Let's Make A Racket - XXIV

It's Thursday again (sheesh, these days it seems like we have a bloody Thursday every week) and today we'll be dipping once again into that cheesy old Cheese Mechanics live cassette tape known to discerning Norwich rhythm'n'blues fans as "Cheeses of Nazareth".

PLAY THIS LOUD AND DANCE!

No guitar solo to speak of in this one, but today it's party time with my favourite cheesy "sanity band"!
Short, sweet and somewhat pungent, this is an extract from a Cheeses' gig displaying us in what passed for our ridiculous pomp.

Believe it or not, Neil (who sings this) is a quietly-spoken abstract painter and film-maker, but put him up on stage and he gets progressively worked up into such a frenzy that the English language disappears and is replaced by "Neil-Speak"
"OoKAR jugs RAAAR by ookya GYAAAR!" as he sings at one point and as we say on Neil-World.

Our Neil and Our Dive (I know I've posted this pic before but it's the only one I've got of the two of us where we don't look like the miserable old sods we truly are).

This - especially toward the end - gives some idea of what a Cheese Mechanics gig was actually like.
Between all the guitar solos we'd whip in one of these; short, sharp and ludicrous.
It's a basic law of physics, stick a Bo Diddley riff into the last set and you're guaranteed a floor full of drunken girls in various states of undress, shrieking and giggling and occasionally flashing their boobs at one another.

In fact I enjoyed re-living this so much I'll also stick in the next track from that gig, even though I've posted this one before: "You Got Me Running", aka "Any Way You Want."

If you left a Cheeses' gig without a big fat cheesy grin plastered over your face then we weren't doing our job right.

Front-Bottoms

As Jules reminded me in yesterday's comments, no matter how innocent my posts may be, not many days go by without someone bringing up the subject of genitalia in the comments box.
For those who missed the discussion, a wall of vaginas (and the opportunity to have your own vagina immortalised), together with my own perfect penis are available to the grubby-minded on Joy's "I, Woman" blog: http://iwoman.me.uk/ (not somewhere I tend to hang around a lot, I confess … I feel inadequate enough as it is without all that girl power talk).
Look for "The Perfect Vagina" post.

As I've now brought up the subject in my post, perhaps my comments box will remain unsullied and genitalia-free today.

Some hope …

…

Oh … Addendum (on a related matter):

This was on Engrish.com today.
Is it just me or is this tragic magazine funny in one too many ways?


Oh, and the small, yappy-type dogs' names (フイフイ&ロメオ) translate phonetically as "Fifi" and "Romeo".
Sick puppies …

Oink

As I've got nothing to post today, here is yet another old photo of me when I was cute, to tie in with the "What's Cooking With Dive" posts and to prove that I have always been a glutton.

I like food. I've always liked food. I will always like food.
Give me food!
Now!

What's Cooking With Dive? Bloody Breakfast

I know it's not a full moon until the fifteenth, but once or twice a year that ol' lycanthrope gene kicks in outta phase and the craving for blood drives me, howling and hairy, to Harvey's.

Harvey's - as I've said before in the earlier "What's Cooking With Dive" posts, is the militant wing of Norwich's organic real meat movement. The messages about factory/agrochemical/intensive "meat-substitute" on their delivery vans scare the bejeebers out of pedestrians.
Their lovely shop is a combination of organic butchers, militant bookshop and local organic wholefood outlet and is one of the finest places to stand on this planet.
They have a daily menu board letting you know exactly which local farm each of the meats on display comes from and photos on the noticeboard of the happy creatures grazing in rich pasture, rooting in woodland and not being kept in concrete pens under fluorescent lights, fed ground up bits of their predecessors deemed unfit for humans and injected with so many antibiotic and growth hormone chemicals that they are the same size in six weeks as a real animal is in six months. Little wonder the present generation is obese, allergic to everything and their infections immune to antibiotics.

