Pretending people care... in September. There's kind of a Maida Vale trip theme to this one - a place I ate that day, the book I read waiting in the street, and the CD that reasoned it all.
Place: Hummingbird Bakery, Notting Hill
My mum bought us the Hummingbird Bakery recipie book about two years ago I think - from it we've made brownies, cupcakes, pies, and always meant to go. When my dad and I were in Notting Hill the other week, we saw a girl who worked there in a Hummingbird Bakery sweater and chased after her when I realised how close we were. I had Hummingbird brownie, which was rather wonderful, but surprisingly my dad's Black Bottom cupcake - chocolate, with cheese and buttery icing on top - was probably more delicious. A small place, a lovely atmousphere, they give you your food in cute boxes with handles. If you're ever nearby, go. Or if you're not nearby, plan a pilgramage before you die.
Book: "The Radleys" - Matt Haig In a world of "Twilight" and "Marked" and things like that, it's definitely reassuring that a novel like this exists. Whilst it definitely isn't a spoof, "The Radleys" is a book that's hilarious as well as being able to be taken seriously. Making you think to be concerned about the neighborus, this is the story of Helen and Peter Radley's realisation that it's time to tell their teenage offspring the reason they feel ill without eating meat, why they have trouble sleeping, why they can't go outside without coating themselves in Factor 30.
Album: "A Creature I Don't Know" - Laura Marling Because, how could I not? I'll review this in more detail, one day. But every so often you buy a record and fall in love with it. And by that I don't mean like it a lot. I mean every song is fantastic, you get to know the order better than your friends' birthdays and most of the time it stays with you for ever. This has been one of those. From "The Muse", which introduces the new liveliness and odd enigma of this album, to the concluding thought of "Flicker and Fail" it's a wonderful arrangement of guitar and mandolin and strings, melodic surprises and lyrics that tell tales way beyond the expected maturity of a twenty-one year old.
I found the bread machine we used to use all the time in the garage this morning, so I looked for the instruction manual on the internet and currently bread is baking. It's going to take over two hours so I'm going to be annoying and liveblog my attempt at machine breadmaking.
The little green light is next to "kneading" at the moment.
It's nearly two o clock and my hair's still wet. I'm listening to The Head and the Heart, who were the support act when I went to see Death Cab For Cutie and probably drawing with Back Ted N-Ted as my favourite support act I've seen. They're a folk band from Seattle. On stage they were just all completley into it and happy, three of them sort of took it in turns to be lead singer and I saw the most enthusiastic shaky-egg playing I think I ever will.
The music video for that song is also pretty freaking beautiful. I think I'm turning into a fan of theirs. Someone said in the Youtube comments; "if fleet foxes and mumford sons had a happy sparkly-eyed child they would name it head and the heart." S'true.
It's exactly 14:00. Going to check on the bread machine.
We're now "Resting" at 14:03. I keep repeating "Lost In My Mind".
"Oh-ooh..."
I know it's the middle of the summer, and I'm really close to going somewhere really hot on our family holiday, but I miss winter. Is that stupid? Up to recently, I'd never really appreaciated that England is pretty; it went from being just the place where I live, to somewhere I started to want to escape from, but in the last month or so I've started to be able to find beauty in places I am all the time. I think it's partly because of Laura Marling's I Speak Because I Can, talking about rides on bicycles and England in the snow and a walk past a village church she used to take with her father. It's funny, last year I discovered wanderlust and friendship through the internet and electronica. 2011 has so far brought me love for folk music and green fields and home. I think I can find a balance of those things.
14:14. Time for another bread check. Still "Resting." I got rich tea biscuit because I'm hungry and haven't had lunch yet. Now it's gone.
14:31. Kneading again. It's starting to smell delicious and I'm hungry.
Okay I'm really hungry now but waiting for the bread. I think I like to eat more than is healthy.
It's 14:44 and the machine's stopped making noise. "Resting" again. It's a solid ball of dough now instead of just ingredients. Yay. I also just ate another rich tea biscuit, because it has over an hour and thirty minutes left.
See... things like this is just exactly why the internet's shaping the future.
I'm reading a book at the moments called "When God Was a Rabbit", by Sarah Winman, and little things in it keep reminding me of "The Earth Hums in B-Flat". I think it's great when a writer writes from a child's point of view in an adult book, because a lot of children's books seem to patronise and just miss how children think and feel and the things they notice. I know that a book aimed at ten to twelve year olds can't exactly be filled with violence and sex references, but I know that when I was around that age I tired of children's litereture and even some YA novels and read adult books, where sometimes they were too linguistically complexed but the themes in were more interesting to me than a lot of children's books, which seemed patronising. I got really off track there, because "When God Was A Rabbit" isn't a children's book at all, it just has a good grasp of them. It makes me laugh a lot.
