Author: Margot

Veg Box Diaries (1)

Posted on By Margot

Thursday 26 June

Meat box:

  • Chicken Thighs
  • Gammon steaks
  • Venison

Veg Box (small)

  • Potatoes
  • Lettuce
  • Tomatoes
  • Bunch carrots
  • Broad beans
  • Broccoli

There is one thing about having a veg box – you have to eat vegetables. And because veg box vegetables are

  1. So expensive
  2. Organic

You feel obliged to use these vegetables and not throw them away.

Other veg this week (mostly from Sainsbury’s

  • Sweet corn
  • Baking potatoes
  • Avocado
  • Butternut squash
  • Mushrooms
  • Courgettes
  • Asparagus

Thursday

 

Friday

Sweet corn followed by pasta with fresh tomato and Madeira sauce

Saturday

Sticky maple gammon steak served with roast carrots, sweet corn and broccoli and potatoes

Sunday

Saffron risotto with veg (asparagus, courgette, broad beans, carrot)

Monday

Salad followed by chicken curry (chicken thighs, carrots, butternut squash

Tuesday

Salad followed by chicken curry with Bombay potaoes

Wednesday

Salad followed by mushroom omelette and potato wedges

The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson

Posted on By Margot

 

Just like the One Hundred Year Old Man, this book is an extremely enjoyable read as it gallops through the last 50 years or so of history. This time the focus is on South Africa and Sweden. There are some common elements with the one Hundred Year Old man, nuclear weapons, world leader reduced to human beings, an irreverent take on history and Jonasson’s view of liberal humanity. There is a cartoonish quality to thi romp through history, but this does not detract from the enjoyment of the book.

Nombeko is a South African woman, born into poverty during Apartheid. We first meet Nombeko as a 14 year old girl working in a latrine facility. Life is not kind to Nombeko, and injustice haunts her very existence. But Nombeko has great intelligence, a capacity to wait and a resolve to make the best out of the hand that life deals her. She ends up as the guardian of a nuclear bomb accompanied by an assortment of characters who are as odd as she is. Oh yes, she is pursued by Mossad agents who want the bomb and her death.

Knitting socks

Posted on By Margot

I had avoided sock knitting – until now. And I am now a convert to this strange pastime, converted by the enticing balls of sock yarn that are available.

 

My first pair was in Aran weight wool. Great to knit – really quick – but too chunky for almost all my shoes. They do make really great bed socks, although denim blue is not really my choice of colour for bed-socks.

Having mastered the techniques I then moved on to knitting socks in 4 ply sock yarn. The yarn I chose was Drops Fabel, the multi-coloured variety. Great to knot with but I found the resulting socks need to be washed using fabric conditioner in the final rinse to soften them up. Hand knitted socked should have a cosy, soft foot feel.

I found a simple pattern for top down socks and discovered that the sock consists of 4 main areas:

  • Cuff
    • Top of leg
    • leg
  • Heel
    • Heel flap
    • Heel turn
  • Gusset
    • Pick up stitches from heel
    • Gusset
  • Foot
    • Instep
    • Toe

Although lots of patterns call for double pointed needles, it is much easier to use circular needles and the magic loop method. This way you can arrange things so that the front/upper section of top the sock is one half and the bottom/back section is on the other half of the circular needle.

Reading and knitting – multitasking

A latte, an eReader, one sock finished and the second a work in progress.

Unless the pattern is very intricate, knitting lends itself to multitasking. Here is my eReader (Sony not a Kindle) set up on a table. I use a stand which was designed for an iPad. Supporting the reader like this lends itself to fast knitting and reading.

Perhaps the most distractive activity when knitting is being in conversation. This is where the mistakes creep in.

 

 

The Boy from Reactor 4 by Orest Stelmach

Posted on By Margot

As I read this, the situation in Ukraine was getting worse, day by day. Crimea had voted to throw in its lot with Russia, and leaping out of the pages was a Tartar from Crimea who spoke Russian and Crimean, but no Ukrainian. As the pro-Russians were claiming their fight was with the fascists in Kiev, the brutality wreaked by the Nazis in Kiev was laid out before the reader. Why would the people in Kiev want to side with those who had caused so much suffering in  the city and Ukraine? Running through the book were the ugly wounds of history intertwined with the sad reality that Ukraine has a long way to go before it becomes a modern democratic state.

