I used to read more. The main thing I read, for quite some time now, are travel books.

And not particularly just guidebooks of places I’m going, or might be going, or one day hope to go. I just love travel writing. Particularly humorous travel writing, opinionated travel writing, travel writing mixed in with memoir and local history and observational comedy and … you get the idea.

This is for two main reasons (with subsections):

1) They’re just brilliant reads. They’re aspiration and inspiration and entertainment all in one. Because:
a) Reading well-written books about travels to places you have never been or do not know well is like travelling when you cannot afford to travel. It is mental travel.
b) Reading books about places you DO know well but in a different age is even better. Because it is ALSO mental travel, but it is mental time travel, and therefore super-extra-cool.

2) When I get to write books, these are the kind of books I want to write. I have no talent for fiction, not on a long-form basis - but this kind of thing I do. And it is what I wish to write.

Also, I like the fact that there seem to have been great swathes of time when travel writing was allowed to be the most vociferously opinionated kind of writing around. Perhaps it’s the natural thing about travelling somewhere where etiquette and everyday practice is different from your own, but people get so exercised about other people’s refusal to behave just like they do at home that their shocked disbelief fair bounces off the page in the most enjoyable fashion.

Mainly, I just love travelling. And I love writing. I would go as far as to say that I do one in order to save enough to do the other. And the day when I can do one in order to provide material for the other to earn enough to raise enough money for more of the first thing and then write about it (and earn money for that) seems like the best kind of circular argument I’ve ever heard.

Anyway.

I have decided to dip into not only my little modest stash of collected US travel books about what you can expect in Britain to build a very proper little guide to my trip. And, as a bonus, I also can also utilise the brilliant (and beautiful) open library and their amazing subject search, which frankly has kept me so busy reading things that this post is about three weeks late in coming.

I was starting this evening with a book by the name of “An American’s Guide to Britain”, published in 1977, and written by Robin W Winks. It’s a lovely book. It’s mainly filled with regional guides pointing out very specifically places in the UK that have a direct link to US history or famous native or naturalised American personages (which is interesting in itself, if you’re prepared to dig through a lot of mentions of birthplaces of the parents of poets you’ve never heard of).

But then, in the section titled ‘a pot pourri of general warnings’, you hit something pure gold, like:

Prostitution is no fun in Britain. Wait until you go to Hamburg or Munich.

This is, perhaps, realistic …. but unusual for a guidebook to mention, in my experience. But then, as advice, that’s about an inch away from:

Both the reception and content of British television is high. Watch it.

Which, frankly, isn’t that consistently true any more (but I’ll still take it). Then, the same page also contains the very sage and true advice:

“The British tend to respect food more than Americans do, and, unless your host and hostess do otherwise, you should not smoke between courses, although you may do so before coffee arrives. You naturally will ask permission to smoke a cigar. English ladies are not of the opinion that you show your virility by sticking a fat stogie in your face”

Darn tootin’. But then, this suggests that American women do. I mean, really?!? Does ANYONE?

I love this kind of thing, though. I literally cannot imagine someone lighting up at a dinner party in someone else’s house now, or in a restaurant, really. But particularly a dinner party at someone’s house. It’s just become unthinkable. Along with the very true:

“Are you cold? Wear a sweater. The British consider 65° an excellent indoor temperature, and regard 72° as stuffy. You will pay dearly if you try to close that gap: sweaters and warm socks are cheaper, and you can take them with you.”

This is still Fact. So true, actually, that I just checked the thermostat thingy on our wall, and it is, indeed, set to about 62°, in its delightfully inaccurate kind of way. Colder than that is too cold. If it’s warmer than that and you’re too cold, you know where the jumper drawer is. Also: there are blankets that can be used on any sofa in the house.

But then, on food, the hopefully no longer true:

“The British are a people of integrity. This also means they are inflexible where matters of propriety are involved. I once attempted to get a waitress to bring an order of ‘hamburger and egg’ with the egg left off, and she refused, since the menu did not list hamburger. The idea that I would pay the full price for half the dish shocked her so deeply, she never found the table again.”

Because frankly, ordering like Sally in When Harry Met The Aforementioned Lady I Just Said The Name Of By Mistake Ruining The Integrity Of This Sentence has become second nature to me, and I feel weird about not being able to do that, or not feeling entitled about doing it, if that’s the case… Less so….

“The fabled, ever-polite, well-informed London Bobby… is a rarer breed every year. They can probably answer your question about directions but not about the location of specific shops; they may well be rather offhand with you and less than magisterially courteous; they may be chewing gum. Even so, they won’t be carrying guns and you needn’t fear them, so walk right up and ask your question”

Though, two things:
a) … Uuuuuuuunless you look like a terrorist, or have a beard or something: in which case you’re fucked. I hope you had no deep connection to your digital camera etc.
b) This makes me, as usual, more concerned about where I am NOW than what might happen while travelling in the UK. Seriously, because every single police officer here in America does carry a gun I shouldn’t ever ask for directions because as sure is eggs is eggs, they WILL shoot me? Cripes.

