A Quitter Writes

It has been brought to my attention that I probably owe you guys some sort of an explanation as to where I have been this past week or so and indeed where I will be for a while yet.

I have not completely given up on Small Glass Planet and shall probably continue it in some shape or other, but not just yet.

As you know, commuting as I do for at least seven hours a day leaves me with very little free time.
I realised that at least an hour of every day was taken up with cruising around Blogville, checking everyone's posts and commenting; and that's without all of the time I spent writing my own posts, the better examples of which took many hours to put together.

Sheesh!

This past week, rather than blogging I have got so much done at home, been out and about with friends and generally found myself with real quality time to relax, and I must confess I am thoroughly enjoying it.

The reason I started blogging was as a kind of free version of vanity publishing; I could write something or record some music and then send it out to whoever might read or listen.
My favourite posts have all been of that type.
Over the years, however, my little corner of the virtual world grew and mutated into Blogville with you guys and most of the time things were just fine and dandy.

Lately, however, my blog feels like it has become infected with a particularly tedious virus. A lot of the joy has seeped out of it and it has got very samey.

First up, there's the Facebook thing, then there's my own writing.

I noticed a while back that some of us were getting sucked in to the Facebook/Twatter (sic) mentality where creative writing and original thought has been gradually replaced by tedious, diary-style drivel and the kind of imbecile, "lowest-common-denominator" trash that those Godawful social networking sites are awash with.
If you're happy doing that kind of thing then by all means feel free to do it, but please not in my comments box.

Sorry, but that's not for me.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to spend what very few leisure hours I have telling people when I blow my nose or go to the bathroom or what type of tree I am; still less to read their own versions of the same.

I just got a little tired of the daily blog-grind.
It reached the stage where it was either get my life back or get sucked in to the Facebook/Twatter mentality of:
"02:18AM … I am sitting in front of my computer reading and writing utter drivel … What the fuck happened to my life? … Oh, and by the way, I am now about to walk into the kitchen to make another cup of coffee and hey! You have GOT to do this quiz! It turns out I am a larch … LOL."

Blech …

It reached the stage where blogging was becoming a chore.

It almost reached the stage where visiting my lovely Blogville neighbours became a chore, and that is not somewhere I want to be.
I like you guys way too much for that to happen.

Then there's my own writing.
With the exception of Germaine Greer, I never read any newpaper article where the writer's name is bigger than what they are writing about.
I've been a local paper features writer and I know how hard it is to continually come up with something good; that all writers have probably half a dozen good pieces in them and what comes after that is hack-work; worthless drivel written because they have to write it to keep their job, rather than anything worth reading.
Sure, they might feel inspired once in a while but most of it is just typed out on the grind and close to deadlines.

My blogging has felt like that for quite a while, now.
I used to come out with decent enough posts (or at least posts that I was pleased with) quite often, but lately it's been down to about one readable post a month and the rest has been filler.

I felt obliged to come up with a ranty post, a cookery post, a photopost, a non-dating post, a comedy post, a Gobothering post, yadda yadda even if I wasn't in the mood to write one.
It just became hack-work, as tedious to read as it was to write.
It was painfully obvious that the quality was suffering …

So I decided to stop for a day, just to see if it was possible …

And it was completely painless.
I switched off the email notification widget in my "comments" settings and changed my homepage to BBC Radio 3.
I have not checked my blog since and have no idea what - if anything - any of you might have written to me, and - quite unexpectedly - have not yet felt the temptation to go take a look.

I will no doubt start visiting your blogs again before too much longer (though of course I will never visit your Facebook sites or Twatters; you're welcome to those, but please don't expect me to join in), so don't be surprised if I start commenting again in a week or three, but I wanted to go cold turkey for a bit just to see if I could.

I can, and it is great.

If I do start posting again it will not be in my old manner of doing a post every day; I shall only write when I have something worth saying.

And I won't be checking everybody's blogs every day like I used to; I may well pop over once a week or so and then I'll only comment if I have something worthwhile to say …

And of course if you've written anything worth commenting on.

So that's where I've been: happily enjoying life in a social-network-free zone called the real world.
I have plans for the next couple of weekends so don't expect me back just yet.

In the meantime, I hope you are all well and send my warmest regards from the land of the living.

Your old neighbour,
Dive.

