We took a road trip to Yorkshire at the weekend to take the kids to see my parents, their grand parents.
The thing to do at the start of any day, not just road trips is to get a proper breakfast, and we are blessed to have in our vicinity a truck stop that does proper breakfast for decent breakfast money.
Proper Breakfast
A good strong cup of tea to wash down a plateful of sausage and bacon and black pudding, and hashbrowns, and mushrooms, and tomatoes (properly cooked, not half a grilled tomato like served at lesser places), plus toast and some proper butter.
And brown sauce. Can’t forget the brown sauce.
After breakfast, we returned to the car and I gave it a quick inspection before we headed toward the motorway.
I was immediately reminded of that meme that was doing the rounds a while ago. The one with the car in the nineties covered in dead insects, contrasted with current day, the clean car. It serves to illustrate the loss of wildlife along our road sides.
I have mentioned it before, but I recall seeing high speed trains arriving at Doncaster station, their yellow frontage blackened with the dead flies collected along its way. Occasionally, there would be dead bird stuffed in to one of the exhaust grills too.
Its true. We don’t see this as much, but its not completely barren out there. I have noticed trains arriving with a coating of flies covering their frontage, though not as heavily as those long lost childhood summers.
Being a colossal nostalgia junky as I am, I am well aware of the nuance behind expression, Nostalgia is a funny thing.
Most of us at some time or another fall in to the trap of wondering if I knew then what I know now, there are songs about such times. I have certainly not been immune to wondering what might have been if I’d paid more attention in school, spent less time in the pub, and dare I say it, found God sooner. Who knows where I could have been by now, I might have even joined the priesthood.
Maybe not.
A lot of these reveries are caused by us being unprepared for something we like to think that we should have seen coming, like buying property when it was £5 a dozen. Or buying bitcoin. Or simply spending more time in the moment with friends and family.
I hadn’t indulged my favourite reveries for quite some time, but it was on the way home from a family trip to visit my parents in Yorkshire where a somewhat emotional nerve had been touched, and my mind went back about thirty years.
I was driving the same road, in my mind, on a trip that was never taken back in 1994, with friends I never had, and a car I’d never owned.
It was a long wheel base land rover, I’d somehow obtained in my late teens, in the daydream, and had customised it somewhat. And now my friends, presumably from the job I didn’t have, or the college I never attended, were on our way home from a smashing weekend event of camping and sunshine, and beer tents, and probably a bit of kayaking. There was probably a dog there for good measure, a bonkers dog that made everyone laugh with its endearing antics.
I don’t like kayaking, or camping, but we must have had an awesome time of it all, seizing the day, carpe diem, and all that. Or something.
My train of thought was interrupted by one of the kids in the back.
“Dad?” He said.
“Yes” I replied.
“Can I have more mobile data?”
“No, but you can tether to mine…”
And so it went. But that little intrusion of modernity lingered in my daydream.
Back in 1994, the Landy was struggling with the hill that I was currently powering up in the present day. In 1994, the air conditioning wasn’t on, it wasn’t there to be on. There was no mobile data to tether to. And the big bright-comes-as-standard-sat-nav screen was absent. So too was the Why Files Podcast that I was half listening to, on Spotify, on my phone, played on the car speakers via Bluetooth.
It suddenly became the most absurd thing. Probably worthy of a short story. But there I was immersed in my daydream about seizing the Golden Years in some idealised past, on an adventure with the bestest of friends, and I was getting grumpy about the air conditioning, I was missing my modern comforts, in a daydream.
This being a fantasy, the air conditioning was no problem. All that was needed was that electronics night course that was bound to have been running at the village hall last year, 1993. That would have given me all of the technical competency needed to ensure that my fantasy Landy had air conditioning just in time for this legendary road trip with pals in 1994.
The next problem was a little more difficult to fix. That Why Files Podcast. We’re talking ancient civilisations. No mobile phone. No mobile data. No Spotify. No Bluetooth. Not even any Why Files.
