temporary post for the benefit of Greg

The list of things I like today includes (but is not limited to): ponies, chocolate, trogdor, urbanspoon, rocks, horchata and 5pm finishes.

Brunswick House Cafe – Revisited

I live quite close to Brunswick House and have kept an eye on the evolution of the cafe over the past year or so since opening.

I had weekend brunch here on a few occasions over the summer and the food has always been very nice – especially the tomatoes on toast – and the coffee good but the service was extremely patchy. They seemed to want to do table service but not actually be able to organise themselves to get it done, leading to long waits to order and receive food, and on a couple of occasions things ordered never arrived. They always seemed to have run out of things on the menu too.

However, we headed down there this week for a drink and since the summer, the place has changed quite a bit. The tiny counter/kitchen area has been redone as a bar and the back room opened out into a proper dining room. I assume this means they now have a real kitchen too. As we were just in for a drink, I didn’t look at the menu but they were fully booked for dinner on a Thursday so they must be doing something right.

As far as our drinks went… There was a distinctly Spanish theme going on, with all 5 beers available, and several of the wines, coming from Spain (although, I’ve since been told they change on a regular basis so this may just have been luck of the draw).

The cocktail list is nice, interesting but not too long and all priced at a quite reasonable £7. I had a “Blood and Sand” which was very tasty indeed, although I did feel it was just a little stingy when it came to portion size.
We tried a few different beers; Alhamra, Ambar Negra and Ambar 1900. All were nice but the Negra was the stand out to my mind; really light and subtle for a dark beer, with a sweet, malty taste.
I’m not sure of the exact prices but the beers were definitely not cheap though – I paid £11 something for two bottles, which was a bit of a shock.

I really like the idea of Brunswick House, the space is very funky, the building is beautiful and it is exactly the sort of offering that the area needs; a refuge for locals wanting to avoid the mediocrity of Clapham but without having to trek East for more something more interesting. However, I am concerned about the slight air of pretension about the place – it doesn’t fit well with the neighbourhood.
I shall be very interested to head back there for a dinner one night and see whether it’s worthwhile.

 

 

Infestation

I squealed because I thought we had cockroaches.
It turned out I’d just spilt a bag of dates across the floor.

Redundant Ideas No.2 : Micro Concierge

I’m very good at knowing what’s going on around London, where’s good to eat and which palaces are worth a visit so maybe I’ll start a service for people like myself, who are often too busy/disorganised to research things themselves but aren’t rich enough to belong to a proper grown-up concierge service.
It would also work well for visitors to the city who wanted a more interesting/less tacky experience than the standard tourist haunts and needed some local knowledge.
Instead of paying a hefty annual membership, you could just pay task by task, eg: a restaurant booking £5, concert tickets £15 + cost, £20 to build an itinerary for a great day/night out in town, based on preferences you’ve provided…

Redundant Ideas: Thoughts about what I could do instead of getting a “real job”:

Number One:
Write a cook book based on my inability to plan a menu:
The Empty Fridge Dinners: what to cook when you forgot to going shopping.

I’m pretty sure there’s a market for this.

Gardening Leave

Hello.
I am in the process of being made redundant.
While it’s not the end of the world, it’s not a particularly fun process. I did, however, think it might be a good opportunity to write a bit more. For the first time in forever, I will have some guilt-free spare time in which to put thought to paper.
I can’t guarantee what emerges will be pretty.

Book Review: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

I read this book (and indeed, wrote this review) quite a while ago but stumbled across it again and thought it was worth sharing.

I really enjoyed this book. It was a fast, easy read, while at the same time being quite intelligent with some interesting ideas.

I am also highly amused by the title, although a wee bit embarrassed that I didn’t get the joke until it was pointed out to me – for shame!

The opening scene, with our hero waking up with absolutely no idea of where or whom he is, is quite gripping. There are so many questions, so many possibilities as to where the story could go from here. Are the notes actually from his former self and can he be trusted? Does the doctor really have his best interests at heart or is there something sinister going on? Is Ian a spy? The book doesn’t quite manage to maintain that momentum throughout but as we move away from the initial set up and introduce new characters and learn more about Eric’s past, there is always enough going on, enough unanswered questions to hold your attention.

