Category: Uncategorized

This never used to happen…

A Carex hand soap dispenser, unexpectedly dripping.

Climate change benefits – number 94.

Nowadays, storms are worse than they used to be. Fact.

As a result, they have lower barometric pressure at their centres. When the storm gets close to you, the pressure drops, and the air in the hand-soap bottle pushes the soap up and out of the pump nozzle.

Climate change deniers will, of course, say something stupid now…

Time to reflect, before we carry on.

My Mum and Dad liked children. At least, I suppose they did, because they had five of us. They did a good job of teaching us many important things, including compassion, thinking carefully about things, and cookery. Once, when I expressed pleasure that some unusually revolting public figure had died, Mum told me off. “He was some woman’s son”, she said.

The building site next door has been quiet today. They have been given the day off, because today is the fiftieth anniversary of the Aberfan Disaster. I was 17 when it happened, and I wept for hours. Thinking about it today, it is still hard to hold back the tears.


The slip of waste coal killed 144 people, including 116 children, who were in the school next to the tip. A hundred and sixteen children. A fund was set up to help, not that there is any way money can compensate for the loss of even a single child, let alone a hundred and sixteen.

Today, fifty years on, as people here quietly remember this disaster, we have millionaires who own tabloid newspapers, and pay truly horrible journalists to write pieces in which they mock the drowning of children fleeing from wars, and claim they were “staged”. When we help refugees, they write demanding the children be X-rayed to prove they are children.

It is not easy to cope with the vicious, right-wing, unpleasantness that is now so common in the UK. It is very depressing to see what so many of us have descended to, after being the heroic nation that helped to save Europe from fascism. But I shall not give up. I shall continue to urge politicians, above all, but everyone else as well, to be decent. 

Comments are off because, sadly, I am only too familiar with the sort of response that thugs make to articles of this kind. 


It’s Madrid, innit?

The first day we were there, we went for a walk… click on the pictures to see larger versions. Offer me money if you want the full resolution ones…

This is a scene in Calle de Gran Via. There is a lot of traffic, but where it was hiding while I took this, I do not know.

Another impressive building, with what I suspect is a modern addition on the top.

This is the Town Hall, I think. I rather liked the “Refugees Welcome” sign on it.

I‘ve no idea what this building is, sorry. It has a sort of anonymous, Ministry of Certain Things, look to it.

The central parts of the city have a very pleasant, well kept, feel to them.

This is the main library and museum, which we visited another day. 

The city has quite a lot of public art, including this stunning bronze frog. 












































More soon…

A range of lenses…

A range of lenses is useful with a DSLR camera. Here’s a rather poor shot through a closed window, taken with a Samyang 8mm fish-eye lens…




You see the yellow circle on the skyline? If you look in that direction through a Centon 500mm mirror lens, you will see that it’s around the DVLA building in Swansea…




Here it is. Yes, it’s a bit misty today, and shooting through double-glazing was unlikely to give a very good result anyway. I nearly said shooting #throughglass…



Repeat posting – The Fougasse!

Here’s another bread recipe I like, to encourage people to make their own bread. Normally, this is a bacon and onion fougasse, but what I have made here is a vegetarian variation. It’s not that I don’t love bacon, you understand. I’m just eating it less often…


The recipe is a variation on the bacon and onion fougasse recipe printed on the back of bags of Allinson’s Very Strong Bread Flour. You don’t have to have exactly that kind of flour, if you live somewhere that doesn’t have supplies of Allinson’s flour, as long as you use a strong white bread flour, this will work.

You’ll need flour, a sachet of yeast, hand-hot water, olive oil, salt, an onion, garlic (optional), sun-dried tomatoes and black olives. You’ll also need a mixing bowl, a tray to bake them on, a frying pan, and an oven to bake them in.

  • Chop the onion finely, and fry it gently in a tablespoon of olive oil, along with the sun-dried tomatoes, which you should cut into thin strips, and the finely chopped garlic. When you feel they have been done enough, let them all cool.
  • While the frying is going on, put 400g of flour, up to 1½ teaspoons of salt, and a 7g sachet of dried yeast in the bowl. Add 175ml of hand-hot water and 75ml of olive oil.
  • Add the cooled, fried ingredients, and the chopped olives, and mix until you have a fine dough. I use a hand held mixer with two dough hooks for this. It will look like this…
  • Tip the dough out onto the work surface, and knead it until it is smooth. I know, it’s rather lumpy with all those tasty ingredients in it, but just knead it until you think it looks right.
  • Cut it into three or four roughly equal pieces, and shape each of them into an oval. Press them fairly flat, a couple of centimetres thick, and put them on an oiled baking tray.
  • With a sharp knife, cut two long deep slashes down the centre of each piece, and then several slashes on each side, to make a leaf pattern. Here are the ones I did this morning…















  • Now, cover them with oiled cling-film, and put them somewhere warm to rise. They need to double in size, more or less, and this will probably take twenty minutes to half an hour. Put the oven on to preheat while this is going on, set to 220°C, or 200°C for a fan oven.
  • Here they are after rising…















  • Bake your fougasses in the middle of the oven for 15 to 20 minutes. You should end up with something like these…

















I forgot to tell you one of the ingredients I used! Herbs go well in this bread, and you can put them in the flour, at the beginning. These ones contain Greek oregano, which goes very well with the tomatoes and olives. You can use whatever herbs you are fond of, of course.

