There was a news article this week about certain restaurants wanting to ban customers from taking photographs of their meals. My initial thoughts were “pretentious nobs”, but thinking about things a little more objectively, I now think, “pretentious nobs”.

You go to a Michelin starred restaurant to experience something utterly wonderful. You take the time to select dishes that have been created and executed by the best culinary minds, in an atmosphere that I’d assume to be welcoming and helpful. This is something special to you and you want to share your experience, excitement, love of and amazement at the creativity of the chef with those who you know will also appreciate the work of those who are the absolute pinnacle of their profession. Plus, you’re paying for it, so it’s yours. So why do these stuck-up twats take such an affront to people wanting to share their experiences and, at the same time, advertising their food?

Because they are arseholes. They are “artists” and taking photographs of their creations is no different to somebody taking a photo of a concert. Yeah? And their point is?

…

I digress to point out that I am still in love with my electric blanket
…

I’d be really flattered if somebody took a photo or screenshot of one of my most impressive spreadsheets, avec table des pivots, and shared them amongst the wider public. I spend hours creating these things and analysing bits of data so that it’s presentable to colleagues. They give me a great sense of pride.

But I’m a scientist at heart. I am objective and pragmatic. Chefs, artists, performers, they lie amongst a merry band of creative people who would otherwise be known as sociopaths if they hadn’t found a calling in life. Or, in other words, “twats”.

I’ve heard rumour that Instagram automatically deletes any images that its software algorithms recognise as “food”. I’m going to Instagram a variety of images of the stuff that’s served up at the snack bar at work. I have every confidence that none will be deleted, especially the dire sandwiches of mayo and compost.

Le sandwich
What is it with the obsession that catering companies have with mayonnaise? My existence had been very happily mayo-free until I was introduced to the vile greasy muck at university. My flatmates had cupboards full of the stuff and I was like Harry Potter when he first entered Hogwarts; it was like entering an entirely new world: I had become exposed to Middle Class. Of course when I was young, I knew that people ate salad cream and I’d even tried it, it was disgusting, but mayonnaise was like a posh version of salad cream, yet equally awful. I just didn’t see the point of it and still can’t to this day.

The snack bar at work stocks all sorts of sandwiches and just about every one is plastered with greasy mayonnaise. Why do they do this? Why can’t they just make a chicken salad sandwich? What is so difficult to conceptualise about this? It’s easy: a bit of chicken breast, some salad leaves. But no, they have to smother the bread with butter, then layer it with mayo, which then turns the green stuff into nothing better than compost and the bread into a millimetre thick, soggy disaster.

There are some things that will change when I’m in charge, one of them being licensing of mayonnaise and banning all exposure to minors. People will need to fill out a 43 page application form that makes them justify why they need it. They’ll then be interviewed and assessed for further processing. Following a week of counselling, they might be allowed to purchase the eggy/oily crap if they sign up to an intensive course of therapy to help them kick the habit and identify much nicer things to use, such as nothing, on their bread-based lunchtime snacks.

The hunger games
Now I’m hungry and could murder a bedtime snack, however because I know that I’d eat them, I don’t buy snacks so I have nothing in the house to satiate me. The little dog seems to really like his chewy sticks, maybe I should give one a go.

Like Battle Royale, The Hunger Games pitted youngsters against each other in a fight to the death. It was a bit like the Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme with killings. I really enjoyed it. I can feel a letter to Prince Philip coming on.

Caveat emptor infuckingdeed
An update on the new-old car: it needed a new exhaust fitting today: £200. There goes any chance of me buying an Hermes scarf to hide my post-op neck wound. I’d wear a polo neck, but my ears are in the wrong place.

At least I haven’t broken my “no booze after midnight” rule.

The stresses of the week in combination with my own weakness compelled me to open my Friday Merlot (£4.79 a bottle at Sainsbury’s) at 6.48pm today. I’d finished the first by 9.30 and, for the first time in a while, opened a second. My sensible side took over for once and I restricted myself to just one glass from bottle 2 of 3.

It shouldn’t matter, but it does. It should matter. And it does.

