A Right Excellent Discourse on Stuff ...

Thursday night and right on time, a month before Christmas, the first little white flakes are falling from the sky: destined, in our case, to land on the decking where they will melt or, if they're lucky enough to survive until morning, the dog will piddle on them.  Don't know which is worse, really. Those of you who enjoy a decent climate probably have no idea just how depressing this is: the last nail in the coffin of the year, a taste to come of life when the sun gutters and goes out and we all sit huddled in our thermal underwear around a smoky candle waiting for the sabre-toothed tigers to come back.

On reflection that's perhaps a little gloomy, but I really could do with some of that global warming stuff they've been promising us. It's not as though snow's any good to anyone, it just plops sullenly down the back of your collar, makes you cold and wet, and generally plays hell with traffic. Whatever, we're up for three months of it now, and there's not much I can do about it.

On the bright side, it does encourage winter cooking. I actually thought longingly of a decent soupe à l'oignon, which is a rare occurence, but then Margo has a pathological hatred of soups and in any case there are only three onions in the house (must get some more at the market on Saturday) which is not really enough to do a decent job. There's no bread either, and a toasted slice of baguette laden with cheese is a must for floating on onion soup. Which goes some way to explaining why we're having tandoori chicken tonight.

And then Jeremy (and Malyon, when she turns up with Tony in tow) will require fondue, and raclette, and tartiflette. All of which I personally find a bit suffocatingly heavy, as they're 95% melted cheese, and about as subtle about it as a blow to the head with a sledeghammer. Still, maybe I'll be able to get away with a choucroute and perhaps a cassoulet or two - that would be nice. Have to invite friends over, of course: I still haven't learnt how to make either in quantities sufficient for fewer than 8 people. Not that that stops me.

Of course this morning, just to piss me off on a Saturday, it snowed some more. And for some reason the snow-ploughs wanted to stay snugly tucked up inside in the warm, because they certainly weren't out when Jerry and I left for Chambéry at 9:00 am. First snowfall of the year and all of a sudden everyone forgets how to drive on the stuff: I mean I'm quite willing to admit that I get a bit tense, especially when overtaking, but there's no point in going all to pieces, for god's sake! There were a couple of cars in the ditch on the little stretch of road down below us, and one ahead of me with its tyres vainly spinning as it slid sideways ...

Not that Chambéry was much better. The autoroute hadn't been déneigée either, and best perhaps not to speak of the state of the VRU ... still, we got through to Carrefour with only a few brown-pants moments on the odd roundabout, and on the upside both the supermarkets and the market itself were pretty much deserted, with only the odd brave or foolhardy soul (which does that make me, I wonder) doing the rounds.

It's an odd thing, but where we (or more perhaps our colonist cousins) would describe something as a lemon, the French call it a turnip. Un véritable navet d'un film to describe something like, say, 2012. (Which was, let it be said, pretty bloody awful.) It's strange because the French actually rather like turnips. Fair enough, especially as they eschew the horticultural-society monsters and prefer them young, the size of golf-balls: still, as far as I'm concerned they'll always be cattle-fodder. I"m doubtless doing injustice to a noble vegetable, but there you are.

I've spoken of them before, and I know you wonder: this is what my little croquettes de porc look like. Guess what we had for lunch? More good comforting winter food. On the "pro" side: no need to wash the frying pan, two adolescents with chunks of baguette will wipe it cleaner than your dishwasher could ever do. Also, you only need two glasses of white wine for the actual recipe, which leaves you a reasonable amount to drink. Before getting on to the rosé. Although it's probably time we stopped pretending that it's still summer, give it away and start hitting the red.

Anyway, Jeremy came with me for a reason: normally he'd still be looking forward to another three hours in bed at the time I leave. But as it happens there was to be a rock concert - at which some of his friends happen to be playing - up at St. Hilaire du Touvet, so I said that if he tagged along and behaved himself I'd take him up after lunch. Of course that was Friday night, and I had most emphatically not counted on the snow. Have I mentioned that St. Hilaire is a little village, at about 1400m altitude up in the Chartreuse, accessible only by little twisty windy decidedly narrow roads, the sort with a cliff-face on one side and a precipice on the other? Thought not.

Oddly enough, and despite Sophie's dire forebodings, it was actually less painful than getting in to Chambéry. By the time we headed up the roads had been cleared, and I left him with the traditional phrase of parents everywhere: "make sure no-one throws up on your sleeping bag, 'cos you're the one who'll be cleaning it and vomit is hell to get out of the zipper teeth". The only grim spot on the horizon was coming back down, when I got stuck behind some old fart in a Kangoo who evidently thought that 50kph was a bit daring. As there was nowhere available to force him off the road, strap him to the bonnet of what I suppose I shall have to call his car and do an impromptu transplant operation, I refrained from eating his liver raw with a plastic teaspoon, and just overtook him at the first opportunity.

I'm sure, as he disappeared rapidly from view in the side mirror, I saw him shaking his fist angrily, doubtless dribbling curses about the "yoof" who've no respect for human life through his dentures.

That cheered me up immensely, so much so that I decided to do a bit of baking whilst I had the oven on for our roast chicken. The excellent David Lebowitz had a recipe for Oatmeal Raisin cookies and suggested that perhaps replacing the raisins with cranberries and white chocolate would be a good idea. I did that and he was, as usual, quite right. Goodnight, all. Happy barbecue, whilst we is freezing in the dark. Don't snigger, it'll be your turn soon enough.