And then, of course, there’s the utterly affectionate and wonderful glimpse of:

“…the law will also frustrate you. Everyone knows that Boots on Piccadilly is open throughout the night and on Sunday. But you may purchase only emergency items outside regular hours. While the toothpaste will stare up at you from under drapes, salivate all you will, you may not buy it; on the other hand, you may buy a prophylactic across the counter, for this is clearly an emergency. In any event, people would not be interesting if they were logical.”

On the one hand? That last statement is as true as any ever written.
On the other - Yes, alright. It’s safe to assume that to an out-of-hours shopper in Piccadilly Circus, fucking is a more pressing matter than dental hygiene. We may have famously bad teeth, but by golly we know how to have fun. Even on Sunday (sometimes).

And such is the advice.

I’ve been mining my collection (small, but growing), all weekend (while hanging out in parks eating cheese and slices of sliced salted cured pig, there’s no point in sounding like I’ve been reading-room-deep in earnest study for days on end) and marking pages with scraps of paper and typing things up, but also, I’ve been the collection found on the absolutely incredible (and publicly-tended) resource of Open Library - particularly their ability to subject search.

So over the next few weeks, in the preparation for coming home, I was going to type up some of the highlights from those (ranging, generally, from the mid 19th century to the early 1980s-ish) and then, when all that is done, I will undoubtedly know EVERYTHING that can be known about visiting my homeland at the end of the month.
Also if I happen to get on a plane that is a bit time-travelly.

The ridiculous-speeded weeks continue to fall away, and I fail to write as much as I meant to here (although mainly - yays! - because I’ve been offered other work and I’m being anxious about getting that done, rather than because I am sad, as has so often been the case in the past), although always mean to.

However: I need to start a countdown, because a month from now I will be going back to the UK (for a holiday) and am officially bordering on TOO excited.

I never meant to be away this long in one stretch, but things happened, and I put off going back at all for a holiday until I knew whether we’d be moving back for good, because we’d need to save the money for that instead. But that stretched on, and on and on. And it’s been so long waiting to find out precisely what’s going to be the plan from here on out (we still don’t know, but have a couple of events to attend so had to go back now whatever the case) that by the time I go back, I won’t have been in the motherland for bordering on 22 months.

THAT’S ALMOST TWO YEARS, FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

I’m simultaneously nervous and over-excited. I know things will be the same in so many ways - how much can possibly change in under two years (apart from the sodding government, obviously)? And there are already a list of things I want to do and buy and places I want to go and to eat.

Although weirdly, like many other Internationally-resident British people of my acquaintance, that latter list is topped by Pizza Express, which to be honest I didn’t go to that often when I had the chance every day. However, on my holiday, I think I may actually go every day. Every. Single. Day. When I’m not at one of the other eateries on the list, or somewhere eating sausage sandwiches. Mmmm, proper sausages. On granary bread. MmmmmmmmmMMMMmmmmm.

I’m worried in case everything’s changed. I’m worried because even when I went to Montreal the other week I found myself doing things the way I’ve become used to instinctively doing things here, like ONLY getting in cabs from the curb side door (they shout at you if you try and do otherwise), and forgetting to start packing my own bags at the supermarket (seriously: Half the time I’ve given up trying because of the amount of times I’ve been stared at by the people employed to pack bags like I’m trying to steal their job or something), or expecting traffic to give way to pedestrians always, or carrying a dead weight in quarters everywhere I go because you need them for the bus/muni and finding somewhere to get change is a complete pain in the arse.

And I don’t know if I still have the instinct for the way things work in the Land of OtherHome. I’m sure it will all come flooding back and be like I never left - at least that’s what everyone assures me. But I’ve spent so long getting so entirely wrapped up to the eyeballs in THIS city; in the history, the public transport and layout, the attitudes and geography and nightlife and events and all of these things at once, that I can’t even imagine being in another place, or another city that ISN’T this one.

Luckily, I have a cunning plan.

Well, for a start, I will just do walking (without, hopefully, doing ‘getting run over because of looking the wrong way when crossing the road’) all over London, and Brighton and wherever it is else that I am going, and before I know it, it will all be as natural to me as … something normal and British and completely expectable. See? I can’t even think of a thing. Chicken-flavoured crisps.

My secret passion of collectables that I have somehow completely forgotten to mention on this blog - or possibly on the internet, ever - will be a irreplaceable tool in my battle to assimilate fast enough to do all the things that need to be done and spend time with the branches of family and friends that I so desperately want to see. Oh, and try and get some meetings and sort out some work at the same time. And go to a wedding in Norway. And have a bit of a relax and get ready to come back here and throw myself (hopefully) into a bunch of other, different work that I’ll tell you about when I stop worrying if it’s really happening or not.
In one small three-week period.

So yes. That marvellous plan involving the impressive collection and burning passion that I haven’t ever mentioned can begin tomorrow.
Good old tomorrow.

