So I emailed a friend the following:

Just received spam offering military green lasers. You, I’m sure, want one!

He replied:

It would complete the set…

Get me 500 and aim them at the moon.

Together we may yet defeat the threat from the moon-people.

I say ‘people’ but they hardly deserve to be called that, the alien scum.

Many thanks for this most important information. Without your help (and the lasers) we will assuredly be living under the yoke of those oppressive lunar fiends by the end of next year. Mark my words.

Oh sanity, where is thy sting?

BTW, my brother is home from Iraq. He shouldn’t have to go on active service for another two years.

Just a note about one of the tastiest dals I’ve made recently: a very rich flavour and no-where near as much fire as I normally like. This is apparently not too far from gujurati style.

Ingredients

• 228g oily toor dal
• 114g sweet potato, chopped
• 3 tsp cashew nuts
• 2 tsp oil
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp chopped garlic
• 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
• 1 tsp ginger paste
• 1 tsp hot chilli powder
• 1 tsp ground turmeric
• 1 tsp jaggery goor (palm sugar) – you could use normal brown sugar
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp coriander paste

1. Wash and drain the dal.
2. Place it in a pan with 750 ml water, bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes.
3. Rinse and drain the dal.
4. Meanwhile, place the sweet potato in another pan with a modicum of water, bring to the boil and simmer until very soft, then drain the sweet potato.
5. Fry the cumin seeds until they begin to pop, then add the garlic, ginger paste, chilli powder and turmeric.
6. Lightly fry this mixture until the curry scent begins to evolve, then add the tomatoes.
   Fry this mixture lightly until it has reduced and thickened significantly.
7. Meanwhile lightly toast the cashew nuts in a dry frying-pan
8. Mash the lentils and sweet potato, then add the tomato mix, cashew nuts and jaggery goor.
9. Add a modicum of water, bring to the boil and lightly simmer while you cook the accompaniments.
10. Just before serving, add in the lemon juice and coriander paste.

I served this with couscous and boiled curly cale.

• 150g dry couscous
• 200ml hot vegetable stock
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp coriander paste

Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl, cover with cling-film and leave for 10-15 minutes.

OK, nothing earth-shattering but both my hostess (who has a very low capsaicin tolerance) and I (who likes a bit of burn) enjoyed this.

My hostess and I saw Control last night. As far as I can tell, most of the sound-track was actual Joy Division recordings, from live events or from Unknown Pleasures. If not, it was a brilliant recreation of Ian Curtis‘ fantastic voice, physical beauty and weird on-stage presence, along with the grot that inspired this strand of ‘post-punk’. I admit that some of the attempts to compress 5 or more years into under 2 hours occasionally clunked, but such compression is probably bound to be lossy.

Even though I knew the ending, I was in tears as I came out. My hostess was aghast – she hadn’t known this story. I think we left a damp trail down Lothian Road. Most of today, the tense waves of sound that end Atmosphere have been reverberating through my head.

Since last night I’ve been remembering, semi-fondly, all the time I spent with punks, late-model hippies, speed-freaks, the Special Brew crew, queens and tokers in the late 70s and early 80s, and being utterly in love with a school-friend who introduced me to Joy Division and later Pink Floyd via The Final Cut (still one of my ‘Desert Island Discs’). One of the people from this time, leader of a Wiccan group, was my inspiration to become vegan, with her promise of a massive spiritual high. So far the chemical kind has been stronger, but being vegan has provided a quiet, lasting satisfaction.

OK, a lot has changed since then and I have little to no excuse for unhappiness. However, some of the melancholy that arose or found expression then has stayed with me ever since, much to the confoundment of anyone who has tried to be close to me. I guess my laughter is often stoner-manic in an unconscious attempt to layer a thick enough skin over my failures and the unhappiness I’ve perpetrated on others.

This year’s durga puja included a Hogwarts pandal! Yeehah.

Friday – my current employment contract ends*

Saturday – my home team crashes out of the Rugby world cup, courtesy of the poms. Mandapanda‘s lot are taken out by France.

Sunday – my hostess’ home team is beaten by Argentina. She’s quite a fan – she bought this flat partly because it’s a drop-kick from the gates of Murrayfield stadium. She’s not happy.

*For many reasons, this is actually a positive thing. I need some time to sort out quite a few personal and family things which I haven’t been able to do while working.

