Tomato soup cake

I am far from the only person I know who read the 'Baking with Sylvia' article in the Guardian last week, but I think I was the only one who really took it seriously.

It is about how she saw baking as therapeutic and consoling -- something precise and measured and achievable and warm in a hostile world. I have often felt the same about cooking. Not the getting in late have to eat fast kind of cooking, nor the feeling like a dobber trying not to use butter kind of cooking, but the kind of cooking where you have plenty of time and a real feel for what you want to make.

I am quite a good cook, if I say so myself. In theory it's the kind of thing anyone can be good at if they put in the hours, but in practice I do think there's something more to it. It's a bit like gardening, only on a completely different timescale. Creative, satisfying, and a way of caring for a part of yourself that needs to feel grounded and that it is dealing with known quantities. You also need people to cook *for* (cooking for one is no good at all), but I do it as much for myself as anyone else.

So it was interesting to read about Sylvia Plath's baking, and although baking is not my usual thing, I decided to make her tomato soup cake with the conveniently provided recipe. I had some mellow music (Holly Cole's Dark Dear Heart), it was Sunday afternoon, chill out, contemplate, bake.

Only it didn't quite happen like that. S's sister and her three children are staying this weekend, and if you are a four year old girl there is nothing like the prospect of making a cake to get you excited. So S and the small person became my assistants, we had flour and sugar everywhere and I had to belt out to the shops for more eggs as we had scrambled about a thousand of them for breakfast. The tomato soup became a secret ingredient that everyone had to try and guess, and there was about five times as much cream cheese frosting as you could possibly want to eat if you hoped to hold on to your teeth.

So it was not the introspective cake it should have been, but it was a big hit nonetheless, except with the person who is at an age where he only eats sausages and other things made of mechanically recovered meat. I wonder what Sylvia would have made of it?

joella

Census returns of the Jedi

Great headline, good story. Makes you proud to be British. And I don't even like Star Wars but I think the idea of Yoda on Thought for the Day is very cool indeed.

joella

Why I am going on holiday with my parents

1. Because I've still got parents but won't have forever and I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently
2. Because they asked me last year and I said no but maybe next year and now it's next year and I try not to say things that I don't mean
3. Because I wasn't home for Christmas last year or the year before or the year before that and won't be this year either
4. Because they're paying.

Actually, no 4 makes me sound a lot more callous than I actually am -- I was going to do it before they were paying. I WAS!

Don't for a second get the impression though that I don't like my parents, or that I don't like spending time with them, as neither is the case. My parents are great people, I love them very much, I get on very well with them, and I see them every couple of months -- not bad going considering we live over 200 miles apart.

But they don't travel well, or maybe more accurately, as I don't know unless I'm there, we don't travel well together. The last time we left the country together we came back sitting at opposite ends of the plane and pretending not to know each other. Admittedly we had all been to my grandmother's funeral, but still. Add to that that the family dachshund had been self harming because we left him in kennels, and you really start to get the harmonious picture.

So it was with some trepidation that I agreed. As did my sister, but she went last year, had a good time and is on the whole about seventeen times more easy going than I am.

Then all we had to do was find a holiday. They wanted to go to Italy, I wanted to go to Cuba, so we had to manage holiday expectations right from the start. We settled on Spain, because I wanted to practise my Spanish, but the places they shortlisted were miles from the sea. They wanted somewhere quiet. I found somewhere which seemed quiet but had plenty to do, but it wasn't posh enough. Dad has to have a four star hotel.

Spain was looking out, at least on my and my sister's budgets (this was before they were paying). We moved on to Greece, but I have bad memories of Greece. Then Tunisia, but Dad's not sure because they're Arabs and he's Jewish. Hey, there's Croatia these days, but we're not at all sure about the food (we're all vegetarian).

Somebody mentioned Israel, but I vetoed that, and then Egypt, nope. What about Florida? No, Mum doesn't want to fly for more than four hours. The Gambia? Don't be ridiculous.It was looking like Centerparcs (only not in Holland, you understand).

Then, just after they had decided to pay so that we wouldn't end up staying in a tent on the lawn of their hotel, my sister found a brochure for Turkey. It's affordable, the weather's great, we're near a beautiful beach, the flight's the right length, all that mezze is great for veggies, and the hotel looks amazing. We're off!