But anyway (:@) I need to be up in the morning because I need to pay a visit to Kwik Fit so they can look at the exhaust on my new/old car. It was a bit blowy on the way to work this morning and on my way home it decided to go full throttle “I’ve got a fucking huge hole in me. No, this isn’t a Subaru you can hear from 400 yards, it’s a Nissan, and no, it’s not a Skyline”.

Sheesh. In all fairness, I did know that the exhaust needed some attention when I bought the thing, but I’d have hoped it would have lasted more than three weeks. Still, at least I’ll get it over and done with… until the next thing. I’m betting shock absorbers.

Caveat fucking emptor indeed.

The desperation of life
Sometimes I just sit here and shake my head, an expression of pure exasperation on my face as I think about stuff. Stuff like knowing I was going to go into the freezer and take out sausages to thaw overnight while I was downstairs, but forgot. As usual. And now I have get out of my comfortable bed, disturb the little dog of perpetual licking and venture into the cold dark depths of my kitchen. It’s no big deal, it really isn’t, but the daily realisations of my ability to get sidetracked make me want to punch myself in my head.

At least that’s sorted, I just need to remember to buy fresh basil tomorrow and then I’ll be fully prepared for one of my absolute favourite meals: Italian sausage pasta. Fuckindelish.

Comfort food
I find a lot of comfort in cooking. Not one for following recipes, I just stick what’s tried and tested and that brings me plenty of satisfaction. The whole process brings relief from my worries and the transformation of aromas from the raw, freshly prepared ingredient through the stages of cooking is something quite wonderful.

For this particular dish, I start with finely chopping an onion and slicing some fresh red chillis. Onions are onions, but the less obvious the better. The hot stuff commences with part-cooking the sausages in olive oil. This is a process that requires constant attention as the surfaces of the bags of mystery must brown evenly. Much splattering ensues as they release the essence of their ingredients into the atmosphere – garlic, fennel, rosemary. It’s usually at this point that I recall that I’ve changed the bedding and I have washing drying, so I run upstairs to close the doors.

With the sausages evenly browned, it’s time to remove them from the pan and start cooking the onions and chilli. To this, the handful of fresh basil leaves transforms the atmosphere of caramelising onion and sweetness of the basil fill the air.

I want it NOW! But this is only a fraction of this culinary journey. The sausages go back into the pan, along with tomatoes and water, salt and pepper. Over the next forty minutes, magic happens. I put aside science, this is magic.

The final scene is the cooking of the pasta itself. I wait until the water comes to the boil, add salt – the water fizzes in excitement – and oil – the water settles back down and I add the tubular pasta with its beautifully formed ridges. And wait. And wait. And wait. It’s always worth waiting until that moment when the pasta is cooked to perfection.

Condensation obscures my glasses as the whole kitchen becomes filled with steam as the pasta is drained and returned to the pan. It is mixed with just the correct amount of sauce and plated out into white porcelain; a little more sauce added to the top of the dish.

And there it is: happiness in a bowl.

Happiness in my tummy.

There are those who see cooking as something to be endured, and I’m inclined to agree with them on a work night when I’m tired and hungry and I just need food. But there’s something special about having that close relationship with your ingredients and your hob and your pan; knowing that what you start out with will not just bring you sustenance, but true happiness.

Cooking is a pretty good metaphor for life itself. We can look around us and see that we have just disparate things and bits of stuff and this will never bring satisfaction or joy. We need to look at we have available to us and see how they can be used together as simple ingredients that can transform into something pretty special. But it does take a little bit of thought, effort and patience.

I’ve always maintained that the months from November to March are my nadir. Most winters, my mood dips drastically, lethargy consumes me, I retreat to the safety and comfort provided by the confines of my home and my bed. My relationship with the little dog suffers because he is generally confined to on-lead walks, which he hates, which makes me resent him; we both miss the hour-long explorations of the local woods.

Whether my winter depression is real, whether it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy (akin to the attestations of those who claim to hate Christmas for the sake of it), or maybe a combination of the two, the fact of the matter is that I detest the dark months.