Taking A Break

I'm taking a break.
I'm not sure how long for; maybe forever, maybe just until tomorrow.
In case I'm not back, thanks for listening.
D.

An Architect Writes

… or rather reads …

Hoorah for The Guardian!
A far more balanced and less sweary opinion than my own on the latest architectural row.

Sunshine Saturday

I got mugged by Springtime this morning.

Wandering around the early morning city I meandered vaguely toward the marketplace to choose some yummy tentacled baby octopoids, some fatty salmon and tuna for sashimi and a pint of prawns for snacks, when "THWACK" … I got hit over the head by the first truly glorious day of the year.

It was well before nine and at least seventy degrees. Woohoo!

With my scrummy seafood safely in David's fridge I waddled up the cherry path past St.Peter Mancroft to meet Tony and Terri for coffee and breakfast and the Guardian book reviews.

It was so glorious outside that we decided on a second breakfast at The Forum, which led me back through the last of the cherries …

… too delicious for words …

… and the first of the horse chestnut blossom (æsculus hippocastanum, or "buckeye" to our Colonials) …

… past this sweet little Japanese elm in St.Peters' churchyard and on to the Festival of Mind, Body and Spirit, which was spilling out of the Forum and into the sunshine in a happy, tree-hugging way.

There I met Joy, putting together the Norwich Mind stall and was almost tempted by an Indian head massage, the only thing stopping me was all the caffeine swilling around inside me which is none too conducive to relaxation.

Not to worry; they'll be at Joy's Festival of Cultures later in the summer and I'll be sure to get a happy head there.

And so back through St.Stephen's churchyard, which sports these beautiful gates …

… and this equally beautiful fence.



Springtime … Fuck, yeah!

Ah … Er … I Can Explain …

This one's for Shan, so she can point and snicker at me.
I was flicking through my Daily Comics widget yesterday and spat coffee into my keyboard when this came up.

Hee hee! That's me booking my place in the hot basement. Hey ho.

No post as such today; I'm heading into the city for breakfast and some retail therapy.

Yesterday's Japanese phrase for you to learn was:
"酔っぱらっただけならまでしも、彼はとんでもないばかをやらかしたんだ。"

"Yopparatta dakenara madeshimo, Karewa tondemo nai baka wo yarakashitanda."

We've all been there; it means:
"Not only did he get drunk, he also made a complete fool of himself."
The operative word there being "ばか" (baka) or stupid; an essential part of any visit to Japan, the phrase "baka gaijin" (stupid foreigner) will follow you around like a bad perfume.

Our final visit of the week to the wonderful Pizzicato Five and the incomparably stylish Nomiya Maki features one of the most fabulous dresses I've ever seen.
Totally awesome!
All girls should dress like this. Mmmmmmmmm …

And let's all do the hand-wavy thing in the chorus! Yay!

Enjoy your weekends!

964 Little Rays Of Sunshine

Holy, crap! I just added them up and found that this is my nine-hundred and sixty-fourth post! Another few weeks and it'll be my thousandth.

That is quite staggeringly scary … nine-hundred and sixty-four pages of complete and utter toss; a veritable fœtid pismire of unconscionable wank.

Will I let the side down by writing anything worth reading today?
Will I fuck …
Let's talk drivel.

Camp drivel, to be precise.
Both Katie and Lucio have recently held forth on the subject of camp, with lucidity and insight.
Never one to be blessed with either of those things, I - on the other hand - shall reminisce about that most disgusting and unpalatable of childhood privations: Camp "coffee".

Let me take you by the hand and lead you back in time to Austerity Britain shortly after the end of post-war rationing.
Exhausted by war and crippled by debt, we survived on such things as powdered egg, Spam™ and Camp coffee.
Those were the days when the only fruit we saw was an orange in our Christmas sock.
We didn't get to taste actual coffee until the 1970s, when mum and dad bought a new-fangled "percolator", which may go some way to explaining my overcompensatory caffeine addiction in adult life.

