Pot64pouri

More bread related paraphernalia has arrived at the Casa Epictetus, including a set of drug dealer's scales and a bag of ascorbic acid. It feels good to have yet another hobby that demands constant spending at a level which it would be hard to justify to someone else. Speaking of which, I have also just bought the new Strelets set of English longbowmen, for no better reason than...well actually for no real reason at all, except that it's new and I wanted it. In fact I must admit to an intense mental struggle before I ended up only buying one box. Yes it's spend and damn the consequences here, an attitude which was only heightened when I went the other day to see my financial advisor. We agreed a certain course of action and then he said that he couldn't execute it immediately because he was going to the Cayman Islands and would let me know when he got back. I cannot decide whether this comforts or alarms me.

 I have been to my first concert of the year, seeing the Ale Marys, who played the same set that they did when I'd seen them three weeks earlier, and which was just as enjoyable second time around. As we left I asked my companion for the evening - a different lady to the previous occasion - for her thoughts and she replied "I thought they were very good. I might bring the dog next time.", a statement that raised so many questions that I was lost for words until it was too late to reply at all.

I have also been to the cinema to see Vertigo, Hitchcock's masterpiece, which stars James Stewart, always watchable, and Kim Novak, after whom a company that I worked for once named a computer in their data centre. (Do people give their computers names any more?) It seems redundant of me to say that it is rather good - it was voted the best film of all time by Sight and Sound magazine - but I'm very glad to have seen it on the big screen. As everybody from Hitchcock onwards has observed, either Stewart is too old or Novak (and also Barbara Bel Geddes, appearing here as supposedly the contemporary of a man fourteen years her senior two decades before as Miss Ellie she was cast as the mother of a man only nine years her junior) is too young, but that's Hollywood for you. The film is set in San Francisco and all the famous sites appear: the Golden Gate bridge, Lombard Street, Fisherman's Wharf, the bit of road near the cathedral where I fell off the Segway - they're all here.

A loaf of bread...

...and thou beside me singing in the wilderness

Omar Khayyam (a) of course. Not the chap who liked the product so much that he bought the company, although I do hope they are related. I can't help thinking that Victor has appeared in this blog previously, so apologies for any repetition. The product that I currently like very much is the breadmaker. Obviously it is immensely inconvenient to use, costs far more than going to the excellent artisan baker five minutes from my house, and has required the acquisition of lots of additional equipment - flour storage, milk thermometer etc - but the bread is really good. I am slightly disappointed that the best results so far have come from ready prepared mixes rather than from my own efforts, but perhaps that's why Waitrose is the spiritual home of the breadmaker owner. 

Last night, following the purchase of yet more expensive ingredients, I set it up so as to have freshly baked bread available first thing this morning; the smell was as every bit as good as you would expect. There has been one other bonus out of all this. Coral Laroc - a name not mentioned here for a couple of years, but still very much around - has gone on a juice fast as a new year detox regime (b) and is permanently hungry. What better entertainment then but to make sure that by email and text she is kept fully informed of just how good my bread (and cakes and biscuits and indeed the sweet potato, chilli and spring onion rosti that I made on Monday) are and how wonderful they taste.

(a) When racking my brains for a quote with which to introduce a post about bread I did briefly consider W. B. Yeast, but nothing relevant sprang to mind.

(b) One reason for not mentioning her very often is that if I posted every time she went on a faddy diet there would be no room for anything else.

Luke Chapter 11 Verse 3

And so that was Christmas. The Misses Epictetus bought me a breadmaker. Had I been asked which kitchen device I wanted I would have gone for a deep fat fryer. Fortunately perhaps, my daughters have more concern for the health of their aged parent than he does himself.

I had no bread flour or yeast to hand so I had to have a go with stuff from the cupboard. I made a sort of sweet, oaty brioche which was very pleasant with hummus for lunch. Tomorrow we start in earnest.

As it is?

And so to the theatre. It is obvious from the comments on my previous post that my readers are a bunch of philistines. Having said that, General Fwa's desire for one of the Trammps' stage suits is understandable, indeed commendable. The subject of dressing up for wargaming has been discussed here before, but going the full disco would be a significant and brave departure. It would, I suggest, work best in multiplayer games where moves, dice rolls etc would be made simultaneously in a choreographed routine by all those on one side of the table, involving a mix of twirls, shuffling feet and syncopated handclaps. This is gold; I haven't been so excited by an idea since the time it was suggested that all competition wargamers wore mankinis.

The relevance of the newly revealed philistinism of you, dear readers, is that I shan't be able to ask you to explain the meaning of Pinter's 'No Man's Land', which I went to see last night. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but must admit that I have bugger all idea what it was about. Memory perhaps? Aging? Marital infidelity? My accompanist for the evening suggested it was about the inscrutability of women, but I suspect that she was merely trying to appear deep and meaningful herself, and in any case there aren't any women in it. Instead, there are four male actors and the words Hampstead Heath and cottage appear a lot, so I'm going to stick my neck out and say there's a gay subtext that I didn't understand any more than I did the rest of it.

I saw the live broadcast  of the production that has been touring the UK before ending up at Wyndham's Theatre on Charing Cross Road, and which features both Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart. The brief recorded interview with the two shows Picard to be somewhat more of a luvvy than Gandalf, which accords with the views of my ex-wife ( who seems to have suddenly started making a lot of appearances in this blog for no particular reason) who got boomed at by him at a reception when he was Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield. As actors however, I'd give McKellen the edge. One lengthy monologue by Stewart in the second act was completely upstaged by the silent MacKellen simply sitting and reacting; an episode that I think proved again the benefit of watching the cinema version, with its cutting between closeups of actors. Kudos must also go to Owen Teale who made the line "We're out of bread" so full of menace that I was unnerved despite being 200 miles or so away.