Ok. So we are just listening to something else, problem solved. Maybe Graeme Hancock’s Chariot of the Gods, on audio cassette. Not out for another two years. hardback, not cassette. Ok. What about Von Daniken? He did mysterious stuff like that? Maybe we just sang along to Bohemian Rhapsody on repeat, moshing, all the way home. That was the thing to do in those days, as I recall. Did cassette players have a repeat button?
The sat nav pinged, again, interrupting my daydream. I wasn’t using it, I know the way quite well, but it invaded my daydream nonetheless. And I recall making an audible grumble about it, though no one seemed to pick up on it.
I am an amateur cartographer, low level, and I know my way round a map, but I always go wrong around Teeside, and the satnav comes in handy. Satnav has proved more useful than I like to admit. Would I really prefer to be back in 1994?
I started to think about all the other little things. Heated seats. Heated steering wheel. Powered steering. Assisted brakes, hands free set, keyless ignition…
For years, I’d dipped in to this cute little fantasy whenever things weren’t going my way. For years, when our house was too small for example, and it was impossible to upsize, the solution was in the past, back when a four bedroom house with a drive and a south facing garden cost about £60k. All I needed to do was find a way to buy a house in 1994 and all of my housing issues in the twenty tens would have been solved. Simple.
The same was with work. Needed a new job, if only I could change my skill set in the past to make me career ready in the now. Stoopid really, but I know I’m not the only that does this, so we can have a bit of a laugh about it now I suppose.
Then we passed another milestone on the way home, 1994 and present day. Some such castle, can never remember its name, it hasn’t changed at all in thirty years, only the cars are different, but it reminds me that its time to leave the A66 and head towards Shap. We’re more than half way home and this daydream just isn’t cutting like it used to. Lets try and unpick this a bit. Where have we been in 1994?
1994, young, full of life, we must have been kayaking, probably on some white water river in the North Yorkshire Moors.
Stock Photo
I’m not picturing it. North Yorkshire isn’t like Colorado, and there was definitely a beer tent. Beer tents and kayaking don’t go together, as I understand it, and that goes a long way toward explaining my dislike of kayaking.
Who’s in the car? Lets break that down a bit too. I didn’t have many mates in 1994. After school, we all kind of went our own ways, and thats fine. School brings people together, briefly, artificially binding many divergent paths, and thats totally fine. We’re too early, in 1994 for uni mates, so I suppose I have absolute license to design a friendship group of my own liking.
Drawing a blank here. I enjoy my own company too much. Maybe throw in a couple of age adjusted Felicity Kendals in there and a Phillipa Foresta though. That would be awesome, in its own way, except we are entering designs of fornication territory, and thats a sin that thankfully Jesus, in his wisdom, saved me from long long ago. No need to be worrying about that well dodged bullet now is there. Good times.
Daydreaming used to be easy, fun, escapism. But now I’m daydreaming about driving a car with none of the modern features, no air conditioning, no power steering, struggling up hills, and being unhappy about it, on the way back from a place I can’t remember, with people that I can’t picture.
What about the dog? I can almost smell it, soggy, hairy, panting heavily in my ear, breath like a rotting whale carcass, as it tries to put its face out through my open window from behind my seat. I love dogs, seriously I do, I’m just not very good with them. This perfect weekend day dream seems to involve a lot of picking up and bagging of dog mess to be disposed of sensibly. I’m not picturing it.
So what are we evening talking about here? My day dreams were usually preambles to current problems solved in the past. Mostly about housing. Housing was a huge issue. But thats sorted now, to some extent.
I’m day dreaming about driving along the road I’m actually driving already, but I am daydreaming about missing the car I am actually driving. So why don’t I just think about the journey? It’s a beautiful day after all. The sun is shining but not too bright, maginificent massive white clouds fill the distant sky.
