A Blog by Mr P A Rhodes

Name:
Location: London, United Kingdom

Tuesday, July 08, 2025

Soup, A Cauli

Scandalously, the My Word! books remain stubbornly out of print, and I don't know if it ever gets repeated on Radio 4 Extra or whatever, but I remember this from the time and it should be better known (this text was in "The Utterly Ultimate My Word! Collection")

THE pure unalloyed joy, the flight of the heart on wings of song, the flowering of the spirit like the opening of a jacaranda-tree blossom at the prospect of my wife returning tomorrow after a week away is tempered by the thought of the squalid state the kitchen is in.

In order to preserve the balance of nature it is vital that I maintain the fiction that I am capable, at a pinch, of looking after myself and can be left for a few hours without change and decay taking over the household. So, in the few hours left me, I have an alarming number of important things to do, most of which have been brought about by my firm conviction that women run things on old-fashioned, traditional lines which would benefit from the application of a cold, rational, male intelligence; i.e. mine.

First of all I must replenish the stock of tinned soup in the store cupboard. Round about Day Two I realised that man could live on tinned soup alone. It heats up in a jiffy and, more than that, the tin can be used as a throwaway saucepan. With the help of a pair of pliers to hold the thing, the empty tin can be used to boil eggs or anything else and then thrown away; the soul-numbing process of washing-up is thereby minimised. The trouble is that a keen female eye, viewing the stock cupboard, will spot at a glance that a suspicious quantity of tinned soup has been consumed. So it must be replaced.

On Day One I had realised that, as master of all I surveyed, I did not have to eat vegetables. I have no religious or moral objections to vegetables but they are, as it were, dull. They are the also-rans of the plate. One takes an egg, or a piece of meat, or fish, with pleasure but then one has, as a kind of penance, to dilute one's pleasure with a damp lump of boskage. However, this puritan attitude that no meal is worthy without veg. is strongly held in this house so I must somehow give the impression that vegetables have been consumed in quantity. What I must do is to buy a cauliflower and shake it about a bit in the kitchen. Fragments will then be found under the table and in corners, giving the impression that vegetables have been in the forefront of my diet.

And then there is the refrigerator. This seemed to me a most inefficient instrument, yielding up stiff butter when I wanted it to spread, ice-cold milk when I wanted milk to warm up for the coffee, and when I needed some ice cubes the ice container was apparently welded to the shelf with cold. So I instituted a system whereby I switched off the fridge at breakfast, thereby making the contents malleable when I needed them, and switched it on again at night. This has worked quite well except that the contents of the fridge are now a cluster of variously sized rectangular snowballs. I must remember to take a hammer and chisel to them before tomorrow.

And I need a stout elastic band because I have done in the vacuum cleaner. I used one of my gumboots for kitchen refuse to save messing about with a bin but liquids seeped through a hole in the toe. The obvious solution to a hole in a gumboot toe is to bung it up with a mixture of sawdust and the remains of that tin of car undersealing compound which one has in one's garage. I poured the underseal and the sawdust into a thing called a Liquidiser, which is a kind of electric food-mixer, but what I failed to note was that one is supposed to put the lid on before operating it. And when I began to vacuum clean the mixture of tar and sawdust off the kitchen ceiling it seemed to jam up the works. The motor went on running but there was a smell of burning rubber and now I must, before tomorrow, provide the vacuum cleaner with a new rubber band.

And eggs. We have an ark in the orchard containing nine hens, which provide us with a regular intake of beige eggs. I went out to feed them on Evening One and I think that they missed my wife. They greeted me, I felt, reproachfully, making sounds not unlike those made by Mr Frankie Howerd. "Ooh!" they went, "Ooooh, OooooOOOh." So I undid the door of the ark and led them on an educational tour of the garden, pointing out where the new drainage is to be laid, the place on the lawn where I had lost my lighter, the vulgar shape which one of the poplar trees had grown into. And then the dogs joined us and helped to take the chickens out of themselves by chasing them, and soon the air was filled with feathers and joyous squawks. I finally got the chickens back into the ark by midnight but, oddly, they haven't laid an egg between them the whole week. Since my wife will be expecting to be greeted by about three dozen beige eggs, I must do something about this before she returns. I also had a spot of bother with a packet of frozen peas. I thought I would vary my diet by making myself a Spanish omelet, i.e. as I understood it, an omelet with a pea or two in it. Now the packet stated clearly that if less than four servings was required the necessary amount could be obtained by giving the frozen pack a sharp buffet with an instrument. I had my soup tin on the gas-stove, with a knob of butter in it, and I obeyed the instructions; that is to say, I held the frozen lump in my left hand and aimed a blow at it with a convenient instrument - my dog's drinking bowl. It worked up to a point. One frozen pea detached itself, bounced off my knee, and disappeared. Where had it gone? My Afghan hound was right next to me at the time, watching keenly what I was doing with her bowl, and I had a sudden horrible suspicion that the pea had gone into her ear. I called to her. She evinced no interest. I went round the other side and called again. She looked up. I made a mental note to take the dog to the vet for a swift peaectomy operation before tomorrow.

