1 pot cookery.

So incredibly unfair. In the last few months the yet living fat lady of "two fat ladies" fame, stole my idea and published a book of single pot recipes... Incidentally why have I not bought it yet? These are simple, ingenious little recipes which require less kit and thus; critically less washing up. I'm talking stews, soups, warming delicious recipes. Well today I made a single pot lentil soup, and flapjack which is so ridiculously simple it might as well be one pot.

Perfect Lentil Soup:

Makes 8-10 portions:

1 Onion chopped,

3-4 cloves of garlic, crushed.

2 chicken stock cubes,

2 litres of water.

500g of lentils,

1-2 cans of chopped tomatoes ( ideally two, but I was being stingy today.)

1 can of baked beans,

oil,

salt and pepper,

spices: chilli powder, ground chilli flakes, cumin. mixed ground spice.

1. Heat the oil gently and add the spices. Fry gently, add the chopped onion and leave on a low heat till the onion softens. Add the garlic, and continue to fry.

2. Add the chopped tomatoes and make up some stock with the cubes and water.

3. Add the lentils quickly followed by the water. Bring to the boil and then allow to simmer gently until the lentils begin to soften.

4. Add the baked beans. Cook until it is a nice soupy texture, the beans are warm and the lentils are completely soft.

This is the most durable food I know. I make a big batch and then eat it for a week without getting bored. I love to eat it with lightly poached eggs, so the yolk mixes in with the soup and makes it thick and rich. It's delicious with cheese and bread, tonight I have put brie on top and it's melted in perfectly. It would be amazing with white fish, chicken and pork. It's a winter warmer. If you make it thicker you can serve it on spaghetti with butter and cheese. You can bake it in the oven and eat it with salad.

Flapjacks:

I seem incapable of making food in small amounts. I tripled these quantities and put the mix in a rectangular baking tray (usually used for roast potatoes). This recipe is from the ladybird cookery book of my childhood.

3oz of butter,

3oz of sugar,

30z of golden syrup

6oz of oats.

1. Preheat oven to 160 C. Grease a tray and line with greaseproof paper. The tray needs to be big enough to hold the amount of flapjack you want to make. Inexact, but true!

2. Melt the butter on a low heat in a pan, add the sugar and golden syrup. Stir it altogether don't let it so much as bubble. If it boils the pan will never, ever, ever come clean. Pour the oats in. Mix it altogether gently.

3. Put it in the tray. Put the saucepan in the sink, and fill it with hot water. (You'll thank me later). Bake the mix for 20-25 minutes. It will still be soft when it comes out the oven. If it's hard when it leaves the oven it will be like trying to eat rocks.

4. Let it cool a bit then remove it from the tray.

5. I'm gonna drizzle some dark chocolate on these bad boys.

They smell amazing. I freaking love cooking!

It's official, I'm a pervert...

But then, so are you. And so is your best friend, your mum, your neighbour. In fact it's getting so fucking crowded in here that I'm wondering why I ever aspired to being a pervert in the first place.

I went to a seminar today run by Dr Adam Phillips, a psychologist so renowned he has a proper wikipedia page which might have been written by someone other than him. It was the use of the word "perversion" in clinical practice. For swathes of the 20th Century perversion has been a term designed to separate people in categories. Specifically "normal people" and "perverts" and these categories have been created based on the normative values of particular groups. Psychoanalysts and Christians being just two. Oh what company the scientists are keeping.

However more recent study of psychoanalysis has veered away from seeing people in these categories and has begun to look at the tendencies. Perverse activities vs. perverts. These activities are defined as actions which excite people because they are explicitly or implicitly forbidden by parents. Perversions are activities you believe you shouldn't be indulging in.

They are a way of dealing with and controlling your own sexuality. So if your particular fetish happens to be feet, in my opinion that is no different to being coprophiliac or having a perverse interest in heterosexual penetrative sex with a significant other. Pic related.

It was also fascinating to gain a grounding in psychoanalytic theory. Which perhaps will not help me particularly with my Renaissance Literature MA but continues to fascinate me in ways which probably aren't healthy. The most perfect and simple example of the issues presented by Freud were quoted to me today. "To the child the mother is everything, but to the mother the child is not everything." All those times our needs went unfulfilled, are what drives us to treat our partners the way we do. The way we with-hold sex. Because we can and because we couldn't always get food when we wanted it as a child. It's a fascinating topic, but needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

As Phillips today informed me, psychoanalysts are the ultimate sadists. They categorise people as perverts in order to have the false sensation that they control the "norms" of sexual behaviour. They do this because sexuality is unnerving. We wonder why people choose to have sex with people of the same sex, why on earth they enjoy pain, or fetishize feet because we are afraid of these different sexualities.