A random sampling of Bruce-headlines

• On a fairly predicable whim, I went to the opening of the new Applestore in Buchanan street and got 2 t-shirts to prove it! Also saw how I look on the iSight webcam in a MacBook Pro. Ugh!
• Next weekend I’m going to Worcester to see my brother who will be on leave from Iraq.
• I finally got around to mending my hostess’ wooden chair.
• My hostess took me to a Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra gig. I found there’s no extracting Nurofen un-noticed from its pack, even when the music is very loud.
• I bought a fair bit of raucous guitar music (1 Motörhead and 2 Manic Street Preachers CDs) from the iTunes store.
• I only lasted the first half of a piano concert (Alfred Brendel). The combination of unpleasant (to me) music and really unpleasant seats beat me.
• I signed on for another month at L&L. (I’m not sure if this and the previous headline about nurofen are related.)
• I finally discovered iSyncing between the Palm and the mac. Now I only have two un-synced address/phone lists (cellphone and laptop/desktop/palm). It took a while to sort the discrepancies between the two datasets.
• As a corollary, I’m getting into iCal.
• Going ‘cold bark’ on Purdeys. (All of the L&L production team is in thrall to britvic.) Still got the Irn Bru habit.

Yesterday was a Good Day.

The most important thing I have to report is that my dad is out of hospital. At the beginning of this week, we understood that the medics wanted to decide whether he needed a stent or whether exercise and medication would be better. However, there was no news on when such decisions might be taken.

On Wednesday, dad had a scan for blood-flow around his heart. This was delayed for a few hours because it’s meant to be done after a period of starvation. However, the ward wasn’t aware of the impending scan and so gave him breakfast. Dad wasn’t aware either and so he cheerfully ate it.

On Thursday, dad had another scan after some exercise. I am puzzled that they couldn’t do the two scans in the same session but I suppose that there’s a limit to the amount of radioactive tracer that can be injected in one day.

Yesterday dad sent me a text to say he was getting out that afternoon. I cried – I hadn’t realised quite how much worry had been stored up in me. I was also concerned how he would get home. Mum was in no state to drive 70 miles because of her sciatica. However, she and dad were both reluctant to pay the £85 that the Red Cross would have charged for this journey. (I’d researched this aspect while I was home last weekend.) However, my brother’s girlfriend collected my mum and sister yesterday evening and together they went to fetch dad. Huge thanks, Jenni!

I phoned dad last night to see if he was home. I’m amused that he’d taken mum, Sue and Jenni to a Worcester curry-house to make sure they were fed and to thank them. I think this was the second proper meal mum had had since dad’s attack. When she got home from the late visiting sessions, she was too tired and sore to make anything more complex than a couple of sandwiches to cushion her insulin injection.

I’m not worried that dad will be on an unhelpful diet now: mum won’t leave him any choice, even if he does want to stray. I doubt he will want to because he’s been sick fed-up of incarceration!

Other good things happened yesterday. I can’t blog about one at all and another was a a hint of optimism about my future. I’ll see how it goes before commenting further. The other good things were celebrating a colleague starting her maternity leave and two other colleagues turning 30.

Finally, my hostess and I went to see Puppetry of the Penis last night. Yeehah! Two adult males completely naked on the stage, doing hilarious things with their tackle. Who could ask for more?

Have a look here. (It’s slow and there is a ‘welcome’ screen to go through… sorry.)

I wish my daemon had been called Unix.

Well, after a number of days of waiting, mum has been told that dad will have his angiogram tomorrow afternoon. We don’t know what happens thereafter but we expect it involves him coming home not too long thereafter.

I spoke to him today and he sounded good – a bit of a cough but nothing that alarmed me. I’ll be please when he is home, not least for my mum’s sake. The travelling and late returns from Birmingham are doing bad things for her sciatica and overall energy.

More as and when…

No, my dad has not been transmuted into a bird of prey, klingon or otherwise. Instead, he has now been taken to Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital for his angiogram.

This seems to be good news for two reasons:

1. It means he has recovered enough to travel and consider the medium- to long-term future.
2. Secondly, it’s a bit less hassle for mum to visit him because she only has to get a bus or drive into Worcester City Centre, travel 30 minutes on a frequent, direct train service to the station that serves this hospital and Birmingham University and then walk what appears to be 400 metres on the hospital’s own connectivity map. This is much better than the plethora of buses or driving to Worcester Royal Infirmary, which appears to have been moved right out in the sticks.

I spoke to dad just after he had arrived at QE – he sounded good. In fact mum tells me that while he was at WRI, he asked he to bring him his allen keys (hexagonal spanners) so he could sort the door on his toilet area!