Have a cup of coffee, put a cd on...

It had to happen eventually; I am sorting through my cd collection.

I'm currently listening to a Pulp bootleg cd from a Shepherds Bush concert in 1995 to decide if it stays or goes, and the riff at the beginning of Disco 2000 is *still* one of my favourites. But do I really need bootlegs of live Pulp shows? I'm listening to this one through to see if Jarvis says anything incredibly adorable, but so far he's just been dissing horoscopes ("fucking bollocks", apparently) and talking about home furnishings. Not a patch on the banter you get on his Sunday Service on BBC radio 6. I also have a lot of Pulp CD singles, the earlier ones deserve to stay in my collection, but I don't really need the single version, plus two remixes, of Party Hard. Does anyone?!

My cd collection is very late-90's focused, as this was what I was (retroactively) into in my late teens and early twenties. Think Shine compilations cds, the Slingbacks, Pulp, Placebo, My Life Story, Lush... so it's really not representative of "the sort of music I like nowadays". I remember going mad (a slight over-reaction) when a new significant other started looking through my cd collection and making assumptions about me and my tastes accordingly. Because whilst my tastes have moved on, I've not really been buying the cds to reflect it. (I will leave you to make your own assumptions about how I have been acquiring music if not by buying it on cd. Clue: I haven't just been buying it on vinyl instead. And I keep it mostly on my computer.)

A lot of my cd collection was amassed during my university years, when I worked at a secondhand record shop and volunteered at a books & music focused charity shop. Secondhand cds were therefore cheaper than cheap for me, and so I ended up with the entire Super Furry Animals collection without really noticing (a collection which has now been whittled down to "Rings Around the World" when I realised I didn't really like them that much, if at all. I also discovered last year that I owned almost all the White Stripes cds, including a bizarre release called "Electrostripes", comprising entirely of electro covers of the White Stripes. Not that remarkable until you realise I have little more than a passing fondness for either the band or the covering genre.)

There is also a small selection of cds in my collection (misleadingly filed amongst all my others) that are not cds to be listened to, but artifacts from past relationships disguised as cds to be listened to. I'm talking about mix cds that exes made me, that I didn't really like but as I liked them at the time I can't really bring myself to throw away. I'm not going to get rid of these, but they have no place in my cd collection.
Then, even more toxic, are cds that exes copied for me which contain music I would quite like to listen to but everytime I pick them up the cute messages written on them spiral me into a mood completely different to the one I was in when I first thought "you know what, I'm in a good mood. I'd like to listen to some Tilly and the Wall". I have finally hit upon the solution of ripping all these cds to my computer and filing away the cds themselves into suitcases with other relationship detritus, as mp3s via itunes or ipod pack (slightly) less of a punch than her handwriting. Hopefully as I listen to the music in this new digital no-mans-land I can make new, happier associations than the ones I currently have.

The cds I *have* been buying since my record shop assistant days tend to be small bands, either unsigned or signed to DIY labels, like Ste McCabe, Hotpants Romance, The Lovely Eggs, Das Wanderlust that I have seen live and want to support, enthusiastically. Which seems like a reasonable compromise - if they are the only cds I buy they are probably the most deserving of my money.

My cd collection is never going to be accurate way to read my personality (and whoever came up with that suggestion probably read High Fidelity too many times) but at least after today it will only contain things I actively want to keep.

The Muffins Are On Me.

I got my copy of Vegan Brunch through the post this morning and got completely over excited. Our Saturday post arrives around 11am, so by the time I had looked through the book and decided what I wanted to make, it was already lunchtime. I went out on my bike for ingredients to make English Muffins and Scrambled Tofu (and also picked up some reduced plantain which I think I will cook up for brunch tomorrow), and at about 4pm sat down to this feast:

And (whilst it may not be the most photogenic meal ever and could have done with some green vegetables in it) it was great, and the potato salad on the right was made with the last of my smile potatoes! I've never made (savoury) muffins from scratch, so that was pretty exciting. I am already planning a smoked paprika version, and a marmite version. Mmmm. And scrambled tofu. I know it's this big vegan cliche staple that everyone is bored with, but I'd never tried it, and I think I could eat a lot of it before I got bored.

Vegan Brunch is a very exciting cookery book. I already own a couple of books by Isa Chandra Moskowitz (Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar) and they are all beautiful and entertaining and inspiring.

The only thing that trips me up is the American English (as these are American cookbooks), which is particularly difficult when it comes to measurements/volumes and the fact that some ingredients have different names. Like what the American's call cornmeal, we call maize flour - or more commonly - polenta. So I often have to approach recipes with my computer on in the background so I can google anything I don't understand.

Whilst trying to work out what cornmeal was, I came across this site, which promises to answer "life's vexing cooking questions". It's set up in a Q & A style, and you can search the archive or submit new questions. The tone of the answers can be a bit sarcastic at times, but it's a really useful site especially if you are trying to bridge the American/British cooking terms divide.

I also discovered that US and UK teaspoons and tablespoons are not exactly the same size as their transatlantic counterparts, which led me to this site which not only gives conversions from US teaspoons to UK teaspoons, but all sorts of other useful conversions, like a cup of flour converted into metric weight. Although to be honest I just have a set of American-size measuring cups which I use for any American cookbooks.

