geekspeak the problem for the literary purposes of blogland and he began with It's f*cked and relented with I don't want to talk about it. And left the room...

This is about as moody, sulky or badtempered as he gets, but as it happens so infrequently, all I want to do is hug and help... Not allowed or able to do either, and he is now curled over the old motherboard, stroking the processor murmuring What's wrong with you?

Despite six years of medical training, I have to say I never get this kind of sympathy or undivided attention over forty eight hours when I'm ill...

The perks of the job...

Since joining the hallowed team at MirrorMirror, they have been getting vast amounts of press coverage for their delicious bath melts. At the moment, that's all I seem to be wrapping... That and some serious bling for some men (presumably for the women in their lives, but hey, I'm open to all fashions!)

A very satisfying perk of the job has been a few invitations to launches and events surrounding current and potential suppliers of the website. My best friend and I were lucky enough to attend the launch of beautiful handbag designer Amishi at Annabel's in Berkley Square on Wednesday night...

Queue naked ladies painted to match the handbags perched in their palms (the Boy and her Boy were not a little unimpressed when they heard about this later), copious free champagne, perched and nibbling on canapes at the bar, and then later enveloped in the opulent velvet sofas (when I finally had to admit defeat in the fact of some fiercesome stiletto onslaught). Though the handbags were gloriously decadent, they were a bit glitzy for my taste: jaw-dropping amounts of Swarovski Crystals and the like. On the right person restrained enough to wear a black evening dress and let the bag do the talking (sadly not me), they would be truly sensational...

To top off the schmoozing, we were given a goodie bag on the way out. We climbed the staircase back into Berkley Square, elegant, poised and a little tipsy, and immediately dived to the bench in the nearest bus shelter to see what goodies awaited us.

Aren't we lucky girls?!

Martha Stewart I Am Not

Or how to not follow instructions...

Apparently I mentioned at some point in the past a vague inkling for making candles. The Boy never remembers to empty the dishwasher or pick up milk, but that he remembered... So part of my birthday present was a rather vast ("Top of the Range") candle making kit, complete with Stearic Acid, a column mould and a forty page booklet...

My first project was an attempt to recreate Martha Stewart's rather delicate teacup candles using the batch of four cups I bartered for in Brussels and melting down the droopy stub of a rose scented column candle my mum got me from Bicester Village.

I melted down the candles in a double boiler set up and added TWO SHAVINGS of the red dye from my packet... I think that may have been my rookie mistake...

I set up my wick wrapped around a skewer and set in a wick sustainer in the bottom and poured my melted wax in.



I recalled something about preventing bubbles by putting holes in the top of the setting wax and pouring more in...



I don't think I did it right... Behold the crater candle...



Not quite the vision of delicacy and prettiness I was after...

Turn again Whittington, though lowly citizen, Lord Mayor of London

This Saturday saw the Boy and I (in my beautiful new boots of course) striding down Bishopsgate to get us a spot to watch the Lord Mayor's Show.

Big planes treated us to a flyover just before 11am



A loan bugle called us to silence for 2 minutes.

All of this was amazingly covered by a range of people for the BBC(note my subtle highlighting of Clare Balding who spent most of the morning looking pretty frazzled and striding from one interview to another):




A lovely morning, with jigging, bands, twirls and spills, but sadly blighted by what I can only describe as the traiterous behaviour of my boots, which crippled me with five (count them) blisters and are now rendered unwearable until my injured feet can bear the rematch...



A happy London day. With London feet. Ouch.

Autumn wanderings...

Decided to not waste yesterday and got me to the John Soane Museum, a much lauded but often queue-heavy teeny tiny museum behind High Holborn and Kingsway.

Turned out that 2pm on a Friday was a perfectly pleasant time to wander through the beautifully preserved old rooms, gawp in horror at the probably-stolen-from-ancient-and-preserved-sites mummy tombs and flotsam and jetsam of Roman architecture and wish I was wearing a swoop-worthy bustle to grace the curving staircases.

