Sweet

Hot damn! What a relief it is to have an extra seven hours a day of normally wasted commuting time to catch up on my work. I love Wednesdays and Thursdays when I get to work from home.

After the past two days (a total of seventeen hours sat on delayed trains, plus all sorts of crappy interruptions in the office), today is pretty darned blissy.
I had a lovely hour-long lie in, watching the news with dippy eggies, coffee and a smoothie in bed, followed by a glorious soak in the bath instead of a rushed shower, then I started work at six.
I'm just taking a coffee break and will start to catch up on my blog-visiting when I've posted this.

As I'm peckish again now, here's something yummy that I'd never eaten before the weekend.
Joy has been introducing me to Filipino cuisine and after our Japanese lunch on Saturday she gave me some suman to try.

Suman are sweet rice cakes.
Sticky and delicious!
And what fun to unwrap!

In taste and texture they are a little like a cross between sushi rice and mochi.
Joy eats hers with sugar or fries them in butter but having no sweet tooth I ate mine with a chopped mango, rocket and cracked pepper salad with a drizzle of walnut oil.
I also tried one with just freshly squeezed lemon juice and it was yummy!
If any of you Colonials mentions maple syrup I'll slap you. The rice was fragrant and sweet enough without the additional cloying, sugary crap.

They were utterly delicious!
Thanks, Joy!

As I am Meester Happy today, here's a nice happy song.
It's from the Lost In Translation soundtrack and it's Phoenix playing "Too Young".




A brief addendum:
This item from the BBC News website this morning kind of explains why I don't date the local girls. Life in Norfolk … Hey ho.

The Happy Commuter Writes …

After yesterday's bag of shite, here's a song dedicated to my train operator, "National Express".

For anyone not familiar with them, they used to (and still do) run the crappiest coach service in the world (which this song was written to celebrate/satirise) and - in a particularly nasty bout of sadism - the government allowed them to take over my train line.

I have no idea why the lovely Neil has set his video in a National Health hospital, but listen to the lyrics for a taste of my commute (over nine hours yesterday but hopefully only seven today … ha).

As soon as I get a free moment I will catch up on my blog-visiting.
Promise.

In the meantime, here is some light music.
Everybody sing …

Crap

Holy crap!
Over nine hours of delayed train journeys today, just to get to the office and back.
Work was a heap of crap, too.
I'm trashed, emotionally and physically.
I'm just in the door and I'm going to crawl up the stairs and dump the wreckage of myself on the bed.
Tomorrow promises the same, so I'll have to catch up on all your blogs on Wednesday when - hoo-fucking-rah - I'll be working from home.

Of Flying Fish And Pesky Pachyderms

Lunch at Shiki with Joy, yesterday.

Here she is with her cool new haircut, looking totally excited about Old Dive's company.
Anyhoo … I must right a wrong. I've been dissing Shiki for charging four times what I can get Japanese food for in London.
What we need is more Japanese restaurants and sushi bars in Norwich, but Norfolk is so culturally backward that a night of multicultural diversity here involves listening to a Shirley Bassey record while eating a bowl of Campbell's soup (that'll be lost on the Colonials so I'd better add that McD is considered an exotic foreign food here, though how it could possibly be considered a food of any type is quite beyond me).

So … After miso, rice, tamago, yellowtail, unagi, flying fish and more sushi, plus teryaki salmon for Joy I can declare the quality of the food there is amazing. The unagi is even better than London and the rest is just as good.
We're going back one evening to watch Isko show off his Teppanyaki skills.

Soooo … Both being born to shop, we hit the city for a spot of retail therapy before meeting up with Thom in Castle Gardens, the lovely little park around the moat to Norwich Castle.

Where we found … uh-oh … another of those pesky pachyderms!
The sun decided to come out then and I burnt my neck, dammit!

And there was no escape from the marauding elephants. This rather attractively decorated one is in the garden of the local TV station.

And this is Joy's personal favourite, sitting, glittering in the Royal Arcade, where it was attracting lots of stupid locals to touch it and go "Oooh!"

To accompany today's post, here's a lovely little lazy Sunday tune from those mad Japanese girls in Cibo Matto (the video is pure genius):



Enjoy your Sunday.



A brief postscript for Lynn.
£30 a month for go anywhere wireless internet and they'll throw in a free laptop. You have no more excuses! Hee hee. I must confess to loving the "FREE LAPTOP!" followed by the "£30.00 pm". Those nice folk at the Nokia shop are surely taking the piss.

Seeing Elephants

Hey! No fair!

The whole of America was partying last night and this morning it's me who's seeing elephants.
I was a good boy and didn't drink last night (much), so it seems a little unfair.
Like Terry Pratchett's unfortunate deity, the "Oh God" Of Hangovers, who suffers for other people I feel like I am hallucinating for all you boozy Colonials after your Fourth of July knees-up.

Anyhoo … I took photos of some of the elephants. There were loads of them, dotted all over the city this morning.

