move over miss marple

the presence of struan in brighton the week before last has been explained, by none other than struan himself, after i sent him an email via the belle and sebastian website. here's (some of) what he said: "Hey it was me.... I was having a quiet fish tea to myself before djiing at a club..."
closer inspection reveals this to be true, he was djing at holdup at the arc club.
mystery solved. i totally rule.

i can stop any time i want

like the offspring of techie and an english student (ahem), hamlet - the text adventure is wonderful but somehow wrong. don't start playing it if you can't spare the time. i found myself putting my supper on the table, eating a couple of bites and then going back to the computer to play for another few minutes. evercrack my arse, they should make this a class a substance. (via guardian weblog)

frittata fun

i made a delicious frittata last night, and i've just finished eating the rest of it for lunch. it was so nice that i thought i'd like to share the recipe (and also have it handy for me next time i want to make it). what i like about this is that you can pretty much chuck in anything you've got in your fridge, which is what i did. what i do is to cook one, eat half of it hot, and let the other half cool and have it cold the next day. if you cut it into quarters i'd say it would serve four as part of a main meal, or two if you've got big appetites (like me). cold, it would be good picnic food. have it with tomato ketchup, it's grate.

you will need bits in italics are optional, replace them with whatever you want - this obviously makes a good veggie dish if you leave out the sausages and the bacon:
olive oil
half a large onion, cut into very small pieces
a clove of garlic, ditto
two potatoes, peeled and cut into centimetre (ish) cubes
a red pepper, washed and cut into bite-sized bits
two large flat mushrooms, washed and cut into bite-sized bits
two sausages, cut into quarters
two rashers of streaky bacon
some fresh basil
four large eggs/ five smaller eggs, beaten and seasoned

here's what you do:
fry the onion and the garlic in the olive oil over a low heat in a large non-stick frying pan (mine's about 26cm diameter) until the onion has gone transparent. add the potato and stir it all in. the potato takes the longest of everything to cook - i think mine took about half an hour last night - but it depends on the size of your cubes, so i recommend testing them every so often, by eating a bit. scientific, i know. when the potato is soft, but there's still a bit of bite left in the centre, add the rest of your ingredients except for the eggs and any fresh herbs you want to put in.
fry these all together until the vegetables are soft and the meat is cooked through, this should take about ten minutes. then add the basil (or whatever herbs you want) and the eggs. swirl the eggs around the pan to make sure that everything is covered, then leave it on a low heat for about 15 minutes.
the egg should have mostly set when you come back to it, but it will probably still be a little runny at the top. in order to fix this, you want to put the frying pan under a hot grill for a couple of minutes, keep an eye on it and when it's nicely browned on top, it's done!
serve it with a green salad.

also, audioscrobbler is now on my sidelinks (under listening), it will tell you what i'm listening to on itunes (as long as i'm online). i'm all about transparency, me.

oh god. stuart murdoch is in the same restaurant as me. in brighton. as we speak (type).

edited 22/8/04 it's true, i came up the stairs from the bathroom, and there he was, sitting on his own reading a paper. i didn't in the end go over and speak to him, because i didn't really want to interrupt his meal. the question is, what is he doing in brighton (when we met him in scarborough, he told a whole story about how he didn't like brighton because he once came down from london to buy a motorbike on a sunday to drive back to glasgow - stuart h's version is here)?

new look, baby!

i finally got around to making good on my promise to redesign. and it's only just over eighteen months since the last one. huzzah. goodbye to pink (well, almost). i was going to wait for my tech support guy to tell me that it looked alright in his browser, but it looks fine in safari, ie and opera as far as i can tell, so i thought i'd just go ahead and launch it. it does look a bit wrong if you change the font size in view. but i'm not really sure how to get around that, so sorry to those of you who have their font size bigger. if it does look horrible in your browser, please let me know, but you'll prolly have to tell me how to fix it as well.

in other news, blogs are the new zines. go blogs! you totally rock! can you tell i'm bored?

on the train to london 'any passengers using the toilets please note that the flush is behind the seat and is not the red button marked emergency alarm'. Hee hee.

i'm feeling distinctly over-caffeinated at the moment this is because when i met everett true today i had a cup of coffee. i don't drink a lot of coffee. i also then had two glasses of pepsi when i got home (i'm so rock and roll, me), so that's why i'm feeling slightly shaky 'n' stuff. the interview went well i think, and mr true's cat was a sweetie too (always important). back to the diss now i think.

i'm somewhat freaked out by the discovery that a second person from my course is moving to dubai (the first was matt. it makes me almost glad that i have been expressly forbidden from moving there by my parents (not that i'd pay any attention to them if i did want to go). surely there are journalism jobs in britain somewhere. i did at least have a good interview yesterday with this mysterious blogger yesterday. most productive. so i suppose being unemployed is at least good for my dissertation.

small pleasures #6 - brushing my teeth in the shower there's a scene in american beauty, where lester (kevin spacey) brushes his teeth in the shower. that to me is true decadence.

you think that's a bit strange no doubt, but look: i grew up in a house with no shower. we got a handheld, attached to the bath shower in 1995 or something, but that's the closest thing we have. you can't brush your teeth under a shower that you have to hold in your hand, not least because your arm will get tired.

so i didn't really get to live the dream until university. and what a dream it is. brushing my teeth in the shower is an expression of freedom to me. it means more than just the physical act. we never have enough hot water at home, so you can't actually bathe every day, no matter how much you want to. brushing my teeth in the shower is a way of saying showering is something that i can do every day, like brushing my teeth.

