I’ve become affluent and moved to the West End of Glasgow. Little bit of a lie that one. We got the shop and all the legal stuff was finally tied up a week ago. So far we’ve had a front window replaced, the basement floor painted and I’ve hunted down all the water leaks in the pipes that I can find. I’ve only got a few electrical problems to sort and I’ll be happy with the state of the place.

The place is huge. I keep forgetting just how big it is until I get home every night and realise how small my house is.

All our stock has been moved in and put on the shelves so now we’re just waiting on a fridge, our coffee machine to arrive and our sign to be put up and we’ll be sorted. Vonnie is looking at a soft launch for Monday so we’ll go from there.

Here’s a few pics giving you a clue as to how things might look.

Ingredients:
150g butter
115g brown sugar
180g golden syrup
200g self raising flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1.5 teaspoons nutmeg
2 beaten eggs
400g icing sugar
1 tablespoon water

1. Start by preheating your oven to gas mark 4. In my case it was about gas mark 4.5 as our oven just doesn’t seem to hit the temperatures it’s supposed to.
2. Put the butter, sugar, syrup and water into a saucepan and heat gently until everything has melted of dissolved. Once that’s done remove from the heat and set aside to cool for 10 minutes.
3. Grease and/or line a tin. I used a large diameter tin as yet again cooking times can vary considerable due to our oven if I use smaller/higher tins.
4. Sift the flour and spices into a bowl and then add the cooled liquid. Using an electric whisk mix this together and them add the eggs. Continue mixing until smooth.
5. Pour the mixture into a greased or lined cake tin.
6. Bake for around 45 minutes to an hour. Or until a knife in the centre comes out clean.
7. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack.

This is where I stopped following the recipe. We never bothered to ice our sponge as we’ve been getting bored recently of sweet sweet icing but it did allow us to realise that if you let this cake cool enough to be able to cut it cleanly but it still warm and steaming on the inside it fantastic. The next day once it’s cooled down completely though it could probably do with some icing or even some hot custard poured over the top of it.

The house is always quiet during the day when the kids are at nursery. We don’t quite get the same peace on those days at the moment though as this last week we’ve had all the staff over working our livingroom until we get the lease signed.

Today seems to be different though. I mentioned on Twitter that I thought today was Sunday and couldn’t work out why. Vonnie thought it was because of the lack of kids in the house and Clare thought it might have been because I was drinking at the wedding last night. It’s not that though.

It’s roughly 10am on a Saturday morning and I can’t even hear traffic on the main road outside. There is the tick of the clock and the hum of my laptops fan as it struggles to keep everything in there cool enough to work. Penny is lying down somewhere and not chasing the cats and the chooks aren’t shouting like their usual selves.

I can only think it’s the rain. It’s not on heavy, in fact I think it may have actually stopped now, but it has dulled all the noise from outside which is a rarity around here. It’s very peaceful.

I miss the kids. Thankfully we’re picking the girls up in an hour or so but we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to get the boys.

Every couple of years I rewatch every episode of The West Wing. It’s a big investment in time but that show stand the test of time so well.

Every so often I’ll be watching an episode only for it to finish and then remember that The Bartlett’s are fictional.

The show is so well written, the characters are fantastic and the actors playing them are perfect. A show like this is a rarity and all to often any show that comes close to being as good as this ends up being diluted by the producers and TV stations in the aim to get more viewers.

If you haven’t seen it, and I’m sure there are few but I don’t image that many, then find a copy and watch an episode. I cannot think of a single weak episode so take your pick. You’ll enjoy it.

After they’d had their breakfast I finally managed to get Nairn explain why he wanted to go. Apparently Bad Uncle Barry+ lives in the same flat in Good Uncle Barry’s hall cupboard.

Seriously. Where do they come up with these things?

* Good Uncle Barry was my best man and used to be my boss many moons ago when I worked for Safeway. He’s good in the sense that he isn’t Bad Uncle Barry.
+ Bad Uncle Barry is a completely different Barry. He is the tattooed crazy artist that teaches our kids to swear on sunny days in the park and encourages them to push old grannies into rivers. He’s even got our kids to start drawing up plans for the invasion of Europe and eventually the overall ruling of the universe. He’s that bad.

The question is though how did I survive? Of course I did. I was helped a lot by the weather though.

Friday was a great day only dampened by the fact Vonnie had took all my change the night before and the local cash machine was out of order. We ended up walking from our house to the town centre via my dentist to pay an outstanding bill, round the shops to kill some time and them on to my parents for a few hours. The kids were knackered when we got home so they had an early night which meant I got to see the football. Basically Friday was made of win.

