Snowmageddon and Bacon Rolls

Tuesday 27 Feb

Went into town to see the movie Lady Bird. With the internet promising apocalyptic weather over the next few days I wasn’t sure when I would next get out of the house. The Beast from the East was on the way, they said. Freezing temperatures and shedloads of snow, they said.

Not likely, I thought. Winter after winter we get these predictions, and they do happen, somewhere in the UK, I’ve seen it on the news, all those drivers stuck on motorways and whatnot. But never in Edinburgh. Too close to the coast. Snow doesn’t really lie here.

I exited the flat into a shallow carpet of tiny hailstones. Drove into town. The Beast, it seemed, had made a preliminary foray into Edinburgh, and the old girl was clad in a thin veil of ghostly white. The wind was gusting a little. I parked up on London Road, and walked/slid up to the cinema.

Lady Bird was a great film. At some stage I experienced the gradually-dawning realisation that I was watching an American teenage girl’s coming-of-age movie. However, it was frequently hilarious, and often touching, and only spoiled a little by the fact that it was subtitled. This is the second Tuesday in a row I have been ambushed by unwanted subtitles at the cinema. Is Tuesday Subtitle Day at Vue?

I left the cinema. Some fresh snow had fallen in the meantime. Scraped the windscreen clear and headed home.

Wednesday 28 Feb

From 3pm today until 10am tomorrow, a red weather warning is in place from the MET Office. I normally drive into the office around lunchtime on a Wednesday, but today it seemed sensible to stay and work from home all day.

Working from home has benefits, some of which are bacon-and-egg-roll-shaped. I followed up that lunchtime benefit with a simpler, more austere second course of bacon-only-roll. One has to take one’s bacon roll opportunities when they present themselves.

Just recently I found myself in town on a Friday morning. A narrow window of bacon-roll-opportunity presented itself, so narrow it was more like one of those windows you get in castles, just wide enough to shoot an arrow through, but it was enough. I marched, expectant, into the New Town Deli.

The barista had tattoos. I was reassured.

“Do you do bacon rolls?”

She looked unsure. I scanned the blackboard. It was all smashed avocado and crushed fennel seeds.

“No, sorry,” she explained, after a short conversation with her supervisor. “That was yesterday.”

That was yesterday? Is Thursday Bacon Roll Day? I’m an Anglican, and thus primed to celebrate feast days on the appropriate occasion, but have now missed Bacon Roll Day AND the memo about Subtitle Day.

Anyway, back to the present. My boss has also decided to work from home today. We communicate via email, with Snowmageddon updates via WhatsApp.

14:17 Definitely worsening here. People are panic buying at the local shop. 

My boss lives in The Sticks. If the local shop gets cleaned out they might need to do food drops by helicopter.

I put it to him that he wouldn’t know they were panic buying there unless he was there panic buying himself. He is unable to effectively deny this. Meantime I am quietly panicking myself, as my coffee beans have almost run out.

14:59 One minute until Snowmageddon.

The wind picks up. Within an hour the snow is coming down hard. I do what work I can from home and eventually stop for tea. In the interests of a balanced diet, I eschew more bacon, and instead have sausages. And potatoes.

Flatmate returned from work with the disturbing news that our local McDonalds had shut.

Thursday 1 Mar

More snow overnight. Car looks like it’s not going anywhere for a while. I pulled back the curtains to see neighbours pulling their kids along the middle of the road in sledges.

No buses running today. Fresh coffee beans now gone. Had to make an emergency raid on the reserve coffee bean jar this morning.

Sky cleared a bit in the morning. My flatmate’s work is closed today, but he was asked to go and put up a sign on the door to say this. He wrapped up and walked into town.

Main roads are ok. Just passed one guy on skis!

He asked if I wanted anything. I realise that I have bacon, but no rolls, so ask him if he could stop off for some at Sainsbury’s. Apparently the panic-buyers have got there first.

Brioche only!

A bacon brioche doesn’t sound terrible, and he agreed to bring the brioches. Meanwhile I decide to revisit Morrison’s to see if it was open today.

It was. I stocked up on bacon, rolls, and other essentials.

Climbed the steep street back towards my flat, and say a cheery “Hi!” to a snowboarder going the other way.

Safely back in the flat, I reestablish WhatsApp communication with the boss.

Local shop is out of milk and bread…

And I used up all our bacon for breakfast

He sends a picture of his back garden, complete with snow ramp, and sledging daughter. It’s all happening in The Sticks.

After lunch the Rector’s Administrator emails. She is working from home in Morningside, and all is well – she has plenty of Prosecco and Waitrose hasn’t yet run out of quinoa.

H texts. H loves the snow, but not the cold. The heating in her flat has two settings: Clay Oven, and Old People’s Home. I suspect it’s on the latter today.

