Fever Pitch: Feed a Cold

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of a silly smile will be in want of a reality check. As I awoke this morning from uneasy dreams I found myself transformed in my bed into a giant beetle. It was a bright cold day in May, and John Humphries was wittering on about GM wheat crops. I had no idea which way was up, which was down, why someone had replaced my brain with sawdust and my stomach with some sort of gelatinous acid, and I couldn’t understand why all I could do was recall the first lines from books. Probably because I felt like crawling back under the covers, beetle like, and hibernating in my room, Samsa-esque, for the rest of the day.

Those of you who were party to the Apprentice tweet-along last night will know several things. Firstly – stereotyping might be wrong, but not when it involved Essex. The other things are more pertinent to my current horizontal state. I had a couple of glasses of wine. I was absolutely fine and in fairly fine fettle. One of the items they were selling was a scuttling beetle. Ah, you say, it all makes sense now – she’s hungover so she threw a sickie and the only thing she can think of to characterise this phantom illness and somehow lend it an iota of credulity is the residual memory of some cheap and nasty toys from off of the tellybox. I really wish you were right, because then it wouldn’t feel as though there’s a horny manatee bouncing up and down on my stomach and using my temples for sparring practice. I am, without a doubt, crook.

I won’t go into details – suffice it to say that my face won’t stop exploding and you could probably fry a decent steak on my forehead while your beer chills down in my hand. Having made the mistake of musing aloud ‘I haven’t had a bug for ages…’, this is surely my karmic comeuppance. Karma is, indeed, a bitch.

Being ill sucks. For a very many reasons it sucks the big one. I should point out now, I’m not very good a being ill – I tend to want to do things and get on with stuff. I don’t like people offering to do things for me, or make me stuff – in short, I hate feeling pathetic. On the flip-side, it’s grim being home alone and ill. Back at the ranch (which has escaped the Somerset floods, thank goodness) there was the mothership and a snuffly hound to keep an ailing Caro company. What’s more, mum would call in and have that “she can’t come in today” chat. Sending your temporary boss an apologetic email at 8am when you’re feeling gippy is a a horrible experience – however grim you feel, it always feels like a lame excuse…

So I decided to compromise with myself – stay on the sofa with plenty of fluids, blankets, tissues, the ‘sod off’ hat on and the television chattering away, and I’m allowed to get on with some online bits and bobs to stop me from feeling completely useless. My life is, indeed, that exciting.

Bluesday: The Mexican Day of the Dud

How, I thought to myself – for there was no one else within earshot with whom to wonder and, even if there had been, I very much doubt they would have cared because people very rarely do care about idle musing and vaguely rhetorical question – and that’s why the bag ladies who chase the pigeons in the park are not known for their sparkling conversation so much as for their remarkably extensive collection of twine…

How, I repeated – to remind myself where I was after the earshot tangent – am I going to a) use up the two avocados I have which are just at a point of perfect ripeness b) cheer myself up? You see, something riled me this morning. It might have been the pigeon that swooped down to try and steal my morning cigarette from my hand – my hand the scheming sky-rat – and forced me to do the “holy crap I’m being attacked by a pigeon” flail which is neither attractive, nor comely, but somehow hilarious when witnessed from afar. It might have been the sheer grumpiness of pretty much everyone I crossed paths with this morning on the way to work – something about the rain brings out the misanthrope in even the cheeriest of Londoner. You see, as soon as the rain begins to fall, and the umbrella has to be manhandled along with the obligatory bulging briefcase, and slippery platforms everywhere serve as the gateway to a sweaty, condensation ridden Gehenna that is the overstuffed tube carriage, people begin to transform, Hulk-like, into utter cretins. It wasn’t that I had my bum felt up by some unpleasant little man as he was groping for the rail. It wasn’t that the woman standing behind me was sneezing, snuffling and wiping her nose on her pashmina. It wasn’t even that I was accosted by a bucket-jingling fundraiser dressed, for some inexplicable reason, as a dog as I tried to exit the station. It was probably a combination of all of those things on top of the fact that it’s Tuesday. And, as I have previously mentioned at least once, nobody likes Tuesdays.

