Mischance

On the intersection with Deansgate a crowd had gathered.

A man lay on the floor, moaning and rubbing his leg. A bicycle lay on its side. Another man stood by, concerned at the well-being of the injured. A pedestrian had been crossing the road by the green crossing light. A cyclist, ignoring the traffic lights, sailed through and collided with him.

The cyclist lay on the ground, moaning.

The pedestrian stood by, apologising for the accident.

I wondered if it was bad form to kick a fallen man.

Magpie 23

The boss was in one of his snitty moods. Which is a bit like saying that snow is cold and wet and that dandelions are yellow. You can't blame the scorpion for its sting so I generally went with the flow, which always seemed to annoy him all the more, which made it all worthwhile. So today the boss was in one of his snitty moods.

He approached my desk brandishing the big, brass fire extinguisher I'd bought just that morning. He flourished it at me, which was no mean feat as it was all metal and he's no weightlifter.

"And what is this?" he asked. Dumb, really, but there you go.

"It's a fire extinguisher," I explained.

"No, sir, it is not!" he declaimed. I think it was declaimed, it was certainly something beginning with D whatever it was.

"No, honestly, it is. If you look, it even says so on the label. The lettering's very distinct."

"No, sir, it is not a fire extinguisher. It is an anachronism."

"I'm pretty OK with anachronisms," I pointed out.

"This is not just an anachronism. It is a dangerous anachronism."

I have to admit that this wrong-footed me a bit. We didn't do temporal mechanics at my school and the Doctor Who revival has rather passed me by. I had another look, to be on the safe side.

"No, it's definitely a fire extinguisher. It's got instructions on what to do in case of a fire and everything."

"It is a fire extinguisher that you fill with water," he spat. He could have filled the blessed thing with two sentences. "That makes it dangerous. It would be deadly in the case of an electrical fire."

"Would it help if I promised not to set fire to any electricity?"

"It would not. What is it doing here?"

"Well, actually, I'd bought it for decorative purposes rather than in case of fire.We've a perfectly serviceable fire extinguisher on the wall over there and I've been fully trained in the procedure for running screaming out of the building if anyone so much as lights a cigarette, so we didn't need another one except for decoration."

"Decoration?"

"Yes. An objet d'art. Or, more properly, an objet trouvé."

"Objet trouvé? And where did you find this thing?"

"In the window of an antique shop. They were having a sale."

"This is intolerable! What if some unsuspecting person thought that this was for real? There could be a disaster."

"There's only you and me who ever work here. I know not to use it and you wouldn't use it even if it were in full working order. So where's the problem?"

"And where would you have this abomination for safekeeping?"

"I rather thought it would do over there by the roll-top desk, along with the sit-up-and-beg Imperial typewriter, the Bakelite telephone and Mrs. Edna Putiss."

"Mrs. Edna Putiss?"

"Yes, she followed me here from the bus station. Can I keep her?"

More participants in Willow's Magpie Tales challenge here.

Sunday singalong

Drips

Day eight of the hosepipe ban; the ninth day of torrential rainfall. Still, it's good for the garden.

I nipped out between showers and pruned back a couple of roses that had been flattened by Thursday night's deluge. Much to my delight I found some more seedlings of long-lost friends -- Echiums and California poppies -- and was also quietly astonished to find that the bottlebrush bush that I had written off as a Winter loss may still not have any leaves on it but has managed a bunch of flowers. I was very pleased. Much to my chagrin, I find that the rambling rose that I spent two years chopping down and digging out has risen from the grave. I have to be firm: it's a heartrendingly beautiful rose but there just isn't room for anything, however lovely, that grows eighteen feet in a season. I may let the railway have it in return for all those brambles and sycamore seedlings.

There are the usual mutterings about the hosepipe ban. And the usual justifications, together with pictures of empty reservoirs and threats to bugger up the North-West tourist industry. I have to wonder about the quality of maintenance of our reservoirs if they're so very, very low after the two wet and windy summers we had in 2008 and 2009. And while I can understand why all of last Autumn's flood water didn't get saved -- it's in the nature of flood water to hit and run -- I can't understand why more of an effort wasn't made to trap the Winter's melt water. There is was: all that frozen water not going anywhere for a month, nice and handy by the roadside and ready for picking up and dumping into reservoirs.

Too much effort or not profitable enough.

Pfah! The problem with market economies is the compartmentalising of cost. So long as it can be kept off my particular balance sheet I don't have to worry about it. Remember all the bleating about the cost to the economy of all those blocked roads and accidents and stuff? In a command economy the cost of leaving the ice where it was would be weighed against the cost of shovelling it up and shipping it to somewhere useful. Clear roads, filled reservoirs and people in paid employment in a recession, job done. Or else we could have had derivatives specialists and directors of merchant banks doing the shovel work as part of their community service.