They also had a small exhibition on the unknown-to-me architectural prowess of poet John Betjeman.

Loved this poster for his book:

The Fabulous Yawning Breadth of the Internet

Nothing that's good can be copied...

This reminds me of Plato's cave of ideas and cookie cutter imagery. We are only imperfect attempts at copying God's original perfection. Somewhere there is a cookie cutter of the perfect woman and the perfect man.

And Yves St Laurent is dressing them.

_________________________________________

And in a moment of loving that YouTube is brimful with fashion and vintage dress as well as idiots putting cats in washing machines, I also discovered that I am not alone in my house on a Saturday Night. The Internet really does bring people together.

The best moments in reading ae when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

Alan Bennet, The History Boys

The Boots have died... Long live the Boots

In January 2004, I went boot shopping for my Mum... She was having trouble finding knee high boots that fit her right calf (larger than her left due to 40-odd years of sewing machines - amusing fact of seamstress life until you try to go bootshopping)...

Anyway, I found a Pikolinos pair that were roomy on me. Sad to say they didn't fit her, but I had by this point fallen utterly in love with them, and they were to become my FAVOURITE footwear for all year round, chuck 'em on, dress it up, wear it down, summer flitty dress or opaque tighted mini skirted chic.



They were on the verge of death last year, when I replaced the zips and the soles at great cost... Then the heel started breaking. And the sole slipped. And the zips didn't run as smoothly as they used to... And I had to start admitting to myself that they weren't going to last me 10,000 years like they're supposed to.

The hunt began.

I give you... my beautiful new boots...



Now I realise that my new ones do look more knackered than my old, but believe me when I say that that is how they come and I *HEART* them. They make me happy.

I feel extraordinary amounts of guilt. I have a very small income, very large outgoings, and £2,000 on my credit card. But my sister bought a pair at the same time so we got Buy One, Get One Half Price, so actually we saved money.

And that's all that really matters... That and MY NEW BOOTS!!!

For reasons best known to the Boy's camera, my legs look short and fat in the second picture. I am 5'11" and they're all I've got going on. I'm claiming the legs of the top picture.

Pleased to Remember the 5th November...

One of only a few to celebrate Bonfire Night on the actual day this year (falling on a Sunday does rather *pee on your bonfire* as the saying goes)... However, as the many journalists ranted, Hackney's celebrations rather lacked a bonfire this year, and instead revolved around a Bengali folk tale involving a tiger and a mean emperor...

Nonetheless, there was a funfair...



Sparklers...



And spectacular fireworks...



The pictures of the tiger in question didn't come out very well (you try snapping above 20,000 bescarfed individuals and see how well it comes out!) so here's one I stole earlier....


Hope you're appreciating my 'slow exposure night vision' pics... Not a wild success, but an attempt at bloggy artiness?!

Cake slice...

For the princely sum of three whole English pounds

It makes me happy!!

The sea, the sea...

What a spontaneously lovely weekend! It started out rather gruesomely with the Boy developing a tummy bug for 8 hours of dehydration. Not fun. But the upshot of it was that his horrid week of nights was brought to an abrupt halt and so he had two days recovering from the nights and the bug which meant that he was bored of loafing around the house by the time Saturday came...

I decided that stretching his birthday over ten days wasn't quite good enough, being as he had lost all sense of time and place in the six dark days of on calls. So, breakfast in bed and hideously indulgent lying in triumphantly achieved, we decided on a drive into the country and out of the city. Hoorah!

Kent always seems to be our destination of choice. Adjacent to the Blackwall tunnel as we are, it's just the quickest way out of London and therefore on into the land of oast houses and no hills.

Whitstable. Oh lovely whitstable. If only the Boy ate fish. The sheer number of delectable looking oyster bars.... Ho hum. We made do with cream tea at the Tudor Cafe complete with beams and gingham tablecloths...

And watched the ships come in at the harbour...



Ambling around the shops and found myself a rather splendid cake knife at one of the many charity shops there... Fab little nooks and crannies to be found right down Harbour Street...



Can't recommend it enough!