I know I'm in my own world... it's okay, they know me here

Winter is coming, the nights are drawing in and the blackberries are out in force… that means it’s time to start knitting again! Knitting is such a winter pastime for me, and I love having an enormous bag full of yarn to pick through and find the perfect one for a project. Of course it would help if I bought enough of any one yarn to do a whole project with…

Anyway, this winter I intend to learn to cable so I can make beautiful things like this hat. It’s supposed to be pretty tricky and time-consuming, but you get good things at the end of it, so.

Other awesome autumnal pursuits: today I picked two whole boxes full of blackberries to make jam and other preserves with, and I have a third box of rosehips with which I intend to make rosehip and crabapple jelly. I already made elderberry and damson jam as well as blackberry chutney this week (the latter not yet tasted, so God only knows if that turned out edible.) But I’m having a lot of fun being a hunter/gatherer/warrior nomad, producing my own preserves and knitting my own clothes. There’s something wonderful about making things that lets me feel wonderfully self-sufficient and accomplished.

Delicious blackberry and crabapple jam that I made myself out of fruit I picked myself from the Great Outdoors. I FEEL SO ACCOMPLISHED, LIKE A NOMAD LIVING OFF THE LAND



(Okay maybe I bought the sugar at Tesco)


BUT, BUT, I am planning to make elderberry and rosehip jam too, and maybe hawthorn berry stuff, since they are also edible! And maybe I will have to give away most of it since I don't eat a lot of jam. BUT I will have made it myself out of things I picked! (And sugar from Tesco.)


I AM A NOMADIC HUNTER/GATHERER WANDERING THE WILDS AND FEEDING MYSELF WITH THE FRUITS OF MY LABOURS


ALSO MY KITCHEN IS INCREDIBLY STICKY FROM THE JAM-MAKING, I AM NOT KIDDING, I KEEP FINDING JAM EVERYWHERE

I went blackberry picking today out along the canal by my flat and got a whole lunchbox full of lovely ripe blackberries for my pains (and pains there were, my friends, PAINS THERE WERE. I got prickled and impaled and stabbed all over the shop. A little bit stung by nettles, too. But BLACKBERRIES. And they're FREE.) There are loads of elderberry trees and rosehips and even a wild apple tree out along there too, and I'm seriously thinking about trying my hand at elderberry jelly or something, just for kicks.

But now that I have all these blackberries I had to figure out what to do with them. Pie is an obvious choice, but the last time I went out to dinner with my parents I had this wonderful venison in blackberry sauce that I really wanted to try and recreate. I didn't have any venison in (ha, like I ever have venison in!) so I went with roasted chicken instead.




I used this recipe here and I have to say it came out DELICIOUS. (Mine had lots more blackberries and sauce and purple than the picture.) I added a little bit of balsamic vinegar to the sauce which really seemed to work. I also roasted a whole load of potato, sweet potato, carrot, squash and courgette in oil and a little rosemary to go with it, which was totally yum too.

I still have most of my blackberries left though - anyone have any idea for what to do with them? I'm thinking puff pastry and cream, maybe a little nutmeg.

For lemniciate's fabulous mixtape exchange!



Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)

1. Somewhere Only We Know - Keane
2. Born This Way - Lady GaGa
3. Meet me at my window - Jack's Mannequin
4. 100 Suns - 30 seconds to Mars
5. Bigger than my Body - John Mayer
6. Changed the way you kiss me - Example
7. Heart's a mess - Gotye
8. What if - Bombay Bicycle Club
9. Rise - The Frames
10. Bang Bang (my baby shot me down) - Nancy Sinatra
11. Mr Brightside - The Killers
12. Bigger than us - White Lies
13. SUPER SEKRIT BONUS TRACK


This really ended up as kind of a progression of their relationship through the film, and how the world breaks up that love despite them. I hope you like it, brilligspoons!

A lot of people are talking about how this is just about criminality, and people feeling like they can steal things with nobody stopping them. I’m not going to disagree that that’s a huge part of this whole thing, and I'm not going to claim that this juvenile assholes are political or that they're 'protesting' anything, because they're not. But personally I think a lot of the why is this happening now is because the recession has been going on so long that we all feel weighed down by it, and that young people in this country have been told all their lives that they deserve to have a giant TV and to be famous for no reason and roll in money and have games consoles and luxury goods and not to have to work for it. And they don’t have that, because it’s ridiculous to expect that they should, but they do because that’s the way they’ve been programmed, and so they feel like they’ve been deprived of these things and so now they’re taking them because they feel like they’re owed and because of these riots they can.

We live in a culture where it’s never our own fault, it’s always somebody else’s, and it’s always somebody else’s responsibility to raise our kids to be polite or earn money or report a crime or build something good for our communities. I’m sure most of you have commented at some time or other how rude kids are these days, and how disrespectful, and selfish. And this is the result.

As ever, please feel free to disagree with me - I won't be offended! I love a good debate.

Everyone in London, please be safe and let us all know you’re okay. We didn’t let some assholes blowing us up stop us from being strong and caring about each other and working to make things better, and we shouldn’t let this stop us either.

There are only 11 people with my name on Facebook, two of whom have double-barrelled names. Five of those I'm guessing live in the US based on their free census data online.

I feel very findable and exposed right now O-O I found two of my previous addresses without even trying on some of those people-finding sites. Does anyone know if there's a way to opt out of that kind of thing?

So last week I went to this awesome Film School day at Raindance Studios in London (they're totally awesome - Danny Boyle and Christopher Nolan have both been students there) and it was super exciting and inspiring and helpful in terms of knowing where to start getting into the industry and what I want to do. I could write a whole post about this school! But instead I am going to whine like a little bitch because I decided to order a handheld camera because of this class to try making my own movies and I got this camera off eBay and it is rubbish TT-TT

The picture is all grainy and it tracks really badly and it's my own fault for going cheap but I expected a bit more for my money, honestly, so now I am sad. And also in possession of a really shitty camcorder. Which I will have to try to sell off again. SIGH. ARGH. WHY WORLD WHY.