In the meantime, I should go back to making a list of all the things I have to see, buy, and eat that aren’t new (M&S/Bravissimo underwear shopping is high on the list, obvs) as well as worrying about all the things that have changed that I can’t possibly imagine.

Not much as changed in the motherland, has it?
You’ve basically all frozen everything from the second I left, waiting for the moment I step back onto that hallowed ground, right?
Brilliant. Thanks. That’s good to know.

Seriously though: is there anything enormous, that has changed? Are there eventualities I totally should have started planning for in advance already? Oh god. I’ve only got a month.

We’ve been on the run for a while, My Beloved and I.

Not very convincingly, like, in the Bonnie and Clyde kind of way. There have been no false names or bank robberies or even gun battles, and all and pursuant long-arm-of-the-law lot would have had to do is stand at the end of the road, watching as we disappeared up it at snails pace, turned round at the end and headed straight back toward them.

We have, to be fair, just been running. Which deserves a post of its own, so I promise to write one within the next week, or you’re officially allowed to set the dogs on me. But the thing we’ve been building up to has been the big, iconic and traditional San Francisco race, the Bay to Breakers, which was on Sunday.

It’s a simple course, from down near the ferry building, downtown, surrounded by banks and skyscrapers, right in the middle of the city, on the Bay side of the peninsula the city sits on, all the way to the great highway at Ocean Beach - the Breakers. Bay to Breakers, see?

It’s a route I’ve walked before, before I knew it was something I might run one day. It’s about seven and a half miles, or twelve kilometres, and we both did ok, and were very proud of ourselves. Would have done better if we hadn’t both been struck down with chest infections and all manner of nasty in the last few weeks, compounding the fact we haven’t actually been running that long. Ending up running less than half and walking the rest, I still managed to do it in 1 hour 33 minutes - my beloved in slightly longer, and am confident I can knock mine down under 1.15 by next year.

As you can tell, I am mainly proud of myself in a super-perfectionist, not-really-proud-of-myself-because-I-think-I-should-do-better kind of way. But, you know, that’s still a pretty high watermark of self-pride for me, so let’s not knock it. I did end up enjoying walking back past half of the race route, and, by the time I was there, decided just to walk home, though, so with the extra 8 miles that added, it was a pretty good day, legwise. I am glad I don’t have a pedometer, because I don’t think I could afford one with that many fingers and toes to count on, and it would have been sad not to be able to count that high.

But that’s not the point. The point is this: The Bay to Breakers is a Very San Francisco kind of race.

Of course, I say that, but then, I’ve not been involved in running other races.
Perhaps all races are like this.
Perhaps all races begin with a time-honoured tradition of people queueing up in the start line corale, and merrily tossing little flour tortillas - you know, the kind you’d use for tacos - up over the crowd, like floppy little frisbees. I think it’s more likely that this race over others began for me listening to a small pack of vikings from some local University fraternity discussing where best they’d found to conceal their booze in their spandex costumes, as a soft, sweet acrid-smoky smell drifted over from parts of the crowd of runners.
I certainly hope every run doesn’t begin with the sound of a klaxon and one of the frat boys shouting “Ohhh! We’ve got a puker! HAHA!” at the same time, because frankly that was a little bit off-putting. Did give one the incentive to get moving, however, and fast, so perhaps I should thank him.

About 70,000 people run the Bay to Breakers, apparently, though I don’t know if that’s just counting the registered runners, or the thousands who wait in the side streets a mile or two from the starting line - mainly large groups in costumes, and join in without having to pay the entrance fee.

There were, as far as I could tell, though, about a squillion people doing it. And some of them looked a lot more unfit than me, so that made me feel better, because I do worry about that. I also realised that no one would be staring at me thinking how unfit I looked, because no matter how unfit I might appear to be, I was comprehensively less naked than a lot of people there, so give less to stare at.

In San Francisco, it must be said - and I imagine this is muchly a hangover from the super-hippy era - it doesn’t take much to persuade people that right now is a completely fine time to get as naked as possible. And this, regardless of the fact that San Francisco is not the most dependable place in California for weather. To say the least. Still, most public events, marches, concerts, holidays and special events do not feel complete without at least a few old naked hippies. Given that San Francisco is one of the San Franciscoest, there were a lot of naked people. Most of them aging hippies. And all power to them. And their bits.

However, those who weren’t naked wore clothes. Costumes. About eleventy billion of the squillion running the race were in costumes. And they were all brilliant.

I didn’t take many pictures - because I was running, mainly - and I won’t send you to any particular flickr groups of pictures people watching the race took, because frankly, they’re quite well stocked with aging naked hippies, and I don’t think that’s what we want to dwell on (you know, all power to them, as aforementioned: though I do have to state for the record my belief that if you’re wearing a t-shirt and fleece but no clothes on your bottom half, you quite clearly just want to show people your dingle, and don’t pretend there’s any celebration of the human body or the release of being freed from clothing about it; you very obviously understand clothing as a concept, you just want to wander round pantless. I am not celebrating your right to wave your tiny hairless rodent at me, and that is the end of it).