Er … Sorry. I didn't mean to go off on one.
What I'm actually trying to say here is that organic black pudding (my lycanthrope-lite substitute for human blood) is yummy.

Black pudding (aka blood pudding) is basically blood, cooked with fat (the Germans sometimes put suet, oatmeal or even bread in there, but they're German).

When I was a kid, my grandparents kept a house-pig on their farm (that's it, above; a beautiful old fifteenth century higgledy-piggledy house that I wish was still in the family, with lil' ol' me posing on the gate) as did most country families.
Come the onset of winter, the pig would be slaughtered to provide meat through 'til spring. And the blood that was drained off didn't get wasted. Goodness, no. Boiled up with diced belly fat and stirred until it congeals, then stuffed inside an intestine to set, it makes one of the most delicious delicacies known to man (this is gonna gross out the veggies even more than when I ate the whalemeat).

So anyhoo … That atavistic werewolf howl hit hard yesterday and steered me to Harvey's so that this morning I could enjoy a rare treat: a ludicrously unhealthy fried breakfast.

Here's what I had:
3 organic, free range eggs,
3 rashers of local organic bacon,
About an inch and a half of black pudding, cut into three thick slices,
Half a dozen organic kidneys,
A side-plate-sized flat field mushroom,
A handful of button mushrooms,
4 tomatoes out of the garden.

Recipe:
Fry that lot up and eat it.
Serves 3 people, 2 Americans, or one exceedingly greedy werewolf.
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
I won't have to eat again for a week.

Meanwhile, Back In The Office

Before I start, you simply MUST pop over to Lulubelle's blog and check this out!
Did you laugh or cry?

Meanwhile, back in the office, this is what I'm working on at the moment.

You can see a part of the old school on the right. The yellow stone buildings are my new additions. The pointy bit will be the new entrance with admin and a lecture theatre and the new school hall is behind it on the left.

Here's a sort of aerial view.

Around the back we are knocking down loads of crap from the fifties and temporary classrooms to create a new dining hall (the curvy bit) with a new library and classrooms. All the parts with greenish roofs are new. There'll be loads of photovoltaic panels on the hall and the rest of the new build has grass or sedum roofs with grey water recycling and a big new heat pump under the swimming pool so that awful boiler chimney can come down in the next phase. By the time I'm done the school will be twice the size and need half the current power to run it.

The dining hall will be dug in to the side of a small slope so that it's barely visible from neighbouring properties.

The grass roof will carry on the line of the slope, hopefully hiding the fact that there's a bloody enormous building under there.

Here's the new entrance on the left and the existing entrance (which will just be for staff) on the right.

For any newbies who might not know, I design girls' schools for a living. Here are a few more of my 3D models to illustrate what I get up to.



There are more under the "Work" label, along with a lot of whingeing.
Right … Enough work. I'm off to the city for breakfast.

The "N" In Hello

Getting back to the "Please explain women" post, the general consensus of opinion from the comments of the good burghers of Blogville seems to be:
from the hetero-men: "Be afraid!"
from the hetero-women: "Be VERY afraid!"
from the lesbian and gay community: "Actually, women are great but be afraid anyway."

All of which leaves me none the wiser but considerably more frightened of women.
Thanks, guys.
My problem is that it's been so long since I experienced whatever it is I'm supposed to be afraid of that I can't remember what a "relationship" is like at all.
And I would kinda like to try another one before I die - if only so I can say "Aha! NOW I remember why I should be afraid."

Some of you very kindly gave me some not-exactly-helpful advice on this problem a couple of years ago but due to the fact that I'm too ugly to get close enough to a woman to try any of it out, things have not exactly developed, romance-wise.
Although on the plus side I have become a world-renowned authority on whining self-pity and onanism so I suppose I shouldn't really complain.

So … Old Dive's miserable about being alone again. When you've finished pointing and laughing I'd appreciate some "Let's get the old bastard dating again" tips, please.

