Author: Nick

Sitting here in Texas, where somewhat bizarrely, he started his radio career, I was so sad that the man who reared numerous generations on music beyond the mainstream has died – so young and so far away from home too.

I distinctly remember him playing ‘New England’ by Billy Bragg in about 1984, and turning the light back on to jot down the artist and title thinking, ‘hmm that was pretty good…’

At some point in 1987, Ray and I went to Radio 1’s building near Broadcasting House and left a tape for him to play.

Anyway, we went back shortly after the same night and the receptionist called him the studio. He answered and promised he would listen to it (man, we could be pushy when we wanted to be!). Friends subsequently told us that he did in fact play one of our songs – Razor Blades – one night soon after, but despite our drummer at that time being an engineer for the World Service, we weren’t able to verify that. There was no instant play-lists as there are now for every BBC radio show.

But hey, we spoke to the man at the height of his powers and given our relative position in the music industry, it was very gallant of him to bother. But that open-mindedness is what exposed him to what is continually new and interesting in popular music.

It’s difficult to imagine any other DJ would provoke as much affection as he did. Long may he R.I.P.

For the past year or two – in fact ever since we realized that going out every Saturday night was no longer feasible because of certain, ahem, restrictions – we have increased the amount of cooking we do. In fact I have made cooking on Saturday night a sort of weekly feature as well as trying to fit it in a couple of others time during the week (but this is New York, so not getting food delivered now and again would be a crime against the local economy).

The other reason for doing this to enable us to influence – and I’ll put it no more strongly than that – what the kids eat as they grow up, and hopefully to get them engaged and enthusiastic about cooking once they’re old enough to wield a knife. Thankfully we’ve got a few years to learn before that becomes an issue, and boy do I need that!

Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that I’ll be sharing my recipes – or to be more accurate, the recipes that I lift from various books and websites – and letting you know what we think of them. I will try to format them as well as my HTML skills will allow.

None of them will be exactly pushing the cullinary envelope – I mean I really was on baked potatoes being a major achievement about three years ago – and they will all be vegetarian, simply because otherwise they would just get cooked and tossed in the bin!

To kick it off, last week’s effort was vegetable savoury pie from the BBC’s website. The link is here, The recipe is also in the extended entry part of this post, so if you hit the ‘more’ link below you’ll find it. I apologize for not being able to make those pages look like this one, but there you go.

We have a running joke at home that whatever we cook, it always tastes better the day after I cook it. But in this case this actually was preferable on the Saturday night. The stir-fried vegetables were especially nice, but you couldn’t taste the blue cheese that much, despite me putting on more than the recipe suggested. That was probably due to the heat, as you could taste it more the following day.

One element that was missing was fresh cream – described as ‘single cream’ in the recipe. Such a thing is not sold in New York supermarkets. It’s so prevalent in the UK that even our cats only treated it as a minor delicacy. But the nearest I can find to it is whipping cream. If anyone knows anything closer to single dairy cream as they understand it, please let me know.

I’d rate this recipe at about 8/10 and one of the best savory pies I’ve had, although I know I have a better one or two that I’ll cook at some point soon.
Continue reading “Cooking”

News that Madness has signed a one-album deal to do an album of ska and reggae covers will go down particularly well with one member of our household, that’s for sure. That’s because right now the little man’s favorite tune starts like this:

“Hey you, don’t watch that, watch this
This is the heavy heavy monster sound…”

I mean what 2 year old couldn’t like that intro?

(He knows the rest of One Step Beyond off by heart too)

From the blog of William Gibson

President Bush goes to an elementary school to talk about the war.

After his talk, he offers to answer questions. One little boy puts up his hand and the president asks him his name.

“I’m Billy, sir.”

“And what’s your question, Billy?”

“I have three questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? And whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden?”

Just then the bell rings for recess. Bush announces that they’ll continue after recess.

When they return, Bush asks, “OK, where were we? Question time! Who has a question?”

Another little boy raises his hand. The president asks his name.

“I’m Steve, sir.”

“And what’s your question, Steve?”

“I have five questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? Whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden? Why did the recess bell go off twenty minutes early? And what the heck happened to Billy?”

This was the first haircut I’d had done professionally for about 10 years. This was the first haircut the little man had had done professionally his entire life.

We chose Astor Place Hair, which has been in the same place since 1947. It’s just a large basement room with barbers and hairdressers renting numerous chairs – must be 30 at least down there.

Don’t worry, it gets better…

It used to occupy a ground floor shop too, but rent got too high so the family that owned it gave it up to become a Cold Stone Creamery, which was just as well as somebody deserved a special treat after being so good, allowing Hector to cut his hair like this (follow the ‘more’ link for the results).
Continue reading “Hair”

Given my first Fulham game was Fulham v Nottingham Forest, where Brian Clough was a month into his legendary tenure of what he turned into a great Forest side, his passing at the age of 69 today was noteworthy and sad. Hardly unexpected though, given all that’s he’s been through over the past 10 years or so.

Quite apart from having a team that had the longest unbeaten run in the League until Arsenal just surpassed it and winning two European Cups in the trot in ’79 and ’80 – in those great Adidas kits too – his record as a player was phenomenal.

That Fulham game was on February 5 1975 and we drew 1-1 in the first replay. We needed two more before we got through to the 4th round and of course eventually the FA Cup Final, but less said about the result of that the better.

There is something to be said about Britain that you can invade the grounds of Buckingham Palace and the chamber of the House of Commons and not be gunned down in a spray of bullets. Nobody got hurt in this week’s protests – thought they did outside Parliament of course – and they made their point.

So much utter nonsense and the usual invocation of Al-Qaeda has spewed forth that you’d think Osama Bin Laden’s next tactic would be thumbing through Marvel comics looking for that tight fitting suit that would be the basis of the next attack.

And the fact that one of the them was Brian Ferry’s son and another a member of the England polo team just rams home the absurdity of the situation. I do hope this doesn’t lead to a state of paranoia and government touting of the ‘terror’ card as a way of pushing real issues that effect people off to the side – as it has patently has here in the US – but I fear that is what will happen.

And it wasn’t the greatest attack on Parliament for 300 years as many have indicated – the Luftwaffe still retains that dubious honour, dating back to 1941.

This is pretty neat; the UK’s Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) has launched an online mapping tool showing noise levels on London streets and are going to extend it to the rest of the country eventually.

I’m always struck by how quiet our little bit of it is when I’m there, especially compared with NYC and this confirms what ny ears were – or were not – hearing. Insert your postcode of choice and give it a whirl.

A lot of pictures from our family trip to LBI on the Jersey Shore in August, finally posted here.

But it’s one for the family & friends only, so you’ll need a log-in to see them. Contact us in the usual way if you don’t have a username & password.

You go away for 10 days or so and lo and behold someone holds a political convention in your home town! Anyway, Eliot got into the Republican convention on the first day and took some great shots of the calm before the carefully-stagemanaged storm of vitriol that are well worth a peek.