Tesco are selling plain chocolate Choco Leibniz at half price again. Under those circumstances, I do think that they should be held legally liable for the fact that I eat too many of them... and because I eat too many of them, I get fat and grumpy. I'm not sure if I should get damages for being grumpy, but I'm pretty sure the husband should.
Anyway, my most and least favourite quotes of the day:
Favourite: 'my socks keep slipping down and my shoes are chewing my feet' (Johanna)
Least Favourite: 'the associative discourses forming the foci of the hygienic self antithetically unravel around him' (Robert Miles: Gothic Writing 1750-1820 - A Genealogy, p163. He really does write a complete load of bollocks, and I'm pretty convinced it doesn't actually mean anything.)
18 July 2009
7 July 2009
Paving hell before 9am
I just had a piece of cheesecake and two (admittedly really quite small) brownies for breakfast. I really didn't mean to. I got the cheesecake out of the fridge to cut it into bits and freeze it, but when I had cut the first piece I realised that because it has quite a high proportion of fresh strawberries in it (and I mean in it, not scattered on top) that probably wouldn't work very well. So I was left standing in the kitchen, staring at a piece of cheesecake, at a time when I hadn't already decided what I was going to eat for breakfast. My instincts were therefore at least partly laudable, involving tidiness and avoiding waste. The brownies are harder to explain.
After a month and a bit of really not doing very much at all, I'm meant to be hitting reality again today. Reality for these purposes means trying to write a dissertation about some novels I don't really like very much, which might possibly explain the brownies. Yesterday evening, in a vague attempt at staving off both the dissertation and the ironing, I even read this week's Guardian review section. In theory it's what I buy the Saturday Guardian for, but in reality they accumulate around the flat for months, unread, until I get cross and throw several dozen out at once. It even had some ideas buried in it that I would like time to play with: a quote from Auden, that '' poetry makes nothing happen"; the idea that the structure of Possession was influenced by the reader response to The Name of the Rose; the suggestion that the black death was anthrax or haemorrhagic fever rather than plague; and a quote from a new novel by Michael Thomas called Man Gone Down, that "No true idealist has a back-up plan". However, they will all have to wait until I have re-read a load of stuff I read several months ago, and written about 5,000 words.
Oh, and one day I would like to read David Nicholls' 'One Day' - but given the state of my finances at the moment, that will have to wait until I can get a cheap, second-hand paperback. In the meantime, I'll eat more brownies. And possibly more cheesecake.
After a month and a bit of really not doing very much at all, I'm meant to be hitting reality again today. Reality for these purposes means trying to write a dissertation about some novels I don't really like very much, which might possibly explain the brownies. Yesterday evening, in a vague attempt at staving off both the dissertation and the ironing, I even read this week's Guardian review section. In theory it's what I buy the Saturday Guardian for, but in reality they accumulate around the flat for months, unread, until I get cross and throw several dozen out at once. It even had some ideas buried in it that I would like time to play with: a quote from Auden, that '' poetry makes nothing happen"; the idea that the structure of Possession was influenced by the reader response to The Name of the Rose; the suggestion that the black death was anthrax or haemorrhagic fever rather than plague; and a quote from a new novel by Michael Thomas called Man Gone Down, that "No true idealist has a back-up plan". However, they will all have to wait until I have re-read a load of stuff I read several months ago, and written about 5,000 words.
Oh, and one day I would like to read David Nicholls' 'One Day' - but given the state of my finances at the moment, that will have to wait until I can get a cheap, second-hand paperback. In the meantime, I'll eat more brownies. And possibly more cheesecake.
4 July 2009
Can stand the heat, but cut down on the chocolate?
Yesterday, I had chocolate chip cookies for breakfast. It was the first time I'd done that in a while (well, four weeks anyway) - and I really couldn't eat nearly as many of them as I usually would. I was wondering if it was the heat was cutting down my sugar/ cocoa tolerance; although if it was the effect is clearly only marginal as I managed to eat more of them later, and a German friend bought me a box of Merci chocolates a couple of days ago and the husband and I were happily munching our way through them in front of the TV last night as well.
However, it is true that eating chocolate even in 'normal' quantities (I'm thinking standard-sized bar, here) can actually make me feel a bit odd. If I go super-size, I often feel really quite odd. At one level, you could argue that's part of the point - but I wonder if that might be how I, eventually, kick the habit. I used to binge-drink, but gradually came to the realisation that it made me feel bad enough that it was a risk that just wasn't worth taking. That took about 18 years, so if I start now, I guess I might have my chocolate consumption under control shortly before my fifty-sixth birthday.
It's cooler now, anyway. There's no tennis on that I actually want to watch, and the evenings are beginning to draw in. I'm thinking of declaring autumn, sometime around the middle of next week.
However, it is true that eating chocolate even in 'normal' quantities (I'm thinking standard-sized bar, here) can actually make me feel a bit odd. If I go super-size, I often feel really quite odd. At one level, you could argue that's part of the point - but I wonder if that might be how I, eventually, kick the habit. I used to binge-drink, but gradually came to the realisation that it made me feel bad enough that it was a risk that just wasn't worth taking. That took about 18 years, so if I start now, I guess I might have my chocolate consumption under control shortly before my fifty-sixth birthday.
It's cooler now, anyway. There's no tennis on that I actually want to watch, and the evenings are beginning to draw in. I'm thinking of declaring autumn, sometime around the middle of next week.
