Diet of Cheese

Two weeks with no post on here is unheard of (although I have some way to go to break Michelle Lipton’s 26 days of silence), but I have excuses! Lots of them. And they all seem to revolve around cheese.

25th February: dinner here with a soon-to-be-stratospherically-successful screenwriter (STBSSS), and the cheese diet is go! Macaroni cheese and cheesecake (is there actual cheese involved in the making of cheesecake? These are important questions, people). The STBSSS goes for something called a delice, which involves a large lump of cake, a huge flower and something that looks like a chocolate covered twig, which she bravely bites into: I’m pleased to report that it was edible.

26th February: dinner here, and the cheese theme continues. Ginos seem to cook almost exclusively with cream (apparently they have tankers of the stuff shipped in on an hourly basis*), but that’s not good enough for me: no, sir. With the infamous transglyceride incident still at the forefront of her mind, my wife gives me the filthiest of looks. But I don’t care: I’m on a cheese roll (well, not really, but you get the idea).

Medical aside: a couple of years ago, I had a routine cholesterol test, which flagged up a transglyceride (a nasty but delicious fat) level of about 16 - apparently, this is bad; very bad. The consultant accused me of going out on a fifteen pint bender the night before the blood test. Not me, guv. Then perhaps you ate twelve handfuls of butter? Nope: I’d remember that (I hope). We continued in this vein for at least thirty minutes: much hilarity ensued.

27th February: dinner here, in the library no less. Arf! However, I suspect that most of the books on display have been purchased from one of those places specialising in slightly worn but artful decor: the titles prove it – Domestic Fowl Rearing, The Poultry Keeper. At least they’re not books about cheese: by now I’m suffering dairy overkill, so I lay off the cheese for one night. That said, the dessert tasted suspiciously like mascarpone, but I’m past caring.

Telly box aside: does anyone remember that BBC series a few years back with Phil Daniels where he played a restaurant critic? Can’t remember the title of it (Holding On?), but in one memorable sequence, he goes to a restaurant, where he stuffs his face like Mr Creosote. However, he has another restaurant review to do that night, so he visits the gents, where he sicks up his dinner before waltzing off to his next assignment. Just thought I’d mention it ;-)

28th February: lunch here, and dinner here, where my wife and I seem to have the entire place to ourselves. No cheese on the menu (for which I thank the good baby Jesus above), but by now another problem has manifested itself: I'm bankrupt. I consider selling an internal organ, but decide that I would only eventually replace it with more cheese.

1st March: afternoon tea (!) here, where we sit next to an old lady who looks like a bad transvestite (I work with two transvestites – one of them has bigger biceps than me). I rapidly come to the conclusion that these are the only people who would be seen dead taking afternoon tea. More clotted cream than you shake a dainty cake fork at. By now, I’m starting to suffer from dairy-based hallucinations.

2nd March: back to (relative) normality with sausage and chips from here.

Once I’ve gotten over the hundredweight of cheese I’ve ingested over the last two weeks or so, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
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* Obviously a lie. It's at least every thirty minutes.

It’s All About Me Me Me

This blog was one year old last Tuesday. Hooray! Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to post a picture of a croissant in celebration, so here’s a picture of a cake I made earlier**:Cakes and croissants aside, here’s a summary of the last twelve months:

* I’ve had scripts shortlisted for TAPS and METLAB, plus a load of script reads from people who’ve stroked their goatees and proclaimed, "Hmmm – very interesting, Mister Smith," in a vaguely sinister fashion. On the downside, I picked a fight with Gordy Hoffman, the Blue Cat heavyweight bruiser. For the record, Gordy is an all round good egg and I’m a very sore loser (never play Monopoly with me, as I will ‘accidentally’ knock over the board if I’m losing – you have been warned!).

* Unfit for Print had its first death threat! Double hooray! I upset a support band I reviewed here, who proceeded to leave a stream of badly spelt swear words and incoherent insults in the comments section. I unfortunately removed these due to the many morally upstanding people who frequent this blog (incidentally, I wasn’t the only one who thought they were awful), but even so – a death threat! Good, eh? That’s another ambition ticked off the list.

* I wrote about a band with a lot more presence and talent back in August 2007 here. And – holy crap! – six months later, various members of Slab! piled onto the comments section and turned it into an unofficial message board for the band, which is still trundling on as I type. All this is set to change in the near future, as the band have just announced their new website here (it’s still under construction, but looks pretty sparkly so far). And what’s more, head honchos Stephen Dray and Paul Jarvis are back in the studio working on Slab’s third album after a layoff of nearly twenty years. Triple hooray! Also, trivia fans, Slab’s phenomenally talented ex-bass player Bill Davies’s father is none other than the BBC’s adapter–in-chief, Andrew Davies (Slab! even featured in an episode of the Davies penned A Very Peculiar Practice). Well I never.

* One of the first comments on the Slab! thread was from Tim Elsenburg, who fronts up the banjo-packing laptop pop hurricane that is Sweet Billy Pilgrim. With one fine album up their sleeves, SBP were a real find for me this year – I can only urge you to buy their album several times over and rejoice in the fact that the internet does occasionally offer up things that are truly worthy of attention.

* On a more personal note, I’ve been stalked by Stanley Tucci and Myleene Klass, who has personally attempted to sell me everything from travel insurance to Classic FM CDs. Really, there ought to be a law against it.

* After I had a good moan about them, Marchmont Films re-launched their website – and guess what? It looks exactly like the one before (but without mention of the British Curry Awards)!

Here’s to another 12 months of carousing!

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** This is obviously a lie.