I spent all morning writing copy about stunning resorts in Mexico and, although the sun was doing its best to squeeze through the clouds like a frantic, overweight businessman at 8.45 in the morning at Baker Street (I have the scars), it simply didn’t break through. I now know why all of the windows in most of the offices in London (even those on the ground floor) are sealed shut. The juxtaposition of the smiling lunatics on my screen, sunning themselves and cavorting in the azure waters, supping on delicious food and drinking violently coloured cocktails, and the decidedly flat, grey sky outside did little to lighten my mood. In fact, it made me pine for sunshine, wonder what the folks at my favourite Backpackers back in Mombasa were up to (probably getting drunk and being obscene in the swimming pool), and it almost made me book a holiday – but then I remembered that I live in London and don’t have a permanent job. The likelihood of my scrounging together the funds for a sojourn elsewhere, deciding where to go, mobilising at least one friend to go with, and booking the damn thing before drinking the carefully scrounged pennies is, let’s face it, minimal.

In said sunnier climes the stresses and strains of playing human sardines every morning and dodging tourists (yes, I’m now one of those Londoners who growls when people walk slowly or stop for no apparent reason in the middle of the street) melt away like the top layers of skin on a vest wearing, English breakfast eating lout on a ‘lads’ holiday in Magaluf. And why do they melt away? (No, not the layers of skin – that’s a result of the classic ‘Caucasian + Sun + Booze – Common Sense = 3^rd Degree Burns + Chlamydia’ equation.) They melt away in a haze of teeny-tiny umbrellas and artfully tied sarongs because the smug buggers have regular jobs and so they’re financially stable and they’ve been organised and monetarily chaste enough to carefully engineer their escape from whatever constitutes their day-to-day and not spend the holiday fund in the pub on a rainy Tuesday evening after getting a serious case of the ‘Oh-sod-its’ and getting smashed on Sambuca “because that makes it feel a bit like a holiday – right”? (We may, ladies and gents, have found the source of my brow-furrowing.) When your worries are where to go on holiday next, whether to book the hotel with the free-form pool or the infinity pool, and whether to pre-book your inflight meal as Kosher (because then you’ll get served first) or take a chance on the inevitable chicken based monstrosity and get smashed on free booze instead, it’s easy for those worries to melt away. It’s like melting a snowflake in a blast furnace. When your worries are, in fact, how to base an entire meal around two ripe avocados and some stale pitta bread because you don’t want the former to go off (that’s £1 wasted) and you can’t risk the latter getting any harder (because you can’t find the time to get to the dentist), it’s more of task to melt anything. When your worry is what on earth you’re going to do for the rest of your life when all of the jobs you’re applying for demand at least two years’ worth of experience – and what am I going to conjure these aeons of experience out of, pray? I used up all my spider’s webs and fairy dust on the dancing unicorn. (Sad story really – who knew that unicorns only eat omelettes made from dodo eggs and that dancing would require quite so much energy. Still, it made a lovely tooth pick for the giant down the road. Recycling, people – do your bit).

The graduate malaise has settled and I’m starting to creep down that terrifying path of ‘I suppose I could do that for a couple of years’. If you’ve ever gone shopping for Christmas presents on 24^th December and ended up convincing yourself that Great Aunt Ida would simply adore a ‘Best of Sergei the Meercat’ CD, or gone to get a dress for a wedding in your lunch hour and ended up in something that looks like Gok Wan vomited on Gadaffi’s tent, ran it through a shredder and added a fascinator that looks uncannily like a marshmallow you found down the back of the sofa tacked onto one of those weird white dog turds, then you’ll know what I mean. If an asthmatic hamster were to breathe on an ice sculpture for the entirety of its rodent little life, it would melt it with more ease than my worries are likely to. Holiday or no.

So, what was the solution to be? The best advice I have ever received goes something like this: “If you’re worrying about something you can change, change it – if you’re worrying about something you can’t change, stop worrying because there’s bugger all you can do about it.” I may have added the colour at the tail-end of that, but you get the picture. I know I can’t change my employment prospects overnight, but I’m widening the net in the hope that some of the work-related fishies out there might be right for me. (More about fishies in a post coming soon, by the by…) But I can resolve the avocado issue.