Fougasses go very nicely with a vegetable soup…


Repeat posting – Focaccia

I fancied a different kind of bread today, so I searched out a recipe I had saved from the Observer Magazine back in 2009. It’s wondrously easy to make focaccia, and it doesn’t take all that long, either. The results certainly look impressive….

The recipe is a Nigel Slater one, but it’s very similar to all the other focaccia recipes I looked at. You need bowl to mix it in, a container to bake it in and a worktop to knead it on.

The container needs to be a couple of inches, or 5cm, deep, and about ten inches, or 24cm across. I used a round one, but use what you have….

  • Put 450g of strong bread flour in a bowl, with up to 1½ teaspoons of salt (I used quite a bit less, as I have fairly high blood pressure) and a 7g sachet of fast-acting yeast.
  • Add 400ml of warm (not hot, it’ll kill the yeast) water.
  • Mix it into a sticky dough.
  • Put flour on your work surface, tip out the dough onto it, and knead it for five minutes. There’s no special technique, just keep folding it over and stretching it out. If it sticks to the surface, put more flour down. You can stop kneading when the dough doesn’t stick to the work surface any more.
  • Put some flour in your bowl, and put the dough back in. Cover it with cling-film or a tea towel, and wait until it doubles in size. Up to an hour, if your kitchen is at a normal sort of temperature.
  • Put the oven on at 220°C, or maybe as low as 200°C for a fan oven. Ovens vary, and you just need to get used to the one you are using.
  • Lightly oil your baking tin, and sprinkle it with cornmeal (polenta, ground maize) to stop the bread sticking.
  • Put the dough in the tin, cover it loosely with cling-film, and let it rise for half an hour.
  • While it rises, chop up some green olives, garlic, parsley, and thyme. Mix them into a tablespoon of olive oil.
  • When the dough has risen, put flour on your fingers, and push them into it, quite deeply, in an artistic fashion. Or clumsily, if you prefer. Sprinkle the oily olive and herb mixture on the top.
  • Bake it for about half an hour. It should be pale gold on top, and crispy.
  • Drizzle it with more olive oil, if you like. Let it cool.
  • Eat it.
Mine came out like this. I was hoping for more variation in the size of the holes, but maybe there are bigger ones further in. The olives and garlic on top seem a little bit crisp, but I’m pretty pleased with this one.


The sad loss of Rik Mayall.

I’ll have you know I was very upset at the death of Rik Mayall. I enjoyed pretty much everything he did on TV, and in at least one movie. The one most tributes don’t mention, The Dangerous Brothers, with Ade Edmondson, was marvellous.
Those early sketches eventually led to Alan B’Stard, a carefully depicted, vile, Tory politician. I seem not to have seen that series, maybe I was somewhere else, or something. But the scripts that I just looked at are… well…
Alan B’Stard: We hear an awful lot of leftie whingeing about NHS waiting lists. Well the answer’s simple. Shut down the health service. Result? No more waiting lists. You see, in the good old days, you were poor, you got ill and you died. And yet these days people seem to think they’ve got some sort of God-given right to be cured. And what is the result of this sloppy socialist thinking? More poor people. In contrast, my policies would eradicate poor people, thereby eliminating poverty. And they say that we Conservatives have no heart.
Alan B’Stard: Who in this country was not moved when that great Englishman, Gazza, wept bitter tears at the World Cup last year? People thought that he was crying because he had been booked by the umpire and so would miss the final. But that was not the reason. He was crying at the thought that the Conservative government, the only government this young hero had ever known, was behind in the opinion polls.
Alan B’Stard: Why should we, the country that produced Shakespeare, Christopher Wren – and those are just the people on our banknotes for Christ’s sake – cower down to the countries that produced Hitler, Napoleon, the Mafia, and the… the… The Smurfs!
And, a final prophecy…
Alan B’Stard: You know the really great thing about a fudged coalition is that neither of us need to carry out a single promise of our election manifestos.

Happy Birthday, Markos Vamvakaris (deceased)

May 10th is the day Markos Vamvakaris was born, back in 1905. He was one of the first and finest Rebetiko musicians.




