New House, New Bread

So, if you remember, a little while ago we bought a house. A little while ago (about two weeks now), we moved in, and since then have been slowly sort of synchronising ourselves with it. For me, meshing with the new house has involved things like unpacking (of course), going for a run, making stock, baking bread, planting a lime tree and (eventually) blogging about it all. Feels good.

The bread in question is currently cooling on a rack in the kitchen, and despite being a bit of a funny shape I think it's ok. I was worried about how the starter would cope with being moved, but it seems to have managed. I think that sometimes I'm a bit overprotective of it. On the stock front, we managed to defrost the freezer a while ago (not on purpose) and so what better reason to make a full five litres of chickeny goodness? Beef stock this weekend coming, plus possibly some Spanish-accented pork rillettes if I can be arsed.

Work, then. Work is mental. I'm wondering if I've not bitten off a bit more than I can chew, as what started as a relatively simple website re-platforming has turned into the mother of all heaving, beastly complicated program of work, encompassing CRM, contact centre applications, claims management and a fair bit more besides. Add in to that a healthy dollop of intra-group politics and a business that's totally unaware of how to take control of the technology development process, and you have something of a challenge.

It's an enjoyable one though, and so far we seem to be making progress. I'm still confident we'll deliver something by the end of the year; I'm just not totally sure what. It'll be fun finding out though.

Feeling old

You know that saying about how when you notice how young policemen are these days, it's time to start feeling old? Well, I don't know about policemen, but the recent news of the passing of Keith Floyd has certainly made me stop and think.

Before wine, food was one of the first things I got really excited about for more than a month or two - an obsession that has stayed with me. Two things promoted this: Robert Carrier's phenomenal Robert Carrier's Cookbook, and Keith Floyd's book Floyd on Fish (plus the occasional TV appearance), both of which owned by my mother. I would pore over these books for hours, reading recipes over and over, imagining the meals I would cook, how I would plan the preparation, and the way I would serve them.

I loved Robert Carrier's tone, his slightly camp flamboyance tempered with a staunchly cheffy and classically-trained firmess and detail. Floyd though, I loved for his portrayal of the only sort of Englishness I'd been able to admire - the sort of enjoyable, cultured, slightly damaged and helpless charm, and above all the knowledge not only of how to have a jolly good time but how to prepare one for others. I remember promising my 13-year-old self that I too, on my 40th birthday, would crack my way through 40 fat oysters, just as Keith had. You watch - only 8 years to go.

So the passing of the second one (Carrier died in 2006) makes me realise that most of the people in the culinary world who I most admire are dead (these two along with MFK Fisher and Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin). This makes me feel old.

Added to this, the Kiwi and I are about to move into a house on Tuesday, a house which we, thanks to the munificence of a local bank, own. Although this is a truly terrifying thought, I'm excited enough about the prospect to make up for it - far from making me feel grown up, it makes me resent that cash paid out ever month for rent a bit less; now it's a mortgage payment it's actually going somewhere sensible for a change. Aged 32, it's about time.

And so, in honour of Mr Floyd, whom everyone I've ever cooked for should thank (or curse, depending on how well I did on that occasion), I'll be raising a glass this evening. He did a huge amount for food culture in the UK, but more importantly for me, he helped show me that a carefully-prepared meal, of good ingredients, can lift you out of your day-to-day life and into somewhere very special indeed.

Snow, hard work again, honeymoon

Our last holiday until our honeymoon has just happened, and as most of you will already know from emails, Facebook and Twitter, it was an incredible four days spent at Mount Ruapehu, snowboarding, eating, drinking, snowboarding, and generally not being at work. This last bit was good, as it's been a fairly intense three months (only three months!!) and I was beginning to fear a little bit of burnout approaching.

So, for those of you who're not in New Zealand, Mount Ruapehu is an active volcano in the North Island, about four and a half hours' drive from Auckland on a good day. We were boarding at Turoa, and staying in Ohakune, about 20 minutes' drive down the hill and a genuinely lovely little town. The mountain's profile might be recognisable to some as Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings - it's more covered in snowboarders in real life.

To save a bit of time, we headed to Hamilton on Wednesday night, to stay with the Kiwi's sister and other half, which shortened the morning's drive by an hour or so and provided a great lasagne courtesy of the younger Kiwi. Stupidly early on Thursday we headed south, and some time after breakfast we could spot the mountain in the distance. We were on the hill by mid-morning, my initial nerves about having forgotten how to do it long gone by the end of the first run. That said, it was only December we were in Whistler.

Thursday was good - Friday was better. The snow was some of the best I've seen in all my three snowboarding trips; as good as Whistler at its best. They'd had 10cm on the Wednesday, and the perfect balance of clear, sunny days, cool temperatures and cold nights ensured it stayed deep and soft until we left. Saturday was good, but busy - obviously word had spread and the world and his dog had made the trip to the mountain. Sunday we managed a good breakfast before making an unhurried journey back home through stunning scenery.

Work, which we temporarily escaped, is intense. I can't speak for the Kiwi, although I know she's mentally busy, but for my part the pace and strain are fantastic. I've just convinced the business to hire another member of staff to support me, which should help, and with another project workstream about to kick off I'll need it, I think. Development is moving slowly even so, which is a bit of a concern as I'm burning through my credibility with every extra dollar I spend without showing a result. Hopefully I've built up enough of it to last another six weeks or so.

As for the last point - we have booked our honeymoon finally. Torn between heading from a southern hemisphere summer to the UK in February, and going to a beach not far from here, we chose the latter. We're going to Aitutaki, a tiny island north of Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands. Following a long time without any time off, and a wedding to boot, I think a week spent on a beach doing as close to nothing as possible will be just the thing.

Blending in

HOW good is this? I've been meaning to mention it for a while, only just got round to it. A friend of mine makes wine in Marlborough under his label Fiasco, and we've become friends, like many people he and I know, mainly through Twitter. He and his wife blog fairly enthusiastically too, and they both have a fair amount of highly intelligent stuff to say, not only on the subject of winemaking, which they live and breathe, but on the marketing and distribution of wine too.

Now, Aaron (for that is his name) is full of excellent ideas. They spend precisely $0.00 on marketing, and yet he's properly out there, and it seems to be working for him. The man has an innate understanding of social interaction online, and whilst his work in this space is defiantly non-commercial in content, what he's managed to do is something most marketers can only dream of - he's built a genuine dialogue with his customer based on a mutual understanding, and based on a very good product indeed.

Anyway, Fiasco's most recent ruse involved the blending of their 09 Sauvignon Blanc. Only being a small vineyard, Fiasco don't have the latitude of some larger concerns of being able to blend from multiple vineyard sites. In order to get a bit of complexity into the wine, Aaron's used three different yeast strains to deliver three distinct wines from the same grapes from the same vineyard, a not uncommon practice.

We've been following the fermentation for some time, as the wines develop their own characteristics and Aaron's been video blogging like a crazy person. Literally.

So the plan he came up with a while back involved getting his online acquaintances to sign up for a blending experiment. Some time after signing up, three bottles arrived in the post, labelled A, B and C. The instructions were simple: try a couple of different percentage blends, note down your favourite, and email the results back to Fiasco. The average across all the results they get back will be the final blend. A genuinely user-generated thing - brilliant.

So not only did we get the chance to experience the blending process first-hand (it was amazing to see how three wines mixed together produced something so much better than any of them individually), we had a hand in creating a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that will be on the shelves of our nearby wine merchants in a few months' time.

What a brilliant thing to do.

Home Sweet Home

Although I've been a bit slack in terms of blogging recently, I'd hoped to be able to document the house-buying process as it unfolded, outlining the ups and downs, the excitement and disappointment etc etc etc. Unfortunately for the content of this blog, we've just bought one.

We've been going through open homes for a while now, traipsing through other peoples' houses several times a weekend, nosing through closets and tutting at wallpaper, diligently leaving our shoes at the door. Last weekend, we went to a few more, including one place in Point Chevalier which was a bit of a departure for us. Being naive foreigners (the Kiwi counts as a foreigner, having as much experience of housebuying in Auckland as I do), we'd been looking for one of the lovely old villas they have round here. Most of them have been done up to one standard or another, but in reality they're all 70+ years old and held together with plaster and old wallpaper paste in the main.

