Oolong's New Writeups

January 1, 2010 (essay)

2010-01-01T11:24:13Z

Reasons I Get Grumpy About New Year

Mid-winter is a bloody stupid time for a new year celebration. This isn't a time of new beginnings, it's a time of huddling around snuffling, wishing it wasn't so bloody cold, and cheering yourself up with the odd bit of carousing.
It's all the more stupid when you consider that by and large we adopted the Roman names for months, even though they obviously count from March* - around the time of the Spring Equinox, a very sensible time to celebrate the coming of the new. So our year ends after the twelfth month, 'Month Ten'.
The date was originally fixed to coincide with the Winter Solstice, as was Christmas*, but because humans hadn't got the hang of calendars yet, they ended up getting spread out. So we have three celebrations over the course of about a week and a half, if you bother celebrating the actual solstice.
I've been around too many people on coke at New Year. It's been a while

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Spice cake with pear butter filling (recipe)

2009-12-16T19:39:53Z

I'm not an experienced baker. That's partly because I've been cooking vegan for the last ten years, and before that, I hardly cooked at all. Also, I'm not one for following recipes, and I hate cooking anything that's less than great. These things add up.

A couple of months back, however, I had some astonishingly good vegan cupcakes: perfect, moist, fluffy sponge, far lighter than the dense-but-delicious results I'd had substituting flax seed for egg in chocolate cake. It turns out they were made using soy milk and vinegar - my host reckoned the vinegar curdles the soy in such a way as to make it act rather like egg white, holding bubbles beautifully as long as you get it into the oven fast enough.

Knowing that the perfect vegan sponge was possible, and hearing that it's not even very difficult, I decided it was time to experiment when my friend announced she was throwing a Cake Party. One of the things about not eating eggs is that…

The Remains of the Day (review)

2009-12-10T14:01:48Z

In many ways, this film is perfect: It is impeccably cast, gorgeously shot, with a spot-on original score.

It is also a brave and interesting film, for a number of reasons - above all because it takes cowardice as its theme, and explores it deeply with an unflinching eye. We see an awful lot of films about bravery, heroism, people risking everything for the sake of others or to Do The Right Thing; the flipside is seldom explored, and it doesn't make comfortable viewing.

Our protagonists here are thoroughly decent people, getting on with what they feel sort of obliged to be doing, but never quite having the courage to do what they really should do. With hindsight, it seems perfectly obvious that it was a grievous mistake to encourage Nazi Germany to re-arm and become a major player in Europe, however ungentlemanly it was to cripple the country at the end of World War One; Lord Darlington's refusal to face up to what was happening smacks of moral cowardice…

Chocolate and Chestnut Risotto (recipe)

2009-10-08T07:24:37Z

Sometimes I get seized by a vision of something I think I could cook, that I've never heard of anybody else cooking but which feels to me like it could be really, really good. Every now and then it turns out that I'm wrong, and my crazy ideas don't add up to something delicious after all. Most of the time though, I find that I am right and make something I'm really happy with, like chocolate risotto with chestnuts and pears.

For once I pretty much know how much I used of each of the ingredients, because I followed the risotto essentials from the excellent mushroom risotto recipe (one of the few recipes I've ever actually followed as such) in The Vegetable Book, by Colin Spencer (one of my all-time favourite books). This provided a good-sized helping for three people, possibly greedy people. You could probably feed four average-sized stomachs without too much trouble. I would describe this as semi-sweet - enough so that it feels indulgent, but not…

Editor Log: July 2009 (log)

2009-07-17T17:16:36Z

Hello! Apparently I'm officially in charge of this thing for the next few days, or something. Fortunately I've just about finished moving house myself, so I'm in a position to take up some slack.

Here's some stuff that's been bouncing around in my brain for a while...

On Poetry

First and foremost, poetry is not easy. Okay, sometimes a fine poem pops fully formed into someone's head... but that's not usually how it works, and I always suspect that when it does happen that way, it's usually because the poet has already consciously practised their craft enough for their subconscious to get the hang of it. In almost all cases, writing a good poem takes some application.

Imagining that poetry is easy is, I think, a common mistake. In fact I strongly suspect that it is the mistake at the root of at least half of all genuinely bad poems, as well as forming part of the reason some people dismiss poetry in general a bit too easily. I went to see Stephen Fry talk a couple…

Trafalgar Square (place)

2009-06-15T18:01:00Z

Trafalgar Square is one of the two main places that demonstrations end up in London, and I've probably been there for demonstrations more often than I have just wandering around London. On May Day 2000 I was stuck behind police lines there for several hours. It's a great rallying point, and a fine stop-off place for a passing tourist even now that they've starved out the pigeons. Otherwise, though, there's just not much call to go there unless it's New Year's Eve and you really love enormous crowds.

The Square is designed to be impressive, and it doesn't disappoint in this respect. The sheer size of the space, the enormous lion statues, and the massive public erection that is Nelson's Column, give it the air of an Important Place where Important Things are likely to happen, probably involving Important People with Important Ideas. All of this goes to explain why so many political rallies happen there - plus, it's only about ten minutes' walk from the…