Plus the heavy reliance on Freud leads to some weird conclusions. Men we are told are more perverse than women because they fear castration, so they must find things which arouse them in case they lose their penises. This bullshit has never really flown with me. Women are just as perverse as men, but why on earth would they show it. I am inclined to believe (alongside the unnamed woman in stoller's article: "The Term Perversion") that once women's liberation is fully realised that women will be able to be as open about their own sexuality. They will stop pretending to be content to be the object, (if they still are? This is weird territory for me,) and be more able to talk about what interests them. Having spoken to women about masturbation and most of the time, hit a brick wall, I feel that openness about sexuality will continue to be limited to the bedroom. Or worse cosmo magazine. (Try Scarlet, it got a bit tiring after a while, but it is actually attempting to explore sex, as opposed to normalise.)

New shoes!!!!

You are all going to see these, so it's a non-story, but I'm quite in love with my new crazy shoes... they have two sets of laces for christ sake. I need some kooky shoes now that everyone has military brown boots. They are comfy but really tricky to put on, so I guess I just won't take them off.

They are perfect because they will go with all my clothes, and are slumpy, but still neat. My parents sent me some pyjamas today and a post card. I think there should be mandatory care packages from parents to students who have for university. In the care package today was a postcard. With a picture of Queen Victoria and her dog. The note read:

Our noble hound today ate through my belt so my trousers keep falling down. We are not amused. Dad.

This week I'm reading about print and manuscript culture. I think my first or at least my procedural might look at times when works were circulated as manuscript even after coming into print and arguing that this was not necessarily because of flexibility and engagement: Since these things were still very much possible with printed works... but because of economic reasons. I think it's an interesting and different enough argument to get me through this busy, busy start of term.

Poor Little Rich White Boys.

A potent cliché amongst historians is that the study of the past will prevent history repeating itself. It is with this ideal and hope with which Friedrich von Hayek writes The Road to Serfdom, his bestselling discussion of the economic and political climate of 1944. The root of his argument is that socialism is the root cause of both fascism and communism. That communal power leads to universally shared and expressed ideas. This in turn leads to a need to spread the simple but effective ideologies of the community and eventually to enforce these ideologies through violence. In it's place he argues that in order to protect the "individual" ( I will come back to this loaded term) it is necessary to have a free market, with lots of competition and private property controlling the wealth. Put simply, Hayek argues that if the state takes away the power from the private property owners it will lead them on a road to serfdom.

His argument at its heart is for freedom of the individual. He posits that socialism is set up to destroy individualism and that a free market aids individualism. In so doing he highlights his own utter ignorance for the core roots of socialism. To look at this we need to go back to Friedrich Engels seminal socialist text, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Writing in the 1840s Engels is discussing a period in which Hayek's ideals of private ownership and free markets are in full swing. England is the richest and most powerful nation in the world, individual freedom must therefore of course be at its most high, the "working man" at his most comfortable and secure:

"Often the inspectors found, in a single house, two families in two rooms. All slept in one, and used the other as a kitchen and dining-room in common. Often more than one family lived in a single damp cellar, in whose pestilent atmosphere twelve to sixteen persons were crowded together. To these and other sources of disease must be added that pigs were kept, and other disgusting things of the most revolting kind were found."

In such environments it becomes difficult to begin to imagine the individual freedoms of the men and women who were living in these environments, unable to afford basics liberties such as privacy. "We must add that many families, who had but one room for themselves, receive boarders and lodgers in it, that such lodgers of both sexes by no means rarely sleep in the same bed with the married couple." It becomes difficult to contemplate that they could pick and choose the work, or life they led.

Poverty is rarely touched upon by Hayek. His ideals require the working man to be free and he believes the freedom of all men in England to be somehow self-evident: "By the beginning of the 20th Century, the working man had reached the degree of comfort, security and personal independence which 100 years before had hardly seemed possible." Hayek carefully compares the working man with Engels' working man, but offers no evidence for this new found security and independence of the working classes. George Orwell in the 20s and 30s wrote extensively about the problems which continued to face the poor throughout Britain. His books the Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, are the accounts of his experiences of the working class experience. Socialism is not an attempt to create uniformity as Hayek suggests (by lumping together socialism, Marxism and communism into one very small rowing boat) but was originally founded upon the realisation that capitalism was destroying the independence and individuality of the poor.