Lets take the time to fine tune this moment. We’re heading back, not from kayaking, but a beer tent. Where has a beer tent up North Yorkshire? The North Yorkshire Moors Railway. But we’ve done that loads, and every time was great. Lets imagine that trip was more meaningful instead.
So, who is in the car again? Meaningful people. So that’ll be the kids and the wife. And where is meaningful that we might be making such a journey? Visiting Mam and Dad.
I saw a video on Facebook the other day. An older lady explaining how these are your Golden Years.
“You still have your health, loved ones are still around, the dog still lay at your feet”.
I’m seeing a lot of AI recreations of the past at the moment, in the various social media feeds. They usually have a tag line Christmas 1995, or 1967 or something. And what these videos aim to capture is the mundane everyday awesomeness of the past.
We’d all love to go back twenty years, thirty years, forty years, to revisit just one absolutely ordinary day. See our parents again, full of life, our siblings, our forever friends before they drifted on toward pastures greener. To see the dog and hear him bark at the neighbour. To hear the old phone ring, the gate at the bottom of the garden creak open and slam shut.
The point that we keep missing though, is that this is our twenty year ago now, right now, this ordinary moment is one that we will in future years look back on with longing.
And worse than that, our memories of today will be recalled as “nothing happened” because of the time consumed by social media. None of us will lay on death beds lamenting how little time we spent on twitter. This is a warning, a call to sanity.
Wheel Flats
It occurred to me the other day that we don’t hear wheel flats anymore.
Wheel flats are a train thing. When there is uneven wear on the steal wheel, they hit the track like a hammer with every rotation. Wheel flats causes track damage and has led to some horrific rail disasters in the past. So they are monitored, and fixed.
I spend a lot of time on the railways, travelling here and there, and it occurred to me that this sound is absent.
The thought of it took me back down the through the decades, back to when I would stand at the station, watching the slow coal train chug past. The stench of diesel fresh in the air and its thick black exhaust following the sound of the engine receding in to the distance, but there was still the squeak and clatter and squeel of the 36 coal hoppers slowly following the locomotive up the gentle incline. Standing out from the typical sounds was that low thud of the wheel flat. You would hear it coming, you would hear it pass, and you would hear it miles in to the distance, its frequency increasing with the speed of the train, long after the flashing red tail light had vanished in to the dim evening haze.
And then you’d go home. And tea would be made for your by your mother, a plate of chips, deep fried in lard of course, home cut, served maybe with sausages, the type that were thirty percent gristle, but it didn’t matter. Lashings and lashings of salt and vinegar more than made up for it. The best thing in the world. The most ordinary thing in the world, now marooned, out of reach, in the Golden Years.
A Lovely Evening
Beer o’clock came in after midnight, and I could have been really grumpy about it, but I wasn’t, though I was getting a little stressed at times.
It was supposed to be an evening of me and the lass going to see the Spooky Men’s Choir, but the youngest son’s return date/time was announced after we booked tickets, so the oldest went in my place.
The show was expected to end at about nine pm, though I have no idea where that time was plucked from, while the youngest was due back from France at half eight.
Any way. It was going to be tight, but I was optimistic about the plan to drop them off at seven in Kendal for the show, drive to Kirby Lonsdale, watch YouTube in the car while waiting for up to about an hour, no biggy, and then return to pick up at the Taxi Rank in Kendal.
After dropping off my first born and his mom, I then got the message that the coach was delayed until ten pm, so I went home and ate half a roast chicken, dipped in hot sauce. I have an undocumented Hot Sauce problem, but thats another story.
So it was then back to Kendal for nine pm. The show was still going after 21:40, and messages were unhelpful, so I had no choice but to back to the school, 30 minutes away, where I got the message that it would now be eleven. I also saw that the show had ended and they were ready to be collected. So I had to weigh up if I now had time to get back to Kendal with time to return to the school.