What we had was this wretched stuff:

Made by the Scots - probably in revenge for Culloden, and originally envisioned as a quick way of brewing something awful for military purposes - this ghastly concoction consisted (and still consists if you have the stomach for it) mostly of water and sugar, together with 26% chicory essence and 4 (yes, four)% coffee essence.
It is a thick, syrupy glop that is truly nasty, even when massively diluted in hot water and leavened with yet more sugar.
Totally unpalatable.
Utterly disgusting.
Ick.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, it produces a cup of brown liquid that is almost but not quite entirely unlike coffee.
I still shudder at the memories …

In an amusing twist, a couple of years back, the company changed the label (much to the fusty spuffling fury of racist old tories and Daily Mail readers … "This is political correctness gone MAD!") to finally allow the Sikh manservant to sit down and share a mug of this revolting liquid with his Scottish superior, having been standing there with his tray since 1876, when the stuff was first unleashed upon us.

Anyhoo … enough camp nostalgia; let's get nostagic about condoms instead.

Yesterday's Japanese phrase was inspired by the title of the accompanying song: "Weekend".
The phrase was:

何かには週末

"Nani ka ni wa shuumatsu".

This probably makes no sense whatsoever in Japanese, as it is an English idiomatic phrase.
Another classic would be "A piece of cake" for something that we find easy, yet translated into French and rendered as "Un morceau de gâteau" it becomes gibberish.

As with 何かには週末, which - as any fule kno - means "Something for the weekend."

Apparently - having discussed this with a Colonial - the phrase is meaningless even to our cousins across the pond, so please allow me to elucidate.

Let us step back again for a moment into Austerity Britain.
Due to a mixture of prudish and cowardly government and nutjob religious pressure, condoms are not actually available anywhere in the country …

… except …

… for some unfathomable reason in … er … barbers' shops.
Accompanying dad to such establishments for a short back and sides in my youth I became familiar with the phrase.
Condoms were deemed too shocking to display, even in such a male-dominated environment as the back room of a barbershop and so - once a gentleman had been shorn - the barber would ask his customary question:
"Something for the weekend, sir?"
Monies would change hands and said gentleman would walk nonchalantly away, wearing an embarrassed smirk, his jacket pocket bulging with stinky rubber.

So …
Now we've got that out of the way, let's dance.
Or "踊りませんか", as you should have learned by now.

Today's phrase for you to learn is a handy one at a dance:
"酔っぱらっただけならまでしも、彼はとんでもないばかをやらかしたんだ。"

As it is Pizzicato Five Week here on the Planet, we'll get jiggy to another of Nomiya Maki's incomparably stylish homages: Baby Portable Rock.

Love that dress!

何かには週末

More retro cosplay hilarity with Pizzicato Five (this is turning into Pizzicato Five Nostalgia-fest Week here at the Planet).
I love the awesomely cheesy Hammond solo on this one.

Today's post is especially dedicated to my mum and to anyone else who ever gets into their head the absurdly horrifying notion that brown might someday come back into fashion.



Ah, the seventies; the original and genuine decade that taste forgot.

Yesterday's Japanese phrase for you to learn was, of course:

踊りませんか
"Odorimasenka"

A polite way to ask a girl if she might not care to dance.

踊る　"Odoru" is the plain form of the verb to dance;

踊ります　"odorimasu" the polite form.

When asking a girl it is nicer to inquire whether she might "not" like to dance;
踊りません　"odorimasen" is the negative with か　"ka" making it a question.

Today's phrase is in the title of the post.
If anyone is silly enough to use Babelfish, yesterday's translated as "It doesn't threaten?" for the hiragana, and with the correct kanji: "It doesn't dance?" … probably not the translation you want to use unless you like your face slapped.

踊りませんか

From the sublime to the ridiculous.
Too busy to post today, but never too busy to dance like your dad to Pizzicato Five.



Groovy!

踊りませんか

Worth The Wait

Last Wednesday evening finds Old Dive the Samuel Beckett fanboy sitting, tense with excited anticipation in the middle of the third row, around ten feet from the front of the stage at Norwich's beautifully refurbished Theatre Royal.

I am waiting for the start of one of my very favourite plays. I've seen eight productions since we made a mess of it in the sixth form at school, but this promises to be the dream team production and it doesn't disappoint.

Samuel Beckett's glorious Waiting For Godot, with Patrick Stewart as Vladimir and Sir Ian Mc.Kellen as Estragon.

I mean Holy crap! What's not to love? The most wonderful play ever written about the comedy and despair of the human condition, starring a couple who were born to play Vladimir and Estragon and who have just reached the perfect age to do so.

I won't bother going through these guys' stage, cinema and tv history; we all know and love them.