I'll give you a hand by listing my good points and bad points:

Good points …
I have a great job, a nice house in a beautiful village and a cool car that's less than a week old.
I'm a pretty good cook.
I like housework.
I can iron like a demon.
I don't have an inconvenient wife and kids.
I love shopping.
I'm well educated, a decent musician and artist and I've never smoked.
I am allegedly funny, smart and good company.
I can take no for an answer.

Bad Points …
I'm forty-nine years old.
I'm slightly less sexually attractive than the stuff you clean out of your plughole.

No matter how many items I cram into the "Good" category, it's those two little "Bad"s that outweigh them a million times over and guarantee me a lifetime of heartache, misery, loneliness and grubby masturbation.

The trouble with being Ug is, as I've said before, that an Ug guy is as "safe" as a gay guy; pretty girls love to have us as friends, to shop and gossip with (and to moan endlessly to us about their relationships), but the prospect of actually dating one of us would induce an amusing combination of screaming and vomiting in every single one of 'em.
Being everybody's best friend is wonderful, but being everybody's best friend and nobody's lover kinda grates; at least it does after the first few decades.

Dating is real ordeal for an Ug.
We ugs are the people who put the "N" in "hello" … We say "Hello" to a woman and she takes one look at us and her mind crams that "N" in there, transforming "Hello" into "Hell No".

And while living alone has its plus points - unhindered access to a bathroom that's free of industrial quantities of stinky gunk and being able to do, think, eat and drink whatever I please when I feel like it - it would be nice if that was something I chose to do. But a cold empty house and a cold empty bed are compulsory upon achieving Ug-dom.

So … It's been a couple of years since the "dating advice" fiasco and we've got some new folk here in Blogville. Does anyone out there have any useful advice that might help Old Dive get a date and rediscover just why I should be so afraid of weemen?

Let's Make A Racket - XXIII

It's Thursday, it's Rackety Time, but I'm feeling kind of mellow this morning so let's chill out today with a couple of versions of an old Bob Dylan song.

The first version is from a session very late one night down at the Blues Club, featuring Michael, Steve, Dave, Laurie and myself.
At the end of the gig, after the standard, raucous encores the few remaining drunks still wanted more, so we all looked at one another quizzically until Michael said "How about Dylan's old Corinna, Corinna"?
We said "Sure." though none of us had ever played it before, but it's a song we all knew and loved so Michael started us off and away we went.
You can tell we are figuring out what to play as we go along, especially in my solo, but Laurie always plays such subtle sax and Michael's piano solo in this version is just beautiful.



In honour of that solo, here is a photo of him wearing a particularly splendid hat and seemingly lost in a little Michael-sized reverie.

A couple of weeks later we recorded a version at a Cheese Mechanics rehearsal with Neil on harmonica and Ron on drums. I played a slightly more together solo but it's the first bar of Neil's harmonica solo that floats my boat.

It's a song that we always play now whenever we get together. One of those gentle, swaying tunes that have us all nodding and smiling like the band in The Muppets.

Pop Quiz

I hate it when I'm too busy to blog.
But today is one of those days, so instead of writing reams of guff and annoying the Yanquis I'll ask you a question that's been bugging me for nigh on fifty years:

Please explain women to me.

Use both sides of the paper if necessary.

Cruising For A Bruising

I better watch myself here.
I've been getting perilously close (see yesterday's comments) to open warfare with the Yanquis over language (again).
Not that there's anything wrong with that; arrogant and pedantic insult-mongery is one of my few remaining pleasures in life (that and the over-use of hyphens, adjectives and parentheses … oh, and those three little dots … er … and starting sentences with "and") …
It's just that blogs will collide again soon (hopefully in early October for the Rothko show at Tate Modern) and the next Blogville resident to hit London is a US citizen, and a formidably intelligent and well-read one at that.
But most worryingly of all she is a swim team girl and swim team girls punch hard!

Let's just sit back with a coffee and take five while we clear the air and try to reduce things from a boiling, seething, transatlantic rage to a gentle simmer with no punching involved.

