My name is X, and I play Su Doku

There had to be an admission sooner or later. My name is Alison, and I confess to Su Doku. Do you play it? Do it? Is this now something to confess to, given that su doku fever has dimmed a little?

Perhaps I can give a comparison. Back when I was teaching English in Poland, words were my stock in trade, morning noon and night. I enjoyed it, but it meant I wanted something unrelated to words to wind down in the evening. Mum kindly sent me cross-stitch samplers, which did the trick.

Not that much has changed on the words front. I may not teach now, but much of my work involves words, emails, letters, phone conversations etc. Numbers have become quite a good way to relax, particularly on work trips, where words continue from morning to night, including over mealtimes with clients.

Yes, it is addictive. I can’t do the fiendish ones very often, but I can usually manage the difficult ones fairly reguarly. It doesn’t matter that you’ve just solved one – you feel the need to do another one. Immediately. And preferably even faster than the previous one. No wonder the Japanese, the originators of su doku, include how long they take to solve a puzzle.

Now my travel kit includes a magnetic su doku board. I admit that I’ve still to get the hang of it a bit more – the hand and eye skills are a bit different to writing in the numbers with a pen.

Having chosen a job that is ‘useful..worthwhile…’ and many other balanced, equatable things, it’s quite nice to do something that is not particularly constructive, but just fun.

Of maps and men

Having revisited one former home, found myself visiting the town where I spent my secondary years, only half a week later. (Reasons for this less positive, though perhaps I’ll do a separate post about that.)

Otley has its market, and Upton-on-Severn has its maps…and also morris men (though thankfully not all the time).

I used to live in Malvern, where the water comes from, and Morgan sports cars. A good place to mention with the centenary of Elgar this year – one theory suggests that the outline of the Malvern Hills was an influence on the structure of his Enigma Variations.  That’s something to ponder during the ad breaks on Classic FM.

Upton, meanwhile, is a few miles away from Malvern, and tends to be good at various festivals, including folk, and jazz. The weekend when we were around happened to be one where over 100 different morris dancing troupes had gathered together, so it was testing stuff elbowing your way through the bells and floral hoops and along to the river to have your sandwiches. This is the advantage of central England – a great location for all the ‘enthusiasts’ to travel to and congregate in.

Upton also has a map shop…Mum loves maps, and with my brother about to do an extended trip to Australia and New Zealand, this was the opportunity to investigate what maps might be available.

This particular shop has previously offered maps of obscure parts of Warsaw that I would later teach in. This time, it had no difficulty in turning up a multilingual copy of a map of the Tatras Forest Park (alpine part of Poland, with the main mountains mostly on the Slovak side).

Had I wanted to go back to Legnica, where I also worked, I would have been able to buy a map of it on the spot – and of at least a dozen other small Polish towns that most people have never heard of.

(Mum incidently made it out the shop with only 4 maps, which was quite good going for a trip that she isn’t going on herself.)
I saw the map shop recently featured in a travel article, as one of the top five map shops in the UK. It stocks 55 000 items. You can also buy items online. What are you waiting for?

10 years…

It’s not often that I manage a politics reference, but here’s my chance.

Ten years…well yes, it’s about Tony Blair, but also about me and Dan.

We chalked up ten years together at the end of April.  Admittedly, we then spent a lot of the first year apart, while I was teaching in Poland, and Dan was finishing his degree, plus a few work trips on either side since then, but it’s still a decade of thee-and-me, which is quite something.

So yes, our relationship has been played out with Blair in the background, and all the New Labour developments.  We predate Tony’s election result by a few days, but thankfully we aren’t now off to do speaking tours around the world.  (Occasionally, it feels slightly like that on the odd work trip…)

Given that we’re in the generation which had never really known anything but Tory governments until New Labour came to power, it’s quite something to see the end of another long-running campaign.  In addition, with the swing towards SNP in the recent Scottish elections, the political background is set to change quite a bit more.

Here’s to another decade in power meanwhile…(sorry love.  Both of us.  Really.  Of course.)

Busy in the blogosphere

Rather aware I haven’t written for a while – and simultaneously, have discovered a few more friends who have their own blogs.

Andrew Philip, a poet and reporter for the Scottish Parliament, who was part of the same linguistics department as me a few years ago, has a fairly frequent looking kind of blog, with lots of critiques of poetry, some thoughts on politics, and probably more. As I only discovered the blog today, haven’t yet seen much more than that.

Tony Pugh, a friend from church, and well-known cinema goer, has also got a blog, which includes his film reviews, and probably some more politics, with a global/social perspective.

Rupert, one of the leaders at church, now puts all his sermons (or seems to, anyway) on his blog, as well as a lot else, and encourages people to continue discussing with him after the event. (He also kindly writes comments on our blog – one of the few who do – so has to get a citation for that, at least.)

So where are all the women? Given stereotypes about which sex has more to say, there ought to be a lot of blogs written by women out there. Probably there are, and I just haven’t found them yet. Probably also, it’s a lot of fun writing your own posts, and this can detract from getting round to reading other people’s.

Meanwhile, Dan seems to be advising ever more clients to consider using blogs to manage comments from staff (on an intranet), or include advice from visitors to a site who have used a service (like a reviews site, but a little more informal?).

Anyway, I’m just getting into my stride here, and have managed to write a post that isn’t about food, or travel, so I’d better go back and consult my notebook as to what else I’ve been planning to write about for the last few weeks…

B’stilla…but no fandango

Have just looked back at the last two posts, and funnily enough, they are both about food.  Again.  So I might as well have thirds, and write another post about food.

Dan has put up a picture of Eric in Paris, but truly, we were there too…We had three and a bit days there before a work meeting for me, and made the most of trying out the amazing range of restaurants around the Montparnasse area where we were staying.

Adding on my few days for work meetings too, managed to truffle through Japanese, Moroccan, Vietnamese, French (restaurant, and bistro-style), and Breton (ie crepes).  In a work culture where you have wine at lunchtime, lunch is subsidised at the office you are visiting, and the meal lasts two hours, it was all very pleasant.

Meanwhile, the b’stilla is a reference to the Moroccan restaurant we visited.  B’stilla (or pastilla) is a dish I have wanted to try for a long time, and the restaurant happily had it on the menu.

It is essentially a speciality of the kind brought out for weddings – a very special chicken pie, or pigeon in the more traditional version.  It is encased in very fine filo pastry, and has the sweet-savoury thing popular in the eastern Mediterranean and middle East.  For the pie, this meant that the top was dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon.

The other attraction of the restaurant was the cat.  As we arrived, we could see a waiter trying to catch a cat which was paused to run into the restaurant – and as we walked in, so did the cat.  This is clearly not very hygienic, it’s true, but we happened to be given a table by the waiter’s stand where the bills were made up.

The cat was clearly well known, and ended up curled alongside the senior waiter, who laid on a saucer of something, while directing the other waiters.

The cat knew its stuff too, and proceeded to charm several other tables.  I’m sure that there must have been some kind of truce between leftovers and pushing your luck, and the waiters seemed pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

The title is of course an attempt at a pun on a line from Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.  The middle talky bit, that everyone thinks they know.  Go on. You know you want to sing along.