Advent #7

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Confused

We recently invested in an air fryer. I was a bit dubious – not in the same way I was superstitiously opposed to dishwashers for the first twenty years of marriage, but in the sense that I had never even heard of an air fryer until my daughter bought one. It came with claims of being quicker (which it is) and cheaper (which it is) than the traditional oven; and also with claims that it makes very crispy roast potatoes.

The first time I tried, selecting the ‘Air Fry’ function and cooking them for about half an hour, they were certainly cooked but distinctly non-crispy. Undeterred, and paying a little more attention to the control panel on the front of the thing, second time round I selected ‘Roast’ – and lo and behold they were very crispy indeed, meaning that I couldn’t send it back under the Trade Descriptions Act and also that I had an awful lot of roast potatoes to eat.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never actually thought of roast potatoes as being something you roast (halfway through this sentence and already I’m beginning to think yes, yes it is just me) but rather as something you cook TO GO WITH a roast. I’ve certainly never had roast potatoes except as an accompaniment to a roasted something else. (And now, like those moments when you look at something with fresh eyes, or say the same word so often it begins to sound strange, I find myself wondering what on earth ‘roasted’ even means.)

So anyway, the upshot of all that is that come Christmas Day, although I can’t see us squeezing the duck into the air fryer I CAN see us having a lot of roasted vegetables to go with it.

Merry Crisp-ness.  

Advent #6

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Childhood, Christmas, Family

In a different life I might have been a farmer or a blacksmith. Well, possibly…

Those were the trades of my two grandfathers, so perhaps I might have taken after one or the other of them? In truth I can’t believe I would have suited either profession – not just because of the mess, but because I don’t have that generation’s stoic nature.

My Uncle recently regaled us with a ‘new’ anecdote of Grandpa Curnow, who one night had a rat suddenly jump inside his welly. During the time which, if it had been me, would have been taken up with rushing about and screaming, Grandpa reasoned that the best way to not antagonise the rat, and so avoid getting bitten, was just to wait patiently for the rat to vacate the boot of its own accord.

No less calm in a crisis was Grandpa Pearce. One Christmas years ago – not Christmas Day itself, but during the week from Christmas to New Year – the boy from next door came round to politely ask, did we know our chimney was on fire?

We didn’t – but thus apprised of the fact, Grandpa fetched a pillow and stuck it up the chimney. That, as far as I recall, was that; and certainly his lack of fuss or panic meant that none of us felt the need to evacuate, assembling outside by the potting shed for Gran to check the register.

I can’t honestly picture myself in either of those scenarios, nor in the field or at the forge. I have, though I’ve never asked him, a suspicion that my brother might have been more suited to it. I can certainly vouch for his own calm fire-extinguishing skills on at least one occasion.

He’s turned out to be a bloody good Grandpa too.

Advent #5

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, TV

One thing I’m looking forward to this Christmas, unusually, is watching The King’s Speech. You may think I mean to misunderstand for comic effect, deliberately confusing it with the film of the same name and spending the whole ten minutes saying things like “When does Helena Bonham-Carter show up?” and “That’s wrong, they didn’t have push button telephones in 1936.” But no, for once it’s genuine interest in watching the genuine speech from the, well, genuine King.

It’s a bit like the hordes of extra millions who tune in for the first episode with a new Doctor Who – not that I want to offend anybody by equating the accession of a monarch with the casting of a TV show, that might be a flippant comment too far and get me sent to the Tower of London (or the Tower of Rassilon, these Doctor Who fans can be a pretty militant bunch).

I know that, factually, there were Christmas Day broadcasts by monarchs before Queen Elizabeth – but in terms of it becoming a fixture, an absolutely fundamental part of Christmas Day for millions, that happened during her reign. So to see ‘somebody new’ doing it will be… Well, I don’t know what it’ll be. (Hence the curiosity.)

