Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

The water boiler in the local ‘tea point’ is bust. Again. I tried making a coffee by adding coffee granules to cold water and then nuking the result in the microwave. Sure enough that gets it hot, but whatever chemical reaction you get by pouring hot water onto coffee granules does not replicate if you heat up coffee dissolved in cold water. So now I have to trail off to the next nearest ‘tea point’, half way around the building.

This is the second taste disaster I have been confronted with in less that 24 hours. Last night we decided to make our own Indian dinner. Butter chicken, rice and a Daal. How hard could it be, we’ve made other Indian food quite easily and enjoyed it.

To be fair, the butter chicken was edible, if lacking something. Perhaps next time we will be a little more enthusiastic in checking the mix of ingredients; we used dried, ground spices instead of fresh in several places and I suspect this was somewhat detrimental to the result. Still, as I say, it was edible.

The Daal. Oh, what shall I say of the Daal?

I have never had a good experience with a lentil. That should have been the warning. Lentils are little beads of demon poo. No recipe worth the eating should have lentils in it. Whatever you cook using them, no matter how few there may be in the recipe, you just end up finding oddly transported and transferred lentils everywhere. And they become stickier than the most powerful super magnet, so when you wash up something that had no business meeting a lentil, you find one of the little buggers glued limpet-like to the bottom.

Anyway, that’s what happens with the odd lentil here and there. Daal, though, contains many lentils and individual demon poo pellets become demon diarrhoea.

We took lentils; we added water. They drank it, so we added more. We added spices. We added more spices. We added onion, we added tomato, we added coconut milk, we added garlic. Potatoes went in, but never came out. The lentils took it all and came back for more. We boiled, we simmered and we stirred. We coaxed, prayed and cursed. The wet orange gloop leered at us but remained unmoved: it just became the inevitable boiling hot orange demon poo.

I transferred it to another hob so we could get on with the butter chicken. The Daal didn’t like that, oh no, sirree: it spat at us. It spat like Old Faithful with belly ache. Then it spat again, a good, gutsy gob-ful. I put it back on its original hob and it calmed down. We scrubbed the hob, the tiles, the extractor fan and the side of the fridge. We mopped the floor. We have immovable iridescent – though oddly primarily orange – blobs that refuse to be cleaned on previously white surfaces. The grout between the tiles has become Daal. There is something eating a hole in my slipper.

Eventually we tried it: hot, sloppy tasteless but irritatingly spicy orange sludge. With strange brown bits.

Furtle and I went to bed a little hungrier than usual last night. We didn’t have quite enough potato wedges, though what we had were tasty. The gin and tonics were nice, too.

Beddy-byes for Bryan shortly, I think. I had intended to go a bit earlier, but I have spent a large part of this evening flummoxed by technology and time passed to the extent that I didn't have dinner until close on eleven this evening, so I decided that maybe I'd wait a while before creeping under the duvet.

Webcams, see. Pain the arse. I don't even want to use it as a webcam; I want to use the inbuilt microphone to talk on Skype. It's done it before, but it refuses to work now. Admittedly I can't remember which of the jack sockets I used last time, but there's only four of the buggers and none seem to do the trick any more. Why it can't just send everything down the bloody USB port is beyond me.

Oh well.

As for the rest of today, well a bit of a wash out, thanks for asking. I slept badly last night on account of the cough - or rather I slept well but spasmodically, so when the alarm went off at 7.30 this morning, I woke up, yawned and then wondered why the radio had gone quiet. Well that would be because between switching the phone alarm off, the radio alarm coming on and me yawning, a time displacement that would have had Mulder wetting himself occurred. Between the start of the yawn and the end of it, a mere 75 minutes passed and suddenly I was late.

Late, I should add, for work, not as in the Late Bryan Lea. I realise that typing that out is a little redundant, but well, that bloke at the back - you know who I mean - well, he is a bit slow. I spent far too much of the day trying to find very simple words to explain a very complex thing to a very stupid person. It was very wearing.

Ironic, then, that I should be so awake now at the fag end of the day.

colonel_maxim and ruletwo are in Tallinn tonight. Capital of sunny Estonia. I have the Athenaeum Club to myself until Friday evening.

True to form, I have nothing planned to take advantage of this opportunity. I may have a G&T to see the night off.

That's it, folks.