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.

My right knee is definitely giving me gyp. It’s not so bad when I get out of bed in a morning, but it doesn’t take much effort on my part for it to start getting achey, particularly if I am standing around rather than walking. Add to this the general creakiness I get from sitting in this excuse for a chair I have in the office and I am wondering whether I might not be better off using my kneecap as an ashtray and having my leg welded straight so I can stump around like a cross between Long John Silver and Frankenstein’s monster. Given that the kneecap feels loose, for want of a better word, perhaps First World War style puttees extended up and around the knee would help, but then that would start a strange transformation into Mummy movies.

Someone has been splicing time and space in North London again. You rarely see many operatives in the Totteridge & Whetsone area using nuclear accelerators to weld reality back in place¹, so there tends to be more obvious outbreaks of oddness on the extended reaches of the tube network than there are in the centre. Or rather, they are less controlled. I guess it’s a Men in Black thing.

Anyway, there was a woman on the tube this morning who looked like she had been assembled from various elements of Eastenders, Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and Abba, circa 1976. Imagine a middle-aged elf wearing a silvery circlet on her forehead and trying to arrange something over a mobile phone in an Essex accent and you’ll get a portion of the picture.

She disappeared mysteriously at Camden Town, just where the reality operatives start congregating in earnest, so I feel my point is made.

Creepy Swedish Guy was on the train this morning, too. First time I’ve seen him for a while. He has new reading glasses that make him look like a goblin watch repair man.

¹As a regular reader, you will recall that sometime back in the summer, it was suggested by some one in my comments section – I have it in mind that it was either jfs or littleonionz - that tourists with wheely cases are actually disguised space-time engineers who repair and maintain the fabric of reality in central London and other major cities, helping to combat alternate reality leaks that let through the occasional pieces of the past, mythology or other dimensions.

My Girl^TM has bought me a shiny brand new 19" flat screen monitor for my PC. I now have an oddly-named LG Flatron L194WS. It is both flat and wide screen and is fantastic - though my wallpaper sits forlornly in the middle of the new screen. At a width of 1024 it no longer cuts the mustard, but where to find another? Tis no matter, though. The screen is fantastic.

My old heavy weight 15" monitor hogged so much space that my desk was placed a good 6" from the wall to allow me to get the monitor and keyboard on it and most of my desktop space was lost. I have it all back and the room seems so much bigger now, too. Despite moving the desk to the right a few inches because of the plug sockets, the ability to push it almost directly against the wall has given us quite a lot more usable floor space up here in the Tower. Pity then, that in two or three months time we shall probably have to move. Still, them's the breaks.

There is a rule that says any work you do to improve a computer takes three to four times longer than you estimate. In this case, while the plug and pray facility worked perfectly first time, the effort we went to shifting printers, spare furniture and boxes to make the room to shift the desk four or five inches to the right had to be seen to be believed and involved much grunting, grumbling and general annoyance. Still, it was worth it.

Wide, flat screen! My office desktop is going to feel very cramped when I go back to work on Tuesday.

The TV aerial has been fixed and we celebrated by brazenly watching the entertainingly shallow Primeval last night, before reverting to DVDs for our entertainment.

Having dragged myself out of bed before 8.30 on a Saturday, which is almost a mythical time, because we had been informed that the engineer would arrive any time between 8.30 and 13.00, he of course arriver at about 12.35. It is a rule that had I stayed in bed he would have arrived at 8.30 prompt and gone away again before I could have dressed and dashed down four flights of stairs.

Like everything else that I have fixed myself or had fixed in the Athenaeum Club the question seems to be less 'why did it go wrong?' as 'how in God's name did it ever work?' The first example being when I mended the inherited broadband connection that up and died one day. I opened up the connection box expecting to see a loose connection and found three bare wires sticking into a blob of blu-tak. I don't know who did that in the first place, but there is a strong probability that it was some one on my friends list, or known to us. I have never and shall not enquire further. It's fixed properly and that is that.

The engineer belied his appearance and scrambled fearlessly and with a certain fat cat grace through the bedroom window and up onto the roof about forty-five feet above the High Road and cheerfully scrambled around making pleasantly artisan noises for a few minutes before coming back to report the scale of the problem.

Whoever jury-rigged the broadband, however, was a rank amateur compared to the cowboy who set up the TV aerial. This special piece of work strays into the grey area between 'jury rigged' and 'jerry built' (look them up, folks; we did). It seems that the aerial had been bracketed to the most crumbly bits of ancient chimney and had, over a period of time, worn away the mortar before falling back to leave the aerial itself at a drunken angle whereby twice a day for thirty seconds it was perfectly aligned with Arcturus and we were able to pick up static in colour. In addition, the coaxial cable that fed into the bedroom, and which, by dint of a cable splitter in the house and about forty feet of coaxial extension had been supplying a signal to both the bedroom and the living room was not attached to anything. Outside the bedroom window there was about a yard of cable, which ended in bare corroded wires that showed every evidence of having been in that state for many years. There was further evidence that the main cable from the aerial had been spliced with a knife and a split made and held using sticky tape.

Back in the living room, quite unrelated to all that, it seems that the cable extension from the window to the TV had corroded together and then fallen apart. Any one of those should have stopped any form of signal ever reaching the TV years ago. It all stopped working a fortnight ago.

I wonder what other inventively bizarre secrets the Athenaeum Club holds and which will remain undiscovered when we eventually move out?