You can overlook all this to a degree, as most of them really are lovely houses. However, when you talk to someone who lives in one, words like draughty, cold, damp, money pit, mould and pleaseletmeliveinamodernhouse start to come out, so we thought we'd take a chance and look at a recently built place.

On Monday our offer was accepted:


It's a three-bedroomed free-standing place over two floors, with a little garden and a deck (just behind the fence on the left of the photo). The couple selling it are moving north of the harbour with their new baby, and have kept the place beautifully. Brilliantly, the HRV system they've installed keeps the house both warm and dry more or less all the time, something which I've come to see the value of during the cold, damp Auckland winter.

So there's one more stage of paperwork to get through, and with luck our offer will go unconditional on Monday. We'll be in by the end of September, having given the vendors a bit of time to find a new place of their own as we're in no desperate hurry to move. On that note, it's amazing to notice how much simpler and friendlier the New Zealand purchase process is than the English one. I say English advisedly, as I'm told that north of the border things are again simpler. There's no gazumping, no massive stress over completion and exchange dates. There are penalties levied if the agreed move-in date isn't kept to, and the party at fault is charged. The estate agent pretty much does the lot for you.

Your fiancée does a fair bit too, apparently. It's obviously hard work, as this (Saturday) morning she's looking very tired indeed and was quite incoherent when she got home this morning. Poor thing.

More on this as we get it. Today involves meeting a friend from the UK, who now lives in Melbourne, at the airport and pootling round Auckland for the rest of the day, which should be pleasant as it's beautifully sunny outside and the city will be sparkling and shining by the harbour. It might even be an opportunity to take the top down...

So how's it going?

So I've been blogging (rarely) about stuff that's going on here, but I'm not sure (and can't be bothered checking) that I've actually mentioned anything about how it's feeling. So I thought I should try. Now, a recent Myers-Briggs test showed that by quite a long shot, I'm 'Thinking' rather than 'Feeling', so this could be a bit of a challenge.

It's been just over six months since we arrived in New Zealand, and over seven since we left London. It really doesn't seem that long. In that time, we've moved all our possessions to the other side of the world, acquired cars, bank accounts, jobs, furniture, kitchen stuff, towels and stuff like that. We are now looking for a house to keep it all in.

Funnily enough, just when I think I'm getting round to be able to answer the question, people have stopped asking us if we've settled in ok. Settling in is a process, and I think we're definitely moving through it comfortably enough.

I rant a lot about things I don't like - this is just part of me. This means it can seem though, that I'm generally unhappy with my lot, but this isn't really the case. I could go on for hours about the superficial good things and not-so-good things about living here, but realistically they don't add up to more or less than anywhere else. Good pies / dodgy road rules. Positive working culture / stupidly expensive dairy produce. You know the sort of conversation - the sort of phatic communion* that forms 80% of human conversation. More, probably.

I am happy here. Happy-er than I was before we left, in many ways. I miss people very much, family, old friends, colleagues who've become close friends - lots of people. I miss meeting people on Sundays in the pub that you could get to without driving. But on the other hand, there's email, MSN, Skype, Twitter, Facebook - all helping those people seem a little less distant. The pub I can live without to an extent - and my bank balance thanks me for that.

I like having our own television. Watching it whilst sitting on our own sofa. Working with people who do what they say they'll do, and who're genuinely open to change. Leaving the office at a reasonable time and getting home to enjoy the rest of the day. I like that Auckland is such a beautiful city, and I like even more that no one here seems to realise that. I like that we have plans in place, that we know what we want out of our immediate lives and that we're taking steps to get there. That feels pretty good.

So yes - it's going well, on the whole. Very well.





* I've been looking for an opportunity to use this phrase for a while now. Score!

Vic Chesnutt, Kings Arms Tavern, 4 July 2009

Whilst working at Virgin Digital many years ago, my colleague Mark passed me an unmarked CD, and said 'play this - it's going to be massive'. The track started with a donk-donk-donk-donk that would become terribly familiar over the coming year as Gnarls Barkley's 'Crazy', a track which I still rather like despite having heard it over a gazillion times. It's a bit bittersweet actually, as I remember the conversation with our PR company the day after the track was released. Being the first digital-only single to be chart elegible (I think... something like that anyway) they were keen to make a big song and dance over our day one sales. Asked for the number, I said 'Thirty-two'. '32 thousand? Brilliant news, I'll get the release out'. 'No mate. Thirty-two.'

How depressing. The track went on to deliver about 31,000 digital sales in the UK that week, of which we did, um, about fifty.

Anyway, moving to the nub of this post, earlier this year, one half of Gnarls (Dangermouse) hooked up with Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, and David Lynch, on a project known as 'Dark Night of the Soul'. This was to be a bit of a masterpiece, with a 100-page booklet featuring Lynch's photography, numerous guest spots and Dangermouse's trademark unorthodox, brilliant production.

One dispute with the record label later, and the album was put out, minus the actual audio content. Contained within the box was a blank CD, with a bit of text exhorting the user to 'use the CD as they saw fit'. The subtext here, naturally, was that they'd leaked the content online and an enterprising fan could easily find it. I may have done. And it's a great album.

The final two tracks feature one Vic Chesnutt, about whom you can read more here, but suffice it to say that he's seen as a bit of a legend in some parts. As a songwriter he's intelligent, emotive and darkly humourous, as a performer that gallows humour comes across even more strongly. So when I noticed he was touring New Zealand and playing in Auckland this weekend I grabbed a pair of tickets.

So into the largely empty venue we walked at about quarter to nine. We got drinks, settled against a wall at the back (no seats in this place). A few more punters filtered in as the support cranked his way through a few fairly hackneyed tracks. A couple of people came in towards the end of his set - one in a wheelchair (Chesnutt is paraplegic, easy to spot...), one a short, older lady who looked a bit confused, wearing trademark 'crazy lady' clothes. She wandered around for a bit, conspicuous in the nearly-empty venue, and then got up on the stage. And picked up a guitar. And began some stretches.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Victoria Williams. A bit of a legend in her own right, apparently, and it's fair to say that for portions of her performance I was completely transfixed, and there was a definite musical brilliance going on there throughout. Shambolic, unselfconscious, at times fascinating, but her habit of stopping songs part-way through because she'd forgotten the rest, or constantly detuning and retuning, slipping the beat every few bars and forcing Vic (on drums) to stop and restart, got a bit much. 90 minutes of this though was a challenge, one which as it happens was too much for the Kiwi - she went home.

I'm still in two minds about this. I'd never heard of her prior to this gig, and I'm still not sure whether this was amazing or awful. I suspect it's a perfect mix of both. On the occasions where she found a bit of form and let rip, she was amazing. The initial shambling ineptitude was charming, but rapidly got tiresome.

After all this, Vic (with whom she's been friends for over 20 years, apparently) did his thing, getting an unbelievable sound out of his battered acoustic. He did play one of the Dangermouse tracks (Grim Augury, which stripped of its electronica was startlingly raw and bleak), and for the majority of the show played older stuff and audience requests. In such an intimate venue (which had filled a bit by now), his style came across fantastically; personal, human and warm whilst at the same time searingly emotional.

What really threw all this into perspective for me though was the car ride home. After nearly three hours of emotionally intelligent, personal, richly descriptive music performed in a variety of unique ways, the noise that vomited out of the car radio was just too much and had to be turned off. Overproduced, sterile, facile and sickeningly meaningless. Some genres make a virtue of this and that I applaud, but when it's glossy synthetics masquerading as indie pop I just can't take it.

So on reflection, I'm really glad I went. Challenging, yes. But so very, very good. Don't know if I could do it every week though. Fortunately in Auckland that's not much of a likelihood.

About the bread

It's been a bad few weeks for bread. For some reason the last three weekends have produced really dodgy loaves, weirdly rubbery and a bit moist, heavy on the bottom and ridiculously over-aerated at the top. Not nice at all - one particularly bad one wasn't even good enough for toast.

