Well, I woke up, scratched, swung my legs out of bed, put one foot in front of the other, etc etc.

Yeah. You don’t actually need all the detail, do you?

I’ve had a bloody lovely day. Bucks Fizz and a croissant, the company of my family, a phone call with my grandmother, a turkey dinner, a walk at dusk and a bit of TV – The Gruffalo and then Dr Who. The former was excellent, the latter was saved by John Simm quite literally chewing the scenery and Bernard Cribbins being exactly as good as I’d hoped. Really very frustatingingly part one of two, and the big reveal at the end had virtually no shock value at all.

Notable gifts: a stock pot, and a copy of Larousse Gastonomique. Next year: soup!

I am fighting the tempatation here to gush about Miranda and my family, because it’s them that put my festive spirit back, but the rest of you don’t need my vomiting up joy and rainbows everywhere.

So instead, one last set of holiday wishes for you all. Hope yours was a good as mine.

The holiday season is in full swing, and while you’ll hear all about my day in full boring detail later, because that’s the next topic, I thought I’d use this “whatever tickles your fancy” to talk about the holiday season in general, and what it means to me.

I’m not religious in any sense that Christmas or any other midwinter festival could possible have any meaning for me. But I do love this time of year. I like that it’s been around in one form or another for thousands of years, like a groove etched in our collective psyche that says “it’s dark and bloody miserable out there. Take a bit of time to remember be good to one another, why don’t you?”

I feel like the days between Christmas and New Year are a time when we hit the collective pause button, and spend a bit of time with our nearest and dearest without any particular obligation to do anything but vegetate collectively. Work can sod off, plans that aren’t “let’s stay in and eat and drink, and maybe watch a bit of telly” can be paused. Everything else is window dressing – the family gatherings, the gift exchanges, the lights and the tinsel they’re all lovely, but really they’re just how we dress up a collective rest period to make it a bit more special. Remind me at some point to talk about the Lancastrian tradition of Wakes weeks in Summer, and why we really ought to make them apply to office work all around the country,

Honestly, by the point in the year, I’m ready for a few days of dead time, and battery re-charging. I’ve been having to fight to sustain a good mood a bit for the last month – November and December always kick the shit out of me a bit at work, and things have otherwise been a bit busy and stressful. One of my resolutions for next year is to have a more relaxed November and December, with less social run-around, because I don’t think I’ve had a week with less than three social engagements since October, and while I love you all, I don’t feel I’ve had much “me” time, and more time off work, because I’ve worked up to the last minute the last two years, and when your major clients are large pub chains, that means there’s a lot to do, and it’s put a crimp in my festive spirit.

So come back later today, to hear all about how I got it back.

Compliments of the season to all of you. May your holidays be filled with cheer.

Playing catchup. Longer post tonight, probably. Anyway, I know the meme said “YouTube video”, but I like Vimeo more, and I particularly like this video, about the unseen digital ghosts that haunt our world.

Immaterials: the ghost in the field from timo on Vimeo.

Just one? But I’ve worked on so many…

Debenhams was the first website I ever did any professional work for. This is Local London was the first website I was responsible for the upkeep of. ipoints was the first website I ever really enjoyed working on. I’ve spent the last few years working on a bunch of websites for various large pub companies, and that’s been fun.

But I can’t really do a rundown of sites I’ve been involved with with putting Ninth Art squarely at the top of the list. It ate 5 years of Andrew’s life, and a lot of Antony’s and my free time on a less sustained basis. It remains the single website I’m proudest to have been involved with, even if most of what I wrote for it make me cringe now, but y’know, some of it’s coming up on a decade old, so y’know. I still don’t know how much of an impact 9A had on anything, really, but what I do know is that a number of people I like and respect were kind enough to say good things about the site, and every now and again, I do randomly meet people who remember the site, and say kind things about it, and even if the site did nothing else, I do very much miss sitting down with Andrew and Antony over drinks and talking rubbish about comics, and it gave us an excuse to do that.

