Rain yesterday. Blue skies today. Rain forecast tomorrow.
Status:
Popped into work briefly to take a few photos and get some flour. We got given an unwanted bread maker a while back and it’s fantastic. Takes two minutes to load it up with yeast, flour, salt and water, press two buttons and five hours later it contains a hot loaf of bread. We’ve adopted a number of kitchen gadgets over the years – juicers, air fryers, courgette peelers – and they’ve all wound up back on the street WhatsApp group. But the bread maker is never leaving.
The joke at Loaf is that I’m the only person who works there who isn’t really that passionate about food, let alone bread. I got the job for other reasons, so it’s quite ironic that while I was signed off with chronic fatigue I started baking. Not that the bakers at work would recognise what I do as “baking”.
Overnight listening:
- In Our Time: The Battle of Trafalgar - turns out it didn’t really affect the war and Napoleon shrugged the defeat off, but it did allow the UK to endlessly milk it for propaganda purposes.
Music:
Reading:
- The Outsiders: why Francis Ford Coppola’s coming-of-age drama is secretly gay
- How The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds showed the world that sampling could be an art form - When this came out I was just the right age for it to be transformative. I remember buying the album in Woolworths, of all places.
- ‘If I stopped using speed it would be a massive step back’: Life with undiagnosed adult ADHD - I was talking to someone about how ADHD medicine is basically speed and that those who can’t get a prescription self medicate, and quickly realised I had no idea what I was on about. Now I do.
- Women’s Institute will no longer accept trans women as members from April - notable that, as with the Guides, the organisation desperately doesn’t want to do this but “legal advice” says they have to in case some transphobe sues them and legal costs drain their coffers. They might want to disobey the law for moral reasons but can’t afford it. Classic chilling effect overriding common decency. A fix to the law would solve this but I can’t see our coward government doing that.
- Obsessions, Possessions: Coventry Biennial - great to see this is still going and still artist-lead.
Watching:
- Harvest my Borlotti beans with me - Gerald Stratford, aka the red cabbage guy, is bascially my late step-grandfather in every way. I sent the channel to my sister and she agrees. Quite uncanny. (I have quite strong West Country roots and can do the accent on demand.)