So, remedial action. I'd noticed that the dough, which is normally quite loose in this recipe, had been getting more and more liquid, up to the point where it was really more of a batter, and was behaving a bit like crumpet batter at that. So towards the end of last week, I woke my starter up, poured off some of the goopy liquid that was collecting on the top, and fed it with a much more flour-heavy feed than usual. One more chunky feed later and the weekend's baking could start. Again, I added a bit more flour than the recipe demanded.

The most important thing I did was to use the right amount of starter in the initial rise. I'd been using double the amount, which was probably the root of my problems.

The result? We're back in the game. A great, fluffy, flavoursome loaf this time, this one almost too good for toast. It did get a bit lively during the second prove, as the following will show:


The dough was pretty powerful - aggressive, one might almost say. Rumours of my starter's demise are greatly exaggerated :)

How is it nearly JULY already?

I promise this won't be a monthly thing - constantly harping on about the way time seems to be speeding up, when all along we know it's all part of the theory of relativity; the each passing month and year being, relatively speaking, a smaller part of the whole thing.

Anyway, things do seem to be going rather quickly. Like when, during a meeting with a mortgage advisor (another story...) this evening I said I'd been working for four weeks. The Kiwi corrected me with the actual story - six. Six weeks of brain-melting, mind-bending getting my head around not only the wacky world of insurance but a rather labyrinthine group of companies to boot. It's a weird one - a massive mental challenge in understanding stuff, but comparatively little in the way of stuff to, like, do. Still, I'm keeping myself busy by making outlandish promises and then struggling to keep up with them, usual story.

In other news, we have a dining room table! This is a bigger deal than it perhaps sounds, but I'll not go into the detail. Trust me, it's changed our lives. Eating sitting at a table still feels like a bit of a luxury. That, and being able to go places without cadging a lift off the Kiwi or ruining yet another pair of shoes. The car is turning out to be a lot of fun, something to look forward to at the end of the day. It's in the garage at the moment having its wheel alignment done, which I'm hoping will correct a little niggle it's been having lately where the power steering gets a bit twitchy.

Here's a thing for all of you back in the land of sensible driving: the New Zealanders are well known for their love of adrenalin sports, being the No.1 place in the world for life-threatening leisure pursuits. This extends to driving, apparently, with a road rule (A RULE!) which says that if you're turning right into a road, and an oncoming car is turning left into the same road, the oncoming car has to give way. They sort of slow down and tuck their car into the kerb, whilst you wait to see if they actually are stopping or not, and they keep moving because they don't know whether you're going to turn ahead of them or not, and then you both step on it at the same time and narrowly avoid a collision with either the car in question or one of the many which get bored of waiting and swerve around you both. This rule appears to be designed to make even the simplest manoevre something which gets the heart pumping and the adrenalin flowing. I'm not keen on it, as you might have guessed.

Other than that, not a lot's been going on. We work, we cook, we sleep. And it's brilliant.

How is it JUNE already?

Seriously, I turn around for five minutes and half the year's gone - is this what getting old's all about? A gentle nudge from my sister reminded me yesterday that I'd not actually posted anything in quite some time, let alone anything that wasn't about baking, so here we are - another post which might not be all about breadmaking.

Work has been taking up an indecent amount of my time lately, as I seem to remember it doing back in 2008, and on the whole things seem to be going well. The pace is somewhat slower than I'm used to, so on the one hand I can seem reasonably dynamic without too much effort, and on the other the stress levels probably aren't as high. The Kiwi, on the other hand, seems to spend her entire day moving at 100kph, so we're in slightly different zones for an hour or so once we get home.

What I'm doing at the moment isn't really for discussion this openly, but suffice it to say we're making some very definite plans to move forward, taking overall company strategy and working out ways to implement it in some hopefully market-changing ways. If my plans come together, all should become clear. Fingers crossed.

In other news, I bought a car today - my first one ever (aged 31). Living either in Manchester or London, both places with pretty good public transport networks, I've never really needed a car more than four or five times a year, so renting has always been good enough. However, living in Auckland, not having a car basically means you either remain confined to a walking distance around your house (during which you will get rained on), or put yourself at the mercy of public transport, which effectively means you will probably get where you want to go, but probably not before the moon has gone once around the earth.

So, and I know precisely who's going to take the piss at this point, I bought this:

Quite simply, I have always wanted a sports car. On the shopping list for me were the following:

• Engine in the back
• Two seats
• Roof that comes off

... and this little Toyota ticks all those boxes (even if it is technically mid-engined) and fits neatly into my price bracket. Whilst it's only a 1.8L, it weighs about as much as a matchbox and thus manages to be quite, um, quick, whilst the proportions make it superbly balanced. I drove four of them yesterday and any lingering doubt that I was doing the right thing went right out of the window. So, provided it passes its AA inspection next week, it will be mine before the weekend.

It has a frankly hilarious storage ability, about enough room for an overnight bag and a pork pie, but that's part of its charm, I reckon. Anyway, it's my first car. Forgive me for getting a bit gushy about it.

On the bread front (and I couldn't write a post without it), I've been baking every weekend, with the exception of the one we went away for recently (to Mount Maunganui, by the seaside). The bread's getting steadily better, with the flavour deepening and mellowing, and the texture getting more relaxed and open. I have two loaves proving right now in fact, basking in the glow of our electric heater along with the Kiwi. It's cold here at the moment, cold and sunny, and our electric heater, oil-filled heater and dehumidifier have been working overtime. Can't wait to see our power bill for this month...

Second sourdough batch

Before I begin, let me put your mind at ease - although I do intend to bake a couple of sourdough loaves every weekend, I'm not going to blog about each of them in turn. I thought I'd mention this week's as we're still in the early days of the process and the first one of this batch turned out a little odd.

I bought a new loaf tin this week, so I can bake two at once, instead of having to spend literally the whole weekend with something either baking or proving. This one's actually a little slimmer than the other, so it's producing a taller loaf. I've noticed that the base of this loaf turned out completely solid for about a centimetre up, which I'm putting down to there being too much dough in the tin - it would've risen past the top during the second prove if there hadn't been a teatowel covering it. I'm thinking that the weight of the dough on top flattened out the base a bit during this prove, possibly - the top was also unusually flat, so it didn't seem to rise much in the oven.

The texture on the whole is still looking good; getting more open still, and still nicely elastic. I'm a bit concerned about what seems to be a slightly moist, rubbery quality to it, which I'm putting down to fractional underbaking. Cooler for longer next weekend, I think, this could be me needing to get to grips with my oven. Flavour-wise I think I'm onto something good here, the sourness is really coming out now and the bread has a big, full flavour right through the crust. It's gaining character.

This far it's being mainly used for morning toast, and to accompany cheese. I may start attempting sandwiches with it at some point but I have yet to see what my new job's lunch arrangement is, so we'll see if it's worth bothering before going down that path. There's talk of a wine, cheese and bread event going on at our local wine merchant, so I need to get my bread in shape for that - there's some serious amateur bakers attending and I don't want to be shown up!

First loaves!

It's been a month or so in gestation, but my sourdough starter came of age this weekend. Hoping that it was finally stable, I made a couple of loaves out of it. Things seemed to go well, so I've stopped feeding it and it lives in the fridge now, instead of the sunny spots in the living room. The whole process to date has been about building a yeast colony which is stable - as you may remember from earlier posts, in the early days it changed appearance and smell quite frequently as the yeasts and various bacteria etc tried to reach equilibrium. Over the past week, it's been fairly unchanging, so I'm assuming that's proof of stability.

So, two loaves this weekend. I only have one loaf tin at the moment, so I'm making them in sequence rather than in parallel. Fortunately that gave me a bit of opportunity to make some changes to the second one. So here's the first:


Not a bad start, I reckon. It's a bit wonky, which doesn't really come across in the photo, but the texture is good, nice and elastic if a little less open than I was expecting. The crust is good too, and the flavour's typically sour, with a good depth and a nice, rounded fruity hint. I'm not happy that it split so much, and how lopsided the top is. A bit of research suggests this might be due to an overly speedy prove.