Buggered batteries ...

Well, just when the week looked set to a good start ... of course, after a lovely weekend it had to start raining - heavily - and then I come out of the office to find that the battery's completely dead. Run up the curtain, barely enough juice to light up the inside of the car, and certainly none to do fancy things like lock or unlock it. So here I am, sitting in the office, waiting for the nice breakdown man to come along and fix me up.

Which is not really the way I'd planned on spending the start of the evening, should you be wondering.

An hour and a half later and the guy still hasn't turned up, so I ring back the insurance to see what the hell is going on and find out, to my dismay, that I appear to have slipped through the cracks. So they've promised that this time someone really will come, and it shouldn't be more than half an hour. I bloody well hope so, this is getting boring. And let's face it, there's little more boring than hanging around in the rain in a carpark, waiting for someone to turn up and replace your battery.

'Tis already, it would seem, the season to be merry. At least, that's what I deduce from the lorry-loads of slaughtered pine-trees, neatly wrapped in their plastic netting, going along the autoroutes. Seems a bit early to me - I mean, there are still four weeks to go, does anyone really expect the poor things not to be half-bald by the time Christmas day comes around? Or do they stick the poor things in a nitrogen atmosphere in a cold store until closer to the day? That would be pretty sad, if true. Especially if, when they open the doors, Santa and a couple of elves are found there lying stiff and frozen. Never trust a reindeer.

Isn't it just amazing what you can do with left-over pumpkin and pork? I only ask because we had vasty quantities of both floating around the other day (pumpkin is, as far as Jeremy is concerned, an insect - despite the distinct lack of legs - and thus classed as inedible unless really desperate) and so the pork got thickly sliced, the pumpkin mashed up with some decent curry, corn kernels, sour cream and cubes of roast potatoes and then fried, and the whole lot plonked on the table with some carottes vichy and a few shy bits of broccoli peeking out.

This, on the other hand, is not left-over (well, just enough left over for breakfast, to be honest): it is in fact a favourite, burgundy apple tart. Although it doesn't look much like any normal person's idea of a tart, and personally I'm happier referring to it as apple cake: whatever, simple and delicious. (By the way, don't get your hopes up. The "burgundy" in the name refers to its place of origin, not its contents. But as there's nothing time-critical going on when you're making it, feel free to empty a bottle whilst doing so, should you feel that way inclined.)

When I say simple ... take two eggs, break into a bowl with around 3/4 cup of sugar, and use your trusty electric beater to beat shit out of it until thick and creamy. Then add 3/4 cup of flour, 15cl of cream (or sour cream, if you like) and, if you have some, a drop or two of lemon oil - beat again till well mixed. Now stick in something like 25gm of butter, in small dice, and beat hell out of that too.

It's called apple cake/whatever for a good reason: you should now stir in two apples, peeled, cored and cut into slices or diced - your preference - and a handful of raisins, if that rocks your boat. I like 'em, Margo doesn't - whatever. If you didn't have lemon oil, some finely chopped or grated lemon peel would be a good idea too. Then slosh the whole lot into a buttered and sugared rectangular mould, bake till done (about 30 minutes, in my oven anyway), unmould and enjoy. With a good crème anglaise would be nice, and I quite like a dollop of redcurrant jelly. But maybe that's just me.

If you happen to have some left the next morning, you could probably try cutting it into half-inch slices, frying it in a little butter and sprinkling with sugar. I'm not inciting you to do that, just saying it's possible ...

Bloody shame it's Friday: dawned bright and sunny (a bit crisp, mind you). Seems a shame to waste it brushing up on cgi scripting for the SNCF ... which leads me inevitably to a few reflections.

I distinctly remember someone once telling me that a friend of his brother had it on good authority that one fine day Linus Torvalds was in the toilet reading and the idea of cloning UNIX came to him, out of the blue. After three hours and quite a bit of toilet paper he'd got the basic architecture sketched out, and over the following month of weekends he and a couple of hard-core coder friends got 350,000 lines of code and the first alpha version of the Linux 1.0.0 kernel ready. The longest part was picking the name.


And I really do have to ask myself why he bothered. Why go out of your way to duplicate the feel and functionality of a bloated, baroque system with everything in it but the kitchen sink? Come to that, if you look carefully you'll probably find that that's snuck its way in there too, lurking behind the purple beachballs with the Hawaiian motif, just over beside the drivers for the ICL punched-card readers. (Reminds me: anyone seen the remake of Hawaii 5-0? We really like it.)

I mean, there is still support built-in for terminals that communicate over string or knitted twine, using different types of knots to represent ASCII characters. And even a fervent admirer would have to admit that the "user-friendly" interface and the "intuitive" commands are a bit arcane.

Why not put all that undoubted talent into developing something genuinely innovative and useful? Like, say, bread that never fell buttered-side down? Or a genetically engineered cat that brought you coffee in the mornings, or at least didn't try to kill you in various subtle ways during the day? Or an improved version of the black death that only infects people who wander along yammering the petty details of their sad lives into their Bluetooth headsets? (I mean, some of these things I do not want to know. I do not care what you said/he said, nor do I wish to know that you've just bought some new knickers, in a fetching shade of salmon-pink. But I digress.)

Something that improves the general lot of humanity (or at least those that don't have Bluetooth headsets)? But no, geeks don't think like that, so we got something that, as Bismarck remarked, is not really for the faint-hearted to look at. (He was talking about lawmaking, I admit, so I may have taken him out of context, but what the hell.)