I’m quite profoundly fucked off about the error at the DNS company that lead to us losing our two original domain names for that site, and having to buy the .org instead, and do periodically check to see if their of them have become available again. I also keep promising myself that I’ll rebuild publishing engine for the site, just because I’d like little things like nicer URLs on the articles, even if it is only an archive these days.

I’m kind of vaguely looking for a project on a similar scale to get involved with again, just because, well, 9A has been inert for a few years, and I don’t like that the single website I’m proudest to have been involved with is that old. There’s a few other websites I’m working on that I really like, but they’re small, private community things, rather than anything public, and I do quite fancy doing something digital and public that isn’t just blogging again – I don’t think I’d write for anyone again, but the idea of building a bespoke content management system for a website I genuinely cared about, that’s got some appeal, and I know I’d do it better this time around. One to think about a bit more in the new year, I guess.

3 pepper pasta with chorizo. Serves 4. This is something I cook quite a lot – it’s easy to vary the ingredients a bit, depending on what I have in the cupboard and who I’m cooking for. I suspect this will make a lot of the more serious cooks on my friends list cringe, as it’s really not a lot more than “throw everything in the pot, and warm it up”, and I’m probably committing some basic culinary crimes in here, but it tends to come out both tasty and filling, so I’m happy enough with it.

Ingredients:
500g Tagliatelle Pasta
700g jar of passatta
250g pomodorino tomatoes
125g chestnut mushrooms
450g chorizo.
1 large onion.
3 cloves garlic.
1 red bell pepper
2 romano peppers
1 (or more, depending on taste) small red chilli
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon mixed dried herbs.

Chop the onion – not too finely, but you’re not looking for massive chunks, either. Chuck in a pan (I use a heavy iron frying pan with high sides) on a low heat with a generous slug of olive oil (there’s a lot of veg going to fry in this, so I tend not to bother measuring it, and just trust that the veg will take a fair bit). While that’s sweating and softening, finely dice the bell pepper, and then throw that in as well. Take a moment to enjoy the smell of slowly frying onion, then finely chop the romano peppers as well, and add them. Give everything a good stir.

Chop the chorizo into small cubes. This can be a bit of a pain in the arse – I tend to slice it into 1-2cm rings, then quarter them. Don’t add it yet – you’re just doing it now because the peppers can take bloody ages to soften. Stir the peppers and onions every so often while you’re doing this, and remember to stop and enjoy the smell.

Chop and add the small chilli(s) – I use one for people who don’t like spicy food, two if I’m just cooking for myself, and three when I’m cooking for total spice monsters, but personally I don’t enjoy the three chilli version. I don’t de-seed them, or scrap out the pith, because I want the capascin bite along with the flavour, but I guess that depends on how you like your chilli.

Halve and add the tomatoes. A tip I picked up from watching Heston Blumenthal – when chopping the tomatoes don’t slice them top to bottom, slice them horizontally through middle – it results in a more intense taste. Apparently this is because quite a lot of of the flavour of tomatoes comes from the interaction od some chemicals in their skin with chemicals in the liquid pulp, and slicing them horizontally drags more of the skin chemicals through the pulp.

Chop and add the mushrooms and throw them in. Then finely chop the garlic and add that, along with the diced chorizo. And yes, stir everything again. Leave it all going on the low heat, stirring every so often until the mushrooms look cooked, and the chorizo has released a decent amount of oil – it’ll start colouring the mushrooms, which I personally find very pleasing, for no reason I can adequately explain. At that point, you want to add the passata, and leave it all to simmer gently. After about ten minutes, add the paprika and dried herbs, and stir them in.

At the point you add the passata, put a (very) large pan of water on to boil for the pasta. Don’t cover the pan – the time it takes uncovered water to boil is useful to give all the flavours in the sauce time to infuse, and you’re keeping the sauce on a low-medium heat, anyway, so as long as your stir it ever so often, it’s not likely to burn – I don’t recall ever burning this, and I’m fully capable of burning water.