Of course, Turkey does share a border with Iraq, but I decided not to mention that. They tell me it will all be over by May anyway.

joella

Special dispensation

I believe in monogamy. Or more specifically, in serial monogamy -- one person in your bed and by your side for your whole adult life is a lovely idea but how many people do you know who actually manage that? Not many. We all grow and change, relationships stop working, people break up. But I do believe you should only do one at a time.

I don't approve of dirty shaggers: if you want to sleep around that's fine, but make sure you're free to and use a condom. If you're not free to, then don't: if you want someone else badly enough to leave the person you're with then you shouldn't be with them anymore anyway, and if you don't want someone else *that* badly, then deal with it.

And most of the time, it's as simple as that. That's the line I walk, it's one of those non-negotiables. I don't eat meat, I brush my teeth every night no matter what state I'm in, I don't sleep with more than one person at a time. However you look at it.

And I take this very seriously. I even find it hard to fantasise about other people, because that means I have to fantasise the person I'm with out of the way first, and by the time I've been through that process (amnesia? job abroad? paralysis from waist down?) and all the associated guilt, I've often gone right off the boil.

Which is why, being a literal sort of girl, I came up with the Special Dispensation, a pre-negotiated arrangement which allows me to sleep with a specified person as a one-off without having to split up first, should the situation ever arise, which of course it won't, but I am anxious and believe in Being Prepared.

For at least ten years the SD applied to Billy Bragg, a reasonably accessible rock star, but the closest I ever got was being sick at his feet -- this was probably a bit too close, certainly for him. Around this time he also lost his appeal, which might have been a consequence of that humiliating experience outside a club toilet but I think had more to do with his embracing of his 'dad' status and getting together with The Blokes. It's just all too matey and not at all sexy these days.

And so the post fell vacant, though Ani DiFranco probably merited it for a while.

But I have realised it should really go to Nick Cave. He writes songs about love and sex and death that make me want to scream, and he just keeps getting better. I don't want to use my SD on someone about whom people say "well, I prefer the early stuff". Amazon said of Nocturama (just out): its heartstopping beauty is nothing short of life affirming. I couldn't agree more. I'd do him.

joella

Life in the fast lane

I went swimming at lunchtime, thanks to my fierce friend & colleague L, who goes three times a week and makes me feel shit if I don't go with her at least once. She is in her costume and in the pool before I have put my bag in the locker, and striding out of the changing room fully dressed by the time I get back from the shower, so we only go together in the loosest possible sense, but it does get me there and for this I am very grateful.

And something very liberating happened today. There are two lanes at lunchtime, plus a wider bit which you can use as a lane but usually has Very Slow Old People in it, plus women who don't like getting their hair wet. And the lanes are marked Slow and Fast.

In essence, I have observed, this is like marking them Women and Men. Women tend to think "well, I might be Medium, but I'm definitely not Fast", and go in the slow lane. Men tend to think "well, I might be Medium but I'm definitely not Slow" and go in the fast lane.

Which would be ok I guess, except there are usually far more women than men swimming at lunchtime, so you get seven of us bumping into each other's feet and some lucky guy gets a whole lane to himself. But the leap from Slow to Fast seems just too big for the average woman to make. I have certainly never dared.

Until today. Today the slow lane was crowded, the big wide lane had people doing random things in it, and I was feeling brave. So I got straight in the fast lane and did front crawl as fast as I could for four lengths and nearly killed myself. Then... the lone man in the fast lane got out and I had the whole lane to myself!

So I went back to my usual mixture of strokes, getting off on the space but swimming as fast as possible in case anyone shouted 'Hey, you're only Medium' at me. And, of course, ready to slip under the barrier into Slow if a genuinely Fast person came along.

About four lengths later, something odd happened. A woman came out of the changing rooms, looked in the pool at me, then got in the fast lane. And then another, and another. And by ten lengths in there were as many of us in the fast lane as in the slow lane, all shapes and sizes and colours of the rainbow, different strokes for different folks etc. One of the pool staff picking up floats stopped to watch, a whole lane full of women who had thought 'yes, I feel fast enough today'.