Which in turn reminds me that I saw an article today blaming poor old Tim Berners-Lee (aka "Greatest Living Briton"™) for all the ills of the internet - spam, DDOS, DNS poisoning, you name it - due to his lack of concern, some 20 years ago, for security. Never mind that the poor bugger's hardly responsible for all that, all he ever got up to was developing the HTTP protocol while he was supposed to be particle-bothering. Still, I suppose that as da intartubez was originally a British invention - before DARPA got their famously swivel-eyed pointy heads around it - he could be held to share some of the guilt by association.

Having finished raving - I spotted some frozen prawns at the supermarket today (what with Christmas coming up, 'tis definitely the season to be buying foie gras and other such things if you're into that - won't even have to take out a second mortgage to pay for it), so guess what Sophie and I had for lunch? First you fry the little sods up in butter until they go nice and pink, as god intended them to be, then you flambé the poor things (Scotch is good), then you pour in a glass of white mixed with a decent dose of olive oil, heaps of smashed garlic and some chopped parsley, let that reduce rapidly (bit of a sod really, it goes too fast to be able to drink a great deal whilst it's going on), then you eat it.

Messily, I must admit. Because unlike Sophie, I have never learnt the fine art of shelling prawns with a knife and fork, and even after watching her with some admiration I've still no great desire to learn. Prefer fingers.

And then, to follow, Sophie brought out a surprise: some aged Cheddar, bought at Lidl. At least 18 months old (so it's not as though it's juvenile murder), little flakes of salt in it - absolutely scrumptious. Do you know how long it's been since I had decent Cheddar? No, thought not.

Then, for reasons which escape me, Lucas asked what, in my long and varied career, were my culinary catastrophes. I'm sure you lot can think of some, back when I was just starting to teach myself how to cook (still, nothing, I hope, as gross as Browneye Puddding), but let it be admitted I myself can think of a couple. The accidental cassoulet pizza was, let's face it, an unmitigated disaster, and  then there was the time I roasted a chicken ... nothing wrong with that in itself, but I'd neglected to read the fine print. It was, of course, a boiling fowl, and it had obviously been getting quite a bit of exercise in the last few decades of its life.

And I can still remember Ian and Marie's wedding.

There was to be a mechoui - a spit-roasted sheep - and the general consensus was that it would be a good idea to stuff the poor thing (adding insult to injury) before the event. So as Ian had collected a number of mushrooms the night before, I bravely undertook to do the deed using them as a base. That may have been, in retrospect, a mistake. Don't get me wrong, it smelt wonderful. And the first five minutes of eating it were fine. But afterwards ... oddly enough, there were still some that went back for seconds. They may have been the ones scraping the stuffing onto the ground, don't know, I was having a lie-down.

But right now, seeing as Jeremy has buggered off to spend the night at Montmelian at a friend's place, I'm off to make dinner for two: a teeny roast chicken on garlic cloves, brussels sprouts (yes, Virginia, I do like those), and a sort of linzertorte to follow. Goodnight, all: mind how you go.

Another one of those blonde moments ...

Well, I suppose you've got the barbecues out of hibernation and are spending your weekends out on the beach doing your bit to reduce marine diversity and encourage grape-growing: over here in Ole Yurrup we is freezing our arses off (slight exaggeration, it hasn't actually got below zero yet except for one morning a few weeks ago, and I think that was a mistake) in the rain.

I see that I completely forgot to mention something: having fallen upon the link in David Lebowitz's excellent blog (the link's over there somewhere on the right) I thought I'd go have a look for myself at the catalogue of Librarie Gastéréa, in Lausanne, where I came upon this item:

BAUDRICOURT (Le Sire de) Manuel culinaire aphrodisiaque à l'usage des adultes des deux sexes / Paris, Edition photographique, s. d. [vers 1900].

In-12, demi-maroquin olive, dos lisse orné de filets dorés, 124 pp.

EDITION ORIGINALE RARE de ce recueil de 130 recettes "choisies parmi les plus opérantes". Illustrations "galantes" dans le texte. 

So, a cookbook dedicated to supposedly extremely effective aphrodisiac foods, for the use of either sex. (The cookbook, that is.) With naughty pictures. Sounds interesting, but I'm not really ready to shell out 570€ for a bit of soft-core food porn. But it would be nice to have on the shelves, snuggled up next to Escoffier. If anyone wants to get me a belated birthday present ...

Well, today turned out rather better than expected: foggy in the morning, as you can see, but not really too bad, all things considered. I can handle days like that. I should probably say that the day started out well, because there were some (admittedly minor) issues.

All of which were my fault, and totally unrelated to women drivers or anything (and I'm not saying that just to get Margo's hand off my windpipe, honest).

Actually, some were not in fact my fault: like, the midday rosé wasn't perfectly chilled because when I turned up at Sophie's she was out finishing off her shopping and both the brats were apparently sleeping the sleep of the dead behind locked doors, so the rosé had to stay put in the boot of the car rather than go into the freezer for ten minutes, as god intended.

Still, the devil finds work for idle hands, as they say, and without risking my neck too much I managed to pluck the last of the figs.

So anyway, Sophie had to go off and assist (or at least be present) at the flinging of the ashes of an uncle of her soon-to-be ex-husband (the flinging in question being into the Chéran, and it just might explain the taste of the mountain trout), which left me with a whole afternoon free in which to look like an idiot. Which, rising to the challenge, I did not fail to do.