The blizzards continue all day. Looking out on my back “garden”, I realise that if the snow continues, it won’t be long before even the weeds are completely submerged. This is a non-trivial amount of snow.

I put the kettle on, and pop some brioches under the grill. Get momentarily distracted and before you know it, the brioches are smoking.  Who knew brioches toasted so quickly? I flip open the kitchen window, and the Beast makes short work of the smoke in the kitchen, before it even has a chance to reach the nostrils of the Loudest Most Sensitive Smoke Alarm in the world.

I have Blackened Brioche with marmalade. Surprisingly tasty.

Followed that up with a bacon-based tea. One has to keep one’s energy levels up at times like this.

Stay safe out there, Britons.

Skiing and the Porcelain Plateau

It’s a dreich day in January. I’m back in my favourite corner seat at Century General, gazing through misted windows at a rainy Montrose Terrace. H has been highly disapproving of my continual weight loss, openly suspecting anorexia on my part. I am some way off the “underweight” classification, shall we say, but am manfully doing my bit to keep her happy by horsing down CG’s chocolate-and-coconut cake.

The last few weeks have been full of highlights to bring you all up to date on, notably dinner chez Wiseman, which was, as ever, excellent, and only enhanced by the Wisemans’ eminently sensible decision to install a toilet with a dangling-chain flush, thus removing the need for post-prandial flush button decision-making. I was grateful.

Christmas in London was full of our usual family Christmas traditions… Panettone for breakfast, Christmas Eve lasagne, a mild case of the lurgy, and Baileys of an evening. On discovering a near-empty bottle of Ireland’s finest export in the kitchen, I, quietly panicking, enquired of my sister if there was any more.

There was. Actually a visit to the cellar made me wonder if she had left any Baileys for the rest of London.

“It was on offer” she protested.

Just before Christmas I attempted to skateboard in the park with my 8-year-old nephew. I sent a photo of this (I did not send a video) to my rad skateboarding friend Gabe. Gabe teaches chess to New York kids for a living. I love that sentence.

Gabe warned me to be careful, and being rad, added a hashtag.

#getrad

I made it back safely, without at any point getting rad.

Christmas came and went, with my attempts to bribe the kids into getting up a bit later on Christmas morning largely unsuccessful.

Three days after Christmas, I boarded an Oak Hall bus headed for the Austrian Alps. My expectations of a 24 hour bus trip were somewhere south of horrendous, but I am delighted to report that there was an unexpectedly decent amount of sleep achieved. On boarding the bus, I made an attempt to introduce myself to some of my travelling companions. I met a couple of twins from Preston. Transpires they were called Rio and Nakita. I made my way back to my seat, bells furiously going off in the back of my head. It was much later before I plucked up the courage to ask if they had been named after hit songs from the 80s.

They had. What’s more, they loved their songs. They also had an older sister named Simone. After Nina, I presume. I loved their parents already.

On arriving in room 220 at the Hotel Alpenblick in Schlitters (careful how you say that), my room-mates (two of them) and I tossed a coin to see who would get the single bed, and who would be sharing the ‘Austrian Twin’ (two single mattresses in a double frame). I won. Room-mate 1 looked momentarily disconsolate, and then, in a moment of genius, removed the mattress from his side of the bed and planted it on the floor, where it stayed all week. Necessity is the mother of invention.

I inspected the bathroom, and was immediately distracted by the toilet. No confusing flush buttons, just a reassuringly solitary old-fashioned handle.

However.

The bowl was like nothing I’d seen before, and I’ve been going to the toilet for nigh-on 40 years now.

Rather than having the normal sloping sides down into a watery bottom, It had a plateau about halfway up. This plateau took up much of the bowl, leaving a smallish channel at the front leading downwards to the water.

And so it was, after one had, you know, done one’s business… one got to turn around and view the results of one’s efforts, presented as if on a platter, MUCH closer than one is used to. It was, frankly, disconcerting. Especially on the occasions when one turned around and thought

“I did all THAT?”

But the best was yet to come. On pressing the flush handle, jets of water shot out from the rear of the bowl, along the plateau, forcibly sweeping anything that was deposited there into the channel at the front. Mostly into the channel. But it was a very powerful jet of water. One quickly learned to be standing alongside the toilet, rather than directly in front, when pressing the flush handle.

It was a great week’s skiing, only enhanced by getting caught in a blizzard two days in a row and surviving to tell the tale. On the final afternoon, as the weather closed in, and we were still high up the mountain and some way from safety, the visibility worsened to the point where we could see only three chairlift-supporting towers. Then it went down to two, and then one. Filipideedoodaa, at this point, was having goggle-related issues, and was unable to see anything at all.

