Author: Joan

Silen’ces’

The pronunciation of names in UK English is messed up. ‘Magdalene’ is pronounced ‘Maudlin’. ‘Edinburgh’ is pronounced ‘Edinbra’. You can count on the ‘w’ being superfluous: ‘Norwich’ is ‘Norrich’, ‘Berwick’ is ‘Berrick’, ‘Warwick’ is ‘Warrick’, ‘Bromwich’ is ‘Bromich’.

Interestingly, ‘Sandwich’ is not ‘Sandich’.

The thing that drives me nuts is the ‘ces’ syllable, which is completely absent in speech.

Gloucester = Gloster
Leicester = Lester
Worcester = Wooster

I was complaining about this to Owen. Owen was saying, ‘I was in this town near Oxford, it had a ridiculous name…’

‘Oh! I KNOW! Bister!’ I jumped in, naming the town spelt ‘Bicester’. ‘Look, I can handle Gloster and Lester and even Wooster. But Bister, that’s just perverse!’

‘It’s better than Toaster,’ Owen said calmly.

‘Toaster?’

‘Yes, there’s another town called Toaster — T O W C E S T E R.’

Hufflepuff!


Which Hogwarts house will you be sorted into?


I am not a Harry Potter fan but I do like the idea of sorting people by personality. If it’s not MBTI, then it’s Hogwarts houses and sorting hats. I looked up Hogwarts houses on Wikipedia and found the following descriptions.

  • Gryffindor values courage, chivalry and boldness.
  • Hufflepuff values hard work, loyalty, determination, patience, friendship and fair play.
  • Ravenclaw values intelligence, knowledge and wit.
  • Slytherin values ambition, cunning and resourcefulness.

On reading this, I thought, ‘Hmm. Hufflepuff, I guess. Maybe Ravenclaw.’ So I searched for ‘what harry potter house quiz‘, did the first test and got these results.

Hufflepuff – 14
Ravenclaw – 12
Gryffindor – 11
Slytherin – 8

Sheesh… this sorting hat quiz is intense! There’s a consent form.

I just did that test. It was very long but at least the questions weren’t leading. I got:

Ravenclaw – 88
Hufflepuff – 85
Gryffindor – 81
Slytherin – 41

Walk through my day

Yesterday was a fun day. I wrote some sub-sub-sections of my dissertation in the morning. In the afternoon, my college held its annual garden party, so I sat in the sunshine while eating and drinking with friends. I left the party to meet a classmate for coffee. We then walked to to a local architectural practice because the director had agreed to be interviewed for our research. After the interview, I walked home, changed, then went to Parker’s Piece for our weekly class football game. I left the game early to go to a meeting; I’m helping to organise the orientation camp for the next batch of 100 students on my scholarship. The meeting ran over time, so I was late for The Round Ceilidh at Emmanuel College. I danced English folk dances with a libraryful of people until 10:30 PM. Then I walked home.

Don’t know what to do? Go psuedo-space

Getting closer to the end of a degree course, it’s natural for people to start talking about careers.

‘What are you doing after this?’

‘I don’t know yet. Maybe study some more.’

‘I’m going back to my old company.’

‘I might travel a bit.’

‘I’ve got two interviews next week.’

Here’s an option for anyone who doesn’t know what they want to do for the next two years: take a pretend trip to Mars. You can apply to the European Space Agency — see the call for candidates (pdf). Now, there’s something to tell the grandkids!

Grocery pie

This chart is based on what I spent on my last three weeks of grocery shopping. I spend £15-20 a week on groceries. I suspect that I am fruit-and-vegetable heavy and bakery light.

By the way, it was not my idea to put two decimal places on those percentages. Of course I can’t state my grocery proportions to four significant figures of accuracy. OpenOffice did that automatically and I couldn’t figure out how to change it. I don’t know if it’s because OpenOffice Calc is not user friendly or if I’m crippled by Microsoft Excel brain.