It really was quite simple:  I took off with the intention of taking some photos of the Lac Noir, which is a little lake lost somewhere in the masses of rubble on the flanks of the Granier. So I headed off up the départmentale towards the Col du Granier, and when I got there realised that I'd probably missed the turnoff. What the hell, it was a lovely day, so I thought I'd go back down towards Chapareillan and get some photos that way as well.

How to feel like a prat ...

That's all well and good, but I must have been in brilliant blonde form when I parked (briefly, I thought) on one of the little routes forestières and somehow failed to notice that I'd cunningly backed up so that the right rear wheel was hanging in the air over a metre-deep pit of icy water, and both front wheels sitting in nice greasy mud.

Once Margo had stopped sniggering she kindly agreed to come along and tow me out, which was probably not something she'd planned on doing on her birthday. On the bright side, I now know how to fit the tow-hook onto my car.

The tow-hook lives in the little toolkit which nestles in the spare tyre, in the boot. Which was, of course, still full with that morning's shopping, including ten bottles of wine. Have I mentioned that the arse-end of the car was dangling over a deep pool of water? Yeah, I thought so. Clever old me.

 That was not, unfortunately, the end of it. Having, as one does, some rolled pork shoulder and some apples I decided to roast the one and make tarte Tatin with the other for that night's dinner. As I've said before, I make the caramel directly in the pie dish (helps to use a Pyrex one, I find) and then sprinkle cinnamon over that when it's cooled down a bit.

Fair enough, but I have two little jars of cinnamon in the spice cupboard, one of which contains cinnamon and the other, prominently marked "Not cinnamon", in fact contains cayenne pepper. Luckily I hadn't really got into the spirit of scattering by the time I came to my wits.

Actually, the combination isn't all that bad. The chili, as is its wont, brings out some of the flavours that would otherwise have stood shyly on the sidelines, waiting for a date ... that's why you'll sometimes find the stuff in expensive chocolate. It's still not really something I'd recommend you do on a regular basis, not unless you have a bloody good idea about your chili tolerance.

It must have been a dull week on the El Reg Innuendo and Triple Entendre desk, 'cos they decided to enliven my Friday with the following headlines (just click to get to the articles):

"Crab Shack mock cock cop attack shock"

and the delightfully ambiguous

"Pussy-slurping: You think you understand it but you don't" or, if you prefer, "Boffins in cataclysmic lingual robotics breakthrough". Be warned, there is actually some science in there. 

Anyway, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that it's still alarmingly fine and sunny to go off to the office and get a bit of paperwork done in peace and quiet. Let no-one say that the French fiscal administration is behind the times: I've actually signed up, online, to file our monthly GST declarations via the intertubes. Now once I've printed out the PDF, signed it, posted it, and got the acknowledgement back (probably in a month or two), I will be able to do just that ...

And by the way, turns out I may have been a bit mean-spirited suggesting that Tony was trying his best to be unable to come over. So it seems we will be meeting him at Christmas after all, when Mal turns up with him in tow. A brave lad.

Start thinking about choucroute ...

And once more did they hie them to the lair of that which is called Yog Sothoth, Eater of Souls, Destroyer Of Worlds, and That Which Chews The Slippers. And there did they propitiate it as is prescribed in the dark works (but the TV guide works just as well, if you don't happen to have a copy of the arcane version), and turnèd they the little knob, and lo! the central heating came on again. And a bloody good thing too, for it was starting to get just a little nippy.

Although you wouldn't think it to judge from the weather we've been having recently - up in the 20s yesterday! Can't last - didn't, of course, today was gray, dismal, and there was snow around 1100m. Not a good sign, as far as I'm concerned.

Last weekend of course was All Saints: Toussaint, in these benighted parts. It's that time when absolutely everyone heads off to the cemetary to stick great pots of flowers on top of old Uncle Wossname. If you're cheap, and untroubled by moral scruples, it's also a really good time to pick up some cheap flowers to stick around the house.

I've discovered something else to avoid: pinching the nerve at the base of yer spine. (For some strange reason, the frogs refer to this as the sciatic nerve. I suppose it"s just possible that they know what they're on about.) Whatever, hurts like buggery, and had me hobbling around like an old man for a couple of days. It's not so much the moving, just changing position from prone to upright, and vice versa - made getting into and out of the car a bit delicate. Whatever, I'll remember not to laugh so much next time. (Can't even think how it happened, actually. Just bent down to pick up a piece of wood, and on straightening up - ouch!)

On the bright side, at least the phone and the PC are more or less under control.  The phone works as well as one could expect, and I can even make and receive phone calls with it: the PC does more or less what I want, apart from the occasional hiccup. Like, insisting on recognising a prototype Win CE card as a GPS Camera (whatever that may be), and not letting me debug it. I suppose I can live with that.

Oh, don't try eating these. They're really pretty, I agree, only mildly psychotropic in small doses (and purgative too, I believe), apparently mortal if over-indulged in. Yep, these are ricin seeds. Who'd've believed our old friend Jacques was a closet terrorist, happily cultivating the raw ingredients for insidious weapons of mass destruction? You just can't trust anyone these days.