I decided that it wouldn’t hurt if the wife and boy waited in the pub for an hour or so.
By now it was proper dark, and chucking it down. I took a photo from the carpark. Lots of cars. In the dark. Engines running. Headlights on.
Waiting in the school carpark
Checking the maps I saw that the M6 was shut near Lancaster, it is often shut near Lancaster, so I asked my youngest son to send a screen shot of his map.
On the wayWaitingComparing Maps
I would have had time to return to kendal after all, if I’d know sooner. He finally arrived at 23.15 with stories of high adventure in a French chateau, bomb site, chocolate factory, market, beach, etc, and we went to pick up the rest of us at the taxi rank in Kendal, after being kicked out of the pub in to the rain with anecdotes of comical outrage from an under sized angry alcoholic, or something, and packets of dry roasted peanuts, that I can’t eat, but thats another story.
Postman Pat Country
Its a lot like driving through the Postman Pat set, are the roads of Cumbria, during the day. At night, in the rain, and stuck amidst the somewhat impatient arses that are the typical Cumbrian drivers, that have been waiting hours to collect their own child, it is something else entirely.
Not proud to report that I almost caused an accident where I approached a roundabout all wrong because I had forgotten it was there, thinking it was the main M6 junction roundabout, and not the little one just next to it. It is dangerous to drive by assumptions on a familiar road in the dark and wet, but so easily done. Scary, but luckily I drive over cautiously anyway.
We finally arrived home after midnight, where a beer was waiting for me. In the years that come, God willing, I will look back on this as a really lovely evening.
But its time for another one, and for completely different reasons. Last time it was about feeding the algorithm, the lack of engagement, the politics, and that it simply took me away from my raison d’être. My writing.
This time, the reasons are a little bit more insidious.
Everyone I speak to will say something like “where does all the time go?” Or “How on earth is it July already?”
Time doesn’t feel right, and it doesn’t just feel not right for me. It feels not right for everyone, or mostly everyone, or just everyone that has talked about it. Either way, its not just me.
For a long time I simply assumed it was an age thing. Or maybe I was drinking too much.
No. I did some research, and its social media. We spend hours on our devices, but when our brains make sense of this during our sleep, our dreams, the whole time that we are awake and interacting with our phones is classified by the brain as “nothing happened”.
And its not just time at home. A three hour commute spent on the phone didn’t happen. A holiday away, with the phone, didn’t happen. It really is insidious.
And then, we notice how everything is designed to keep your face attached to the screen. Continuous scrolling to keep us hooked, the likes and replies on our posts are witheld until they can be used to entice us back when our attention begins to flag. We are bribed back with a flurry of attention.
The politics have changed. There are no pile ons if you say the wrong thing anymore, but its easy to get embroiled in pointless arguments.
The thing at the moment is the Supergirl movie. I won’t be watching it, so why the hell am I being drawn in to arguments about it.
And climate change. The Sun comes out and everyone wants to argue about how terrible it is, while simultaneously booking the flight to the Mediterranean in search of that very sun.
And the whole blue button/red button thing. If you don’t know. Don’t go there.
There is no profit in social media for me. It doesn’t drive any sales, it doesn’t deliver any engagement revenue. It just eats my time.
So the question is. How do I feel about deleting my account?
I feel nothing. There’s a little bit of FOMO but there are no great debates to be preserved.
Sod it. It can go. And I can reclaim my time, and spend it on better things, and hopefully have something worth remembering at the end of the day. Maybe.
Update.
It is done. And it is liberating.
The account is deactivated and the app is uninstalled.
After posting this blog post, I returned to my account to find a good natured reply to a post about the lost opportunities to explore the buses of Sheffield in Dr Who, and an insulting response to my views of Supergirl.
I then, ofcourse, replied about the buses, and gave a brutal put down to the miscreant. Neither are productive use of my time, but both are enticing to see what happens next.
