Symbolic Forest

It looks like I’m a pest.

At the parent’s house, upstairs. I can hear a ticking noise. Something like a ticking noise, anyway. Something, once every second. Bzzp … bzzp … bzzp. It’s quiet, but penetrating, and I’ve barely been able to hear it for a minute before it becomes intensely annoying.

I rummaged around, trying to track it down, finding out where it seems loudest. And I find: on the landing, something glowing red and plugged into a power socket. BZZP! … BZZP! “Ultrasonic pest repellent” it says, on the side.

“What? You’re not supposed to be able to hear that!” said The Mother, when I asked her about it. “You can’t hear it. You’re kidding me.”

“Nope,” I said, plugging it in in front of her. “You mean you can’t hear it?” I said, as I was holding this thing, loudly going BZZP in my hand.

“No,” she said. “Nothing at all.” BZZP!

The Parents are, it turns out, worried they have mice. There is, on a regular basis, a rustling somewhere between the floorboards and the ceiling. The cat is evidently not putting the putative mice off; so they’ve invested in this device, to scare the mice away. Only pests can hear it, it says. And, erm, me. I can’t believe that I have superhuman hearing, so presumably I’m just a pest.

Keyword noise: hearing, mice, noise, nuisance, pest, repellent, sound, ultrasonic, The Mother.

People round here often say: ooh, I don’t like going down to London. I’d hate to drive down there. It’s terrible. It’s so bad to drive around London. All the drivers round there are such bad drivers.

And I say: “hah”. Because I’ve driven round London,^* and not had any problems with other people’s driving. I’ve driven round here – a lot more, obviously – and I can hardly go on a car trip without something making me go: “what the hell are they doing?”

In the past 24 hours I’ve driven about 25 miles in total. In that time I’ve had four people overtake me because they’ve thought I’ve been driving too slowly. That is: I’ve been driving at 60mph, on a narrow twisty country road. I drive at 60mph down it, because I know it well; I know where the bends are, where my lines of sight are, and how fast I can go and still be able to stop on sight. And I get overtaken by people zooming past me at 90-ish. On the road past the office, which is an urban road, I drive down it at 30mph and get overtaken by people doing about 50.

Now, no doubt these people would claim they’re very good drivers, and therefore it’s entirely safe for them to drive like that. This is, frankly, bollocks. It’s never safe to drive at 90mph down a twisty country road with a couple of farms along it. These people are living proof of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the more incompetent a person is, the more likely they are to overestimate their skill.

That’s fine when it involves things that don’t concern me. But when I’m driving to work every day, and meeting these idiots every few miles, it bothers me. I don’t want to end up in a ditch, because of your rudeness, idiocy, or misjudgement. If you pass me at 90mph, keep on going – because when you impale yourself on a 20mph ploughshare in half a mile, I want to have plenty of distance between us.

* although no further in than Zone 2; Mile End or Clapham Junction

Keyword noise: bad driving, countryside, danger, driving, Dunning-Kruger Effect, rural, skill, speed.

We turned to each other and said: “it was never this silly in the Old Days,” was it? And I don’t think it was.

In Doctor Who of Olden Times, you might well have got little creatures made from body fat. The difference, though, is that they wouldn’t have been so damn cute. They wouldn’t have had happy smiling faces and stubby hands to wave with. It’s always been a children’s show, but the old series was never so consciously one.

There are hints of something darker, I’ll admit. A minor character dying purely because of the doctor’s assistant fiddling with something she doesn’t understand, for example. Not fiddling with it because she wants to know what it does, but fidgeting and giving her hands something to do, and killing someone directly because of it. Maybe that will come back up later in the series. There are rumours, after all, that things are going to get much darker later on; but I’ll have to see it to believe it.

Keyword noise: BBC, Catherine Tate, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Russell T Davies, television, The Doctor.

All of a sudden, this week, summer seems to be on the way. It can’t just be that we’re doing everything an hour later than we were a week ago. There’s something particular about a cool summer morning, or a drowsy summer evening, that this week has in spades.

By comparison: here’s some photos from Wales, not even a fortnight ago now, but another season entirely.

Keyword noise: Blaenau Ffestiniog, Caernarfon, Eryri, Ffestiniog, Llechwedd, Afon Menai, Menai Strait, Cymru, Gogledd Cymru, North Wales, photography, rain, seasons, Snowdonia, Wales, weather.

The last couple of years, I’ve posted “guess which bits are true” posts on April 1st.

I didn’t particularly feel like trying to fool anyone this year. Things have been a bit too stressful, lately, for me to spend much time writing here; for me to spend much time writing true things, never mind about making things up.

Work has been rather busy lately; a lot of upheaval. I’ve heard it said that when you see people under stress, it can bring out new qualities in them. It hasn’t seemed true, to me. It’s pushed people to become more extreme versions of their ordinary selves. The tetchy people are tetchier, the people who flap around panicking panic more, and the arse-lickers use their tongue ever more often. And, on the other hand, the nice friendly people are just as nice and friendly as ever.

At least everything else is going well. And we didn’t get too snowed-in, camping. I could tell it was a good sign when K – who had never been camping before – started saying “the next time we go camping, we’ll have to…”

Keyword noise: April Fools Day, camping, holiday, stress, work.

Yes, typical. I write something about how unreliable the long-range weather forecast is, and what happens? It’s right for once. And the short term forecast – no snow in Wales – was wrong, too. We had a weekend of rain, sleet, snow, hail, wind. When I started to put the tent up, and was engulfed in a cloud of hail, I should have known it was a bad sign.