This winter, here in the UK, we’ve experienced greyness, hurricane-force winds and constant rain. Whereas most years, we are at least granted some merciful sunshine and crisp, frosty days, the winter of 2013-14 will go down in history as the biggest pile of shit in recorded history – and we’ve not even been flooded up here. Even the penguins are on anti-depressants.

But today is the 20th of February and March is just around the corner. The move into the third month of the year will hopefully bring more favourable weather, but if not that, light and flowers and pancakes.

Bring. It. On.

I shall welcome the spring by finally painting my bedroom. For the past few months I’ve been taunted by the paint splodges on the walls. I’ve no idea what came over me, but I thought some shade of blue would be the way forward, but the more I’ve been looking this mess, the more my love of neutrals has been confirmed. It won’t be magnolia, but it won’t be far off. Can’t go wrong with Natural Hessian.

Forward thinking
Many things about the forthcoming months are uncertain, but one thing that is almost certain to happen before the end of the summer is the surgery to remove the troublesome growth in my parathyroid gland. I have many troublesome growths – my entire body is a troublesome growth, but this particular one has been causing grief for over a year now.

The surgery is dependent on genetics testing to determine whether I’m a mutant, but irrespective of that, it’s probably going to be quite brutal. I’m having visions of near decapitation, arterial spurts and severing of vital nerves. I tend to get these visions when I’m plotting revenge against those who have wronged me, but it’s different when the scalpel cutting a six inch incision on your own neck.

Still, I get a fortnight off work afterwards and then there’s the fun of buying accessories to cover the wound as it heals. I’m undecided between an Elizabethan ruff and an Hermes scarf and I need to check out eBay in order to help this process.

Tina has got a Cortina
I haven’t, and I know it was Gina. I wonder what it’d be like to drive one of those 1970s beauties. No power steering, no ABS, no air-con, no electric windows, a shit stereo that’s not even a stereo. God, how did people even live back then?

So yes, cars. I bit the bullet and changed my trusty old Nissan Almera recently… for a slightly less old Almera that needs to earn my trust. I liked the colour and the fact that it has five doors and a seatbelt that doesn’t garrotte me… ooh, and leather, and alloys AND A SPOILER! I mean, why would you need any additions to spoil an Almera when the basic design does it pretty much anyway? Still, it’s nice and it’s comfortable and it should last me a few years.

I’ve come to the conclusion that, unless money is no object, you’re really better off paying no more than £500 a year for the purchase of a car – the last one cost me £300 a year (actually, it cost me about £90 a year), the one before that cost me £2,000 a year. They all got me to and from work and the places that I needed to be in pretty decent comfort (apart from the seatbelt thing) with wonderful reliability.

Caveat emptor, they say, whoever they are. Never a truer word is spoken than in relation to buying a car (or a dog). Plus there’s that thing of, if it looks too good to be true, then there’s probably something wrong with it – as I found out when an HPI check saved me from buying an almost perfect, beautiful, low mileage… insurance write off.

Shame you can’t do HPI checks on mini schnauzer puppies.

Ghosts
After previous experiences with significant others, in particular the last one, I always promised myself that I would not allow anybody to ride roughshod over my emotions and that any hint of suspicion would have me running for the hills. This is all well and good, but it’s probably a better idea to deal with the issues of one’s past completely so that they can’t continue to have a detrimental effect as you move on through life. I need a bloody good kick up the arse.

I went for a meal to celebrate my dad’s birthday today. The whole family was there: loud brother and his girlfriend (*waves*); my sister, her feller and my niece; Mum and Dad, and family friends, Ivan and Sue. We gathered at the local Italian restaurant where we’ve conducted such celebrations for nearly thirty years. It’s a great place with good food and a friendly atmosphere. I once dined with David Beckham there, don’t you know – well, he came in for a meal while I was in there once, so it was as good as.

It was lovely, if a little lengthy. I get bored in those situations, well not in the situations as such, but the prolonged sitting at the table after finishing my meal induces tedium and irritation, not to mention a numb backside. I’d much rather be able to move from the table to the less formal bar area and have a coffee and a chat there. Or just go home so I can have a lie down.