It was great.

At one point I did get stuck behind a leg-flailing woman in one of those tankini things. I felt like saying 'hey, don't you know this is the fast lane?'. But I didn't.

joella

The Lipson-Shiu Corporate Type Test

Following a lunch largely consisting of radishes and chocolate (my tastebuds have gone haywire recently, of which more another time, no I am not pregnant), I went back to look at the Escher Lego. And then looked at the rest of the guy's site.

I do have a small fondness for geeks, and the Lipson-Shiu Corporate Type Test is a very good geek page for anyone who's ever had to do Myers-Briggs (me, I've had to do it twice, once as a result of below-mentioned running battles). I am a SCIE by this reckoning, I quite like that.

joella

Escher Lego

Don't ask me how I came across this. It started with one of those emails from someone who has fifty million dollars in an offshore bank account and wants to give you half of it, but the rest of it was just one of those random clicking things you do sometimes.

Anyway. This man, and his friend, have spent many months making Escher out of Lego. I am part awed and part freaked out.

joella

So-called personalisation

In the job I have just left, I had several running battles, positioning myself as the defender of the website end-user against the Forces of Marketing. One of these was about site personalisation. Certain people seemed to wet their pants at this prospect, while I sat in the corner and said No, just... NO.

We got the phone bill last week, I paid it online via the Co-op Bank. You have to log in for that, but obviously there's a point to it, or else you could be paying any old person's phone bill, nice idea, but it won't catch on.

It was quite a hefty bill, though, and I noticed that only two of our 'friends and family' numbers are actually for current friends or family, so I thought I would follow their friendly advice and log into 'my bt.com' (or whatever they call it) and change them.

We have a broadband connection (a BT one, in fact). BT is a huge company with presumably a great deal invested in its online customer service. Could I get the fucking thing to work? No I could not.

First of all, I know I have been into this service before at some stage, but it might well have been from my previous abode, in which case the phone number and (possibly?) account number are different. It seemed to recognise one of my standard usernames, but not with one of my standard passwords, but it told me I could enter my account number and it would give me my password.

So I did, and it told me my account number wasn't valid. Which it most certainly is because I had just copied it straight off the bill, so either I had a different account number when I registered that username, or someone else is using that username. Either way, I wasn't getting anywhere.

So I tried to register again, filled in the form with all my details, some of them twice, and hit return. Nothing for a while, then a 'page cannot be displayed' error. So I went back and the form was empty. And I really could not be arsed filling it in again.

This is what happens with websites. Even when they're good, they're not very good. And at least if it had worked I would have got something out of it that would have saved me money. Who is going to bother to go through all of this to choose the type of content they see when they get to an organisation's homepage, compared, say, with clicking on something that looks interesting?

No one. And even if you do it once, even if your username and password doesn't go straight out of your head, will you do it twice? Will you arse. You'll go and do something less boring instead.

I know I am running registration and personalisation together, and I know about cookies and all that, but my point stands. And we will continue to have Liz's old house, my sister's long-gone Dutch flat and S's ex-boyfriend on our Friends & Family till the cows come home.

joella

Also

Blogging is very different from other kinds of writing, isn't it? It kind of reminds me of when email first happened. I had an email address very early, because of my strange job writing about online information before much information was online. And as a result I wrote long, involved emails to other people I knew who had email addresses, and a couple of these saved exchanges now feel like relics from another age, so intimate and detailed are they. Email took some getting used to, and of course evolved as well, to the point where now I get so fucking much of it I rarely use it for anything important.

For a while there was texting, but that's pretty limiting, and there's no easy way to save them offline, as it were, and then there was Messenger, but I got pretty burnt by that when I inadvertently became someone's masturbation aid. Just the once, mind. At least, as far as I know.

And now there's blogging. While the main person I am writing for remains myself, I think, I obviously do bear a wider audience in mind. This mostly has an effect when I want to tell a story which involves other people. Etiquette obliges one to avoid naming names, or to omit certain details, in order not to piss anyone off. But it's complicated. I quite enjoy the challenge, but every now and again it's almost impossible.

