Off to see the Wizard

Food

This is an unashamed food fangirl post. On Friday we took Boyfriend’s parents to The Man Behind the Curtain and it was amazing. For anyone who wonders whether Michelin star food is worth it, my personal view is now 100% yes. I took photos, I took notes, I was a horrible geeky foodie, and it didn’t ruin my experience one little bit, because it was just thoroughly amazing.

To begin with, it’s like eating in an art gallery. So, honestly, the pictures should just take over from here. Apologies in advance (I’m not famed for my photography)…

mbtc
Amazing art-gallery surroundings
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Course 1
course2
Course 2

Course 1 – hand massaged braised octopus, sicilian lemon, butter, capers, and smoked paprika emulsion

Course 2 – 15 year old beef, served rare, olive oil sauce, dried black olive powder, potato ovulata (which was a super-thin cellophane-y layer on the top and was WEIRD)

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Course 3

Course 3 – Puffed rice noodles, parmesan, sea urchin “bolognese”

Course 4 – My photo really doesn’t do this one justice. Spider crab layered with tomato and crispy wonton, quails egg with jam (I missed the fruit). I also missed what the wafer-thing on top is, but it was great. This was a real stand-out dish all round.

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Course 4

 

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Course 5

Course 5 – This is the fish course from Great British Menu this year, which both me and Boyfriend recognised at once and got a bit excited about.

Cod loin, squid ink dashi, char grilled gem lettuce, tiny pototo shreds with squid ink and malt vinegar powder.

 

 

Course 6 – Probably my second favourite. Iberian pork loin, slow cooked egg yolk in an edible egg shell, covered with BBQ cinders, ajo blanco and anchovies.

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Course 6

Course 7 – BBQ prawn (I missed the specific type) with smokey sauce in the head, veal sweetbread in spicy Hong Kong style sauce, sticky rice, seaweed, and hot and sour consommé.

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Course 7

 

 

 

 

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Course 8

Course 8 – Desert. Chocolate, lavender and honey mousse so thick you could plaster walls with it. Violet ice cream, puffed potatoes with beetroot power and potato and vanilla foam. And tempered chocolate.

 

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Course 9

Course 9 was agreed by everyone to be the high-point of the meal. A bite-sized cupcake with an edible wrapper. The cupcake is chocolate mousse, raspberry mascarpone, pistachio, and a passion fruit centre. Even after Boyfriend described how great it was, it was still amazing.

There’s not much left to say. I presume that the restaurant name is a reference to the Wizard of Oz, a normal man hidden behind a curtain performing amazing illusions. Not that I’d call Michael O’Hare or any of his team “normal” after that meal. But it’s definitely full of magic and wonder and illusion and I absolutely recommend it.

Couldn’t Make it Up

Fun

So my latest YouTube obsession is make-up tutorials.

Not because I’m learning anything, because I like sleep more than make-up, and I have clunky sausage fingers, and my skin doesn’t like it. Just because they are the most soothing thing.

I shared this with a friend, who presented me with the best gift imaginable. This list.

That’s it for today, because you need to follow the link and bask in it.

Plans

Life, Music

The first thing I noticed when I started this post is that I’ve already written something called “Plans”, so I went back and looked at that. It’s funny, and tiny, and completely different to what I’m about to write, so hold onto your hats, kids.

I’m a Death Cab for Cutie obsessive, and my favourite album is “Plans”. It is made up of some of the most heartfelt, horrible, inspirational music I’ve ever listened to. The song below isn’t one of my favourites, but it does have two really valuable sentiments. Fair warning: don’t listen to it if you’re sad. It’s a very sad song.

Let’s start at the beginning, with this line:

“It came to me then, that every plan..
..is a tiny prayer to Father Time”

I need plans. I have been an anxious person my whole life, and I struggle to cope with uncertainty in any form. My life revolves around structure, organisation, and a knowledge of what is coming tomorrow. When I don’t have that (and I don’t, more and more regularly) I find myself stressed, confused, and at odds with my own emotions (which mostly suggest that if I hide somewhere for a while and don’t talk to anyone, the world will eventually begin to make sense again. Spoiler alert: that totally doesn’t work).

