Feed

You know, sometimes I think I may love the books I initially found hard to get into, even more when after the perseverance they turn into something absolutely brilliant. Feed by Mira Grant is one such book, set around 30 years into the future, we’re now in a post zombie apocalypse world, where it almost, but not quite, went to pot. Society is still functioning, even with strident security restrictions and massive no go areas and people get on with things, albeit in a slightly different way to how they did it before. One such change is in journalism, with bloggers now the trusted news media, in Feed we follow one such blogging team; George – the newsie, Shaun – the Irwin (as in Steve Irwin, Irwins go poke zombies with sticks) and Buffy – the fictional (she writes stories and keeps the team’s tech devices up to date), as they follow a senator as he goes on tour around the country, as he tries to win the party nomination for presidency. As you can imagine, political tours when there are zombies around are tricky, difficult things, particularly when it soon appears that some outside force doesn’t want the tour to go as planned ……

I thought Feed was an incredibly clever book, it’s clear throughout the book that Grant has constructed this post ‘zombie apocalypse’ world in meticulous detail (which may have been why I found the book slow going at first, as she had to create the world before the action started, but it was worth it). She’s thought of why and how the zombie apocalypse happened, going right into the ‘biology’ of it and she’s really thought of how society would change. I particularly loved the little details in the book, like how George Romero went from horror film maker to saviour and how Apple make the creme de la creme field testing kits with the highest degree of accuracy (and the highest cost). I loved how Grant depicted social media evolving and I got a kick out of a few of the scenes in the book involved people doing what I do in my real life job. I also loved how this book really is a parable about today’s society and how we react with fear and how it restricts our freedoms, just replace the zombies with terrorists.

I also really loved, when I got to the end of the book, discovering that Feed is actually the first in a trilogy, bliss! So torn now though, I had another book lined up, which I’m also desperate to read (which is also part of another trilogy I love), so argh, torn between two trilogies now (both books are slogging it out on my iPhone as I type, which one shall I read first – I love / hate being able to download books immediately!).

Virgin to Veteran – week 2

21st July

 

 

Butterflied chicken for tea, it was nice but nothing particularly to write home about. However the method of flattening out the chicken breasts meant that two plump chicken breasts were enough to feed two adults and two not too big kids and the not too big kids ate it all up to.

22nd July

 

The kids are lucky to go to a school with a wonderful new canteen and a fantastic selection of school dinners. The head chef is brilliant and he’s particularly famed, at least by my kids anyway, for his meatballs, you mention his meatballs and my two start to go all glassy eyed and dreamy. So, as they seemed to like meatballs so much I decided to have a go at making them myself, even though I knew they probably wouldn’t be a match on the schools . . . and they weren’t, the kids still ate them all up them (these were the Italian version of the Spanish meatballs recipe in Virgin to Veteran, I do like how Stern gives variations on some of his recipes).

26th July

 

These were butternut squash falafel and they were absolutely delicious and the kids (like with the courgette fritters last week) absolutely hated them, which is a shame as again, these are not a recipe to make just for one. The recipe was a bit of a faff to make though but ooh worth it . . . (heads off to drool somewhere other than my keyboard).

Related articles

• Sam Stern’s Virgin to Veteran – week 1 (lacer.wordpress.com)

Olympic cycling in Richmond Park

Regular readers of this blog would kind of guess that I live close to Richmond Park, so when I heard that the Olympic cycling was passing through, of course I had to go, despite last time I saw a road cycle race, as a teenager on exchange to France, being bored to tears. Waiting for the race this time was a lot more fun, very relaxing sitting on the grass and with a long enough route, not too crowded. Even the police motorcyclists streaming past at regular intervals seemed to be enjoying themselves (the one below was doing high fives with the crowd).

And then there was the cyclists, in two main groups, they whizzed past in almost a blink of an eye.

Team GB were in the second group and they got such a cheer but the few riders that were lagging behind the two groups got even louder cheers.

After seeing the riders past I rushed home (which really wasn’t far away), hoping to catch the final sprint at the finish on TV and guess what? They beat me to it! By the time I switched the TV on the race had just finished! So it’s quicker for them to cycle into Central London from Richmond Park than it is for me to walk home!

PS I of course stayed up to watch the Opening Ceremony last night and I absolutely loved it, Danny Boyle is a genius and I loved in particular his support for the NHS. I know other countries may not have particularly got that bit but trust me, this was about Britain and although we may occasionally moan about our NHS (trust me I could say a thing or two about how long it takes to remove wisdom teeth right now) but it is a service that is very dear to all our hearts because all we have to do is see other countries that don’t have a free health care system and see how difficult it is for the self employed or low incomed and we love and appreciate our NHS even more (plus the people who work for the NHS are complete stars). And at a time when the NHS is under such attack by the incompetent ideologically motivated ******* we have the misfortune to have in power at the moment, to have someone say how much we appreciate the NHS, in such an extremely high profile way, was fantastic. I also loved the bit about children’s literature and Mr. Bean and oh the Queen, a Bond Girl! Absolutely fantastic. And oh the cauldron!  Stunningly beautiful, I really hope they display the cauldron somewhere like the V&A (or maybe still on site) once the Olympics are over. And oh the choice of the next generation to light the cauldron, just perfect.

