Kipperee

I expect everybody does this: that thing where you've been drinking before a party, and then you go to the party and drink, and then someone suggests going back to their place after rather than going home, and in the car on the way - well, you find yourself volunteering...

So Helen and Mark picked me up last night and we went down to Jess & Alan's to party on like the dudes we are, and collected Jacqui & Paul there and were heading back to Helen's for another bottle of wine and bed, and Mark said "We've only got four kippers, mind, for the morning," and rather than saying "That's okay, I don't eat breakfast as a rule" (because that's true but still, y'know, kippers) I said "Got any rice?" And Mark said yes, and I said "I could make kedgeree."

So there I am this morning, and Helen has not forgotten, and so I had to improvise a kedgeree.

Like this:

Cook the right amount of rice. Meanwhile peel and slice an onion, crush a couple of cloves of garlic, quarter a majority of mushrooms. Skin the kippers, discover they won't flake and cut them into fingers.

Sizzle the onion in oil, adding spices: they had turmeric and cumin and coriander and fennel seed, so that's what I used.

Add the garlic, then the mushrooms, then the kipper fingers.

Add the rice.

Keep turning it over, while you fry some eggs to go on top. (They had duck eggs - but one of them was bad. I've never broken a bad egg before. It was horrid.)

Add a chopped chili (this late because I didn't know they had any until Helen went into the garden and came back with it).

I think that was it, unless I've forgotten something. Dead easy, dead tasty, classic British Raj-like breakfast. Only with kippers instead of smoked haddock: hence, kipperee. But I expect everybody does that.

A man, a plan. No canal. Panama!

Okay, so this is Project Panama, for want of a better name.

Today, I am having Off. Because it's already half-gone, and I can.

Tomorrow, I rise betimes and do All The Cooking. Bread (for lunches), pork scratchings (for nibblings), chilli (a vasty pot, for suppers).

Then I hie me to the library with my lunch, and I work until I can't stand it any more, and then I come home and work some more.

Three thousand words a day, minimum, until this book is done. It ought to take a week.

(For clarity's sake, let it be said that I can't remember the last time I wrote three thousand words in a day, let alone several times consecutively. Nevertheless. If I work ten hours a day, that's only three hundred words an hour. Actually, I can write faster than that.)

It might be nice if I found an actual plot somewhere along the way, but hey. An end, that's all I'm asking for. I don't think that's too much?

Oops

You know that thing about falling at the first hurdle...?

One book. One.

I thought, as I'm not working today, I'd be useful and practical and sort through a big box of stuff. Then I would (a) have sorted stuff, and (b) have a big empty box to sort stuff into.

First thing out of the box? Is a book. Ah, I thought, here begins the winnowing. Whatever this book is, I shall decide whether to keep it, to sell it or to give it away; and the chances are good on the giving away, for 'tis only an old paperback of little commercial value, and the default position has to be against keeping, I'm only keeping those books I really need. So...

So then I turned it over to look at the cover.

It's Introducing Mind and Brain by Angus Gellatly and Oscar Zarate. Picked up on a whim secondhand, just because it looked interesting. Never read, it just occupies space: it's exactly the kind of book I should be shedding. If I ever need it, I can pick up another copy v cheap. It should go into the Lit & Phil donations box, without a moment's hesitation.

But it's interesting. I opened it, I flicked through - I want to read it now. I want to read it now. I want to keep it. I want to learn the stuff it has to teach me. I want to have read it already, I want to know that stuff. I want...

Ahem. If they're all going to be as hard as this, I might as well give up now. But giving up is not an option.

Eek.

Eek!

Fraught with peril, this process. Fraught, I tell you.

I found magazines in the box. And was shuffling through them, thinking "Don't need you, or you, or you, or..." when I came to the monthly Culture mag produced by the local newspaper. And was on the very verge of flinging it into the recycling, when I thought "Hang on a minute. Why would I have kept it even this long? Chances are, there's an interview with me or a review or something. That makes it Archive..."

So I ran my eye down the contents page. And didn't see my name, and was again on the verge of flinging it - when I realised that that cat, the big photograph at the top of the contents page, directing me to p 42? That was Mac, that was...

So, yup. It's an article about my office here, the room I work in. And it's Mac's first appearance in print. That's Archive, that is.

On a related topic: what does one do with the magazines produced over the years by the BSFA and the BFS and so forth? Recycle, or try to find a home for? Can there be anyone interested in years-old publications by interest-societies? Are they Archive, as I have a professional interest in their interests? I dunno. Help me, O Internets...

The Napoleon of pigs

Government minister on the news, trying to tell us we don't realise how lucky we are; but I missed the intro, and I didn't recognise her - and I couldn't tell if she were Tory or Lib Dem.

When did that happen, that they became indistinguishable?