I guess this first speech sort of writes itself – it’ll be part reflection on the reign of the late Queen, part reinforcement of the continuation and continuity of the monarchy. But in terms of how the King will deliver it, how he will come across, the impression he’ll make… We don’t know. And so I’m genuinely interested to watch it, for once.

Will he be behind his desk? Out in his gardens? Will he try for a more informal approach? And, most intriguingly, will he wear the long multi-coloured scarf?

Advent #4

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Marge admits to making practice versions of the family’s evening meal, because “at 6:00 we go live!” Although not an exact match (even in its heyday, my hair never had quite as much body as Mrs S’s) I felt a little of that madness today, when we ended up having a dry run of our Christmas Day lunch!

It wasn’t an exact match, for rehearsal purposes the key role of ‘Duck’ was in fact played by a chicken. (I should love to report that partway through I asked my wife, “How’s your duck?” and she deadpanned, “Tastes like chicken” but alas it never arose.) Otherwise, it was pretty authentic. The roast potatoes were actual roast potatoes; the carrots were real carrots; even the homemade stuffing was genuine (although, as always, it never actually gets stuffed anywhere). There were a few director’s notes (some of the potatoes had decided to stick together, prompting the instruction “less oil”) but by and large I think we can consider today’s pilot version of Christmas Day a success.

Inevitably, despite the colder feel to the air today, and the arrival of a tree and all the trimmings in next door’s front window, it wasn’t completely like Christmas Day. True, there was the usual nonsensical lunchtime conversation (from me mainly) but on the actual day I hope my feet will be toasty warm with that ‘new slipper’ feeling, rather than flapping around in a worn out pair tasked with clinging on grimly for just three more weeks; there will also, come 25th, be more presents and even, possibly, some alcohol.

The biggest difference of course is that, unlike the real thing, Monday tomorrow doesn’t mean Boxing Day it means back to work.

Oh dear! Roll on Christmas Day!

Advent #3

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Family

I’m not sure at what point something becomes a tradition but I have a feeling my Uncle has started one, by sending us a calendar each year. More specifically, by MAKING us a calendar each year.

I’d better clarify for fear of a visit by the legal representatives of messrs Bonusprint, he’s not physically assembling them, wrestling with those fiddly comb binders into the wee small hours. But taking the photos, and compiling them into a calendar, those ARE all his own work.

The first year’s theme was street art from around the world, taken during what for shorthand I’ll call his Michael Palin era – murals adorning buildings in such varied places as Lithuania, Iceland and Stoke-on-Trent. That was 2021, and was followed naturally enough by 2022 which features UK canals.

Especially daring, in terms of mixing things up, is August’s now-defunct stretch of the Lancaster canal near Kendall, because there’s no water in it! It’s a beautifully evocative shot of an old brick bridge across a vista of green grass – an ex-canal if you like (perhaps pining to be a fjord). And having just begun December’s final chapter, I can reveal that it shows an urban canal winding its way behind abandoned factory buildings, and looking not unlike the sort of place three men might have sailed a tin bath during Last of the Summer Wine’s heyday.

Two in a row was very pleasing, but it wasn’t until news reached me during the Summer that a third was already on the cards that it dawned on me he’d snuck a new tradition on us – and one of which I heartily approve. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I look forward to getting a new one each Christmas from now on.

Definitely a date to mark on the calendar!

Advent #2

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas

Radio 2 announced earlier this week that Christmas would be ‘officially launched’ at 8am on 1st December by no less a person than ‘The King of Christmas’! Apologies for not mustering a drum roll before revealing that yesterday morning this turned out to be…

…Cliff Richard.

I must admit he wouldn’t have been my first guess (or my second). Ruling out any actual Kings of Christmas (ie, it was never going to be Santa or our Lord) I’d have thought perhaps Noddy Holder. Radio 2 stalwart Aled Jones maybe. At a push, thinking of Band Aid, Sir Bob Geldof (although that would have run the risk of him being the F**King of Christmas I suppose). But no. Cliff.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Cliff. I don’t have any problem with Mistletoe & Wine, although I’m really more of a Carrie and Wired for Sound guy (even if it was forty years before I realised he WASN’T singing “I like small people, I like tall people”). I don’t even mind Saviour’s Day, whether it’s cool or not. (It’s not.) But somehow I never associate Cliff with Christmas in the same way as, say, Roy Wood or Mariah Carey or Jona Lewie.