I suppose it must have been a month or so ago that they started bringing in the grapes: now it's time to start making some serious wine.  You can tell when, like me, you follow a Peugeot van with about a tonne of sugar in it: I'd say around 40 25kg sacks of sugar. Either they've an awful lot of jam to make, or there's a few hectolitres of wine that they feel requires chaptalisation. Personally I'd thought the grapes were sweet enough to not need that: apparently I'm wrong, or maybe they're trying for for "sticky" this year.

As you can probably tell, I've been wandering around Chambéry again, camera in hand.  Off to the Chateau de Boigne to see the trees losing their leaves under a brilliant blue sky, then the usual Saturday lunch with Sophie.

And for once, made it simple. Oeufs pochés Rossini, even simpler than eggs Benedict, and just as nice in my opinion. Still involves poaching eggs, though, so if you're uncomfortable with that you should probably leave the room now. (Really, it's not that difficult. Hell, even I learnt how to do it.)

The traditional recipe calls for croutons: knowing that these are nothing fancier than fried rounds of bread, I'm more than happy to use buttered toasted muffins. Bloody sight easier, and tastes just as good. Anyway, having prepared a bit of sauce béarnaise (add a dose of tomato concentrate/ketchup to it if you want to call it sauce Aurore), toasted the muffins and poached the eggs, just lay the muffins out on a serving dish, stick a good thick slice of foie gras on each and slide an egg on top, and stick them in the oven for five minutes whilst you make the salad.

When that's done, pull the eggs out of the oven, slosh some sauce over the top and serve. Do not expect applause: adolescents apparently don't do that.

A few vicious thoughts on ergonomy ...

 Actually, I should probably have titled this "I really, really need to wash my car". But that's not going to happen any time in the immediate future: it'll start raining sometime soon anyway, so what's the point?

Going to moan some more: not only have I had to get my new PC fit for purpose (and don't get me on to the subject of the keyboard, which is really really cheap and flexy) but I'm trying to get used to a new phone, which is kind of more urgent. Computers I can chop and change and run in parallel, but I've only got one SIM card ...

Anyway, the old Samsung UGH600 fell once too often: it's survived 1-metre falls onto concrete and tarmac, been sat on, wedged into the car seat, you name it, but the other day it fell two inches onto the floor, landed screen-side down on a dust-mote and whee! there's a big shatter mark on the screen. This, I thought, is the beginning of the end, so I went looking for a new one. No-one, apparently, does dumb phones anymore: at least, the only slider phone I could find that actually had a keyboard (I'll pass on a RIM, thanks) was pink and had Hello Kitty! stamped all over it. And whilst I don't mind being considered a bit odd, that might have been a bit much to bring out in meetings.

So I gritted my teeth and ordered a Samsung Wave, which arrived this morning, and I'm trying to get things transferred. And I have come, once again, to the conclusion that although Samsung make good phones, they make really ratshit software. The last lot that came with the old phone was counter-intuitive and bad: this is evil, or at least soul-destroying. Let me explain.

First of all, the old software would - sometimes - let you save your contacts and then export them to a CSV file. Messages, on the other hand, were much more random, and if ever you had multi-part messages (ie anything over 160 characters) you could forget about them, because Samsung's own software couldn't handle them. (It's not as though it's bloody rocket science, is it? It's been happening for years, for god's sake.) So I kissed my messages goodbye, but I did have the phonebook.

I thought I'd start from scratch, so I installed the new software (called Kies, what kind of a name is that?) and thought to myself  "Right! I shall create myself a new phonebook!". That was a mistake, because you can't. Your only option is to open a phonebook file, and if you type in a new name it will spit at you and say the file doesn't exist. Which is true, but rather misses the point. OK, let's try exporting the old phonebook. (From the home machine, on the first floor, of course.) Try as a Windows Address Book format: well and good, but the new software doesn't recognise that (damn, didn't look at the recognised files extensions). Go back upstairs, try as .vcf format: one entry per phonebook entry, and it seems I have to import each one individually. Let's try another trip and .csv format: yes, that works! Sort of.

Importing the .csv requires you to give the field mapping, so you have to check back to the .csv to get the column names and say what phonebook field you want each one to correspond to. Considering that, in many cases, the names are the same, you'd think this could have been automated, but apparently that was too difficult. So we go through that rather boring procedure and hit the button and lo! I have all my entries. Some of which have no phone numbers. At this point, I was happy that the machine hadn't melted down, so that was OK.

The new software gives you a nice spread-sheet style list of entries and you can in fact click on a cell (say, for mobile number) and an edit field opens, but you can't type anything into it. So that's a fat lot of bloody good. If you double-click on a line, though, a data-entry form will in fact pop up and you can type stuff in, but it has a few idiosyncracies of its own. For one thing, it requires a mobile number. (As does the import process: this is apparently why some of my entries had no number. No mobe, no numbers at all.) This is odd, because the phone itself doesn't care. But the software does.

It also has a really innovative, possibly even ground-breaking feature (I'd say it was magical, but I think Steve Jobs has patented that one), and I'm sure that back at orbiting corporate HQ in Seoul they're really pleased with it: when you edit a field with data already in it you can put the cursor where you want and start typing. (I did this because I had some numbers without the international dialling prefix, which is handy to have if I'm calling France from Switzerland, for instance.) But don't type more than one character, because once you've done that the cursor will automatically skip to the end of the data entry field! So to delete the leading zero and add the "+33" prefix takes four keystrokes and four mousie move/clicks. And you have to use the mouse, 'cos the cursor keys seem to be disabled inside the field.  Should probably count my blessings that the TAB key still navigates from field to field. I mean, what demented cretin came up with that one? Don't these idiots have a usability lab? Are they all high on crystal meth? Do they just not care?

