Cooking With Richard

Spitfire:

Vulcan bomber, recently restored at the cost of £7m by these guys:

Red Arrows:

Top Gear race across Japan [this link will only work if you’re in the UK] in a fast car versus a shinkansen (and other types of train).

Note: The interesting part starts at around 15 minutes in.

Click for programme

At a pet shop near Hemel Hamster:

おいしそう:

だいげーびる:

M-kun:

The bathroom is vaguely finished, 4 days late (double the original estimate). At least one can now have a bath, although not a shower:

This is what I’m eating at the moment … Reheated curry, peas and bread:

There’s about another 3 days of work to go, if they pull their fingers out (ie. unlikely):

• finish off the grouting and miscellaneous work in the bathroom (½ day)
• put up a new ceiling in the kitchen and plaster the downstairs (1+ day, lots of disruption)
• some electrical work (½ day)
• new carpets everywhere (1 day, but not really disruptive)

The plan you see above is actually the very first time that anyone has written down a plan for the work.

This blog needs a new category.

Forget best, we need worst …

Anyway, this is for Lady E.

In case you were wondering, it’s our bedroom:

.. And the worst thing of all is I haven’t seen my wife for days.

Photos from the Boston Skywalk, stitched together into a panorama using hugin in Fedora:

Click to enlarge

Click to supersize me (TIFF image)

Gyoza and pork ramen from Sapporo Ramen in a little Japanese mall in Cambridge MA. The noodles were exceedingly good:

This is something they call “bubble tea“, which is a sweet tea with tapioca balls. The one I had here was made with red beans and green tea, but you can have other variations. I think this has probably got about a million calories in it, but it’s pretty pleasant to drink on a very hot day like today:

Clam Chowder, essentially a clam/fish soup with cream, with oyster-flavour crackers. This is a Boston / New England speciality. Pretty good actually:

Smoked salmon:

A more posh clam chowder:

Strawberries covered in chocolate, and cake. The strawberries were very tasty:

Red Hat Summit in Boston:

Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox:

Bagels for breakfast:

Da boyz:

Our crazy driving holiday around Scotland is now over. I drove 1,104 miles. Here are some photos:

Troooon

Booooat

♫♬listen to the song ♪♫♬

Arran and Lamlash

Home of the worst pub on Arran …

Lunch

Castles and shika

Shikatetsu …

The Lamb and Whisky

The Array Whisky distillery, home of some rather pleasant spirits.

Loch

Maggie the moggie

It’s my bro’s moggie:

I so want this game …

I think this is a brilliant concept. This artist called “SLINKACHU” paints snails and then photographs them in urban environments. Previously he was famous for doing these little people on ordinary city streets.

I really hope that the artist lets the snails “go free”, perhaps to be discovered by a bemused commuter, or a snail connoisseur…

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While I was looking at this snail art, I saw that the artist had painted a sadly familiar “tag” on a snail, “TOX.08“. If you regularly travel through London, you will be familiar with the depressing vandalism of this teenager. I found this 10 minute documentary on the internet about the culprit of this eyesore, it’s worth watching because it shows the people who have to clear this spam off tubes, and where tube trains go in the night …

Oriental City has been under threat for so long, but it is finally to close at the end of May, to make way for soulless flats and a DIY superstore. (There aren’t enough DIY superstores in London apparently, so a one-of-its-kind shopping centre has to be leveled to make way for one).

I’ve been going there regularly for at least ten years, but today was the last time.

There aren’t really any alternatives. Chinese Wing Yip, down the road, is expanding, but they don’t have the other shops or non-Chinese food. Japanese TK Trading is miles away.

More discussion of the closure …

Thanks to ex-Mayor Ken Livingstone for valiantly defending the store — oh no, in fact he approved the planning application. Well, he’s been thrown out of office now, but his stupid planning decisions like this and others will linger on.

This is what I got from Utsuwa no Yakata Japanese pottery shop:

This morning I was called out of the blue by “George” a researcher at BBC Radio 4 iPM programme, interactive little brother of the PM programme (Radio 4’s 5 o’clock daily news).

George wanted to talk to me about the Great Spam Archive, all the spam I’ve collected in my inbox since August 1997 (archive by date), and I was happy to oblige. I ended up going to Broadcasting House this afternoon, and being interviewed by Eddie Mair about my “favorite” spam, and why on earth I started to collect it (answer: I simply never delete any old email).

The process is a bit strange — they sit you in a sound-proof booth and you talk to the presenter over a microphone. (Eddie was sitting in another BBC studio). The whole interview lasted perhaps 10 minutes after which Eddie politely thanked me and I left. Now I guess they cut the ‘umms’ and ‘errs’ out and cut it down to a 1 or 2 minute slot. I’ll find out soon — the broadcast is due on-air at 5.30pm (in about an hour).

Update

Well, it’s over. They edited it a lot to make me sound intelligent .. I’ll have an MP3 clip from the show up shortly in case people want to listen.

Update #2

No sound file posted by the BBC yet, but they’ve put some background information up on the iPM blog here.

Update - audio

Here it is –> Edited MP3 file with my interview <–

If you want to hear the full program, it’s available for the next week on the iPM podcast site.

Dorchester:

Little Wittenham and the Wittenham Clumps, Northmoor Trust:

Bravery:

Lambs!

Push!

Previously: Uncanny valley of the dolls …

Easter weekend was a wash-out because of the high winds, rain and snow:

We went to the Rose and Crown in Kings Langley for beer and greasy pub fish and chips and ale pie: