bleak

I’m on a train, extremely hungry. Actually I’ll moderate that down to slightly hungry. I just read a very brutal and very truthful article in the New Internationalist about a women’s shelter in Afghanistan. Perspective.

This was being written on a laptop grabbing impulse, as I realised I can write whatever the fook I fancy about all the people in this carriage without any of them ever finding out. I think I actually startled the girl next to me (her felt coat looks like a blanket I would be suspicious of in an ancient relative’s house HAHA she has no idea I think that) with my fervour, but now I’m experiencing an anticlimax crisis, because I’ve realised it’s perhaps not that fruitful to be systematically mean to everyone in Coach C, even if they are all a bunch of fucktards, which they are not even. It’s just a carriage full of human beings. What was I so excited about. Sigh. Life is just a series of desaturations.

 I can smell cucumber and appel strudel.

I should never have started writing this.

ABANDONED DRAFT #1

Why is my chocolate cute? Why do Lindt think I'm going to want to eat it more if it looks like a happy chicken? Personally, I would prefer it if the chocolate came wrapped as a microbe, as knife crime or as deforestation, because then at least I could justify my gluttony. When it's so adorable, though, I feel repulsed at my own enjoyment as I crunch through its skull, collecting the fragments in its empty body.

ABANDONED DRAFT #2 (please forgive apparent existential woe)

So that was long.

Just don't mention it. 

Today finds me in London, in my house, feet resting on an empty clothes drier, surrounded by artefactual blips of otherwise standard human existence.

BACK IT COMETH

It’s 9am, I finished the 1^st year of my MA yesterday and I almost certainly should not be writing a blog entry. Surely, SURELY, I have better ‘initial freedom things’ to be doing (e.g. eggy brekkie, Runescape, prolonged bath etc), but the only thing my brain can process is more writing. Writing everywhere, here, there, hanging out on the stair(s). And surely, SURELY, you have better things to be reading (the news, that unfinished book, informative back of cereal box etc), yet for some reason you are here, following these verrrrrry words with your crusty little eyeballs. I only assume they are crusty because it’s relatively early on in the day and you might not have rubbed away 100% of residual sleep.

Due to the facts that a) I have eaten almost exclusively dry sandwiches for the past week, and b) no one did it anyway, I’m not going to give you any lists of three or any food/book/song recommendations - instead I’m just going to warble on about unrelated pap and try my absolute hardest not to ask the crisis question why do you think anyone would want to read this because sanity is important at this stage.

So the most interesting thing I can think of is that I kicked an eel the other day. I went for a swim at Southend and everyone insists it was just seaweed but for all of you doubters, read the below:

·      seaweed is soft

·      eels are hard

·      I’ve kicked fish before and am familiar with their firmness

·      it was definitely an eel

The second most interesting thing I can think of is that there is complicated controversy / confusion surrounding the resale of plots of land purchased by Greenpeace to prevent the expansion of Heathrow. The ultimate conclusion: bad.

I need to stop doing this now because I am vegetating. In my pants. Sitting on top of my bag full of clothes that I need to finish packing for my impending summer of exolondon existence. zoooooooooooooom off I go

To A Neglected Blog

To A Neglected Blog

You subsist dormant
Type stored in a cabinet
Not condemned to dust

Never realised I could make titles

The Berfooda Triangle is a tripartite ramble of tenuously interconnected art forms. You can expect a synesthetic mush of art, music, food, and not much else.

Some people, after experiencing a particularly traumatising or emotionally unsettling event, will turn to writing to offload their thoughts.

I am one of those people, and my problem is compost. Or, to be more precise, my problem is MY compost. MY compost that I am trying to cultivate, to the extent whereby I physically plunge my grebby little hands into the bin, fishing out other people’s potato peelings and apple cores and depositing them back into my specifically designated bowl. ‘Specifically designated bowl’ can in this case be taken to mean an upturned microwave lid (fig 1).