First up: please don't think from yesterday's post that I am ridiculing American accents; I am not. I love them; the Boston accent so close to my own, the Noo Yoik and Noo Joisey twang, the lazy Californian consonants, the hilarious yet strangely beautiful Minnesota Nice, the glorious deep south drawl and all points between, including such delightful mixtures as our Robyn's lovely accent, born in the deep south, raised around Chicago and slipping into a local Ohio cadence when she gets angry with me (not uncommon).

Also, please don't think I am one of those idiots who insist language must stand still. I gleefully enjoy a varied and kinky sex life with the English language and acknowledge that it is a living thing and should move - enticingly slinkily - with the times.

But …
Here are a couple of archive snippets from the early part of this debate that might make my feelings a little clearer:

"… to etymology. To the derivations of words. And way back in time to the first person who pointed to a hippopotamus after a long night's drinking and named it.

As my long term blog-sufferers know, I have a real bug up my ass about the use of language.
This resulted - some years ago - in the only letter of protest I have ever written to the BBC.
I was watching the news one night and the BBC's Washington correspondent (at that time the windmill-armed, jug-eared buffoon Andrew Marr) uttered the non-word "normalcy".

NOT IN THE CONTEXT OF A QUOTE!

I recall leaping off the sofa, spuffling and sputtering with indignant rage.
This was the BBC for goodness sake! We expect standards! We expect BBC English! What we do NOT expect is a BBC news correspondent speaking gibberish! The BBC's motto is NOT "Nation Shall Speak Gibberish Unto Nation".
At least it wasn't the last time I looked …

And so I rattled off a furious epistle to the Beeb, explaining the derivation of this obscenity and demanding summary execution for Marr (a course of action regrettably not followed).

This linguistic excresence had first tumbled clumsily out of the mouth of one Warren Gamaliel Harding, twenty-ninth President of our lamentably lost colonies and the man who started the appalling avalanche of ignorance that has culminated in the present incumbent of that office being unable even to pronounce his middle initial: namely the monumentally incompetent George Walker Bush.

Even in Harding's own day his call for a "return to normalcy" was derided; not for its intent, but for its linguistic gaucherie.
Here is e.e.cummings on Harding's passing in 1923:
"The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead."
And H.L Mencken:
"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

Splendid!

The thing that most bugs me about "normalcy" however, is that the word itself encourages ignorance; it actually forces human intelligence to take a step backward.
"Normality" - the word Harding's floundering mind must have been groping for - is of course derived from the French "normalité". Not much of a leap there.
After the Norman conquest, a vast word-hoard of French was absorbed into the English language; already a melting pot of Celtic, Breton, Saxon and many others, with Latin as the written norm.
Language is a living thing and it evolves with usage, but the basic meaning of any word is revealed through its etymology. You can trace its roots back through English, French, Latin, Greek, whatever; eventually - in our case - to Indo-Aryan.
When a word such as "normality/normalité" is altered - whether through ignorance or design - it loses part of its meaning. It has taken a step toward becoming a mere abstract symbol; an arbitrary amalgam of sounds to which nobody other than the person who produced it can attach any meaning.
This is the road to chaos. And it would render the Times Crossword even more mind-buggeringly difficult than it is.

The first words were felt as much as spoken. Burroughs posits that the first words were "sex" words and he could well be right. Some were undoubtedly onomatopœic; hunter-gatherer words echoing the sounds of the world around them. The Indo-Aryan word "Ma" for mother occurs in almost all languages, whether they are connected or not. What I'm trying to put across here is that words that have evolved and adapted naturally still retain their essential meanings.
Neologisms: new words for new concepts are continually being brought into existence; the common example being John Logie Baird's coining of the term "television", from the Greek "tele" for "distant, and the Latin "visio" for "seeing". Some people even more pedantic than me insist that neologisms should only be formed from the same language roots, but even - like television - if they are not, then, like all naturally evolved words, some idea of their meaning can be still gauged from their roots.
The French suffixes "…ité" and "…cy" have historially derived and separate usages. Confusing them merely creates confusion and the nuance of meaning is lost.

