During the deepest, darkest depths of a revision low, I watched a youtube video of an ambiguously nerdy man blending tricolour silly putty. I feel this is probably an appropriate metaphor for my end of June 2012 life, as the many putties of me (stay with me) are also getting mushed together, though minus the vicious metal blades, I am pleased to add. The orange putty is my degree shtooff including exams and their impending arrival/completion and my voyages to Lyon next year. The blue putty is my beautiful party calendar of smashy smashy. The purple putty is, however, the big dollop that engulfs everything else in a slightly panicky glop, as it is me being offered yesterday a summer au pair job to a French family in Guadeloupe starting in...fourteen days. I am obvs completely psyched for this opportunity HOWEVER I don't possess many of the necessary things, among which are a typhoid inoculation and a crumple free linen wardrobe, and I need to move out of my house and I need to learn how to change a baby's nappy and I need to somehow not be so goddamn pale or else I am going burn to an actual crisp, A REAL LIVE HUMAN CRISP.
To counter act this, I'm bringing the blending back to the kitchen where it belongs and offering you a Stella Fox inspired smoothie which tastes nothing like putty:

Tesco frozen fruits of the forest (£2)
One banana (1/5 of £1.20)
Thee tablespoons of vanilla yog (£1 for Onken at the mo)
One tin of peaches (69p)
Orange juice (£1.60)

1) Pop it all in a jug or other suitable receptacle for containing sploshy liquid
2) Whizz it all up, ideally with a hand held blender. This is better than a general food processor (G.F.P.) as it means less fiddly washing up and you feel like a very powerful wizard, pulverising everything in your way.

Another handy hint that is not the entire meal, but rather a tasty enhancement to a basic risotto dish, is the blending of peas, mint and oil to create what one could term a paste. This can then be stirred into any kind of risotto, but preferably one with ham or other pea friendly flavours, to make it green and more diverse.

This smoothie / emerald delight combo is to be eaten IN CONJUNCTION WITH (yeah I did) several different pieces of musical genius, either all playing at once on various stereos of Hi-Fis or other forgotten devices of electronic sound equipment, or listened to in rapid succession, in order to give off the impression of a seamless transfer and resultant blend effect. That sentence is a prime example of such blending; breathing is cheating. They are all remixes too, just to add to the hash up effect. First up is Cay's Crays Kalbata Remix by Fat Freddy's Drop, which at first sounds disconcertingly like Nelly Furtado's Maneater, but don't worry - the similarity soon ends. Second is Please Mr Postman Refix by Cragga, which I find myself singing joltingly along to, bravely and misguidedly attempting all the deliberately juttery mash ups, and third is Lonely Lonely Frisbee's Mix by Feist, which is good for having a conversation over the top of. I mean that in a good way, as you can still appreciate the music when you are taking breaths, for example.

The blended book for this probably quite hectic mix (especially if you are playing the songs all at the same time) is The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. If you have watched the film, put aside your prejudices - the book is almost four hundred million times better, and if you have already read the book FOR GOODNESS SAKE PLEASE DON'T WATCH THE FILM. Time travelling in the book is sexy and emotionally confusing, but in the film it is problematic and inconvenient. Right now, time travel would just be so handy for unblending all my life putties.

My favourite Mr. Man is Mr. Rush. It has always been this way, so I put it down to the 'birds of a feather flock together' theory: I see in him a nose similar to if not larger than my own and am therefore drawn towards him as my equal. The one major problem with this affinity, however, is that he is lilac, and that is the one colour I really really despise. What is its purpose?! It's not grey, it's not purple - it's just a limp shade of complete apathy that instantly makes everything look less appealing. Poor Mr. Rush, not only is his entire body a nose, but it is also the colour of damp cardboard mixed with my grandma's hand cream. HOWEVER, if one looks past these superficial problems, Mr. Rush is actually in possession of the best ever quality for this time of year: getting on with stuff.