Like yesterday. I really wanted to explain why I hate Valentine's Day so much, because that's what was dominating my thoughts all day, and this is currently the place where I muse on these things. But it's impossible without mentioning my Significant Ex, and while nobody from his time zone has ever visited, he might well be furious at even a passing mention, by name or not. I do try and avoid it, honest.

And then there was a whole Valentine's Day episode with Miles that I just skated over, on the grounds that, well, it was a long time ago and should be laid to rest. He never normally reads this, he gets more than enough ranting I suspect. But I think his curiosity was piqued, so he did, and then he pointed out that I hadn't explained why it was that I wanted to chop him into little pieces with my axe. You just can't please some people.

This is blogging about blogging, which is only mildly interesting even to me, so I think I will take myself to bed. Tomorrow: Why I Am Going On Holiday With My Parents.

joella

Upon not being in London

Between one and two per cent of the population of this country was in London by noon today, demonstrating against a war that is almost inevitable. I didn't get out of bed until 1pm. I am trying to work out why.

It's not that I want the war to happen. It's not that I didn't have anyone to go with -- Miles wouldn't have come, because he agrees with Julie Burchill -- but some of my favourite people got up early this morning in order to stand up and be counted, and several of them asked me if I wanted to come too. It's not like it's a long way, it wasn't raining, and I do think this is a profoundly significant time: decisions made now are going to have huge ramifications for the future of international relations. So what then?

I think it has to do with what I feel is the essential futility of the gesture. There was a fabulous Onion article the week after September 11: Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake. Getting on the bus to London this morning would have felt a bit like that.

I think we're just reaching the end of a marketing campaign. The date it's all going to kick off is in a diary somewhere in the White House with a big ring round it, and every day left between then and now is planned down to the colour of tie and the timbre of voice. The French and the Germans have thrown things a bit, causing a huge brainstorming session somewhere, but really, that's detail and it won't change a thing.

The consequences will be huge and unpredictable, Europe and NATO may well never be the same again, but George W Bush is going to have himself a war, Tony Blair is going to back him because he feels that's better than not backing him, and it really doesn't matter what the rest of us think any more than it matters what the Iraqis think.

Of course, I could be wrong. In which case I take my hat off to anyone who stood in the cold for hours today needing a wee.

joella

February the Fourteenth

I hate Valentine's Day. It's worse than Christmas.

When I was 10 I got my first Valentine's card. I thought it might be from Robert Jones, whom I was mad about. I still have a bit of lead in my elbow from where he stabbed me with a pencil. I don't think he even did it on purpose, but it was the most attention he had ever paid me and there was no way anyone was taking that lead out.

Anyway, I was in transports of ecstasy until it transpired that the card was from my mother and sister, who had thought that thinking it was from Robert Jones might cheer me up. This was not an accurate assessment of the situation, as I was instead deeply humiliated and then inconsolable for days. I probably made them feel shit as well. I'm sorry. I should have refused to have anything to do with the whole thing from that moment on.

But I didn't, I persevered. Mistake.

There were a few blissful years when I first got together with my Significant Ex, where February 14th was a day full of magic and romance. Once I remember taking ecstasy and making snow angels together in the middle of the night in a perfect college garden setting. That kind of thing.

But the conversation that kick started the decline and eventual end of that relationship also took place on Valentine's Day. It was the only Friday night we had had on our own together for months, is why, it was more of a coincidence than anything else, but it was pretty fucking awful. We had separated by the time it came round the next year, and that year I went back to see my mum. She didn't try and give me any cards that time, but she did take a photo of me on the beach at Lytham, which is a little bit too studied in its misery, but mostly does the job.

It got even more complicated once Miles and I got together, and for a few years I made a point of spending the day on my own, drinking red wine, being reflective and then just being pissed. That didn't work last year, as we were in Guatemala together, and I felt I should perhaps show a bit of grace and maturity and get over stuff. He bought me a necklace with a little jade axe on it, which was Dead Symbolic as for a while I used a real axe to chop wood representing him (and other people, I was fairly generous in my fury) into little pieces. And we moved on.

Or that was the plan, because the whole hearts and flowers thing still makes me want to hurl something out the window. LIFE ISN'T LIKE THAT OKAY?