The story centres on Nadia, daughter of Ukrainian emigres who is tricked into searching for her uncle Damian and her cousin. the purpose is to bring her hitherto unknown cousin to America and safety.

Good read- yes

I a looking forward to reading the next book of the series,  The Boy who Stole From the Dead.

Currently reading Feb 2014

Posted on By Margot

Having seen the film, I am now reading 12 years a slave (Kindle format)

Plato’s Republic (from Kobo)

Audio book: Great Minds of the Western Tradition from Audible (http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Classics/Great-Minds-of-the-Western-Intellectual-Tradition-3rd-Edition-Audiobook/B00DMDN0AO ). This is a series of lectures, approximately 30mins each. Total listening time is 43 hours – sI think I will be listening for some time.

 

12 years a slave

Posted on By Margot

There is a story that is told in my family about my great-grandfather, William Cunningham, who found that his new wife, Isabella Cameron, came complete with a slave plantation in British Guiana. My great-grandfather freed the slaves. He did a few another things, this man from Glasgow, but that is another story.

So we went to our local cinema to see the Oscar nominated film, 12 Years a Slave, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northrup. Solomon is a good, honest decent hard working citizen of New York State. He has a wife and two delightful children. He is also black. The year is 1841, twenty years before the start of the American Civil War. Solomon is enticed into going to Washington, where he is kidnapped and delivered into slavery. During the next 12 years, Solomon never gives up his humanity and decency, despite the deprivations and cruelty forced upon him. Eventually he manages to persuade a white Canadian, a carpenter called Bass to write to a list of people in Saratoga, New York. Liberation followed..

The film was beautiful. When Solomon has to whip Patsee, another slave, the camera was on Solomon. Any other director would have relished the blood and flesh – but McQueen does not. We see, in the end, Patsee’s back, a cruel mass of flesh and skin and blood as her wounds are being dressed. The degradation of the human beings sold into slavery does not need to humiliate.

Perhaps one of the mot startling message that came from the film was that slavery did not just dehumanise the slaves, but also their “masters”. The presence of slaves often had a corrosive effect on the relationships within the household. Wives and children had competitors. The slave-owner’s legitimate children often had half brothers and sisters born into slavery, living only yards away from them in abject poverty.

And then too were the economics. Solomon’s masters had to borrow money to buy him. $1,000 would buy you a male slave in 1841. This, depending on the source, was equivalent to $28,000 today (http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community_education/teacher/calc/hist1800.cfm ). Slaves were an expensive investment and also needed overseers. The reason for employing slaves appears to be largely social, owning slaves bought status. However, given the cost of initial purchase it seems incredible that anyone would want to mistreat their property.

Another point. I am reading Plato at the moment. Heavy going sometimes. Plato (through Socrates) asks “What Is Justice?” Ah yes, just what is justice in a slave owning society? Justice says that I have a right to my property. But what if my property is another human being? What then?

We now have a concept of justice that is inclusive. Solomon does eventually attain his liberty and return home. And yet he is denied justice. Despite his best efforts, those who were responsible for his enslavement went unpunished.

 

The Wolf of Wall Street

Posted on By Margot

The phone rings. I answer. On the other end of the line is a polite american voice  wishing to sell me some stocks in a company that I have never heard of. Alarm bells ring in my head – boiler room scam and I put the phone down, but not before I inform the caller that I do not want to deal with criminals….

On Friday we went to see “The Wolf of Wall Street” at our local cinema.

Two things stuck in my mind from the reviews that I had seen:

  1. It was an extremely long film
  2. It was morally ambivalent

Yes, on both accounts this was true. It was very long and I am sure it could have been edited to remove an hour or so. Was it necessary to have quite so many orgies? And the ending was unsatisfactory. The problem is that the film was based on a true story so the ending could not be edited too much. Jordan Belfort served 22 months in prison for fraud and money laundering and now he is running his own motivational speaking business. $2000 dollars for a set of 10 DVDs to learn how to sell. Part of the judgement against Belfort was that he had to make restitution to his victims, to the tune of an eye-watering $110 million (55,000 DVD sets).