And so here's the second one - a much better shape, possibly due to an extra hour on the second prove. It got right up to the top of the tin this time (the first one fell a little short) before it went in the oven, so I think I need to benchmark it right there. This probably helped the shape too.


So there we go. I'm going to aim to do this every weekend (although I'll be getting a second bread tin, you mark my words), as it's not that much of a hassle. Friday night, combine starter, flour and water, feed the original starter. Saturday morning, beat in more flour and a bit of salt. Five or six hours later, bake. By my reckoning, excepting electricity charges, two loaves of sourdough a week should cost me about $2.30ish for the flour.

Still need to work on that shape though. Will be interesting to see how the flavour develops as the starter matures.

Excuses, excuses...

I've just noticed that the cheesy little Nike+ widget in the right-hand bar on this page is gently making fun of the fact that I've not been for a run in a while. The truth is that I have, but my Nike+ sensor has run out, so I need to buy a new one, which won't happen until I get paid. I'm still putting 50k a month in, don't you worry, it's just not being recorded.

Honest.

Brilliant

The waiting is over - this week I agreed terms with an employer, and I start work on the 19th May. After five months of not working, this is an overwhelming relief. We're not entirely out of the woods yet though, as there are bills to be paid at the end of this month which my pro-rated pay won't cover, but hopefully a client for whom I've been doing a little work back in the UK will actually bother to pay me for it at some point during this month.

I don't think I'd realised quite how much being unemployed had affected me. Friends of mine have told me in the past that my job (whatever it was at the time) was always far too important to me, and it's true to an extent that my sense of self-worth is entirely wrapped up in what I do for a living. So to be out of work, to me, is to have no social worth. Entertainingly, I don't view other people like this - this rule only applies to me, you understand. The Kiwi and I had a celebratory curry on Thursday night and I realised that I was smiling properly for the first time in ages; smiling with total happiness, without that lurking feeling that had been telling me up to this point that, until I had a job, I had nothing to smile about.

So I suppose there should be a learning experience here in finding self-worth in places other than the workplace, but I suspect I'll not really take it on board. This is the usual way of things.

And what of the job? Well, suffice it to say it's in the insurance industry, and involves me forming and implementing a strategy for the online channel. Currently the online arm of the business is... me, but over time it'll need to grow. The main challenge in moving a mainly offline business to a true multi-channel one is predominantly a cultural one, and although the top level of this organisation is open to the concept, it'll be convincing the troops that'll be the 'pushing water uphill' element of this particular engagement, I suspect.

I'm going to remain coy in this forum about who it is, so I can be reasonably open about how it's going, but most of you probably know. Very excited about starting indeed, they're a good bunch of people from what I can see, with a very clear and pragmatic view on the next steps for their business. Prior to that, though, I have a week of genuine holiday to get through, so with that, it's back to my baking... on which more later!

How to stretch a chicken

Today, I made chicken stock for the first time in ages. There's something very ritualistic and soothing about doing this, the preparation, the slow simmering, the straining and the portioning out into 500ml portions to freeze. If you have a freezer and a stove, and you don't make your own stock, you're cheating yourself out of the one thing that'll make your cooking taste really, really good. With no freezer in our rented flat in London, I've been grimacing at powdered stock in food for too long now.

Although the Kiwi now has a job (yay!), we're still very much on a budget, so I thought I'd see if I could stretch the bird a little further than normal. When I jointed it for the stock, I peeled the breasts off with the peg-bone attached (a supreme, I believe), and jointed the rest for the stock pan. These, once marinated in sumac, lemon, pomegranate molasses, garlic and thyme and olive oil for a while, were served on a bed of couscous for dinner tonight.

The stock, once simmered for three and a half hours, was strained, and whilst I would normally have chucked the resultant sieve-full of veg and chicken bits away, I took out the chicken pieces and whizzed the veg in the blender with a little stock to loosen it. Chopped and bones and gristle removed, the chicken went back into the mix. With a bit of seasoning and possibly some cumin, this will be tomorrow's lunch. Granted, most of the flavour in the pan went into the stock itself, and so the soup is a little less punchy than I'm used to, but needs must.

Tomorrow evening's dinner will be paella. The depth of the flavour will come from the stock absorbed by the rice grains, and the prawns and squid rings cooked in it. Two blocks of stock are also in the freezer, to be used at some point in the future. By my reckoning, that's three meals for two, plus the two more I'll get out of the frozen stock. Quite pleased with myself, I am.

Oh, and this weekend, if the starter's up to it, I'll bake my first sourdough loaf!

Making money

When I first started this blog, I decided to start running Google advertising on it, mainly as an experiment for me to find out how it all worked in practise than with any aspirations to be the next Rupert Murdoch. Apart from anything else, the fact that I purposefully keep the existence of this blog reasonably quiet sort of stands in the way of significant traffic. Anyone who's stalking me will notice I've removed this blog from my profile, so I can promote my other blog without worrying about traffic spilling over onto this one. I'd like to be able to be as frank and honest as possible on this one, without worrying about who's reading it.

On Eating Auckland though, I actively promote it using things like Twitter, Facebook, Google and good ol' word of mouth, and traffic is picking up. One of the things I've found interesting recently is the way much more traffic than I expected is coming through feed readers, such as Google Reader. During April, I've had about 400 page impressions, and around 100 feed impressions; basically this more or less means about 20% of my audience don't tend to visit the site at all. Fortunately I use Feedburner to advertise within feeds, and peculiarly get a very good result from that.

The thing about this statistic is how it, in microcosm, outlines a changing behaviour pattern in media consumption in general. Apart from my daily visits to the Guardian website, all the news I consume comes through either Google Reader or Newsstand (on the iPod Touch). This means I'm reading articles without actually visiting any of the sites I use, so I'm not viewing any advertising on those sites. An online publisher is paid per ad displayed, effectively, so by the numbers I'm seeing, a fifth of potential revenue is being lost by users managing their own news consumption in this way.

What's weird is that, in all the feeds I consume, my feeds are the only ones with adverts in. Am I the only one who's worked this out?

Finally, to those of you who use ad-blocking tools, what you're doing is effectively theft, and to do so displays either astonishing ignorance or just plain unpleasantness. Please stop it.

Not about breadmaking

Amid all this sourdough nonsense of late, I've perhaps been avoiding the subject of what's actually going on over here. Coaxing my starter into life has occupied a fair bit of my time, admittedly, but I do have (part of) a life outside of the kitchen. Sort of.

So on the job front, I'm still bashing away at the market here, trying to find a suitable niche. Next week I'm to be subjected to a battery of psychometric tests as part of a conversation I'm having with an insurance company, and it's hard to say just how much I'm not looking forward to it. Still, needs must.

The Kiwi's faring a little better, but out of sheer superstition I'll refrain from commenting until the process has moved on a bit further, but at the moment things look good.

In other news, I have begun to miss London, and I always wondered when it would happen. It was sort of inevitable that springtime would be the time, as we slip into grey skies and all-too-obviously unheated houses, all I hear from the other side of the world is news of beautiful spring days, the optimism of the coming summer and the excitement of eating and drinking outside. I think what really precipitated this homesickness was a comment in this week's Popbitch newsletter, which simply said 'The sun is out. The sky is blue. The ska is on the stereo.' I've tried a bit of Desmond Dekker's superbly sunny '007' this morning, but it's not really having the desired effect and our sky is still a leaden grey.

Perhaps I might try a bit of the Specials later on.

Also, it seems that people I don't know are reading Eating Auckland and enjoying it - I started getting a bit of traffic from an unfamiliar site the other day, and it turns out it was a discussion on a (more popular) blog about maintaining a point of view whilst blogging. Someone was holding my site up as a great example of a totally impartial blog and said some lovely things about it too, which fair made my day.

Feeding... and feeding... and feeding...

Open the box. Examine contents for signs of life. Stir the mixture. Pour away 200ml of it. Combine 100g flour and 150ml water. Mix into mixture. Close box.

Twice a day. For two weeks. Apparently this is what it takes to get a sourdough starter to a stable existence, when one can actually make bread out of it. It'd better work.