Suffice to say that Sir Ian Mc.Kellen and Patrick Stewart are both blessed with THE VOICE and at seventy and sixty-eight years old respectively at last have the gravitas and credibility to play these two fabulous rôles.
They are at the peak of their powers and - like Didi and Gogo - have been building a genuine relationship for fifty years in some truly wonderful plays.

So … The curtain rises …
How did they do?

Godot is a very easy play to get spectacularly wrong. All eight productions I have seen have been wildly different.
A lot of productions go for the easy option and play it for laughs.
Which is fine as far as it goes, as Beckett has written a gutbustingly hilarious script.

But that is only half of it.
From around 500BC and the first Greek theatre, the masks of comedy and tragedy have been inseparable and this play needs them both in perfect balance.

One particular production - and a very good one - eschewed the comedy altogether, making the funny lines bitter or wistful and omitting the slapstick routines Didi and Gogo have developed over fifty years of life on the road together.
The result was overpoweringly bleak. Hugely impressive, but not the most fun I've ever had in a theatre.

The Guardian theatre critic must have been a fan of that particular production as he criticised Mc.Kellen and Stewart (mildly in an otherwise rave review) for "playing it for laughs" in the first act.

I find their double act perfect.
To feel the full tragedy; the shock, horror and devastation of the latter parts of the play, you need to build up sympathy for Didi and Gogo and this production has, in my view, given us the perfect Godot.

The set is reassuringly dark and bleak, with the tree bare for the first half of the play … the pitiful display of leaves that bedeck its broken branches as the second act opens betokening the pathetic hope life gives us a moment before dashing it away.

But the first act …
Mc.Kellen clambers painfully and slowly - as befits a seventy year old man - over a pile of masonry rubble and enters the stage; sits, exhausted and tries forlornly - and with little success - to remove the remains of his boots from his swollen and bloody feet.
Enter Patrick Stewart as an only slightly more dapper Vladimir and we are off.
Their rapport is instant and marvellous to behold.
Like an old married couple who have long ago forgotten why they married in the first place they bicker, fight, make up and bicker again. They are the most believable and instantly lovable Didi and Gogo I have ever seen.

The audience erupts into gales of helpless laughter. Mc.Kellen and Stewart turn out to be a classic and wonderful comedy double act, yet through the sheer class of their acting the pain and despair of the two protagonists is constantly there, nagging at us as we roar with mirth, both with them and at their misfortune.

Being as close to the actors as if they are here in my living room with me is amazing. Although Vladimir and Estragon are completely alone in their desolation, some audience interaction is inevitable and there are several instances of eye contact with them both; one in particular, where Mc.Kellen sits musing and gazing out over "the fog" that is the audience, he catches my eye and keeps it for a long, long time. There is such an intensity, such a sparkle in the old charmer's gaze that I am transfixed. He's still a seductive old bugger at seventy!

There is indeed a magic about both of them; in the programme notes I had read over coffee in the upstairs restaurant beforehand while studying my old script, they had discussed how they approached the rôles. There was reverence there, but also a determination to make this Godot their own. Not as two individuals, Vladimir and Estragon, but as a cohesive and inseparable whole.
They succeeded spectacularly.

One passage in particular, shortly before the first arrival of Pozzo and Lucky is so tricky to get right and can often appear crass:

Vladimir: What do we do now?

Estragon: Wait.

Vladimir: Yes, but while we're waiting.

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?

Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection!

Estragon: (highly excited) An erection!

Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?

Estragon: Let's hang ourselves immediately!

Mc.Kellen and Stewart play this with such a rush of pure, innocent, childlike wonder it is marvellous to behold. A pair of old, old men, careworn and hopeless seeing a glimpse of light in the darkness; the opportunity for one last erection and then blissful oblivion …
But of course it - like all hope - fades …

I've seen that played straight, played for laughs, played cringe-inducingly badly, but with Mc.Kellen and Stewart at last I really believe it.
And they keep it up (no pun intended) for the full two and a half hours.

Of course even a top-drawer Vladimir and Estragon can see all their work ruined by a poor Pozzo and Lucky.
No so here.
The casting for this production is peerless.
Simon Callow plays the rôle of his life as Pozzo. He takes the part of the casually vicious, Stalinesque buffoon and plays it to the hilt as the monstrous ringmaster of his own hideous freak show.
Wonderful.
Hilarious.
Horrifying.
An explosion of light and colour and noise and brutal violence against the grey but cheerful innocence of what's gone before; he is shockingly good.