The film covers Belfort’s rise and fall, beginnning in 1987. Belfort begins work with Rothschild Stock Brokers, and then Black Monday happens and the stock market crashes. The great storm of 1987 and the London Stock exchange is off line. Net effect as far as ths story is concerned is that Rothschild folds and the young Belford has to fend for himself. And he does in spectacular fashion, creating the brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont which at its peak employed over a 1,000 people. Stratton Oakmont’s core business was a “boiler room” scam, where worthless stocks were sold to unsuspecting customers. Eventually the justice system caught up with Belfort.

Belfort was deeply into drugs and sex. This is portrayed in the film, perhaps over portrayed. But there is something which is missing. Belfort claims that he had forgotten his ethics in the excesses of Stratton Oakmont. That may be so, but there is a gaping great hole in the centre of this narrative. Compassion for the victim. You are lef at teh end of the film with the distinct impression that as far as the Wolf of Wall Street was concerned, all he had done wrong was break a few rules and get caught. The victims never make it to the screen. The men and women who ploughed their life savings into Belfort’s “Make me rich” schemes. Belfort comes across as a charming sociopath unable to to empthise with people.

I found the film extremely disturbing, not because of the sex and drugs and profanities, but because it never shows the real human cost of Belfort’s actions.

If you want to discover the reason for the financial collapse in 2008, then this is your film. Greed, pure, unadulterated greed filtered through a drug-fuelled haze. Is there justice in the world? The answer from this film is “NO”. Have the financial players from the noughties learned their lesson? NO. Is the wealth of the USA based on a fiction? YES.

The film itself could quite easily be a stage play (and much shorter). A few years ago, we went to see the stage play “Enron”, which covered pretty much the same story – how greed and a total disdain for the regulatory process.

 

Links

The victims:

 

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/investors-story-left-out-of-wall-st-wolf-movie/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

 

 

Reading in June 2013

Posted on By Margot


So this June I began by reading Dropping the Habit by Marion Dante.  And gave up half way through. well I did cheat, and I read the ending. not an inspiring read.


Things got better with The Story of the 100 Year Old Man who Climbed out of a Window and Disappeared by Jonas Johansson. So good in fact that after I had finished reading, I got the audio book so I could listen to the second reading. It si funny as you are taken on a whistlestop tour of teh mjor events on the 20th. century. My rereading has just got to 1968 and the riots in Paris.


The central charater is Allan Karlson. Apolitical, non judgemental – all Allan has asked for in life is a comfortble bed, plenty of food and vodka. Money, status, power mean little to Allan. And thanks to a little creative surgey, neither do women. Allan was never a violent man – yet he seems to have been instrumental in the deaths of a large number of people. Perhaps it was something to do with his fascination with explosives.


The next good book in June was And the Mounains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner. Another very satisfying read. How can this book be described? A collection of linked short stories perhaps? I am not a great fan of short stories as a rule, but this was a brilliant collection of interlinked stories. So what do we have? A warlord's son, coming to terms with the monstrosity of a father, the story of a girl horribly mutiated and abandonned by her mother, a glimpse of a story of an Afghan girl with a skull nearly cleeved in two, the story fo a doctor who promises so much… And more. Here we see Hosseni moving away from the Afghan community as he tells the story of Markos and Thalia who meet each other as children living on a Greek Islad. Hosseni also touches on social relism and the big issue for so many families these days, that of caring for the elderly.


June is coming to and end, and there are two more books, First I am reading The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje. This is about an 11 year old boy travelling unaccompanied to England on a ship. Fanciful? When my father was 12, he and 3 of his brothers were put on a ship to sail from Georgetown, British Guiana to England. these 4 boys, undisciplined, ran amok on the ship. This is what people did in the Great British diaspora, nice, middle-class people dispatched their children to sail half way round the world on their own to be met at the other end by relatives they scarely knew. So I reading this book with not quite the same critical eye as many commentators . Although this book is about an 11 year old boy and his friends it is not writeen for children.


Unlike my second book which I am listening to on my journey to and from work,   This is a book by Carlos Rius Zafon – The Watcher in the Shadows. written for teenagers, and here we see the contrast between the optimism of the teenager and the cynicism of the adult, Zafon writes adventure books centred on teenagers, and sex is a natural part of teenage experience – but for Zafon, sex is part of a relationship. And these realtionships are part of teh adventure of growing up.