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A couple of kind words about our crappy new bar via comment and email and the need to document our household goods for insurance purposes really brought to light how much of our stuff is solid wood and quite dark at that.  However, the first thing we ever bought together is still my personal favourite.  We got it at a consignment place near the Italian place in Virginia-Highlands (Atlanta) where Jackie was sous early in 1986 and it has since traveled the world supporting our meals and drinks in lousy flats and houses ringing with multitudes of languages and dialects.

I especially like the squirrel details:

It needs some work although that’s nothing new.  The leg supports are loose and the drawer rails worn.  I wouldn’t know where to start with the surface wear (the leaves that stay tucked in most of the time are in pristine shape, though).  Any suggestions?

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We were looking for another piece of furniture when this caught the eyes of both of us at the Chernobyl Children’s Charity Shop on Victoria Road.  Since we were on a different shopping mission, we ignored our impulses and forged on, mentioning it to one another later that day.  When we realised we both liked it (although a bit overpriced for thrift store wares), we made a point of going back to see if it was still there.

As you see, it was, and it was marked down (still pricy but less so).  So this is our new bar.

That is, if we can keep bottles around long enough to justify that moniker.

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During coffee and the Sunday paper, the sun appeared (don’t worry, it is still castratingly cold) and one of the urban foxes in the buurt found a sliver of daylight in our back garden.

 

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[Originally, this project was described here,  and you can see the most recent prior Update (1) here.]

I’m glad I extended the natural bounds of Old Town to include everything the estate agents like to market thus, if for no other reason than the legitimate bounds are so small and this gives me a bit more connectivity to the greater region.  However, I did choose some butt-ugly territory when I was drawing the initial border.  Oh, well…shall we carry on?

 

It was cold but calm and clear and birds were singing–more spring than winter–so I didn’t linger over the coffee and Sunday Observer too long and got out into the fresh air.  The Radnor Street Cemetery has an entrance on my side of Eastcott and since it serves both as a formal Victorian burial ground AND as a nature preserve it is always a nice crossing but especially in the mid-winter morning light.  Photos of the RSC next time (or, there are very nice ones at Swindon in the Past Lane), but I was keen to clear some of the bounds from the map today and continued on to the rail bridge that divides north and south Swindon then around to the rail trail that used to connect Old Town Station (and then Marlborough to Salisbury) with Swindon.  The final few turns were just ‘zenning’ the trail and I found a quick connection to Bath Road from the house via King William Street (at Eastcott Hill near the Moose Lodge).

Though still winter, the days are getting longer at a noticeable clip and I slipped into my sweats while on the bus and ran from the tented market up Commercial Street with the sun setting behind me.  I stopped by the house to drop off my backpack and continued out to the Town Gardens which I found was already closed (winter hours).

  

At the end of Quarry there’s an alleyway with a great mural on it but the alleyway is barely wide enough for two people to squeeze past one another and the mural is mostly dark colours so I couldn’t manage a decent picture of it on this trip, but there were loads of decent graffiti around including this shiny bit under the Devizes Road bridge over the rail trail next to where I discarded yet another race/hash shirt combo:

The climb up Mill Road/Westlecot was steeper than I was really prepared for and I took it a bit fast.  Reaching The Mall, I opted for the flat route past the Commonweal School then a few alleyways and South Street (where one of the Victorian cottages at the Prospect Hill end has a cool bit of signage out back):

Although not a run because I was laden with 6 bottles of wine (from Tesco, not the now-residential Eastcott Hill Wine Store) and other groceries, I explored a bit of the alleyway archipelago.

  

The route was meant to (and did) take me past the Swindon Cycle Working Men’s Club which is still CIU affiliated but not so much a men’s club or having anything to do with cycling.  I read they are looking for new members and as I have moved away from Ferndale WMC (and let my membership lapse and I think it has shut down anyway) and it is pretty close to the house.  On the way I spotted this wall in an alleyway (nice the way the door is surrounded by the art) and these neat roof ornaments on Dryden:

Hopped off the bus just after the Magic Roundabout and did a bit of a neat neighbourhood I’ve never explored before and finally entered the mapping zone at the Queen’s Park which is sort of a gigantic arboretum and really holds some promise for spring and summer visits:

  

On exiting, I realised where I was when I spotted the back of the Jewel in the Crown, but the Holy Rood School was a bit of a surprise.

The Friday run this week took in a bit of Marlborough Road corridor including the area around Intel, the Marriott, a giant wooded park to the south, and the Croft Sport Centre.  I also spotted these two houses…the one on the left was the one we were driving out to see if we wanted to rent it just over two years ago but were crashed into by a large Mercedes van.  The one on the right was the first one we inspected for this most recent move but the stairwell was too narrow for any of the shit we would have wanted to put upstairs (and the landlord would accept the kitty as a cohabitant).