Still not quite at the end of my pains, for having got most of the entries up-to-date on the PC you're now faced with the hurdle of getting them transferred to the phone. So you plug the phone in with the handy USB cable, Windows sees it and will let me copy files to and fro, but the phone says it can't log on in Kies mode until I have killed all running applications (how do I do that? Where's the bloody manual? Where's the task manager?) and the mother-loving PC software doesn't want to know anyway.

So I check the manual and hold the menu button down for five seconds until the task manager appears and gives me the option of killing all running processes: which, despite warnings about losing any unsaved data, I do. Happily. The phone is happy: it connects. The PC software still sees nothing. I unplug, I replug, I kill the PC software and restart it: by some miracle, the two enter into contact and bodily fluids (or whatever) are exchanged. I may now transfer my half-assed and incomplete phonebook over, and I do this with some alacrity before the frikkin' software decides it doesn't wanna.

So what sort of company ships software that will only connect to their own hardware when it feels like it, and the wind is blowing in the right direction? Well, I can name you one. For no extra charge, I can also name you a piece of software that's getting uninstalled in the next five minutes.

Surprisingly enough, getting my Dalek ringtone over was a piece of cake: just copied the MP3 file over with Windows and picked it on the phone (under "Sound/Profile/Normal/Ringtone", but I suppose I can live with that). Have to choose something else for my wakeup alarm, though. I really do not want to wake up every morning to shrill cries of "Exterminate! Exterminate!".

Then on the actual phone side, OK, it's a soft keyboard and you can pick the language and everything. 'Cos it's a smartphone, you see. So I thought I'd set it up with a French keyboard, because the accents come in handy - like frak, 'cos the only difference is that the layout is azerty rather than qwerty, you're still not getting any accents. Can't get them if you go into handwriting entry mode either (which otherwise works rather well): only way I've found so far is to go into keypad entry mode where it emulates a bog-standard dumb-phone and you click six times on e to get é, and if I wanted to do that I wouldn't have got a bloody smartphone, would I?

One reason Mother Theresa got beatified was that she didn't have a smartphone.

End of rant.

In other, family-related news, we apparently get to see Malyon over, before, or after Christmas. Should, by some quirk of fate, Tony get his passport, we'll see him as well. Personally, I have this nagging feeling that he's doing everything he can to not get his passport, so as to avoid meeting us. Probably a wise move, all things considered: no point in being disillusioned when still so young.

And then Malyon apparently hikes off (canoes off) to the middle of the Ecuadorian jungle in June/July 2011, to count bugs in the rain-forest canopy. Or that's what she says. (Actually, what she really said was "I'll mainly be working on frogs." Which is rather ambiguous and, if you happen to be a frog, more than a little worrying. I don't honestly want to know.)

Tomorrow being Saturday it's off to the market again, as usual: Margo's in Nantes, Sophie's down south at Cap d'Agde, so my options are limited. I shall have to go drinking with Bryan. I'll let you know how it all works out.

As it happens, not so well. Bryan was off kayaking up the coastline or doing a couple of lengths of lac du Bourget, or whatever he does in his spare time (when not trying to pick up waitresses), so I was condemned to drink une blanche all by my lonesome, looking out over the deserted terrace.

Still, not a complete waste of a day, as I picked up some collier d'agneau (that's neck of lamb, to you, don't bother googling it) at Mr. B's, and Carrefour were hocking off two chickens for the price of one (sailing close to the wind on the DLC, but what the hell ...) so after taking Jeremy up to the optician's to order some glasses and contacts I started cooking. Which I personally find rather a comforting thing to do.

The chooks found their way into a roasting pan with some potatoes and seemed happy with that: godnose what I'm going to do with the leftovers. Strip the meat from the bones, freeze it and turn it into an enormous chicken strudel at some point, no doubt.

The lamb is still simmering slowly on the range, turned into a navarin: floured, browned savagely, then drowned in white wine along with some carrots, potatoes and herbs. Should be fit to eat tomorrow night: when I don't have Jeremy, as he's been invited to sleep over at a friend's. More bloody leftovers.

There was also half a tin of apricots in the fridge, left over from a clafouti a couple of months back (only joking), so the obvious thing to do with that was to make a bretonne. Now there are two ways you can go about this: traditionally you'd make a thick slab of sweet short pastry (but using shortbread dough would elevate it to ther realms of the sublime), stick some apricots on top, and bake it.

This is all very well as far as it goes, but not, in my humble opinion, sufficient. I make something more like a kuchen: flour, butter, sugar, an egg and yeast revived in milk to make something approaching a brioche dough. (For a proper kuchen you'd also put in grated lemon peel. I have a little bottle of natural lemon oil, which works rather well.) This you shall flatten out into a round in the base of a springform cake tin and, when risen, shall ye put the apricots on top. After which you just have to strew sugar, cinnamon and powdered almonds all over before sticking it into the oven for half an hour.

And it doesn't mind if it's sitting next to a couple of chickens.

The week that was ...

Definitely autumn: a grey, dismal day until the clouds finally pissed off around 18:30, just in time for the sun to go down. Not my favourite season - not by a long shot - and knowing that there's another four months of crap weather to follow, doubtless involving snow at some point, really doesn't help.

