PODKA UND WALNUSS SCHNAPPS

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Last night, Dave (mine), Dave (non-denominational), Jenny and I had a board games evening that turned into a group chemistry session. Er, not that kind. Someone at work had given me six unripe walnuts from the tree in his back garden, to make schnapps with. We were very taken with the description of the colour changes in the solution over the course of a year - from light green to dark green as the essential oils dissolve out of the nuts, to black when they oxidise, to, finally, a deep mahogany. The conversation turned to speculation as to what else we could steep in vodka for fun and profit, and the obvious answer surfaced - coffee beans!

The internet had got there ahead of us, of course, and with nicer pictures. Coffee vodka takes only 12 hours to become drinkable, giving much faster gratification than the walnut schnapps, which will be ready in a year.

Dave cracked a large handful of his fancy coffee beans between two chopping boards while I quartered my unripe walnuts. They were strangely unlike the ripe ones we eat: when asked to guess, most people thought they were limes or quinces. They were smooth and green, with a faint spicy aroma. Inside, the shells had not yet started to develop, and though the familiar curlicued pattern was present, it was picked out in translucent goo and white pith. When we'd both finished our preparations, Dave added a shake of sugar to his and we covered our test samples in a respectable layer of Finlandia vodka. They were then put in the airing cupboard.



This morning, the coffee vodka had turned an impressively opaque black. We filtered it through a tea strainer to get the shiny, beetle-like beans out. Even after that, when I held the glass up to the light, the shadows of my fingers did not show through.



The four of us stood in the kitchen, clinked our beakers to science and took a sip. At the first taste, our tongues met sweetness, but it was followed up immediately by the black bitterness of the coffee and a combined caffeine/alcohol kick that could blow your head off. It is truly wonderful stuff, a brew for cementing dark unholy compacts. It goes nicely with dark chocolate, too. We have honoured it with the name of Podka.



I'm not supposed to be drinking at the moment, so clearly vodka and caffeine was the best breakfast possible. Hopefully, by the time my walnuts are schnapps I will be in a position to appreciate them fully!

THE WAGES OF SIN

In the course of some inter-desk shenanigans this afternoon, my boss tried to tempt me and Sarah the summer student into eating some BBQ Beef Hula Hoops he'd lifted from our physicist's desk drawer.

"Come on, share the guilt," he beguiled us.

"I wouldn't eat your stolen beef Hula Hoops even if I could!" I declared grandly.

"Can you eat them, though?" someone else asked. I set out to find a definitive answer, committed as ever to the twin causes of Truth and filling up the five minutes between collecting samples.

A moment's googling brought me to the United Biscuits customer care webpage, where they helpfully offer no less than 15 lists of products suitable for various special diets. A note at the top of the list states, "Valid only for the month of July 2009," so they are presumably updated once a month.

This month, vegans like me are allowed the following:

HULA HOOPS
Original
Salt & Vinegar Flavour
Smoky Bacon Flavour

I doubt that any of my readers who eat bacon actually thought there was any in their crisps, so this would be fine, except that Muslim customers are offered this selection, all "vegetarian and alcohol free":

HULA HOOPS
Original
Salt & Vinegar Flavour
Cheese & Onion Flavour
Roast Chicken Flavour

The Cheese & Onion and Roast Chicken flavours probably contain whey powder, so that's why they're on this list and not the vegan one, but where have the Bacon hoops gone? I guessed that they were left off because Muslims might not want even fake pig flavour in their crisps - but, no, Bacon Flavour Discos, Skips and Wheat Crunchies are all okay.

Does this mean Smokey Bacon Hula Hoops contain alcohol? I would buy a packet and see if I get tipsy, but unfortunately I am opposed to fake pig flavouring on grounds of taste.

I avoided the wages of sin (they are beef-flavour savoury snacks) but gained a new mystery.

RAPE CRISIS CRISIS

Dave recently blogged at Not Powerless about the "rape crisis crisis". Despite promising in his election manifesto to provide funding for four new rape crisis centres in the capital, as well as to sustain the only one already operating, Boris Johnson has done nothing to help them. The Croydon rape crisis centre may soon have to close because of this lack of funding. It goes without saying that the work they do is highly important and this is a big problem.

Dave has written a follow-up post about the issue and suggests ways to help, including writing to Boris Johnson to remind him to keep his promise in the consultation to decide funding, closing the 20th of July. I highly recommend reading both posts and taking action!

***

I haven't mentioned Not Powerless here yet. It's Dave's and my new(ish) project: A blog about things you can practically do to make the world better. We (mostly Dave so far to be honest) are writing about current events, politics, the environment and social issues, with a slant towards practical actions our readers can take for positive change.

Cementing his new persona as opinionated hippy blogger, my brother Ed will shortly be joining us there as a writer. Comments are always highly welcome!