And cowering, half-dead at the other end of the rope in mute submissive resignation is Ronald Pickup as Lucky.

I've seen him play Beckett before and I knew he would be good, but he is simply astonishing.
His breathless, rabid, bespittled and totally insane "in spite of the tennis" monologue/diatribe shakes the audience with its intensity; he starts stark raving mad and gets more psychotic by the second, building to such a frenzied climax that - as Vladimir siezes his "speaking hat", wrenching it from his head and Lucky freezes, wild-eyed and staring blindly out at us, drool running down his front - there are five long seconds of dead silence and stillness and then - as he collapses - the auditorium erupts in a thoroughly deserved and prolonged ovation while poor Ronald lays prostrate and exhausted at the front of the stage.

I am not usually a fan of spontaneous applause during a play, but this is the first of many on the night and every one brings a twinkle to the eye and the twitch of a grin to the corner of the mouth of the cast.
They are brilliant and they know it.

The first half is perfect, but the second even better.

Mc.Kellen and Stewart are just as funny, sparking off one another, totally believable as Didi and Gogo but suddenly the laughs are uncomfortable; the humour the deepest black.

The false hope of the leaves on the tree is about to be dashed and our whole world will tumble, crashing around us in bitter ruin.
They have indeed played it for laughs quite deliberately, but only to set us up for the fall.

The slow-dawning realisation of the hopelessness and despair of our heroes' purgatorial dilemma creeps like dread out over the audience and freezes our hearts.

When it comes to the climax it is shattering.
Pozzo's shocking blindness. The horror of knowing that there but for the grace of God-knows-what go Didi and Gogo; how close Vladimir might have come to the tyranny of Pozzo and Estragon to the Hellish hopelessness of Lucky.

As Lucky lays unconscious, with Mc.Kellen administering a shockingly violent and realistic kicking to his unresisting body we are aghast!

And then comes the truth …
The stage is quiet and dark; Pozzo and Lucky have once again departed as we wait for the inevitable appearance of the Boy with his never-changing message.
Estragon sits, nodding off in utterly exhausted despair and Vladimir wanders the stage, bereft; his soliloquy on the human condition made all the more poignant and heartbreaking by the laughter that has preceded it and set us up for this devastating sucker punch.
We knew it was coming and willingly walked right into it.
Tears sting my eyes and pour down my cheeks. As they do those of everyone present.

And at the last, just before Didi and Gogo turn to go but realise they never can, they try once again to hang themselves but - inevitably - the wretched piece of rope that had been Estragon's belt snaps in half and Mc.Kellen's trousers drop around his ankles.

But we do not laugh … We cannot laugh any more.

There they stand …

Us.

A huge standing ovation goes on and on, with three curtain calls for the cast, variously and all together (including a very fortunate local schoolboy as the Boy) and then Stewart and Mc.Kellen return once more and give us a music hall dance routine, juggle with their hats, strike a pose and are gone …

Like Vladimir and Estragon in their interminable and unreasoning wait for Godot I have waited fifty years to see this production.
However long I live I'll never see a better one.

It is still touring.
If you get the faintest chance of a ticket, take it!
You must see this production.
It truly deserves the classic review: "You'll laugh; you'll cry; it'll change your life".



Apologies to Sir. Ian Mc.Kellen for nicking some of these photos from his website.

What's Cooking With Dive? Pig Fat Pasta

Three guesses what we're making this week!

Yeah, okay, so maybe the title gave it away …

This post is respectfully dedicated to Katherine, who at the moment is unable to eat certain things including cake (AUGH!), pork and pasta.
I'm crap at cakes (legacy of having a mum who bakes constantly and incomparably; I've never had to learn), so here, especially for Katherine is Dive's own "Pig Fat Pasta".

As you all know by now, I am a lazy-assed cook. When I get home just before bedtime after my crap commute I often turn to a bag of dried organic pasta as a time-saver, but back in the days when I had a life I used to make my own pasta all the time.

So as part of my ongoing quest to get my life back I've decided to do what good Italian mamas do and make a monthly batch of my own, eat some and freeze the rest.
The advantage of home-made over bought stuff is that bought, dried pasta - even the good organic stuff - is made with water and not eggs.
Ironically, this makes even better "al dente" pasta than home-made for certain dishes, but it doesn't taste anywhere near as nice.