Something that helps me with that is writing this blog. It’s a nice, controlled space, and a way to process thoughts, feelings, and reactions to my life and make sense of them. But I’m also coming to realise that uncertainty is a part of everything, and that just because you make plans, doesn’t mean that forces beyond your control won’t change them…see the above quote. All of my plans are just tiny prayers, and seeing them like that makes them feel a lot less important, which I think is a good thing. It means it’s ok if they don’t quite pan out.

This all in mind, here are a few plans which I’m praying might happen (but which I’m not going to beat myself up for if other bits of life get in the way)

  • I plan to finish my hoodie blanket, and post about it here
  • I plan to create myself some new desk art
  • I plan to bake more often, and I plan that the baking will be good
  • I plan to finally make myself a dress out of the word fabric I’ve been hoarding since Into The Woods
  • I plan to smile at least once every single day
  • I plan to go to the theatre as often as possible, and watch things I’ve never seen before

I said before that “What Sarah Said” has two sentiments I really value. A first listen to Plans can feel quite disheartening, if you’re in that mood, but so much of what they sing can have a positive spin, just like the quote above. The second one comes at the end of the song, and it’s where the title is pulled from:

“I’m thinking of what Sarah said..
..love is watching someone die”

For a lot of the people who commented on the video, this is the line which tugged at their heartstrings. I can’t even begin to imagine what it feels like to watch a loved one die.

But.

As an anxious person, one of the things which often happens is that I nervously convince myself that everyone hates me, and that I’m a horrible burden. But what I know to be true is that I’m not at all, and that I have people in my life who love me enough that no matter how terrible everything gets (and I’m lucky, because it’s really never even been close to terrible) they’ll always be right there. So..

  • I plan to fully appreciate all of the wonderful people in my life, and spend lots of time with them and show them how much I value them all.

 

(PS. I know this seems like it’s coming from a super sad place, but it’s really not. I have the CD of Plans in my car, and I listen to it non-stop. I’m constantly finding silver linings and consoling messages in the lyrics and I absolutely urge literally everyone to listen to it, because it’s just great)

In defence of the modern Students’ Union

Life, Work

I feel like I’ve been waiting to wade into this debate for months, and I’m finally ready. Let’s talk about Students’ Unions and freedom of speech.

Except let’s not. After all, everyone else has had their go. The most recent article I’ve read is this one, from the Guardian, and it got me thinking about my actual views on the matter, which are thusly.

  1. Freedom of speech is important. People died for our right to it, and there are hundreds of thousands of places in the world where it’s still curtailed.
  2. Students are people, and people can be hurt.
  3. Universities are places of learning and should be starting those difficult conversations, and encouraging challenging debate (my views on the education system aside)

Right, so these things keep fighting against each other. Students are humans, so they shouldn’t be subjected to situations which feel threatening to certain humans. But they’ve gone to university to learn, and where else will they be exposed to these views? And where better to encourage free discourse, in a sphere of learning and growth.

Fine.

Let’s just look at the word “union” for a second. A google-define (because I don’t have a paper dictionary to hand, sue me) gives the following definition:

Union

ˈjuːnjən,-ɪən
  1. the action of joining together or the fact of being joined together, especially in a political context
  2. a society or association formed by people with a common interest or purpose

Now. I wasn’t born yesterday. I know that we think of trade unions as empowering movements of positive social change (or maybe an irritating itch in the side of the status quo), and Students’ Unions used to be the home of debate, free thinking, and general sticking-it-to-the-man. But let’s get real, times have changed.

There’s a consistent rhetoric with the anti no-platform brigade. They criticise SUs for creating a nanny state and reducing the exposure of students to radical thought. Seriously though? I have the internet. I’m on it now. The people (quite rightly, in many ways) actively reducing exposure to radical thought, are the government. Many universities are trying to find ways around that, because in the modern world, engagement with radical and broad-ranging thought is key to degree-level discourse. Yes, there are institutions which are falling down, but it is the fundamental role of universities now to encourage freedom of thought and speech.

Where does that leave SUs? No longer the necessary platform for reform and protest, SUs are free to take on a new (and much-needed, in the current student landscape) position as the provider of a support system. With ever-rising fees and ever decreasing job prospects, students are in need of a place they can go for advice, to maintain their personal welfare, and to find a group of people with a common purpose. And they have a right to consider that space “safe”.

