17 December 2023
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A Weekend of Carols

I doubt many churches will be leaving their carol services until next weekend so there have been a lot going on this weekend. I’ve had two so far and another one to come tomorrow.

Yesterday was the Diocesan Global Carol Service, hosted at All Saints with Holy Trinity in town. The diocese has a strong strand of intercultural worship, which I hooked into with an event I attended earlier this year. Kev and I joined the worship team for the service and supported songs in languages including Farsi (Iran), Igbo (Nigeria) and more. I also gleaned a lot from Bishop Martyn’s address, particularly the idea of scratch nativities, where you avoid the arguments about who plays the key roles by inviting everyone to come along and act to whichever role they fancy, even if it ends up with three Josephs and four Marys.

Tonight was at our own church. My particular roles were leading the singing of the carols (organ accompaniment and no choir this year, so that part was mainly to give the congregation a clear cue on when to start singing themselves) and leading the intercessions. I was very happy with how my reading team did, who brought the idea I had of splitting each narrative between a couple of readers representing key roles (eg, Mary and the angel, Joseph and the angel, Mary and Joseph, etc). I think it worked well to present familiar readings but in a fresh way.

Tomorrow is probably the easiest of the three for me. I’m playing with the Charnwood Symphonic Wind Orchestra before and after the mayor’s carol service (back at All Saints in town again) as well as supporting some of the carols in the event. For that one I just have to sit on the back row and play the basslines as shown by the music (although, to be fair, that only seems easy because I’ve been building those reading skills for the last couple of years).

16 December 2023
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Christmas Sing Around 2023

Three songs for me at the Christmas sing around at The Plough Inn. I opened with While Shepherds Watched, to the original Cranbrook tune, on mandolin. That was an opportunity to get some extra practise in for leading the same song at the Diocesan Global Carol Service in the evening. Next time it was my turn, I went for Good King Wenceslas, also on mandolin. We won’t gather again until after the feast of Stephen (26 Dec) and I enjoy the opportunity to do the voices of the king and his page as well as the overall message of the song. Finally, I did a song on my bass (I had the six string electric with me, also ready for the carol service): God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.

Lots of other songs from the other musicians too, both seasonal and not. I look forward to rejoining this talented bunch on Saturday 30th December.

15 December 2023
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Bird food

Back in the summer, we visited a dog show in Long Clawson, where one of our neighbours was taking several of her dogs. On the way, we passed a farm advertising bird food which, when I looked it up later that day, turned out to be Brinvale Bird Foods.

Their prices turned out to be quite reasonable and we got some supplies, mainly their ‘sparrow’ mix, which is good but seems prone to clumping in damp weather. We decided to pop over there in person today and picked up some other varieties. The person in the shop also confirmed that they had seen the clumping in the winter and use a different mix instead, so we’ll experiment with creating some ‘cocktails’ of different ingredients and see what works for our local feathered friends.

13 December 2023
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Helleborus bottled

I’m glad I didn’t bottle my Helleborus brew when I first tested it a few days ago. I thought it might have bottomed out at 1.010 but yesterday (and today) it had got down to 1.004. One the advantages of the method I have adopted recently (mashing with 10l water and then sparging with another 3l) is that I have a lot more wort and so I don’t mind doing a few samples.

The “disadvantage” is that, even with drawing extra samples, I can expect to get more bottles at the end. That’s not bad in itself but it means, with this second brew of the year, I’ve already used up most of my collection of bottles. Fortunately, I think the previous brew has now reached a drinkable state so I’ll be able to start making room for another brew in the New Year (and consider how I might store a few more bottles in future).

12 December 2023
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Training Band Christmas Concert 2023

Instead of rehearsing tonight, Charnwood Training Band performed a concert of the pieces we have been working on this term for friends, family and a few members of the Concert Band who were able to make it down early.

We’ll be picking up some new pieces next year, a couple of which we’ve had a brief look at and others which are yet to be purchased. I’m also going to have a stab at doing a simple arrangement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony as I wasn’t keen on the preview of the one that was available (which sounded a bit too simplified). That will keep me occupied once all the Christmas stuff is done.

11 December 2023
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Robots (the animated film)

Last night, Jane and got fed up of scrolling through multiple streaming services trying to find something that we both fancied watching and decided to fire up the DVD drive instead and dig back into our small collection. What we picked out was Robots (2005), an animated film that tracks the quest of a small town protagonist who heads to the big city to pursue his dream of making a career as an inventor. It probably doesn’t give too much away to say that he succeeds, making friends, getting the girl and saving the world in the process.

I’d forgotten just what a brilliant film it is. It wasn’t a Pixar production (instead it came from Blue Sky Studios) but I’d put it up alongside the best of their work regarding both visual presentation and the plotting and scripting. It is helped by a strong voice cast, blessed particularly by the energising spark of the late Robin Williams doing the kinds of things he did best. I also spotted numerous homages to other films I am familiar with and I expect I missed many more.