The thing with eating at restaurants that I find just a tad annoying is the: “Is everything alright with your meal [insert: guys, sir, madam, depending on establishment]” that without fail comes just as everybody has their mouth full with food. We all muffle our approval and carry on with our meal. Then somebody else comes and asks the same thing. Yes, it’s lovely, thank you.

I’m not sure why they do this. The waiting staff at this particular restaurant are the most attentive I’ve ever known: the owner beats it into them. You can’t even reach for the bottle of wine to pour a glass without a ninja waiter appearing from nowhere to swiftly take the bottle from your hand and pour for you. They are always on hand to make sure that your meal is as you would expect, so I’m assuming that it’s purely out of curtesy that they ensure that all is well, repeatedly. I’m sure they use the same ninja skills to detect when their customers’ mouths are at their fullest to check though.

Even if you’re in a place where the food isn’t quite living up to expectations, it’s difficult to say something, well for me at least. I run through a checklist:

If the food fulfils these criteria, then I’m not one to complain, especially if I’m hungry.

I get so uncomfortable when people I’m with make a scene in a restaurant. I get incredibly uncomfortable when people I am with are unfriendly to the waiting staff. On too many occasions, my ex behaved exactly like this. On one occasion, she pursued a head waiter into the kitchen in a city centre restaurant so she could remonstrate with him. She even asked if I found it embarrassing. Of course I found it fucking embarrassing. It’s bloody rude and it’s unnecessary.

When I go to the supermarket, I actually enjoy going to a till with a real cashier and having a chat to that person. It makes the whole experience so much nicer, rather than enduring the frustrations of pleading with the self checkout, trying to convince it that the unexpected item in the bagging area is a bag. I especially like it when there’s a woman on the till who’s approaching retirement – you can have a wonderful gossip with them and it doesn’t add anything to the time it takes to conduct the transaction. Others find such conversations a terrible inconvenience and an insult to their intelligence. Well stuff them, miserable bastards.

People who work in restaurants, shops, bars, they don’t earn a huge amount of money and they work very long hours. It’s hard work and I wouldn’t like to do it. So long as they are polite and friendly, they deserve to be treated with respect – it’s a two way thing. I have learned that if somebody I am with can’t summon up the manners to be polite to the person who is serving them coffee, then I really don’t think I want to be associated with them.

Thirteen or so years ago, I stopped drinking. Things had got to a stage where I realised that I was being controlled by an impulsion to drink every evening; I woke up to myself and stopped. What followed were eleven blissful, hangover-free years in which I knew I could rely on myself. When my life fell apart a couple of years ago, I hit the bottle hard and, for a few months, I found myself drinking every day again. It started with having a house full of booze that was left by the one whose actions had caused me to lose myself. There was no way I was giving away £10 bottles of wine, not when I needed the self-indulgence of inebriation to ensure that I was experiencing the absolute worst time of my life.

Once things calmed down, though, I got it back under control and became a proud weekend binge drinker. This was something that I’d never achieved as an adult. The compulsion to drink midweek was gone and I now consider my relationship with booze almost normal. Normal, that is, except for the fact that it makes me so ill. It’s as if alcohol is seeking some sort of vicious revenge for all those years that I forsake it… forsook it… didn’t allow a drop to pass my lips… whatever.

People don’t understand me when I tell them how much I enjoyed abstinence. They give up for a month or so and do nothing but whinge and moan all the time instead of looking for the positives and enjoying the numerous benefits that come from staying sober.

So I’m facing a bit of a dilemma. Do I continue as I am doing and play Russian roulette every weekend, never knowing whether the bottle of wine that I drink on a Friday night will render me utterly useless the following day? Or do I just pack it in all together, knowing that I’ll just feel so much better? Taking the latter option will be so much easier this time round. I’d no longer feel uncomfortable when faced with the questions of those who find it incredulous that somebody doesn’t drink. Instead of having to come up with some cock and bull story, I’d have the confidence to tell them that booze and I just don’t get along.

Late nights and brain toxins
I’ve never experimented with my sleep so I don’t know what my optimum sleepy time really is. All I do know is that I need far more then six hours on a worknight. There was a study published in Science this week, which of course I haven’t read. I think, because I couldn’t actually even be bothered to read the noddy version that was on the BBC news website, that the study showed that sleep gets rid of all the toxic chemicals from your brain that accumulate during the day. Something like that anyway.

