Last weekend the BF came to visit.  He came bearing gifts, including a belated (but greatly appreciated) Christmas present, Alicia Paulson’s (she of Posie Gets Cozy) book Stitched in Time.  Between happily perusing this and cooking up a storm at my house (on Saturday night we had chops with stuffing, gravy, roast spuds and parsnips and mangetout, with apple crumble and custard to follow – Nigella is quaking), we also managed to fit a jaunt to the Lighthouse Cinema in Smithfield to see Frost/Nixon.  I’d never been to this cinema before, which opened, if the website is to be believed, at the end of 2006, so it’s about bloody time I actually went to it.  It’s very open, airy, bright with lots of clean, modern-looking finishes. 

The film wasn’t half bad either, and the BF enjoyed comparing it to the version he’d seen on the stage, the jammy get, with the same pairing of Michael Sheen and Frank Langella in the central roles.  Afterward, we took ourselves off to KOH restaurant, just across the road from the red Luas line’s Jervis stop, where we had some very filling and appetising Thai food (I had the spring rolls and “chicken cashew nut” with rice).  Luckily, we got to the airport from there just in time for the BF to make a mad dash for his plane, which was setting off nearly an hour earlier than he’d thought.

In other news, Skinny la minx has posted pictures of quite literally The Best Afghan Throw in the World EVER and I highly recommend E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

I am old

I may be only 20, but I am very definitely old, because I actually thought, “Goodness, doesn’t she look young,” on seeing the new promotional bumph for Topshop.

Having finally finished Defoe’s Moll Flanders, I feel I can blamelessly turn to the blog.  Here’s a few of my recommendations this week:

• From Posie Gets Cozy, what looks like an amazing chicken soup recipe and some very pretty pictures of colouring pencils
• The Winter’s Tale is on at the Project in Dublin till next Saturday – while it’s pretty well staged (and, it must be noted, cheap by Dublin theatre standards), I put it here in order to urge you to marvel at the bizarreness of this half-tragedy, half-comedy (but definitely not a tragicomedy)
• Two very good posts, one from The Happiness Project and the other from the Communicatrix, about lighting a fire under you and just doing whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing / putting off doing but really should do
• The Guardian recently published an explanation for those of you who have always wondered what the reference to Verlaine and Rimbaud meant in Bob Dylan’s You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
• … and finally, RIP Tony Hart

Sage advice

Theodor Adorno: “Whoever concretely enjoys artworks is a philistine.”

(Learnt in a barnstorming lecture this afternoon.)

I realise I haven’t posted anything in a little while.  While I have been doing a variety of things – such as reacquainting myself with the piano after an absence of a few months, and catching up on college reading – I haven’t been making very much recently and I think this is a situation that is unlikely to change a great deal soon as I’m heading into a couple of months of dedicated study.  However, this doesn’t mean I’m going anywhere, just that instead of putting up just the small number of blog-worthy things that I’m managing to get done at the moment, I’m going to try to introduce some Not Martha-style link posts, where I let others know about some of the cool stuff I’ve come across elsewhere on the web (because everyone knows when you’re in a period of “dedicated study”, your blog intake increases exponentially, yes?).

• First up, from new-to-me blog Decorno, these posts on creating binders for all your home resources and some advice on how much love to put into your rented apartment when you’re just starting out (the comments on this post are particularly good).
• A nice little tutorial from Apartment Therapy on making your own magazine files.
• Also on AT, the perfect house.
• The blog of the Communicatrix is usually insightful, thought-provoking and very funny, but I particularly liked this post on thirty ways to mix up your day in just ten minutes.  I suppose I have a short attention span.
• And, finally, I’m hoping to visit Norway this year, as a friend of mine will be doing part of her degree in Oslo and I want to take the opportunity to visit.  The current idea is that the BF and I will take this scenic Oslo-Bergen-Oslo train which has the advantage of being flexible and offering some hotel discounts, but the only stipulation the BF has made is that he gets to see a fjord, so this is a plan that’s open to negotiation.  We’re thinking of spending five or six days in the country.  Can anyone recommend good Norwegian sights, or indeed sites, restaurants or hotels for someone on a tiny budget? 

2009

Happy New Year everyone! I spent my New Year’s Eve at an excellent party in London, a couple of streets away from where all the fireworks on the South Bank happen (as in,the fireworks beside Big Ben that get put on BBC1 every year).

A couple of days later the BF and I had a slap-up meal at the Sausage and Mash Café in Spitalfields, after having had a wander round and a look at Hawksmoor’s Christ Church up the road, and the Ten Bells pub on the corner beside it (I recommend Alan Moore’s From Hell if you wish to explore the significance of these places any further).  I had the “winter warmer” meal, which consisted of wonderful parsnip-potato-and-cheese mash, a spicy peppercorn gravy and two pork sausages which contained something special or other.  I suppose this confirms my Bad Blogger status as no photos were taken and I can’t even tell you what distinguished my bangers from each other, but it was quality and pretty cheap, too (around the £7.50 mark).  The BF had the same mash and gravy but two game-based sausages (one of which was boar, if I recall correctly).  The atmosphere was that of an old-fashioned greasy spoon, with red and white gingham oilcloth tablecloths and condiments on your table (including a fantastic array of mustards – beer mustard, anyone?).  It was a cosy little spot with plenty of young people in possession of fashionable haircuts and I recommend it heartily.