Lastly there is the problem of my breath. Last night I made myself a casserole of sausages - or rather, a soup-tin-role of sausages - but I seemed to have lost the salt. After a deal of searching I found an alien looking container marked 'Sel' and applied it liberally. It seems that it was garlic salt. I did not realise what it had done to my breath- one doesn't with garlic - until this afternoon when I stood waiting for somebody to open a door to me and suddenly noticed that the varnish on the door was bubbling.

So I have a number of things to remember to do before tomorrow, such as tinned soup, a cauliflower, de-frosting the refrigerator, buying an elastic band for the vacuum cleaner, getting in three dozen beige eggs, seeing the vet about the pea in the dog's ear and taking something for the garlic on my breath.

How, you are perhaps asking yourself, will he possibly remember all these things? Well, hopefully I have put them all together into a kind of chant, or song. It goes: "Soup ... a cauli ... fridge ... elastic ... eggs ... pea ... halitosis."

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Distraction

I haven't really got into the habit of this, have I? We had a baby. That's my excuse.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Hello, I'm a potential customer!

Look away now if I've already bored you about this one by email. Actually, that's probably everyone who might ever read this, isn't it? Anyway, I ought to try to train myself to use this thing so here it is again: Apple are, famously, running some ads comparing Macs and PCs. The new UK versions that have just started star comedians Mitchell and Webb. The ads, with their "I'm a Mac and I'm much cooler and funner" theme, are presumably targeting the less technically savvy PC users. So, I hope my experience of actually trying to see the ads isn't typical...
  • There's one of those Mitchell & Webb Mac ads that I keep hearing about. Perhaps I'll follow this "see all the ads" link to see the rest of them...
  • "Quicktime 7 is required". Which version have I got? Let's check... start the player... No, I still don't want to upgrade to QuickTime Player Pro, thank you very much, I just want to see your funny ad.
  • OK, this is Quicktime 6.5.2. It's probably got an Update option...yes! No: "Your QuickTime Software is up to date".
  • Maybe it'll work anyway. Apple stuff "Just Works" - it says so just below the player box. And it is now playing the ad soundtrack... but without any pictures.
  • The "Quicktime" tab at the top of Apple's UK web site gives me a "page not found error". [subsequently they seem to have fixed this]
  • So, login as admin, find and install Quicktime 7 (painless enough), and back to Apple's site to watch the ads. It defaults to the US site so now it's the bloke from The Daily Show. Also, the picture keeps breaking up in bizarre ways that give the characters unpleasant facial deformities.
  • OK, found the English versions. Hmmm...
Assuming the goal of the ads is to convert PC users (not just to make Mac users feel smug), it seems a bit of an own goal. There are other formats that will Just Work on most PCs, so why annoy the customer by using a less-supported format? Although I suppose the real target audience are not just PC owners, but PC-owning iPod owners, who will already have installed iTunes and therefore probably QT too. I still quite fancy getting a Mac, of course