15:13. Bread is rising now! It's also filled the shape of the tin it's in but still sort of a dough ball.
I don't have anything interesting to say anymore. I feel a bit like we're sat here and we're making bread together and now we're awkward and silent around each other whilst we're waiting for it to be done.
15:31 Bread still rising. I read more of "When God Was A Rabbit" but I won't spoil it for you. Just under an hour left. I'm watching an episode of Charmed to pass the time.
16:44 I couldn't watch Charmed because I lost the remote batteries but the bread is done. It rose too much but was still delicious. Thanks for... um... keeping me company?
I don't really have anything interesting to talk about today. I'm sorry.
Thinking about it in the shower just now, one of the things I thought of writing about then dismissed was a thought I had before. I was watching E4 and an advert came on for the TV show How I Met Your Mother, and I noticed that the funny thing about it is that it seems to me like it was showing all of the men in the show as fun and loose and immature, whilst women sit and tut at them. In the program it isn't like that all, it was just the way the advert portrayed it a little. And that reminded me of something Dee Plume tweeted a while ago, about a similar thing in a movie poster: men having fun whilst their wives sit and tut at them. And I was thinking about how that was a little annoying and stereotypical but then I thought: they can't really do things the other way round, because that wouldn't be very politically correct either; men tutting and complaining at the stupid and immature things that females do. So, as usual, that didn't really have a point or conclusion.
The other really, really important thing that made me think today was this, an Amanda Palmer song about a break-up because of her hating "Vegemite", which I'm pretty sure is Australian marmite. If you aren't familiar with marmite, it's a weird salty brown beer type sandwich spread which tastes delicious.
... and if there's a point to that whole thing, it's that marmite tastes good and Amanda Palmer is wrong but the song is awesome and I lol'd.
I'm listening to perhaps my second maybe equal first favourite ever cover of Radiohead's "Creep", by Scala and Kolachny. I don't know much about them, but this will always be the song that came up on stereomood in my last few minutes of writing for NaNoWriMo last year. I love this song a lot, I hadn't heard it at all until Amanda Palmer performed it at a webcast a while back. And I love them all, the original, Amanda Palmer's cover and that one.
I did tell you I'd write something intellectually stimulating.
If ever you read something on the internet, maybe somewhere like wordpress or livejournal, some forums, possibly even fanfiction.net, vaguely dark or sexual or violent that's written by someone named Beth Barrow, it's probably mine. Let me explain.
I first combined the internet and writing when I was younger and for around a year, I frequented fanfiction.net. Stupidly, around this time I thought it was a good idea to talk to my parents about the stuff I wrote and I didn't realise there'd be times when I didn't want them to read things. Although it's unlikely, I know people can Google me now and occasionally find things, and that is bad, sometimes, so I'm doing what everyone on the NaNo forums seems to do; I want a pen name.
When I was a child, every time my friend and I went on a day out with our mums, I would demand that we change our names for the day. I was the sort of child that liked to imagine things, to make everyday situations more like something else - there was a phase when I was about seven where I would call my coat my cloak, for two years of primary school I kept a diary of things that were just absolute lies, signing it at the end of every entry with the name Lyra. I can't remember all the names I'd had over the years, but I recall being Marina one time we went to a farm, demanding my friend Charlotte name herself Aqua. If we went to Cadbury's World, my name was Lola for the day. I was Laura, then later Melanie, after a phase I went through where I was a fan of a girl band called All Angel's, who I later realised were very Christian based. Aged eight, I once went camping and made friends with a girl who spent a whole two days believing I was named Lulu.
We all told lies when we were children. Mine were just less purposeful.
The idea of a pen name or maybe, for now at least, seems like a good idea. I won't tell you what it's going to be because that would ruin the pen name idea. Soon, I will start to write things which will appear on the blog and they will be kept under my real name, which although I'm pretty sure nobody reads this, I don't want to take any chances. If I make an account on a website I've never been to before, under a username or pseudonym, or what they actually call them, I can be free to write about anything I feel like. It doesn't matter if I say stupid things, or mess up. It's not like it's me, anyway.
I feel tired today. I have to go to the same food festival twice this weekend. A few days ago I sat down to write a blog, then realised a lot of blood was exiting my foot. That's all I have to say right now.
