Freewheeling Andy

Me, I stubbornly refuse to read Pratchett because people have been talking him up since the beginning of time, and every time I see him on TV he's irritating, and the "in" jokes people tell from his books just seem very unfunny to me. And I can't face the thought of those depressing dark "i had a difficult childhood" Frank McCourt, Dave Pelzer type books, either. And I always struggle desperately when trying to read any pre-20th century novels. Anyone else?

The life span of TVP is nil. It is inedible as soon as it comes into existence. Don't let any weirdo try and tell you otherwise.

Maybe not Turkish, as such, but Claudia Roden's Book Of Middle Eastern Cookery is excellent on the whole Eastern Med's cuisine (and north african).

The Kapuscinski is just brilliant. Wonderful, brilliant, astonsihing, insightful and shocking reportage. I've just finished the piece where he's in Congo when the President is killed and everyone goes on a rampage killing all the whites in the city, then they escape by pure chance, end up in Burundi and put in prison as suspected allies of the Congolese (who were going to kill them), and again escape by pure chance the day they were going to be shot. Gobsmacked.

I've started Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Soccer War. He's a legendary Polish foreign correspondent, and he covered all of the massive changes of the 60s. This is a shortish book, and covers his time observing something silly like 30 revolutions over 10 or 15 years. So far, so good. He sees loads and writes in a lovely, light, interesting style.

Well, back to this - I've finished reading How The Universe Got Its Spots. A great read, covering some really hard physics - but starting from close to scratch so you get the history of physics thought along with tricky maths and then to the concept of the strange topologies of space. But being written as a series of letters it touches repeatedly on the personal and the personal life. Some of the Amazon reviews thought this was a bad thing - but I think it lightened the impact of the tricky physics. Others thought it was meaningless to have the personal in there because of the way the personal life seemed to have no direct relation to the physics. I actually think this is good, because it leaves two parallel threads telling two important stories. The first about cosmology and topology. The second saying that even the hardcore scientist is not some mysterious freak living a soulless life, but actually lives a (fairly) normal life doing normal things, and no matter how much people often want to describe the glorious confluences between peoples' lives and research, the reality is that it doesn't actually work that way, any more than me going out on a date or going to the pub has any major impact on my work.

Sounds very similar to something from Nice called "socca" that I've tried making a few times.

And I was hoping this would be less bonkers, but instead of the anal-wow consumption factor and the world being run by the godess Ishtar, instead I get transfinite maths (infinity + infinity = infinity). Argh!

Right. Victor Pelevin, on the basis of one book, is a very, very exciting author. I doubt he'd be to everyone's tastes but this is high quality literature with more ideas in most sentences than many authors use to fill entire books. I'm now excited about reading his other novels, and his short stories. What is it? Very cynical, very satirical, quite funny, slightly buddhist, vaguely druggy, Russian, intense and engrossing. My brain is full now.

I finished Babylon on the plane yesterday. It's completely and utterly bonkers. More bonkers than I could have conceivably imagined even though it was pretty bonkers all the way through. Um... don't know what to say about it, really, because any book where you discover the entire Russian government is computer generated as a method of marketing, and they all got erased, is just start raving bonkers. I think the phrase "The hell of the eternal football championship" is the one that will live with me longest. I'm starting on some cosmology now, instead - How The Universe Got Its Spots by Janna Levin.

Given a choice I'd always eat the meat. I used to be a vegephobe (is that a word?), but slowly got into the veggies. I still sometimes find cooking them too much of a pain if I can just eat steak, though.

I really quite enjoyed Morality Play when I read it, although it was a while ago and my memory is hazy. I do remember trying to decide whether the playing (oh, good pun Andy) with the history of theatre was clever or contrived.

The more I read, the more brilliant it is. Currently in the middle of an essay written by Che Guevara through the medium of a Ouija board on the subject of a zen understanding of how the viewer of a television stops really being a subject in the subject-object dualism and instead becomes a virtual subject who is being zapped by the television itself. Utterly deranged and utterly brilliant. The world is going to have to work hard to come up with better stuff for me this year.

I'm still loving Babylon, but I'm more convinced than ever that it wouldn't be for everyone. Quite a lot of the weirdness seems to be drugs fuelled with a fantastic mad trip on agaric mushrooms described as a way of triggering creative processes; and so on. The book is an excellent satire on advertising, and in particular advertising in post-Soviet Russia where there are no products to advertise against. It's generally very marvellous, to my tastes.

