Unthinkable Wings

Recently Read

The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, which is a useful introduction to the subject.

Currently Reading

Peter Ackroyd on Venice.

Also trying to teach myself some phrases of Spanish from Say it In Spanish, although I cannot concieve of ever needing to say "Can you recommend a good cook?", and I sincerely hope I won't need "I have typhoid fever"...

Reading Next
Heffers had a sale of fiction in translation, so I shall probably read Bulgakov, Diary of a Young Doctor next.

The first gay TV drama, rediscovered?

It's an ITV television play, set in the South of the US, immediately before the Civil War. It's said to hold up well to a modern audience, though there is no word on whether the accents would cause American viewers to wince...

Taking a leaf out of Oursin's book, I thought it would be interesting (for me, if not for you), to start keeping a log of this. At the moment, weekends are the only time I'm not eating institutional food anyway....

Friday dinner: cheated, as we were both feeling fairly grotty, and went to Yippee!, the sort-of-Pan-Asian (i.e. mostly Chinese, apart from the samosas) noodle bar round the corner. Less good for vegetarian/ pescetarian purposes than we had anticipated - all the noodle soups had chicken stock in them, which was a shame, but while the vegetable rolls were disappointing (mostly chunks of carrot in the filling), the prawn toast was enjoyable, and the fried noodles with prawns, beansprouts, pak choi and chilli slices was exactly what I wanted.

Saturday: For lunch, knocked together a spinach, tomato and feta fritatta, with a little bit of garlic added in. Probably used more spinach than was really good for the balance of flavours, but it was still very tasty. Baked fritattas are my new favourite vegetarian thing - so much easier than omlettes, but extremely satisfying! Stone Soup has a recipe for a chickpea, parmesan and rosemary one that I am keen to try soon.

For dinner, we had a change of plan. We had some fillets of wild Pacific salmon, and had been planning to do them with pak choi, but I had chopped up a pepper at lunch, thinking it might go in the fritatta, and then realised it wouldn't fit. So we spiced the salmon with chipotle, oregano, and coriander, blackened it, and served it with fried red pepper and onions, and a can of refried beans we had in the cupboard (slightly slackened with a little water, and supplemented with a chopped red chilli. I wouldn't normally use a whole chilli for these purposes, but the ones Sainsburys has at the moment are extremely mild).

Sunday: For lunch, bacon rolls with Frank's Hot Sauce, supplemented with the pak choi, so that it didn't go to waste.

For dinner, top rump of beef, which I had covered in mixed herbs and a little salt before browning it all over, and putting it in the slow cooker with a little water and cooking it on low for... a couple of hours. Ended up nearer medium than rare, but very tender and well-flavoured. On the side, roast potatoes, and stewed cherry tomatoes. This was a last minute improvisation. We had bought savoy cabbage, but when we cut it up, it was covered in little black spots, and while I suspect they were only a cosmetic problem, I wasn't sure, so we used up the tomatoes left over from the fritatta that were originally being kept for snacking. And very well they went with the roast too (probably better than the cabbage, actually).

Very peculiar dream last night, where, unusually, I can remember quite a lot of plot. I have no idea why I was dreaming about surviving a sort of zombie apocalypse with a group consisting of the last Archbishop of Canterbury and a number of mediaeval re-enactors, though....

A good New Year to one and all, and many may you see!

Still, I'm very sad to hear of the death of CMJ, excellent cricket commentator, and one of the voices of summer, hushed far too soon. I hadn't even realised he was ill, though I was a little worried when he wasn't commentating this year... May he rest in peace.

My grandmother on my future employment by the diocese of Wakefield:

I've never been there myself, but my mother's uncle was drowned there, cutting a branch of palm* that was hanging over the river for his sweetheart. My mother would never have it in the house after that. [PAUSE]. So there's a definite family connection there.


* No idea. I think she said 'palm'; I'm guessing it's a dialect term I don't know, but I couldn't get a word in edgeways to ask - legionseagle?

*

Addenbrooks surgery department had knocked off for the day by the time I got hold of Lawyer. In other news, I am beginning to go into a complete panic about getting ready to move back to Cambridge - and the sermon I failed to finish this afternoon is just dire, what there is of it.

*sticks straws in hair*

So, it looks likely that we have a new Archbishop of Canterbury - Justin Welby of Durham.* Slightly surprising, inasmuch as he isn't very experienced, but I think on the whole he's a decent choice, and there's some hope he has some administrative talent, which would not go amiss. And he does give the impression of saying his prayers, which is a good thing in an Archbishop.

I've frequently heard him described as a conservative evangelical, but I can't quite work out why. He's certainly an evangelical - it is, after all, their turn - but the conservatism I've seen less evidence of, apart from the fact that he's opposed to gay marriage, but it's almost impossible to find bishops who are in favour, and that includes people who would normally be called liberals.** Of course, that may just be a function of him not having been high-profile for very long, and I may be missing something, but it equally may arise from the media not being very good (understandably enough) at reading the subtleties of things.


*Rotten luck for Durham; he's only been in post a year, and before that they had N.T. "Tom" Wright, who though a distinguished scholar, was never actually there....

** I believe that +Buckingham (the one with the interesting but poorly laid out blog) and +Salisbury have come out in favour, but they obviously won't go any further, +Salisbury because of his marital situation (married a divorcee), and +Buckingham because he says what he thinks too bluntly.

ETA: I left the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds off the list (thank you, bookwormsarah), but the point remains. Also, I am reminded that Welby lists the encyclical "Rerum Novarum" (the one in which Leo XIII sketched out Catholic social teaching on industrial relations and the like, endorsing unions, among other things) as the greatest influence on his moral thinking. Which probably won't please Conservative (as in party politics) Anglicans, but again is a count against him being all that much of a conservative evangelical, because regardless of political stance, endorsing Papal teaching is not something that that crowd tends to do.

Can we deduce from Julian Fellowes' slightly shaky grasp of how (pre-)eclampsia works that he's not a Call The Midwife fan?

Anyone have any tips on discouraging clothes moths? Unfortunately, mothballs make the inside of my throat swell up, but grateful for any other suggestions...

TV Tropes now has a page for Rev.

This, of course, also includes a set of tropes for each character. They list the Archdeacon as straight gay: a homosexual character who has no camp mannerisms or obviously 'gay' affectations.

I'm not sure about this, given that it's fairly obvious from early on to viewers who know anything about the C of E that he's gay. And the sauna scene early on in S2 was also a bit of a give-away...