Some of you may make your own pasta and you'll know that once or twice a month is quite enough for all that mess and effort, but that it is definitely worth doing as a treat.

In the good old days I used to roll all mine by hand, but since I bought Phil a pasta roller a few years back, which he actually uses, I decided to invest in one for myself.
Hoorah for the recession and half-price cookware sales!

Anyhoo, get your pinnies on and let's head for the kitchen and make a mess.

First up: Ingredients.
All organic, as ever, and as local as possible.
Onion, garlic, eggies, 00 pasta flour, lardons, Prosciutto, Gran Padano and Parmesan cheeses and some Kalamata olives on the side.

What we're making with that lot will be home-made Prosciutto di Parma e Gran Padano Tortellini (that's ham and cheese but it sounds so much sexier in Italian) simply cooked with garlic, onion and organic smoked bacon fatty lardons.
Pig Fat Pasta.

Later on, I might get into classic sauces, green spinach pasta, black squid ink pasta, red tomato and brown wholemeal pasta and lots of other related things that make for a delicious meal and a cheap photopost.
Today, however, we're doing basic pasta making so we'll dispense with any sauces and keep things plain dumb simple, just the way I like 'em.

For anyone who may not have made pasta at home before, this is one of the most fun ways you can possibly spend an hour or so of your weekend (and a lot of that hour is spent just sitting about). It's a truly awesome thing to do if you have someone over for coffee and a chat; two people can have even more fun than one making pasta.
Lotsa mess; lotsa laughs.

So …
As we're making tortellini, we're going to need something to stuff them with.
Today's theme is pig fat, so let's choose one of the finest culinary pinnacles pig fat can attain and grab some Prosciutto di Parma.
We're talking at least two year old matured and of course we're talking organic.
You want flavour? This is a wafer-thin, concentrated taste-orgasm.
Chop it up nice and finely.

Add to that a finely grated wodge of Gran Padano cheese (we're saving the Parmesan to serve it with).
Mix well (added bonus points of licking your fingers clean. Cookie dough got NOTHING on this)!

Done that?
Right … Eggies!
Organic, local, yadda, yadda …
I don't usually specify amounts (other than the glop, the sploosh, the roughly-a-handful and the about yay much) but it kinda makes sense here, so for my pasta session today I'll be using 300grams (that's around ten and a half ounces in real money) of organic "00" pasta flour ("farina di grano tenero" if you wanna be pretentious and I usually do) and I'll add to that two whole eggs and one extra yolk (for yumminess).

The white from the third egg can go in with the filling to make it easier to work.
Oh, and don't waste those shells! Crunch 'em all up and put 'em on the garden around hostas and cabbages; like coffee grounds, slugs can't bear eggshells.

Hokay … Sieve your flour onto a board or clean worktop. You want to make it into a cute little mountain and then bash the top in to form a volcano. Yay! Back to kiddie cooking!

Into the caldera of your volcano go the two and a half eggies. If you do it right, they stay in focus but if your hands are covered in flour your camera might sulk a bit like mine did.

You can use your fingers from the start if you like but I prefer to break up the yolks with a fork and start it off that way, gradually incorporating more of the flour into the eggs.

Which is very relaxing, if slightly gross to look at.

When you can't contain your childish excitement any longer, get your fingers in there and start having some serious gloopy fun.

After a while, you'll end up with a sticky, floury ball and a load of leftover flour (important).

Now comes the fun part.
This is what pasta making is all about. This is why Italian mamas don't have to spend time down the gym to get forearms like Popeye's.
Get kneading!
YAY!

My stupid, cheapo digital camera decided that "Way Overexposed" was the correct setting for these and who am I to argue with a piece of plastic crap?

Keep on kneading until your forearms inflate, remembering to keep changing hands at ninety-nine.

After a while, your dough will start to feel more elastic and silky and less lumpy and floury.
Time to really put the hammer down and take out all those anger management issues.

When you can poke your finger into the dough and it springs straight back out, your pasta and yourself are both ready for a rest.

This is what all that effort has produced. A kinda doughy lump.

Some people wrap their doughy lump in clingfilm and pop it in the fridge for half an hour.
I prefer to cover it with a damp teatowel and leave it where I can see it.
Time to chill out with a coffee and the paper.