we've just had a new shower installed in the flat (those of you who know the old shower will know how much this means), it's sheer joy. it's freedom from the tyranny of bathing.

i walked past the pride parade today. it did indeed make me feel very proud - i got that kind of lump in the throat that you get when you know that something is fantastic (i had exactly the same thing yesterday when nadia won big brother). i also felt a bit ashamed of myself - other than being on various committees at uni as an lgb rep, i've not really done much to advance 'the cause'. i've never even been to pride. any pride (unless you count the uni lgb social group, and i only went to that twice. and once was in freshers' week of my first year). i'm a rubbish lesbian (not least because i'm bi).

small pleasures #5 - juxtaposition yesterday, as i was trying to think of interesting things to say about my dissertation, i heard the familiar sound of bass pumping from a car stereo at high volume. the sound drew nearer and nearer. at home this is not a very uncommon situation, in fact it's pretty common, but in peacehaven... well the name says it all really. finally, the car was almost driving past our window, and i began to make out what the music it was playing was - hip hop? was it? that's what it would have been in the bush. no. it was playing s club 7. and it made me smile.

oops, i got a bit distracted by a dvd last night (i joined lovefilm, and i'm extremely impressed, i may set up a blog to record my lovefilm adventures - hmmm - but that's one for another day). anyway, today's small pleasures has a movie theme, so it's kind of relevant:

small pleasures #4 - solo cinema i have previously mentioned that i don't get a huge amount of time to myself (although i'm making up for that in spades at the moment, by living alone for a month). so that's one of the reasons that i like to occasionally go to the cinema (or a gig for that matter) on my own. that said, it is a very occasional treat - i've only seen three films alone: swingers, american beauty and secretary. the first and the last were for very pragmatic reasons - no one wanted to see them with me (and i had to review secretary for my student paper - i described it as being not that different from runaway bride), the middle was because i'd seen it and loved it so much that i had to see it again. but all three definitely make my top 20 of favourite films.

what i like about going to the pictures on my own is not having to worry about what someone else is thinking - if they like it or not, and i don't have to stress out about popcorn issues (do we share, do we get one each, salt or sweet) or whether we need to stop to use the conveniences before or after the film.

what i don't like about going alone is not having someone to talk about the film to - not being able to say "oh i loved that bit when...", but i suppose that's what the internet's for.

small pleasures #3 - good morning/afternoon living in london you don't often say hello to people. it's not necessarily because we're unfriendly, it's more because we have other things on our minds. but sometimes it is nice to say hello to your neighbours, or people you meet on a walk. it happened today - i went for a lovely long walk, along the cliffs, from peacehaven to newhaven. i hadn't really intended to walk that far, i was wearing slightly inappropriate shoes, and i did end up getting a tiny bit sunburnt (just pink, not really sore or anything). on the way, i met only one other walker, who was going the opposite direction for me. he stood to one side to let me get past on the path, and we had a very brief chat about the weather.

in london, i can be as misanthropic as i want to be, but in sussex and in york, i actually quite enjoy a bit of interaction with strangers. contradictory i know, but there you go.

small pleasures #2 - little children i love being sat behind a small child on a bus, it gives me a distinct sense of happy well-being to make a silly face at a kid who is watching me with interest. i'm not the world's biggest sprog fan, but a well-behaved, smiley child laughing at me invariably makes me feel very happy, and gives me a tiny glow for the rest of the day.

similarly, meeting two of the children of my ex-vicar's parishners a couple of months ago gave me the same feeling. i got to read them stories, and admire their art (i have a drawing of a house by one of them magnetted to my fireplace) and have fairly involved conversations about cats. lovely.

by the way, this is the 200th post on atsot. it's the week of anniversaries, clearly. go blog! you rock!

so i've been thinking all day of ideas for the theme week, and while i quite liked a few of them, i confess i did get a bit stuck. however, this is the one that i'm going for: small pleasures. things that give me a tiny thrill of joy.

#1 - please may i every so often, someone will come up to the bar at work and say "please may i have a bottle of beer and a gin and tonic", or whatever. i had a nanny until i was 2 and a half (when she got married and my brother was born), and she taught me to say "please may i get down" after a meal, or "please may i have some more juice". so i think that's probably why it gives me that tiny frisson of happiness when i hear them say it. it's just so sweet, and polite and slightly childlike. yay for them.

in more work-related news i've got a couple more entries in the famous people i have served a drink to (an occasional series). this is because i worked the hitchhiker's guide wrap party on friday. the first in this series was mark owen, who ordered a white wine and a gin and tonic.

so #2 is martin freeman (aka) tim from the office, he ordered a pimms and lemonade, but i'm not entirely sure that it was for him because i definitely saw him having a beer about five minutes later.

#3 is the rapper mos def, who ordered a smirnoff vodka and orange juice. he specifically wanted smirnoff. luckily it's the only brand we sell.

there were a few other well known faces around, but those were the only two i actually served, i think, by about half past twelve i was going slightly insane with exhaustion and being too hot (it was so so hot).

dear blog, how are you? i hope you are well. i am fine. i am down in the seaside again. it is very hot, but there is quite a nice breeze. i like it because it's not as hot as london.
i have forgotten almost everybody's birthday this year, so it is hardly surprising that i forgot yours. but that doesn't mean i wasn't thinking of you, blog.
as i will now have some more time to myself i thought i would we could have a theme week here at atsot. the last one was egoweefs, which was a very long time ago. i've not decided what the theme is going to be as yet, but i'm sure it will be grate. or possibly rubbish.
anyway, i just wanted to say sorry for neglecting you,
lots of love,
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ps, yay for clipart