It is pertinent to mention, at this point, that my argument covers SUs as individual organisations, and I do understand the argument as it relates to the National Union of Students. Some of their broadcast views do seem to err in favour of preventing an informative and constructive debate. However, every article that has touched on this subject of late has mentioned “banning” certain things, or not allowing speakers into union buildings. That argument is misguided because it ignores the new value of the SU as an institution. No longer do we need a place to vent our revolutionary angst – universities are increasingly better at being a platform for that discourse – but what we do badly need, in the absence of relevant action from the government, are places to feel safe and supported. Why shouldn’t that place be the Students’ Union?

Respect

Life, Rant, Work

So last night I happened upon this article. For the lazy, it’s a guy talking about how he began to recognise that small things which didn’t bother him bothered his wife, and how he realised too late that by ignoring the fact that they bothered her (because he didn’t *get* it), he ended up not giving her the respect she deserved.

I think it’s a nicely written piece, and it broadly expresses some feelings I have about my own relationship (though we’ve transitioned from glass-beside-the-sink to recycling-bin-unemptied, which I think may constitute progress). It also made me think about the dynamic of expecting something of someone and respecting someone for doing something.

The continuation of this post is going to come across a little spoilt, because I’m going to use some examples from my own life, so let it first be said that I appreciate my attitudes could change in these situations, and I could work to find them less frustrating. But I still think that all of these examples show a fundamental lack of respect, so I’m going to use them anyway, spoiltness be damned.

There are certain types of people who are always going to be taken for granted, and I am one of those people. I have clear facets of my personality that are asking to be abused, and I am daft enough to allow this with only minor grumbling at the end of the day. I think when you’re a person who is keen to make others happy this is pretty commonplace, but I do think that there are occasions where it goes too far, and a person can stop feeling respected and start feeling devalued.

When I was at school (and in uni, I’m sad to say), most people I spent time with in class, spent time with me because I was a hard worker. I know this, because I still talk to three people who were in my year at school. Three. And two from my degree. I always felt like I had a lot of friends because I talked to a lot of people, and had someone to sit with in every class, and it didn’t matter that those people would copy my work, or casually slide over and see if they could be in my project group. Very occasionally, the lack of actual respect for me would come through, when I’d not had time to finish an essay, or a maths question. There would be an expectation that I’d help other people, to the point where they’d be rudely frustrated if *I* hadn’t done *their* work.

Another personality aspect which people take for granted is my ability to plan. I like having a plan, because I don’t like uncertainty, because it makes me anxious. But that doesn’t mean I like *planning* per se, and it certainly doesn’t mean it’s easy. My work role requires detailed planning, and usually it’s by-the-by to change something, but on occasion it’s incredibly complex. More often than not, the person asking me to change these plans will have had ample opportunity to let me know they won’t work, and yet it is expected that I will change a planned meeting with 15 people in at the drop of a hat. Those people who do this the most frequently are those who are least appreciative of the effort which goes into the process, and that, ultimately, constitutes a lack of respect.

The last trait which I think is under-respected is enthusiasm. It is difficult for a lot of people to be enthusiastic about themselves, and I know how much I appreciate it when my friends are enthusiastic on my behalf. But when you actively encourage your friends on a consistent basis, it becomes the norm, and it becomes expected. Which is crazy, because no-one can maintain that level of enthusiasm for anything. So occasionally you drop off, and ask the wrong questions (or don’t ask any at all), or have the wrong reactions. When that illicits a negative response, that is when your friend is taking you for granted, rather than respecting how much effort you’re putting into caring about their life.

As I mentioned, I think this post comes across whiney, but after reading the article I linked at the top, I really stopped to think about what being respected as a person means. A lot of people find it difficult to value their own strengths, that that is made exceptionally difficult when it is thrust into your face that other people don’t value them either. I’m lucky that I never realised my peers were using my work-ethic, rather than respecting me more as a person for having it. If I’d realised, I might have tried less hard.

Long story short, take a step back and look at the people around you, and take a second to recognise what they do for you, and what it costs them.

Understanding

Life

Humanity is an endless mystery. Every human brain is a special snowflake, intricate and complicated and nothing like anyone else’s. The most mysterious thing about humanity, though, is our incessant need to ignore the above, and relentlessly try to understand each other. Honestly. It’s a wonder we’ve made it this far.

In the beginning, man decided to try and understand the world, mostly by getting in boats and killing a bunch of whatever he found at the other end. Man tried to understand food by setting it on fire (and that went pretty well, because barbecues). Man tried to understand animals, by slicing them up, and people, by slicing them up, and the stars, and rocks, and rainbows, and language, and just everything you can possibly think of.