Some of my very earliest memories are of the train bridge in the village where I grew up. I was three, maybe four, and would be taken to see my aunties that lived at the other side of the village, and to get there, we’d have to cross the bridge.
Being a train freak, as my mother would later put it, I would insist that we stayed on the bridge long enough to see at least one train go by. What seemed like hours would pass while I stared hopefully down the track willing the bright headlight of a distant train to appear.
I have long since embellished the memories of passing trains with additional details that I can’t have known at the time, but the core memory remains accurate. The sheer joy of it, and the tangible relief from my mam, that we could continue on our journey.
I don’t live there any more, but when my own kids were little we lived by the railway and had a crossing on our door step. Had my own children shown the slightest interest in trains I can imagine myself too, standing at that crossing, waiting, longing, for something to pass. It would have been a long wait though.
At this crossing you could wait all day for a train and not see one, except perhaps at half eleven in the morning, and then again at about twelve, passing by on its once a day round trip to the harbour and back. Or on a Thursday when the nuclear flask train made its once weekly return trip.
Thats a hell of a wait for a little one, but us train freaks, waiting is part of the fun.
It has been said, and you know who you are, that if a joke needs to be explained, its not funny. But I’ll do it anyway.
I have a light sensitivity. Nothing formally diagnosed, I just learned long ago that I don’t like bright lights. So if I were to be travelling, say, from Barnsley to Thurnscoe on the 226, as I often did at college, I knew to sit on the left hand side of the bus, because travelling east, that would put the bright glaring sun on the opposite side where it would bother me the least.
Thirty odd years later, on a bright sunny June evening, and I find myself at London Euston facing a two and a half hour train journey from South to North. I know better than to sit, if I can help it, on the left side of the train, where the sun is still high in the western sky.
But there’s this curious thing. Round about half way in to my journey, in the vicinity of Stafford, the sun glares in. Facing east, on a North Bound train, the sun gets in my face from the west. It should be impossible, but there it is.
Heading South West toward The North
There are a few curves here that put the train to the south west, literally going in the wrong direction. Its no wonder our trains are so slow, they might as well be going in circles. HS2 can’t come soon enough.
So that explains the sun, but where’s the joke? Well, although its customary in the UK to say up north, down south, up to Scotland, down to London, in railway parlance, the two running lines aren’t named by their cardinal directions, they are Up and Down. Up is always heading towards London, down is always heading away. So the Up Express would be the one going toward the capital.
Sunny Side Up
Sunny Side Up refers to fried eggs that have not been flipped, I prefer mine Over Hard buts that’s by the by. On this Down Express, I avoided the sunny side, and I thought that would make for an amusing blog title. Am I wrong? I think not.
This is a follow up to a previous post about growing up in Thurnscoe. I had wanted to show the kids some of the places that I had played as a child, and to climb my favourite tree, but it wasn’t there. The tree wasn’t just cut down, every trace of it was obliterated from the Yorkshire landscape. I must confess to a smidgen of self doubt now. Had I somehow remembered it wrong? Was there ever a tree there at all? Were my adventures in the high branches just a dream, the product of some childhood fever?
No. The tree was real, and I have found it on Google Earth.
20032018Before and After
Google Earth has a fantastic feature that allows you to wind back the clock. Some data goes back decades, but for this obscure corner of the Dearne Valley, the earliest recorded imagery is 2002. This will be a great tool for the academics of the future, centuries from now.
The red circles indicate the position of the tree. It wasn’t my imagination, and significant changes have also taken place in the field to right, it seems to have been cleared and worked over.
2002200320082009201320172018
So, I know at least that memory was spot on, and that the tree disappeared some time between 2003 and 2008. There must be something in the archives about this. I’m planning to check the local papers and the planning applications.
Reema ThenReema NowNothing lasts forever
Google Earth has some great images of the Reema Estate going back to 2002. During that time, the entire estate has been torn down and work started on building replacement housing. Next to the estate was a farm, that was already reduced to just a house surrounded by derelict farm buildings, abandoned stables, the shell of a barn, and a large overgrown paddock. All of this is now housing. The arable fields to the east have also become a new housing development.