There are times when one can almost forget the stultifying idiocies and evils of the Soviet system.

Some days the news is too peculiar for words

I have to thank Daveyp for pointing this one out.

Old black magic

It's not been a bad year for fruit so far. I had an over-sufficiency of blackcurrants. I off-loaded some on my parents but as I'd already taken a few pounds off their bush they were getting a bit fruit-packed. Especially as they're not supposed to be eating a lot of sweet stuff. I don't have a sweet tooth myself (he says, hiding the evidence of a tube of fruit pastilles I accidentally scoffed in one while shouting at the television news), so I've not been making tarts and the like. Picking at the raw blackcurrants is fine but let's be honest, that faint whiff of cat is always a bit off-putting. Then I had an idea, which is why I've now a couple of jars of blackcurrant ketchup. As always with me, the recipe is very approximate.

• A pound or so of blackcurrants
• Two or three or four chopped cloves of garlic
• A chopped shallot, or a couple of chopped silverskin onions, or you can cheat and cop up a couple of pickled onions, which is what I'd have done had I been planning this
• Oil for cooking; I used extra-virgin olive oil because that's what was on the worktop
• White wine vinegar

Wash the blackcurrants and remove all the bits of stick, leaves and spiders and stuff because this is a vegetarian recipe. Gently fry the blackcurrants until the juices start to run. Now add the garlic and onion and cook until the onion starts becoming translucent. Add enough vinegar to cover the mixture and bring to the boil. As soon as it reaches this stage, bring the heat right down and let it all simmer gently. Now decant the mixture into sterilised small jars. You'll be left with a very messy pan with bits of caramelised blackcurrant in it. Deglaze the pan with a big splash of vinegar and pour this into the jars. Warm another tablespoon of vinegar in the pan and use this to cover the mixtures in the jars. Seal them and put them somewhere darkish for a couple of days.

After a couple of days you'll have a thick, dark purple spreadable mass. The cooking and the vinegar both bring out the sweetness of the blackcurrants (but it still comes as a surprise to me that the result is as sweet as it turns out to be). Spread on some bread with a bit of iceberg lettuce and crispy bacon and the job's a good 'un. It works well with a well-flavoured cheese, too.

I was going to try this on a sausage butty but when I opened the packet they'd gone all furry. I had that bachelor moment where you reckon that a hot grill would burn all the fur off but then common sense took over. So the blackcurrant ketchup works quite well with a last-minute Co-op pork pie.

When Diana Dors ruled the world

My dad was playing on the swings with my small niece.

"Dinosaurs were very, very big," she said.

"Yes they were," he agreed.

"They were HUGE. And very, very fierce. Dinosaurs were very, very big and really fierce."

"Ooh yes."

"I've seen a dinosaur's bones. I saw a dinosaur skeleton. We went to the museum and we saw a dinosaur skeleton. It was huge. And I touched its claw. But it was all right because it was only the skeleton."

"Very good. Did it have big teeth as well?"

"It had very big teeth. But I wasn't scared: there aren't any dinosaurs any more. They died out. They all died out a long, long time ago."

"Well, that's a relief, isn't it?"

"It must have been very scary when you were a little boy, with all those dinosaurs running around."

Fantastic Farewell

Been here.

I'm knocking on fifty (but look years younger). I've spent the evening sitting in the rain on a park bench singing my heart out to a particularly cheesy rendition of "The Wonder of You" being sung by a Dead Elvis impersonator as the audience debates whether or not Frank Sidebottom's older kid brother should kill Little Frank (a cardboard puppet) so that he can go into a paper mâché sarcophagus and join Big Frank in the afterlife.

It doesn't get a lot better than that.

MacNosh

Nachos.

Crisps and mince.

However did the Scots not invent that first?

While you were watching the football...

Herbidaceous

I'm a bit over-run with marjoram and lemon balm at the moment, which is no bad thing. I literally can't sit in the garden without having to sit on a bunch of one or the other, which is rather lovely.

A friend asked what I'd use lemon balm for in the kitchen. Most lemon balm recipes involve fish but my friend is a vegetarian and I'm no fish cook. I use it a lot in tisanes (a load of crushed leaves and a teaspoon of honey) but usually I just snap a few leaves off to chew absent-mindedly. I thought I'd have a go at putting together a sauce for pasta using it.