Having launched Christmas we were then exposed to a whole hour of Christmas songs beginning, rather tactlessly, with Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody. By half eight it was getting a bit embarrassing that Cliff himself was nowhere to be heard – thankfully, just before quarter to nine up popped Mistletoe & Wine, rescuing us from a potential faux pas and also, presumably, and if I understand the workings correctly of the Performing Rights Act, racking up a few more pence for Cliff’s pension fund.

What a day for Cliff – royalty AND royalties. 

Advent #1

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Childhood, Christmas, Doctor Who

When I was still in Primary School, WH Smith ran a competition the first prize in which was billed as a genuine V.I.N.CENT robot (from Disney’s then-recent The Black Hole). Looking back, unless I missed a huge technological leap in robotics in the late-seventies it was clearly no such thing (certainly Roddy McDowall was never going to move into the prize winner’s house just to do the voice) but even now, four-plus decades on, I still wonder what the prize actually was.

Advertising is a sneaky business, full of phrases like ‘from’ and ‘up to’ – so WHS’s competition is just one example of that brand of misleading hype. Toy ads always vastly overstate the actual amount of fun available in their products. There are no real murders or secret passages in Cluedo; nor any real explosions or actual battleships in, um, Battleship. And, I mean to say, I love Star Wars but Escape from Death Star is the most tedious board game I have ever played (and I speak as a man who used to own Waddington’s Blast-Off!).

Christmas too, with its barrage of adverts, is increasingly over-hyped, which inevitably risks leaving us disappointed – not because of any actual failings, but because Christmas can never hope to live up to our absurdly heightened expectations.

I was also still in Primary School when I woke one morning to find Tom Baker staring out of the newspaper, announcing that he was leaving Doctor Who. The quote that always stuck in my mind is that after seven years, he said, “there’s nothing more… except repetition.”

I’m not convinced I have twenty-four more things to say about Christmas – but, with that deliberate bit of UNDER-selling, and with the very real danger of repetition, welcome to December.

Here (possibly) we go again!

To Boldly Go…

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Family

Just at the moment I feel I’m in, as Captain Kirk might say, a house with all the children gone.

Mrs Curnow is away house & dog sitting (although as far as I know she’s planning to come back) and meanwhile Miss Curnow has moved out and into her first flat (and as far as I know she’s NOT).

So whereas William Shatner was musing over how empty the Enterprise was with its trainee crew having been reassigned and in the wake of the death of science officer Mr Spock (apologies to anybody reading who’s managed to avoid The Wrath of Khan for the past four decades) I am literally feeling the sense of a house with all the children gone by dint of being in a house, with all the children (OK, with the one child) gone.

Oddly this is pretty much the first time I can remember having the place, indeed any place, to myself in this way. Unlike, for example, my wife in her bachelorette days, and my brother, and now (as recently established) my daughter, I’ve never actually lived alone – which thinking about it, strikes me as a bit surprising because I think I’d be rather good at it (assuming having a conversation with the fridge is normal).

The first flat I moved into was not, in fact, my flat per se so much as a sublease on the settee in my brother’s flat – and, never one for the flashy and theatrical where the unshowy and barely-noticeable will suffice, the major watershed life-moment of leaving home and moving into a new place for the first time, was just a ten minute walk down the road carrying little more than a few Doctor Who books and a pocketful of dreams. (If it helps to picture the moment, very much like Julie Andrews leaving the nunnery except that I didn’t have a guitar.)

