The moving finger rants

In 1787, Robert Burns the Ploughman Poet walked along the riverside by the Falls of Bruar. Bruar Falls, in Athole, are exceedingly picturesque and beautiful; said he, misspelling ‘Atholl’ as he did so, but their effect is much impaired by the want of trees and shrubs. Thus inspired to action, he did what any of us would do. He wrote a poem and addressed it to the landowner.

Let lofty firs, and ashes cool,
My lowly banks o'erspread,
And view, deep-bending in the pool,
Their shadow's wat'ry bed:
Let fragrant birks, in woodbines drest,
My craggy cliffs adorn;

and so on and so on

There was already a birk adorning those cliffs, but he'd gone home to write a poem.

As a result the Duke of Atholl instituted a massive tree-planting programme. Because some inkstained twit wrote a poem. Is that how you get a public works project approved? Is some latter-day Bard even now penning A Humble Petition to just get the damn trams finished already? Or is that, as I suspect, a niche that these days is filled by the letters page of the Scotsman?

Nonetheless, a couple of weeks ago I popped up north to view the result. The Falls of Bruar is an area of outstanding natural beauty, and these days you can't see any of it because there are trees everywhere.

I already can't stand Robert Burns. Now he's actively ruining things I like to do (viz., looking at waterfalls). I'm inclined to start taking this personal.

I can't write like Burns (thank Christ), so perhaps a humble petition after the style of Scotland's other favourite son will suffice.

Ohh, 'twas in the month of July two thousand and twelve,
Into the woods around the Falls of Bruar did we delve,
And tho' the scenery was beautiful like a painting or a frieze,
None of it could we see because of all the bloody trees,
and ooowhhh ...

I may have slipped into a Milligoon voice towards the end there, but in my defence, it's hard not to.

Remainder of the photoset is here. I had to climb down slippery rocks on cliff edges to get some of these shots. Rabbie is actually trying to kill me.

Hello Paul, your Star Trek costume has arrived. Bloody hell, my life just took a weird turn. However it's just a top, so if you could please wear black trousers and shoes... welcome to the wonderful world of movie stardom. Please provide the bottom half of your own spacesuit.

Has anyone seen my legs? They don't appear to be below my waist, where I normally keep them.

Playing the Star Trek psycho (it's just occurred to me: That Scene with Janet Leigh wouldn't have worked nearly so well with a sonic shower) tomorrow and Friday, and then, on Friday, I have to change out of the Starfleet uniform and run off to audition for a completely different piece. Specifically, I need to stop killin' dudes, cross town, and do a romantic scene with a beautiful twenty-year-old. I can't see this ending well, and not only because the romance is written by Dostoyevsky.

I mean that quite literally. Dear old Fyodor Mikhaylovich is not particularly renowned for his mastery of the screenplay as an artform, largely due to his untimely death some years before the genre was invented. This script is lifted straight out of the book into a single fixed scene, one set, one shot, no direction, and no regard given to how films work. I gather this company have previously only done stage work: it shows. More work for me. Would be a good part, though.

~

At regular pays-the-bills work today I've received a single-sentence email (Can you please confirm that we have a reservation with you for 2 people for 2 nights Nov 11-12) in 100-point Arial text, taking up four screens and requiring me to scroll. I don't respond well to being shouted at. I've considered answering in 200-point ALL CAPS AND BOLD FOR GOOD MEASURE, or maybe whispering a reply in Flyspeck-3. Neither option amuses me sufficiently. I think I'mma sophisticate this up.

my dear mister price
your reservation stands firm
like the ancient oak

Better idea: commission Brian Blessed to phone him up and reconfirm.

I'm getting a little tired of this travesty that supermarkets call bacon. As we all know, they add water to make it sizzle. Because, obviously, the most important thing about bacon is what it sounds like.

I understand they've got to do something to maintain their profit margins. No one would be sadder than I to see Mr Sainsbury or Lord Tesco destitute, rummaging through the bins at the back of their own once-great stores for spare Ferraris or Learjets past their expiry date. Our captains of industry are fragile and need our support. Viscount Wal-Mart of Somerfield alone maintains a vast harem of mistresses, each of whom requires necessary breast augmentation surgery to survive: please, donate as many millions as you can spare. Lines are open until just before you leave work, when they'll shut arbitrarily so that you have to go shopping first thing in the morning.

With every donation of £100 or more we'll send you this FREE GIFT of a stylish clubcard point! Call now!

So they add some water. I can live with this. Recently, though, they got carried away. Now there's so much water that, when it leaches out of the bacon, it fills up the frying pan. Bacon fully immersed in water doesn't sizzle any more, it simmers. There's a pathetic bubbling noise while the meat curls up and goes exactly the wrong shade of pink and, more importantly, ceases to be bacon.

Boiled bacon is such a horrible, 19th-century slum housing dish. It's what the Cratchits would eat before goin down t'pit. It's what you eat if you can only buy whatever bit of the pig nobody else wanted, and also you never learned to cook because your mother died of typhoid when you were seven. I demand Maillard reactions with my bacon, and for that the pan has to be dry.

So I've developed a habit of pouring out all the water half-way through cooking—trying not to drop the bacon in the sink in the process—and, as a result, the stuff actually starts to sizzle again. By adding water the supermarket people have achieved the opposite of their goal.

That's assuming that their goal was to make it sizzle in the first place. Their actual goal is to take cheap pig-flavoured slush of the sort that ought to be sold (if at all) in bottles, call it bacon, and sell it at three quid a pack. This is understood, but at some point they abandoned any pretence that they were doing it for our benefit. I wouldn't mind the lying so much if it wasn't so brazen.

Don't get me started on the fact that the bottom rasher of every pack is half as thick as all the others. Somebody, somewhere, specifically designed the bacon slicer to do that. Great job, Bacon Slicer Engineer Dude. Sleep well. One day I will find you.

All that said, my ragu recipe specifically calls for cheap shitty supermarket bacon, because I drain off the salty pork-infused liquid and use it at a later stage. My bacon, pepper and pig-slush bolognese is a thing of beauty. I'd like to see Jamie Oliver the Mockney Prat put a positive spin on that.

All of which has made me crave proper bacon. And the Friendly Local Butcher waved at me when I was passing the shop the other day (I wasn't even wearing the cloak at the time, which is what makes this stand out, since I suspect it's often the cloak that gets noticed rather than the handsome young dude inside). Must be a sign.