Life Less Literary |
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A small selection of the many things that have happened to Dan Sumption, his family, friends and colleagues
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Sunday, July 21, 2002
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
Gaaa.... ain't that always the way. Here I am, wasting time before getting started on a job. I remembered that I haven't been to Niina's site for ages. Lots there I want to look at and read and mail Niina about... but I don't have that much time to waste. Gotta get a train to London in an hour. Must get a move on! Add comment | this item Yay! I just saved a butterfly. It had been fluttering around, on and off, all morning, in a gap between the window and the blind, about 8 feet above my head. I got up on my chair and used a broom to gently guide it towards the open window. Eventually we made it. Was very rewarding watching it flutter away over the rooftops of Sheffield below me. Reminds me, last night just as I was closing the windows up here, a moth made a dive to get into the house. He maneuvered past me, Luke Skywalker-style, turning on his side to squeeze through the last gap of window before bursting triumphantly into the void of the living room (and probably aiming a single fatal bolt of laser energy at the stereo cabinet). It was an awesome sight. I never really thought of moths as very aeronautical creatures. Add comment | this item Monday, July 15, 2002
To my list of "currently reading" below I should add Fast Food Nation. I know I'm going to make it to the end of this one, and soon, it's pretty un-putdownable. Yeah, the Hunter S Thompson is good as well, but somehow I can't get quite so worked up over a collection of letters. Add comment | this item Yee-ess! Guy has finally got his site live - and it's a big improvement on the quarter-finished version I saw a few weeks ago. I really enjoyed browsing around, reading the Photoshop tips, admiring the stylish pornography. Thank you Guy, wonderful stuff :) 1 comment Add comment | this item Well, I finally did it. I finally got on my bike again. Last year I had a huge resurgence of interest in cycling just before Lola was born. When I went back down to London I took my bike with me, cycled to work and back (about 15 mile round-trip) every day. But when I left Hard Reality last October, I left my bike behind (for various reasons - no space in the car when I did my big office unload, lots of trips on the train with no car, lots of trips on the car but not passing close enough to South Kensington, lots of passing close to South Kensington without being sober enough to cycle in a straight line, etc etc etc). So my bike rotted away in the bowels of 60 Sloane Avenue for nearly 9 months. Cut to... well, a few weeks ago really. Like a solar-lunar eclipse with all the planets in alignment, all the factors required for me to collect my lovely old rust 1988 Saracen Trekker (no name as yet... well, bloody stupid idea giving your vehicles names, isn't it) were present. So I drove over with Mark and bunged it in the car. It's been in the garden a while now, wheels on, wheels off, grease off, grease on. I kinda did a half-hearted clean-up and service, nothing like the one it needs but at least it's rideable. And then this afternoon, as a test, I took it down the hill to Langsett Cycles (for some chain cleaner) and Safeway (for some tomato juice and tabasco sauce - yeah, virgin marys day!). Bugger me it's hard work getting back up Addy Road with shopping on the back. And then this evening I met up with Ian for a proper little cycle ride. Rode down to Hillsborough to meet him, I'm sure the wind when cycling downhill didn't used to sound that loud, still it was fun charging down Rivelin Bank and hoping that my brakes would hold out at the bottom. Just before I left, Gill had been moaning about Sheffield drivers being crap and not used to cyclists, and shortly after meeting Ian I got my first experience of this - woman beeping us and waving her fist because we were riding two abreast (even though she had a whole other lane to do as she pleased with). We got going along the A6101 Rivelin Valley Road, climbing gently (well, gentler than Addy Road) towards the Peaks. Another example of driver brainlessness at the bottom of Hagg Hill, where a guy in a beaten-up old white Fiesta waited for us to come virtually in front of his car (Ian was about 2 feet away) before hammering his foot down and accelerating out of the side-road almost into Ian. I made the universal "dick-head" symbol on my helmet, I'm sure the driver missed it but I like to think it provided some amusement to the queue of drivers also waiting to exit Hagg Hill. At the end of the road we turned left onto the A57 back towards Sheffield. Another fun incident with motor vehicles - a car overtook us at about 60mph, just as a motorbike was overtaking the car at about 80mph, and another car was coming the other way. I'm still not sure how we all managed to squeeze side-by-side on the two-lane blacktop, but somehow we lived to tell the tale. As we reached Crosspool I relaxed, mentally and physically. We'd pretty much reached the peak of our climb, just another lovely sharp downhill into Crookes and we'd be home for dinner. Oh no. Ian had other ideas. He passed the left turn "oh" I thought, "he's going to take the one halfway down"... past that "ah, he's going to turn at the traffic lights in Broomhill"... past that "perhaps that little road just after Richer Sounds?" Oh no, he was going for broke. Being Ian, he wanted to make the exercise as torturous (and hence fitness-building) as possible. Took us right back down to the bloody ring-road, then back up the agonizingly steep (and long) hill of Crookes Valley Road/Barber Road. I had been so ready not to climb again that my legs just switched off. I watched Ian pulling further and further away, as I changed down to first gear and my legs span ineffectually on the pedals. I felt rather stupid as I was almost overtaken by pedestrians walking alongside me. But somehow I made it back up to Commonside. It was only when I climbed off my bike and tried to walk in the front door that I realised quite how much that last half-mile had taken out of me. My legs barely supported me, it's