It works well with a white sauce with a little (very little) bit of wild mushroom, the flavour infuses the sauce but you have to look for it to realise that it's there. Not a hard sell, I know! All you have to do is make a simple white sauce (or cheat and use a half-tin of Campbell's condensed cream of mushroom), warm it through until it's more-or-less ready then add a handful of finely-shredded lemon balm. Stir it through, give it half a minute on a very low, or even no, light and then stir in the pasta.

I didn't manage to come up with a sauce that didn't involve cream, which is a bit of a shame I feel. The truth of the matter is that even if you leave it to the very last minute to add it to an oil-based sauce some of the flavour's still cooked out. Which still left me with a pleasant little herb sauce:

• Some extra-virgin olive oil
• Some garlic (probably a couple of cloves) not especially finely-chopped, it'll be flavouring the sauce but also providing the texture
• A couple of button mushrooms if you really must
• Two large handfuls of marjoram, tear off the leaves and chop the stems up finely
• A large handful of mint (a small handful if you're like me and have been lucky enough to have some black mint growing in the garden), tear the leaves up and chop the stems very finely
• A handful of shelled walnuts
• Pasta of your choice

Warm the olive oil (be careful not to heat it too fast or it might burn). Chuck in the garlic and cook it gently. Cook the pasta, throwing a handful of walnuts into the water a couple of minutes before the end (to blanch them). When the pasta's nearly cooked it's time to put the herbs in with the garlic. Fold the herbs into the oil until it's wilted. Then fold in the pasta and walnuts. Stir it all together to make sure that everything's had a touch of everything else then serve and eat.

It's a bit nice, honest.

Still not got a lemon balm recipe sorted, though.

Add-on:

I should have mentioned that you can, if you want, spice this up a bit by adding a bit of pickled Jalapeno pepper. It has to be pickled because if you're adding chili to this you also need the bite of the vinegar. Or you can change the vibe, in a nice way, by adding some finely-chopped dill pickle. Some salted capers doesn't hurt, either.

Probably being too honest for my own good

The youngest relative has returned to the topic of my marital status. I think we've agreed that she's not setting me up on a blind date with either the Year Three teacher or the mother of one of the girls in her class. I don't entirely trust her not to try and get around the agreement though.

"So why aren't you married?" she asked.

"I like being miserable on my own and I haven't found anybody who would want to be miserable with me."

"Oh well. If you just want miserable you may as well get yourself a baby. They're dead miserable, honest. All they do is cry and scream and eat and cry and poo and cry a bit more. And they wake you up in the middle of the night so that they can cry and scream and poo."

"I've known women like that," I admitted.

Click

Back in the old days, cameras were mechanical devices. You pressed the button and a mechanical iris engaged to set the width of the lens diaphragm and a shutter opened and closed at the required speed for the exposure. A Leica made a lovely, gentle hiss (I borrowed one once) and my industrial-strength Zenit made a loud clunk. Possibly because it was made out of the combine harvesters that were remaindered during the Kazakh famines of the 1930s. The Zenit was the entry-level SLR; it was about a quarter of the price of the next cheapest model on the market.

It's all digital now. Which is good in lots of ways: I get to see the pictures there and then and I can tidy up the exposure without the use of chemicals and red light bulbs. No moving parts, unless you count my finger.

So why does everyone's digital camera go clunk?

R.I.P.

In an interview in London I was once asked what was the best cultural event I'd ever been to. I answered that I'd seen Shakespeare in Stratford; von Stroheim in Edinburgh; opera, dance and all sorts of theatre but the single best cultural event I'd ever been to was a Frank Sidebottom gig in a working men's club in Timperley. The audience were all grown-ups with all the cares of the world about their shoulders but for a couple of glorious hours they were allowed out on licence and were eight years old again, laughing and singing and joyful in their tomfoolery.

This is by way of an entirely inadequate thank-you.

Godspeed, Chris.

From the observatory

My small niece has an unerring sense of logic. She is also cursed with her uncle's gift of commentary.

She had popped in at my parents' house, as is her wont, to cadge rather a lot of toast off my dad. And a bit of cheese please. And some more toast.

"You know how my dad supports Man City..." she said, "well, I support them, too. But I shouldn't really, should I? When I came out of my mummy's tummy I was in Middlesborough, so I should support Middlesborough, shouldn't I?"

To his credit, my father reassured her that it wasn't compulsory. The child is of mixed parentage - Lancashire and Yorkshire. It's quite funny listening to her talk as she's got her mother's Middlesborough quirks like "cayek" for "cake," but all with our southern Mancunian accent.

A little later, her mother wanted to know why she hadn't eaten her dinner. My dad owned up and got a rollicking for it. As the fur subsided my niece turned to him and said:

"Don't take any notice. Parents get like that when they're old. They go all yaddadadayaddayadda. They can't help it."