I gave my lump around forty minutes and then got that leftover flour and sieved some onto the worktop (having cleaned off all the doughy crap first).

In the good old days when I had a big enough kitchen and a really long rolling pin I would roll all my pasta by hand, but now the longest piece of worktop I have is only around four feet so it's machine time.
A lot of people have an "unwanted gift" pasta roller or a "we thought it looked nice but we never use it" pasta roller tucked away somewhere and now we're going to get that out and play with it.

Anyone here have "Play-Doh"™ when you were kids?
This is just the same, except you can eat it this time around.

So …
Let's rip that dough ball into two and give the first lump a quick roll, leaving the rest under the damp cloth for later.

Clamp your pasta roller to your worktop and open it to its widest setting, then simply crank the dough through it.
Simplissimo.

Close it down a notch and squeeze it some more.
You really want to then put it back on the wide setting, fold the pasta in half and then repeat the process several times on the two widest settings.
This conditions the pasta nicely and helps it keep its shape rather than just springing back. If you've ever rolled it by hand you know just how frustrating it can be when you've at last got it to condom thin-ness and you breathe a huge sigh of satisfaction, only for it to spring back to four times as thick as you want it.

Once you've run the dough through the widest settings a few times, folding it and re-pressing it, you can work your way down through the settings, squeezing your pasta thinner and thinner each time.

You might notice it getting a bit long.

Or even a lot long … In fact by the time this little doughball is done it will be a little over eight feet long.

For things like spaghetti and lasagne you'll want the second from thinnest setting, but for stuffed pasta like tortellini, you want it so thin you can read your paper through it, so you go right down to the thinnest setting.

If you want to make wide sheet pasta, when it's reached the thinnest setting, simply fold it neatly and start again with the thickest and you should get nice, square-edged lasagne sheets.

Today, though, we want an eight foot long, three inch wide strip for the three inch circular pastry cutter to play with.

Thusly.

Now's the time to add your filling.

Kinda like this. I added some fresh parsley from the windowcill to the Prosciutto and Gran Padano and eggwhite mixture and then plonked a glob onto each little pasta circle.

Next, slightly moisten the edge closest to you and fold the little circle in half, pressing lightly to seal the edges.

Simply wrap the thing around your finger …

And lo … a tortellini (or whatever the singular of tortellini might be … a tortellino, perhaps).
Whichever of you at the back of the room who said it looks like a vagina is going to get a slap after class.

Set those little guys out to dry. Turn them over after ten minutes or so to let them dry out evenly.
If you're going to be cooking them later in the day, pop 'em in the fridge. If you don't they tend to come apart when you put them on to boil and you end up with a wet soup of your filling and some floating pasta circles.

While they were drying I made some more. Four times this amount in the end, plus a load of tagliatelle, all for the freezer for treats later in the month.

Now let's get cooking!

Heat up a non-stick pan or wok and whop in a handful of nice fatty lardons.
No oil; we're cooking our Pig Fat Pasta in pig fat.
F L A V O U R !
Lean meat is just an exercise in chewing; all the flavour is in the fat, which is why nicely marbled beef is pricier than lean.
People forget that simple fact. Eat fatty meat for flavour but eat less of it than you would eat lean. You'll be just as healthy and a whole lot happier.

Oh, and of course, this has got to be organic. If you use factory "chemo-pork substitute" and whap it in the pan like this you'll end up with an unpleasant watery soup as that stuff has at least twenty percent water added by weight after all the chemicals.
Cheap "meat" is a false economy.
"Like a Sunday in T.J.
It's cheap but it's not free …"
as Steely Dan so nicely put it.
It's certainly not something I want to put in my mouth!

Anyhoo … While that's sizzling nicely, plop your pasta into some boiling water (not salted, unless you like everything to taste of salt, which I don't … add it at the table if you really can't survive without it).

Get a good sizzle going with your lardons and then toss in an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic, turn down the heat and let the onion sweat clear.

When the pasta is done (four minutes), drain it and add what have become entertainingly mutated tortellini mis-shapes to the pan and stir them around until they're liberally coated in pig fat (don't let the term gross you out; if you eat bacon, you'll LOVE this).

Then simply add shaved Parmesan and olives, plate it up and eat it up.
Yummy!
Rich, eggy home-made pasta, perfectly al dente.
With pig fat.
Old Dive's Pig Fat Pasta.

Enjoy!