In a seasonal development, we walked up to the Hellfire Club at the weekend. I am still stiff. When did my children become faster and fitter than me?
On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Waffle took the boys out and the Princess and I stayed at home. After reading peacefully downstairs for a bit, I went upstairs to see what she was up to. She was sitting in bed reading a book of poetry which had been given to her by a kind relative. “Come downstairs,” I said. She did and we had a Victorian hour while she lay on the rug in front of the fire and read me out the poems she liked. She has also drafted two poems both of which I wanted to put up here but neither of which I have permission to circulate to a wider audience [though one of them is on the wall at school – glory!].
I was very proud on Sunday when she did a prayer from the altar at mass. If you’re 9, it’s no joke to face the entire congregation – admittedly the church was not exactly full but there must have been well over 100 people and most of them were at least 50 years older than her. Alas, as you know pride comes before a fall. My particular fall was to be nabbed by the mass organiser and asked to do a reading or an opening prayer at the next mass which does not fill me with enthusiasm but I could hardly refuse. Oh well.
And in exciting news, my sister-in-law is stranded in New York where she went for a meeting last Saturday. Unfortunate.
And why am I up at all hours writing about random items from my weekend here? I will tell you, of course I’ll tell you. I made a brack from a recipe in the Irish Times [scroll down, scroll down]. I let the raisins and sultanas soak overnight. This evening I folded in the rest of the ingredients. It has been cooking at gas mark 2 for the past 5 hours. Is it cooked? No, it isn’t. This reminds me of the great plum pudding disaster of 2011. No more seasonal baking for me thanks.
Ah hills, I vaguely remember what they are; I wish we had one near Brussels.
I was in New York during a big’outage’ (note the local terminology) a few years ago, though admittedly not while a massive storm was raging. It started while I was at a filming of the Ricki Lake Show (don’t ask), bringing it to a premature end. There followed three says of climbing 13 flights of stairs to get to my bedroom (in the posher hotels, where they were actually bothered about fire regs, the guests had to sleep in the street); the water also stopped working after a while. Still, it was preferable to enduring any more Ricki.
re. the Brack: 800 mL of liquid to 680 grams of flour seems a bit way too much. Did it ever cook?
Event…ually. Was up until 2 in the morning. It was fine but really not worth it.
Yes, hills are good. Tell about Ricki Lake. Ah do.
My fellow traveller’s sister had won a competition to travel the world and write an article for the Guardian on each stop. Ricki was her top recommendation for New York. We duly went. They allocate the seats according to how you’re dressed; as one of the few people not in a tracksuit I was placed right next to Ricki. I was conscious that this, plus the fact that I had a rictus grin on my face throughout while everyone else seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves, made me a natural target for the warm-up guy who was picking on all the foreigners (the poor Germans predictably got the worst of this) and who kept coming back on every time there was a commercial break, which of course in America is every five minutes. I was in constant terror he’d ask me something, pick up on my accent and make me his running gag!
The first programme, which they just managed to wrap as the power cut happened, was a makeover (which, bizarrely, seemed to consist of putting people in pink party wigs and just throwing on some slap then analysing this as some life-changing transformation). The second, which looked more promising, was parents who enter their children in beauty pageants; sadly, this never made it to screen. When the power cut happened the producers appealed for calm but bedlam ensued – people climbing over seats in the dark, screaming and shouting – I suppose it wasn’t that long after 9/11 though there was no obvious cause for worry. It was a relief for so many reasons to get out into the street, though we didn’t know why there was a power cut or how long it would last…
New York was quite nice in the power cut – it was summer so it was all candle-lit picnics in the park eating the food the delis were almost giving away, candle-lit evenings in bars, no feeling of insecurity. There was no transport, though, and I’d really wanted to get off Manhattan and explore.
This is the culprit: http://www.ellielevenson.co.uk/page9.htm
Praxis, you have a very glamorous past..
On interesting television encounters, I was in University Challenge a few years back. Much to our amusement, they film the Jeremy Kyle show in the same studios in Manchester, and the two queues were side by side. Eventually, the Kyle crowd wandered off to be x-rayed and security scanned before filming (apparently there’d been some incidents in the past), while we team members went in another entry to be fed, watered, made-up and patronised by Paxman. (We weren’t Oxbridge.)
We won one round, lost in the second, and I still haven’t been able to look at the DVD!
I think you’re being a bit unfair to Jeremy Paxman there, he’s patronising to everybody. Am very impressed that you went through to round 2 – wonder if I saw you?