I'm a bit less concerned about it now than I was, as it's still alive and bubbling, just very slowly. It's behaving a bit like a sulky teenager, responding only to the odd poke and regular feeding. I think the problem is that it's got a bit colder of late, and so our inside temperature is a bit lower than the required 20C (central heating has apparently not made it this far south), and so my little yeasts are working very sluggishly indeed. From what I can tell, this isn't a bad thing necessarily, but it might mean it'll take a while to get stable. I've been placing it in what sunlight our flat gets during the day, and feeding it with slightly warm water to try to keep it cosy.

Hmmm. Ten days or so to go, possibly more.

Phase 2 begins...

After two days of seeming inactivity, I've decided my starter needs feeding. We're six days after birth, well short of the stated ten day minimum in my recipe, but after the five day period that some online recipes say. Also, the book I'm following (Moro) says that after ten days the bag containing the crushed grapes should be inflated - this happened after about three days for me. So here we go, moving on a little early.

As you can see, it's all gone a bit quiet and has separated out quite a bit. After so much activity at the start, I've got a bit nervous with all this quietness.

A quick look in the top shows that there's a healthy-looking yeast bloom on the surface of the liquid and the bag, and there are still a few bubbles coming up from the gunge in the bottom. I'm not sure what this means, but I've embarked on this feeding lark and I'm going to see it through. I suspect yeast needs a firm, decisive hand to coax it into full, breadmaking productivity.

Odour-wise, it's not actually as bad as I thought. It's hardly Chanel No.5, but it's clean-smelling, sour and definitely grapey, with a growing yeasty character. It doesn't smell rotten, and the slight cheesiness I got off it the other day has gone.

So I lifted out the bag, scraped off as much gunge as I could, and squeezed the residual juice out of it, which by now had taken a decent amount of colour from the grape skins. This went into the sink, to be dealt with later on.

A quick stir, and in went the requisite 100g of flour and 150ml water, more stirring and we're done. I realised with some horror that I'd forgotten to discard a third or so of the total mass first, as all the recipes tell you to do, but there's plenty of room in the container, so I think (hope) it'll be ok this once. I've made a mark on the side where the mixture comes up to, so I'll keep an eye on it and see if it's getting unruly.

Here it is after its first feed. It looks quite contented and settled I think. The lumps of flour in it are apparently ok - I've broken them down a bit but didn't want to work the mixture too much. We'll see; if it's still lumpy in a few days I might give it a bit of a go with a whisk or something.

So here we go - two feeds a day at regular intervals for two weeks. Who knows though, this might come together sooner if the process to date is anything to go by. This is the bit I've been worrying about a bit to be honest - it all seems like rather a lot of work, but I'm sure it'll pay off in the end.

I'll post a next instalment either in a week or so, or if anything astonishing happens, whichever comes first.

Poor willpower and over-attentiveness

I've been getting a bit concerned the past few days about the health of my starter. It's turned itself back over, with the liquid now sitting on the top, and the bag of grapes which was quite inflated is starting to sag a bit. It doesn't look at all as lively as it did, either. It smells pretty unusual, but it's not a mouldy or overly unpleasant smell, sort of cheesy and yeasty with a bit of sourness on it, so I think we could still be on the right track.

So I've given in to temptation and given it a stir. I've also turned the bag over in the liquid as it was starting to dry out on the top. Finally, in response to a number of internet sources, I've unclipped the lid, so that the seal isn't airtight, which should let the thing breathe a little whilst ensuring it's not entirely sterile. Letting natural yeasts and things in from the air is apparently to be encouraged. It may start to make the kitchen smell funny though, in which case it's back on with the clips.

I'm also starting to doubt our recipe a little, which says to leave the starter to build for two weeks prior to the first feed. Some online recipes have you feeding it in five days or even less, and normally say it's ready for one once it starts to get active, which it certainly was a few days ago. I hope I'm not starving it. I reckon that if it's not done anything by tomorrow afternoon I'll feed it, as that'll make five days. Perhaps I have peculiarly lively (and hungry) yeasts going on in there, who knows.

Real world vs Twitter

Tonight, the Kiwi and I took part in a wine tasting on Twitter. Interesting concept, one that was dreamt up by three guys, the owner of a wine store in Auckland, a wine writer in Oamaru and a winemaker in Marlborough about two months ago. The deal is simple; you buy a bottle of Fiasco's 'Black Pearl' Pinot Noir, have your first taste at 2000 on April 19th, and post your tasting notes on Twitter.

Here's the feed: http://bit.ly/9UGeH

On the whole, a bit of a success. The wine itself is excellent, not only superbly priced at $20 (special Tweetbunch price, apparently), but it's Aaron's first Pinot of his own, I think, which is a fair achievement in itself. It's actually quite European in style, with a bit more juicy acidity and slightly more forward fruit, but with a great earthiness that NZ Pinots often don't have, certainly not this young (2008).

You lot in the UK probably won't see hide nor hair of it though, as I don't think he makes all that much. Such is life.

And of the event? A great idea, I think, and it went really well. True, there's the lack of face-to-face interaction that's the hallmark of online social interaction, but realistically that takes nothing away from it. You're still chatting away to a group of similarly-minded people, still tasting wine, still enjoying the experience, but with the added bonus of not only being able to talk directly to the winemaker, but not having to leave the house. I know there'll be a few 'social networking stunts our emotional growth' comments bandied about, as there always are, but the long and short of it is that this was a really innovative use of Twitter which worked tremendously well.

I think there may be more in future. Also, we made it onto Twitscoop, but that might be as much to do with the rest of the world being asleep / just waking up as because a few dozen of us were tasting wine at the time :)

It's alive!

This is bizarre, truly bizarre stuff. About 24 hours after kicking off the starter, a layer of yellowish liquid appeared on the surface of my starter, presumably some of the water and grape juice separating out. It got steadily deeper, and I considered stirring it in but thought better of it, deciding to follow the book (which doesn't say to do anything to it for two weeks).



This morning, the Kiwi pointed out (with some alarm) that things had changed somewhat. As you can see from the picture, the whitish goop has surged up from beneath the liquid and is full of bubbles, proving that something is active within the box. The photo doesn't really do justice to quite how mental this thing's gone, and we've still got a minimum of eight days left to go before I'm allowed to tinker with it. The recipe says ten days to two weeks, and I'm sticking to it. The one thing I'm allowing myself to do is to pop the lid every now and then to release any gas - I don't fancy scraping fermenting yeast and flour off my kitchen walls in the event of an explosion.

This is brilliant - a great sign that my starter is alive, for now at least. I'm very proud. More on this as we get it.

Starting the starter

Finding myself recently with quite a bit of spare time, I've begun a project I've been meaning to get into for a while. I'm going to bake my own sourdough bread, but rather than using brewer's yeast of the sort you can get fresh from a friendly baker or dried in packets, I'm making my own sourdough starter, using natural wild yeasts. This is a bit of an undertaking for me, so I'm going to document the process on this blog - it should take about four weeks until I can make some bread, and we're dealing with me trying to keep a bucket of micro-organisms alive for that time, so it could be interesting.

The way this is supposed to work, I think, is that we try to slowly culture yeasts, found both naturally in flour and on the skins of organic grapes, in a food-rich mixture of flour and water, until we get to the point where the starter is a more or less stable environment containing both active yeast colonies and a fair bit of acids and all sorts of good things. Once we're stable, we use a bit of the starter to bake some bread, and feed the starter to replace the lost volume and kick it off again. That's the rough theory, anyway.



So here's where we begin, with the stuff needed to make the starter. I decided that spending a small fortune on organic flour was probably out of the question at this point, so for this run I'm attempting this with normal high grade bread flour. The grapes are organic, all $11.00 of the blighters. I'm also using water that's been out of the tap for a while, to let some of the chlorine gas escape (our water here is somewhat aggressively treated). The water and flour variables are ones I'll change if this doesn't work.



Here's it all mixed together. The grapes are tied up in a light tea towel, so they can be lifted out later on. They're lightly crushed, with the juice mixed in with the flour and water, and then submerged in the goop. Lid on, wait two weeks for stuff to happen. I will report back.

Woohoo! Mantis!