3 July 2009
Gary Go? (Chocolate free...)
This isn't about chocolate, it's about Gary Go.
You see, I'm still not quite sure what to think of him. I've only seen him live once - supporting Take That in Sunderland - and I thought he was competent and professional, although he did a really odd, pumping hand/arm gesture a couple of times which looked as if he was trying to milk a mechanical cow. Admittedly, I also wanted to rip his clothes off, but that was because they looked nice and warm and dry ... and I was so cold I wasn't sure if my toes had fallen off.
One of my issues with him is that he looks like a young conservative from about 1984, who has found himself stuck in the wrong decade and is trying not to get found out. I can imagine him being a bit like a (hairier, less northern) version of William Hague, or a (taller, less confused) version of John Bercow.
The other issue is the songs. For about half an hour, a couple of weeks ago, I thought that they were wonderful (no pun intended) - but I was on a bus at the time, and I generally hate buses, so it may just have been the fact that they were taking the edge off the whole bus scenario. Or just the fact that they make good background music if you are in (relatively slow) motion. In general, I like songs which have complicated lyrics - so by rights I should like his stuff. But they sound like they have been lifted out of some kind of executive coaching manual. I used to work at a firm which had a sales process called 'Refuse to lose' - and a lot of the rest of the songs sound as if they were written to become the soundtrack if anyone ever tried to turn 'Seven Habits of Highly Effective People' into a film. There is a tinge of vaguely psychologically-based sub-clinical self-affirmation about all of them which I find slightly disturbing.
I have half a suspicion that he probably doesn't even like chocolate. There was some footage in one of his video blogs where he was getting unnecessarily excited about a banana cake.
The result is that in ten years time, I kind of find it easier to imagine him as a shrink, a management consultant or a show-man hypnotist than as a chart-topping musician. Which presumably means that he is going to be the biggest thing that the music industry has ever seen...
You see, I'm still not quite sure what to think of him. I've only seen him live once - supporting Take That in Sunderland - and I thought he was competent and professional, although he did a really odd, pumping hand/arm gesture a couple of times which looked as if he was trying to milk a mechanical cow. Admittedly, I also wanted to rip his clothes off, but that was because they looked nice and warm and dry ... and I was so cold I wasn't sure if my toes had fallen off.
One of my issues with him is that he looks like a young conservative from about 1984, who has found himself stuck in the wrong decade and is trying not to get found out. I can imagine him being a bit like a (hairier, less northern) version of William Hague, or a (taller, less confused) version of John Bercow.
The other issue is the songs. For about half an hour, a couple of weeks ago, I thought that they were wonderful (no pun intended) - but I was on a bus at the time, and I generally hate buses, so it may just have been the fact that they were taking the edge off the whole bus scenario. Or just the fact that they make good background music if you are in (relatively slow) motion. In general, I like songs which have complicated lyrics - so by rights I should like his stuff. But they sound like they have been lifted out of some kind of executive coaching manual. I used to work at a firm which had a sales process called 'Refuse to lose' - and a lot of the rest of the songs sound as if they were written to become the soundtrack if anyone ever tried to turn 'Seven Habits of Highly Effective People' into a film. There is a tinge of vaguely psychologically-based sub-clinical self-affirmation about all of them which I find slightly disturbing.
I have half a suspicion that he probably doesn't even like chocolate. There was some footage in one of his video blogs where he was getting unnecessarily excited about a banana cake.
The result is that in ten years time, I kind of find it easier to imagine him as a shrink, a management consultant or a show-man hypnotist than as a chart-topping musician. Which presumably means that he is going to be the biggest thing that the music industry has ever seen...
Things on Sticks
Earlier in the week, I had a Haagen Dazs stick bar - simply because I was at Wimbledon and they have some kind of exclusive supplier deal. I don't generally get the point of choc ices on sticks which come in plastic wrappers inside cardboard boxes. The box is too clearly there to persuade me to pay more than the contents are actually worth. In this case, the contents - a cookies and cream thing - were actually not too bad; and if I am at Wimbledon I expect to pay through the nose anyway. Clearly, if Haagen Dazs hadn't completely inexplicably failed to realise that the short-term feature flavour, midnight cookies and cream, was actually a much better experience all round, it could have been even better, but it still wasn't bad.
However, something about the bits which they had stuck in the chocolate coating meant that it somehow ended up tasting more like a biscuit than either a chocolate or an ice cream. And I have now had several Magnums, and the excessive ice cream to chocolate ratio is becoming increasingly irksome. So my favourite chocolate thing on a stick is officially the Thorntons Chocolate Trio - where even the white chocolate ice cream tastes dreamy and chocolatey. Sadly, they are about as easy to find in this part of London as a snow leopard, or a post office, or somewhere that makes a decent pizza...
However, something about the bits which they had stuck in the chocolate coating meant that it somehow ended up tasting more like a biscuit than either a chocolate or an ice cream. And I have now had several Magnums, and the excessive ice cream to chocolate ratio is becoming increasingly irksome. So my favourite chocolate thing on a stick is officially the Thorntons Chocolate Trio - where even the white chocolate ice cream tastes dreamy and chocolatey. Sadly, they are about as easy to find in this part of London as a snow leopard, or a post office, or somewhere that makes a decent pizza...
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