  

More next week….

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The formal jogging exploration of Old Town began with a quick trip to Tesco (outside the stated bounds but I don’t really colour within the lines).  Returning with some mulligatawny and a bottle of wine I avoided the rude pedestrian walkway of Regent Street and did a little of Eastcott Hill turning across from the Sea of Green hydroponics shop:

The next evening was warmer than it has been in weeks and the twilight lingered in the nearly cloudless skies and I took the opportunity to enjoy the hilly terrain, going first down Dover Street to the footpath that comes out across from Savernake then up to the alley behind the houses parallel to the roadway.  A couple beat me to the little stair case to the upper ground and westward so I continued on to Bath Road and down Okus to the long staircase down to lower Kingshill.  I looped Bowood once to tick it off the list then followed an alley I thought would end after a block but went on all the way (with some road crossings) to the Running Horse.  Moreover, it linked to many more alleys, an archipelago to rival Tucson’s.

        

Back up the Kingshill and via some more pedestrian cut-throughs and I found myself face-to-face with the Clifton and then on the way back by the house crossed paths with the Globe and the Castle…I’ve never run past so many good pubs without stopping, or at least not in a long time.  Then, it was back down Prospect Hill to Crombey Street and across the ‘bumming park’  to walk Jackie home from work over some now-ticked-off-the-list territory. {Oh, Jackie’s co-workers refer to it as the Bumming Park because sometime in the annals *snicker* of history it was a cruising zone.}

   

Next, I entered the map zone at the end of a run from the edge of South Marston on my way to pic up some stuff for supper at the Cooperative.  Pushing the last bit of the hill to Christ Church I was going to finish in the Lawns Park but found the cemetery gate locked and decided I was already done.  The poignancy of the grave of a ten-year, above, in a little copse with ornaments hung from the trees around it caught my attention and I figured it would have been something I remembered recently from the newspaper; no, this fresh patch was covered in July 2010.

The cemetery is a good one, if you are into these (I love ‘em).  One odd feature is the large flower bedding area stuck full of metal funeral markers I saw as I exited to cool off in the park before the grocery trek.

   

A brief jog into Gorse Hill and back left me hungry for a good kebab, but I guess I should have stopped at the kebab van stood in the Wickes car park because everyone in Old Town opens after 3 pm.  The mappable bits picked up near the Coop, again, but the Old Town Kebab was my first locked door followed soon after by King’s Best BBQ down Victoria Road, but I had some other errands to do and figured I could wait it out…

  

However, the wait was fruitless as I arrived back at King’s at 3:15 to find it still locked and dark and uninhabited.  Shit, they are the oldest kebabery in town and have a fantastic reputation for quality and cleanliness (and I was feeling lazy and didn’t fancy a walk back into Old Town proper).  Testing some alleyways along the way I loaded up at the Old Town Kebab House and did a little strolling dining through bits of the park before heading home:

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Daily since 19 January, I have trudged across town carrying or pushing loads of leftover shite the mile-and-a-half from the old house to the new one.  I have some moving company skates that got left behind by a company in Arizona that used them to move 1200 pound pieces of delicate equipment between buildings; on two separate and quite rainy occasions I steered these laden with 200-300 pound loads of boxes shrink wrapped onto the skates with large potted plants on top.  Other days, I had canvas straps holding hemp shopping bags all over me bandoleer-style, and I received uncharacteristic deference on the streets and pavements as, quite obviously, an insane person.

Today was the oddest trip yet while being the lightest load so far.  I stuffed a Bogen tripod, a crowbar, and just about anything else that would go in the backpack then grabbed the propane canister remaining from the ex-BBQ and headed off.  The shadows looked at times like a winged demon and at others like a ninja although as I passed the shops in Regent Street I could see clearly from the reflection in the window I just looked like a jackass with some sort of heretofore unheard of fetish (note, this may be true).

I thought this might make a crappy Kevin Costner movie, but I ran out of steam on the poster idea (“rated PG for Pansies and Geraniums which will winter over nicely with a bit of mulch” just seemed like too much effort to add).

All that remains are the Hoover, a rake, the strimmer, a fan (to dry the carpets post-cleaning) and some plastic planters and window boxes–more fucking garden shite.

Oh, yeah, that’s my street on the right side of the Beehive, and it is steeper than the picture let’s on (here’s the view down the other way from a few mornings ago–the yellow house halfway down is the one I’m standing in front of in the poster):

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“Yeah, still doing the move.” [Pause] “Western Street in Old Town. Mental.”    — one of our movers on his cellphone to a mate

Western is narrow and steep and after 8-10 inches of snow accumulation it is only good for recreation but the movers didn’t want to cancel the job and so at 8 am their truck arrived on Ferndale and they started shifting our shit to the new digs.