Eating two avocados in one go is not advisable – I’ve done it before and it made me feel decidedly queasy. So the plan (not that I’m writing this at work instead of researching sunny places in, um, *checks email* Portugal – great, now I’m resisting the urge to make an off-colour yet topical joke about, yeah, well, you know…) – the plan is to get home, get into my pyjamas and onesie (because days like these must be rectified with head-to-toe fleeciness in the absence of a man with wine and cuddles at the ready), carve out the avocadoes (removing the stones – well, this is meant to be a food blog with some semblance of utility, right?), put them into a bowl and beat the living daylights out of them. Into this green mix of fury I’ll be adding olive oil, lime juice (I prefer it to lemon when it comes to avocados – something satisfying about the green on green), some chilli flakes (still working through the flakes from the home-grown, home-dried chillies of last summer – ah, the heady days…), coriander (chopped as finely as possibly without massacring my thumb), a little bit of plain yoghurt (if it hasn’t turned into cheese already), and some chopped mint. These may sound like terribly bourgeois ingredients for a so-called struggling graduate, but I can assure you that the mint is in a pot and was a housewarming present, the coriander came from the shop at which my housemate works, and the olive oil was also a housewarming gift. People know better than to give me presents I can’t eat or drink.

Yes, oh travelled and eminently cultured reader, I’m going to make guacamole. (See, there’s the nod back to Mexico – and you thought this was an unstructured rant… For shame.) I would normally chop some tomato into it, some bits of real chilli, maybe even some teeny tiny cubes of cucumber – but that means detouring on my way home, and that’s simply not going to happen. But what of the stale pitta, I hear you cry… There’s a nifty trick there. It works with naan bread too – anything sufficiently doughy really, though I have yet to try it with muffins… Run your hand under the tap and flick some cold water onto both sides of the pitta – don’t soak it, just dampen the outside. Then whack it into a hot oven – I would suggest a temperature, but the previous tenants were so keen on oven-based cuisine that they managed to rub the numbers off from around the outside of the dial. We’re working on the assumption that 7ish is about 190°C. That seems to work for most things. Don’t leave it in there too long, 2/3 minutes max. You should get a reasonably moist and fluffy pitta at the end of it. I can only imagine that chucking a couple of ice cubes in the bottom of the oven would do a similar job, but I’ve seen the bottom of our oven, and I don’t want my pitta to taste of burnt-cheesy steam.

This isn’t a balanced meal. It’s healthy, yes, but it’s going in the ‘snack/canapé’ category for a reason. I have no idea what else is in the fridge. If I’m right, then we still have some bacon leftover from the big party at the weekend from which I’m fairly sure most of the staff at a popular posh deli in Chelsea are still recovering (points for guessing which one…). If so, then my day is looking up. Bacon and avocado is a combination I cannot praise highly enough. It’s salty, and sweet, and cruchy, and soft, and with a kick of chilli and some reconstituted pitta bread (and possibly a stolen olive or two – don’t judge me) that’ll see me right until tomorrow morning. If you’ve never tried it, you have to. I will, of course, post pictures later tonight in that split second just after it’s made and just before it’s devoured with gusto. Mucho gusto. At least, it’ll last me until someone comes home drunk, decides to order pizza, passes out after ten frantic minutes of carb loading and it’s left to me to ‘tidy up’.

Sods law, the sun is now shining outside – seems Mr Creosote at Baker Street managed, by hook, crook or the liberal application of butter, to extricate himself and bumble out of the haze. So I now sound like a grumpy, ungrateful grad with a massively warped perception of not only my life, but the lives of others. I won’t deny it – but every now and again you have to take out the dark side of your personality, flutter it about to dislodge the moths, press it to your face and inhale that sweet-sour smell of cynicism, disdain and misanthropy before stuffing it back into the depths and putting obscene quantities of spicy guacamole in your face, washed down with a forgotten beer that’s been hiding at the back of the fridge since Saturday night. I did, in matter of fact, have a fabulous weekend in really rather lovely company and have been grinning like a fool since said company left on Sunday – until this morning, anyway – but that burst of happiness and girlish giggling wouldn’t serve any narrative purpose, and it’s wrong to flaunt your happiness in front of others. Especially on a Tuesday. That’s what the other days of the week are for…

So nice, they named it twice

Pineapple Express. I watched it once. I believe I was inebriated at the time. Apparently it’s a very witty film with just the right amount of physical, highbrow and drug-related humour. I remember laughing a lot, but recall none of the jokes. This quotation from said weedy-romp, however, has stuck with me: “Couscous – the food so nice, they named it twice.” And (god help me, I sound like a Carrie Bradshaw wannabe – eurgh) I couldn’t help but wonder – if it’s nice, is it always named twice? I mean, how many other ‘double words’ are there, really? If it’s named twice, is it always nice? And Or have I blindly strayed into the territory of the false syllogism?

