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First shoots from the chilli plants

I planted twenty chilli seeds, following my friend Rosanna’s instructions, and so far only one has germinated. I’ve given up on the others and planted another batch in the hope that some others will join my successful seedling.

I’ve not grown a plant from seed, except at school – cress on blotting paper in primary, a bean for GCSE. Watching the plant emerge from such has tiny seed has been thrilling. I am so excited that it’s a struggle not to give it a name, because that would be silly. And, while it’s a shame that the other plants haven’t appeared, this one success has given me a little confidence.

Repotting proved harder than expected, and I worried that I would injure the plant. It survived the move and is thriving. I love checking on it for new signs of progress, seeing the signs of each new sprouting leaf:

I’m now well into onto the second stage of Rosanna’s instructions:

When the shoots are an inch tall remove the clingfilm. Keep the compost most but not wet.
When the seedlings are two inches tall, re-pot into a window box or 9” round pot. Water well and put somewhere nice and sunny. A south-facing windowsill is perfect.
Keep the soil moist but not wet and feed once a week with Baby Bio or similar. Chillies also love tomato food if you have any.

I’ve bought some baby bio and a watering can (the latter from the pound shop’s Charlie Dimmock range, naturally) and will do my best to see this plant to adulthood. I’m going away for a week soon, so there will be strict instructions for my house-sitter. I’m starting to feel very affectionate about this plant. But I am not going to give it a name.

The Papernet

The idea of the Papernet emerged around 2006-9. It was discussed in a talk by Aaron Straup Cope, and worked on by people such as design-group BERG, who created the Little Printer. Broadly, it’s the about combining paper with the Internet. Or, as the Papercamp announcement put it:

“Whether that’s looking at material possibilities of paper itself, connecting paper to the internet and vice-versa with things like 2d-barcodes, RFIDs or exotic things like printing with conductive inks… it’s about the fact that paper hasn’t gone away in the digital age – it’s become more useful, more abundant and in some cases gone and got itself superpowers”

Even in the internet, paper has its uses. Paper maps can be passed around and drawn on. I can give a stranger a print-out to look at, but might not want to pass them my phone. Paper is for scribbling and sharing. At festivals, everyone still has small paper timetables dangling on lanyards – you don’t have to worry about running out of battery between stages. There’s also a charm to hand-drawn maps that online services can’t compete with. You can tear paper, scribble on it, glue it over offensive adverts, post it, use it to support a wobbly table-leg.

One of my favourite ideas was Warren Ellis’ suggestion of an email-to-print service for “a podcast that spits out paper“, inspired by Schulze & Webb’s 2006 “social letterbox.”. Ellis said it should not be referred to as a papercast, despite that being an excellent name. Yes, in some ways this is reinventing the fax machine, but it’s an interesting reinvention.

Most applications involve printing, but not all. There is potential for photography (and the use of printing terminals) and cardboard (google and muji binoculars). Improvements in OCR and image recognition promise a flow of information from objects back into the internet

There was even a Papercamp, in January 2009, which was liveblogged by Jeremy Keith. This was a day to “talk about, fiddle with, make and explore what’s possible with paper based on a blog post”, and “hacking paper and its new possibilities”. It was based around the barcamp format, where slots are available for the attendees to fill out the schedule. Some interesting things turned up:

“Nick O’Leary is talking about graphs. He wants to represent them with paper rather than simply on paper. He came up with some code that generates an image including lines showing where to fold and cut. Print it out, cut it and fold it and voila!, 3D graphs. He holds up an example. It’s beautiful. He wants to make a pop-up book of statistics.”

and then there is what Keith describes as “the missing piece of the papernet puzzle: edibility. [Sawa Tanaka] has made edible prints on rice paper: English breakfast, fish’n’chips, soba ….”

There is so much that can be done – such as using print-on-demand services to create one-off notebooks. Or even gamebooks, like the old I-spy book. Using software to help produce decorated origami (something I’ve used to hide stories inside origami designs). Creating simple A7 booklets. Printing off day-planners before heading out to work. Several people have used receipt-printers (one similar project being Tom Armitage and Jeff Noon’s collaboration, The Literary Operator). Some were influenced by Moleskine’s city guides, wondering about ephemeral tourist guides. You could even combine GPS and paper in dead letter drops.

The Internet can bring paper alive.

25/3 – Some further suggestions from @6loss: “digital pens, ozobots, conductive ink.”

Don’t you have time to read?