Many of the places that I knew were gone before the first aerial pictures were taken, but I’ve highlighted them here.
This is not as clear as I’d hoped, but I’m teaching myself how to edit images properly using Gimp. Good images are imported.
I was hoping that there would be better Streetview Images, but unfortunately not.
There is this one image though, from the corner of the Reema estate, by the path that led to the railway. I have very distinct memories of going here when I was very small. It represented the absolute boundary of where I was allowed to play. Beyond here were the dangerous places. The road was busier, wider, this was the bus route. It felt exposed, open, foreboding, and it still does. This was the frontier, and it always felt like there should have been more houses here, and its quite likely that there should have been. This corner was a T Junction, but only two roads.
I have had this dream for a long time, of being a story teller in the visual medium.
I have dabbled here and there with miniatures, building sets, and even learning how to use Blender. My biggest obstacle has always been satisfying characters. Characters are difficult.
I tried my hand at clay sculpting. I had this idea that maybe I could do stop motion. But it turns out that sculpting is really difficult and I’m not that good at it.
I think my problem was scale. I tried to do everything in 1:24 scale, but that was really all that I have space for. It doesn’t help that I don’t have the eyesight for small details.
Modelling with card was a bit easier, but its not about the characters with the card.
Admittedly, some of these were made as toys for the boys, but I was working out a style, or trying to. These were passable toys, but no one would watch a video in this quality.
The last resort, though I never attempted puppetry, fabrics being way outside of my skill set and experience, was hand drawn illustrations.
I have used these hand drawn cartoon images to illustrate some of my articles, and with a bit of effort, it could work. Its definitely an option. With work.
The other option I was looking at for a while was 3D animation. I taught myself the basics of Blender, but I hit the same problem, again and again. People. Characters.
Its easy to build an office in 3d, its just polygons coloured accordingly. But people are difficult.
So there are options available to me, but with work and effort and swear words.
There’s also the other option that no one wants to talk about. AI.
I don’t like AI, no one likes AI, but is it an option?
I admit, I do use AI to assist with illustrations. I prefer to use my own images, or stock, but sometimes I can’t find an image of something that I want because it doesn’t exist, or it does but its blurry or grainy or something. Not ideal, but its there, and AI can make it suit my needs.
There’s just no getting away from it though. Its here for good, so I’ve been playing with it to generate trains and some of the results are ok.
To anyone that knows anything about trains, these are terrible, but they’d pass, would they not, in a short film?
Maybe they would, so I had a go at creation something more sci fi, to see how it might work for one of my science fiction stories.
Or maybe I could make my own episode of Star Trek? I dreamed of doing that in the nineties.
The results are a bit hit and miss though. The prompt doesn’t always draw what you have asked for. But you can animate your own images.
I used it to animate one of my own images, and the result was genuinely creepy.
I used it to animate one of my cartoons. Its not terrible I suppose. Its an option.
More recently I have been looking at the capabilities of creating fantastical places, but I keep running in to the same issues.
Here’s a bar on a distant planet, a million light years away.
Fantastical Evening
So I then thought, what about the same place during the day, what if it was a wedding? A
I did not ask the animation to include audio. It added that by itself. Do I have to specify everything? Including what not to include?
So I ran it again, this time to drop the dialogue, and instead give me a cinematic scene panning through the crowd and centering on the cross.
It went a bit bonkers.
So I tried again, asking it to keep it real.
And then I ran out of credits.
AI appears maddeningly good, but its also expensive. Who wants to spend that time and money on frustratingly close but unusable footage?
I think the time will come, but when it does, it will be too expensive for the likes of me, and everyone will be demanding authenticity in their art anyway.
They often ask, if you could say three words to your eighteen year old self, what would they be?