Hm? I’ll let you think about it for a minute…

I came up with the following foodie ‘double word’: Paw Paw. Paw Paws are, to my mind, nice. But that was it. So I expanded my search terms to include non foodie items.

Other ‘double words’ eddied about in my brain as I sat, waiting to be given something to do. Yes, I was writing my blog while at work – so sue me. Or pull me up on a disciplinary and let’s have a decidedly 80s, Rogue Cop Vs Chief of Police showdown. Do something, but don’t leave me with nothing to occupy my time. I’ll start chewing shoes or scratching the furniture, and I might even be forced to defecate in the corner for attention. Never let me get bored.

So, what were these ‘double words’?

Bambam, the child of Barney and Betty on the Flintstones. The one with the worrying rage issues. Remember him? Club and all, he used to run around, clearly in need of some sort of some Supernanny attention or a clip round the ear, beating the living daylights out of his father (which may account for his diminutive stature) and a purple dinosaur who was, purportedly, his friend. But you can’t eat children these days, so the violent little blighter doesn’t count as ‘food’ (although if I was that dinosaur, I’d have made short work of him and his daft Gaga-esque over the shoulder loin cloth long ago).

Toto, the grotty little ‘dog’ from The Wizard of Oz. Sorry, all you toy-dog owners, but a dog has to come to above the ankle to be considered even vaguely canine in my book. That thing was a hors d’oeuvre dressed up as a rat, masquerading as a pet. What is more, yapping is not allowed. It’s not cute, it’s tantamount to a violent, stabbing assault on the ear. If you can’t bark and either strike fear into the hearts of children or shake the foundations of the house, then shut up. No one cares. And, while you’re at it, stop being so lazy and pleading to be picked up. If you have a medical condition which requires you to be carried around like some sort of snuffling odour machine then stay at home. No one wants to see that, let alone be at eye-level with it on the tube. Dogs go on the floor, not in bags or cutesy little doggy carriers. So, yes, Toto popped into my head momentarily – but then my subconscious drop kicked it, Jack Black Vs Baxter style (Anchorman reference folks, keep up), out of my mind because, frankly, the little runt had it coming and I had better things to think about.

The other Toto, the band that brought us ‘Africa’ 20 years ago was a more welcome visitor to my tiny little mind. I would sing, but “Happy Birthday, ‘Africa’” sounds disgustingly patronising and colonial, and frankly I don’t want to touch that political minefield with a barge pole. Oh dear, I shouldn’t have said minefield, should I? Ahem, moving swiftly on. Needless to say, I still have the sodding song firmly in my brain and, as my phone has not yet been juiced up with aural delights and my earphones are broken, it will be until I get home tonight and push it out forcibly with the musical equivalent of a beefy bouncer at a dodgy nightclub – something like Rage Against The Machine or Meatloaf. No one would mess with Meatloaf. (And yes, oh disdainful and disappointed reader, I do have some of his albums, but I’m fairly sure that they were obtained illicitly, so that’s ok.)

Tuktuk. Yeah, well now we’re scraping the barrel, aren’t we, Brain? Yes, Pinky, we are. I loved tuktuks in Mombasa. We once fit nine people into one tiny little vehicle – one either side of the driver, all cosy like, four on the passenger bench, one on the floor between the bench and the driver’s seat, and two in the boot. The driver was clearly drunk and the size of his pupils made asking him if he ate his greens or just smoked them completely redundant. But we weren’t going far, and we weren’t going particularly fast either – what’s more, I was one of the lucky two ladies sat up front with the driver, so all I had to do was commando roll out of there (military style, I’ll have you know – I was wearing pants) if it looked like we were puttering slowly to our doom. We didn’t find doom. We found a scummy club with dance music and the rest of the night is between me, the furniture and my cohorts. End of.