 

Most of the stuff was packed into these cube shaped boxes, 36cm on a side, that are marked with the hazard classes of all varieties of chemicals that were originally shipped in them. They are sturdy for their intended purpose, so we tend to load them as full as possible: they are the precise size of record albums so half a shelf of vinyl will pack in, and you can easily fit 75 pounds of books into one.

As the boxes are all more-or-less identical we were careful to mark them so it would be easy to find the bits we needed as we slowly unpack. So, in which of the 10 boxes marked “KITCHEN” or “KITCHEN SHITE” should I look for the plates, wine glasses, pizza wheel? Dinner was served on alternative place settings.

The cat was a trooper, for the most part (which is surprising because he is afraid of EVERYTHING except being flung 10-12 feet through the air onto a mattress or exercise pad which he absolutely adores). It is about 1.5 miles to walk from the old to the new place, and he hates the cat carrier but once off Ferndale, a very busy street, and into the snow-covered park nearby and then the Oasis bike lanes he seemed mesmerized by the scenery and calmed down a bit. Even on the walk up the crowded, pedestrianized shopping lane of Regent’s Street he seemed to be looking around more so than his usual cowering from strangers (although he may have been imploring the passers-by to save him from this mad man who was carrying him, in a cage, through this bedlam.

Once at the house, though, he had a few sniffs of stuff he should recognize then hid under the couch until I sorted the boxes into their various rooms. He came over and curled on my chest as I lay on the floor at one point (in pain from the days exertions), and then once the bed was reconstructed he found a pillow that smelled familiar and crawled under the blanket there.

The neighbourhood seems friendly so far, with fewer yobs and more young folk that appear to be starting families (the kids we’ve spotted are too young to yob it up yet). The walk to Jackie’s work is pleasant and the street is dead silent (as are most of the narrow, one-way lanes in the buurt). I think this is going to work out just fine.

A bottle of Cava cooled nicely here but we’ll give it a day or two before we take the coffee and newspaper out for some fresh air

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Well, it is true that we LOOKED at a couple of houses in Montagu Street but preferred Old Town over Rodbourne as it is so much closer to the things we actually do in town.   And, the house we settled on isn’t sharp or sophisticated outside but inside works so much better for us; to mix my Bob metaphors, it seemed to say, “your débutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want.”

[Sidebar: I did a 30 minute lecture, recently, with more than 50 Bob Dylan lyrics,marked on the white board as 'ticks' as I progressed, peppered throughout, and only one professor from the audience came by to congratulate me on THAT point...Oxford may be grand, but it isn't really cool.]

But, returning to the starting theme, we got a basement down the stairs.

It has been a nice run so far, I have to admit (despite obvious glitches), on Ferndale Road, and I’ll still come over for the butcher and the Italian deli, but rarely more…”when bringing her name up he speaks of a farewell kiss to me…He’s sure got a lotta gall* to be so useless and all muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall….”

———————————————————————————————–

*Jackie doesn’t cut Jerry any slack…I love the man and the things The Family did for us chemically and, for that matter, matrimonially (probably more to do with Kleps, the guy who did our wedding, than her hatred of the Dead, but same batch, same dip).  See you kids who know us at the house, the rest schedule a meet-up at Riff’s, the Vic, the Hive or the Castle!

So, here we go…another fucking move.  Let’s try to make this one a little more permanent for awhile.

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So, four years now (or, rather, next week it will be…here’s the annual reports for years Three, Two, and One for historical perspective).

We just received our new visas valid until 2016 but plan to take the next step toward citizenship in a year, Indefinite Leave to Remain…sort of the British Green Card.  There is an exam, first, but in general it is all downhill from here.

The view from Western Street near the new house…also all downhill

Additionally, we are in the process of moving house (which is why I rushed the annual report a week forward) from just north of the Oasis over to Old Town to a house situated close walks to either the Beehive or the Castle or the Globe (recently reopened!)—three locals instead of one and all three of high quality—and dozens of others a short walk. The new house has three bedrooms each larger than its counterpart in the old house, the two receptions are larger and made into more of an open-plan configuration, the bath is larger and has a tub (not just a shower), and there is a finished basement; on the down side, the kitchen is a little narrower and more primitive as is the small garden but everything we do and everywhere we normally go in Swindon (save for the butcher) is so close.