I will therefore zoom on to the speedy recipe of today that will not gauge a chunk out of your revision (if you're in some kind of education) / partying (if you've just finished some kind of education) / daily life (if you are neither a student nor an ex-student), Pasta à la Lazy Gregson:

Spaghetti or other variant of pasta in a quick easy to open packet

2 sausages (either veggie or real) ready defrosted for quick cooking

1 red pepper quickly plucked from a nearby tree

tomato ketchup stored in a nearby cupboard for quick fetching

harissa paste in a jar with the lid already unscrewed for quick use

tomato puree same as above, except replace the word 'jar' with tube, as this is the more likely form of container

honey with a quick eazy squeezy function bottle

olive oil in a bottle with a wide enough mouth that allows quick pouring

1) Put the water on to boil at lightening speed

2) In a frying pan, fry the sausages and pepper in a bit of olive oil at cheetah speed

3) Put the pasta in the water at concord speed

4) Dollop in some harissa paste, some ketchup, some purée and some honey to the sausage and pep mix at rollercoaster speed

5) Combine everything in a medium sized bowl and eat at high speed at lightening speed again

I would recommend not eating this at such pace, however, as indigestion can be an unpleasant thing and might ruin the next few minutes you are going to spend rapidly listening and reading the following: Salaam by K'naan, which clocks in at 26 seconds long. Once again, it's eerie, which seems to be an emerging trend in my tracks of choice, however at 43.3% of a minute you are unlikely to be entirely freaked out.

For a zippy (seriously running out of fast words here) read, Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe has it all - it took me about 3 hours to read cover to cover and is so tightly packed with comment that you will feel as if you have devoured a 1000 page epic...a bit like one of those dried out compacted flannels Father Christmas used to pop in the stocking that expands and becomes a lovely jungle scene when wet. You probably wouldn't want an image of Welcome to Our Hillbrow on your flannel, however, as it centres around the problem of HIV and apartheid, but it is so sensitively dealt with that it's not a confrontational read by any means.

I was so Mr. Rushed when I created this ensemble that the spaghetti was insufficiently drained, but thankfully Mpe had bored even this in mind and laminated her cover so no books were harmed in the process:

I feel sorry for The List. It's only ever really seen as a way of shopping effectively or rushing off an answer in an exam if you run out of time, but it deserves so much more recognition that this. You couldn't possibly write down everything ever, so The List really exists to show what is NOT needed - how handy is that?! To help explain, here is a list of everything I can't draw: people, horses, shadows, detail, geometric shapes, odd perspectives, buildings, underwater scenes, food, flowers, fabric creases, flags, lilac, fruit, letters, sports, blurry speedy movement, vehicles, snow, ivy, wind especially wind how do you draw wind, waterfalls, gemstones, extreme melancholy, bridges, headland and/or gorse bushes, whisks, snowflakes, graffiti, hoovers and deck-chairs. See? Writing down everything I can draw would have taken about 50 years of solid dedication, so The List has in actual fact saved me from becoming an empty 70 year old with no friends.
I would naturally follow on to a list themed recipe, but sadly that doesn't exist, so here is a not entirely tangential (think queues...they are sort of like lists and are pretty British) but perhaps off puttingly typical JUBILEE SURPRISE. Try to see past the grimyellowschoolbaglunchcoronationchicken preconception because this is actually a seriously nice sandwich filler:

2 cooked and chopped chicken breasts
1 tablespoon of mango chutney
2 tablespoons of mayo
1 tablespoon crème fraîche (è and î NICE)
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 lemon's worth of squeeze
1 finely chopped red onion
handful of chives
salt and pep

1) Mix it all together
2) Use a medium sized flame torch to brown up the edges. Then hydrogenate it to make it solid at room temperature. Flake some gold leaf and sprinkle over to finish.

For a Jubilee themed song, what better than some classic and resolutely British brass music?
...Well I can think of at least 46 things better than that, so here is a merry world vibe that I cannot really imagine the queen sailing along the river to: Biriya by Mory Kanté. It's got a great drum beat and if you listen to it enough, you can sing along and feel bilingual.
For the novel, I am going to fully indulge in an English classic of, as we do actually do the old Nov quite spectacularly, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Apparently it is the first detective type novel - came before Sherlock an' all that - and it features a huge diamond that is so big it's almost yellow, some really grim quicksand and someone called Godfrey. There are obviously a lot of nineteenth-century-closed-in views, their sentiments on a group of three travelling Hindu priests for example are a bit dubious, but the narrator of the majority of the novel told by Gabriel Betteredge is brilliant and I wish he were my grandfather.


Also, seeing as we haven't had much vegetable in this triangle, and we all know I need to mention vegetables as much as possible, here's a shout out to John's greengrocers on Brunswick Street in Leamington - 1000 splendid grapes for under £2? Yes please.