I wrote this post a few years ago and never published it. At the time, I was thinking a lot about the point of novels and fiction. We’ve had about three ‘revivals’ of the short story announced in the press since I wrote it, but short stories are still not loved by publishers. I also suspect people are reading fewer novels now than when it was written – although they may be buying more, given the number of cheap paperbacks and Kindle offers that are available. Meanwhile, I now rarely read novels, finding myself more interested in creative non-fiction. Reality Hunger.

BS Johnson’s novel, Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry is very short. It stretches the definition of novel, coming in at about 20,000 words. Johnson pre-empted this with a meta-fictional intervention from the eponymous Christie Malry:

“…who wants long novels anyway? Why spend all your spare time for a month reading a thousand-page novel when you can have a comparable aesthetic experience in the theatre or the cinema in only one evening? The writing of a long novel is in itself an anachronistic act: it was relevant only to a society and a set of social conditions that no longer exist”

My reaction to long novels these days is to feel affronted: who does this writer think they are? I don’t know how anyone has time to read long novels. The average UK work week is 41.4 hours. Add in time to sleep, cook, read weblog posts, update twitter and facebook, and play video games, it’s a wonder anyone reads novels. Considering that most people read 2 words per second, an average-sized 80,000 word novel takes about 11 hours. How long does it take most people to read an epic?

The time available to read is also dissected into smaller gaps, periods of dead time when it’s hard to do other things: flights, waiting rooms or the daily commute. I always wondered why people didn’t turn to short stories – after all, a half-hour commute is long enough to read a decent short story. Or you could get stuck into a couple of poems, and gaze out of the window while digesting them. Why do people stick with novels?

I found one possible answer in a round-table discussion, where Ra Page claimed “People read novels on the bus because it’s their little bit of down time, and they want to link those moments up and bring them together to make a longer experience.” If Ra Page is correct, people want novels to give a their day-to-day life a structure.

This was something else that obsessed BS Johnson. Jonathan Coe’s book on Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, quotes a letter in which he says, discussing his films, “I would like to make an audience think about WHY they demand a story from films but not from life.” We burrow into novels to find something lacking from our routine.

A major problem with restricting reading to these dead moments is that such moments are suited for certain types of novels: novels you can fall asleep to without losing the plot; or novels that can be followed despite the annoying conversations around you. Such books need to be simple, so they can be interrupted at any point and resumed with little effort. And if that’s true, then great novels are something that can only be enjoyed by students, the sick and the under-employed.

Maybe the novel is no longer suitable for the world we live in. I still enjoy reading, when I have time, but I’m aware that I might be one of the last generations to see novels as an essential part of life. New technologies are eroding the audience for the novel. They have to compete with movies and video games and mobile internet technologies – and I’d be hard pressed to state that novels are an intrinsically worthier method of entertainment than computer games or social networking.

Korma Vindaloo

curry3 — Post-hike curry with Katharine, Romi and Kaylee

I like to tease kormas. I’m not a fan – they’re too sweet for my liking, and seem a little bland to my palette. Consequently, I’d not had one for a long time.

I’ve recently been going hiking with my friends Romi and Katharine. We like to order a curry in the evenings, trying out restaurants and takeaways along the route. Romi is as much of a fan of spice as I am, so we’ll order the hottest dishes on the menu.

On our most recent trip, the local curry house didn’t have many vegetable options, and wouldn’t make a vegetable vindaloo specially. So we asked for a vegetable madras, spiced up to vindaloo strength. They managed this and did a pretty good job. It had the fire of a vindaloo, but the taste of a madras.

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The next night, we decided to order curry again. This time, we decided to ask for something foolish. Could we have a vindaloo-strength Jalfrezi? Yes we could. Could we have a vindaloo-strength korma? Yes we could.

The korma vindaloo tasted as ridiculous as you might expect. The creaminess was in conflict with the spice – but for a korma it was pretty good. Although I’m not sure the curry house should really have indulged our experiment.

An obscure Indian-inspired cuisine

We’ve recently had some Israeli visitors at work. This has led to some discussions of kosher food and where to find it in Brighton. It turns out that this town has no kosher restaurants. Yesterday this led to a rambling conversations that ended up somewhere surprising.

One of our guests said that Hove was, at least, better than India for kosher food. We ended up talking about Jewish communities there. It turns out that most of the Jewish population of Cochin moved to Israel in the 1960s, and they have their own cuisine that fuses Indian and Jewish food. It’s quite an obscure type of cookery – the community is about 7000 strong, and there are no restaurants, apart from a private dining option – and only a couple of cookbooks.

