Merlin

So Merlin’s started, I know I haven’t written about TV for a while (for the record I watched Spooks Code 9 and loved it) but I had to write about this. First of all I so wanted to like this. I have long lamented the lack of lovely period fantasy weekend teatime drama that they used to have in the winter when I was a kid and I think this is the 21st century take on it, with better special effects obviously to boost. 

My first impressions though were not good and that was the music, so OTT I half expected Mickey Mouse to come waltzing out of the castle and there was Anthony Stewart Head being evil but not enough evil in my book. But it warmed up on me, as Mr. Lacer remarked it was nice to see the castle looking ‘new’ after all back then it would have been and whichever real castle they filmed at looked nice to. I warmed to the two actors that play Merlin and Arthur and old Victor Meldrew was good to. I loved the dragon, the way how it looked quite dinosaur like and if people complain about the CGI on that, well it is only the BBC, they can’t blow all our licence fee on it! And it was nice to see Gwen from Torchwood getting a bit of work and her last scene this episode was rather good. The big surprise though that this was just a purely BBC Wales production, I’d have thought they’d have got HBO or someone to chip in to, so hats off to them, BBC Wales are truely taking over the world. I’ll be watching next week.

Happy Birthday Cath Kidston!

 

I have two birthday cakes to make in the next two months (if I ever have baby number 3, please, please, please may it be anything other than an Autumn baby like my other two). I need practice at icing cakes as that is not my strong point, possibly because I don’t much see the point of icing, as it distracts from the loveliness of the cake and adds pointless calories, but try telling that to a soon to be 5 year old who wants a castle cake for her birthday (I blame Waitrose bakery section myself and no I’m not going to buy one ready made at £20 odd quid a pop). So I thought entering the bake Cath Kidston a birthday cake competition might be worth ago as a) it’d be practice b) there’s a small slim chance I might win a trendy radio and most importantly c) I get to eat the cake afterwards.

I wasn’t going to exactly recreate one of the kid’s birthday cakes; Boy Lacer will probably have a Charlie and Lola monster cake which I’m thinking of making as a marble cake as my mum always used to make me and my sister marble cakes for our birthday when we were small, it was her one and only cake (other than cupcakes and those were out of packet mix) as far as I remember. Girl Lacer has requested a castle cake and she wants it to be chocolate, she wanted a castle cake last year to, that was an attempt at buttercream icing, I think I need to be a bit better this year. Hence the Cath Kidston practice at handling icing, particularly coloured icing.

The design is based on Cath Kidston’s shooting star fabric and underneath all that icing is the cake (minus the recommended decorations)  from Tana Ramsay’s Girl’s Birthday Cake (a Victoria sponge really), which tasted delicious and was really easy to make (I like recipes which say basically ‘put all ingredients in a bowl then mix’). It’s actually the first Victoria sponge I’ve made since school (too many bad connotations of home economics lessons, even though (eventually) I was the teacher’s star pupil) and I was quite surprised it worked! I neglected to put in Tana Ramsay’s recommended marscapone as my corner shop isn’t that sophisticated and I did buy some whipping cream but proved to be not that good at whipping it, so it was just jam which I think Boy Lacer would prefer anyway as he doesn’t like creamy stuff.

As for the tasting? Well I’ve never seen Boy Lacer’s mouth open so wide as he tried to cram the whole lot in at once (he’s been watching me type this and has been pointing at the photo going “cake! cake! cake!”). Girl Lacer also liked it, as did Mr. Lacer but he said it made him over-sugared, which it did me to (I had to go and down a glass of water immediately after eating it) but that was just the icing. The cake itself was so lovely and light (if I do say so myself) how can something as simple as eggs, flour, milk, sugar and butter, taste so nice?

Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism by Dawn Prince-Hughes

Thanks to a recommendation by Julie from Bookworm when she popped over to my blog one Sunday Salon, I’ve been reading Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism by Dawn Prince-Hughes. An autobiography about one woman’s life with undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome and how she discovered herself through her work with gorillas.

Her life pre-gorillas was in part incredibly sad, although she had a happy family life, allowed to explore her wild side out in the countryside around her home, school was difficult and when she left home she drifted from couch to couch in various acquaintances houses to sleeping in doorways. Her life started towards more positive change when she actually got a job dancing in a strip joint, it gave her the security of a constant job and allowed her to feel more settled. She then felt brave enough to go to the zoo and that’s where she met the gorillas.

Through watching the gorillas and eventually working with them, she learnt about gorilla and consequently human behaviour. In the book she describes the gorilla families at the zoo so perfectly, you feel like you know them, feel their joy and feel their pain. She goes back into education and after gaining a PhD is now an adjunct professor of anthropology (according to the back of the book). It’s an inspiring book about the willingness to continue to strive to improve yourself and the fight to appear ‘normal’. Reading Prince-Hughes describe how she has to deliberately rather than intuitively like most people remember to smile and nod in all the right places. She reminded me of a duck on a river, still on top, feet desperately paddling underneath.

I’d recommend this book to anyone with autism in their family, I often wish I could see into my son’s mind. Prince-Hughes describes her first day at kindergarten, lining up with the other children whilst the parents looked on, a lot of the other children were screaming for the parents but she stayed still, feeling like it was pointless making a fuss because her world was about to end. When I take my son to playgroup I wonder if that’s going through my son’s head, his brief hesitation as we walk over the threshold or a brief whimper when I say goodbye are the only signs he’s not totally comfortable.

It’s interesting how she talks about signs of autism in the rest of her family to and about how she only had suspicion that she could be diagnosed when a nephew was diagnosed the same. Me and Mr. Lacer talk about this quite a lot, we both show certain autistic traits, both being socially awkward, me showing certain dyspraxic traits and my uncle almost certainly has undiagnosed Asperger’s and I wonder how Boy Lacer’s process towards a firm diagnosis (currently it’s ‘just’ social communication disorder probable autistic spectrum, the ‘probable’ will almost certainly be removed after his playgroup assessment next week, personally I think it’s Asperger’s and dyspraxia, will effect my uncle and my dad’s relationship towards him, which most of the time is on the side of being annoyed).

I also enjoyed this book for the writing about the gorillas, it brought back all the books I read about gorillas when I was a teenager (I wanted to work in the field with gorillas a la Gorillas in the Mist). So a great book on two fronts with the urgent message at the end that we need to look after our cousins who are really just like us.