CLICKCLICK

Back on my birthday last year, I started a project I rather ambitiously called A Year of Living Photographically. I planned to take one (or more) photo a day for the whole year and put them up on a photoblog. I had a lot of aims for this project: to make a record I could look back on when wondering where so much time had gone, to improve my picture-taking and perhaps also my confidence, not to go crazy in the weeks of unemployment (and then sandwich artistry and data entry) I had ahead of me after leaving university.

Things started off well. Taking pictures every day gave me at least a little structure, and it may not be just my imagination that some of the photos I took in the summer months were pretty good. Then came the winter, when life becomes more difficult. Photography is apparently included in that: I've spent the last hours trawling through November, the month when the world went out of focus. I mean that literally. The camera doesn't lie, after all. I slipped a few times and, at some point, realised that I was a long way from my intended goal. I might have sort of given up for a while.

Suzy, who gave me the idea for all this with her Project 366, also fell short of an entire year, but she had a better track record and a much better excuse than me: losing her camera in mid-November. She's now restarted her project with an avalanche of great pictures. Ack, I thought, on seeing them, with shame and a strange inspiration: if Suzy can start again, so can I! It was a moment of great determination, and then I left my camera at Katinka's for a week.

My plan now is to cherry-pick the photographs I actually like from the last few months. I started taking daily pictures again last Saturday. Hopefully I'll be able to post them more regularly this time.



I read this plaintive AskMetaFilter question today: I used to be creative. How do I get that back? Among the good answers put forward (make and protect time for yourself to pursue something creative; let yourself play; watch less TV!) was this comment, which summed something I knew but hadn't explicitly thought before:

We live in a culture that doesn't respect grown-up amateurs very much. Kids, sure, if they keep themselves and their friends entertained with the fruits of their imagination, that's good enough. But creative adults are expected to find an audience for the things they create, and told that they aren't "real" artists/writers/musicians until they do. There's a lot of pressure to either Get Serious or quit creating. And since most of us never really wanted to Get Serious — which involves a lot of hard, tedious, unfulfilling work — we quit.

So the first step is recognizing that pressure and resisting it. Go back to entertaining yourself and your friends like you did when you were a kid.

If all this talk of picture-taking has whetted your appetite for photography, or simply for pictures that aren't mine, I recommend the beautiful, amusing and Gothic work of Diana Pinto, or perhaps the breathtaking travelogues of OneEighteen, particularly his maritime photos.

IF YOU WANT A FRIEND WE CAN DRINK IN THE AFTERNOON

It's been a very musical week. After a year of broken computers and scraping by, I finally got an external hard drive and got back all my MP3s from Dave's back-up. I've been putting all 25 Gb on shuffle and just luxuriating in it. Are Playground Lights doing anything these days? "If We Leave Tomorrow" is an even better song than I remembered. I've rediscovered Tori Amos - I never really paid the attention to get into From The Choirgirl Hotel but I think I might now.

Colin visited at the weekend - well, okay, he happened to be graduating in the area and met me for coffee and Dan-Brown's-massive-schlong jokes (brave lad). He's leant me CDs by Automatic Loveletter and Manchester Orchestra, which I haven't really listened to yet because I've been caught up with Donkey by CSS. I finally got my hands on a hard copy. It's a fantastic album. Note to Ed: I've also got El Presidente's self-titled album! Yeah!

This weekend I also met Maren of Urban Fairy and found her very interesting, beautiful and well-matched with Adam "Early Electric" Crothers. Hopefully I'll get to talk to her a bit more the next time we meet.

I also found out that Mystery Train have a CD coming out - very exciting.

While rushing to meet Colin on Saturday, I was stopped by a neat, American-accented man who asked me if I lived in Cambridge. Thinking he wanted directions, I said yes, to be asked if I wanted to take part in a psychology experiment the next day. I did a lot of those while I was an undergraduate - they were always good for a fiver, which might be the difference between lunch for the next few days and overdraft-limit-pushing - so I agreed and took Dave along with me.

It turned out to be an experiment on the psychology of music, being filmed for a series of documentaries on Cambridge University research in the year of the university's 800th anniversary. We listened to a number of clips and rated how much we liked them, before filling out a standard personality questionnaire. Then came the surprise - we were asked if we would stay on and be interviewed for the documentary. I felt bad because most of the people who had been asked to stay had run off, claiming revision, so agreed again. We were only waiting around for another two and a half hours - fifty minutes of which were because of church bells ringing loudly next door!