However, while running, I saw:

- A herd of unicorns. With hairy legs and horns and everything. This was brilliant.

- Some sychronised swimmers - or, basically, several women in swimming costumes, running in swimming costumes with a piece of blue material stretched between them. This was also suitably fantastic.

- A couple running, both dressed as a single episode character from cult British BBC comedy The Mighty Boosh. I was expecting several things from Bay to Breakers. I was not expecting Old Gregg.

- A man dressed as Brave Sir Robin from Monty Python as the Holy Grail with - frankly, the greatest of props due his companion - with a man running beside him being his faithful servant playing the coconut shells to make the clip-clop noises of his imaginary horses, seemingly the whole way.

- This guy:

(Yeah, the one with the bunny tail on the right there. Enormous beard when you got round the front. He was awesome).

- A large amount of gorillas.

- And bananas. Giant yellow fuzzy costume ones, I mean, rather than the small aged hippy kind. But still, with all the gorillas around it’s amazing how they get through the day without one eating the other.

- And superheroes and fairies. I assume because these are two costumes you can do quite easily without adjusting your traditional spandex running gear too much.

- Golfing teams, and football teams, who played their various sports all the way around.

- These gentlemen:

- And, similarly, a couple my beloved said he saw, him with a t-shirt that said ‘just the tip’, and her, actually heavily pregnant, with a t-shirt stretched over her belly saying ‘that’s what he said’.

- There were a huge amount of people dressed up in San Franciscoish pastiches of those bloody Tea-party protesters who can’t spell ’socialism’, let alone understand what it means, and seem to be hold an unending series of protests complaining about how much they hate everything because they are twunts. My favourite one was someone carrying a sign reading “KEEP YOUR TEA PARTY OUT OF MY ICED VENTI VANILLA SUGAR-FREE NON-FAT SOY CHAI LATTE FEST” which demonstrates commendably the one of the things I love about San Francisco. People do realise they’re as mockable as anyone else (just not as hate-fuelled as the actual Tea-Party folks. And with some self-knowledge. And knowledge. And a sense of humour. It’s basically quite different).

- It being Sunday - or maybe not, maybe they would have come out and shouted whichever day it was - a bunch of crazy people with signs came out to stand on stepladders and shout at Every Single Person that went past that they were a sinner, and if they didn’t repent soon, would die horribly and burn in hell for all eternity, and for many of the people running past, even repentance wouldn’t help much. I heard lots of people challenging these views, but I think my favourite was the person who shouted back in a really crestfallen and confused voice: “YOU HATE US BECAUSE WE ARE RUNNING? WHY DO YOU HATE RUNNING?”

And then there were the Salmon.
I knew there were going to be salmon - i had heard about this concept: people dressed up in salmon costumes, running the race from the finish line through to the start line - so, basically running the whole race backward.. or rather, swimming against the stream. Like salmon. And so when I saw the line of 20 or so enormous salmon costumes heading down the middle of the road toward me, I was cheered, but not surprised.

What did surprise me were the bears. I really hadn’t expected the bears.
Behind the salmon, you see, there were a line of about 15 people dressed up in bear costumes, running after the salmon, trying to catch them. Becase Bears Eat Salmon, you see. Brilliant.
And the briliantest thing of all, was that they were actually running like bears.
Not as in ‘on all fours’, of course. As in ‘with their arms up in a ‘grrrrr’ pose, going ‘grrrrr’. Just as it should be.

So yes.
Running? ok, I will do more of it. And write the thing I said I would.
Nudity? at least a great encouragement to keep ahead of the pack. Though when the elderly hippies start passing you, it is at least a reminder that they may be elderly hippies, but they’re also sodding Californians, and therefore sixteen times more healthy at 75 than you are at 33.
6am on a Sunday morning? As in the time you have to get up to do running? Stupid. I didn’t even know that time existed, though it stands to reason that if it does, it was invented by the kind of person that does competitive running for fun.
Self-proudness? Something I have to work on. But I’m super-excited to have crossed a finish line for the first time in my life, regardless of how much better I could have done.
Running bears? MARVELLOUS.

I thought I should mark a post with the things I have meant to write about for ages, and the things I need to write about from the last week. But it will be a waste if I write lots of words about them and how I am going to write about them when I have the chance, so I thought I would just post a picture to remind me I was going to write about each. And then you will just have to wait, I’m afraid, until this day is over, and I can start mopping them up.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Goodness, but I have a lot to catch up on.

Just in case anyone was going to come here and comment on an event that usually happens on this day, the situation is this:

A few months ago, when matters of contracts and redundancy and worries about where to live were at their most fretful, I set myself a date of my birthday. If, by my birthday, we didn’t have a definite idea of how we were going to be able to make money and live here properly for a bit, we were going to have to start thinking about who we know and who might employ us if we go home to newly-tory Britain, instead (the “newly-tory” bit wasn’t IN the plan, btw, that’s just been added in, post-newly-toryness) and really start working out how to move us, stuff cats etc back home again.

