Here's to You

Who would have thought that it would have been such a nice day when Mrs Robinson threw in the towel? I bought British Strawberries (Class A) at the Coop this morning and am planning a picnic while I still can. And can't believe I have to close up shop for a while here.

I will saw one thing though about survival and that it is worth fighting for. The Standard Tandoori on Walton Street NEEDS to become more consistent if it's ever going to survive this eviction notice from St. John's College. Save standing out on the street with wih a picket sign saying "Capitalism too hot for you Tikka?", I will tell tell thim this: sort our your Palak Paneer!!!

It's always delicious but on any given night, this Indian restaurant will prepare one of about ten different versions of Palak Paneer. Sometimes the cheese is softer, sometimes there is more coriander, and sometimes there is none. Soemetimes they forget entirely to put in the onions. This can make for a nice taste in itself, but to survive - one needs to be consistent. How can anyone get an idea of how to judge you (which is everyone's favorite activity/job in this town), if you keep changing like a kaleidoscope? Keep the coriander, or throw it out with the bathwater (or whatever you have been boiling Okra in). Consistency is the key to at least giving someone a vague idea.

Take a hint from a landscape that always stays the same. The Salève never gets evicted you know.

Consistency can be no fun too. I always get a cold in June

the shittiest dressed couple in the world

"I can't imagine living in Oxford for all my life" she said, "but I can't think it's worse than the military. I think than anyone thinks that they're living in a machine."

But he could think of staying in Oxford. He could think of it being entirely possible to spend the rest of his life. Partly because in a small part, he was still the same person he used to be. Or whatever, because whatever he was now, it hadn't been since high school that he had given a fuck about anything.

It was something in the blue out his window though, and the accent of his dealer, that told him in England that anyone could make it if they tried. On his feet, the hard heeled suede loafers gripped his feet like hot hands. "This is" he said, and paused: "our gilded birdcage.

"Do you think I can borrow some socks?" she said. He rummaged in his dresser and pulled out a ball of navy blue.

"What are they dirty?" she gasped. "AAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaah!"

"Well I think I might have worn them once or twice" he replied, after giving the socks a good sniff."

""You really don't have any socks?" she moaned. "aren't there any in there", pointing to the laundry basket. "Oh no, you don't want to look in there. "Why? is it dirty?" she asked. "It's my everything basket. It's for laundry but also for just throwing things in." He ruffled through it though, and came up with a pair of navy blue cashmere socks.

"I don't want to lend you these." he said, standing up: "they're too sentimental."

"Ill give you some weed next week when I buy more" she said. And giving in he gave her the socks. "They're still a little damp from the laundry" he said. What he didn't say was that it had been three days since he had done laundry.

"How do you like my get up?" The cashmere socks - blue - over her tights from the Coop(tm) all under a Black shoe Sylvia Plath would have gotten excited about, looked, in fact - like shit. She looked like a greek peasant in her black dress, that had somehow gotten lost in Oxford by way of the mid-nineties. And one could have gotten the impression that she may have been through secretarial school from her jacket.

And of course, she was offended when he told her so.

"Do you realize you're worrying about how people will think of you when you want down the High Street? It's kebab hour - everything is ugly now" he said.

She proceded to bitch, but then he reproached her:

"I'm here, and you're towering over me like a Canadian librarian. And you know, you really ARE a bitch, if you can come here, and CRITICIZE the way someone does their laundry and where the fuck they keep their toothbrush. Get thee fucking gone, you gaping axewound. Fuck you."

But when they stepped into the night blue - more green and blue though, there was something that turned the green more vivid or the tulips at least, a little less excitable.

barely daring to breathe or Achoo

It will be so sad if the Standar Tandoori really does get evicted by St. John's College. I am super-patronising them with obsessive purchasing of their Palak Paneer.

Ahime.

toke-a-cola?

Sometimes in life, the only way to be nice to a person, is to be completely indifferent to them. Still, do we use this too often as a justification to be indifferent to those we're sure we don't care about? What, it there is such a thing, requires us to be kind to other people, in and of itself?

cashback?