I live with seven others, all* of who eat an unseemly amount of vegetables, so have taken it upon myself to become Legume Mulch Representative 2013. It was all going well, and I began to develop particular favourites (orange peel = good, pleasantly fragranced. Onionskin = bad, insubstantial and blows away in the wind. Mouldy celery/spinach/salad leaves = great, adds nice green colour, gives off superficial impression of advanced decomposition. Entire product = shameful, suggests waste and unfinished gluttony etc), but recently I have been led to believe there is a kompost konspiracy being carried out against me.

Just this morning, for example, I was looking for my bowl (lid) of fermented substance to put my tea bag in, and I saw it hideously empty, sitting in the sink, gleaming with fairy liquid. WHAT? Who dares sterilize the fetid mulch? Well, clearly someone, cos that half butternut squash bubblin’ with fungi is now amongst the plastic detritus of the real bin world. I’m going to stop this pre-amble here for the following reasons:

a)     it was about to get repetitive

b)    it brought us to the present day, as I am writing this immediately post sink/bowl (lid) discovery, and therefore have no more factual information to convey.

What I do have, however, is a gustatory (1 point) recipe to kick off this week’s triangle. Naturally (1 point), we’re making it compostable, so expect plenty’o’veg trimmings and maybe** even a few unnecessarily peeled products.

Ingredients:

- An unseemly quantity of mushrooms; a veritable, munificent (1 point) pile

- a slightly smaller, albeit it still significant, mound of new potatoes

- Bunch of fresh thyme

- Bunch of real time (approx 30 mins for prep and cooking)

- 2 tbsp double cream

- 2 tbsp white wine

- Salt and pep

- Greaseproof paper

- Simple string, rustic rope or cute cord

Method:

1)    WARNING. This is a preparatory action: peel, chop, and boil the potatoes until just cooked. Fling the peel into the ostcomp.

2)    Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees sea

3)    Cut out big squares of the greaseproof paper, large enough to hold a hefty portion and be tied at the top with your choice of fastener

4)    Peel the mushrooms excessively, send the shavings to the compost too

5)    Place them either whole or halved in a mixing bowl, along with the cooked potatoes

6)    Sprinkle the thyme (don’t forget to compost those stalks – they look fabulous in amongst the other mulch!!!!111!)

7)    Add the wine, cream, salt and pepper. Stir together

8)    Spoon out portions of each on to the squares. Fasten the squares to make what one could define as ‘parcels’, ‘pockets’ or ‘sacks’, and then place on a tray.

9)    Bake for 20 minutes

10) Devour

So, you should be feeling a little full after that. But we all know full doesn’t mean enriched (unlike the soil, post-compost…com(post^2)…which is endlessly improved by such wealth of vegetable squelch), so to give yourselves the equivalent brain fertilizer, may I suggest the following work, by graffiti artist Narcelio Grud. It is entitled Tropical Hungry (fig 2) and is made entirely out of natural produce, mainly decomposing/overripe he found at the local market. Although not as neatly effulgent (1 point) as his other street art, Tropical Hungry is impressive for its resourcefulness, and clearly demonstrates Grud’s understanding of colour, as he manages to make a squishy carambola actually look useful. 

Although no longer a hostile environment, the soil of your mind could still do with one final mineral: that of music, my friends (awarding myself the right to be over-familiar) Apple Bobbing by Joe Goddard (from the album Harvest Festival) has no lyrics, but does posses the most beautifully appropriate title. It is borderline soft drum and bass, something which should not be held against it in my opinion, and provides the perfect backdrop (or foreground, depending on your personal views towards music’s role) to the Hungry for Mushroom Bobbing experience. If you think this paragraph needs more parentheses, text YES to 778778.

* ‘All’ with the exception of one, who doesn’t know what a grape is. Joking so far aside it has been pushed into the next room.