No wonder the Scandinavians all either become alcoholics or top themselves over the winter. An eternal diet of grain alcohol and pickled herring can do that to you.


Still, at least there's still food. And, of course, wine.


Margo's not a great fan of veal chops - she doesn't actively dislike them, but they just don't tick her boxes - but unfortunately for her I am (a fan, that is). Especially when crumbed and fried just right, and served with sauce gribiche, which is the main attraction for Margo. Sauce gribiche is an odd mayonnaise (in that it's made with hard-boiled eggs, rather than raw ones) and it's the traditional accompaniment to such culinary delights as tête de veau, which is - yes - a cooked, boned, stuffed, rolled calf's head. Need a good sauce with that - not that you're likely to find me eating it. It takes me an hour or so to summon up the courage to eye a croissant in the face, let alone the rather quizzical look of a recently-departed calf.

Anyway, first hard-boil an egg. I'm assuming you're capable of this without further instructions on my part: should I be mistaken, feel free to leave now. When that's done (the boiling), slice it around the middle (I personally find this much easier when it's shelled, but you may have other ideas), stick the yolk in a small bowl and put the white somewhere you won't forget it, because you'll need it soon.

Now use the back of a spoon to mash the yolk with a good dose of Dijon mustard (don't know why, but cookbooks always specify a wooden spoon. Can't think why that should be, it's not as though it adds any flavour or anything), and when that's well incorporated start beating in some olive oil - bit by bit, until you think you've got as much as it will take. (You'll know when you've gone too far. It will separate and look very sad, and you'll have to start again. Although you could try energetically whisking in a tsp of water - it may work.)

Once you've got it to the right point, add obscene amounts of chives, chopped capers, parsley - whatever takes your fancy, really - the finely chopped egg-white, and a dribble or two of decent vinegar. Mix well, and serve. Excellent with cold meats, or boring old veal chops.

Speaking of vinegar, I know I've spoken of the chili vinegar I make, by the simple expedient of leaving little langue d'oiseau chilis to soak in good cider vinegar for a month or so, after which it's fit to go into Magali-dressing. There is a little Health & Safety advisory to go with that, which is, quite simply - do not let some of the little buggers slip into the vinaigrette along with the vinegar. Sophie got one with a mouthful of rabbit-food last weekend, and damned-near choked. I think she's forgiven me. Suppose I was lucky she didn't find the other two I spotted lurking under a lettuce-leaf at the bottom of the salad bowl, and manage to dispose of quietly.


Jerry's on holiday - again. The fact that school's out for two weeks has also put a dampener on the strikes; after all, who wants to protest out in the cold leaving the kids warm at home? Last week was apparently quite chaud, as they say: the proviseur of Lycée Monge apparently got truncheoned by the CRS when he went to deny them entry to the school (as he has every right to do), there've been a few cars and many rubbish bins torched, and Bryan was moaning today about being evicted from one of his favourite bars at 8pm on Thursday, being as there was a manifestation taking place. All good stirring stuff, almost makes me want to sing the Marseillaise under the shower.

But what I really started out to say was that when Margo brought him home on Friday night, he casually tossed her a bit of paper: turned out to be the results of his last maths test. He only got 20/20: it would be an understatement to say that that's a bit of an improvement on last year. Don't know what happened, but something certainly seems to have. Shan't complain.

On the other hand, I would like to moan about the fact that nothing seems to be delivered with paper manuals these days. Yes, I'm sure it's very ecobloodylogical, but it's also a right pain in the proverbials. Case in point: last Saturday night Sophie tried to take a photo with my camera, and must have pressed some buttons. So wandering about Chambéry today, I discovered to my horror that instead of the full-screen view of the shot I'd just taken I got a useless thumbnail with all sorts of histogram information, about which I do not care. So I had to wait until I got home and fired up a computer so that I could look at the bloody PDF to find out that I just had to push the INFO button repeatedly in playback mode until I got the display back the way I like it.

Bloody marvellous. At least the old Nikon F401 came with a hefty honest-to-god paper booklet (still in the camera bag, by the way) detailing everything you might ever want to know about its care, feeding and operation, and all you needed to consult it was a pair of glasses (for the typeface was, let it be admitted, pretty miniscule).

Which reminds me that I read an interesting article the other day in The Economist, on preserving digital documents. Not only, as they pointed out, does the physical medium present problems (anyone still have a reliable 5" floppy disk reader? Or an MO drive, with working SCSI-I interface that'll fit into a PCI-Express slot? Thought not) but the actual file formats themselves are problematic. Especially when proprietary (as they all were) and from companies that've long since ceased to exist and whose documentation, such as it was, paid a visit to the dumpster years ago.

Whatever. We're all still alive - although technically speaking I can't be certain about Jeremy, because he still hasn't emerged from the Nest he calls a bed. Smart lad. Margo's off to another salon next week, up at Nantes, passing by Lyon and the south of Paris to pick up her new toy - a long-arm sewing machine conceived with only one purpose in mind, quilting quilts (which sounds a bit oxymoronic, but I can't help that). We shall have to find a place for it to live when it arrives here.

And that"s pretty much the week that was. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to try and find some pickled herrings somewhere.

The snow is nigh ...