Overnight, and by that I mean at 4.30am when it was broad daylight outside, a fox decided to have a go at getting into our chicken coop. The noise the hens were making made me thing it had actually got in and it wasn’t until I climbed back into bed after throwing on my dressing gown and running out into the garden to check on them that I realised just what the time was. Needless to say I didn’t get much sleep after that.

Saturday was movie day for the kids as it was due to rain at some point during the day. Buckets of popcorn and peanut flavour crisps later the kids had plowed through Spongebob Squarepants The Movie, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo. Again I got to see the football but this time Greer joined me rather than sleep through it.

Sunday has consisted of stopping the kids from killing each other as they were suffering from cabin fever. From late last night onwards all it did was rain until lunchtime and the wind was threatening to lift the cars parked in the street up off their wheels. I also discovered that the rain was being blown into our boilers gas vent which meant there were puddles of rain water in the boiler cupboard. No idea how to prevent that one in future.

So… no kids were damaged in the making of this weekend and I actually managed to get some housework done.

The question is just how better will Vonnie do when I’m down in Manchester later in the year. Please don’t show me up too much dear?

I was working my way through old photos on Flickr last night when I came across one that illustrated my photography ‘pedigree’ in such a way that I had to share it with you. Before we get to that however a little history. When I was six my parents gave me an old Kodak 110 film camera which I loved to pieces but I think in all the years I had that I only ever actually took about three rolls of photos with it as I spent most of my time opening the back to trick it into thinking there was a film wound on so that I could press the shutter release and hear it *click*. My brother later got my parents disc camera which caused some jealousy issues but I got over that. I know I had another camera between then and getting my Canon Sureshot for my 21st birthday but for the life of me I cannot remember what it was. My parents bought one of the first ‘decent’ digital camera whilst on holiday one year and I was always stealing it. By decent I mean it had a 1.3 million pixel sensor and I could draw pictures quicker than it could save photos to it’s internal memory. I’ve since moved on to bigger and better cameras but that is where I’ve come from.

For years I would watch Blue Peters photography competitions and wonder why I couldn’t do it. Looking back at this photo though you can see why. I suffered from, and still do, holiday-snapshot-itis. At least 99.995% of all my shots come out looking like someone took it from the inside of a half empty beer glass.

click for bigger image

I had one wall in covered in photographs and I was very strict with how good they had to be before I would put them on that wall. If you look closely you can plainly see even the non-snapshot photos are of the same quality as my snapshots.

Looking back at the photo though it’s basically my life at that time in miniature. From photos of ex-girlfriends and holidays in Majorca to drunken snapshots of my student days and of the hours I would spend in the evenings playing football. The shelves hold everything from my Pratchett and Gemmell books to my MTB glasses. I still cannot remember the hi-fi that is in the bottom left of the photo. It was before I bought my JVC so I’m assuming it was my dads old one with it’s turntable and CD player but I don’t actually remember ever having that one.

Anyway…I thought I’d share.

Movies are different for me but that’s possibly down to them being more of a visual thing than music. I have a very definite list of favourite films that very rarely gets updated. Finding a favourite amongst them though is another story so your stuck with a few from that top bunch.

Dead Poets Society
To this day I don’t know what it is about this film that makes me like it so much. It’s slow. One of it’s main characters is a poetry teacher. It sometimes makes me cry. All things I would normally say rule out a film from being in that lucky bunch of movies I call my favourites.

I guess it’s the inspirational side of the film that keeps me coming back for repeat viewings.

Pump Up The Volume
If ever there was a film I could put on and never become bored by it then this is it. It’s not the greatest or most original storyline but I think Christian Slater’s character being the quiet and shy one at school was just to close to home.

Animal House
This one doesn’t need any explanation. When National Lampoon films were good.

I could easily list another 10 films for this list but these will do until the next time I need to pick a favourite.

A lot of folk have been writing about their favourite song recently and whilst most have struggled to pick one through all the years a handful are in the same boat as myself. My musical tastes change every day and my collection can only be described as eclectic at best. Generally my favourite song is the track that I listen to most but as with everything it’s the context that’s important.

Five years ago I went to the Download Festival and I stood and listened to Velvet Revolver cover Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. It was a warm sunny night and it capped a great day off and even now on evenings like that the song jumps to the front of my head. That isn’t my favourite song of the moment however.

I’ve only recently became a fan of True Blood but the shows theme tune by Jace Everett fits it perfectly. Unfortunately I need to have the opening credits played along side it though as it just doesn’t hit the same chords without it.

Am I the only one that links music to visual cues?