Last night, in my weariness I forgot to mention - there was an altercation last night in the Coop. I was in the self check out line. Two of the machines, call them 1 and 3 were closed and I was going to be next on 2 when the man had taken his change, receipt and groceries with him out of the store. So...just as I was about to pay the 84p for my bottle of Volvic, this swarthy man comes in off Walton Street looking like he has seen a ghost. He approaches a member of the late night skeleton crew and starts yelling at the poor woman about the noise emanating from the self service check out. You can hardly blame anyone in this situation: the swarthy man who evidently lives above the Coop's self check out section (that would be too much!) clearly is bothered at night by the computer voice of the self service check out yelling at everyone (three at once) telling them to "remove the last item from the bag, and place it on the scanner". At the same time, the Nigerian check out lady can't care much for Robot Rhonda as she takes away jobs yet creates a LOT of extra work for all the humans who work in the store. For an example of this, just think of any time I have tried to buy a croissant from the self check out till on a visa debit card and it's required the assistance of the check out human across the room punching something in, and the awkward guy who works in the back opening up the machine with his keys.

Still what struck me about the situation last night was then, not the absurdity of the self check out and the noise it made, because I could see everyone agreeing that it was unpleasant. What really shocked me was the violent nature in the swarthy man towards the check out lady when he told her the machine should be turned off at 10 pm. We don't see violence much in the world today, certainly not in grocery stores where the heartiest decent meal you could buy is a Linda McCartney line Chili Non Carne.

I'm not going to go the Coop anymore really. I was with Rebecca recently in the big Sainsburys' and was reminded of how they have a much better food section and certainly more healthy.

morning hymn

Did you know that only Alpen(tm?) Muesli has three royal warrants? That's fine and it is nice to know that one can eat on the same standards as the Queen or the Prince of Wales even at 9:30 in the morning but one thing kind of took me aback. The third royal warrant says: "BY APPOINTMENT TO HER MAJESTY H. M. QUEEN ELIZABETH, THE QUEEN MOTHER: MANUFACTURERS OF BREAKFAST CEREALS, WEETABIX LIMITED, BURTON LATIMER." (no tm). Well what's kind of creepy is that this could be read as Alpen advocating their product as sustenance suitable for corpses. With all due respect to WEETABIX LIMITED, BURTON LATIMER, but shouldn't you take the royal warrant off the product one the royal is dead? If you don't, the customer is likely to think they're food is pretty old - whether it means they've had the cereal in their kitchen since before she died, OR that it means it was a lot older than you'd like to have thought, when you bought it. The cereal is not even particularly good, so they are in danger of giving the impression that they're not marketing they're product to whomever will like it, but instead to whomever will eat. As you can imagine this leaves gaping open the possibility of diluting the royal warrant and it's significance. If you will bear with me, maybe you can understand what I mean. If royal warrants can be given by dead people, what's to stop them from being given by non-royals or indeed people who don't exist at all? As a case in point let us imagine there is in America a gourmet soup company. The director of marketing sees underperformance by a luxury mixed vegetable soup of theirs, which he believes is capable of being a lot more powerful in the soup sector and on the shelves, if only people would buy it. It may happen that one day companies such as this one would give in and label the product with a "Terry Schiavo Official Warrant" to make the product more appealing. This just deludes the customer thinking they are getting a celebrity quality product, when they are really getting the actual celebrity, blended and in a can. The problem with fame, celebrity and indeed breakfast cereal is that their only common and potentially humanising attributes let us slip so easily into a place where we prefer to exploit people the only time and place we're in a position to help them. No?