The numbers suggest it did pretty well (estimated $75M budget and over $260M worldwide gross) but it isn’t a film I’ve heard many people talking about. If I mentioned something like Toy Story, Star Wars or Ice Age (the Blue Sky Studios series you probably have heard of), I’m pretty sure most people likely to be reading this would know those franchises but this one never made it to the franchise stage and I felt I had to qualify the title with “an animated film…”.]

Perhaps the title was too generic? Nevertheless, highly recommended for a funny, warm-hearted film that ought to appeal to a wide swathe of people.

10 December 2023
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Flyaway

Last night was windy and, this morning, we saw that both of the cold frames at the canal end of the garden had disappeared. They are the type with thin, hollow metal poles and plastic connectors and the covers were starting to wear but they have weathered stormy weather before.

One turned out to have just gone a few feet away and was sitting, right side up, in the canal. We could reach it from the wall and the end of the garden and it doesn’t seem any the worse for wear although we’ve now got the frame anchored down with a lot of bricks as well as a few pegs.

The other? That’s anybody’s guess. I wandered quite a way up and down the canal side, out of sight of our house in both directions, but there was no sign of it. Either it got lifted up and deposited further afield (or over a fence or wall but not in the water) or somebody else spotted it and retrieved it. The latter, at least, would be better than having it adding to the rubbish in the area.

Will we replace it? Possibly but probably with an upgrade to a stronger and more anchored design.

9 December 2023
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Chicken Dopiaza

I stumbled across a YouTube channel this morning offering a “30 minute” Chicken Dopiaza recipe (an onion-heavy curry dish) and, by this evening, I’d cooked up a version of it.

Chicken Dopiaza

30 minutes? It probably took me an hour or more in total, including finding the various spices (or the nearest equivalents) and doing all the prep work. I’m sure preparing three different batches of onions ought to figure in the cooking time. However, if you aren’t in a rush, it is a tasty recipe.

I scaled everything down by half and had to make one or two substitutions. For example, my ‘curry mix’ was garam masala (which I have quite a lot of) with some tumeric mixed in. I’d say that the overall dish came out a bit on the wet side. I reckon I could have halved the liquid (the ‘stock’ created by boiling the first batch of onions) in half again, or perhaps it just needed to be cooked over a more intense heat to drive more of the water off. Tasty overall though and I wouldn’t have been too disappointed to get something similar if eating out at a curry house.

8 December 2023
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Super Crisps

Sometime ago, I got a mandoline — the slicing gadget, not the musical instrument. With a sharp blade set against a depth guide, you can quickly slice things to a consistent width. That includes fingers, so I make good use of the gripper tool that comes with it and also a pair of cut resistant gloves!

My reason for wanting one was to make potato crisps using my deep fryer and, although it has been pressed into service for plenty of other projects, today was the first time I actually tried this project. The results were fantastic!

One medium potato yielded a good portion for two people. I sliced it on the thinnest setting, dropped the slices in salted water and then set them on racks to dry off. That could have been done a few hours earlier but a little bit of water doesn’t matter in the context of a fryer that is deep enough not to have any danger of bubbling over. I put the basket in first and dropped in the slices, batch by batch, so that they have formed a skin before they hit the wire, preventing them sticking.

At the point they were just beginning to colour, I shook off the excess fat and turned them out onto kitchen towel on a plate before collecting in a bowl. Once all the slices were done, I briefly refried them (larger batches) to deep the colour and, once back in the bowl again, seasoned with salt, black pepper and some sumac powder.

The process is quite labour intensive and requires a certain energy investment. They also probably won’t keep very long. However, it saves all the embodied energy of the production and transport of a packet of factory-produced crisps and doesn’t require the hard-to-recycle packaging so I will certainly be making more potato crisps in the future.

7 December 2023
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Answered and Unanswered

I have had a detailed answer back from the local MP with regard to the question I sent a few days ago comparing the Elgin marbles with MPs (and still no reply from the prospective Labour candidate). However, while I can grant that some respect, it entirely fails to grapple with the question of why it is okay for the Government to seek to change the law regarding migrants but not about blocks of marble.

Could it be, perhaps, that lots of people have written to her about the migrant issue and I’m mainly getting a standard response? I hope so because at least that demonstrates there might be a level of compassion from my fellow denizens of this ‘town of refuge’.

Meanwhile, it remains unlikely that I’ll ever find myself moved to vote Conservative but I will be considering whether my voting tactic will be to vote Labour (the most likely to unseat the Conservatives but still facing an uphill battle) or to go for a more minority party to express my discontent with the present incumbents and perhaps give a bit more hope to one of the further off challengers.

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