Of course, there’s Tin Tin, the Cha Cha and Bora Bora, but none of these things interest me – that is, unless a swarthy Spaniard decides to teach me the ways of the world through the medium of dance, in which case, I’m there. Or he wants to take me to Bora Bora (Triple X reference folks, seriously – keep up!). But if he’s into Tin Tin then it’s over. I simply can’t abide that name. It’s nothing to do with the cartoon, I know it’s the keystone to the childhood of many – but a certain Swiss German ruined all that for me. No, no, don’t pity me. He was taken for all he had – and it turns out, he didn’t have much. And he wasn’t named twice.

Bon Bon? Sorry, I don’t trust any food that is named ‘Good Good’. It’s tantamount to the idiots that name their children using abstract nouns – Charity, Faith, Hope and Patience had better meet my children. Oh, you didn’t know I had kids? Yeah. They’re called Irony, Fury, Disdain and Violence. We should arrange a playdate. Or not. Up to you…

This was going to be a post about the wonders of couscous – it is a fantastic staple and ingredient – but I got rather carried away. I told you not to let me get bored. At some point I’ll get foodie again. But not if you let me get bored. If you can think of any other relevant and worthy ‘double words’, please let me know. I’ll take pleasure in rolling them around my mouth like a fine wine. I might spit them out and then analyse them, but that’s part of the whole tasting process, right?

Requests are currently being taken for posts – if you want me to cook/eat something or talk about something in particular then do let me know. What’s the worst that could happen? I could ignore you, tell you that you’re prat, or take you suggestion on board and mention you. Yes, I’m that shallow and grab-handing. But you love me, right? Bambam beat the crap out of his family and all his friends and he always seemed fairly popular – so I’m taking it from him. Bam-fricketty-bam.

 

Snacky Hack

Today’s post is, I am afraid boy and girls, a short one. I had my first day of in-house training at iTrigga today, doing some editorial work and writing digital content. Great fun with lovely people, but all that concentration has left me more bushed than two birds in a bush. I don’t know what happened to the one in the hand. Mayhaps I ate it…

I always vowed I was never going to be one of those city folk who skips breakfast, grabs a stodgy sarnie at lunch and then got home and chowed down. Well, my name is Caroline, and I’m one of those people. My alarm didn’t go off at the right time, I forgot to cancel an appointment, I was worried I was going to be late, I was nervous. Yes, yes, we’ve all made those excuses before, but the truth is that I couldn’t be bothered. And that’s terrible. I had myself a lovely Thom Yum soup for dinner and may well have indulged in some custard. While mopping up the last of the yellowy gunge with my finger (don’t you judge me! I know you’ve done it…) I did a mental stock-take of the fridge and decided on tomorrow’s lunch…

I’m going to make up some couscous with veg stock and chop some tomato, cucumber and radish into it. Lashings of black pepper and lemon juice will be applied. Liberally. Yes, a liberal lashing – that’s how hardcore I am. I cooked up some chicken drumsticks the other night, so the meat’s going to come off that and get mixed about in the couscous, maybe with some raw, shredded cabbage for a bit of bite. Lunch in the fridge, it’s straight to bed for an early night and some light Radio 4 to lull me into a coma… Yes, I’m that cultured.

I’ll munch a banana in the morning and have a piece of toast too - before I leave the house. Not just to get my blood sugar going with more than a cup of tea, but because I have to walk past a St*rb*cks (I refuse to type such profanity in full, this is a family show), and two cookie shops on my way to the office. 

With any luck I’ll be back to my rambling self on Thursday when you’ll hear all about whatever I’ve stuffed into my face and the face of those I love that day. I’m feeling something sausage related may be in order. Now now, don’t be obscene. That’s my prerogative. 

Curry on Nomming: The Director’s Cut

One of the beauties of cohabiting with my two lovely lady friends is that they actually eat real food. Breakfast is breakfast – it’s not a third of a grape with a droplet of pro-biotic snot. Lunch is lunch – it is certainly not a line of Ryvita dust, snorted delicately off a mint leaf. Dinner is dinner – it is a substantial, delicious feast which makes sucking Martini olives look like the sad act it is. This is appealing to me for various reasons…

1) I don’t get frowned at for making bacon and eggs and a giant cafetiere of coffee pretty much every morning. No guilt-inducing grapefruits here.