Once the pasta water is boiling, add the pasta – cook it like you usually would – some people salt the water, some people add a bit of olive oil – whichever your prefer. The timings for this kind of assume you’re using a fresh pasta that should cook in about 5 minutes, but I don’t imagine anything that takes less than 10-15 minutes is going to change things very much.

Obviously, taste the sauce as you go, to check you’re getting a flavour you like. Things I often wind up doing: adding a bit of salt, or a generous quantity of ground black pepper, or a bit of chilli/tabasco sauce for bite. This isn’t meant to be a fully-on spicy sauce exactly, but still, people should know there’s chilli in it, you know?

Serve with freshly grated parmesan. Goes well with a light-medium bodied red wine, or a peroni-type lager.

Substitutions you can make easily: Swap some or all of the chorizo for chunks of chicken, or for extra mushrooms – you may find your want to add more chilli with less chorizo. There’s a Lloyd Grossman brand pasta sauce base that’s made with peppers rather than tomatoes which makes a really great substitution for the passata, it’s just a bit hard to find sometimes, which is why I most often cook this with passata. And obviously, you can throw out the shop bought passata and make you own tomato sauce base if you’re so inclined, but I’m not.

I skipped past photography yesterday. I’ve talked about roleplaying before. That’s the big two out the window, right there. I’m honestly not sure that blogging counts as a hobby, and nor does pissing about on the internet. So here’s a thing it honestly surprises me to be writing about: cooking.

I love food, this much is no secret. I like to eat in posh restaurants (and less posh restaurants – good food is good food, and it doesn’t have to be fancy), and I can talk about tastes and flavours in a pretty convincing manner.

But in the last year or so I’ve started to take more pleasure in cooking than I ever have before – it used to be something I didn’t do, then it became something I did because I liked the end product, even if I didn’t enjoy the actual process, but of late I find myself taking pleasure in the cooking itself.

I’m not a very skilled cook, especially not compared to the huge list of Serious Cooks among my group of friends, and doubt I ever will be, but as long as a recipe doesn’t require much of an attention span or any particularly difficult culinary tricks, I seem to do OK. I did black pudding with caramelised apple, and a cider reduction a few weeks ago, and some basic marinaded pork with peaches turned out so well I made it again the following night. Given that a year ago, I basically cooked the same three pasta dishes a lot (and I still do, because they are bloody tasty) I count this as progress. I made a sage and rosemary butter for the first time last night to go with some pre-purchased venison tortellini, and while it hardly counts as cooking, as it basically required me to melt some butter and throw some herbs in it, then add lemon juice once it was off the heat, it was still something I’d never done before, and will be doing again.

I guess the big difference from before would be that a year or two ago, I cooked what I cooked, and that was it, but now, I’m much more willing to give something new a go, and even once I have, I find myself thinking of other dishes I could so something similar with, or wondering “what would happen if I replaced the sage with…” Not everything works, but before when it didn’t work, I’d have given it up as a sign that I couldn’t cook, but now I tend to make a note of what not to do, and think of another approach – I tried to do a pancake filling made of plums and bananas that didn’t end well (came out bloody tasty, but it was essentially a mess of disintegrated plums combined with sugar, butter and rum with some sliced bananas floating in it – it was tasty, but it wasn’t what I wanted) and I’ve got a pasta sauce involving mushroom and black pudding that I haven’t got right yet – I’m trying to get little cubes of black pudding to crisp up to provide texture as well as flavour, but they either come out soft, or they totally disintegrate into the sauce. But I know what I’m going to try next time…

I take pretty pictures. I’m sorry this isn’t a longer entry, but I’ve had a busy Saturday already, I have a cold, and I urgently want to take to my bed in order to prevent said cold from wrecking me, because I have stuff to do tomorrow, and I’ve got to be in work next week. So you get a short entry, with instructions to go and look at my photoblog instead, and with any luck, I’ll be feeling a bit better by tomorrow.