The only races I did this past year were the London Marathon (5 pubs plus a can of Carling on the last mile) and the Beerathon (5 miles with a pint and a hefty food item between each) and the mileage run for the year suffered from this lack of focus—1950 give or take about 25 (most estimates pretty good using gmap-pedometer), while the last several years (except for the year of the wreck) were in the 2200-2500 range.

On the runs, I visited  255 new pubs with a stunning 67 new ones (steep part of the graph) in September when I took two weeks off work and ran at least 10 miles per day in new territory each day. The 1000th wasn’t as big a thrill as I thought it would be, but I saw some really nice places and met some really fine folk. The September holiday found me visiting Gloucester, South Wales, Slough (exotic, I know) and Exeter along with some nearer-to-Swindon trips. The 100 Yellow Beer Challenge was responsible for a lot of second visits to pubs I might not otherwise have gone to after an initial stop and many of these seemed better the second time around. Oh, and my Workingman’s Club appears to have failed or at least hasn’t been open the last several times I’ve popped by (I have a grand one scoped out for the new neighbourhood, though).

Best pubs in Year Four (reverse order by First Visit write-up):
The Southgate Inn, Devizes
Byron’s, Swindon
The Hop Inn, Swindon
Dicey Reilly’s, Teignmouth
The Brass Monkey, Teignmouth
One Eyed Jack’s, Gloucester
Ye Olde Red Lion, Tredegar
The Rose of Denmark, Woolwich
The Volunteer Rifleman’s Arms
The Green Dragon, Marlborough
The British Lion, Devizes
The Blue Boar, Alsbourne (for the Dr. Who connections)

Favourite write-ups:
Postboxes
British Citizenship Exam Prep
Risk Assessment-Bins
Oxford Tourists
Assize Court, Bristol

Cock Flavour
Paul Simon in Hyde Park
Edie’s Lawn
The hunt
The Bremen Musicians (German children’s story)
Sex Tourism in Wiltshire
Modern Algebra for Omid
Burns’ Day Lunch

There are others search for ‘made me laugh.’  The blog may or may not have made some of the over 100,000 visitors laugh, but the damn fools keep checking in (that’s you, that is).

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Twice in as many days, people in sunny climes (and whose blogs I read) have posted whinges about their endless summers (with one inviting her minions to blather on about fall in their necks of the woods–so here goes).

As the days retreat, here, and the light takes on the orange cast that its low angle dictates I find the chores around the garden tedious and hopelessly depressing…our pots of wild flowers are becoming fire hazards, the sunflowers are ratty and yet still seedless (it rained a lot this year and there was little sun or heat for proper growth…they only flowered when I dumped copious volumes of phosphorous rich fertilizer on them during my holiday last month), the petunias are bolting, and the lawn mocks them all with its exuberance in the face of the swampy conditions…and the cat door, as I now see in the picture, is filthy and could do with a wipe.

The trees, however, are showing vibrant and early colour so tomorrow we are going to Stroud to take a walk on the hillier bits of the Cotswolds into the medieval village of Painswick (where the “New Street” was built in 1428 — the Old Street probably doesn’t get around much anymore — and the grocer delivers wares by donkey).

It is entirely possible a pub stop or two will occur.

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Kitty doesn’t play well with others so he doesn’t go out unsupervised (even then, he still winds up biting neighbour kitties and dogs).  I grew him some grass to chomp, but he likes to just sit there and reflect on his day:

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Cassoulet Step 1: Duck Confit

Cassoulet is my favourite winter dish, but it is supposed to be rustic, poor-people’s food and made from leftovers (which is why there are so many and widely varying recipes for it). A batch of cassoulet made from all the starting ingredients fresh from the grocer sets you back a few bob, but it is still well worth the effort.

My recipe, which is ever-evolving (here is last year’s batch, for comparison), uses either a roast duck or an ample amount of duck confit.  Confit is a way of preserving meats under duck or goose fat and lends quite a bit of class to inferior cuts–a 15th-century peasant preparation that the lord of the manor would appropriate as the years progressed.  The meat is salted heavily (more so than you might think is a good idea) then drowned in the fat and cooked at just over the boiling temperature for hours. Normally, you would just use leg quarters but this is for my extra special xmas and New Year’s cassoulet so I bought a whole Gressingham duck (4.5 kg) and cut it into pieces.  The breasts are a bit of an extravagance, but we really don’t treat ourselves too often.

The fat rises above the liquified connective tissue...yum

Salting as I went along, the pieces were layered pretty tightly into a slow cooker set on low to get things started. I had a tangerine that had a nick in it and I put it in, quartered, and sprinkled a few fennel seeds around and crushed a rounded tablespoon of pepper corns coarsely and dumped them betwixt layers.  I still needed to go pick up a couple of items at the store so the fat melting off the duck itself would have to do to start; I added another 500g later, along with some pork fat trimmings I found stored in the freezer from a roast last month.