That was back when ‘my birthday’ seemed a billion years away.
And now, when my birthday seems, or as calendar-nazis would claim, IS today, it would appear that now would be the time to start thinking about those things.

But it isn’t.

It is, in ways I cannot (of course) talk about, things are tantalisingly close to being ok, but not ACTUALLY ok by the date I have set, which, yes, happens to be my birthday.

So I’ve been trying to postpone my birthday to when I actually know what’s going on, what we’re doing, which continent we’re likely to be living in, etc.
Because that is the thing I want to celebrate, and I don’t want to recognise that this sodding date has passed without having celebrated it.

BUT. My beloved says that it is not possible to postpone ones birthday. That you are not allowed to decide which birthday your day is to be on unless you are the queen (I am not).

So, though I wish to celebrate not today, but a different day a few days from now when my life has got itself back in order, it would appear that today is my birthday whether I like it or not.

I choose, therefore, to like it, because birthdays are brilliant, and everyone has to do what you say, and nothing you eat contains calories. Hooray!

I love making cookies. I love eating them as well, but I love baking them more.

And let’s get this clear - before anyone even tries to start some kind of debate about whether I’ve lost my accent/given up my heritage/sold my soul to Walmart/set fire to the Queen/caused Samuel Johnson to start spinning in his grave, let’s just settle on one simple definition: biscuits are crunchy, cookies are chewy, both refer in this instance to mainly sweet baked goods, and that is the end of it for now.

I used to like baking in the UK too, when I at least had an office to take baked goods to, and an oven that did what I thought it was going to - and now I’m here and don’t (in either case), I don’t bake cookies anywhere near as much. We made pretty boxes of cookies for everyone’s christmas present, but Christmas is a damnedly infrequent event. I miss it, it’s a deeply satisfying business. Maybe I could be a cookie lady for a Brilliant New Career. No, wait, it probably means early mornings, doesn’t it? Screw that. I have other, less sleep-depriving ambitions (or, to give them a more accurate name, ‘dreams’).

So at the weekend we were in the mood for making cookies, and luckily were going somewhere we could palm them off on other people affectionately - because really, liking to bake is a dangerous thing when you don’t have an office job or attend a lot of village fetes: you just end up eating a lot of baked goods. Like, A LOT.

But since we had a chance of handing them off at a nice social event, we baked.

The first ones we baked were my any occasion fall-back cookie, that are, frankly, brilliant. Mainly because it’s a basic but endlessly adaptable recipe that just lets you be as creative as you can be bothered to be. You might remember I asked for help finding it just before Christmas, because I couldn’t find it online, and my copy is wedged into a cookbook somewhere in a storage unit near Brighton, and a nice lady called Claire typed it out for me.

BASIC (and completely delicious) COOKIE RECIPE
by Gill Meller in the Guardian Weekend originally, passed to me by Claire S in a comment

125g unsalted butter (melted),
100g unrefined granulated sugar,
75g light muscovado sugar,
1 egg,
2 tsp vanilla extract,
150g plain flour,
1/2tsp baking powder,
pinch of salt,
100g of “extras”, as in chocolate, obviously.

Preheat oven to 190C/375F/Gas mark 5 and line two baking sheets with baking parchment. (These instructions obviously not exactly as printed in weekend, as I have a short attention span…)
Put the two sugars in a bowl, add melted butter and beat, add egg and vanilla and beat again to combine. Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt, then stir in your “extras”.
Put heaped dessertspoonfuls of the mix on to the baking sheets, leaving lots of space as they spread out a lot. Bake for eight to ten minutes, until just golden brown. Leave to harden on the baking sheets for a couple of minutes, then transfer to cooling racks.

So that’s the magic: 100g of ANYTHING YOU LIKE. And the fun is thinking up combinations of things - 50g of one, 50g of another, or any balance, and then playing with them - I have in the past made very successful versions with:
Milk chocolate chip and hazelnuts
Sliced dried apricots, toasted oats and white chocolate
Dark Chocolate, raspberry pieces and pine nuts
Smarties
Reeces Pieces
Other chocolate broken up and mixed in
Caramel and sea salt
Added cinnamon/nutmeg/cloves and cranberries
yoghurt raisins
Lavender, lemon, toasted oats
chilli chocolate and something to temper it. damned if I can remember what.
crispy bacon bits and chocolate chips.

The salty/sweet thing is something that you get in a lot of deserts and baked things in California, and of which I’m very fond, not actually having that much of a pure sweet tooth. Saturday we made bacon/chocolate-chip, apricot/white chocolate, and something else My Beloved was in charge of. Choc Chip, Flu & Raisin, possibly.

Honestly, though, they’re the quickest, easiest, and most satisfying recipe I know. All I would say is that if your added extras include things that have their own oils, obviously try and get as much off as possible - grill bacon, put it on kitchen roll to cool; chop and toast nuts in a dry pan to seal them etc - otherwise the cookies can end up absorbing more of the oil than you want. You want them to be soft and moist, not greasy.