In sharp contrast, my daughter’s move has taken A Very Long Time. On what felt like about day seventy-three, in acknowledgement of how drawn-out the process had become, she said that, “Next time we should probably…” – but I have to confess I found the prospect of a ‘next time’ so triggering that I’ve blanked out the rest of whatever she was suggesting (although I’m hoping it involved the word ‘Pickfords’). The saga of the van and the long night of the arm chairs are still too recent and too raw for me to dwell on now, although I sense that they are already beginning the slow process of bedding in to become well-worn anecdotes in years to come.

But anyway, regardless of all the delays and frustrations, and with the caveat that there are still a few odds and sods here yet to be moved (a standard lamp, some dresses, what seems to be half a set of hair rollers) the lion’s share of her worldly goods have been successfully moved into my daughter’s new flat – and, more to the point I suppose, so has she.

I have to admit to being slightly envious, recalling the excitement of moving into a new place, especially for the first time. Yes of course, along with that freedom comes responsibility and obligation. But I can distantly remember feeling inexplicably thrilled to get an electric bill with my name on it. And anyway, the bills are a small price to pay (metaphorically that is!) for that new found freedom, for being able to decide for yourself what you do, where you go, what you eat, when (if!) you clean up…

It’s also a moment of change, a fresh start, a chance to (as the Sixties might have said) to find yourself, to decide YOUR way of doing things which have previously been either dictated or even done for you. To be independent, properly, for the first time.

A chance, as Captain Kirk might say, to seek out (a) new life.

Another One Bites The Dust…

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in BBC, Doctor Who, Moaning, TV

And just like that, she’s gone.

Not Liz Truss, who has discovered that although Janet Brown made it look easy during the eighties, it’s a tough job being a Thatcher impersonator. No, I’m referring to the impending (at time of writing) regeneration of yet another Doctor Who.

If I’m honest, I don’t entirely approve of this modern trend of ‘set your watch by them’ regenerations. In the old days things were much more random – a bit like schoolchildren used to memorise the wives of Henry VIII, so the departures of the old-school Doctors take some remembering (“sacked, typecasting, couldn’t get a rise, resigned, car park, Powell never replies”, something like that). Whereas nowadays there’s a definite pattern of three series, a handful of specials, and you’re out.

On the plus side, if you like that sort of thing, any six year olds getting into Doctor Who when it came back in 2005 will already have seen four regenerations, this latest being their fifth. Whereas I was not-quite three and still on Bagpuss and Bod when Jon Pertwee left, meaning I was almost in secondary school before I saw my first change (Tom Baker falling to his death saving the universe) and into puberty for my second.

Since I seem to be in a moaning mood, I don’t really approve of these new-fangled triumphant regenerations either – by which I mean they have all taken place with the Doctor actually looking pretty healthy, stood up and walking around in just the way I imagine people at death’s door don’t tend to, and with plenty of time to make long goodbye speeches (or in the case of David Tennant, what felt like a never-ending farewell tour).

For all my fifty-something grumbling however, I’m still excited, although I have to confess I’ve never yet felt the sadness that apparently a lot of people feel when a Doctor leaves – that has always been far outweighed by the excitement of a new one coming in. My main memory of the night of David Tennant’s finale, as he finally succumbed to his fate and exploded into death saving Bernard Cribbins, is not of reliving in my head the thrilling excitement of that action-packed, fan-pleasing hour-and-a-bit episode – no, it’s of logging on to the BBC website straight afterwards to watch the action-packed, fan-pleasing minute-and-a-bit trailer showing clips of incoming Matt Smith’s ‘Coming Soon’ debut season.

“The old man must die” says a character in Jon Pertwee’s final adventure (in an accent and in make-up which we’d nowadays call questionable, but let’s leave that for now) – “and the new man will discover to his inexpressible joy that he has never existed.” That’s probably why Doctor Who is still around all these years later – not just because of the brilliant idea of being able to ‘in story’ replace and refresh the lead, but because it’s always moving forward. That’s certainly why I maintain that new Doctor Who is always more exciting than old, because every time you sit down to a new episode there’s the possibility it will be the best one they’ve ever done.

