Rowan took some nice photos yesterday
Archive for October, 2001
Rowan took some nice photos yesterday
We have LEFT THE BUILDING
Our work here is done
Cooked some food the other night - lovely millenium cookbook recipe for some kinda mexican bean casserole thingy sandwiched between corn pancakey layers and drizzled with sweet chilli sauce and coriander “cream”. Invented my own bizarre desert to follow - baked figs, topped and tailed with slices of lemon and with some bizarre kumquatty-type things the name of which escapes me speared through them, all dusted with a little brown sugar & lime zest and then floated in strawberry and plum sauce. Not bad.
While I was in Greece I got a Tattoo. Yeah, it’s nearly faded (don’t worry mum, it’s hennah)
Doubts growing over the new job but, sod it, I’m spending the money anyway. And it’s nice being home in the meantime, some great photos turned up in the post:
3 from Jenny & Mike showing Rowan in her bridesmaid’s get-up at Hannah’s wedding
And still on the wedding theme, this shot from Ed & Anaïs’s wedding that I have been waiting over a year to see! (wonderful B&W photography by Steff, shame the East End gangster shots of me & Ed striding to the wedding post-8am-brandy weren’t quite as gangster-like as I’d hoped)
so tired
Oh Joy! I got my new job! It’s at Vizzavi, doing Apache/Oracle installations (a subject on which my knowledge is fairly scant… but I’m a fast learner!) starting in a week (they wanted me there on Monday but… I gotta read a few Apache/Oracle books first 
So this lunchtime I did what I always do on receiving news of a new job - SPEND! First I dragged Mark along to The Library (ridiculously expensive but very friendly fashion shop in Kensington) where, for the first time in my life, I bought an item of clothing (shirt) WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE PRICE TAG! Turned out to be £160 (not bad - I had expected worse). Mark bought some very pleasant cologne for £70 (which he proceed to spray liberally over me). Then I headed down to King’s Road. In Size? (a shoe shop, not as expensive or exclusive as the last place but not excessively cheap either) I saw a pair of trainers I liked - went for them. The damage this time was £170 - silly money, it’s not as if they were Miu Mius or anything (they were Pumas) but hey… whatever. Then I bought O’Reilly’s Unix in a Nutshell (think I’m gonna need it in a week’s time). Feel so good after this little capitalist exercise - and it all cost me less than a day’s pay at my new rate! Gonna have to rein myself in soon though (thinking I should pick up a high-end Sony Vaio next week!)
I find it strange how people can have “regulars” for their lunch. The very idea of eating the same meal for lunch every day is so unappealing to me, I need variety in my life. But then I remember when I used to work at Olivetti in Richmond, for almost 2 years I bought the same sandwich and packet of crisps every day; well, perhaps I’d vary it once it week, but the overwhelming majority of lunches consisted of avocado salad and mayonnaise on ciabatta from La Fornia in the town centre, accompanied by salt and vinegar crisps. It was just the most gorgeous, indulgent meal possible, followed up by perhaps a chocolate bar, piece of cake, pastry or greek yoghurt. And it was also fun imagining that the Italian students, who would work there for perhaps 2 months at a time to improve their English, were flirting with me.
Once I left Richmond, I was a bit stranded at lunchtimes. I tried other places, I tried other avocado salads with mayo (on ciabatta or otherwise), but nowhere was the same. I can’t quite pinpoint why, but I think it was a combination of factors - the ciabatta was never as fresh or light (so many places now serve chewy ciabatta, I have almost gone off it altogether), the mayonnaise wasn’t as fresh (I’m sure La Fornaia used real egg home-made stuff), the sandwich wasn’t as easily manageable (avocado has a habit of slipping sideways out of its bread jacket, lubricated by mayonnaise, so that by the time I get three-quarters of the way along the sandwich I’m holding two empty pieces of bread and my hands are covered in goo), there were no Italian students… whatever.
Anyway, today I felt as if I had gone back in time. OK, no Italian students but I can live without that part. For breakfast I bought avocado salad with mayo (albeit on sunflower seed roll) from the Greenfields (?) Cafe near South Kensington tube. It was gorgeous, delicious - not the same as the Richmond version (there was cress in the salad, plus a little lemon juice). Perhaps it was just my hangover that made it that way, but it felt as it I hadn’t eaten such a good sandwich since Richmond 7 years ago. Mmmmm.
Fabulously lucid dream last night. I was Harry Potter: a little older than the Harry Potter of the books, a little more filled out around the torso, but identifiably the same person. The lucidity arrived during a spell contest, I cannot tell you how fabulous it was to be improvising gestures and phrases and seeing real, unbelievable consequences spring from my hands. And then, a simple flick and a word and I was flying.
I flew through a cathedral. The cathedral was packed with people. At the front was a woman singing popular pap. The crowds were going mad. It was terrible, it was wrong, I could feel it in my blood. Clutched to my chest as I flew was my son (actually Dyllan, Jon’s son who was in the office yesterday). He was being drawn towards the music, starting to love it, getting into it, and it was my quest to stop him, to draw him back to the true way. In the bottom right hand corner of my “screen” was an old man (Dumbledore?) who was offering me words of guidance, and an indistinct figure stood behind him but said nothing. I was strangely surprised but quite please when he introduced me to a priest and told me that basically the old establishment were in agreement with me, and wanted to halt the spread of this new mania. They would do anything that they could to help, but were limited as they could not offend their public - I was more or less on my own, and had to rely upon my spells and my enthusiasm for success. But my overriding mission was to save my son, I could not let him slip over to the dark side. I slipped out of the dream as I was flying through the cathedral over the crowds, belting out Bohemian Rhapsody at the top of my voice in a (fairly succesful)_attempt to drown out the heavily amplified music coming from the stage - and I was loving it, the singing, the giving it my all, the flying.
The meaning of the dream was fairly clear to me. Don’t just go with the flow, think of your kids, do everything in your power for them, kick against the pricks. It kinda made sense in terms of my current situation.
Wrote a review of a Napster book for Brand Republic.
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