Hayek writes: "Our generation has forgotten that a system of private property is a most important guarantee of freedom. It is only becuase of the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves." The "we" of this statement refers to those like Hayek, the rich, the white, the male, and the powerful. The Road to Serfdom is adored by people like Hayek; Churchill used up precious stocks of rationed paper printing thousands of copies of it, Glenn Beck, stark raving mad republican broadcaster loves it, and George W. Bush sr. gave Hayek a medal of freedom for writing it. The individual freedoms which Hayek wishes to protect are their freedoms. But it says nothing for the freedom of the poor to have enough money to put a roof over their heads, to have enough food to eat, to have job satisfaction or even the simple choice of being able to leave their job and find better employment.

Interestingly, Hayek paints two pictures of the working man, the first is the comfortable, secure ideal I have already discussed. The second is those who will seize power if socialism is allowed to slide into communism or fascism. "The higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their tastes and views are differentiated. If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity in outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive instincts prevail." Once a political extreme prevails, it will be the less individualistic people who will take control. Thus on the one hand Hayek suggests that the poor have independence and individualism and on the other purports that their like of individualism will lead them to become powerful in a communal state. The hearty warm working man is transformed into a uniform, dangerous bureaucrat.

Hayek's Road to Serfdom closes with the following rhetoric: The guiding principle in any attempt to create a world of free men must be this: a policy of freedom for the individual is the only progressive policy." In reality what Hayek proposes is a regression away from giving the working class an opportunity to develop individuality and independence. Instead he is self-serving in his attempts to preserve the wealth and independence of the rich. Indeed his ideas were played out during the 80s by Thatcher's government. Once again Britain was engaged in the biggest boom of the 20th Century, and yet unemployment was at its highest since the war. Hayek gives the right a cosy little bedtime story that socialism is about crushing the individual which makes it easy for them to privatise, to destroy small businesses, to find loopholes in tax and ultimately to be as greedy as they like. But socialism is not about creating a community which controls everything, it's about closing the gap between rich and poor, about giving everyone the opportunity to be free. To misquote Marx; if Hayek's description of socialism is correct, then I am not a socialist.

A Gentleman's Game

It has been a long time since I last posted. I have found work. I work in a kitchen, a male-dominated environment in which the work is hard but I don't mind too much. It is interesting and busy enough that I don't count the minutes. This is particularly lucky as sometimes I work an 11 or 12 hour shift or 720 minutes. I wash the pots. In this respect I am the lowest of the low. The chefs tell me what to do, the waiters and waitresses tell me what to do. I am at the bottom of a very long ladder. But unlike working in an office I do have a certain amount of autonomy. In at least my space; the realm of the sink I am queen, and I can get a little grumpy and officious when people mess up my space or waste my time. I find it interesting that the component parts of the kitchen all need to be in place for it to run smoothly. The little bitty jobs that waste time and are unproductive but still need to be done fall to me frustratingly, but sometimes everything runs smoothly.

I do not like the pay. THE PAY IS BAD. It is disgusting, it has always been disgusting that the minimum wage is graded down based on age. Anyone who is old enough to be working full-time. Who is trying to support themselves beyond the aid of their parents deserves minimum wage. Whether they are 16 or 18 or 21. I am fortunate that I am 21. On October 1st the legislation will change I will earn the full minimum wage. 5.90 an hour. Hopefully by then my tax code problems will be resolved. As it is I am working for £4 an hour after tax. I am desperately poor. But it hasn't kicked in yet. Provided I can sustain myself for this month I should be able to support myself.

James seems to be unable to motivate himself to find work. Apart from getting press-ganged into an interview for telesales the progress is very very slow. He is afraid. He is so afraid that even if we designate a day to go into town and find work we will not arrive before around 2 and often it is much later, leaving little time to actually talk to anyone. He doesn't search online, he doesn't try and he is unafraid of abject poverty. I don't really know what to do.

The Chalet School

I've taken a break from my satanic reading list because it is a wee bit heavy at times to read a couple of chalet school books. The chalet school series was the creation of Elinor Brent-Dyer published (at least according to wikipedia) between 1920 and 1970. In that time she wrote over 60 of the damn things. They are annoying books and that's probably why I can't stop reading the dreadful copy I'm reading at the moment. The main reason I am fascinated by these books is there potent anti-feminist message and staunch continuation of not simply 50s ideals but victorian ones.