The interviews involved being played a few clips of music we'd already heard: opera, hip hop, metal, country - generic clips that wouldn't cost them a fortune to broadcast. We were then asked questions on how we thought musical tastes reflect on a person's character. After spending the waiting time playing charades with a bunch of comical misfits (very like a film), I had no brainspace to give considered opinions so they got a stream of consciousness instead. The filmmakers seemed to like it. "Amazing!" they said. They had said the same thing about the guy who was interviewed before me, but then he's an MC and so clearly has lots of relevant opinions. I was just talking off the top of my head. As Dave and I were leaving, after our individual interviews, the assistant filmmaker told us, "I don't know if you two ever talk about this stuff between yourselves, but you really should." I'm not quite sure what that means.

I'm a little loath to post the url where this documentary will appear, because they could always cut it about to show us as crazy racists, but once it's got past the shadowy OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS and the even more sinister EIGHT HUNDRED COMMITTEE it will probably end up here.

This entry is brought to you by taking the day off work for the Beer Festival, and that's where I'm going back to now, stopping by women's coffee on the way.

BLOGGING, SHEDDING, BASSING, NOT BLOGGING

I have been oddly blogphobic lately and I'm not sure how long it's going to continue. I'm not dead or exploded, though, don't worry. Elsewhere on the web it's plainly spring, since my friends are sprouting new blogs left, right and centre:

• DJ Moonlight (aka Hayley) has switched all of her blogging to Blogger and is posting regularly with live and record reviews, new bands, playlists for her two radio shows on MTJR (New Music New Talent and Pigtails & Army Boots) and heads-up for upcoming tours.
• DJ Mike Fisher, meanwhile, has a very shiny new website with playlists for Mike in the Morning and Sunday Lunch, a requests panel and his thoughts on music and current events.
• Amazingly, Hayley has even convinced Ruth to start blogging, at Wonderland. I really enjoyed the last couple of posts - hope there'll be more up there soon!

Is this the Shed of the Year 2009?

If none of this is what interests you, perhaps you'll be more inclined to have a look at my stepdad's amazing Caribbean Pirate Shed?

The Lady Sarah out of Worthing has been gathering quite some attention lately. Even Gardener's World has been round! I encourage you to see what you can do with the bottom of a garden with a load of salvage, a lot of hard work, Bajan rum and the light of the setting sun in your rigging.

If you feel that it just might be Shed of the Year, you can vote for it without signing up to Readers Sheds.

Now I'm off to bleach my hair, play bass and not blog.

BUNNIES

The last day of the school visit to CERN was spent in Geneva, where the party split into three groups: the four short students, the four tall students and the three staff, that is, two teachers and me. We wandered through the mesh of shopping streets between the station and the lake, raked by a cold wind and distorted just enough away from a grid pattern that Puck got lost.

I wasn’t shopping, since I was travelling onwards to Bern and Zürich, but for the rest of the group it was the last day in the country and Puck and Kathleen wanted to get presents for their families. That meant chocolates, of course! We crossed the water by one of the many small bridges and went into a small chocolaterie.

Inside it was warm and smelled delicious. Two ladies in aprons, with their hair in buns, greeted us in French and I nodded awkwardly. Not speaking the local language, beyond the most token of bonjours and mercis, had made me more disoriented than I’d expected. Kathleen and Puck turned towards the boxes of chocolates and Swiss-brand bars, discussing what they could bring back for their staff room. I, meanwhile, sidled up to the front counter and the rows of individual chocolates behind glass.

Dozens of kinds of tiny sweets nestled in rows there, each one surely a mouthful of pure delight. There were dark chocolates and light chocolates and every shade between; pink ones and green ones and yellow ones; chocolates topped with flakes or dusted with cocoa powder. There were sweets filled with ganache, with champagne, with marzipan, and there were even several kinds that were probably vegan. A tray of crystallised pineapple slices dipped in dark chocolate caught my eye in particular, as did something complicated with pistachios. The lady at the counter had seen me hovering. I decided not to buy anything, not even one pineapple slice, and rejoined the others in the other side of the shop.

It took me a while to work out why there were so many chocolate rabbits back there. Holidays have a way of taking me completely by surprise these days.

The shelves were filled with them, all the way up to the ceiling, in all possible designs. Small bunnies that would fit into a child's hand – large, hollow bunnies that would take an adult some time to polish off. Again, there were dark, light and multi-coloured variations; many had the eyes picked out in varying colours. You could buy a rabbit with a chocolate tennis racket, a rabbit with a marzipan carrot and a winning smile, a rabbit wearing a floppy sunhat, its ears seemingly poking out through convenient holes. The longer I looked, waiting – not impatiently – for Puck and Kathleen to work through their souvenir lists, the more rabbits I saw. There were chicks, too, and some other animals. Even a milk-chocolate snail. I started to feel a little sick.

All of those white chocolate eyes, all of those happily ignorant animal smiles. I imagined biting off a rabbit's ear. I couldn't do it. I was glad when we left.