2) There are always hungry tummies to feed. Being of Mediterranean origin, I have the feeding gene. Thankfully, these two have the eating gene.

3) If (who am I kidding, when) I make far far far too much food (see point 2) there is a grand selection of receptacles – clip top, side snap, vacuum bag, cling film, tin foil, etc. –  to store the leftovers.

Ah, yes, leftovers… Almost two weeks ago I made a vegetable curry. It was delicious. I cooked off the spices in oil, added tinned tomatoes and simmered the sauce for 15 mins. After that I blitzed the sauce with a hand whizzer dooberry. Yes, that is its technical name. Then the veggies went in. Should I have fried them off first? Maybe. But I wanted the mushrooms, courgette, peppers etc. to soak up all the yums, like a trio of spicy sponges. Of course there were kidney beans. Doubtless, there were chickpeas. It bubbled, puttered and mingled away for about and hour during which time I cooked the brown rice. It’s crunchy, nutty, and almost impossible to overcook. Bonus.

Even after we had all had a large helping each, there was a reddish orange, oozy pile of deliciousness left. Excellent. And the reincarnations of this fragrant treat just kept on coming…

- The basis of a sauce for sausages – broccoli added for freshness.

- The filling for a whole-grain tortilla wrap which was garnished with a little yoghurt and some grated cucumber.

- Added to some leftover couscous, a little veg stock and fresh peas and served with a chunk of toasted sourdough.

- The final incarnation was, really, very similar to the second and was based on the third. I’m sure that’s very profound if you’re into incarnation or the order of being, but I was hungry, and it was lunchtime, and that’s as profound as it got. I took a big Kos lettuce leaf, dolloped on a little bit of yoghurt, some shredded carrot and the rest of the heady mix. Remarkably, it still tasted fresh. Joyfully, it was a case of ‘eating up’, one of my favourite past-times. Sadly, it was the end of MegaCurry.

Don’t think it was just me eating this on and off for almost a fortnight. Both my housemates enjoyed it. Possibly on pasta, with rice, as soup – I didn’t inquire too closely. It was a victory for frugality, for economy, for the brave little veggies that held up so long while being heated, cooled, bombarded with minute additions of flavour. It was a very good thing. And the best thing? The pots it was inhabiting as it decreased in volume, that brave little curry of mine, the pots are now clean, dry and awaiting their next charge. What it will be, I simply couldn’t say, although it’s feeling like a week for a root vegetable type stew…

People who throw away ‘the end’ of something upset me greatly. Don’t want it now? Someone might later. Freeze it. Make it into a soup. Put it on a jacket potato. Oh, it is potato? Turn it into potato cakes, or fish cakes, or whack it in a soup. Get creative. Be brave. If it doesn’t hum, walk and it isn’t sporting designer stubble all of sudden then it’s good to eat. Above all, do not fear the leftover - yesterday’s dinner is the future.

Third Degree Kilburns…

It has been far, far, far too long since I last posted, well, anything. Kenya was a heady blur of Tusker, meeting fantastic people, managing dramas, day managing the hostel, lying in the sun, thinking about my life and checking people in and out by candle-light when the power went down. Which is did with remarkable regularity. Of course, we didn’t have a generator -so I had only intermittent internet access. Oh, and then the little notebook I had with me had a run with a boisterous Dane and his beer… Needless to say, I was cut off for a while. A loooong while. And it got me to thinking.

I came back the UK just before Christmas – and that’s when it all got interesting… Newly single, back from sun, sea and Swahili, I decided it was time for a change. So, despite the epic rant about London that was Out Of Africa: Part 2, I decided to roll up, ignite and take a long drag on the big smoke. Within six weeks of 2012 being toasted in at the house of a friend of a friend (whose mother was particularly confused at our sudden presence and somewhat overly lubricated attitude – sorry, mother of friend of friend) I had moved into a house with two friends. In NW London. Life moves fast. I moved slightly faster. Unfortunately, my job hunt has slowed exponentially. I think it’s going backwards…

The process of looking for gainful employment is, well, dragging along at a particularly painful pace. I’ve been overtaken by several snails and shoved out of the way by a sloth or two to boot. I’m in touch with a couple of recruiters, but of course they can only go as fast as their clients – and no one seems in a hurry to hire anyone at the moment. The market is very much an employer’s market at the moment, so all us grads can do is tart up our CVs and stand them at the proverbial bar waiting to be picked up by Mr Right. Here’s hoping. The only eyes it’s caught so far have been from people convinced I’d be ideal as a Recruitment Consultant – because I’m such a money motivated, competitive go-getter… It’s like being propositioned by a bloke in a dodgy old duffle coat at a bus stop who thinks you’d be perfect as part of his ‘artistic photography project’… I fear unemployment may have made me cynical.