Having said that, dicking around with language is great fun. It is what writers and poets do. It is what the kid down the street does.
Language moves forward; meaning is refined and even redefined. This is a good thing. I myself have even been party to linguistic debauchery, having once been caught using the word "party" as a verb (yikes)!
"Normalcy" when used by a bumbling President is funny; when used by the BBC - arbiters of the English Language - it is a crime against reason. An irrevocable step down the path to ignorance. They now use it with alarming frequency; proof positive that accusations of their "dumbing down" are well founded.
Twats.

Okay. Mister Pedantic can go back in his box now. Just don't use "normalcy" around me unless you want a slap."

Hokay. So while I am happy with neologisms per se, I deplore the corruption of words through ignorance to form twisted neologisms with no trace of meaning. Admittedly not something that most Americans do but a disturbingly high proportion of their politicians are guilty of it.

Next up, we come to the real bug up my ass: Noah Webster and the dumbing down of language, literature and culture.
Back to the archives:

"The OED, by the way (for the benefit of my dear readers in the colonies) is the Oxford English Dictionary; the definitive repository of English (as opposed to American English, for which you have the esteemed Mister Noah Webster).

Digression time:
I have a great deal of respect for old Noah. He made an admirable attempt to render the horrifically complex and arcane juggernaut that is the English language more easily comprehensible to children and - necessary in a growing, multicultural nation - to the huddled masses of non-English speaking immigrants yearning to be free.

Inevitably he was forced to simplify spellings and - here's the bit that always makes me shudder - to standardise (or standardize as he would have it) suffixes.
It is this last which has just obliged Blogger to put a red line under the correct spelling and to leave Webster's abomination unscathed and my teeth gnashing.
This simplification and standardisation of suffixes - as ranted about in yesterday's polemic - has deprived Americans of a great part of the essential beauty and poetry of the English language as well as the ability to look at a word and to surmise from its Greek, Latin, French, Norse or Germanic - or other - structure, its underlying meaning.
And "color" (sorry, I had to shudder again) is not a word; it is a spelling mistake.

While I hate to appear pompous and patronising (HA! You know I LOVE IT! … and that's "patronising", NOT "patronizing", he patronised), I feel that these days, Webster's simplified spellings should be confined to teaching young children and non-English speaking immigrants, and that - once they have achieved a decent grasp of the basics - they should then advance to the correct spellings and meanings (much as Japanese children - and Japanese students such as myself - are first taught using the phonetic alphabets of ひらがな and カタカナ before moving on to the complex and beautiful Kanji which show the true meanings and concepts of what is being written)."

"American English", i.e. Noah Webster's simplified version of the language is fine as long as it is confined within the borders of the USA (although these days it really should only be used to help non-English speakers get a grasp).
What irks the many billions of English speakers (and spellers) outside those borders is the assumption by US citizens that their simplified version of the language is the standard version.
US citizens are only a small proportion of the English speakers in the world and yet we buy a computer in England, India or Australia only to find that it is set to Websterisms by default and - what is even more insulting - when you go to correct the settings you find American Simplified English is actually referred to as "English" while English itself is called "International English"!

Were Microsoft, Apple, et al to take the simple step of calling English "English" and American Simplified English "American Simplified English" (or even just "US English"), at a stroke, billions of people all around the planet would hate and resent America just a little bit less.