"Why not smile? You've been sad for a while."*

This morning I have been spring-cleaning my garden, making it tidy enough to invite friends round for homemade wine and fires in the chimnea, pruning shrubs to make way for the new spring growth, and having a rationalisation of my gardening equipment before I move. I have countless seed trays and pots, which seem to increase in number each year even though I use very few of them. I've also got a load of old tyres that I painted up in bright colours and then stacked up to grow potatoes and strawberries in, which are not very transportable once full of soil and plants, so I'm not going to take with me when I go.

I put a post on the classifieds site at work to see if anyone wanted my excess seed trays, pots and tyres, and a woman got in touch to say she would love to have them as her son wants to start growing vegetables. So I feel pretty happy about that, not only have I de-cluttered and made my garden more habitable, but a little boy can learn about growing vegetables!

Whilst emptying the compost out of the stacked up tyres, I discovered the very end of the yield of last year's homegrown potatoes - a variety called "smile"! They are so-called because of the little half moon markings (which you can see clearly in the photo on right hand potato) which look like a smile. There are just enough potatoes for making a portion of potato salad, one of my favourite things to make with little homegrown potatoes.

*The subject line of this post is taken from one of my favourite REM songs, "Why Not Smile", and if you have spotify, you can listen to it here: R.E.M. – Why Not Smile - Oxford American Version

Springtime is the Season

"The springtime is the season where everyone's a friend

Loneliness and desperation both come to an end

No matter how you've died through winter, in spring you're born again

Your life might not be going good but spring helps you to pretend."

(Of Montreal, Springtime is the Season)

Today is the first day of spring.

Mid week I concocted plans to make a banner with this quote on it, and suspend in in the park today. I found some old fabric I could use, but when I tried to start crafting I found the paint I was going to use had solidified, and it was raining, and I wasn't feeling particularly full of the joys of spring, so it didn't happen.

I sorted through my paint cupboard in the hope of finding something else I could use, but there was nothing that would be weather resistant. But this did mean I finally got round to sorting through my paint cupboard. Several tins that had completely dried up got thrown out, and there's a few more that I will hang on to just before I move, and if I still haven't used them I can send them to this ace local project called Seagulls which collects old paint to be redistributed amongst the community.

I also collected three more of those brewery crates (after persuading my sister to take a trip to the supermarket with me in her car, we stopped en-route). I now have them in red, blue, green and black! I realised the backyard I've been getting them from belongs not to a terraced house, but to a closed down off-license cornershop, which explains why the crates are there.

Do you want this box? Part Two

On Thursday I received a message from a friend that said:

"Always loads of cardboard boxes in the Merrion Centre loading bay, get in by the hotel. Ask if you need more help."

After this fantastic tip-off, I met the him outside the Merrion Centre when he finished work and collected 7 boxes out of the recycling bins. And there were more, that's just all I could comfortably carry. (And I mean comfortable in the same way that trying to sleep on the megabus is comfortable.) So that's a supply I can tap into on any day it looks like I might not hit my quota.

I've also started thinking about how to transport all my bottles of homemade wine when I move, which led me to a stash of discarded brewery crates.  It took me a long time to work out that brewery crates would be the best way to transport my wine. I'd thought about just putting them in cardboard boxes with bubblewrap (no no no), and then about those cardboard fold-out wine carriers you get from the supermarket, but after having the question in the back of my mind for a couple of days I suddenly remembered these crates I had seen months ago (the sturdy plastic sort that hold 12 bottles) in the backyard of an empty house on my way home from work. I figured they have already been out of circulation so long that the brewery wouldn't miss them, so I might as well use them. I took one today (which I am going to count as today's quota for my "do you want this box?" challenge, even thought it's not made of cardboard), and I plan to pick up another crate each time I'm going past so that I end up with seven or eight of them. Because as well as carrying bottles, they also make great outdoor stools if you upturn them and put a cushion on top. Let's hope we move somewhere with a yard or garden!

I've been making wine for about 18months, and I've probably got about 50 bottles of wine maturing, dating back from when I started. I've also got 9 demi-johns still full of wine, which should be ready to bottle before I move (if not before), so that's another... 54 bottles! Over 100 bottles of wine!!

Wow. I'd never really stopped to think about how much wine I would end up with, I just kept making exciting new varieties, or making more of the delicious ones that got drunk straight away.

"Hope is the thing with feathers"

In an earlier post, I was lamenting the fact that I couldn't scan in an illustration of a blue tit from my favourite bird identification book, as I didn't have the right leads to make my scanner work. Well, two trips to PC World later (have mercy on my soul) and an hour long tech-support session with my brother over skype whilst we tried to download the correct driver, I now have a fully working scanner!

I love this book so much! I got it for 50p from one of the few charity shops that will still sell you worn out, written in books for under a pound, rather than brand new/barely read books for nearer a fiver. On the front page, it says "To Daniel, with love from Bristol Granny xxx" and the spine is coming off, but this only endears it to me further.