So although I’ll no doubt be complaining if a perfectly healthy Jodie fireworks away on Sunday night after giving us her equivalent of an Oscar acceptance speech, I’ll still be watching. Excited for the regeneration and excited to see what’s next.

It’s quite a thing to think that, give or take a day or six, this latest regeneration is going out exactly fifty-six years after the very first one. All these years later it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to watch that at the time – but the impossible effect of turning the face of William Hartnell into that of Patrick Troughton remains one of the most convincing and jaw-dropping sequences the show has ever done. An eerily darkened TARDIS, the sound of the time machine’s engines, a blazing light engulfing the Doctor’s face…

And just like that, he’s gone.

In Liz We Truss

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Little Bit Of Politics, Moaning, Money

I know it’s an awful title, sorry, but it just had the edge over “Elizabeth – Aaaarrrrrgh!” (By which I mean, I tossed a coin).

With the appropriate Spoiler Warning in case you’ve been recording all the news to binge watch later, it seems now almost certain that Liz Truss is going to win the Tory Leadership Contest. Nothing is ever 100% definite until it’s announced of course, and I certainly don’t always get it right (“what do you mean, the new Doctor Who ISN’T a woman?!”) but… well, the media seems to be taking it as read and who am I to argue? I really have to hand it to the Conservative Party: every time you think “at least the next leader can’t be as bad as this one” they somehow manage to pull it out of the bag and give us somebody even worse!

Not that Boris ‘Worse-Than-Theresa-May’ Johnson is gone yet, there’s still time for him to make a mess of things… And how kind of him to pop up yesterday to prove that very point, when he suggested tackling the cost of living crisis by buying a new kettle. I’m not disputing either the fact, or the general principle, that buying a more efficient kettle will save you money – but I suspect the people struggling most with their energy bills don’t have the luxury of buying a new £20 kettle now, just so that in three years’ time they can feel the warm self-satisfied glow of knowing they’ve saved themselves a tenner.

The bigger problem is the implication that Boris & co think “people worrying about their energy bills” actually means “people complaining about paying bigger bills”. Of course that’s a part of it, but the real issue is people NOT BEING ABLE to pay bills at all. In fact, although the recent pre-Autumn focus has portrayed this as an impending crisis, for the worst-off I suspect the crisis well and truly impended some months ago with the first massive price hike in the Spring.

Interestingly, Boris also claimed that his successor will be able to announce a huge package of measures – with the implication that it will be significantly more impactful than just giving everyone a free kettle. I can’t quite make up my mind if this is him putting the boot in by writing cheques his successor will have to honour; or whether he’s generously  letting his successor announce it so that they can make a good first impression. (I mean ‘generously’ in a political sense of course. Dragging the uncertainty out is not in any way generous to people sat watching their Smart Meters flashing away like a strobe light)

In terms of first impressions though, and going back to Liz ‘Has-The-Potential-To-Be-Worse-Than-Boris-Johnson’ Truss, she seems to be establishing her suitability for the role of Prime Minister even before officially winning the race – by which I mean she has already made several U-Turns and offended the French. Other than that, her main ‘cost of living’ policy seems to be the old tax cuts chestnut. Which is something I guess, but again I’m going to suggest the people that have already been heavily-impended on, may not be earning enough to pay tax anyway.

Maybe the problem, deep down, is that they (and I don’t mean this as a dig against politicians in general; only the present government which seems to be an extraordinary, Dickensian collection of grotesques)– They kind of think it’s our own fault if we’re struggling. Our fault for not getting a job; or another job; or a better job; for not having enough savings; for not investing wisely; for not even having the foresight to buy better kettles.

If they can manage then why on earth can’t the rest of us? That feels like it’s the attitude, that it’s all to do with organising ourselves better rather than not actually having enough money, and as such I wonder when it comes to it whether much more support will be forthcoming at all.

So perhaps Monday’s announcement won’t be so much about who will win; but, will the rest of us lose?

Have a good weekend! 😊