Assuming that the more toxic your thoughts during the day, the more toxic the chemicals that need removing from the brain, I’m in deep trouble from the insufficient amount of sleep that I get each night. If I calculate that on an average work day there are about seven hours of me thinking negatively about things and about twenty minutes of positive thoughts, and added to this there are the journeys to and from work during which I want to launch a rocket into the boot of most cars that I’m following, that’s about nine hours of ill-feeling that needs to be excreted from my head. Then there’s walking Rocky on his lead, emptying the dishwasher, despairing at all the fluff in the house and catching the news headlines. Adding it all up, I should really be in bed by 5.30pm and asleep by 6. Getting to sleep at about midnight on a school night means that there are six hours worth of bad thoughts already carried over into the next working day.

I think I need to work this fact into my work e-mail signature. It’s already perfectly evident from the way I answer the phone.

As a celebrated turn coat and hypocrite, my collection of those products that have been designed in California by Apple is ample. I have an iPhone (4s), an iPad (3), an iMac (2011), Apple TV and Airport Express. The phone and tablet are my go to devices for day to day web browsing, pissing about on social media, accessing music, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

I use an electronic diary at work, where our IT system is still firmly embedded in 2003; clinging on to Windows XP. But what with exchange servers and clever shenanigans, my work and home diaries merge across all platforms. I’ll stick something into my diary on my phone and it pops up in my work calendar, on my iPad and in the diary on my computer at home. I’ll arrange a meeting with colleagues and tell them, “OK, that’s in my diary” and then they have to do it, they can’t help themselves… they send me a calendar invitation, which results in this:

The red notification dot of doom.

Why do they have to do this when I’ve already told them that I’ve put it in my diary? Don’t they realise that, no matter how many times I accept their fucking invitation, the red dot of doom is almost impossible to get rid of? Worse still, I get these invititions from people when they know I’m on annual leave. It’s like being hunted by an overzealous pack of rabid administrators.

They’ve obviously been on the “Making the most of Outlook” course, aka “How to really piss people off with the click of a mouse button”. What’s evident from one particular culprit is that the “Making most of Outlook” course clearly doesn’t contain is a section entitled “Turning up to the meetings that you’ve invited loads of people to”. It’s no good adding a note to the invitation that asks attendees to “please come and get me if I don’t show up”, it’s kind of a given that when you arrange a meeting, you turn up.

Minor irritations
Anyway, life must be pretty good when your worst gripe is a red dot on one of your mobile phone application icons.

What is quite annoying is the realisation that your little iPad keyboard doesn’t work properly with a number of applications that have been upgraded recently. I have left-right cursor movement, but not up-down. The only way to resolve this will be to get another Apple product, probably a MacBook Air or something. Or maybe I should just shrug my shoulders and move on.

In reference to “moving on”, my tendency towards flying into road rage is now being affected by the increase in traffic congestion that’s usual for this time of year. All motorists are guilty of contributing to traffic congestion just by being out on the road, but some seem hell bent on making the situation worse by their sheer fuckwittedness. Here are just a few pointers to help keep the traffic moving:

Of course, none of these thing really matter that much in the grand scheme of things and they all stem from self-annoyance because I fail to leave the house before the traffic starts to build up in the morning. There’s not much I can do about dimwitted drivers, but I can try to be on the road when there are fewer of them around. That just leaves the minor problem of what to do about the calendar invite obsessives. I might have to arrange for their fingers to be broken.

It has occurred to me that, living on my own with just the little dog for company, my vocabulary is limited somewhat by my interactions with him and the objects within the house and can be summarised as follows:

I thank you.

And so it came to pass that, after a day of snow-related fun activities in a big fridge, my niece was having some chicken pasta broth as we awaited her mother’s arrival.

Out of the blue, she asked, “You know Mary’s son?”

“Which Mary, Auntie Mary has two daughters.”

“No. You know Mary who’s married to Joseph, her son.”

Oh no! Please don’t take me there, Con!

