I found myself whistling Christmas carols while drinking my coffee this morning.
Category: Me
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Happy birthday to… Heraclitean Fire.
My blog turns four today! That first post four years ago (when the blog was called stormy petrel) wasn’t actually very interesting, but hey-ho.
Mmmm, Smarties.
» The picture, from Flickr, is © Luke and/or Kate Bosman and used under a by-nc-nd licence.
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Happy Birthday Clouded Drab
Clouded Drab — my photoblog — is one year old today. And despite occasional fallow periods, I have posted 92 photos in that year, which seems a respectable number.
This puffin is not one of those photos. I don’t quite know why I only posted one of my puffin pictures from Wales, but here’s another one.
I’ve just installed a random redirect plugin, so click on this link for a random photo.
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Gooseberry liqueur, again
Just a quick update on the gooseberry liqueur I mentioned the other day. I have strained out the fruit and bottled the liqueur.
As you can see, it’s a very pale yellow; if anything it’s just slightly greener than it looks in this picture. And it’s very nice — gooseberry tasting, in fact — though it’s definitely better served cold.
I also now have a bowl full of vodka-soaked gooseberries in the fridge.
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Gooseberry liqueur
Much as I like cooked gooseberries, I was trying to think what I could do with some gooseberries that would keep that sharpness and fragrantness that they have when they’re raw. So I thought I’d try making gooseberry liqueur. I couldn’t actually find any recipes for it, but the basic principle of making fruit liqueur seems pretty straightforward, so I topped and tailed the berries, pricked them all over with a fork, and put them in a jar with a load of sugar and vodka.*
I’m going to leave them to soak for four or five weeks in a cool dark place, strain off the liquid into a bottle and then possibly leave it a little longer to mature. My ideal result would be a kind of gooseberry version of limoncello: sharp and flavoursome. But I’m just making it up as I go along, so I’ll let you know how it turns out in a few weeks.
* Just for my own benefit if I want to remember the quantities later: 800g of gooseberries, 300g of sugar and about 3/4 of a bottle of Stoli.
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1000 AD survival tips
Kottke pointed out this thread, a discussion starting from this question:
I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD (plus or minus 200 years). I assume that such transportation would leave me with what I am wearing, what I know, and nothing else. Any advice would help.
The discussion was picked up at kottke.org and Metafilter.
All those threads are deeply fascinating for what they say about people’s attitudes to the past (and indeed their historical knowledge or lack of it). Most of the responses seem to fall into one of two types; the ludicrously over-confidant: “With my crazy future knowledge verily I will become as a God! I will invent the steam engine! And antibiotics!” and the opposite: “Aargh! By local standards I will be ignorant, stupid and freaky and so I will be burnt as a witch/raped/murdered/die of exposure/murdered again! I won’t last a week!”
I obviously have too high a faith in human nature, because it seems to me that clearly the right thing to do is find the nearest settlement (probably not very far: Europe wasn’t as densely populated then, but most places would be under cultivation), act in as non-threatening a manner as possible, look willing to help in any way possible, and do a Blanche DuBois: rely upon the kindness of strangers.
You’d be unlikely to end up as anything more successful than a serf, and if you happened to turn up at a time of famine or war you’d almost certainly be fucked, but I still think it’s your best chance of survival. The Middle Ages were pretty brutal, but that doesn’t mean that everyone then was either a bumbling idiot or a psychopath.
» The illustration is from the Lindisfarne Gospels and so about 300 years too early for the question, but hey-ho.