hot ice and wondrous strange snow*

Did you know that the Coop now has frozen spinach for £1.25? It is by no means on par with the frozen spinach available in France or Italy or Switzerland, but it is good. I think it comes from Spain actually. In a sense, I have been torn on what to buy when it comes to spinach these days. As I see it, there are both advantages and disadvantages to frozen over fresh spinach. For example, fresh spinach is more expensive. £1.25 at the Coop and £1.15 at Sainsbury's will buy you 500g of spinach from either Spain or Italy, whereas £1.25 at the Coop, and £1.29 at Sainsbury's will get you nearer to an entire kilogram of the frozen plant. I was never very good at math, but it is clearly the case that frozen spinach is, financially speaking, the advisable option. On the same side of the scale as this is the fact that spinach can often be a hassle to clean. Fresh spinach, and from Spain especially, needs to be thoroughly washed because it is often very dirty. Because spinach grows in sandy soil, it is the migrant workers in whatever country (except Switzerland of course) who shoulder the burden of how clean it will be at the time of packaging. In this light, the question is: what is the advantage of fresh spinach? To its credit, fresh spinach tastes better and you can make it in a salad. Of course with this comes the fact that it will not keep for the entire length of a term like it will frozen and you will need to remind yourself that it is waiting to be prepared. Faintly we hear an echo of Petrarch's words: "cosa bella mortal passa, e non dura", and cannot without a heavy heart buy frozen spinach in our concesson to the transience of earthly life. It seems too much time is spent on buying green plants in Oxford.

What I really wanted to show here is that I think we waste a lot really enjoying life in a possible and indeed feasible way, because of the obstacles of time and money. You can melt St Augur over anything and it will taste decent and peperoncino is also good, but how much more aren't we really saving when we don't go for the microwaved life? Next: Volvic and Tap Water go head to head. It just kind of sucks when transience makes it into your grocery bag.

Finally: something that tastes good, ovvero Hermès: Part Deux

You can't exactly buy a very slimming piece of self confidence on Bond Street let alone at Sainsbury's(tm?). But you can buy spinach. I recently went back to that derelict rathole that is the Broad Street Oxfam and a small part of me died when I realised how many square centimeters of French printed silk I had literally let slip through my fingers by not buying the second of the two ties. This sentiment was redoubled because I had gone to said rathole early on my way to an especially boring weekly on German culture, wherein, my tutor - it being her very last lesson to teach before returning to wherever it was she came from in the Eastern Block(tm?). It was very disenchanting because - maybe she had been drinking or something (not gonna speculate, ok?) but she was overtly excited about never having to teach us again. She make jokes, laughed, in a certain sense, came across as a generally amiable person, who was able to see the ridiculousness of us sitting in at 16th century room in Southwest England discussing issues in German contemporary social policy. (n.b. what I mean is that she saw how little one can actually learn about somewhere and someway of somewhere else, not actually being there - the things in themselves are of course valid).

Well anyway, everything has culminated in what I feel to be one of my most defining decisions. Fucking boil it. I was walking down St. Giles (which is a very multicultural thoroughfare and the widest street as in not Boulevard, Avenue, Champs-Élysées™, etc...) and I asked everyone I passed (as in mentally interrogated them) with the "how many of you have had a baguette for lunch today?" The statistics were very alarming and support my theory that only like 11% of the food one ever eats in Oxford is part of a warm meal.

So what to do? How do you skirt this problem if you fit into the is incredibly busy/quasi on a budget category. Fucking boil it. I found out you can boil anything. For example: spinach. Take a pot, fill it with water, boil the water and add the spinach, boil it and remove it. Press out the excess water, then put it back in the pan with some (preferably alpine or Bavarian unsalted) butter and simmer the spinach for a while and I like to add crushed red peppers and lemon juice to make it hot/lemony. This has been really good to know, because after like 3 years of cooking classes in Switzerland, becoming a Vegetarian in England leaves you a lot to be unsure about as to what the hell to eat and not get Salmonellosis.

The point is, Spinach costs around £1.20 (approx. : Sainsbury's = £1.15 for class 1 Italian, organic; Coop = £1.25 for class 2 Spanish (I know - go figure...) and is very easy to cook and nothing to be ashamed of having eaten (not that baguettes are either every once in a while, but if you have more than 2 a week in my opinion, it indicates some sort of loose living.).

Coming next: Leeks™!