Over a month

It’s now been over a month since I last posted, which is really not usual Basil Expo behaviour.  I am now in the midst of my master’s course.  I’m enjoying it enormously, but the blog has run aground on the amount of work I have to belt through for that, as well as the time I’m spending trying to get to know the city and my fellow students.  However, I have also felt some uncertainty with the blog for a while past: its remit has always, purposely, been vaguely defined so that I could steer it in whatever direction I wanted to take it, but for a while recently I have found that that vagueness has its downsides.

I hope to return, but it’s likely to be many weeks before I have leisure to do so.

Renegade Craft Fair London

Last weekend I went to the first inaugural Renegade fair on this side of the Atlantic.  I had high expectations given its American reputation, and I wasn’t disappointed.  Click through for more …

Raspberry and almond muffins

One of my last acts before leaving the old country was to make good use of the lovely kitchen in my family home with a few baking sessions.  This was, as it turns out, an excellent idea — my student kitchen will not be home to a great deal of baking, I wager.  I tried out the recipe for muffins in The Cornucopia Cookbook, which is a single ur-recipe with a lot of potential variations.  We had frozen raspberries and almonds on hand that day, so that was the variation I made.  Be warned, though: the recipe makes enormo-muffins (BB’s-style muffins, for Dublin readers) and could easily be made with a third less of the called-for mixture if you don’t like your cakes seeping all over the tray.  But the enormo-muffins are good too!

“We’ll walk the grounds / by Capability Brown”*

The amazing grounds of Blenheim Palace, Capability Brown’s masterpiece.

They weren’t hurt by the glorious sun in which I saw them, of course.

* Title courtesy of the Divine Comedy’s “Assume the Perpendicular”

Blenheim Palace

Britain has been undergoing the mother of all Indian summers the past week or so.

Visiting Blenheim Palace was not a bad way to make the most of it.

More tomorrow …

Since last writing, I have moved and set up home (room) in Oxford, where I am about to begin a master’s.  In between all the faffing of registration and constant errand-running (oh, I need a laundry rack!  oh, I need cutlery!) I have been taking a few snaps, so I will be posting those.  Hopefully by the time I’ve exhausted most of them I will have some time to write something here too.

To begin with, my college (a view from the gardens of the back of the front quad).

Happy 75th, Mr Henson

This week I’ve mostly been reading

The Tory Atlas of the World, from the Spitting Image book (click for the detailed view: it’s a snorter).

These 10 photos of taped-up New York restaurant windows — and the hilarious commentary — made me laugh immensely.  And made me wish I could visit New York very much.

This study gives me some confidence that my degree (English) is worth something, dammit.

But in reality what I’ve mostly been reading in the past few weeks are course-related: at the moment, I’m moving between The Mill on the Floss and The Woodlanders, both of which have been very enjoyable.  Recently I’ve also read Wordsworth’s The Prelude (not worth your time), Byron’s Don Juan (very slightly more worth your time than The Prelude) and re-read Forster’s Howards End, which I’d forgotten was so great.

In the latest instalment in my occasional series of rock stars in amusing candid photos, we have Bob Dylan playing table tennis with Levon Helm.

Aldi cake

One of my nephews turned six this month, so his auntie coughed up a Smartie-laden chocolate cake (a decorating technique consciously inspired by the skillz evinced by Jane’s daughter Phoebe on many occasions).

I used this recipe for the cake which, I must say, I wasn’t greatly impressed with — I baked it in two sandwich tins though, rather than the recipe’s stipulation of one slab which is then cut into three — this may explain why I found it so dry (though only I seemed to think this: I’m not sure whether I just got a duff slice or everyone else was being polite).  The icing, however (equal parts butter and chocolate [which was itself two parts milk choc to one part dark] melted and then cooled enough to make it malleable), was a winner.

One little girl, just three years old, when it was unveiled, turned to her mother and remarked that she had seen a cake just like it in Aldi.  Don’t look behind the curtain, child!