Sunday 15 April 2007

chicken, curry paste,
some alchemy, some onions,
pineapple chutney.


Recently, after a long hiatus, I have returned to learning shorthand. Wierdly, it would seem that in the intervening years all the previous stuff I’d learned had stuck in my head, and before I knew it I was able to write ‘Dan at the depot had gone to the docks and loaded all the boxes on to the boat’ in a series of curves, dots, dashes and short lines. This will no doubt prove invaluable at some future point in my life when I find myself at the docks with a need to write something down about boxes very quickly.
As is no doubt common with learning this sort of thing, I found it far more advantageous to write my own exercises, rather than the rather dull sentences they give you to practice in the book.
‘We can save the possessed, but the undead must go to the boneyard’ is one of my favourites, along with ‘I ought to go to the park as it is a place in which one can locate men of the Left Hand Path.’ (although here I have to leave the ‘H’ off the word ‘hand’ because I haven’t yet got to the chapter with the H sound in it. I think, however, this gives the phrase a certain Cockney veracity).
This evening I cooked a Burmese Chicken Curry, which we ate as we watched ‘Superstorm’, a new mini-series about, rather unsurprisingly, a very big storm.
Scientists are seeding hurricanes with ice-crystals in order to change their course. A young female scientist (who used to be in Holby City) is keen that the experiment works as it will vindicate the theories of her father, who died (as they so often do in these miniseries) a broken man when his ideas were discredited.