Monday 17 August 2009

Volatile thoughts and hot ice cream

Hot ice cream?! That's impossible! Ice cream withstanding oven temperatures?! How can this be?! The answer, my friends, is Baked Alaska. A layer of ice cream protected in a meringue shell atop a fruit and sponge base. A dessert, I like to believe, only a few can successfully recreate. My very own multi skilled mother being one of them. After much shouting, blending, stirring and beating Mum emerged from the kitchen with a Baked Alaska which only just made it to the dinner table after a failure of kitchen blending tools. Thankfully Dad came to the rescue in building the new advanced blender at the last minute, a new piece of equipment that had lay dormant in the kitchen cupboard until last night, when it answered the emergency call. Mum is still bemoaning the breakdown of her old blender - her original number one blender and presumably this was why she has never used the new device considering the original, the best. I asked her if she buried it in the back garden and surprisingly she nodded with a yes. A vision came into my head of her holding a service for it, a gathering in the garden, singing 'Blend us together lord'.
Before all this Ka and myself had the laziest Sunday Ever. Nothing. Sheer, unadulterated, nothing was done. No gym, no painting, no shopping, no visits, no internet, zilch. Merely the odd chapter of my latest read. We did not get to bed till half six this morning mind you getting back to the flat at approximately half four only to find the living room overrun by Ka and three of her mates after a work night out, all lounging around the couches drinking vodkas, eating pringles and generally putting the world to rights.
Before this Chaz and myself had been in Glasgow, starting off in the Merchant City and ending up in Glasgow's Royal Exchange Square having a catch up over some drinks where discussions got slightly dark and deep with subjects such as life, death, religion, Richard Dawkins and Sambuca. Well, the sambuca wasn't so much talked about, just drank, quickly and sent my stomach into strange, volatile movements with which it slowly recovered after some medicinal vodkas. A trip to the casino followed and then a taxi journey home with Big Raymond from the Auldhouse at the wheel. Raymond was one of the locals from the Auldhouse bar, the famed small country pub I used to work in through my student years, and we done a bit of catching up with him on the way home. Once again the main subject of the conversation being the cheery "who was now dead and who wasn't" like that rather melancholy game they used to play on Radio 1 when listeners had to phone in and tell Simon Mayo if a certain famous person was dead or alive - a major kick up the arse to any work quiet, listening celebrities that were accused of having passed away.
Obviously, since the events of last week, the subjects of death and loss have never been far from my mind. Hopefully thoughts and conversations will get a little cheerier with time.

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