Ready for storage, aging

Once some of the fat has melted into the dish, the temperature setting is turned to warm which will keep things at around 100-110 deg C.  This goes on for about 10 hours, now, during which time the meat absorbs the flavours and the connective tissue melts and dissolves.  Once cool, the meat is stripped and placed in tubs while the gelatin and fat separate and congeal. I don’t know a good use for the gel, so it gets tossed; the fat is remelted and poured over the meat to seal it from the air and airborne contaminants.

This is now ready to be stored.  Put it in a cool, dark cabinet and let it sit for a week or so before use.  Long-term, you should probably store it in the fridge (a month or so), or freezer (until you forget what it is).  A bit of freezer duck confit is always a nice surprise during one of those damp, spring cold snaps. The guys at the Alcoholian do an admirable (and less actionable) job of describing the process and shelf life.

Biscotti and Vin Santo

Discussed in an earlier post, just do it at every holiday and most weekends.

Christmas Eve, A Lighter Bite

I’ve mentioned how wonderful the tomatoes are in the kebab shops with no correlation in the or market stalls, but in the fruit and veg merchants in central Swindon they are sublime.  The little turkish market I walk past every evening has some of the best and at prices that boggle the mind (I would suggest they are involved in money laundering were they not my favourite stall on Manchester or Corporation).  I loaded up on these and some chicken breasts at the halal butcher up the street and a bunch of fresh parsley and other autumn niceties leading into the holiday.

The drill this Xmas Eve was to brown some shallots and garlic (shitloads, some would say) in butter and goose fat then just as the golden tinge hit seal the flesh of bird breasts in this purifying inferno.  Just barely, though, and then throw in many chunks of these heavenly tomatoes, some roughly split black olives, a spoon of crushed oregano, another of black peppercorns, likewise crushed, and a large handful of parsley.  Cover and stew with a cup of dry white wine for an hour then stir, run up the heat and dry it out a bit.  Serve it with a bit of fresh bread (a baguette, made here).  Yum.

Christmas day, make the rest of the Cassoulet

But, while we wait, why not a bit of champagne, pâté, and brie?

Render the fats, cook the other meats

Some butchery is necessary on the meats and as I bought a large shoulder of pork to use some of the other cuttings in stir fries and other dishes earlier in the month but at this point it is down to about 700-900 grams and some of that must be cut away and other bits were meant by the butcher to be roasted to cracklings.  No problem, in fact quite the opposite as I need some lard which I don’t generally keep and so used my butchery skills (duly earned in my earlier, youthful life) to trim this down for the purpose.

The lamb for the stew was also  a shoulder and I couldn’t get anything but a rolled bit at this juncture (my farming connections being somewhat scattered since the move from Bicester).  Again, no matter, but the trimming was a little more delicate, surgical, even.  The butcher did a great job and I especially like the marbling for myself but I don’t want the lamb fat there in something I share, especially when Jackie (who normally despises lamb and mutton) is the prime recipient.

Once the fat is rendered, the skins are pulled and stripped while the heat is turned as high as I can get it–until there is smoke–then the cubed, defatted meats are browned with a crisp surface and nearly raw centre.  I set these aside but collect the blood and other juices for the cassoulet.

Home made lard for the meats fry-up

Cook the beans

The beans are haricots blanches, 750g dry weight soaked in cold water overnight then rinsed.  The reserved pork skins from the rendering are put in the bottom of a stock pot and covered with the beans, two onions studded with cloves, half a pound of finely diced pancetta, a couple of stalks of celery, three carrots cut lengthwise and then in half again, a handful of parsley, some bay leaves, and a tablespoon of salt.  Instead of water, this confection is covered with duck broth and boiled for 1.5 hours before draining and throwing away the onions, parsley, pork skins, and celery.

Set the vegetables

Finally, a healthy dollop of duck fat is melted from the confit and heated hot but not smoking in the pan the meats were fried.  This pan is then filled with scallion greens (some cups), a couple of chopped onions, two cups of shallots, some chopped celery with the greens, several coarsely chopped carrots, a shitload of garlic, and just a pinch (5 – 10) of cumin seeds and two or three fennel seeds (no more, dear god!).  A parsnip or a few potatoes could be done, too, I hear but do not believe.  Remove from heat after the onions are clear but not yet golden.  Mix with the meats so they are all turned together, adding a pound of sliced, good quality garlic sausage or kielbasa.