In addition to those, which are a very tried and tested recipe, I had some homemade marmalade given to me by a generous hostess who happens to make damned fine marmalade, which I wanted to be able to share the pleasure of without inviting random people round for breakfast. So I googled for recipes, and after looking through a few, found this one, which was both delicious-sounding and also simple enough to sound versatile.

Orange Marmalade Cookies
from Tessa’s Kitchen
1/3 cup softened butter
2/3 cup white granulated sugar
1 egg
6 tablespoons orange marmalade (any sort you like)
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy
Add egg and orange marmalade, mix until combined (if mix is too stiff, add a bit more marmalade)
Sift together flour and baking powder
Gradually mix into creamed mixture until dry ingredients are completely incorporated

Drop by rounded spoonful onto greased cookie sheet and bake 8 to 10 minutes at 375 degrees until light golden brown

Cool on wire rack before storing in an airtight container

And when I say ’sounded versatile’, I mean, of course “I can’t help but fuck about with things, so the more foolproof the recipe sounds, the better”.

Discovered I had about 9 tablespoons of marmalade, I decided to make a and a half times the amount (leading to some interesting ‘I need exactly half an egg’ action that Heston Blumenthal would be impressed at), then divided the cookie dough into thirds, left half alone (nice); added some spices and a tablespoon of almond butter, and some extra candied peel that was lying about the cupboard (super-yummy, but needed pressing down a bit on the tray as the resulting dough was stiffer and didn’t spread as easily); and about a third of cup of grated cheddar cheese to the last batch, because if there’s one thing I love more than almost anything in the world, it’s a cheese and jam sandwich (GENIUS.)

And that’s it, really. I just forget to write about things like cooking and food and stuff now that I don’t do that for anyone else, and should, really, more often.

Also, I was kind of hoping that if I put two of my favourite recent cookie recipes up here, a) I wouldn’t spend so long faffing about trying to find them next time and could just print them out and b) That wonderful thing might happen when, magically, you say what your favourite cookie recipes are and suddenly lots of lovely readers say what THEIR favourite recipes are, and then you get to bake lots more cookies just to test them out.

Or that was the sneaky plan, anyway…

*AHEM*….

…Meaningful and decidedly pregnant pause…

Last weekend I went to a wedding - which was a beautiful, joyful, sunny and wonderful occasion, and one which I very much enjoyed from beneath a thick layer of head-fug, cough syrup, and with a voice that made me sound like 5-pack-of-smokes-a-day professional gravel-gargler with a long history of whoredom and possibly some shared genetic characteristics with the sealion community.

Still, that seemed to amuse my friends, and I was very proud of being a brave little mucus-trooper, powering my way through the day just to I could bear witness to this wonderful comingtogetherness of lovelypersons.

I realise, a full week after, that some of my friends are no longer so impressed. Mainly the ones lying in bed, coughing lungs up and cursing my name.

If it is any solace to them, I’m still not completely better, so am suffering with them (no, wait, that’s probably not a good thing to say) and am doing penance by looking after the most-contaminated of my victims, My Own Beloved.

At least, I think that’s who it is. It’s a large lump in the middle of the bed that occasionally calls out for help when its emergency mucus-mopping toilet tissue has rolled away across the floor, or when it needs another hot lemonny drink full of drugs.

Sometimes it makes a small croaky attempt at conversation, and this is what leads me most certainly to assume it to be him, because it’s only after a good seven years of relationship that you assume that the relative colour and consistency of your sputum to be perfectly reasonable pillowtalk.

It’s neon, apparently. And like silly putty.
And we decided that, relative to the stage of illness, mine was just the same at the same point, if you wanted to know.

I’m guessing you probably didn’t.

Anyway, so quite apart from being very sorry to the five people I know I made sick last week, I apologise to all the other people I might have unknowingly infected, whether at a wedding, in the gym, over the internet, by means of passing thought, or just having the letter ‘n’ in both of our names.
I apologise to you all.

In other news, though, I have thought of another new career for my list of brilliant new careers. I will form a government! And then I will rule the UK. Maybe from here, if that is ok with you all, but as I will almost certainly need some help on the ground, so will let you know.

That when you try and save a couple of lines of thought so that you can get back to them in the morning and then publish them by mistake, many readers may see it and get confused by it, even if you’ve unpublished it seconds later.

To those that saw? Shhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!
To thoses that didn’t? What? What post? Oh, no, there was nothing to see here…. move along…. move along.

I have decided, all things considered, I should probably come up with a plan for a brilliant new career to keep me in the manner to which I have become accustomed to. To which I have become accustomed. Or at least the manner to which I have become accustomed to thinking will be coming over the hill any moment now, and which I will actually start living comfortably in some time next week.

There are many opportunities open to a very able intelligent (ish) young (ish) woman (unarguably) with a willingness to try her hand at something new and a lot of very useful skills. Like being able to draw a reasonable polar bear (but only from the side), and making very nice caponata (I’ll give you the recipe sometime). And typing sentences of words about things of variable interestingness and amusingnessosity. And other skills.

