Words

I am, at this very moment, supposed to be writing a short story for this M.A. course. But I don't have a single idea that seems worth a damn. It seemed like an ideal opportunity to raid the old journal I used to keep when I first got to Japan but I got distracted by what may have been a most prophetic comment by one of my colleagues from Fukui:

"You've outlived your uselessness. Now get back to work."
-D. Rosenfeld

Damn. He may have been right...

A little bit of that dough-ray-me

A while ago I tried making my own bread. I think it came out all right. The crust was a little thick, but tasted all right, if I do say so myself.

Next baking task: challah!

Compromise

One of the things that seems to be in the British media kind of a lot lately is stuff concerned with managing the impact of human life on the ecosystem. Stuff like reducing your carbon footprint or cutting back on the distance your food has to travel from source to stomach. So there's a sense that everyone is expected to sorta pitch in and do their part. Which may be some sort of green descendant of Britain's WWII spirit.

Being a civic-minded chap, I figured to do my part too. Last night when I saw a spider the size of a nine-volt battery hanging out near the sink in the bathroom, I thought "great, he can live in here and eat bugs."

It wasn't until I was going to bed that I realized that I was going to try and sleep in a poorly sealed room with a spider the size of a nine-volt battery roaming around, probably looking for somewhere warm to bunk.

Ecolomologism sucks sometimes.

Do it yourself

Tried something new this morning: making my own bread. Modified a recipe I found on the internet, and had a bit of trouble converting the instructions and quantities to metric. Turns out you can't reliably convert a volume measure like cups of flour to milliliters of flour. Even if you find a volume-weight conversion, the type of flour will vary, and that'll throw off the conversion.

Anyway, the dough is rising now. I'm going to punch it down and see if the yeast has got backbone enough to try rising again. I'll let you know how it turns out.

-Loafing in London

Funny, right?

So, like, a couple of years ago I went to Japan. And I met this great girl there.

But then she went to England.

Then, later, I went to England.

Now she's gone to Japan.

Okay, only for a couple of weeks. But still, c'mon.

Inconvenience Store

I've been here long enough to need to go grocery shopping. C'mon, I can't eat highly corrosive fish and chips all the time. And while food shopping here isn't as difficult as in Japan, I'm still having some trouble. Yes, there's the ever-present 'ou'-flavor. As in "Beef-flavoured tea" or "damson flavour jam." And yes, there is still some confusion as to what exactly is the need for two sets of names for things like eggplants, zucchini or fried-blood-scab-sausage. But the thing that may cause me the most trouble is the fact that I can't always actually attempt the act of purchasing food.

Stores here tend to close around 5:00 PM. Like, every single weekday. Some of the more radical ones stay open 'til 6. You want something after that? Hard cheese, old chap. You'll just have to wait until Sunday. Between the hours of 11 and 4. Maybe. And if you've happened to wind up needing, say, food, well, you'd best head to the pub. Yeah. After hours in this part of London your only options for food at the late hour of 7:20 are a pub, a bar that serves food, or a 40 minute train trip into London where you'll be able to find something at, er, a pub. Or maybe one of those chi-chi restaurants where the chef has his own TV special and a plate of artistically arranged pasta will set you back $37 plus tip.

And there is no such thing as a Kwik-E-Mart.

Oh, you can go to a "Food Shoppe" on a "motorway." Assuming you have a car and about forty minutes to drive to get to a place that sells microwave wraps, diet cola and little tiny baggies of salt and vinegar chips.

Which they will insist on calling "crisps."

I wonder how long it's going to be until I resort to some other way to get a meal here...