Glad I've got that off my chest.

joella

I don't have to sell my soul...

New PC comes with New Job. This is normally seen as a good thing, but in this place it takes weeks to get everything working, not least anything making a noise. What is it with firewalls and RealPlayer? And of course it is not 'supported' so you're on your own with Real.com's badly mis-named Knowledge Base and lots of General Errors. Not Loving It.

But persistence will out, and this morning I succeeded in getting radio with a combination of Windows Media Player and Netscape 7.

Why the fuss? Because of 6Music, that's why. Surely the best thing to happen to radio since Triple J, in fact better, because Triple J is Australian so I always get the middle of the night shows when I'm listening at work, and it's just not the right vibe.

So a good day so far. Get radio working, and the first thing I hear is the first track from the first Stone Roses album. And I am right back to summer 1989, stoned out of my head and wondering what a Dord is and why anyone would want to be one.

joella

Will I get sussed?

I had a little crisis of confidence on Friday. I don't have a clue how to do my new job. Not really.

It's like this. Once upon a time I went to school and turned out to be very good at exams. This is because I can remember a lot of things for a short time, which helps you do things like history, and also can spot when things I don't know are similar in some important way to other things that I do know, which helps you do things like chemistry.

So I ended up at Cambridge University doing a degree in social and political science, where I spent three years reading complicated books and developing a new technique which involved writing essays by knitting together little bits of information from multiple sources in a reasonably coherent order without necessarily understanding all of it. Then I had to remember it all for just over a week while I did my finals, and then I was free.

Since then I have worked in a series of environments -- insurance, IT, information science, education, new media -- about which I have known absolutely nothing of any depth. I have simply applied my ability to remember things, my ability to spot patterns and my ability to communicate to the job in hand, worked hard enough not to be ashamed of myself, and moved slowly towards doing something I can see the point of.

So you could say I have spent my life convincing people that I know a lot more about the business in hand than I actually do. And if you think that I have got each new job on the back of my experience in my previous job, I am currently working in development as a knowledge and information manager based on the fact that I know how to run a website based on the fact that I wrote about knowledge and information management based on the fact that I ... what? Wanted to move to Oxford to be with my Significant Ex, and I copyedited an article for school librarians better than anyone else on the day. That saved me from the job as a researcher in the insurance industry which I got because I had done some questionnaire coding for a research project and hey, that was close enough.

Really, everything I sell myself on is built on foundations of sand. And what if they find that out, just as I am getting to do something useful?

The other argument goes that this is what everyone does, and the whole pain of adult life is realising this. Everybody is winging it, all the time. How scary is that?

joella

Two good jelly-related things

1. Vege-Gel from SuperCook. I love jelly, but gelatine is a fairly gross thing even if you are not a vegetarian. For me, it falls into the area occupied also by wine (when I am not Living Healthily, obviously), interesting crisps, instant noodles and parmesan cheese -- stuff which doesn't look like it has any meat in it but actually contains bits of stomach, bone, bladder etc heavily disguised.

We all live by wavy lines, and mine wiggle quite a bit in this area. I look at the label if I am buying myself, but I don't think about it if I am eating out or someone else is cooking or shopping. And with gelatine, there's also the issue of Evening Primrose Oil, which I swear keeps me sane, but the gelatine-free capsules are so tiny I would need to take thousands of them. So I don't think about it, and I swallow.

But back to the point. I can't bring myself to make jelly, even though I love it, because that is so obviously eating gelatine for gelatine's sake, and that is Bad. And then I discovered Vege-Gel. Make it with a litre of freshly squeezed orange juice plus raspberries and elderflower cordial, and you have a sublime triumph of a dessert that looks like a huge, shimmering breast and has harmed no animal in the making. What more could you ask?

2. Lost Horizons by Lemon Jelly. This kind of music is called downtempo, I found out today. I had always thought of it as chill-out but I must be showing my age because I don't even know my genres on the stuff I *like*. Anyway, it's groovy, it's funny, it's clever and it's very English, which I like very much as I assumed you had to live in France or Manhattan to get this vibe right. And it's hard to truly love an album when you know you are not nearly, remotely, hope in hell as cool as the young men in smooth trainers and twisted denim who recorded it.