So here are some of the other things I’m thinking I might move into, professionally:

Professional Outsourced Anxietiator
I realise that it might not seem like a desirable and marketable skill, but imagine if you could - as a business or on a personal level - have someone to worry about things for you? Outsourcing! It would be brilliant! I would say that, at some points, I might not have been able to make enough room in my schedule for worrying on behalf of someone else, but currently, I think I might be able to free up a window or two.

Writer of Books
This is the ideal, obviously. As I am already proficient at making words that go into feeding internet pages and newspaper or magazine pages, it would seem simple that all I have to work out is how to get some books to eat the words that I make instead. Nom nom nom. And then they will be full of my words. Perhaps if I make my words taste of duck. Books eat duck, right?

Shelf organiser
I don’t mind what kind of shop, but can you only imagine? Other people could stock the shelves, and I could be in charge of turning all the labels to face the right way. Gosh, the world would be tidy.

Being a tractor
I would imagine probably a red tractor would be best, as it is a popular and businesslike colour that represents an efficiency people are really looking for in their tractors. Couldn’t work in agriculture, though, because of the old hayfever thing. Maybe I could be a tractor in a non-pollenny environment. Like a beach resort.

Or a polar bear
I could totally be a polar bear. But that’s not quite as realistic. However, if it WAS a possibility, I think I could be a very good polar bear.

Polar bear artist
If I couldn’t BE a polar bear, I think I would excel at being a polar bear artist, as I am very good at drawing polar bears, which would seem to be the main criteria for being a polar bear artist. So I should probably be one of those.

Polar bear Caricaturist
Actually, thinking about it again, I’m actually not that great at drawing polar bears.
I’m far better at dinosaurs. But perhaps if I could corner the market in polar bear caricature - in capturing the essence and the personality of a particular polar bear, then I could become the world’s premiere polar bear caricaturist. I would be invited to all the best polar bear charity galas. Hopefully with a big sign that said ‘please enjoy but do not eat the premiere polar bear caricaturist’.

Doctor
“STAT!!!”
See? You SEE how good I am at that? I can also pull toenails off with pliers. Although admittedly that might qualify me more as a torturer. Also I would probably have to try it on someone else’s before they gave me my medical licence.

Inventor of Great but Ultimately Unmemorable Things
Actually, this was something I meant to write a different post about, because there was this brilliant idea I had in the car the other day about a product that would change the way we all live our lives. And as soon as I remember what that was, I will definitely write that up.

Wrapper of presents
I’m good. No, wait, “good” doesn’t even cover it. I am BRILLIANT. As is evidenced in the picture below:

It is a … no, I’ll leave it as a mystery.
Because I’m THAT brilliant.

Frankly anything that will keep me out of the UK for the next 4-5 years
Or not, depending on the outcome of this evening’s election.
Crumbs, I’ve never had cause to say anything that sounded quite so Paul Danielsy before.

NEW SUGGESTION: EXPERT IN THE OVER-RESIDENCE OF SMALL DOTTED WINGED INSECTS
Many and much thanks to mjb in the comments, who has not only offered my perfect future career (honestly, I’m so high in the google rankings for ‘ladybird infestation’ I might as well sell lock stock and barrel to a pest control company) but also designed me a brilliant poster, which I cannot get the embeddable code for (*ahem*, mjb) but you can find here.

Come ON!!! And that is only a FEW of the brilliant things I can imagine might occur in my short-to-medium term career future! The world - as chief political dude at the BBC Andrew Marr would say - is my Big Dirty Oyster.

And it’s not as if you can get a more attractive mental image than that.

At some point I should really go through every blog post I’ve tried to write that has been stored in the drafts folder of this here site. I was going to have a go at doing that, and went and looked at them, and my goodness but I have literally no idea what happens in my head sometimes. Most are only one sentence, some just a IM conversation with a friend copied into a window, that I really meant to do something with, but clealry couldn’t decide how much context it required. There are almost-completed descriptions and There’s one post Just titled “KITCHENS, EH?” which only contains two sentence fragments: “There is a monster in my sink, which is brilliant because” and “I am prepared, for science”… which I’m quite so fond of as a pair of things that I wish I’d just stuck them up on the blog precisely as they are, because heaven knows they make as much sense now as they possibly ever did. There are also reviews of (almost) every single film I saw last year, something I published then unpublished when I thought the better of it, and several things that display a remarkably bad temper.

So I should delve through and round them up and just get them published. Not right now, though. Right now, however, I am busy lying around coughing in a louche, grumpy kind of way.

I have tried other kinds of coughing. I was coughing in a determined and dramatic way for a while, until I realised I wasn’t really impressing anyone and that if I carried on I might just lose a lung.

I have coughed in a pitiful way, which is a very ladylike and delicate way of attempting to attract sympathy until you realise that the only other person in your house has his headphones on because he’s trying to work through the coughing noises and the cats, who have no intention of fetching you Lemsip, would like you to shut up now so they can go back to sleep.