Assemble and do the first baking

Ready to bake

Cut some tomatoes into large dice, say, quartered if they are really small.  Put enough on the bottom of your casserole (or dutch oven or whatever-you-have that will hold all this and still fit in the oven) so that they WOULD cover the bottom if you mashed them–you should see most of the bottom of the pan, though.  Add layers of beans, then meats and vegetables, then more tomatoes (being more generous after the first layer) in turn so the last layer is the meat and vegetable mixture.  This batch got half a bottle of Orvieto poured over it, but any crisp, dry white wine would do…I’ve used red wine in the past with stunning results.  Bake at 140-150 degrees C until bubbly and browning, about an hour.

First baking complete

Breading

You COULD buy bread...savages

This is one of the more contentious issues in cassoulet orthodoxy, and I’m told you really have to make a choice between the two ways but refuse to do so myself.  If you are a No-Bread-Crumbs person, just leave the pot in the oven another 45 minutes.

Is it ready, yet?

This batch is a bit kinky, though, and was removed from the oven then covered by a 1/2 inch thick layer of bread crumbs made by putting three slices of dry toast, a cup of parmesan-reggiano, and a knob of ice-cold butter into a food processor and reducing to dust.  This is then rebaked for an hour.

Merry Christmas and due to the copious leftovers, even with sharing, Happy New Year.  Well, once the wine cabinet is restocked….

Christmas does a number on the wine stores...

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I love Thanksgiving…too much drink, too much food, and most of it exotic.  After yesterday’s visit to Casa Paolo I had a hankering for some Tuscan Pasta (farfalle, sausages, cannelini, some light spices, a little escarole soup and some stewed tomatoes), so headed up to Franco and Anna’s (a superb Italian deli in our neighbourhood a dude in Lechlade tipped me off to, months ago).  Anna stocks the only decent fresh sausage in the south of England (and the cured meats look as good as what you might find in the Polish places around) and she knows (or is related to) every Italian in the county, it seems, so is always worth a visit.  I also wanted to ask about ordering some Vin Santo for the Christmas holidays (this is something amazing if you dip almond biscotti into it–a discovery from our first trip to Firenze back in 2002).

Turns out, they stock this stuff all the time at less than you pay for it in Italy, so I got a bottle and some almonds and went home to do some baking:

You toast a cup of almonds 10 minutes at 175°C and let them cool.  Meanwhile, mix 2 cups of flour, a teaspoon of baking soda, and a cup of sugar; also, melt a knob of butter (an ounce or two–use a shot glass, ’cause we know you have one).  Once the butter is back to room temperature splash in some vanilla extract (1 or 2 teaspoons) and three eggs, stir ‘em up and pour into the flour mix, and knead.  Once it holds together start dusting with flour and pulling through the bowl until the stuff at the side starts to cling.  Dust it one more time and push the almonds in, letting it sit for 5-10 minutes for the liquids to absorb and the lump to thereby dry a little.  Roll into two cylinders about 16 inches long and bake on a floured sheet at 150°C (300°F) for 40 minutes.  Cut at a diagonal, once cool, into 1/2″ wide slices and toast another 50 minutes at the same temperature.  Divine.

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The answer to the question, "What's the nicest thing your neighbours ever dumped into their front garden?"

I do miss the gnome, face down on their kitchen roof. But, since the neighbours suddenly left at the end of July we have been holding off on celebrating (links to past descriptions of their behaviour can be found here).  As one of my work colleagues put it, “it’s bleak up North, and it sounds like it just got bleaker.”

They sent one of the incompetent offspring (or, at least another relative) over every so often the last month and a half to gather items which, late at night, someone else occasionally would come over and load into a vehicle.

The ducks were let out of their box every few days and visits from the RSPCA never seemed to come to anything.

But they are gone now.  Torturing new neighbours in another jurisdiction.  I have rarely been happier with someone else’s innocent misfortune.

We can probably turn off the surveillance cameras, now.

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I think they are gone.  No shit, all indications are that they have moved away.  With the apparent retreat of the forces of darkness, the Siege of Swindongrad may be over.  I am still cautious but here were a series of emails and then my eyewitness observations of the halfwits:

from    xxxxx.xxxxx@ymail.com
to    xxxxxx@gmail.com
date    Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 1:36 PM
subject    trash

Hey

Don’t get too excited but Fat Boy and The Kid are here in a big rental van from Selby in North Yorkshire. No sign of the caravan or any of their other cars. Pray.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

from     xxxxxx@gmail.com
to    xxxxx.xxxxx@ymail.com
date    Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 2:11 PM
subject    Re: trash

Offer them a hand.  the Sooner they fuck off the better.