And then, at some point, psychology became a science, and some people started looking at other people and realised they couldn’t understand them by slicing them up. So they started talking, and testing, and monitoring, and came up with lots of theories about lots of things (and then fought over them for the next 200 years, because academia is like that kids).

At some point in the 20th century, understanding each other also became a hobby. That’s not to say that people didn’t have empathy before 1901, but I do genuinely believe that there was too much more to life to become inherently bothered by the people around you. Then we hit the industrial revolution, and a couple of World Wars, and then the “teenager” was invented, and there was just more time to spend on introspection, and reflection of that in other people.

Now, it’s a constant thing. You cannot move for blogs sharing the difficulties of addiction, web articles like this one telling men how to understand women, tweets talking about the complexities of mental well-being. TV dramas centring on gay characters in the middle of war zones. It’s EVERYWHERE.

I’m personally very guilty of it. I want to know what makes people tick, because if you know some of those things, you can help them better. That’s the theory of it, anyway. But there does come a point where suddenly all of that well-meaning discovery crosses a line, and becomes bizarre informational voyeurism. I often find myself in the middle of an article thinking “this isn’t for me” – I struggle when I read about groups or subcultures which I don’t identify with (not that I really have any that I do identify with, which I suppose makes it more complex) because it begins to feel like crawling into someone else’s life just because “it might be interesting to look around”.

The fact is, as I mentioned at the start, we’re all of us different, and it’s quite presumptuous (to the point of rudeness) to think that an article, a TV broadcast, or a tweet comes close to explaining us. You begin to put people in boxes, defined by your understanding of discrete characteristics which they have. It’s stereotyping, we just don’t call it that because it’s on a micro scale, and because stereotyping is negative, and we’re being empathetic, which is supposed to be positive.

Ultimately, you have to strike a balance. Seeking knowledge is never going to be a bad thing. But fundamentally, with that knowledge must sit an understanding that humans are as diverse as can be imagined, and just because you understand one aspect of a person, doesn’t mean you understand the person as a whole.

For Jeannine

Food, Life, Travel

A little while back I wrote this post all about my grandfather and how influential and wonderful he is. Today is another very special day, for a very special person, and sadly I’m once again at the other end of the country in inconvenient ways, but I wanted to take a second to share everything I remember and love about Jeannine (my wonderful grandmother).

Jeannine is French. She likes to pretend she isn’t, by living in the UK (and other places that aren’t France) for a significant portion of her life, and by speaking perfect English, and by having various quirky English habits, but she can’t escape it. Two things I quickly learnt as a young child were that the French accent is pervasive and emphatic, and that if you’re an angry French lady there’s really no reason not to let the entire world know it – because they’ll probably end up doing what you want them to.

These are the experiences which helped me understand what it means to be a strong woman. Jeannine is the matriarch of our little family, but also of a much wider dynasty of crazy French folk who followed her lead and took up residence in various parts of the UK. She’s a trailblazer, and an icon. She came to live with my grandfather after the second world war, before moving to Borneo, Afghanistan, and numerous places in between. She learnt fluent English as well as  mastering bits of other languages – before I began my undergraduate degree I discovered she had learnt Farsi (which unfortunately didn’t help me at all in my dreams of Arabic language perfection).

She is an artist, and holidays when I was little were filled with sitting up in her studio or in the summerhouse at the back of the garden, throwing paint at pieces of paper and wishing I could create such delicate masterpieces as her paintings. She knitted, and I had a blue cardigan/dressing gown which I wore for years and years after I grew out of it. Alongside the paining and knitting there was tapestry and crochet, and all kinds of other creative pursuits which I keenly tried to imitate.

Later, when I was old enough to hold sensible conversations, we moved into chats across the breakfast table on every subject imaginable. I’ve taken lots of inspiration from her book choices, which are infinite but all somehow educational, meaning she now seems to have a knowledge of just about everything, from Indian colonial history to the Wimbledon Ladies’ finalists of the last 20 years.

And then there were (and are, because they are still there, being played with by her hoards of great-grandchildren) the games. Woofits “Happy Families”, pick-up-stix, snakes and ladders, and a funny little ludo set which retained its pieces like no board game I’ve ever seen. And a box of tiddlywinks, which I never quite mastered. We’d play for hours, graduating on to proper playing cards when we were a bit older. Bridge hasn’t grabbed my attention, but the range of other games I learnt did.