**definitely

Splendid Adjective and Combined Pun Leader board:

4 points – Polly

3 points – no one, because there is only me in this lonely, lonely game

Find the odd one out:

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 1939
Processors Alliance for Cocoa Traceability and Sustainability ©2013
The Poetry Pact 2014
Treaty of London 1518

Correct, the answer is The Poetry Pact 2014 because, unlike the other three, it does not exist.

Neither, in fact, is it in any way a positive or progressive agreement that will benefit the concordant members in addition to large numbers of the public. 
What it is, however, is a disastrous and violently botched contract, formulated in a three minute conversation during which Robert (previous Berfooda contributor - see below for orange Booth triangle) and I committed ourselves to four subsequent days of moral and emotional turmoil. The initial principle was one of mutual support; a 'you do it if I do it' clause whereby we would both write and read original poetry in support of the Oxjam Beats and Bars. Despite the apparent pleasantness of the pact, we failed to acknowledge the fact that neither of us are competent and/or confident enough to write the poetry, let alone read it aloud. We therefore descended into small scale panic, perhaps even denial, refusing to withdraw from the pact yet also refusing to definitively commit. The resultant action, therefore, was a climactic crumbling of morale, and we both pulled out a mere two hours before the show, turning to comfort eating and prolonged sighs of relief. I would thus like to apologise first and foremost to Oxfam and all the organisers of the event, whom we abandoned ashamedly, and secondly to all those people (i.e. one person) who turned up to the event hoping to see us make enormous fools of our pretentious selves. If the one person who did turn up to see us would like to be reimbursed for their effort, come round to our house any night of the week and we can provide the pseudo-intellectual pomp you were searching for. 

So that brings us neatly on to this week's/month's triangle. Yep, it's sham themed.

The pfoodo (1 point) recipe below relies upon an axis of deception. It looks disgusting, but it tastes delicious. There is room for extra embellishment, especially if you think you have particularly outstanding skills as a chef of fugly cuisine, but make sure you stop yourself from trying to make it look edible, as that would only shatter the fundamental illusion.

Basil pesto
Tomato purée
Grated cheddar cheese
Sliced green olives
Chopped cherry tomatos 
Salt
Pepper
A little sugar
Olive oil
Fusilli
Spaghetti

1) Mix together the first 8 ingredients in a pan. Try and get equal quantities of pesto and tomato purée in order to achieve a nice, even brown paste. 
2) Cook pasta as you always cook pasta.
3) Combine the two, chobbling up the whole thing to obliterate all semblance of edibility. 

If you can manage to get hold of any of Heinz's horrendous and thus discontinued coloured ketchups, then DO. They will make even the most elegantly executed tuile of a meal look like crayola vomit. 

While you're eating this deceptive dish, crank up that volume dial (if you don't have a volume dial, and instead rely on + or - buttons, reassess your entire life ethos and invest immediately) and insert this playlist of pseusic (1 point):

Morning Wonder - The Earlies
Lonely Lonely (Frisbe'ed Remix) - Feist
Mi Mujer - Nicolas Jaar
Luna Y Sol - Manu Chao

These are all fake-singalong songs. They pretend to have user-friendly lyrics, easy melodies and understandable rhythms, however they are actually just the noise equivalent of a bowl of noodles. If you can make it all the way through the whole list without realising how a) off key or b) inhuman you sound, then email me your address and I'll post you a prize. A fake prize, of course. 

As much as I would love to share with you some of my attempts at poetry, if I couldn't do it on the night, I certainly can't do it on the internet. So instead I'm going to toss Raymond Queneau's Cent Mille Miliards de Poèmes in your direction. It is a book of one hundred thousand million sonnets, all written by Ray himself. OR IS IT? Due to the very nature of the theme, obviously not. It is, in fact, a collection of 10 sonnets - each with the same rhyme scheme and metrical structure - cut up along each of the fourteen lines, so that each can be rearranged in 10¹⁴ different ways. Incredulous? Well good luck proving it, cos it would take one reader approximately 190258751 years to read all possible combinations, by which time u w!11 b ded.