When the wind’s blowing hard, the snow is sticky (I think it was actually raining at this point), and you can’t see anything, it’s surprisingly hard to know which way is down… it was in these conditions that Filipideedoodaa attempted to exit the piste stage right, but we agreed that this wasn’t the time for off-piste, and called her back. That’s what friends are for.

New Year’s Eve was fairly quiet in the hotel. Roomie 1, having taken a taxi into town with the youngsters, reported that the Austrian NYE street celebrations were a little insane, with everyone bringing their own fireworks and letting them off at random. He spotted an Austrian gent wandering along the street with fireworks draped over his shoulder, smoking a cigar. Splendid. What could possibly go wrong?

The bus back to London was very similar to the outward journey, except we all knew each other, at least a little. Liam, a young fellow-Edinburgher, was pumping out the tunes via his Bluetooth speaker. Classic 80s, mostly, including Billy Joel and Neil Diamond.

There’s hope for the younger generation yet…

Toilet flushes and girlfriends

Seems like I duly took my own advice and even extended the slowing down to my blogging, which, it’s fair to say, didn’t really require much in the way of brake-application. Could perhaps use a judicious application of the literary accelerator rather than the brake, I’d say. I’ll try and work on that. The time for New Year Intentions is coming round fast, so I’ll add it to the list. Again.

Anyway, my time away from the blogging keyboard has allowed me to spend some much-needed time considering important life questions such as “Do the two buttons on the top of modern toilets actually perform different functions?”

Sometimes they are marked with one dot, and two dots, respectively. Is this a bashful reference to Number Ones and Number Twos? Or a reference to the relative volume of water that is used in the flush? Which, one would think, would be commensurate with the, er, volume of waste, and so could refer to both.

But then sometimes the buttons are different sizes, indeed sometimes the larger button is so much larger that it could only be appropriate for a Number Three (the mind boggles), and then again sometimes the smaller button is encased and enclosed by the larger one, making it unpressable on its own. Unless you are handily carrying a pencil, which I generally wouldn’t, not into a toilet at any rate, for health and safety reasons.

Given the more deliberate, intentional act required to depress the two together, does this activate the Number Two Flush, thereby only using a greater volume of water when strictly necessary? This would make sense in our eco-conscious world.

But then why is it that mostly they continue to flush for as long as you hold them down, regardless of their number of dots, or size, or enclosedness?

I would likely refer to the instruction manual at this point (this point being several years after first encountering the problem, as per the proper manly approach), but I confess I have never seen an instruction manual for a toilet.

Has anyone been taught correct modern-toilet-flushing protocol? Is this something taught at classes on Etiquette? Does anyone have a pdf (even a quick-start guide translated directly from Japanese) they could send me? I would be grateful.

Some months past, I visited a very fine establishment (pub) in Dunning, Perthshire. I cannot recall now the toilet-flushing apparatus they had installed, but I did partake of a very fine pie. When the waiter, mid-plate-clearing, asked me how my meal had been, I remarked that I thought it might have been the finest pie I’d ever eaten.

The waiter, with a sidelong glance at my profile, remarked “Thank you sir. That’s quite the compliment.”

I resolved to lose weight immediately.

Shortly thereafter the Finance Director started her health kick spreadsheet, and the rest is history. It would be indiscreet of me to share exactly how much weight I’ve lost, but suffice to say, were I to parcel up the lost fat in a medium-sized parcel and post it via the Royal Mail, it would cost £22.

In other, unrelated, news, I have been dating the lovely H for several months now. Things are going relatively well (she’s met all of mine, and I’ve met a tiny fraction of hers). Dating me has given her frequent reason to use the rolling-eyes-emoji – I do consider a day wasted if I haven’t provided her at least one opportunity – which I believe she’s grateful for, judging by the enthusiasm with which she’s embraced it.

In yet other news (I really must blog more often), the snowy slopes are calling, indeed they have been calling for 2 years now, but I have finally yielded to their alluring cry. Albeit via the budget-friendly Oak Hall 24-hours-on-a-coach route, which is decidedly less alluring – but – I am convincing myself – fun-filled nonetheless. I shall keep you all posted, possibly on an hourly basis if sleep fails to arrive. H, sadly, is not joining me on this particular adventure, being as yet unpersuaded of the delights of being very cold and falling over a lot at altitude. It’s surely only a matter of time.

Skiing will be happening over New Year – a first for me – but before that there’s a visit to the London branch of the family for Christmas. Where, if memory serves, I once destroyed the modern flush system of their newly-installed toilet with an over-vigorous pressing of the Number Two button. Good times.

Bring back the elevated cistern with the dangling chain, I say.

Have a Merry Christmas y’all.