Excitements at the Chalet School was published in 1957. It tells the story of an entire class of delinquents who upon the proposal of a festival (the school is turning 21. Apparently this is important) decide to reform themselves so that their ideas get taken seriously. It is the typical story of bad girls reformed. But unlike in Blyton's The Naughtiest Girl in the School, the bad acts are swiftly described and dealt with. Blyton on the other hand delighted in the details. I can still vividly remember reading over and over about how the protagonist elizabeth would put cockroaches in her governesses bed and delighted in spilling ink all over the carpet. She likewise comes to be reformed but maintains her outspoken and witty ways. She never becomes perfect.

In Excitements however the naughtiness of the form inter v is squashed quickly. Disliked characters are bitter and shallow cutouts, their concerns are always sidelines by the homogeny. As such I am drawn to liking the characters who are basically bullied by a consistent system of exiling the non-conformists. For example, one girl called Yseult suggests they do a play and chooses the one she would like to perform: "The Land of Heart's Desire, " Yseult said promptly. "What?" Miss Ferrars exclaimed. "But my dear girl, you couldn't touch it! It's far too difficult for schoolgirls!" The teacher enfantilises and humiliates a 16 year old. The material she suggests is tainted by the sexualised promises of love. It is desire and passion. The naughtiest form in the school is made of pupils ranging from the age of 14 to 17 it is an inbetween form. The girls who are too stupid to make it into Va or Vb senior forms are placed there with exceptional middle schoolers. They are the displaced and difficult pupils treated like children because their classmates are still "girls." 70 years earlier Yseult might have already been married and enacting her hearts desires. She is cast as the bitter outcast whilst the mary-sue characters of the novels are very much reinforcing the dominant values of the schools.

This distinction is outlined by the ways in which the two different groups suggest ideas for the all-important festival. Yseult would like a new uniform which is more "artful" whilst The Maynard Triplets (children of Brent-Dyer's original characters) propose that two new chapels be built. One proposes non-conformity, the others reinforcement of the christian values so perpetuated by the school. The teachers laugh at Yseult's idea they ignore the enormous expense of the triplets' idea and instigate it. Conforming gets you taken seriously.

Shrews are tamed at the chalet school but as yet (I've not finished this novel just yet) Yseult has undergone no change and there is no hint that she will. She is not out-right naughty, she is not punished, she is just persistently mocked and ridiculed by teachers, prefects and classmates alike. The chalet school is dated and this rant about a series of books which is rarely read anymore is unimportant. But it is an interesting expression of the tensions of a 1950s Britain which tried to suppress the heart's desire only to find themselves with an angry new creation. The teenager. I am contemplating a rewrite of the chalet school books; a trashy piece of hardcore pornography in which the sexualised humiliations of the young women are made a little less subtle for the gratification of a wide and varied audience of exploitative adults.

Shop work

The end of unemployment could be upon me! I have one small job and that means that I can start the long and winding process to being self-sufficient. I'm working in a little newsagents on Badger Hill. It's a lovely little local shop and I work alone which is a very interesting experience. It's a little dull and can be quite quiet, but work is work and a colleague told me there may be the potential for more hours.

What will I complain about now?

Possibly the loneliness and isolation of living on Heslington East Campus. No shop, no cash machine, no housemates. No nothing. If it weren't for James I would have gone mad 2 days ago. Yay for James.

sainsbury's ne me voudrais pas?

POUR QUOI!!!!!!!

"Human Resources"

The phrase human resources sounds like people who treat other people as renewable energy source. *shudder*

Humans are expendable and easily replaceable after all.

Just a quick note today to say thanks to the lovely boys who played in my D&D campaign today. Not only was behaviour very good with barely any rules lawyering/ cheating, they really put some thought into the second encounter.

I never would have dreamed that Grimm's Mr. Fox would find himself impaled and crushed in his own iron maiden. Bravo.

Grandma's footsteps.

I'll begin by reprinting a sonnet I wrote after my 21st birthday party:

21

Good age. Good enough for a sonnet?
Of course nothing too glib or too fancy.
Just a short collection of warm snapshots.
A dark bar, some close friends, diesel drink.
Folky music, and home before midnight
To play poker not even for pennies.
A quick sleep then presents; casserole dish
Water colours, truffles, and an apron.
Blowing bubbles in the morning sunlight.
Saying goodbye again. I always have to.
Then baking and making - cakes and salad,
Far too many desserts for one party.
Grandma’s footsteps and murder in the dark.
No-one died - we just laughed and played old games.