Now, I know this kind of squeamishness is ridiculous, but I've always been prone to it. When I was a child, filling a paper bag with 10p worth of Saturday sweets, I used to beg my mum for the My Little Pony foam candies. They cost 2p each, twice as much as a fried egg or a cola bottle, so it was a big investment but in the shop it seemed worth it. At home, they sat forlornly on the side, getting stickier. I just couldn't bear to eat them.

No, I'm not one of those people who could kill, gut and cook my own meat, certainly not when I don't have any need to. I'm quite happy with this – it ties in neatly with all the other reasons I'm vegan. I don't want to take part in a system that routinely keeps millions of other animals in inhumane, disgusting conditions before killing them long before the end of a natural lifespan in a cruel and terrifying way. (A quick google brought up this page as a description of some of the things I mean.) Yes, it's silly that I recoil from eating a chocolate bunny – and I have eaten them before, I just have to do it quickly and not think about it – but it reminded me of something about myself that I'm pleased with.

Oh. Except...

The truffles and ganaches I'd been sighing over earlier were, of course, all made with milk and cream. The delicious smell in the shop was part sugar, part cocoa and probably a lot of butter as well. I hadn't been about to buy any of them, but nor had I instantly thought about the production of their ingredients or the way the cows and calves involved had been treated.

As a vegan, I'm very happy with my diet. I like eating beans, vegetables, soya mince and hoummous (etc.) and I hardly ever, on my own, find myself craving cheese, cream or milk chocolate. Unfortunately, the world – especially Switzerland, where by law no food may contain less than 40% butter – is full of temptations. There are a long string of reasons, from experience and research, why I don't want to succumb to them. It would just be a lot easier to remember if all animal products looked like animals.

It would also be easier to be full of myself about my More Ethical Than Thou lifestyle, though, and that's not really an attitude I want to have.

AVAES ADVENTURING

Just a note to point people in the direction of Avaes Adventuring - a travel blog by an ex-colleague of mine who's just begun his journey.

I’m about to embark upon a journey following the countries of my direct cultural heritage. These include Kenya: the country of my mother’s birth, Zanzibar: where my maternal grandfather was born, Pakistan: the country of my fathers’ and paternal grandparents’ birth and also India. India is the common denominator as it hosts the state of Kutch, where all my ancestors originally emigrated to all these places from.

The purpose of this journey is to experience the diversity that is my personal cultural heritage and to allow this experience to feed and fashion my writings as I travel. Simple!

Avaes is a cool guy and I'm looking forward to some great writing and interesting insights on his blog.

CERN, GENEVA, ZÜRICH AND BERN

I spent eight days in Switzerland, helping with a school trip to CERN as I've done a couple of times before and then meeting up with Dave to go to Bern and Zürich by train. The CERN trip went really well, I thought, despite a forced divergence from our usual plan - some sort of little shindig was occurring, so we had to stay at the Geneva Youth Hostel rather than on the site. This meant more time spent on public transport rather than free for the girls to decompress from all the physics we took them through, as well as less of an immersion in the day-to-day scientific atmosphere there. We had a great guided tour around some of the accelerators, though. We also visited, as usual, the Red Cross Museum and took a boat ride across the lake. I'd like to put some pictures up but this will have to wait till next week, when I've bought abDave's old computer - neither I nor my poor ancient laptop have much fun when I try to deal with photos nowadays.

After the group had left, like a true cosmopolitan, I hit up my Geneva connection and got drunk with Hugh and some of his interns before finding Dave. Oops. It was good to catch up with him, though.

We arrived in Bern in the middle of the Museumsnacht, a once-a-year event when the city's many museums stay open till 2am. For a set price, you can enter however many of them you like - it was a little too much for us, though, since we got there at midnight. Instead we walked around the old centre of the city together. It was punctuated with beautiful lighting displays at each of the museums, huge moths fluttering across their facades in constantly-changing colours. Shining vintage cars drove around in a circuit. In the central plaza, there was even a large inflatable igloo with a disco and bar inside. It was just like a citywide May Ball. We had one (very expensive!) drink in the Kornhauskeller, which was far more impressive even than their website shows. Throughout all of this I took no pictures - the camera's batteries had died. Oh well.

Our second night in Bern, we saw Cindy-Jane perform in Hopscotch by Israel Horovitz, with her production company The Free 3eggars (Facebook link), followed by her comedy improv group, Are You Serious?!. The venue was a cellar on the Münstergasse - very intimate and plain, it worked well for both the play and the comedy. I hugely enjoyed the whole evening.

Dave and I finished our trip with a visit to the Alpamare, near Zürich, a huge indoor and outdoor complex of swimming pools, with the free passes we'd got from Maria for Christmas. Then, before we knew it, the holiday was over. A bit like this post, which was meant to be about something entirely different, and now has to end because I ought to eat lunch.