Oh, before I go …
National personal pronouns:
I am English.
Mme and MB are Australian.
I have never been quite sure what to call you colonials living in the States. I mean I know you are technically "Americans", but …
Check the BBC website (outside of the USA) and US news can be found under "Americas" as America stretches from the north of Alaska to the southern tip of Patagonia.
Mexicans, Canadians, Nicaraguans, Colombians, Brazilians, Chileans, Bolivians, the whole damned crew are "Americans", including US citizens, in the same way that English, French and German folk are "European".
"I am a citizen of the United States of America" is a little long winded, so why don't you guys sort yourselves out a national personal pronoun?
Something nice and snappy.
Historically, the only one I have been able to find is "Yanqui", which led to the European term for USA citizens - "Yanks" (and the current British Army rhyming slang for US soldiers of "Septics" … derived from "Septic Tank = Yank").

I can see that calling you Yanquis all the time might irk just a tad, so would one of you please clear up this glaring omission and decide upon a pronoun so that we know what to call you guys?

Right … Air cleared?
If I've calculated correctly, that rational, inoffensive and totally non-confrontational little speech should calm the Yanqui bloggers down and get them off my back.
And save me a punching come October.

What's Cooking With Dive? Comfort Food

Taking a little break from Pinoy cuisine I have to confess that the meal I cook probably more than any other is risotto.

I'll take a few seconds here for Robyn to punch me hard and yell at me to "Cut it out! Enough already of your stupid English mockery of our accent!" as she knows full well what's coming …

The word is "risotto" and it is pronounced "risotto".
It is NOT pronounced "riz-oh-doh". I mean where the fuck in that collection of letters do you find a "d"? Sheesh! Anyone using that mispronunciation deserves to get a good slapping from a big ol' Italian mama.
Take a look … You'll find there are two (count 'em) "T"s in there.
The "s" is soft, but not as soft as a "z" and as for the rest, just try saying "Otto" in an thick Italian accent, taking your time over that big old double "T" and you've got some idea of how stupid Americans sound ordering European food in Europe.
Riz-oh-doh my fat hairy arse!

Also "basil" is pronounced "basil". NOT "bay-zil".
Just go watch an episode of Fawlty Towers if you need help with that.

Hokay. Now we've cleared that up, let's get pinnied up and head for the kitchen.

Here's some stuff that might come in handy when making risotto:

GOOD white wine (some people use a fino sherry or other stuff like that but I love inhaling that glorious chardonnay steam).

DAMNED GOOD olive oil. For this I use my favourite single quinta (estate) Portuguese azeite (cold pressed by foot in big old wooden lagares). This stuff's good enough to drink. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …

Organic Parmesan.

Organic Arborio or Carnorolo rice.

Organic onion and garlic (for crap about which please see the first "What's Cooking With Dive" post).

Basil (that's BASIL) and coriander leaf (the American for which is apparently "cilantro" according to the Transatlantic Dictionary that Robyn and I have been compiling these past two years) from my patio.

So far, so hoopy.
Now everyone makes their own versions of risotto, even those colonial people who can't say it properly. This is one of mine, but feel free to make it however you like.
I make lots of different sorts, my all-time favourite being a mutant autumn risotto with local wild mushrooms and tree fungi, chestnuts and flageolet beans. Woohoo! I'll probably post that when the season comes around.
I also love making artichoke risotto, pumpkin or squash, pea and peapod, beetroot (the pinkest, gayest-looking risotto of them all) and many, many others.
Basically, I can't go a week without risotto. I'm an addict.

Today is seafood risotto as I've been down to the place on the coast where I get my sashimi-quality tuna and picked up a few bags of assorted crustacea, bivalves and things with tentacles for this risotto and a bunch of heads, shells and body parts for my next stock-fest.

Before we start I'm going to go off on one about stock.
I know I had a sweary-Mary about this subject last week but since then I checked out a cookery blog that had been featured on Blogger Dashboard and to my utter horror the woman making risotto (at least she pronounced it right) on the video clip said "I can never be bothered making stock; I use this …" and held up one of those cartons of "bouillon powder" (ingredients: salt, salt, salt, acidity regulator, acid, salt, preservative, e-numbers, flavourings and salt).
I am just glad that none of you were in earshot. Words were shrieked that will never appear on this polite and profanity-free blog.