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

How not to move a harpsichord - a problem in logic


Danger: Harpsichord at work
Originally uploaded by Paul Rhodes.
Imagine a harpsichord is on one side of the river. You need to get it to the other side of the river. It takes two people to carry the harpsichord, and although you don't have a big enough boat (OK, car) to carry it, you know somebody who does. So far so easy. But the harpsichord is behind a locked door to which you do not have the key. And the car starts off in another town. And there are security guards on the other side of the river... It started off as a Simple Plan. A concert was to be held at the Victoria & Albert Museum. This was to involve a harpsichord, currently sitting in the harpsichordist's flat in South London. The necessary estate car was to be borrowed for the day. As the harpsichordist would be out, the keys to the flat were in the posession of a Man who would turn up at the requisite time with said Keys, unlock the flat and help to load the instrument into the car. The nice people at the V&A were expecting us at midday and would help unload at the other end. What could possibly go wrong? Now read on, dot dot dot Having taken the train up to Luton the night before to collect the car, I arrive at the pickup at 10:30, park up and (as it's a fairly busy road) put the hazard indicators on. No sign of the Man With The Keys, and no reply from his phone, so presumably he's on his way. The sun has come out and it's a lovely day for standing around by the side of the road, watching the world go by. The world is mainly buses, delivery men and burglar alarm installers, but you can't have everything. By 11am, I'm a bit concerned and make a few more calls. Then at half past, the Man With The Keys calls (Hurrah!). He had forgotten the appointment (Boo!) but is now on his way. We agree I'll drive to collect him from the nearest (i.e., not very near) convenient tube station. This plan is good, until it transpires that an hour of hazard lights has run down the car battery. Bearing in mind you can't fit a harpsichord in just any old car, this is not the high point of my day. Long-Suffering Wife agrees to come and assist, which necessitates buying some jump leads on the way. I leave a message on Man With The Keys's voicemail suggesting he get a taxi. By 12:30, the car is jump started and running. As Long-Suffering Wife has to go to work, it will stay running until I'm sure the battery is sufficiently charged that it'll start again. The Man With The Keys, not having found a taxi, is on a bus somewhere on the South Circular. Ten to one, and we are quorate. Now we can begin loading up. The Man With the Keys opens the front door. I hover outside to keep an eye on the still-running car. A friendly housemate hovers inside watching the Man With The Keys' valiant attempts to open the inner door with the Keys at his disposal, then takes a closer look and declares them all to be The Keys for the exterior door. There must be an Other Key somewhere. The Man With Some Of The Keys calls his lodgings and shortly a Woman With The Other Key is on her way from North London. We get in the car to drive to the aforementioned nearest (not very near) convenient tube station where, after a short wait and some anxiety about parking attendants, The Man With Some Of The Keys meets The Woman With The Other Key, reunites the keys over the ticket barrier, and we're back on our way. On the plus side, by this time, the battery must be well and truly recharged. At 2:15pm, we breach the final barrier and lug the harpsichord out and into the car. The little trolley we use for moving it around isn't much use in this confined exit so we put it to one side. Only later will this seem like quite a bad idea. Ten minutes after arriving, we're on our way, and with light traffic and some cunning navigation we arrive at the Victora & Albert Museum at ten past three. The security guards don't seem to be expecting us, but after checking us out they find us passes and tell us where to park, and that someone will be along to help with the moving soon. The Man With The Keys exits, stage left, to return later. Unlike the earlier South London Roadside, the back alleys of the V&A are a bit nippy, particularly if you have to stand around in them for the best part of an hour. There is some very nice experimental plasterwork hidden away back there, but I'm not quite interested enough in plaster for this to keep me entertained in the cold. Come four o'clock, the cheerful porters arrive. They are only slightly disheartened by the news that the harpsichord removal trolley is sitting on a doorstep some miles away, and quickly find a workable substitute. By 4:15, the harpsichord is set up in the music room ready for that evening's concert. All is well, at least until the concert is over and the instrument has to be removed to yet another corner of the city - but that's another story...

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Scary Monster


Scary Monster
Originally uploaded by Paul Rhodes.
Partly by way of figuring out how to blog photos from Flickr, but anyway:

What is this thing, anyway? It was in Tokyo, and it must have been about 2 inches long.

Paul

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

It's ten years today since my father died. Not something to dwell on particularly, but to mark the anniversary in a small way we visited the Courtauld Gallery. Highlights included Cranach's Desperate Housewives and Raoul Dufy's Blue Peter Design a Mural Competition Winner, 1906. And some nice Cézanne and Kandinsky. National security of course precludes disclosure of the incident involving my father, Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, the spy Anthony Blunt, and some Michelangelo drawings. At least until Dan Brown offers the family a large sum for the book rights.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

I have created a blog because it is The Law that anyone on the Internet over a certain age must have one (under a certain age, you must still have one, but it's on myspace and uses colour, sound and imagery to prevent anyone over a certain age from reading it). I don't actually have anything to say, though. Ho hum.