Brush with fame

Bridget Jones is going to send me an email next week*.  How do I know this?  Because she wrote to Robert Pattinson to tell him, silly. 

 I am sure you can imagine my surprise when a link to the afore-pictured blog turned up in my Google alerts late last night.

*No she isn't. If she emails anyone, it will be the literary agent who shares my name. Still,it gave me a bit of a start. 

Bit Busy Today

But  let me just say that "Bed and Biscuits", some boarding kennels for pets which I've just spotted on a map, might just be my new favourite business name. 

Might be.  I don't have time to decide.  It's certainly right up there with Fishcoteque, which I may have mentioned before is my favourite fish and chip shop name.

Sunday Night Music Club

One of my favourite things in the whole wide internet is Spotify.  It's a brilliant way to discover all sorts of music, whether that means unearthing long forgotten gems (may I gently point you in the direction of The Rockmelons?) or making brand new discoveries.  For the latter, it works best when paired with Twitter, where there are lots of lovely people around who like to create playlists and then tweet about them.  I like these people a lot.

It was the Twitter/Spotify powerhouse combo, in the hands of Time Out magazine, which led me tonight's SNMC selection.  Time Out publish a themed Spotify playlist each week, and on Friday the theme was cover versions.  I haven't quite worked out how to link to a Spotify playlist yet (anyone?) but you might find it by doing a search.

The list contained some brilliant songs, including this, which gave me goosebumps right in the middle of the Royal Festival Hall.  Twice.

Stupid Australian Scientists

Note to new-ish readers:  there's some back-story to this post which you can read, if you like, here. 


I'm sure you have been lying awake at night wondering whether it was my Mum's barnacle or that ridiculous snail which was eventually named Australia's Top New Species.

Let me say: I feel your pain. The bad news is I still don't have an answer; the results were meant to have been announced by now, but because of some unspecified problem I don't know the details of, they haven't.  My Mum has heard a few whispers, but nothing concrete and I would hate to raise your expectations only for you to have them dashed.  So I'm afraid you're just going to have to wait a bit longer.

I don't know if the hold-up has been caused by an overly-complicated preferential voting system, but given how long the Labour party leadership announcement took yesterday, it wouldn't surprise me.  The one thing I do know is that the winner won't be a Miliband.

In other news: I am navigating the murky, unknown waters of what might be described as a burgeoning new relationship at the moment; with someone who is neither stupid, Australian, nor a scientist, and as such could hardly be less relevant to this particular post, but whatever.  I'm not really planning to mention much else about it around these parts, mainly because, well....you know.  I'm just not. It's nice, though, and I do sort of think he is the bees feet.*

Finally, also from the department of burgeoning things which are not very scientifc: I started making a batch of sloe gin yesterday. Sloe gin is made from sloes, gin and sugar; the proportions of which vary wildly depending on which of five different recipes you believe.  In fact, there are almost definitely more than five recipes available on the inernet; that's how many I read before I decided my head was going to explode and I just dumped as many sloes as I could fit and what looked like around about enough sugar into the amount of gin I had left in the bottle that has been knocking around in my kitchen for a while.

 It is going to be another two months before it's ready, making me think they don't call them sloes for nothing and also making me think that there is no way in the world I can be the first person to ever think of that joke.

*Any scientist worth his or her salt could tell you: they don't have knees.

You'd think a world famous rap artist who sells millions of albums a year could afford a decent set of colouring pencils, wouldn't you?

If you useTwitter you could do a lot worse than follow Kanye West.  I'm not a fan of his music, particularly, but his tweets are brilliantly bonkers, as per these examples:

I feel like if I had to be defined at this point I'll take the title of an inventor or maybe curator. Sonic inventions, curated by emotion.

If baroque and mod had a car crash... what would that ambulance look like?

I know I say it all the time but I want to live inside the Helmut Newton book or inside a Guy Bourdin photo*

  Fighting to be prolific but specific

Whether it's financial or personal skill constraints... Have you ever wished you could just draw better when you want to explain your idea?

He does need some lessons in Twitter etiquette; at the moment he is conducting a survey among his followers to find out who they think the coolest famous creative people are, and  is re-tweeting EVERY SINGLE reply which is clogging up my Twitter feed like no-one's business.  Among the usual suspects (Alexander McQueen, various rap artists I've never heard of, and Quentin Tarantino) answers have included:  "Mick Jagger and Marc Jacobs" (is it just me who is intrigued by this pairing?) and "your mum".


UPDATE:  "I know this is an ironically uncool thing to state but this might have been one of the best questions in Twitter history lol!" says Kanye


*I say this all the time too.

Everything I know about Italian wine, I learnt from Jamiroquai

Not really. But I did learn quite a lot about Italian wine on Monday night from a guy who looked a bit like Jay Kay.  It was his hat, mainly.  

I was at a wine-tasting at the Institute of Directors, and the wine we were drinking (sorry, tasting) came from Piedemont, a tiny region in north west Italy. As an aside,the IoD is an incredibly beautiful building, and is worth a visit if you ever have the opportunity. Also, as it happens, their duck-egg blue walls are the exact same shade of duck-egg blue as my new kitchen wall.  If the room we were in had been about a thousand times smaller, with significantly fewer portraits and there had been a damp patch in one corner of the ceiling I would have been convinced I was in my own kitchen.

The evening worked in the same way most of these things do;  there were lots of tables around the room, all manned by wine producers and agents happy to chat about the wines, and we all wandered about, catalogue in one hand, wine glass in the other, trying the ones we fancied.  Or, in some cases, making a bee-line for the least crowded table and then pretending to listen intelligently while necking whatever booze they had out on offer.