Let's just get this straight before we go any further:
THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR A GOOD HOME-MADE STOCK.
Have that tattooed somewhere you can see it.
Your fishmonger or butcher will give (or if he's mean, sell cheaply) you all the crap you need to make pints of stock for freezing, and making stock is a pleasure far greater than sitting in front of a fucking television going "duuuuur".

So … Let's heat the oil in the pan (or in today's case an old, heavy-bottomed non-stick wok which I find is unbeatable for risotto) and toss in the onion and garlic.
Stir it around and turn down the heat and just let those suckers soften and inhale that glorious aroma.
One of the most comforting things in life is filling your lungs with that marvellous, mellifluous mélange of oil, garlic and onion.

Next, whack the flame back up and toss in the rice (one cup or so per person, depending on how greedy you're feeling) and make sure each and every yummy grain is coated with fragrant oil.

Once it's all coated and hot, rip up some basil (OW! Robyn, stop hitting me and learn to pronounce it correctly) and gently trickle in a good glassful of that boffo chardonnay (don't skimp; use the pricey stuff, not the plonk. It DOES make a difference).
Stir it all in together, turn down the flame and just float blissfully up to the ceiling on those fumes.
WOW!
If anyone thinks cooking is less of a pleasure than eating, you need to get in here and breathe deeply.

Now we come to that pan of yummy fish stock you've got simmering away on the back burner. This one I made using various fish heads and "bits", the parts of prawns the English usually waste and the remains of a couple of fabulous fresh Cromer crabs I'd devoured. I also threw in a load of mussels and baby clams when I was making the stock, which I munched there and then. Whenever you make a fish dish, don't throw anything away; bag it up in the freezer for your next stock-making Sunday afternoon.

Anyhoo, this is the bit where I get to use my ladle as a verb.
Lovingly ladle that stock into the pan. Just one ladle to start with and stir it gently, watching the rice eagerly devour that fishy goodness. It doesn't take long to absorb the first ladle and for things start to get gloopy.
Now all you have to do is chill out and ladle and stir …
Wait for each ladle of lovely stock to be fully absorbed into those fattening rice grains and for the whole mess to achieve gloop heaven before adding the next ladle …
Of course, this is the part that makes most people whine "I don't have the time to make risotto."
MAKE the time!
For fuck's sake, I work full time, commute seven hours a day and have a life and I can still manage to find the time to cook properly; so can you!
Depending on how many you're cooking for it only takes between twenty and forty-five minutes to absorb all that stock (I usually use a little over a pint for this amount) and believe me when I say that it is pure quality time.
Time to reflect and to think.
Time to relax and to bask in that glorious aroma.
Time to get some seriously sensuous stirring going.
Have patience … What is happening in that pan is something magical.

When it is just about ready, throw in your seafood … in this case a mixture of prawns, mussels and squid but use whatever you fancy. Stir it in for a minute or two and then …

You'll know when it's perfect.
It mustn't be wet and sloppy.
It mustn't be drying out or sticky.
It must be soft, smooth, gloopy and wonderful.

As soon as that moment comes around you've got to strike!
Turn off the heat, grate in a generous whack of delicious organic parmesan and give everything one last good stir, then quickly cover the pan.
This is easy if you're cooking it in a saucepan, but with the wok all I have to do is slap a piece of baking foil over there and crimp it down.

Now grab a tea-towel and get those warmed plates out of the oven. You've got around two minutes to get 'em ready, to pour yourself a nice glass of that chardonnay, to pick some more basil and coriander leaf and to see if there are any prawns left in that bowl that you've been dipping into while you've been cooking.
Those two magical minutes are when your risotto gets seriously creamy and has sex with the parmesan.

Now just plonk the whole damned mess on a plate and there you have it:
"Old Dive's assorted crustacea, bivalve and things with tentacles risotto".
Now eat the sucker.

Risotto. One of the greatest pleasures on earth both to make and to eat.
Go to it and enjoy.