Making Bagels

If we hadn't been living for so long in such a backwater, we would likely never have resorted to baking our own. As it was, rather than drive for hours to our nearest stockist, wherever that may be, we found a recipe on-line, and went out Friday evening to stock up on the requisite ingredients. Then, on Sunday afternoon, we set to work; and, after a couple of hours variously mixing, kneading, waiting, dividing, shaping, waiting, boiling, coating and baking, we were amply rewarded with a dozen delicious sesame-seed-coated bagels:

We ate a couple each while they were still hot from the oven. As of this morning there were two left... we're planning to make up another batch this coming weekend.

It's the latest in a line of slow news-weeks here, as nothing very much continues to happen... New entries will continue to be sporadic, an intermixed with pre-enjoyed readymade odds & ends until I can think of more things to write about.

Thus far today I have listened to the first six tracks from The Hives' Veni Vidi Vicious, to a few of the songs from Dog in the Sand by Frank Black and the Catholics, to Philip Glass' Violin Concerto as performed by Gidon Kremer and the Vienna Philharmonic; to most of CD 1 of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works vol 2. As I write, the background music is provided by my most recent acquisition: The Carl Stalling Project: Music from the Warner Bros. Cartoons 1936-1958.

I was pleased to discover over the weekend that there are two new single-estate chocolate bars available from Valrhona. I bought one of them, called Ampamakia: the cocoa for which is grown on a plantation in Madagascar - and found it just as good as the Michel Cluizel bars that have been my chocolate mainstays for the past several months.

Weekly Report

As a part of my working routine I am obliged to compile a weekly report every Friday, in which I allocate my forty hours against the various tasks I have been assigned, and wherein I also set my agenda for the week to come.

When I am busy this seems like an unnecessary imposition, pointless paperwork that swallows time that would be better spent doing the tasks themselves. Here, moreover, one observes a paradox: that recording in ones weekly reports the time one spends compiling ones weekly reports, and filling in ones timesheets the time spent completing ones timesheets, are most often frowned upon by ones managers, who prefer to pretend that such administrative overheads are instantaneous. When I am not so busy, writing the report must take on a somewhat creative dimension, as I strive to strike a compromise between appearing to have been busier than I truly was, whilst not seeming to have been dishonest about it.

In any journal-entry I could write this week, there would be a flavour of the not-so-busy kind of weekly report...

My wife cooked us some delicious home-made Cornish pasties last night. These are a particular treat for me, as they take me back to childhood Saturday lunchtimes, when my Gran would bake a batch of pasties for the whole family. The night before we had crab cakes and a niçoise salad, also extremely good.

I finished Haruki Murakami's novel A Wild Sheep Chase on Saturday. This is the seventh of Murakami's books I've read, and pretty much the seventh I've enjoyed. It seemed to me that there was more of a reliance on 'special effects' in this book than in some of his more recent works, by which I mean that his trademark bizarre happenings and eccentric characters seemed more of an end in themseleves, than as a means of expressing a mood or a message. This didn't spoil the book for me in the least, however. While I wait for his newest book Kafka on the Shore to be translated, I can console myself that I've still yet to read The Elephant Vanishes, Hard-Boiled Wonderland or Dance, Dance, Dance... Since then I skimmed my way through the tail end of D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature, and have made the slightest of inroads into vol. 3 of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

We watched Insomnia on DVD earlier in the week: ironically, my wife started to fall asleep three quarters of the way through the movie (on Monday evening). As this was down to tiredness rather than boredom, we returned to the last half-hour on Tuesday. On Wednesday we watched the '95 movie version of Moll Flanders, a great favourite of my love's, which we'd ordered after its recent DVD release: she loved it just as much the second time around, and I enjoyed it too. Season four of The Sopranos got underway on British TV yesterday: we made a point of watching.

Late Roses, Early Snow

Think of something you wouldn't normally buy for yourself, my wife suggested on our anniversary, at a loss as to what kind of gift to get for me. So I thought and I thought, until, the next day, the right something came to mind: a domain name, a web-hosting package, and a Content Management System.

Saturday began in a drably cold way that matched my hungover mood. We'd been out to O'Leary's, then to my colleague Mr. A_______'s apartment for a housewarming party. I'd had a few beers and a bottle of wine, which was as far as my limited drinking ability would safely carry me. My sociability was sadly limited too, and I left before midnight, not because, à la Cinderella, the magic fairy-dust was about to wear off, but because I just wanted to go home and go to bed.

I spent a couple of hours installing the Movable Type software into my newly-acquired webspace, and was delighted to find this was perfectly achievable even for a hungover novice without a proper FTP application.

By the time (mid-afternoon) I walked down to McDonald's to grab us a bag of greasy food, the rain was turning to sleet. When the time came to take Dog for his afternoon walk in the park, the half-frozen slush lay in a thickening film over the grass, rendering it a weirdly pale pastel shade of green. Soon the sleet had turned to snow. We thought it would be a passing flurry, and would likely melt straightaway, but a half inch of it stuck on the grass, on rooftops and windowledges, on car windscreens, and also on last few tenacious roses in bloom behind the Trinity Church.

But autumn is also a time of colour, and of death. At the end the music thus turns into a festive dance con grandezza. Maybe it bears the echo of a sarabande to the dying splendour of summer - or as T.S. Eliot put it: 'late roses filled with early snow'. (Einojuhani Rautavaara).

This, in our third autumn in Sweden, is the earliest in the year we've seen the snow arrive. We're hoping this is a one-off, and not a foretaste of a harsh winter to come.