Still, the tent didn’t leak very much; and, by wearing all the clothes we’d brought at once, we kept warm. Roll on the next camping trip!

Keyword noise: Cymru, tywydd, camping, hail, holiday, rain, snow, Wales, weather, wind.

It’s a hard thing to do.

The other week, as there’s a long weekend coming up, I booked a camping holiday, in Wales. Only a day or two later, the news outlets started running stories about how awful the Easter weekend weather was going to be; wind, rain, sleet and snow. Oh dear.

There’s still snow on the forecast for Northumbria; but the forecast for the Welsh weather, though, has got noticeably better over the past few days. It’s gone from sleet, to showers, to sunny periods. And I’ve noticed this happening before. There seems to be a tendency now for the forecasts to be more extreme further off, before calming down as the date approaches.

Which is statistically what you’d expect, of course. Extreme weather is, by definition, unlikely, and shorter-range forecasts are always more accurate, so any extreme weather in a long-range forecast is likely to mellow as the forecast gets closer. That doesn’t stop the news jumping on any forecasts of horrible blizzards, though. I’m still worried that the snow forecast for the north Pennines is going to creep southwards over the weekend.

Keyword noise: camping, Easter, holiday, prediction, rain, sleet, snow, Cymru, Wales, weather.

After Thursday’s post, Kahlan got back in touch, with a tip-off. Apparently there had been a rumoured sighting of a can of own-brand non-evil condensed milk, in a Waitrose. So our Saturday was spent driving 25 miles to Harrogate, the nearest branch,^* to find … Nestlé products firmly on the shelves. Oh well.

To make up for the disappointment, we bought an ethical jar of dulce de leche instead, and tried to make cookies, from this recipe. They didn’t quite turn out as I expected, being rather flat and soft, but they still taste good, albeit so sweet that I can barely manage to eat a couple at once. Not surprising, given the huge amount of sugar in each one.

A quick redaction of the recipe, the way we did it: take 230g of butter, chop it up, and beat it until it’s soft. Open your jar of dulce de leche and taste some just to make sure it’s not off or something. Beat 3/4 cup of light brown sugar and 1/2 cup of granulated sugar into the butter, then add 3/4 cup of dulce de leche, assuming you can scrape it out of your measuring cup, and beat that in too, until the mixture is light and fluffy. Lick your cups clean, and your fingers, and anything else the stuff has stuck to. Add 2 eggs, mixing them in one by one, before sifting 2 1/2 cups of flour, half a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of bicarb into the mixture. Rest the dough for a few minutes before putting teaspoon-sized balls of it onto baking trays lined with greaseproof paper, and bake at 160 degrees for 12-14 minutes. Let the cookies cool for 5 minutes before removing them from the baking tray; then when they are properly cold, carefully pair your cookies up into matching-sized pairs before using the last of the dulce de leche – if you have enough left – to sandwich the pairs together. Yum.

* and the only post code district left in the country that’s free of the Mighty Tesco

Keyword noise: baking, biscuits, condensed milk, dulce de leche, food, Harrogate, Nestle, recipe, shopping, Yorkshire.

“My dog’s got no nose.”

“Haven’t we been through this?”

“Shush. My dog’s got no nose.”

“How does he smell?”

Well, funny you should ask that. We’ve just joined this scheme called Smelling-Nose Dogs. You know how, in America, guide dogs are called seeing-eye dogs? My dog with no nose now has his own guide dog, who goes around, sniffs things, guides him away from odorous obstacles and generally lets him in on all the latest dog-gossip.^* And it’s given him a whole new lease of life! He’s happy, and bouncy, and has a shiny coat!^** He’s always bounding around and eager for his smelling-nose dog and him to go for a walk together. Completely unlike how he used to be, always moping in his basket unable to smell anything.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yes, it’s really done him the world of good.”

“Still not very funny, though.”

“Er, no.”

* You know – which dogs have urinated on which lamp-posts and that sort of thing. Which is, I’m told, very important information for dogs.

** Not that that has much to do with anything. Maybe I should be a copywriter for Evil Nestlé’s dog-food arm.

Keyword noise: happy ending, jokes, silliness.

Regular reader Kahlan, in the comments, reminded me of a slight problem we have when it comes to the boiled condensed milk^* mentioned the other day.

The problem is: well, one of morality, and not doing evil. There’s only one brand of condensed milk that’s easy to find in this country, Carnation, produced by the rather unethical Nestlé S. A. This is a bit of a problem, particularly for K, who tries to follow the longstanding international boycott of their products as much as humanly possible. Getting hold of ethically-sound condensed milk is proving to be rather tricky.^** I’m going to write an email to Sainsburys to ask if they stock non-evil condensed milk anywhere. Neither Tesco or Morrisons seem to have a customer services email address that I can track down – they must have them, but prefer to keep their details secret from their customers. I figured it would be fairly pointless asking Asda, Part Of The Walmart Family, because they’re pretty damn evil to begin with.

* also called dulce de leche, if you’re Spanish-speaking, apparently. I will have to find someone who has tried both, to see if they really are the same thing.

** Ironically, getting hold of ethically-sound dulce de leche is rather easier, but that’s not as much fun as boiling a tin of milk for several hours.

Keyword noise: boycott, Carnation, condensed milk, dulce de leche, ethics, Nestle.