Actually, try not to think about it…you might jinx it.

bun

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

from    xxxxx.xxxxx@ymail.com
to    xxxxxx@gmail.com
date    Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 2:29 PM
subject    Re: trash

They are loading the truck. Appliances and odds and ends, some boxes so far. Will keep you posted. Keep praying.

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from    xxxxx.xxxxx@ymail.com
to    xxxxxx@gmail.com
date    Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 3:36 PM

Looks official. Living room furniture gone and tons and tons of boxes.

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from    xxxxxx@gmail.com
to    xxxxx.xxxxx@ymail.com
date    Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 3:40 PM
subject    Re: trash

I’m not buying the champagne, yet…. Yet.  What’s the Wine Warehouse delivery time policy, just in case?
bun

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from    xxxxx.xxxxx@ymail.com
to    xxxxxx@gmail.com
date    Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 4:11 PM
subject    Re: trash

It’s official, baby, whoa-ho! The boxes just  keep coming and now they are carrying out individual odds and ends.

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As I approached the houses from the west I could see the van getting loaded with a bulky item which turned out to be a tanning bed.  If anything says ‘white trash,’ it would be a tanning bed but as I entered our house I was directed to the back window where a hose continuously drained water.  At first we thought it might be an aquarium, but it was still flowing hours later.  This seemed to indicate either a water bed or, far more likely, a hydroponics system; this would also serve to answer why these pale folk have a tanning bed: this is a perfect excuse for high electrical usage if noticed by the power company or a police heat camera (we get an unusual number of helicopter flyovers for a UK town).

Anyway, the House Harpy has reported on her social networking site that she is from Yorkshire and the day after ‘the incident’ (see link to Part 5, below) a couple of older folk came and had a civilised chat in the garden; we reckon these are her unfortunate and almost certainly disappointed parents.

It seems strange that they would move house so suddenly or, indeed, so surreptitiously: with each load one of the feral offspring packed into the truck they would emerge nervously and scope out the traffic on the street.  There were many parking spaces available (and them parking on the pedestrian right-of-way has never been a problem for them before) yet they chose to park their own vehicle down an alleyway.  Moreover, they own this house…that’s the strangest bit of all: they are abandoning an abode they have at least £58K (housing search turned up the last sale date and price) tied up in.

It is the general opinion up and down the street that this lot has been perpetrating benefits theft (welfare fraud for you Americans) on a grand scale.  Lately they have also pissed off a lot of their neighbours (actual citizens in addition to us foreigners) and the general word has been that something had to be done.

A judgement against them to repay several years of incapacity benefits and the 10′s of thousands of pounds per year skimmed for their Motability Scheme vehicles, Council Tax Waivers, and other expensive scams would make sense of this recent behaviour.  I surely hope that is what happened…it would go along nicely with Fat Boy’s loudly proclaimed taunts in no general direction at 3:30 am a few nights ago of, “If they think I’m going to take this they better fucking think again.  They don’t know who their fucking with.”

If “they,” whomever “they” may be, would like to find Fat Boy and his hive there should be some sort of records held by the Collier’s Car, Van and Truck Hire in Selby, North Yorks.  They let him drive off in a truck with registration plates GK52 TFY (first letter a little obscured) on 26th July 2011.

I awoke to birdsong this morning.

Earlier adventures available here, but there will be more:

24 April 2011–Part 1, The Pool, rotting laundry, mangy cats, and other initial thoughts on dignity

19 June 2011–Part 2, ‘Trash’ is to ‘White Trash’ as ‘Common’ is to ‘Dead Common’…Discuss

21 June 2011–Part 3, Pallet Shack?

17 July 2011–Part 4, Six Months Remain On Our Tenancy Agreement

21 July 2011–Part 5, Wiltshire Constabulary involvement

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Following up on the April 2011 report, I give you our neighbours in June.

There were brief periods of sunshine this past Saturday and Wednesday was nice, but the laundry next door has been hanging out since Monday in the intermittent showers and torrents that plagued us most of last week.  Gumption is not a word I wood associate with them next door.

They drained the algal broth before last weekend but only to about 4 inches deep, then stuck a hose in it and refilled overnight (it was overflowing when I went to bed Friday night, 10th June), but they forgot to remove the syphon.  By the afternoon of the next day it was drained down to the residue that can be seen now a week hence (above).  I’m keeping a close eye on our water bill in the event they have found a way to tap into our plumbing.  I’m certain some of the other flood victims two or three doors down either side of these fools will back me up that it was not my excess.

The big stacks of pallets that were scattered about the back third of the garden have since April been broken into pieces and stuffed between the alley wall and the caravan, resulting in collapse of the wall in May.  Since then, the oldest boy that may or may not live there (it is really hard to tell) has been, on occasion, spending hours at a time hammering bits of them back together.  Of course, this project–if I may be so bold as to call it that–gets abandoned at the drop of a hat (or, perhaps the clink of an ice cube) and the remains left in place.  For weeks at a stretch.