“Right, what about him?”

“Well, how can he be God and Jesus?”

Fuck! I’m an atheist! How can I answer this one? I could go all hard-assed Dawkins on her six year old, beautiful, innocent ass. I despise Dawkins and his radical atheism though. There is nothing wrong with hope and belief so long as people live with their feet firmly on this earth. And kids? Kids thrive on hope and fairy tales and wonder and amazement. I will never take that beauty from them. It’s like stealing Christmas or cooking the Easter Bunny in a casserole. Shooting Bambi in the head and letting all the wicked witches win.

So how can God be Jesus?

Why the hell didn’t she ask this of this of her mother? Why Me?

I thought for a while, trying to find some inspiration from orzo pasta and cappelletti.

“Well…” I said, “God wanted to come to earth and show himself as a person, so he came as Jesus. And although God is Jesus’s dad, Jesus is God (oh please help me….). Is that pasta nice?”

“Yeah, it’s lovely! I still don’t get it though.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“OK”

Phew.

The day will come when she might ask if it’s ok not to believe in God. If that day doesn’t come, when she’s old enough, I’ll tell her my philosophy of humanism without any particular desire of her accepting my view of her own. In the meantime, I’ll nudge my philosophy into her life as much as possible.

That philosophy? Respect the planet, the animals, plants and people. Have time for people, treat them as you’d like to be treated yourself. Listen… to others, to the sounds around you. Look… there’s so much beauty before our eyes. Believe… in yourself, we’re all amazing and unique. Love… because this is a very miserable life without it. Laugh at yourself and with others, share your smile and it will spread more than you will ever imagine. Give time… even if it feels like such a terrible chore, those ten minutes might count for days with somebody. Share… with those who need. Be happy. Be fair. Be just.

In my view, you don’t need a god to tell you how to live your life; what’s right is just right.

I’ll tell you what though, those Christians have some bloody good songs.

My war with contact lenses will never be over. Today I engaged in the battle of “contact lens check” at my opticians in Manchester. I was supposed to go in September last year but couldn’t be bothered since I rarely wear them, mainly because I can’t see particularly well with them.

Waking up late, feeling pretty dreadful as ever, I drove into the big city where the new one way system confounded me to the extent that I ended up in a car park that I couldn’t find the exit from. I then got lost in Victoria Station. Things started badly and were only going to get worse.

After a semi-conscious shuffle around Marks’s, I made my way through the hell of the Arndale Centre to the opticians.

The test itself went much as expected.

“How are you finding the lenses?” the optician asked.

“Well, I can’t really see very well through them, so I don’t often wear them.”

“OK, I’ll turn the lights off and, if you cover your left eye, can you tell me the furthest line down that you can read with your right eye?”

“It’s all blurred.”

“Ok, have a look at the red and green panels. Is either of them more in focus than the other?”

“Nope, they’re both blurred.”

“Is it better with or without this lens?”

“No different.”

“Right, let’s have a look with your left eye then. Cover your right eye, what’s the furthest line down that you can read now?”

“Well, that’s better, I can read the second line… just.”

“Red or green panel?”

“Red.”

“Better with or without this lens?”

“No different.”

“OK then, now try with both eyes.”

“Yeah, that’s OK, I can read the top two lines.”

“Right then, your left eye is compensating for your right and you can see OK with them both together, there’s no point in changing them.”

Clearly not, since you’ve got six months’ worth of lenses in the stock room for me and they’re probably going out of date.

I took my lenses out for the orange snot test, replaced them with a fresh pair, and wandered back to Marks’s. Utterly deranged, I bought some underwear that’s probably my niece’s size and made my way back to the car.

Driving is quite uncomfortable when you have a contact lens stuck to the inside of your eyelid.

I’m getting a little fed up of feeling drained. It’s not sleepy tiredness, it’s like there’s a disconnect between my brain and everything that makes my body function. So now on Saturday night, I think I’m going reboot myself by making myself feel so very bad that I’ll never complain about feeling a little bit exhausted. The recipe for this is:

When I regain consciousness, possibly on Monday, I shall note down how I feel and use that as a baseline for future reference.