Also their website is at www.lemonjelly.ky, which made me laugh. The site itself is a bit irritating, although they have had the sense to do a HTML version for grumpy old-fashioned Flash haters like me, so they get points for that.

joella

Groovy urban boho life 3

Miles and I are in adjoining rooms communicating via MSN Messenger.

me: do you want a cup of herbal tea
him: ooh, yes please

(That's enough groovy urban boho life - Ed)

joella

Groovy urban boho life 2

We have a wireless network, so I can in theory write my blog from any room in the house. Or anywhere on the street, in fact. But it's not working properly yet.

joella

Groovy urban boho life?

Shit, I have just written not one but two posts about my bloody *chair* at *work*, then went to read the blogs of my friends and realised that Justin Ruffles has described my life (kind of, he was describing someone else's really) as groovy, urban and boho.

Either he really doesn't get out much or I have got to get back with it. What am I doing, fixating on chairs, elegant and Scandinavian though they can be (if they are not banned)?

So. Groovy urban boho things that are happening.

1. Miles is listening to Orchestra Baobab while tapping on his laptop in our fairy-lit back room
2. I am not watching Footballer's Wives tonight because I am going round to Roger's house in a minute to swim in his pool
3. We bought a bike lock for our new shiny dustbin because the last two got stolen
4. I am going to India for Christmas

It's not really working is it? Bugger.

joella

Okay, I take it back

The HR woman came to see me today. She is not horrible, in fact she is very nice, but perhaps her phone manner is not the best.

It is not my place of work that has banned my chair, it is something to do with the national Health & Safety Executive. Nobody is allowed to use them anymore, not just me. Apparently they are bad for your knees.

I still think I should be allowed to sign my knee rights away and keep using my chair if I want to, but there comes a point where you have to give in gracefully. And seeing as she expressed lots of sympathy at my situation and offered me a made to measure chair and some physiotherapy for my shoulder, I thought perhaps I had reached it.

joella

Chair fascism

Today a woman from my HR department made me cry. I cannot remember the last time anyone made me cry at work. My chair is in contravention of a UN Resolution. It has been banned.

The conversation went a bit like this:

her: Can I ask what kind of chair you have?
me: Um, it's one of those kneely ones.
her: They have been banned. You can't use it anymore.
me: What do you mean, banned?
her: They have been banned. If you keep using it we will be fined.
me: But I have a letter from a doctor you sent me to when I started working here saying it is a fine chair and good for me!
her: They have been banned. You can't use it anymore.
me: But why?

I didn't get an answer to the question why, she just got screechier about the being banned part, despite my aforementioned letter from bona fide occupational health doctor. The best I could do was insist on seeing the paperwork describing the exact nature of this ban.

What can be so evil about my poor little chair? It is a Stokke Variable and my mother bought it for me in 1994. I have taken it to seven desks in four offices since then and nobody has ever minded.

I love my chair. I don't like office chairs, I never have. They don't fit me, they make me fidget and make my shoulders hurt and legs ache. And it's not just offices: I always did my homework lying on a beanbag on the floor, and my college work like that too.

It's my chair, I want to keep it. Nobody else has to use it, I am an adult and happy to take full responsibility for anything that happens to me while I am sitting on it.

And why did I cry? Because I am feeling vulnerable today, it's my vulnerable day of the month when the world feels like it's falling apart even if nothing bad happens. And then I got grief down the phone from someone who doesn't understand about me and my chair and doesn't want to. I spend thirty seven and a half hours a week working for an organisation that has a fucking diversity policy, and they want to make me have the same chair as everybody else.

joella

Giving good headline

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but I would argue that a good headline can give it a run for its money.

Like cryptic crossword clues, writing a really good one demands skill, finesse and humour, and reading a really good one can make your day.

This may be especially true among people who have written them for a living -- l once did this, among other things, for IWR and those of us who read the thing (mostly those of us who wrote it) would congratulate each other when a particularly fine specimen was produced. Sad really.

But I have seen few finer than one from yesterday's Sunday Times, which said as much in eight words as the whole article it introduced:

Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.

Loving it loving it loving it.

joella