There’s been a lot of stuff about Art in this meme. There’s been precious little about Design in it. I like design, and back in the early days of this iteration of this blog, I spent a short while explaining what I think its relationship to Art is.

So having skipped past the need for that re-cap, I thought I’d now witter on a bit about what sort of design I like, and I thought I’d start with a couple of links to designers I know.

Phil Clandillon. I worked with Phil in a little yellow room in Acton. Dark Days. Phil’s particular knack is coming up with really interesting and clever shit using unexpected technologies. The Kasabian “Football Hero” video was him, as was the AC/DC music video that was an Excel spreadsheet, as were a few other clever things that you can find out about at his portfolio there. What I like about Phil’s best work is the strength of his ideas – the execution’s important, too, but I like the fact that Phil isn’t just turning out websites any more, but is in a place where he can come up with genuinely orginal stuff that pulls in all sorts of digital media, and generally makes me think “I wish I’d thought of that”.

BERG. BERG is the sort of place that I would love to work for, but quite frankly, am not clever enough to do so. What I love about their work is twofold: one, is that it tends to be cutting edge, at least in terms of thinking, if not technology, and two, that it tends to be made the with the aim of enabling people to do things – they’re makers, rather than marketers. Also, how can you not love an agency who named themselves after of something out of Quatermass?

Between those two, I find I’ve very neatly encapsulated what I love about design – it’s the means by which people’s ideas shape the world, and bit by bit, change our lives. Here at the start of the 21st century, if you’re not engaged with design as a (very broad) field on some level, I do kind of wonder what you’re doing with your life, apart from taking up resources that the rest of us could be making better use of.

So that’s design as idea, and design as world-shaper, which is all vitally important background, but what about aesthetics? After all, that’s what most people think of when they think of design.

Well, I only really qualified to talk about my own sense of aesthetics, and me, I’m a pretty unabashed Swiss modernist. Give me clean, clear lines, plenty of white space, and attention to simple detail in the service of clarity. Sure, I can appreciate the cluttered, hand drawn and grungy look – I quite like the work of people like Courtney Riot or Christopher Cox, but honestly, give me plain black text, well spaced, on a white background every time – a bit of simple elegance. If I had to pick my favourite font, it’d be Helevetica Neue – just about the only font face that is more precise and tidier than Helevtica.

This applies in just about everything from ink on paper to products to architecture – I love simple clear lines and an absence of clutter. Those who have seen the spaces I inhabit and the general state of my desk are probably laughing themselves sick right now, to which I can only remark that very often, really good design is an aspirational thing.

Well, I’ve talked before about one my favourite works of art, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. So my obvious choice is out.

So let’s talk a little, instead, about my favourite painting, Wright of Derby’s “Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump“. Mostly, what I love about it is the quality he’s given the light. I could stare at if for hours, just contemplating the use of light and shadow in that painting. But even aside from that, I like the themes, the way the different members of the audience are reacting to the progress of science, with expressions ranging from disgust to fascination.

I like the way that all the moral outrage in the painting is reserved not for the fate of the poor bird, but for the effect that the bird’s plight is having on the people watching it – how dare this scientist cause us distress? It seems to me to sum up a lot of the problem with people’s attitude to science, which is simultaneously that it can be terribly harmful to the natural world, but that the reality is most people don’t care about the harm, as long as it doesn’t cause them distress – that there’s a basic hypocrisy inherent in denouncing science and progress while living with the comforts that it has brought us all. Most of the figures in the painting are either unbothered by what is happening, and are far more wrapped up in the other people around the experiment, in some way of form.

I particularly like the fact the of all of them, it is only the scientist who is looking out of the picture, engaging with the viewer and the wider world.

Tom Waits – “Georgia Lee”.

I’d like to talk about it, but there’s something in my eye.