Jewish people are said to have emigrated to India as early as early as the time of King Solomon, around 587 BCE; the earliest records date back to 70CE and synagogues are known to have been built in the 12th and 13th centuries. Other Jewish groups moved there in the fifteenth century in response to persecution in Europe. The community in Cochin avoided the horrors of the Goan inquisition, with Cochin being under Dutch control rather than Portuguese. Following Indian independence and the founding of Israel, most Jewish people left, although the synagogue in Cochin has a small but declining congregation.

I’ve never been rained on as hard as we were in Cochin

One group that moved to Israel settled in the area of Mesilat Zion, near to where one of my colleagues lives. A short distance from Tel Aviv, the moshav (co-operative agricultural community) was founded in 1950 and later taken over by a community from Cochin. The current population here is about 1200 people.

A number of Cochini Jews also settled in Nevatim, which has recently switched from agriculture to promoting tourism. As part of this, Matamey Cochin is a group that hosts Cochini meals in their homes. An article in Tablet magazine ( Jews From Cochin Bring their Unique Indian Cuisine to Israeli Diners) described the food:

“Our food isn’t like the Indian food you know,” explained Miriam Elias… “We use different spices. We stick to a few basic ones and don’t mix them up like the Indians do.” Not only does their cuisine differ from Indian food from other areas, it differs from Hindu cooking in Cochin, too. First of all, it is kosher and devoid of dairy products (the closest you get is coconut milk), and some dishes are strictly Jewish and don’t exist in the local Hindu menu at all. Many of the dishes serve a certain purpose and are aligned with holidays and specific dates. For instance, the Cochin papadam (which differs from the kind of papadum you get in Indian restaurants) is eaten before the Tisha B’Av fast and is served with various kinds of curry. “When we say ‘curry’ we mean something completely different than what you know as curry,” clarified Bat Zion Elias. “Curry for us isn’t a spice mixture or a hot dish. Our curries are a variety of cold salads made out of cooked vegetables, like tomatoes, onions, or eggplants, sort of like matbucha…”

The Cochini food includes a lot of coconut dishes, which is useful because this can substitue for milk in kosher dishes. There is also an interesting approach to cooking onions:

“…We brown large quantities of onions, and then cook vegetables or whatever it is we are cooking in the onion juice, instead of cooking in water. A lot of our dishes are cooked this way, and it gives them a very distinct and special flavor.”

There are only two books devoted to this type of cooking, along with recipes in a few other books. I’ve ordered a book called Spice and Kosher, a book on the cuisine of Cochin Jews. I’m looking forward to experimenting with this. Eti Gilad’s The Cochini Cuisine looks to have been privately printed and doesn’t turn up on Amazon. My copy of Spice and Kosher arrives tomorrow. I can’t wait to explore something of this new cuisine.

P1000366 — Cochin’s fishing nets are one of its famous sights

Growing my own chillis

I’d been meaning to grow chillis from seed, but never got around to it. In the past I’ve been terrible at keeping plants and they always died. Some people have green fingers, I have black fingers. When my friend Rosanna offered seeds from her successful homegrown chilli plants, I had no excuses and said I’d take some.

The tiny seeds (so crunchy) arrived wrapped in clingfilm. Looking at them it seemed amazing that anything would every grow from them.

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Rosanna sent me instructions via Facebook. The first few stages seemed simple enough:

Take a chilli seed, plant it in shallow compost (about one to two inches deep – a takeaway container, an old margarine tub or yoghurt pot is ideal), at a depth of about a quarter of an inch.
You don’t need any special sort of compost – anything will do.
Plant one per yogurt pot or 2-3 per takeaway container. Plant twice as many as you think you’ll need: not all seeds will germinate.
Water well so the soil is damp but not sopping wet. Cover the container with clingfilm and leave somewhere warm in semi-shade (i.e. out of direct sunlight) for a week or two until they sprout. Depending on the time of year this will take between one and four weeks.

I went out to buy compost and plant-pots. It turns out, you can get a lot of cheap gardening things from the pound shop, whose range is endorsed by gardening celebrity Charlie Dimmock. I put twenty seeds out, which is apparently a lot, then waited to see what would happen.

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Only one chilli plant has actually emerged from the soil since I planted them three weeks ago. The others have been sent to the airing cupboard to see if that encourages them to start sprouting. Even though my success rate so far is a mere 5%, that first plant feels like a victory.

Another lost Brighton bookshop

In May 2010 I wrote a post about the Lost Bookshops of Brighton. Visiting Brighton’s bookshops in the 1990s was one of the things that made me fall in love with this town. Over the last 20 years, most of the country’s second hand bookshops have closed, caught between Amazon and a surge in charity shops (who avoid many of the overheads of second-hand bookshops). I miss hunting for second hand books, something I used to spend whole afternoons doing.