I liked the use of typography in the book, which surprised me. Nothing annoys me more (well, that is a slight hyperbole but I do get rather irritated) than books that have multiple narrators and feel the need to change typefaces each chapter to distinguish between the different voices. So, at first I questioned how much the typography actually contributed to the story, but the further you get through, the more it makes sense for it to be included.

One of the things that really appealed to me about this book was that the entire story was based around the theme that words matter. I like this. As part of a generation that has grew up only just before the advent of things such as spell check and text messaging, I’m frequently appalled by people’s attitude towards language – and in particular written language. I know my own is far from perfect but I did really like this (admittedly very fantastic) cautionary tale of what could go wrong when words aren’t afforded the necessary respect.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the ending is the bit that let the book down the most. Without giving too many spoilers, we’ve just experienced an epic, disastrous grand finale, only to be fobbed off with something that was – in equal parts – the requisite happily ever after, an open ended “interpret it how you will” and that laziest of lazies; the “it was all just a dream”.

Despite this, I still thought this was a cracking read; it’s the first book in a few months that I’ve really raced through, staying up to finish rather than just pottering through a few chapters each bedtime.

It’s a word-nerd’s perfect holiday book; read it on a beach in Santorini!

In my perfect world…

I never thought I’d buy a self help book, I really didn’t. The closest I’d gotten was Paolo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, which I found irritating and condescending, and a copy of The Game that someone lent me a year ago and is still sitting, at the bottom of a pile of more recent acquisitions, on the floor of my room.

However, I have today just been onto the interwebs and ordered myself a copy of what I do suspect can only be described as a self help book.

It happened thus:

For a number of years now, I’ve belonged to an online travel forum called Boots’n'All.

I love it; it’s a wonderful resource for planning my adventures, I get heaps of great advice that’s more recent and specific than any guidebook could provide, plus it’s a way to connect with lots of other travel junkies, share my own tips and adventures and generally enjoy a bit of chit-chat (travel related or not) to keep myself from going stir crazy in between trips.

Yesterday, someone started a fun chit-chatty thread titled “In my perfect world…”

Someone answered “…I could jet off to Victoria Falls then wake up in Bora Bora”, Someone else said “…there would be no indoor smoking ban”

I chimed in with three wishes:

…… I would never have to factor finances or annual leave allowances into my travel plans.

… I would have enough time in this life to travel the world and see everything, be a national geographic photographer, take up pottery, be a film maker, write books, run my own hostel, own a vineyard, be a farmer, have a family and enjoy lots of lazy sunday morning sleep-ins.

… I could gather together all the wonderful friends that I’ve made around the world and buy a village for us all to live in together, so I never had to miss anyone.

(Ignore for a second that if you lived in the same village as everyone you know it could all get a bit incestuous)

Then one of the other women on the site replied and asked, had I ever read a book called “Refuse to Choose” by Barbara Sher?

I’d never heard of it so duly pootled off to Amazon to see what it was all about.
And then the whole world changed.
Ok, that’s a bit extreme, I mean I haven’t even read the damn thing yet but yeah, oh wow, even just reading the reader reviews on Amazon made my head spin!

Basically, the premise of this book seems to be that there is a certain personality type known as a “scanner” which has many areas of interest, struggles to commit to a single career path or to finish projects and is often seen as flighty or unreliable.

In an article I found mid-google frenzy, Sher writes:

“Scanners love to read and write, to fix and invent things, to design projects and businesses, to cook and sing, and to create the perfect dinner party. (You’ll notice I didn’t use the word “or,” because Scanners don’t love to do one thing or the other; they love them all.)
A Scanner might be fascinated with learning how to play bridge or bocce, but once she gets good at it, she might never play it again. One Scanner I know proudly showed me a button she was wearing that said, “I Did That Already”.

To Scanners the world is like a big candy store full of fascinating opportunities, and all they want is to reach out and stuff their pockets.

It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

The problem is, Scanners are starving in the candy store. They believe they’re allowed to pursue only one path. But they want them all. If they force themselves to make a choice, they are forever discontented. But usually Scanners don’t choose anything at all. And they don’t feel good about it.”

I can’t even tell you how many chords this strikes for me. I’ve never been able to decide what I want to do when I grow up because I’ve never found anything that’s held my interest, I’ve always ended up wandering off to find something else to do.