At this point I tried coughing in a post-modern minimalist way ‘c___f’, producing coughs of different geometric shapes, coughing in several different languages, and when all those things failed, coughing the hits of Neil Diamond, with added sputum on the choruses.

And now I have run out of ways to cough.

Do you know how long I have had this cough?
Yes.
Two days.

And for one of those I was at a wedding and pushing through the cold-barrier like the proper little mucus-trooper I am.

So really, of my dedicated illness-time, it has been less than a single day.

You really must believe me when I tell you that the word “patient” has never been so inaccurately used.

Grinding. There has been an inordinate amount of grinding going on in my vicinity. Not in a dirty dancing way, in a power tool way and not, no, now you’ve started me thinking of it that way, in THAT close a vicinity, just in a range of fifty feet or so. It is my neighbours. I am amazed and intrigued by my neighbours. And their love of grinding.

[NB: Anyone who has read this blog over any amount of time might know that I have had intriguing and amazing neighbours before. There was the On-The-Toilet family of Glasgow, whose bright bathroom lights and badly frosted window left nothing to the imagination and whose patriarch was building a fully-sized pipe organ in their spare bedroom from scratch. There was a place in London with a neighbour who never made conversation except to make pointed comments about something the previous landlord of the flat we lived in had perpetrated upon his geraniums once. In Brighton there were some students that only appeared to have two pieces of music, one by The Stranglers and one by New Order, and they played both on repeat at such volume that I now can't hear either of them without wanting to throw stuff, and then in our first flat in San Francisco there was the whole sex club thing we lived opposite. It's not because I'm obsessively nosy about neighbours, believe me. Just that I work from home and you do tend to notice stuff when you do that. Anyway.]

I live in an area now where, I am not afraid to say, we could not possibly afford to buy a house. Ever. I mean, strictly speaking, and like a good many people, that description frankly could be about almost anywhere, but here, particularly, the houses are phenomenally expensive, and owned almost exclusively by couples of around my age or slightly older, with a ridiculously-paying job in some kind of financial thing or tech company, a trust fund, a personal trainer each, and one small child with a borderline-ludicrous name.

It is the kind of area where a bookshop I walked past the other day had a window display dedicated to books on learning enough Spanish to communicate with your child’s nanny - or at least phrasebooks so that you didn’t have to learn, just find the apposite phrase and point at it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love it here very much - it’s nice and quiet and smells of blossom and fresh laundry - I’m just not quite on the same page as some of the other residents of my ‘hood. Like my neighbours.

Our kitchen backs onto their garden, this family, and they moved in to their stunning new pad a few months ago. And then a few weeks ago sometime, the grinding began. I was trying to work when I realised that there’d been a monotonous drone coming from the back of our flat. It was not, as I would usually have suspected, My Beloved on the phone (I’m only saying that to check if he reads this, to be honest), it was some moustachioed men, with grinders, on the deck of the house behind. They started grinding the deck. To get the varnish off, we assumed.

They did it all day.
It sounded like this.

“MUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!”

And it sounded like that all day.
Oh, except when they took a break for lunch.
But they didn’t get long for lunch, because they had to start grinding again.

The next day, they came back, and did more grinding.
Just when we thought they’d finished, they started bringing furniture out of the house, and grinding it. Chests of drawers, chairs, tables, bedside cabinets, kitchen cabinet doors, every time I went into the kitchen to get a cup of tea or a fix some food, they had something new to grind.

And when they finished that, they started grinding the deck again. No, seriously.
On Sunday, they started grinding the deck at 8am. 8am. Because it was THAT IMPORTANT that the grinding got done.

At the beginning of this week, my beloved went away to another time zone to interview some people for a story. As usual, we sent emails while the other was asleep so that neither has to wake up with nothing friendly in their inbox (no euphemism intended).

“Good morning.
Hope the hotel has no vermin. Today it rained, so the men with the grinders moved indoors in the house opposite.
I now believe them to whittling out the house from the inside.
Anna”

“Hello.
WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING?!
Perhaps they have just started some sort of Grinders Anonymous meeting at the house?
Slept heavily, don’t know what day it is.
B”

I have no idea. Literally I think that EITHER
a) the family hired them by mistake, intending to contract a two-man crew to carry out some light grinding duties around their new house, wanting to state that it was a flexible contract that would end after the last thing needed to be ground was ground: but unfortunately got the translation for this transaction from Spanglish For Nannies. And so engaged a contractor with a mistaken message that they would be recruiting two families, and wished to contract them for 2 hundred and eleventy BAJILLION hours of grinding, and they would only get paid after the last hour of grinding was done, whether they still had a house left at that point or not.
b) the family belong to a movement called ‘thinnimalism’which is the new extension of minimalism, meaning that now everything is clean and fresh and light-coloured, the house itself feels too bulky so must be whittled down from all sides.

But beyond that, all I can think is that they are people with too much money and not enough clue to do about it.

If they want me to start a new movement in grind-cool decor, I can.
I have totally thought of a bunch of them already.