Another Brighton bookshop is about to be lost. PS Brighton is covered in 50% discount posters, a ‘To Let’ sign hanging above it. This was an excellent source for cult novels, rock biographies and art books. It’s going to be replaced by another coffee shop.

The day after taking the photograph above, I walked down Trafalgar Street. The shop at the corner of Over Street, most recently a bike shop is being refitted. A ghost-sign has emerged from one of the shop’s former incarnations as the Trafalgar Bookshop. I can no longer remember the specific layout of this place, only that it was one of the places I enjoyed hunting.

The North Downs Way on the Installment Plan

Back in December I walked the Downs Link with Kaylee. That route was a little dull – being an old railway line, it was flat, straight and screened by trees on both sides. The most exciting part was the start, St. Martha’s church near Guildford. After seeing that stunning landscape, which was part of the North Downs Way, I knew I had to do that trail.

I finally began in January, setting out with Katharine and Romi. It was frosty but not too cold, and the winter light was incredible. Our pace was fairly slow as we kept stopping to take photographs – although none of us snapped the woman we met carrying a scythe. She was actually charming, despite being armed.

Towards the end of the second day we had one of the best moments I’ve ever had on a walk. We emerged from a wooded trail onto a hillside common which was full of families with dogs, taking advantage of the good weather. Everyone seemed in a great mood. What a lovely way to spend a winter’s day!

The Fate of the British Curry House

I’m currently halfway through Bee Wilson’s excellent book, First Bite, which is about how we learn to eat, mixing historical research with personal stories. I was delighted when the Guardian published her article Who Killed the Great British Curry House.

The piece covers some of the same issues raised in the Vindaloo Stories show about the decline in curry house customers and skilled staff. These problems are now so severe that two or three curry houses are closing each week. Wilson quotes the Bangladeshi Caterers’ Association warning that “as many as a third of Britain’s curry houses – around 4,000 in total – will close over the next couple of years.”

Staffing has been a problem for some time, with restaurant owner’s children leaving the business and immigration restrictions preventing trained chefs from overseas working in the UK. Initiatives such as the curry colleges have failed to have any impact. These ongoing problems have been made worse by the post-referendum economy, which is causing both rents and prices to rise. Wilson describes one owner who is making a loss on many meals, but nervous of putting the price up. For many people, curry is a cheap evening out. One chef, Kobir Ahmed, explains how “there were Cambridge curry houses that had not put up their prices in 20 years because they were scared of losing customers”.

Maybe the curry house is just not needed in the today’s Britain in the same way as it used to be. As Wilson points out, there are far more options for eating out than there were. I also think the curry house is suffering from a change in British socialising. More liberal licensing laws mean that pubs are open later, so there is less drive to the post-pub curry. More pubs are now offering decent food too – indeed, Wetherspoon’s, with its Thursday Curry Club, is the country’s biggest curry chain.

For me, one of the great things about Indian restaurants in Britain is that you can find them everywhere. I’ve been hiking around the country with friends recently and, wherever we go, we can find a curry restaurant. Some have been dire (Stanford-Le-hope, I’m looking at you) others have been amazing. I love the little ways each one stands out from the British curry-house template.

One of my favourite moments in the article was when Wilson described “the soul food of the UK, the bowl of warmth that people turn to when sniffy, sloshed or merely peckish” Curry is a vital part of modern British food, and it’s sad to see it in decline.

PS – Another excellent article from Bee Wilson is It’s time to address the dirty underbelly of “clean eating”.

The Vindaloo Stories Performance

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Last week, on Wednesday 11th, I did the first performance of a show based on Vindaloo Stories. It was lots of fun to put on with a large audience turning out.

Promoting an event in January was hard work, but it was fun. I was interviewed by Melita at Radio Reverb the night before, and Wednesday started early so that I could appear on Radio Sussex’s breakfast show.

This was the first time I’ve done a show or event by myself, so I was delighted that it came out so well. Lots of people helped with it – Emily taught me about press releases; David Bramwell, Rosy Carrick and Rachel Blackman gave great feedback; Kaylee did a great job on the tech; and Robin was there on the night for reassurance. Ema at the Marlborough was also a great help throughout.

There should be recordings coming from the radio interviews. In the meantime there was a review posted by the Latest magazine. I also did an interview with Viva Brighton for this show and an upcoming talk on folklore at the Wellesbourne Society. Now to start looking at future venues for the show.