Markos Vamvakaris was born into a poor Catholic family on the island of Syros in 1905. His father played the greek bagpipes called Gaida and Markos would accompany him on a dog-skin drum. When Markos was eight years old he left school to work with his mother in a cotton thread factory, which he promptly ditched and started picking up odd jobs like newspaper boy, butchers assistant, eventually getting mixed up with the underworld of the streets. He ran away to Piraeus in 1917, supposedly thinking the police were after him for some piece of mischief. There, he worked in a series of gruelling, poorly paid jobs. This was tough, low-down work, but the nights were all about hashish and women.


He frequented the tekedes and by his early twenties had taught himself bouzouki and begun to write songs.  He was kept in fine clothes by an older whore and hung out at the tekes every night. In 1925, Markos heard Old Nikos play bouzouki and was immediately hooked. Six months later he was playing at a teke when Old Nikos stopped by, he couldn’t believe it was the same kid who’d never even played a few months earlier. Nikos said they’d show Markos something in the morning and he’d come back and play it better than them in the evening. 

Even after he began recording, around 1932, and had gained a measure of fame, he continued to work at the Athens slaughter house. His early songs dealt with drugs and underworld themes. He broadened both his lyric base and his appeal when censorship was imposed on the music industry in 1937, though his music always remained within the rebetiko idiom.











Because the bouzouki was considered a low-class instrument, it had not been recorded commercially until 1932 when Yiannis Halikias (aka Jack Gregory), a Greek-American, recorded his “Minore Tou Teke“. The record was very popular, so Spiros Peristeris, who was working as a record producer, composer and instrumentalist for Odeon records in Greece, convinced Odeon to record Vamvakaris. In 1933, Peristeris supervised, and played guitar on Markos’ first recording session (although he had recorded two songs in 1932 for Columbia, they were not released until later). Markos recorded one zeibekiko, O Dervises, and one Hassapiko, O Harmanes. Markos hadn’t considered himself a singer but ended up doing the vocals on these records. They were very successful and Markos’ rough and powerful singing became fashionable.

Markos eventually teamed up with singer Stratos Pagioumitzis, baglamatzis Giorgos Batis, and bouzouki player Anestis Delias to form his famous Piraeus Quartet. 












His popularity was sustained throughout the 1930’s, despite growing political turmoil. The fascist Metaxas ordered the record companies to stop recording hashish songs and make rembetika respectable entertainment. This coupled with the new Greek passion for Italian cantades resulted in enormous changes in Greek rebetiko. And with that came the minor and major scales of piano, guitar and accordion none of which could play the quarter tones required by the old tradition. As a result the oriental flavour of rembetika started to disappear. Vamvakaris and his brother had a brief flurry in the late 1940’s with the famous Kalamata group which included famous musicians like Papaioannou, Hadzichristou and Mitsakis.

















Eventually the style of rebetika that Markos had pioneered became more mainstream, and by the 1940’s Tsitsanis had started changing the subject matter to be about love and less about hashish, prison and other rebetika topics. Likewise, Hiotis started changing the sound of the music, adding two more strings to the bouzouki in 1956 (although he was not, as many claim, the first to do this) and moving towards a more flashy, electric and westernized sound. Markos continued to record in his older style through this period. He died in 1972.

A Noble Scientific Experiment

In which I experiment on myself…

This magnificent weed appeared in the same spot as the smaller version that grew last year. I was pretty certain it wasn’t anything we had planted. 


I asked about it on Google+ and +Andreas Katifes said “We eat that!”


Then, being a cautious type, I asked one of my brothers, who is a famous botanist, and he confirmed it’s a sow thistle, or Sonchus, and is edible.


In fact, it’s one of the kinds of plant that you get in Greek tavernas, served as “Horta”. I rather like it when I’m in Greece, so I decided to give it a try.

I picked a good big bunch, and washed it thoroughly in cold water. It’s growing fairly near our bird feeders, and I didn’t fancy eating anything the birds might have garnished it with. It’s quite impressive how well it repels water; the bits in the picture have been underwater several times.


I picked the best looking parts of my harvest, getting rid of some of the bigger stems and tough, old leaves. Here it is, in water in a stainless steel pan, with some salt and a teaspoon of chopped garlic. There’s nothing fancy to any of the horta recipes I found online; bring it to the boil, and give it however many minutes of that you think best. Some recipes say half an hour, others as little as ten minutes. I settled for fifteen minutes.

And here’s the result!


It has shrunk down quite a lot, the way spinach does. I’ve dressed it with some Greek extra virgin olive oil, and a splash of lemon juice.


I really enjoyed it. It was very similar to the horta I’ve eaten in Greece, which I’m pretty partial to. I think it would be even better if I located a few more of the different weeds that the Greeks use, and mixed them in. I also think ten minutes would have been plenty of time to cook it.


Don’t just rip weeds out of your garden and dump them. See if they can be eaten, that’s my advice.