a cliché to say they'd turned to jelly but, well, I can think of no better cliché to fit the moment. As I walked from the bright sunshine into the darkness of the hallway my eyes flickered and everything went very wierd - dunno if this was blood rushing to/from my head, or what exactly, but it was quite bizarre. I somehow staggered down the hallway and into the kitchen, without collapsing on the steps. Spooning food onto my plate was bloody hard work, my hands kept flopping onto the table in front of me before they could make it as far of the serving dish. But somehow I did eat and drink, and gradually normal service was resumed. I'm looking forward to doing it all again next week. Add comment | this item Mmmm... dunno whether it's the monthly arrival of Observer Food Monthly along with the Sunday papers, but my cooking-muscles really felt like they needed excercising yesterday. I was totally entranced by the article on Ferran Adrià's restaurant El Bulli, worth taking a trip to Barcelona to sample it. My mouth was dripping from the description of the emotions which come with the food, I wonder how much this is really down to the food and how much down to the hype, the expectation, the trouble that most people take to visit such a far-flung place. It made me think back to my visit to the Café de la Gare with Guy, I know the food there was awesome, but also the setting, the circumstances, and the chef Bart's enthusiasm combined to make it more so. Anyway, this bit from the article said it all for me: "I noticed a woman at a nearby table. She had put something into her mouth, and now her whole body shook slightly, as if she was having a fit of hiccups. She sat with her head bowed, her shoulders moving up and down, until she looked at the man she was with. She had tears in her eyes, and when she met his gaze, she started laughing - unafraid laughter that made him laugh too."So I spent most of yesterday in the kitchen. Not sure why it took me quite so long to prepare what I did (starter: buckwheat & wild rice blinis with smoked haddock paté and yoghurt. Main: A tart [wheat-free shortcrust made with brown rice flour, maize flour and oats. Really could have used some butter though for flavour] containing a kind of roasted pepper and egg-yolk flan mix, with green salad. Dessert: Indian-style rice pudding). I put it down to the fact that I did the washing up about 6 times during the course of the day (the food-processor seemed to come in for particularly heavy use). By the end of the day, my feet were killing me, and I had to spend a couple of hours with them in a baby-bath full of cold water and Epsom salts, while I read the newspapers, leisurely-like. Most of the recipes, by the way, came from the Gluten, Wheat and Dairy Free Cookbook by Antoinette Savill, which I've kind of been avoiding using since I got it for my birthday, but now I've dived into it I realise it contains some really good stuff. Add comment | this item Thursday, July 11, 2002
Somehow my life seems to follow my reading habits. When I'm happily breezing through books, I also seem to breeze through work. At the moment, everything's a bit octopussy... tentacles of chaos everywhere. I'm halfway through so many books, I've lost count. Among the current batch are:
Add comment | this item Thursday, July 04, 2002
Wednesday, July 03, 2002
Thanks to Naomi for pointing me to the compatiblity test:
Now, anyone want to let me know how compatible you are with me? Add comment | this item Rowan was pretty pleasant (for her) this morning - got up no problem, made herself breakfast, got dressed, brushed teeth and hair, all pretty quickly and early, leaving us about 20 minutes to spare before leaving for school. Then, just as we were preparing to leave, she snapped into a more normal Rowan morning-mood, complained that her dress was too short, then that it was too loose, tried on another dress but that was just as bad, started yelling and screaming at me, etc etc etc. Finally she found a dress she seemed happy with (it looked rather silly with her other clothes but what the hell, that's the last thing I was going to tell her). She decided to wear her sandals, and though I pointed out that she'd get wet feet in the rain (and got a torrent of abuse in return) I let her because I wanted to get off quickly and just couldn't face more arguing. On the way to school there were more strops - I found myself walking down the street yelling at her at the top of my voice, and then felt pretty bad about it. Although we walked all the way to school holding hands (which she usually refuses to do nowadays) we were both smouldering and looking daggers at one another. Just before we went into school I decided that I had to do something, didn't want to part with us both in such a foul mood. So I said "can we be friends?" and she turned and gave me the most gorgeous (and unexpected) smile. I kissed her on the head and, surprisingly, she let me (normally the potential for social embarrasment that this causes would provoke another twirl of rage from her). More than that, she let me come into her classroom and showed me some of the things she'd done recently (normally she wouldn't be seen dead with her dad in school). As I was looking around the classroom, her teacher told me that Rowan had performed amazingly well in a maths exercise they'd done the previous day - she had been showing the children how to add 11 or 9 to a number by first adding 10 and then adding or subtracting one - something that they wouldn't normally be expected to do until a year later. Most of the other kids had struggled with the idea, but Rowan had taken to it immediately and got all of the answers right. As she told me this, I could see Rowan sitting at her table, a supressed smile of pride creeping over her face. Funnily enough, I'm sure I remember discussing something similar with Rowan months ago - how I always do complicated sums by breaking them down into smaller simpler ones. I like to think that it helped her in some way. I'm so happy that we parted in such a good atmosphere, compared to what had gone on minutes before. Add comment | this item Monday, July 01, 2002
That rainbow came back! Looked awesome on the hillside as I was driving around Sheffield.
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