Trumpety

Trumpety

Trump

I'm now heading back into the city for lunch with Joy and Thom at the Japanese restaurant and then I'll watch the Lord Mayor's Parade in the rain.
While I'm gone, here's today's track by an artist I love and who you may not be familiar with.
Today it's the lovely Neko Case, with a sweet little song about getting murdered on the interstate: Deep Red Bells.

She's the one who came up with my favourite ever opening line to a song:
"Fluorescent lights engage
Like birds
Frying on a wire …"
That's from "Things That Scare Me"

This one has some fine lyrics in it, too:
"A handprint on the driver's side.
It looks a lot like engine oil and tastes like being poor and small
and popsicles in summer"

and

"Now speckled fronds raise round your bones
Who took the time to fold your clothes
and shook the valley of the shadow?"



Both tracks are from her wonderful album "Blacklisted". Go buy.

Song For Katie

Hokay, so I can't stay curmudgeonly for long.

Thanks to Katie's reply to my earlier - somewhat cynical - post, here is the lovely Moon Unit Zappa singing the Californian State Anthem, "Valley Girls".

Totally!
Gag me with a spoon!
Whatever …

Enjoy your party, America. I'm only jealous.

Karaoke Friday

Hey ho. It's the fourth of July and the Colonials are revolting.

Not being in the least bit resentful, curmudgeonly or wishing to offend in any way, this grumpy old man from the Mother Country will join in the celebrations with a little sing-song to remind me of the consequences of said Colonial revolt.

Happy Fourth of July to any damned Yanquis out there!

Let's Make A Racket - XIV

This one's for Peahen.

Picture the scene:
Paul and Steve and Jason and Old Dive are about to start the second set down at the blues club.
Just before we go on stage, Pea says to Paul:
"Do that one … you know … Evil Honey Bee".
Paul cracks up.

From that moment on, this song has always been known as "Evil Honey Bee" in honour of Pea.
For anyone who cares, I was playing Old Les and Paul had his G&L tele on the go. My slide is a 1968 Avon lipstick tube that I nicked off mum when I was little and still use today.

Probably the best photograph ever taken of my face.

Of Palaces And Peasants

While I've got the scanner out …
After yesterday's shots of that most unhinged of royal palaces, the hallucinogenic confection that is the Peña Palace, here are a few shots to show that Portuguese architecture is not always quite so bonkers.

This still-not-quite-sane house is just outside Cascais where the Atlantic starts getting wild. It's built in a little cove, protected from the waves by that sea wall with the arch in it that lets the lagoon flood calmly with each high tide.
I want this house so badly. What a fantastic place to retire and go quietly mad, cackling to myself in the tower.

Back in Cascais, this is the Queen's Palace. Ana's dad, Jose works there as a gardener, the lucky sod.

Inside the palace courtyard. Beautiful.

Of course, with all the money being spent on palaces, most Portuguese live in places like this. Picturesque but not exactly palatial.

Head further west, out to Cabo de São Vicente, and the architecture gets seriously "mad fifteenth-century Jesuit".
This is the hang-out of Don Infante Henriques; Henry The Navigator to you, and from here Vasco da Gama set out on his epic voyage - immortalised in Camõens' "Os Lusiades" - around the southern tip of Africa to India and the Portuguese forged their empire, spanning from Brazil, through Angola and Moçambique to Goa and the Spice Islands, ending up in China and Japan.
His chapel gives Jo, Lee and me a chance to pose like we're in a mail order clothing catalogue.

The most westerly point of Europe. Next piece of land is Brazil.
Jo is bemused to find that the End Of Europe is actually shaped like a cock.
Which says rather a lot about our empire-building tendencies.

I've decided to include the odd piece of music from people that I really like but that most of you may not be too familiar with.
First up comes the wonderful Mr. Howe Gelb, king of lo-fi, messing around with his friends from Giant Sand in a part of America that looks a lot like southern Portugal.
Nice relaxy music.
Though watch out because it's just black for the first ten seconds before it starts …
Enjoy your respective Wednesdays.

Bonkers Architecture

Hey ho. It's July already.
I couldn't sleep last night and at 3:30 this morning I took a stunningly beautiful photo of the sky, a deep sapphire blue brightening to turquoise at the horizon with thin strips of pink-orange cloud streaming away from the point where the sun would soon rise.
Then I went back to bed and read until a few minutes ago when I came down here, plugged in the camera and accidentally wiped the memory card.
Fuck!

So … No lovely photo of this morning's dawn.
Instead - as I've got the scanner out and I have nothing to write about - here are some touristy photos I took of Peña Palace in Sintra, Portugal with a startlingly deep blue sky.
These haven't been Photoshopped; all I had was a UV filter over the lens. It was just one of those days that you sometimes get up in the mountains in Portugal. An intense blue that I could stare up at for hours.

Peña Palace is without a shadow of a doubt the most bonkers building to come out of the architecturally unhinged nineteenth century. I love it.

Mad.

Mad.

Mad.

Mad.

And mad again.

It reminds me of the way the Portuguese dress (and decorate their houses); a charming yet alarming collision of elegance and kitsch.

Apropos of nothing in particular, but I suppose because I'm feeling a little perkier than last week and thinking back to better days, here's "Better Days" to listen to (this album's been on pretty heavy rotation just lately).