I would have to give it some serious reflection, but its highly likely that I would say something deep and profoundly meaningful and important.
“Journal Your Curries!” I would say.
I cannot change the past. I cannot revisit those delightful dishes and document them for posterity like I should have done, but I can change the future. I can journal the future curries that are yet to come, for the good of humanity.
In the meantime. I can look back on some of the curries I have enjoyed previously, and the ones I had the foresight and wisdom to photograph, I will share here.
Lamb Katmandu
The Lamb Katmandu is a lentil based dish that I enjoyed at the Indian Garden in Kirkwall. I am only recently starting to enjoy lentil based dishes, having been turned against them in childhood by an Episode of The Young Ones.
It was a very tastey and perhaps over salted dish. The excess salt would not normally be a problem, but this was an unlicensed restaurant, and there was no beer.
Also of note was the absence of the lime pickle on the pickle trays. Not a deal breaker, but highly irregular. I am in two minds whether I would go for the Katmandu again.
Lamb Kathmandu
Lamb Kabuli
Although I don’t take formal notes, I did begin sharing curry highlights with my Southern Curry Bud. On this occassion I had the Lamb Kabuli at the Sultan in Lancaster.
I noted that it was Lentils and Chickpeas, tangy, with a little spice, not much heat, and that I would have it again.
My Northern Curry Bud had the Lamb Deewana if I remembered correctly. I noted that while it looked appealing, it had a sweetness that I cannot abide in a curry, and that I must remeber not to order it in future as its not the one I was thinking about.
The Sultan is s good and long standing Curry House in Lancaster. It has been there for as long as I can remember. I note that they do an excellent Lamb Naga, and their mushroom rice is the finest I have had anywhere.
Curry Night at the Sultan
Chicken Makhani
I had the Chicken Makhani the Holiday Inn in Derby. Not strictly a curry night, but it is a curry, and I did enjoy it. I noted at the time I paid £16.50 for Marinated chicken breast in a rich curry sauce, served with basmati rice and sourdough Naan. 1080 kcal. I also noted that I was tempted to look up the recipe for this one.
The internet tells me that it’s made with marinated chicken (often tandoori-style, grilled or baked first) simmered in a rich, creamy tomato-based gravy flavored with butter, cream, spices (like garam masala, cumin, coriander, and chili), and sometimes fenugreek.
Chicken Mekhani
I do look for this one menus in proper Indian restaurants. Nice as it was, at the Holiday Inn, for all I know it could have come out of a can.
Others?
I don’t have access to many others at the moment, not many that are useable here, which is odd, given the number of curries I had, and how often I take photos of food.
I had hoped I’d have one of the Lamb Methi, one of my firm favourites, or the banana and shrimp curry that my son ordered once but wasn’t edible. I think that one was only on the menu for a joke, do many people really order the banana and shrimp curry? Surely not.
I should mention one of my old favourites, one I oftem try to recreate by can’t quite capture the flavour of the respite in anotherwise arduous thankless day with an employer of last resort. For a time, back when work wasn’t going my way, I would leave my desk for an hour, collect a hot jacket potato topped with chicken tikka masala, and enjoy it in the park by myself.
Though I know how to make the perfect jacket spud, two hours in the oven, skin crispy from the beef dripping, and the creamy buttery insides, dripping with salt and butter, and though there are many options now for chicken tikka, I have to recreate that delicious combination of the jacket spud, the creamy tikka sauce, and the bit of peace afforded to me on my lunch break.
Sometimes the curry is as much about the moment, as it is about the curry. Sometimes.
“Hark at you with you galavanting off on your foreign holidays. You do you think you are!?”
It’s true. I had a summer holiday in the Canaries, and while I was there I took some photos of buses. I uploaded them here because thats the sort of thing I do.
For some reason, I only have one image of a Bendy Bus, even though there were loads. What was I thinking?
Duggan's Dig 