A few weeks ago, I noticed a praying mantis clinging to the wall above the mystery tree, and it freaked me the hell out. Today it's still there, and from a quick check on Wikipedia, it seems it's to be encouraged as it's entirely carnivorous, so I'm ok with it now. Right now, it's standing guard over the basil (although from the looks of it it'd be better off in the spinach pot), as you can sort of see in this mildly out-of-focus picture. My phone isn't good at close ups.



It looks pretty mean. I wonder if I should put a warning sign on the gate.

Easter, more gardening

This weekend is unusually holiday-like for the Kiwi and me. The past few weeks have been unusually hectic, with the Kiwi's dad's 60th birthday going on last weekend and planning and execution of those plans taking up a bit of time. Well worth it though - what a weekend. So amid all the job-hunting and so on, we're taking these four days to actually have a break. I know it sounds a bit rubbish, given that we don't tend to actually do much during the week, but I think it's more that we're having a break from the constant stress of it all, knowing that there's nothing we can do about it over this weekend.



So I have been tending to our garden. It's been going a bit mental lately, with the spinach sprouting all over the place and the basil beginning to look a bit weird. I think it might be planning to bolt at some point, so I'm feverishly trying to work out how to inveigle some of it into our cooking plans over the coming days, so I can harvest it without just chucking it away. The lime tree, as I've mentioned, is seeming a little bit overenthusiastic, so I've repotted it and am trying to find out how best to prune things like this to keep it in line. I want it alive at least until it has a chance to fruit.

I've also put out a pot with some rosemary and thyme in it, although I'm not sure how well thyme does outside, particularly with the weather cooling down a bit. We'll see - it's quite sheltered where it is, and the plant seems reasonably mature, so it might make it. We'll have the full Simon & Garfunkel if I can find some sage, but apparently that's a right bugger to grow and it always reminds me spookily of rabbits' ears, so perhaps not.

The mystery tree seems to have gone back to sleep. I think it only likes it when there's tons of sunlight and constant warmth, so it looks like we're back to the 'is it just a dead stick?' phase for a while. Everything else seems to be thriving, especially the parsley, and the chilli plants are looking more promising by the day.

So that's the garden update so far - other highlights of the weekend are an Easter dinner out west tomorrow at which I'm cooking a paella (others are doing other bits), and some sort of networking event at a local wine merchant on Monday night which could be entertaining.

One last note before I go and read the paper or something - I had a truly bizarre dream last night which I'm moved to share with you all. Working back at my old job, my boss had sent me to work at a Virgin Megastore, under the sea. It was laid out like the old Piccadilly store, but was submerged a long way off the coast somewhere. The only customers were terrifically rich people with submarines, so whilst the footfall was quite low, the average spend was massive. My role here was to improve the customer service processes, specifically around the handling of telephone and email complaints. I came up with a few options but the staff involved were highly resistant to change and to be honest, seemed to be managing ok. Working in this store was seen as a really great job for most of the staff, who spent most of their days sitting around listening to music and maintaining their spotless racking and promotion spaces, rarely troubled by customers. I remember looking out of the front window to the parked submarines outside and thinking what a great idea it had been to open a branch under the sea.

I would like to point out though, that this is in no way indicative of my normal thought processes whilst acting as a retail business consultant.

Another month...

You may have noticed an uncharacteristic lack of posts here of late. This is mainly as very little has changed over here - we're still looking for work, still getting up in the morning and scouring the job sites, still getting remarkably little traction from doing so. A promising conversation I've been clinging onto for three months fell through yesterday, so we're back to square one again. This ceased to be funny a very long time ago; now it's just boring, and not a little terrifying.

I am not, though, at the point yet where I'm questioning whether or not this was a good idea. It'll take a little longer for that to happen, and a few more rejections too, I think. Oh, and the UK economy would need to be in a better shape than the NZ one, which will take some time, I reckon.

It's still sunny here, although as we move into autumn the breeze is getting a little cooler. What's funny from my perspective is, whilst walking around in jeans and a t-shirt and finding it quite temperate, hearing other people shiver and complain. It's still over 15C and beautifully sunny, FFS people! Man up a little!

The garden, such as it is, is going great guns, although something or other is eating our spinach and some of the leaves on my chilli plant. We've been using the flat-leaf parsley, the basil and the (uneaten) spinach quite happily for a while now, which is nice, and I think the lime tree needs pruning as some of the topmost leaves are looking a bit sickly. Oh, and the Kiwi's spring onions seem to have, er, sprung, finally.

More news as we get it, on all fronts.

The Curious Case of a Truly Awful Film

Last night the Kiwi and I watched 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', the latest film to involve Brad Pitt and apparently also-ran for last year's Academy Awards.

What a terrible, terrible film. It's like a 166 minute slap in the face, a prolonged insult or a particularly bad case of constipation. From the overall concept to the appalling acting and stomach-churning attempts to tackle 'deep' subjects in ways that the Dawson's Creek kids would find mawkish, it almost motivated me to call up David Fincher and ask for that 166 minutes back. There is literally nothing of merit here, not even Cate Blanchett's initially hilarious 'old southern woman' accent (which fast matches being poked continually in the chest as a number one annoyance).

I rarely post about films, but I really had to get this one off my chest. What an absolute shocker.

Kings of Leon, Vector Arena, 25 March 2009

A couple of disclosure points first. Last time KoL came to London, they played Wembley and I kept my distance. I hate stadium gigs with a white-hot burning passion, and much as I really enjoyed the album they were touring (Because of the Times), I couldn't bring myself to pay a fair amount of money to be made to be even more splenetic than usual. I hate the muppets who go to these gigs, hate the way they act like teenagers on a school trip, hate the endless trips to the overpriced bars, the dodgy sound and the fact that the stage is a mile away so you end up watching it on screens and so you'd be better off buying the DVD and watching it at home where the atmosphere is bound to be a million times better and the idiot count is a bit lower.

However, this is Auckland, and things like this don't come around every day. So late last year we bought tickets (on the pound, so they were actually pretty cheap) and went last night. The Vector Arena actually turned out to be a great venue, of reasonable size, acceptable bar prices and well toileted. The sound was superb too, unusual in cavernous places like this. The band played a more or less note-perfect set, just like they did on the records. They adhered to all the usual rock tropes - the limited interaction with the crowd, comments like 'you're the best audience we've had on this tour', and 'hello, we're the Kings of Leon' (uh, thanks for that).

The audience was utterly insane. Seated in great seats (4th row back, rear), we were surrounded by female Beatles fans circa 1967, screaming All The Way Through The Performance. The sort of scream that's literally a heartbeat away from pure hysteria, that rips through the eardrums like a burglar alarm and will not shut up. They really did like the Kings of Leon, clearly.

So on the whole, they did very well indeed. A nice long set with a four-track encore, great sound, great lights etc. They knew exactly what their audience wanted and delivered no more, no less.

Coming away from it though, I couldn't put my finger on quite why I was left feeling so underwhelmed. Compared, say, with Elbow at the Roundhouse, or TV On The Radio at ULU. Different styles of band, admittedly, but what makes the difference between 'good' and 'exhilarating'? You couldn't fault the band in either case, nor the venue. I think it has to come down to the crowd. When every soul in that room is there for one reason and one reason only - to watch the band and drink in every nuance of their performance - that shared focus seems to make the whole experience so much better. When it's more about getting hammered and jumping around and yelling and generally becomes about each individual, it kind of leaves me cold. More than that, it brings uncharactaristically violent urges to the surface.

I wondered for a while if this was an age thing, but to be honest I think I've always felt like this, every since Dinosaur Jnr at the Manchester Academy (my first gig on my own). Loved every minute of that.

So I dunno. I'll probably still go to the odd stadium gig, the odd mainstream band and so on, but I'll probably go on finding it pleasant enough, but a bit disappointing all the same.

Ouch

Before I go to bed, I feel I must share with the world two things I've just heard.

1. The sound, on getting up after having leant on one elbow for about one hour, of something in the shoulder area going like this. Only a bit... wetter.

2. The other sound, on standing up after having leant on one elbow for about an hour, of either my right hip or knee making something close to the sound hydrogen makes when ignited.