I was tidying up my utility room recently, and I came across a bird feeder and a large unopened bag of peanuts I bought in the winter. I decided that if I hadn't at least started the bag before I moved, they would have to be thrown away. So I filled up the bird feeder and hung it up from the porch in my back garden, easily accessible to the bird community, not so easy for my adorable cat to pounce.

And at the weekend I saw a blue tit feeding on the nuts! The glee, the excitement, the unadulterated pleasure that I felt! It was better than getting a parcel through the post, or getting a splinter out my hand. The once-full feeder is now only three quarters full, and I am so happy that I will be able to give the peanuts away one at a time to the birds, rather than keep them in a cupboard and ultimately throw them away.

The subject line of this post is taken from Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope"

Hope 
   

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Do you want this box? Part One

I am moving house soon, and I only realised last week that I am going to need a lot of cardboard boxes. And I only realised that when a colleague said to me "You're moving house soon, you'll need a lot of boxes. Do you want this box?".

Yesterday I set myself the challenge of finding one cardboard box every day until I move and I found three (all in commercial bins on my walk home). Depending on how easy it is to find these boxes, I will either stick exactly to the "one-a-day" rule, or allow an average of one a day (so that the three I picked up yesterday will see me through til the weekend if there's slim pickings today and tomorrow).

I find it easier to do this kind of thing if I make it into a challenge.

I've been at my present house for around six and a half years now, and I have amassed a lot of stuff.  If I have less stuff, I will need less boxes. I'm not going to take this to its logical extreme, and get rid of everything that won't fit in my three boxes, but I am trying to be quite ruthless and downscale my possessions. But how do you even start?

(I own two microwaves and two copies of Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body" and two cast iron casserole dishes. In all these cases I only regularly use one of each, so maybe my duplicates would be a good place to start...)

One friend of mine, when moving from Sheffield to Leeds, set herself the target of reducing her books, film collection and clothes by a third. This appeals to me in its boldness, but for it to really work accurately, I would have to either tackle each category in one go, or I would have to keep count of the number of items kept and discarded to make sure I really did a third/two thirds split. Maybe this system worked for her because she had a less precise, literal interpretation of "a third" than I do.

As I like to gradually pair down my possessions I need a different approach. Another person I knew of apparently gave away one item a day. Unfortunately I acquired this information secondhand, and didn't know him well enough to ask at what point he stopped. What if I use this method and it gets completely out of hand?!

When it comes to sentimental items, I have started taking advantage of any level-headed and unsentimental moments when they occur. I knew that keeping hold of the first flowers my ex ever gave me (three years on they were completely shrivelled and faded as they were never intended to be 'dried flowers') was a bad idea, and to transport them to my new house would be some kind of oversentimental madness. I try and pack that kind of past-relationship-ephemera away into boxes even when I'm not about to move (shoebox after shoebox of letters and trinkets that I don't want to part with, but if I was confronted with them on a daily basis I would find it hard to get out of bed, to misquote the Tindersticks), and the fact that these flowers had sat in a wine bottle on my shelf for so long was a regular reminder of the relationship that I didn't need. And it's not like no one has brought me flowers since then. But I had tried and failed to compost them in the past, and each time I got close I remembered the circumstances they had been presented to me, when after several heartwrenching months of are we/aren't we she decided if she decided she *was* sufficiently over her ex to give the relationship the chance it deserved, and met me at the bus station after work with a bunch of flowers to tell me.
But then this weekend, I thought about the relationship, and realised that even if I throw these flowers away, the relationship still happened. I don't need to keep them to prove that once upon a time, she wanted to be with me. And I threw them away.

And I felt a little bit better.

"Wow, that's a lot of tea..."

Despite drinking a lot coffee, I do like tea. There's a line in one of Jackie Hagan's poem, that goes something like:

"Bisexuality. It's a bit like choosing between tea and coffee."

Whilst I unfortunately can't remember the rest of the poem, I think about that line pretty much *every time* I choose which one to have.

I drink coffee in the morning to help me wake up, and once I've had one I tend to make it two or three but I try and switch to tea after that. I like to invite friends round for a cup of tea and a chat, but if I was "inviting someone in for coffee" I would probably do so in less euphemistic terms. Tea is calming and comforting and sociable and sometimes even medicinal but I have a coffee addiction that isn't going anywhere.

My coffee supplies are limited to a jar of instant coffee for the cup I have before work, and a packet of ground coffee for when I have enough time to make a cafetiere full. My tea collection, on the other hand, has now reached the following epic proportions:

 

(When you click on the image to enlarge it, you will notice it's slightly blurry. This is ironically due to the amount of coffee I drink, making it hard to keep a steady hand when taking photos.) 

I'm not going to buy any new tea until I move house in a few months time, to try and get this collection under control, so that I don't end up in a Go Fish-esque situation (0:57 seconds through the clip).

I spent years thinking that I should watch Go Fish, with it being such a milestone of queer cinema, but when I finally got hold of a copy I was kind of disappointed.  The scene that the tea clip is taken from is lovely (and spot on in terms of the awkwardness you experience when you realise the person you are into is *way* more into tea than you are), but I cringed my way through the rest of the film.