I've just started a Victor Pelevin book on the back of a couple of recommendations of weirdish acquaintances (one on an internet forum thing). It seems brilliant and deranged and very modern. Does anyone else know anything, or have any pointers? I'm reading Babylon. The most famous of his is, I think, The Clay Machine Gun. It's cynical and funny, but probably not everyone's cup of tea (although it probably should be).

Ah. I've just started Babylon by Victor Pelevin. So far, about 20 or 25 pages in, I'm utterly beguiled by it. It's brilliant. Utterly brilliant. If it continues to be as good then I'll be all over every part of the internet telling the world how astonishingly brilliant Victor Pelevin is. Huge big-ups to whoever recommended it. I'm happy as happy can be. It's so fun, so cynical, so entertaining. The various bits of blurb are really unhelpful "A psychedelic Nabokov..."; "A Zen Buddhist Will Self..."; "The 21st Century's Bulgakov relishing the chaos and absurdity of modern russia..."; "often compared to Philip K Dick..." So there you go. He's like 4 completely different authors, only different and more modern. Helpful, eh? What do I care. So far it's just wonderful.

The rillettes are excellent, by the way, but not quite right. I think there's not enough fat in them, peculiarly. Cooking was very simple. Just render down cubed pork belly with a bit of garlic and seasoning in a pot for a very long time on a long temperature, then shred the pork and allow it to set in its own fat. Mmmmmm!

Gnocchi are great. I have a bit of a problem with polenta because it becomes so unappetising when it's cold. As long as I don't have to deal with cold cooked polenta I'm fine. One of my favourite grains to cook with is cracked wheat (sometimes called Burghul or Bulgur wheat). Cooking it slowly, with onion and maybe some cinnamon and cumin, it makes great substitute for rice. Or with a bit more spice, and with cubes of cheese in, Bulgur Pilaf becomes a proper meal.

I finally got to the end of "Travels". It really is an excellent book, but as with so many non-fiction books the lack of narrative flow means what I end up taking much longer over reading it. There's a load of insight about travelling in it, though. Insight about Africa, and about Soviet Russia, too. But the views at the end of how some travel journeys seem utterly tedious to her (I'm very sympathetic to her views on cuise ships and Vienna and Venice), and that the real horror trips have boredom at their heart. Now I need to decide what's next from the pile. It all looks a bit serious.

I didn't use a slow cooker. I used the oven, set on low.

Thinking of slow cooking - I made rillettes yesterday, which cooked very low for about 7 hours in the end.

I've had a slack few days (too much work and booze), but what I've read of the Gellhorn remains excellent. She's utterly eviscerating the chaos in Cameroon, and now she's arrived in Fort Lamy in Chad where her hatred for the place is almost comical. It sounds grim.

OK. Properly this time 1. Favourite main meal ~ pizza (probably) 2. Favourite starter ~ chinese style dumplings 3. Favourite dessert ~ these days it's probably something like tarte tatin (with a good dessert wine) 4. Favourite pizza topping ~ olives 5. Favourite bread ~ sourdough (probably, although this changes daily - my home made granary/pumpkin seed is a winner when it works) 6. Favourite vegetable ~ sugarsnap peas 7. Favourite fruit ~ tomato 8. Favourite cheese ~ parmesan (or unpasteurised cheddars) 9. Favourite takeaway ~ Almost never have takeaway. Probably curry 10. Favourite chocolate bar ~ Star Bar 11. Favourite sandwich ~ Roast beef, parmesan and rocket. (with creamy black pepper sauce).

They're generally not for me, but I love Guys and Dolls.

1. Favourite main meal ~ pizza 2. Favourite starter ~ pizza 3. Favourite dessert ~ pizza 4. Favourite pizza topping ~ another pizza 5. Favourite bread ~ pizza base 6. Favourite vegetable ~ whatever's on my pizza 7. Favourite fruit ~ tomato 8. Favourite cheese ~ mozarella 9. Favourite takeaway ~ pizza 10. Favourite chocolate bar ~ um... I don't know 11. Favourite sandwich ~ one pizza inverted on top of another