What it has done is give me ample time to cook, tidy and obsess about the teeny tiny things which only people with far too much time on their hands really take notice of. We have a wonderful grill and oven in our lovely (if massively dated) house. It’s terrifyingly efficient, and while cooking breakfast for one of my fabulous housemates, I managed to burn my hand. My good, useful, right hand. Three times. These were three discrete instances of putting my hand into the inferno, you understand. Once bitten, twice belligerent, thrice burned. That’s how the saying goes, right?

All I can say is that all my decisions to date (or, since you were last subjected my aimless, tangential ramblings) are ones I’m sticking by. I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I’m living with two wonderful girlies who know me well enough to put up with my inanity, my tendency to talk to myself, and my shouting in the middle of the night (isn’t Sleep Paralysis just peachy?). I’m making friends, fewer enemies and enjoying nesting on my own terms. Life is, essentially, pretty darn good. I’m sure at some point, someone, somewhere will see my CV and decide that I’m just the kind of aimless, tangential but chatty individual they need to write copy for their mega-corporation. I’m sure that at some point, someday, I will stop obsessing over who has and hasn’t been in touch, who has or hasn’t cancelled on me for the fourth time in as many days (you know who you are, Miss Watford).

And I’m sure that at some point I will have enough money to buy something delicious, cook it, photograph it, witter about it ad nauseam and post an actual foodie post in this so-called ‘food blog’. I might even succeed in doing so without burning myself…

Daft Drunk: Prime Time of Your Life

Some songs epitomise a moment, a feeling, a sense of self. Some moments concretise the thoughts, desires and ideas of an era in your existence. Some feelings live forever in your memory and others are forgotten as soon as you experience them. And some senses of self are not only misplaced, but thoroughly awkward when recalled the next morning.

Almost everyone has moments which they can recall – or which are recounted to them by gleeful comrades in a haze of hangover and regret – which they would rather had never happened at all. From the relatively insignificant faux pas to an all out ‘oh-my-goodness-I-can’t-believe-I-did-that-with/to-that-person’ – we have probably all been there, whether we want to admit it or not.

When I arrived in Africa I was a beer pong virgin. I never thought that Kenya would be the one to take my pong cherry (yes, there is a lewd donkey show joke in there, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to lower the tone of what is otherwise a highbrow blogging experience by making it) – but it was. Curiously, the cross-dressing Peace Corps chaps are entirely at fault. For the uninitiated, it is a game in which two teams pour two beers each into 6 plastic cups, and arrange them in two triangles at either end of a long table. Each team has two players, and every turn these players throw one ping pong ball at the cups. Get the ball in the cup, your opponents drink it. Miss, and your opponents get a chance. Sounds simple right? Drink the beer with a side of horseshoes? Not a bit of it. This is a serious game. We instigated a rule proscribing that if a team misses three rounds in a row, then they forfeit a cup – the whole thing was taking too long and frankly you shouldn’t get thirsty during a drinking game. The other rule is that the overall loser has to do a beer funnel. Yeah, I’m living in a glorified frat house. It’s a hard life.

The final nail in the coffin, once you’ve played a few rounds, lost a few more, taken a beer funnel (which I was happily surprised I was rather good at – no comment) and been thrown in the pool by an over-enthusiastic Chilean, is when that particular party song comes on. However hard you try, however competent and supportive your team-mate, however you try to convince yourself you’re sober – you know it’s going to be one of those nights. The look of concentration you see below was feigned – there was a bare bum and a gyrating Uruguayan attempting to put me off… And succeeding. And Daft Punk’s Prine Time of Your Life was blaring out of the speakers at the same time. It may well be the prime time of my life. I was definitely daft. The look on my Taiwanese team-mate’s face tells the rest of the story better than any attempt at narration could do.