Seeing the torch again

How lucky am I? Seeing the torch twice! As it happened it came through my home town for a second time today, as it journeyed by river from Hampton Court to Tower Bridge before heading on land for the stadium. This time it was on the Queen’s barge, the Gloriana, which we missed seeing in the Jubilee, so that was an extra treat. It was really impressive seeing at first three of the tourist boats that go up and down the river near me, side by side, leading the procession, followed by some police boats and then Gloriana herself, with the torch flame in a special beacon at the front of the boat. Following behind was a whole, long flotilla of more boats, it was pretty special. Unfortunately though all the camera gods were against me, first my memory card was full on my ‘proper’ camera, so I had to hurriedly delete some photos and then I got the battery warning light (which is always as frustrating as hell because you see it literally about a minute or two before the camera is about to die, so not much advance warning), so I switched to my iPhone and then the memory space for that filled up after just a couple of snaps! Still I managed to get something.

PS Whilst we were waiting we also heard the 8.12am bell ringing, to be honest probably nowhere near as impressive as it would have been to be near Big Ben or St. Paul’s, as it was just a few hand held bells in the crowd and a hell of a lot of that bell ring tone on the iPhone but hey, all in the community spirit!

A Mascot-y trip round London

We went into town today to meet my dad, we had originally thought to head to the Tower of London but we were torn because a new exhibit had just opened in Tate Modern and we had still yet to see the newly opened Tanks at the Tate as well. So we met up at the Tower of London anyway first, if anything to see the Olympic rings on Tower Bridge (which are pretty wow).

And where we got to spy on an outside broadcast of USA Today (ooh American reporters are a little more glam than ones on the Beeb). We walked past as they were also filming some crowd shots, Girl Lacer is very impressed that she may just possibly be on American TV and that very possibly an old (American) teacher of hers might see her.

We also got to see where the kids’ ancestor by marriage (Thomas More) got brought into the Tower of London (Traitor’s Gate) to have his head chopped off, which Girl Lacer was extremely impressed by but then we decided (after lunch) to head to Tate Modern instead of going into the Tower. We decided to head there by boat (even though it’s within an extremely walkable distance) and to be honest by the time we’d bought the ticket and then waited for the boat we could have walked there a lot quicker and a lot more easily, but it was fun.

Tate Modern was cool, after an initial hmmmmm about the new Turbine Hall installation, a performance / interactive piece by Tino Sehgal, I really liked it.

It may look like a bunch of people standing around but actually most (difficult to tell apart the performers from the visitors) are performance artists who stand round and tell you stories. One of them tried it on my dad, my dad ran a mile. For a while I thought that was it and it took some explaining to the kids, who although are normally massive Turbine Hall fans, were a bit bemused by this one. But then the light flickered out and at first we thought their lights had just failed, they came on again and we thought nothing of it and then they started fading in and out and then something happened which was rather magical and well, you’ll just have to see it (don’t want to ruin the surprise) but the kids went from bemused to impressed (well, I think at least Girl Lacer was).

We also went to see the new display space The Tanks, which were fantastic. Basically The Tanks are where they used to store the oil for the turbine and they have now converted them into a space for performance related art (dance, film etc) and it’s perfect. The all enclosing concrete, with the lack of natural ligt is womb like and it allows you to be really enveloped into the piece. We saw some experimental ballet rehearsals which were a bit hmmmm but then we saw some short films and they were fantastic, not so much the films themselves but how they were displayed, in darkened rooms with some excellent sound systems. I particularly liked the two larger rooms (linked by a glass wall in part), they displayed several screens with different films and little areas of soft carpet and weird things to sit on and odd things propped up against the walls, I loved it, the kids loved it.

But they particularly loved all the mascots we bumped into.

The Torch!

The Olympic Torch came through my part of London today (only a couple of roads away from where we live). I had booked the kids in to the local craft work shop to make their own Olympic Torches beforehand and then we went out and watched.

The atmosphere was lovely, even watching the support crew and the police patrolling the roads ahead was fun (the number of police motor cycles we saw with either an inflatable torch and/or a Wenlock, Mandeville or GB Mascot stuffed behind their windshields. There was even this character (sorry took photo hurriedly not realising it was set on the wrong setting, had to run it through some photo editing software and it still doesn’t look that good).

I hadn’t realised until we finally saw the long line of Torch relay vehicles, exactly how many vehicles there would be (on the TV you really just see the big coach that drives slowly behind the runner)  but there are many more than just that. In fact when we first saw a little torch relay mini bus with torch bearers inside, one of whom was standing up holding his torch and waving, I thought that was it and that maybe the torchbearer for our bit wasn’t running (or walking), he did look a little elderly). Specially as this mini bus was followed by three giant corporate vehicles for the three sponsors.

But then there was a little lull and then people started craning their necks to the left, to a junction just down the road where I think most people knew there’d be a scheduled torch kiss (where one torchbearer exchanges the flame with another) and then there was that big coach from the telly in the distance and then there was the torchbearer. It was a little bit all over in the blink of an eye and the photo I got of the torch kind of looks like it’s just an arm protruding out of one of the burly police officers that guard the torch and its bearer, but still, we saw it (and we did get to see the actual torchbearer to, just didn’t get a good photo).

Different view

Allotment: July 2012 (after the July instalment of my constant garden)

My wrist seriously hampered my allotmentering for all of June and a good chunk of July but I’m back up to almost near normality with my wrist now (the amount I can bend my wrist back is still increasing, although yoga still wouldn’t be a good idea and the most inconvenient thing about it now is that often when my wrist brushes against something it feels like sharp flakes of something are sticking in, they’re not but it’s a bizarre, uncomfortable sensation). So anyway, that all means that I’m in far better shape to go and fight back with the weeds.

The photo above was taken from by apple tree senior, I can’t normally stand there (the rampant Jerusalem artichokes that grow there on that side fight back, literally, if I try) but I cleared that area today, well started anyway, there’s still a lot of yellowing grass to remove, but after a few months of trying to squeeze my gardening into only a portion of the plot it was nice to stand there today and suddenly feel my plot get bigger.