Weekly recycling for two

The fat fuck of a father figure doesn’t work, unless you consider child abuse labour.  You always know when he is home because he whistles constantly and quite loudly.  And, I do mean constantly.  At 3 or 4 in the morning, immediately after berating his 15 year old daughter in the most foul of language (so immediately that one wonders when he took a breath), in the midst of what passes for quiet conversation over there–usually during someone else’s screamed response to one of his screamed comments.  The whistling, often to or at least concurrent with the strains of the sort of urban music that contains “Mariah Carey-esque unnecessary extra syllables,” is lately punctuated with–I shit you not–the phrase “YEEHAW!”

Oh, well, the lease won’t last forever.  I shall continue to take my runs to Old Town where I hope to move when the rental agreement does, mercifully, expire.

Any day now, I expect the hot tub installation

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Good Cap, Bad Cap

When your tv, purchased just over two years earlier for £119, becomes harder and harder to start and the cheapest that a repair shop will DIAGNOSE (not fix) the problem is £100 then you either shop for a new tele or drag out the tools.

First I went on the net and found some repair manuals.  Although the ones I found were in Turkish, the schematics were sensible.

I isolate the problem to something failing in the inverter, and suspected a capacitor had partially failed.  I’ve had a lot of experience with this at work as personal computer power supplies tend to have capacitors spec’ed to last 1-6 months beyond the PC’s warranty and when they fail the sag in power appears as a motherboard failure (the supply will even give +/-12V and +5V everywhere it should but at least one of those can’t reach the necessary current).

Usually it is cheaper to simply replace the entire power supply for the pc although that presupposes that one is available cheaply and that your time is more valuable doing other things.  Both of those are true in the work situation, but when this failure (above) was tracked down at home I ran over to Maplin for a £0.89 replacement and did a 5 minute solder job.  The patient has recovered fully.

Funny the tools you bring overseas when you move away.  These haemostats have served me well in various capacities (even some others where holding high temperature items was involved) but made quite suitable heat sinks to protect the new component from my soldering gun.

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The Southbrook is our new local, and a proper old local it is.  When we walked in at 5:30 last Friday it was already packed with several conversational groups distributed along the bar.  A pint and a large (really large) wine later and I stepped up for another round and one of the barflies came around and served us before returning to his post on our side of the bar.

We hadn’t realised that to the right of the Confessional Box that greets you as you enter this ancient, former barn there was a lounge that serves as a dining room.  Such is the magnetic force of the bar for the two of us, I guess; but when a couple of guys retrieved menus I found my way over there to get some for us as we were starving after a day of unpacking items in the new digs.  Turns out the lounge was even more lively than the public bar and I retreated with our menu back to where Jackie awaited.

The food choice was enormous and I settled on the lamb roast for about £6.50 that arrived with mounds of sweet, succulent lamb covered with gravy atop a rosemary and thyme rich dressing and garnished with fresh, local vegetables cooked just enough to retain crisp texture.  While we waited for this feast we met a large number of the regulars who weren’t just friendly but quite welcoming, indeed.  I don’t know if they’ve ever even had a foreigner grace their establishment before, such was the reception.  I am so pleased that this is our local, after the year in Bicester where no one really gave a rats arse (except of course for the fantastic Black Bull over in Launton).

The Southbrook doesn’t have much of a web presence, somehow even avoiding mention in such nearly comprehensive guides as Beer In The Evening.  It is about a mile walk from the train station and down at a dead end of a side street off Ferndale in a roughly 120 year old housing estate so might not be high on anyone’s agenda for a visit but I would recommend it wholeheartedly.

Now, let’s see how long it takes to get barred.

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Google street view of the new digs

We have moved house to Swindon, ancestral home of Mark Lamar, Diana Dors and Billie Piper and known for the Great Western Railway and the Magic Roundabout (Google any of these if you really want links).  We got about 3 times the garden, and twice the living area of the place in Bicester at £115 per month less (plus another £85 less in Council Tax per month) and the commute on the bus is as quick and as cheap but my annual bus ticket also gives me five other counties to explore (and not just back-and-forth from Bicester to Oxford).  There’ll be more photos once we’ve emptied most of the boxes, but for now lets just say we are very happy with the move.

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Every night around dusk (10 pm-ish, lately) we get a wee visitor in the garden.  Very cute little guy, eh?

Oh, here’s the garden since it hasn’t been posted before (Tim the mushroom gnome from Tucson is near the roses):