I’ve known this about myself for a long time; that any job I have is fun for the first three months or so, until I know how to do it and the novelty wears off, and then I’m bored and when I’m bored, my productivity suffers, as does my mental health.
While I am lucky and seem to have dodged the depression that plagues other members of my family, I am very aware that when I’m not challenged or entertained, I feel trapped, I get down, and then everything just grinds to a halt and all I want to do is curl up bed and hide from the things I feel obliged to do but no longer have any interest in.

In my 30 ears on this planet, I have studied film making, worked as a secretary, a waitress, a live in carer, done a disastrous stint in door-to-door sales, quit everything to go to veterinary school, quit that to go travelling again. As a child all I wanted was ballet lessons. I quit after one term and took up ponies. That lasted a bit longer. At university it was rock climbing, skateboarding, snowboarding, rollerblading. Since then it’s been surfing, diving, running and briefly back to climbing. And I’m not even a sporty person. I can sew, I love to read, to cook, taking photos, writing… My knowledge of useless trivia beggers belief and yet I’m dead weight in a pub quiz because I can’t be relied on to know the answers for any one subject, I just know lots of random facts about very random topics that will probably never come up.

I embrace new interests openly and discard them equally freely. Some things I keep coming back to but am unable to sustain on a constant ongoing basis; I prefer to dip in and dip out.

This blog is a good example.  It’s not the I’ve lost interest in writing, it’s just that I’ve been doing other things. I have  every intention of getting back into it, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
It’s unbelievable the number of posts that get half written and then left in the drafts folder, starring at me accusingly until I’m too ashamed to even visit any more. They just sit there, destined never to get finished because the moment is gone, whatever I wanted to say doesn’t seem so urgent or topical or interesting any more. Revisiting a piece seldom works for me unless it is purely to correct typos and tidy up grammar, if it’s going to get published, it needs to get written while I’m in the moment.

Not all the things I get sidetracked by are fun or exciting; I’ve done what seems to be typical Scanner behaviour and, for lack of a career path that feels like a “calling”, I’ve settled for a “good enough job”. It doesn’t excite or stimulate, it is not something I have any particular interest in, but it pays enough to enable me a good lifestyle and has, until recently, allowed me plenty of spare time to pursue other interests.

Except things have changed now; my job has been taking a lot more out me recently because I’ve just been given a promotion, which involves a lot more work (but not so much reward, as is the way). Again, at first I relished the challenge, the novelty of doing something new, but now it feels less like an adventure and more like just a long hard slog towards something I don’t particularly want anyway… I’ve been struggling and struggling recently with an overwhelming desire to jack it in and run away.  I spend hours daydreaming about what I’ll do next… where I’ll travel… whether I should do a TEFL qualification so I can work as I travel, if I could work at my favourite coffee shop for a couple of months before leaving the city to get experience for the cafe/wine bar/hostel/bookshop I dream of opening one day…
I’m trying to be realistic;  I need to stick around at least until February, for a wedding I’m attending, to go give myself a chance to grow my savings a bit and so I have at least one job on my CV that’s lasted more than 18 months, but it can be very hard at times.

Which gets me back round to this book I’ve just ordered. I’m not hoping it’ll give me all the answers, I know enough about myself and about the world to know that those I must find for myself, but I am hoping that it might just be able to give me a few tips; coping strategies to help me stick my current situation out a little longer, and maybe some advice on how to figure out what to do next.

I’d threaten to report back after reading it but will quite likely get side tracked…

Change of Address

Uh-oh! More admin instead of a real post… Apologies, bad little blogger.

Anyway, as you may notice, I’ve changed the address of the blog. Basically, as scattergun in my approach to the internet as I am most aspects of life, I somehow ended up with over half a dozen different user names across as many websites/platforms and it was all getting a little ridiculous so I’ve decided to just pick one and try to consolidate/simplify my life a little.

I can’t promise this fresh start means anything will change in regards to my very lax blogging habits but at least you might me able to find me a little easier (or at least hopefully, I’ll stop locking myself out of all my accounts!)

Let’s see how we get on, shall we?

pip pip.

Checking in.

Hola.
I’ve not forgotten you, I’ve just been side-tracked by other things; work, life, Glastonbury….
I promise I’ll post something soon, there’s the Cambodia trip yet to write up, the long lost final instalment of last year’s big trip: Miami and Florida Keys, as well as plenty of other goings on.
I may get there in the end. (I may well forget and write something entirely different). In the meantime, I leave you this by way of a peace offering:

(How often does a zebra pop out of a tent and wave at YOU?!!)