Photographer

I went to Oxford on the weekend for my first gig as the designated photographer (I was paid in food, drink and dancing). The event was the Balliol College MCR garden party, ‘A Summer Night at Sea’. I learned something about being an event photographer: because you don’t know the people, it’s difficult to remember if you got everyone at some point during night.

Didn’t know I was looking for love until I fondue

I cannot think of the word ‘fondue’ without singing the Everything but the Girl‘s song ‘I didn’t know I was looking for love‘ …until I found you.

I’m a fan of the chocolate version, and luckily for me, Anna decided that chocolate fondue would be the centrepiece for our girls’ night in.

In a typical engineering course, you might get about 15% of students being female. Our engineering for sustainable development class is blessed with 33% women, and with the partners of men in the class, we could have up to seventeen women at our social events.

After extensive and sensitive consultation, Anna determined that it would not be politically incorrect to have a girls’ night in. Sorry guys, you’re not invited. Monday was the night (the beginning of May Week) and it was a decadant night of mojitos, corn chips, summer fruits and chocolate fondue, ice cream, jelly, buttered popcorn, chick flicks and natter about childbirth, women in science and business, the cultural role of women around the world, and… our dissertations. (There is no escape.)

The gorgeous women of the engineering for sustainable development community.

Anna and I went to the Video Emporium to hire chick flicks. Not knowing people’s precise tastes and moods, we covered all the ground and rented Like water like chocolate (foreign language weepie), Erin Brockovich (girl power + environmentalism), and My big fat Greek wedding (funny and supposedly pointpointingly accurate).

Plugged in

There once was an extrovert, Joan.
She carries a Nokia phone.
With emails to type,
And Aussies to Skype,
Plus Facebook — she’s never alone!

This reminds me of a footwear ditty. Now that I think about it, I think I spelled ‘sandals’ wrong.

English dinner for one

You can tell when I’m lonely solitary because I’ll post something about cooking. When I’m not interacting with people, I’m at home, cooking, which is why there are no other stories to entertain you with.

Without planning it, I cooked myself a very English dinner tonight. Di left me pork and apple sausages from our barbecue on the weekend — she’s in Florence this week so I’m making sure the food isn’t wasted.

For dinner, I grilled two sausages and made potato mash (seasoned with salt, a bit of milk, mixed herbs and paprika). I have paid £8 for a meal like this at The Big Bang.

But wait! There’s more! …Dessert!

I had some bread past its use-by date, so I made bread and butter pudding based on this recipe, but scaled it down by a third and used diced apple because I have no raisins or sultanas.

Interestingly, while I was chopping and mixing and mashing, my eyes kept drooping. I was very sleepy, even though it was only 6 PM. Normally, I wake up if I’m doing something but I must have been tired because when I finished eating and washing up, I flopped into bed and slept for an hour.

Bread and butter pudding with apple

Feeds…four?

  • 4 slices of bread (from my pantry: wholemeal)
  • Small, erm, handful of soft butter
  • 330 mL milk (from my fridge: skim)
  • 1 medium sized apple, diced (from my fridge: cox apple — really nice, never had it before I came to England)
  • 1 large egg, beaten (from my fridge: free range)
  • 2.5 tbsp sugar
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
  • 1/4 tsp cinnamon
  1. Butter one side of each slice of bread. Butter a loaf tin.
  2. Line loaf tin with bread (you will need to cut the slices into thirds). Save three thirds of bread slice to use as the cover.
  3. Mix in a bowl the milk, apple, egg, sugar, vanilla and cinnamon.
  4. Pour the mixture into the loaf tin. Sink the remaining bread slices into the middle.
  5. Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 3 (170°C: 325°F). Let the tin sit for about 20 minutes.
  6. Bake the cake until it is ‘golden brown’ or ‘not too gloopy’. Mine took a long time, about an hour. The recipe reckons it should take half an hour.