I started the evening evening as I meant to go on; taking small sips from each glass, writing perfectly legible notes in my catalogue, and generally feeling quite civilised and classy.  I never spit (my Mum always taught me it's rude) but a few times I did pour the rest of the wine away after I'd tried a mouthful, which took huge willpower - pouring away perfectly good wine does not come naturally to me.   I even tried out my very rusty Italian on a few of the stall-holders, who looked at me with a mixture of pity and amusement and answered my clumsily constructed questions in perfect English.

As the night went on,  sips became slurps, significantly less wine (read: "none") was poured away and my notes turned from neat, detailed descriptions into a blurry mass of exclamation marks, various numbers of ticks of assorted sizes, and other scrawls. These are all crucial elements of  my masterful, self-designed, Wine Rating System.

The system, which  has been finely honed over various wine shows and other events, is a little complicated, so let me break it down for you.  First there are the ticks.  When it comes to ticks, there is no upper limit on numbers, but size definitely matters; a wine I've given four little ticks to will be pretty good, but might be just as good as one with a great big tick next to it.  Then again it might not. Sometimes the ticks are stars, which mean the same as ticks, except I use them more economically; mainly because they take longer to draw. Roughly, two middle-sized ticks mean the same thing as one star, I think, but it's not an exact science.

If a wine is really good I might circle it, or I might put more stars next to it, or maybe an arrow. Sometimes a smiley face, if I'm feeling artistic.  Or I might forget to do any of those things.

Exclamation marks are generally good, although context needs to be taken into consideration, as I will illustrate shortly (such suspense!).  Again, quantity is important; generally speaking, the more exclamation marks the better, but there's a catch; and the catch involves some slightly complicated maths. The impact of each extra exclamation marks becomes considerably less as the number of exclamation marks gets bigger. This is mainly because  I have learnt, over time, the more exclamation marks I've used, the more likely they are to have been caused by my general level of excitement (read: "blood alcohol content")  rather than the quality of the wine.  There is probably a tipping point beyond which extra exclamation marks are actually the sign of the wine being worse not better, but I have never worked out what it is; my guess is around 4 to 5.   

I'm not saying it's a foolproof system, and so this is where the little notes I write become handy; at the start of the evening they contain useful information like "toasty", "very chewy", "could be Chardonnay", or snippets of information passed on by the winemakers; "2007 good year for Barbera*"; "fruity because it's aimed at the American market" and so on.  Later they get less specific but more decisive; I can always tell which stalls I went to last because my notes for those wines say things like "FAB!!!!" or "NOOOOO!!!!!"   (That second example, by the way, is your classic case of exclamation marks being taken in context; here they mean I really, really, really never ought to drink this wine again.)

So what did I learn on Monday night, from the man who wasn't really from Jamiroquai? Well, after dissecting my notes, I realised the main thing I learnt about Italian wine is that I prefer Barbera to Borolo.  I know this because I wrote that information down no less than four times, in various forms.  My favourite version was this somewhat mathematical one:

 " Borolo = tannins = not nice.  Barbera = :-) " 

(For non-wine-drinkers (if you are still here), tannins are things which make your mouth feel all disgusting and dry, which most wine snobs, and some people who are not wine snobs but just have really weird taste, think is a good thing.)

Also, I learnt some things about Italian grapes, some of which I hadn't heard of before. Namely:


1. Armeis, which is white wine, tastes a lot like Chardonnay.

2. Nascetta, also white wine, tastes a lot like Torrontes.  (I only found out about Torrontes a couple of weeks ago but it is my new favourite Argentinian white wine. It tastes like flowers.) 

3. Pelaverga Piccolo grapes are really rare; only 10 producers in the world grow them, apparently, which is completely inconvenient because the Pelaverga Piccolo wine I tried was magic in a glass. It's incredibly light, but still had a bit of substance to it, making it the solution to a problem I've been struggling with for years - finding the perfect red wine to drink during the summer which doesn't taste like fruity water.   I know that in the grand scheme of things there are bigger problems in the world, but finally finding this wine and then discovering I will probably never be able to get hold of any because no-one grows the right grapes is annoying beyond belief. 

4. Barolo wine is made from Nebbiolo grapes.  It's the one you're meant to like the most from this region; I don't.  I am such a wine rebel.

5. A surprising number of  Moscats are a little bit fizzy.  If you are having dinner in Piedemont and don't like bubbles in your dessert wine, go somewhere else for dessert.

6. There are two types of Dolcetto, Dolcetto d'Alba and Dolcetto di Dogliani, and these are completely different even though they are grown pretty close to each other. There's a friendly rivalry between the producers of each type; I am guessing it was no accident last night that they had been put on tables at very opposite ends of the room.  Di dogliani is nicer than D'Alba, I think, but I didn't tell that to the man with the hat.  He grew the wrong sort.



*Don't take my word on the Barbera; there is a very real chance I could have the year wrong.  What I can say, with some certainty, is that there is a particular year which is particularly good for Barbera**, and it has something to do with the weather being really hot or really cold.

**Or maybe it was Barolo.  I'm not sure.

If anyone wants me, I will be doing number 4

There is a new sign above my desk, courtesy of someone I follow on Twitter, who in turn attributed it to someone else.  This is what it says:

How To Write a Novel

1. Think up a story
2. Using about 80,000 words, write the story down.

Pitfalls That Get In The Way Of Writing A Novel

1. Not thinking up a story
2. Not writing down the story
3. Writing down most, but not all, of the story
4. Pissing about on the internet.

It has been making me smile all morning.