And they, ladies and gentlemen, are the sounds of old, old age.

On running in Auckland

By my nature I'm a pretty lazy sort of person, like water I always try to choose the path of least resistance. My running habits are fairly well aligned with this trait, as I run purely to combat the damage I do to my body with fat and alcohol, and try to make it as easy as possible in the process.

Auckland has challenged this somewhat. A typical run might go a bit like this:

Decide to run a bit further today, so plot a 10k route that avoids all known hills. Turn left out of the flat and immediately encounter a hill, tell myself that it's only a short one and charge up it into a headwind. Canter another kilometer or so, turn a corner and am faced with what can only be described as a wall with cars going up it. I can just about see the top, so set a determined pace and chug up it, trying to keep a decent cadence. Get to the top, decide to reward myself with 50m of walking (it's either this or a seizure).

Spotted by someone running on the other side of the road, so start running again out of shame, into a headwind. Get to the end of this bit of road and see the sea (the eastern end of the harbour), start feeling all worthy and windswept. Head along the coast a little to a quaint little Cornish-style bay, the pleasure of seeing which is diminished slightly by the hill rising vertically in front of me. Can't see the top of this one, so adopt a slightly cautious pace and pant up it into a headwind. Woman pushing baby buggy passes me halfway up. At least it wasn't twins, I suppose.

Feel a tiny spot of rain, followed instantaneously by torrential, vertical, drenching downpour. Soaked through in seconds, at which point it stops, sun comes out, pavement and clothes bone dry again. Time elapsed, 20-30 seconds. Reach a turn-off point which thankfully isn't quite the summit, but it'll do. Turn off into a park, get lost. Find a road, predictably (by now) a hill leading upwards. Run up it, starting to lose sense of humour somewhat.

Begin looking for necessary turning off this road. Find to my dismay that few of the roads are actually signposted. A few minutes of searching at each one eventually turns up the right one, which is amazingly a hill leading downwards! Surely homeward bound?

Scramble down hill, avoiding cars parked on the pavement, half out of driveways, half on the road, in the road, across the road. Notice that the road appears to turn upwards relatively soon, note also that it doesn't seem that much of an incline. Sprint up small incline into a headwind, realise too late that behind this tiny lump lurks a chasm, a volcanic valley leading straight down, and straight back up again. Limp down the hill like a lamb to the slaughter.

Halfway up the other side, receive a tiny respite as I cross a road, which is mercifully flat. Unfortunately, this means the next 10m is considerably steeper to compensate. Three-quarters of the way up, I'm whispering encouragement under my breath. Seven-eights of the way up I'm murmuring abuse at myself. At the top I look back down and almost believe it was worth it, the view to the city on one side and the suburbs punctuated by the volcanic cones of Mount Eden, Mount Albert, One Tree Hill spread out on the other. Realise with horror that I'm still one valley away from the home straight.

Another downwards stumble, across the motorway into a headwind that leaves ripple effects across my face. Haul myself up the other side, turn 90 degrees into a headwind and note with a sinking feeling that the home straight is in fact a deceptive incline. Attempt to pass cafes, bars and restaurants on this stretch looking like it's all a bit of a breeze and secretly cursing these people for spending all day in cafes and bars and restaurants and still looking in reasonable shape.

Arrive home, wondering how a circular running route can contain more up than down, and how it can be all into a headwind. What a bizarre place.

Question for you all

Although I'll not be actually doing this until I start earning, I have time to think about it now and so I could do with some help from all you internet people. I currently don't have a satisfactory way of playing audio and video media in our house. Right now, I play music by plugging either my laptop or my iPod into the speakers I sometimes use to amplify the TV. Video I play by connecting the laptop to the TV using a VGA cable - the audio goes through the same speakers.

Problems:

- it's not instantaneous - there's plugging in of things to be done before it goes
- I prefer using my laptop to play music from, as I can use my iPod Touch to remotely control iTunes, but
- I can't use my laptop on the sofa whilst this is going on as it needs to be within VGA cable reach of the TV
- the external speakers don't have a remote (although we will be getting a Viera home cinema system at some point which should solve this to an extent)

So, basically, whilst sitting on our sofa (3.5m from the TV screen), I want to be able to browse a library of audio & video files, and control playback, with the audio and video playback going through the TV (album art would be nice alongside audio). I'll want to be able to add to my libraries through this interface, so a browser at least, and a few toys like Spotify and Last.FM will be needed. At some point in the near future, I'll want to use something like Boxee to access online content as well. The TV is full-HD, and it would be good to make use of that if possible. Note that the home cinema addition will take up one of the two HDMI ports.

I also want nothing to do with Apple hardware (other than the iPod), as it's ruinously expensive over here.

The next step will be setting up speakers in another part of the house, and playing the same audio library through there - I suspect that an Apple AirPort or similar might do the trick here, but that bridge we can cross when we come to it. Got all that?

At the moment it's sounding very much like a small PC tower with a ton of storage space, running Windows (preferably XP or maybe 7), and using the TV as the (primary or secondary) monitor with an HDMI connection. Problems there are that iTunes is rubbish at video playback, and although the DivX player has been working well for me of late, there's no iTouch remote for it. Secondly I'd have to get a wireless (bluetooth, probably) mouse & keyboard for it too, not much of a hassle but still more crap to have lying around the living room.

Years ago, I remember conversations around the critical points of convergence being mobile/media player/online-enabled device, and office/living room. The former we can now see in multiple guises - until I have a satisfactory, cost-effective way to fulfil the above requirements, I don't think we can quite say we've got there just yet.

Answers, suggestions in the comments, or email me directly. This should be fun...

We continue...

Anyone who ever listened to Radio 1 in the early 90s surely can't hear those words without remembering Pete Tong's radio show, each track preceded with those sternly intoned syllables. Weirdly, I notice that noble-minded but severely irritating Gok Wan has adopted exactly the same intonation pattern with Every. Single. Sentence. he utters. Bugs the hell out of me, even though I have to tip my hat to his efforts to reverse the trend in body dysmorphia among women. A trend which, walking around the UK, I saw absolutely no evidence of. Curious.

Anyway, that small digression aside, this week has begun much like the others, with visits to recruiters and not a lot else. For some reason the Wii has stopped working, hopefully something to do with the fuse - I have yet to replace the plug with one of the worryingly fuseless NZ ones, so perhaps I'll get round to that today. This little event will be the highlight of my week so far, replacing one of my key distractions at the moment - along with Facebook, Twitter, numerous blogs and the odd bit of cooking, the Wii makes up the group Things Which Keep Me Sane at the moment.

Twitter I continue to find fascinating. For some reason though, what fascinates me most about it isn't the application itself, or even the ecosystem of other bits and bobs which use it, but the way it's exposing a very basic human need for interaction, boiling down this need to very simple components; sharing, informing, questioning, assisting. Twitter is just a vehicle for this sort of thing, and in time will be seen to be one of many increasingly refined vehicles - the important thing is the human component.

This got me thinking a bit lately. I've said before that good advertising is relevant advertising, both in terms of content, context and timing, but I suppose a slightly cynical refinement of that would be in saying that advertising is good in inverse proportion to how irritating it is to an individual. This adds an extra dimension to the whole thing, in terms of how likely I am to be irritated by the mouthpiece of the advertising message: TelstraClear, for example, are right at the top of my shitlist right now, so even their fairly bland advertising gets my blood pressure up.

On the other hand, before Christmas, I was getting discount vouchers emailed through from friends at the rate of two to three a day, and although none of them were remotely relevant, it didn't really bother me all that much. Perhaps if they had all been from the same person, I might have politely asked them to stop, but my point is that I'm more likely to put up with spam from someone I know. It's like a 'micro-irritant', as opposed to the macro-irritants we get every 10 minutes on commercial TV. Questions about Twitter's moral responsibility to allow users to filter out commercial (or technically, semi-commercial) traffic are pointless. My feeling here is quite the opposite - Twitter has an obligation to allow and even encourage commercial use of the service - users themselves have the responsibility to control what they do and don't want in their feeds. I'll happily put up with my friends spamming me every now and then if they're getting something out of it.