When I lived in Spain, only 3 short years ago, she even came to visit me. We walked around the Alhambra, saw all of the decorated displays, and by the end I was probably more tired than my grandmother. But then, like Geoff, she never liked being called grandmother because it made her feel old, and it is as if she has spent my whole life proving that point to me. She reads this blog, skypes her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and emailed me from her iPad to congratulate me on passing my Masters. I live in the hope that I’ll be so young when I’ve got great-grandchildren of my own.

Jeannine

Happy Birthday Jeannine!

Education, Education, Education

Rant

Let me begin by saying two things. Firstly, I know that once you’ve read this post, dear friend, you’ll probably question why you spend time with me. I like to think there are better reasons than mistakenly thinking we had the same views on education. Secondly, I am always open to my viewpoint being changed by a well-reasoned argument (otherwise known as “if I’m a politician in the future, you can’t hold my current views against me”)

Right, so here goes.

Everyone isn’t entitled to higher education.

Now, allow me to expand. Everyone is entitled to an education. But by the time you get to the age of 18, you should have had appropriate teaching to allow you to make an important choice: whether or not academia is for you. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting to 18 and deciding that you’d like to embark on a career, but that’s not the message I was given when I was that age. I was lulled into a falsehood which dictates that to progress in the modern world you need a degree.

I learnt significantly more from working a job alongside my undergrad than I ever did in earning my 1st class (hons) piece of paper. It frustrates me no end that it’s the latter which makes me employable rather than the former. We’re now reaching a job-market state where there’s a saturation of people qualified to degree level who should get jobs, but can’t, and somehow believe that having been at university for a few years means that they shouldn’t have to lower their expectations.

The reality is, that being at university and doing a waste-of-time generic degree (naming no names, you know who you are) is a way of prolonging our ridiculous 21st century childhood state. And then, when we graduate with our borderline 2:1 generated by multiple choice quizzes and take-home exams, and can’t find a job, we are brought shockingly back down to Earth, mostly under the crushing weight of our now enormous student debt. I’ve been doing this for 7 years now. Trust me. It’s horrendous.

Last week, the government elected to axe the maintenance grant which allows hundreds of thousands of lower-income families to see their children go to university. Lots of people have shared enraged commentaries on how they would never have been able to go to university without a grant to support them.

But here’s the thing.

Yes you would. If you were truly academic, you’d have the security of knowing you’d pass your degree and walk into a job which would give you the income to pay back a loan. Or even better, education would be free to those who were intelligent enough to benefit from it at that level. And if you weren’t smart enough, you could spend those years of your life gaining a real education, learning a trade or even just how to work (something most students completely fail to grasp) rather than spending that hard-earned grant on booze and fancy hipster burgers.

I’m against a lot of things our government has done, and I’m not particularly “for” this move either. But I am against the mentality which our education system has created, which means each child feels entitled to a university place and access to the “university experience”, entitled to a degree, and entitled to a job at the end of it, regardless of if they should have been there in the first place. We’re an enabler society, and it’s ultimately costing us, both in terms of the price of education, but also in terms of the saturation of the job market, loss of truly talented people to other countries or into sectors which can support their growth, and loss of the understanding that what ultimately pays off is hard work.

I await a tirade of angry comments, eagerly.

Regression Therapy and Contemporary Music

Music

I realised I’ve not done a “what I’m listening to” post in a while, and it turns out that my musical remedy to being 25 and having finished my Masters is to go back to listening to all the stuff I listened to when I was 15 (which was 10 entire years ago. 10. TEN).

So, stuff I’m listening to now I’m a grown up:

Like Toy Soldiers – Eminem

Coin-Operated Boy – The Dresden Dolls

Swing Life Away – Rise Against

Praise You In This Storm – Casting Crowns

Make You Smile – +44

Glory Box – Portishead

She Looks To Me – Red Hot Chilli Peppers

Que me quedes tu – Shakira

Better – Regina Spektor

Starlight – Muse

Swing Swing – The All American Rejects

Wires – Athlete

Someday You Will Be Loved – Death Cab for Cutie

Before the Dawn – Evanescence

How To Save A Life –  The Fray

(Having actually searched for the links to each of these, I’m amazed by how accurate I was in guessing they came out when I was around 15. With one notable exception)