All alone again: Margo and Karen have headed off to Milan for this big salon thingie. Sounds as though the Italians could teach the French a thing or two about organising pissups in breweries (or an orgy in a brothel, if you prefer - that translates better into French). There are apparently two big exhibition centres at Milan, about 15 minutes apart, and they both have the same name. So the possibility of some confusion would seem high. Assuming that you are confused, you'd think that when, at the exhibitor's gate, they scanned your barcode, big warning lights would flash up on the computer and they would tell you that you're not at the right place. Apparently not, for according to Margo they wandered around for an hour before someone eventually said that they were not where they wanted to be. (And it's probably just as well that Karen speaks fluent Italian, which is in fact why she's there - to look after poor Margo.)

Whatever, they eventually disovered their mistake and got to the right place (only two hours later than planned) to find that parking was, even by Italian standards, worse than dismal. German mobile-homes with caravans trying to get into the exhibition parking, half a kilometer of backed-up traffic all honking enthusiastically behind ... and they they were told that they had to park on the other side of the street anyway. What fun. Especially lugging all your stuff across a busy 4-lane boulevard and up three flights of stairs ... at least the worst that happened to me today was having WinCE not wanting to include one of my drivers in the build, and I was kind of expecting that because it hadn't played up for over a week.

You may have heard that we're suffering strikes at the moment, occasioned by our dwarf president's proposed reforms on retirement: I cannot say that having lots of retirees on strike really draws attention to itself, as almost by definition they don't do a damn thing anyway, but having the public transport workers go out as well was noticeable. A hell of a lot more traffic on the VRU, which meant diving off and going through twisty side roads to get to the office on Tuesday.

More importantly, and definitely more annoying, I have discovered that there are apps that will not install under Win7 64-bit: including some of my development tools. B'stard. This means that I'm going to have to keep the desktop machine running for a while yet, which was not really in my plans.

And on top of that there's a bit of maintenance to do on the TV computer. One of the external hard-drives died the other day: one of those with about 500Mb of TV series on it, not all of which we've had the time to watch. As I plugged it into the USB port I heard the sad "clunk-clunk-clunk" of a desperately seeking drive head and said to myself "that's one dead disk", but much to my surprise, once I'd managed to pry open the case (shame about that, one of the nice Porsche Design jobs from LaCie), extract the disk and plug it into  the only spare IDE slot on my computer, everything was still there! So I suppose the USB/IDE interface fried, which is kind of unusual.

I have two other definitely dead USB drives lying around (or rather had: I've just now chucked them) that once had Hitachi Deathstar disks in them (do not, ever, buy one of those or you may well wind up regretting it: I've had a 100% failure rate so far) and I'd hoped to be able to reuse one of the housings, but unfortunately they had neither IDE nor SATA connectors but some silly thing with which I am not familiar, so that definitively screwed that idea. So I am going to have to excavate the TV PC from its niche, open it, and stick the drive in it. Probably profit from the occasion to give it a good vacuuming whilst I'm about it, I suppose. Can't hurt.

The other lesson I should probably draw from this is not to buy LaCie gear again. I've bought four: two with the Deathstars which died suddenly just out of warranty, the one with the fried guts, and another one which is still - cross fingers - working. It has all my backups on it, so I hope it keeps on doing so. But as I'm not a particularly trusting person, I think I shall go out and buy yet another little WD 1Tb job, and back up my backups. Just to be on the safe side. (Oddly enough, the really cheap no-name one I got from Rue du Commerce years ago, with Ethernet and USB interfaces, is still working like a champ. Full to overflowing - only 500 Mb - but never a hiccup. Go figure.)

Forgot to mention, not that I want to make you jealous or anything, but how does roast shoulder of lamb with gratin dauphinois and carottes vichy sound, followed by tarte tatin? (Which, incidentally, sounds better as "Tarte tatin, tarte tatintin, tarte tatintin ..." performed to the Star Wars theme - or maybe that's just me.) Should you be wondering; tarte tatin is just upside-down apple pie. Now there are those who will make this with flaky pastry: this is heresy and an abomination, and I'll have no part of it. In the spirit of full disclosure, I will say at this point that I make the caramel in the pie dish itself: no farting around with a saucepan and trying to get the last drops of molten but rapidly hardening golden caramel out. And there's a stall at the market that sells Elstar apples, which I'd always thought to be pretty crap but I've since revised that opinion, as they are in fact quite delicious: crisp, juicy and just a bit tart. Great stuff for a tarte tatin.

And we had a small feast on Saturday to celebrate Sophie's and my birthdays: she's the 5th and I, as you may recall, am the 8th. Should have got round to it last weekend, but what with one thing and another that didn't happen. And in fact we had not one, but two. I turned up as usual at lunchtime, and we enjoyed ourselves so much that we decided to repeat the experience that evening. So I brought Jeremy along with a couple of popsicle lobsters and the makings of a curry for the boys.

I suppose I really should know better by now than to expect that to have been enough. There were five of us after all, with Sophie's friend Séverine, and it rapidly became obvious that something had to be done so I was banished to the kitchen to whip up a chocolate soufflé. Which disappeared in its turn. As did, I'm afraid to say, vast quantities of wine.

And right now it's a gray, depressing Sunday evening, and there's a light dusting of snow up on the Arclusaz, at about 1100m. Emphatically not good: lit the old woodburner in the kitchen, and I shall have to order in some more diesel for the heating. (Shall have to pay for it too, which is another problem.) Still, we've had a good run with the weather, so I suppose I can't complain too much. Good luck with yours, by the way.

Anyway, gotta go: there's a chicken roasting in the oven that needs my tender attention.