Anyway, since I left work in the UK, I no longer have a professional blog, so you'll have to put up with musings like this on this one.

A brief diversion

In the interest of keeping ourselves sane, we've been using some bits and pieces we picked up at a garden centre a while back, and a bright green watering can we got as an engagement gift from the Kiwi's sister, to create a bit of a garden of sorts. Our outside area isn't huge, but it gets a fair bit of sun during the day, so what we have put in seems to be doing quite well.

From left to right in this picture, we've got basil and chillies, spring onions, the mystery tree and spinach. The chillies took about 10 days to germinate, which at the moment seems like about a year, so I was actually going outside to dig them up this morning when I saw some tiny little shoots poking through the soil. It's amazing how little it takes to lift your mood, isn't it? The spinach is also doing well, showing its first leaves and generally looking all shiny and green.

As for the mystery tree, we have two of them. They were here when we moved in, and were in a bit of a sorry state as I don't think anyone had lived here for a few months, very dry months at that. So we gave them some smart white pebbles and plenty of water, and over the past couple of days they've repaid us with a burst of flowers which smell like honeysuckle, complimenting the smell of the Hatter's lilies which permeates the living room. If anyone out there knows what they are, do let me know! Have a look at the close-up and see what you think.

Just out of shot in the first picture is the Empty Pot, which is currently awaiting something to grow in it. We've been going through a ton of flat-leafed parsley (called Italian or Continental Parsley here), so I think some of that might be called for. On the post-job shopping list is a lime tree too, as they're not only decent to look at, but limes are about $1 each here, which is extortionate. I reckon a tree would pay for itself within a season quite easily. We go through a lot of limes here, if not in Pacific cooking, then in Gin & Tonics.

Updates will be forthcoming.

On jobhunting

I have always hated jobhunting with a passion. More than once I've resigned myself to a few more months working in a job I've outgrown purely because I hate the whole process. I hate the constant disappointment, the way your personal worth is evaluated in terms of keywords and qualifications, and the way nine recruitment consultants in ten actually bother to read your CV, let alone take the time to understand what it is that you do. For someone like me who has a fairly shaky grip on my own self-esteem, it's a challenging process.

I don't think I've hated it as much as I do right now though. Two months after arriving in the country we've still to gain any real traction with anyone or anything, and as we come to the end of our interim cash, what's irritating me the most is the creeping sense of desperation, the sense of needing something from someone, the increasing feeling that I'm going to have to take the first thing that comes along and just be grateful for it.

Past experience doesn't help, either. All the positions I've ever worked in have come about through a personal contact, one way or another, with the possible exception of Virgin Digital, and as a colleague there rather unprofessionally told me once, I only just got that job, mainly as someone much better pulled out. So I don't have a huge amount of faith in the recruitment community, you could say.

Anyway, there's a little insight into what's going on at the moment. I applied for a few more things today, so chin up, this might be the week. I should probably take a leaf out of Melvtopia's book and find the hidden positives here... watch this space. Next week, if there's still silence on all fronts, I'm going to the pub.

And asking them if they have any jobs going. Backpedalling 10 years in my career could be just the thing to do, who knows?

Damn weekends

I reckon that, until I'm retired, this is the last time I'm going to have the luxury of disliking weekends intensely. Here's why:

1. At the weekend, no recruiters are working on my behalf, no businesses are working on job descriptions. Things stop.
2. At the weekend, the shops are full of people
3. And so are the roads
4. For some reason, I'm still in the habit of doing less at the weekend than I did in the week, with the result that my weekends are practically catatonic

This Friday we took a mini road trip to Hamilton, taking the opportunity of a friend's birthday to get out of Auckland for a night. The town being one week away from freshers' week, there was an air of expectant hope in the bars and restaurants, the calm before next week's storm I think. Dinner was great, the comedically bad waiter actually serving as a sort of entertainment in itself, and the pizzas mercifully free of jam, fruit and so on, something I'm grateful for every time it happens here.

Yesterday, I built our new barbeque, how butch is that? Tools and everything. I'm pleased to say it went up just within the alloted one hour's construction time, and although it was a bit rainy last night so we didn't use it (it hasn't got a hood, yet), I think it's reasonably sound. I'm going to christen it tonight with a couple of lamb leg steaks that have been nestling in some smoked paprika, garlic, red wine vinegar and olive oil all afternoon, should be a worthy first dish.

I've noticed a degree of curiosity people have over here for the relationship between the English and barbeques. I suppose it's the same intrigue we have for an African who's never seen the snow - a sort of 'have you ever used one of these before' attitude and a slight puzzlement that someone could have attained the age of 31 without using one regularly. It's true - I wasn't brought up with one and I'm still getting to grips with it, and it's always irritated me that there's a whole school of cookery that I've never really been anywhere near, so it's good to have the opportunity. One of the things I'm keen to try is ribs - cooked under the hood (once we get one) for hours until they're meltingly tender.

I've also noticed that in the time since we've been here, I haven't noticed one female going anywhere near one. Barbeques is men's business.

So that's where we are right now. Oh - I'm currently reading Brillat-Savarin's classic 'The Physiology of Taste', translated by the amazing M F K Fisher. I don't think I've had this much fun reading a book in quite some time.

Is it really late February already?

Time is seeming very elastic at the moment, stretching out like caramelised sugar and constantly wrong-footing me. This morning I was inspecting a pot outside where I'd planted some chillies, and decided glumly that they weren't sprouting and so were probably dead, when I noticed on the label that I'd only put them in three days ago. It seemed like over a week.

On the other hand, it seems ridiculous that our second rent payment is due next week. It only feels like we've been in here a week or so, but in reality it's been quite a while. We're pretty much settled in now, with all the absolutely necessary furniture installed and most of our stuff unpacked. Still in boxes are most of the books, CDs and DVDs, which are waiting patiently in the spare room for us to buy a bookcase. This is one of those purchases that we've relegated to the 'when we have jobs' list, along with a thing to put the TV on (entertainment cabinet? I'm sure they have a name), a barbeque, an olive pitter and some decent cheese for a change. Our warped sense of priority means we bought an ice-cream machine this week - it was on a 50% off deal though, in fairness. So far I've made an orange & grapefruit sorbet and some plum ice-cream, both of which pretty good. It's taken a bit of getting used to but I think I have the hang of it now.

Actually, that said I think we're going to relent and get a barbeque anyway. The main reason for this, apart from the social stigma of living in New Zealand and not having one, is that our smoke alarm is so sensitive that showering with the bathroom door open can set the upstairs one off, so the indoor grilling of any meat at all involves all the windows being open, the Kiwi racing round the house flapping things, and me occasionally holding the grill pan outside the kitchen window. Yesterday evening I was grilling some chicken, and poked the sizzling, smoking pan out of the window just as a neighbour walked past - fortunately missing his suit by a whisker. So I think it's a worthwhile purchase. The smoke alarms, you see, are linked to the fire system in the building, which in turn is linked to both the fire service and the sprinklers, neither of which I want going off. We get charged for every fire truck that turns up, and they usually send several.

No news on the job front, although the Kiwi seems to have found some more tame recruiters, which if I've not heard anything by the end of this week I might be pimping myself to as well. The thing that's really getting me worried is the boredom and lack of stimulus - despite trying to follow all the online media and industry buzz I used to, I can feel my brain drying up and grinding to a halt, and the temptation to retreat from the world into a comfortable cocoon of Mario Kart, Simpsons, Quake Live and the odd glass of wine is getting harder to resist.

Hilariously, in the context of all this media nonsense about social media atrophying the brains of our young, Twitter and Facebook are about the only things keeping me sane at the moment.

Eels

Earlier in the week, in search of fish (snapper and salmon, respectively), we took advantage of having NOTHING TO DO ALL DAY and went to the Auckland Fish Market early one morning. We got the fish we were looking for, but I couldn't leave without taking a look at this:



It's a tank of live eels, all intertwined and murky, eyeing me furiously through the glass. We left the market sans eels, but with this little ditty* winding its way round my brain...


*warning: contains distressing and possibly impenetrable British humour