Games in my little little sonnet are important. Because the games which feature are a method of expressing the passage of time. Childhood: playing playground games, Adulthood; turning twenty-one. And of course the inevitable death; murder in the dark. Grandma's footsteps the old woman stalked by successors. The title, of this poem 21, as pointed out by Emily, (she gave me a home made card with a queen and an ace glued to it and wrote pontoon on the inside) is a game as well as a birthday. Games are not as simple as they seem.

I forced my friends to play footsteps again this afternoon, we stood in the courtyard and stalked each other. Some people played others sat out, but everyone engaged. Those who weren't playing were watching, commenting, laughing. Games are infectious and terribly addictive.

Take for example Magic: The gathering a wickedly addictive game which is rightly known in York at least as cardboard crack. But the returns on magic can make it so worth the costs. Yes it is expensive and yes fate is a strumpet, but to win is to reap rewards big time. Likewise computer games offer this input. You pay the costs of money and time: (time in particular) and you reap the rewards of success and constant feedback. This can be dangerous. Games can be selfish as well as social.

I have little direction to this post. No real argument, just a desire to remind people that adulthood is in no way separate from games. No other activities offer the scope and stage for effective learning and the continuation of development. No other activity can potentially better simulate or analyse our cultures; by which I mean that games and these kinds of media could very easily over take literature; very easily be the next step to exploring cultures. Because games are not passive, they are involving.

Play on.

Unemployed, unimpressed.

I have endured unemployment for exactly one month. I have just received marks for the essays which marked the end of my degree and potentially (if things continue as they are) the end of my university career. Undoubtedly the biggest contributor to my problems is the pathetic realities of what is called the "welfare state". If there are people who are living in luxury on benefits they are not doing so legally.

Our government has no means for helping middle class people. No offers, no aid. I know this sounds like ridiculous whinings of a bourgeois, but it's true. When the disenfranchised fall out of education, they fall into an environment which is geared to help them specifically. To get them onto courses, to get them into employment; to help them stay there. This is of course a good thing. But there are no resources in place to help students and graduates, no one to make sure that they can get by. There is a persistent and false belief that people graduate from university and fall into work. There are preconceptions, misconceptions and downright mistakes floating around the employment world. I suffer because people assume that I won't stick their crappy jobs because I have a degree in literature. Well that's just not true. I want their jobs because it gives me the chance to carry on studying. I am not going anywhere. Their job is so valuable whether it is scrubbing pots, selling phones or coffee or books, or cleaning bedrooms.

Another major misconception is that experience is more important than intelligence. To think of one example, I was working in a kitchen last week and was asked to unlink sausages. The chef asked me if I was "knife trained". I got taught how to use a knife at GCSE, and how to open boxes in a book shop. But because I was not chef trained it seems as though I am unqualified. I chop onions, unlink sausages and carve chickens all the time. Thankfully he did give me the knife and let me get on with it. No fingers were lost or cuts sustained; surprisingly. I understand that it stems back to a fear of getting sued. "Untrained woman cuts off own arm with knife whilst trying to unlink sausages." But this culture of fear is utterly ridiculous. Intelligence needs to be recognised as something as useful to a business as experience and the ability to follow orders.

Job interviews: I have had five or six so far, and they have mostly been ok. Not good enough to get me real work obviously, but ok. By far my favourite type is the kind where they ask standard questions about your past. i.e. describe a time when your enthusiasm paid off. Describe a time when you were to blame. etc. These questions are nonsense, they are neither insightful nor useful because the answers you are receiving will be lies. Not necessarily whole lies. Just twisted little truths. I like these interviews because there emphasis is on how a person can analyse their own experiences: which I can do very well. Responses can be easily manipulated.

The worst kind of interview is where the majority of the time is spent describing the job and how oh so difficult it would be. These are not interviews at all. Once you get into this situation, of being forcibly dissuaded from the role the interviewer has already decided you are unfit and is outlining all the ways in which it would be too hard for you. "The level of cleaning has to be much higher than what you might do at home." "It's a busy retail environment and you will have to be able to do two things at once." "You will be required to where a Peter Rabbit uniform... oh you think that's cute, well it is boiling hot inside." Your cries of "I can do that" go unheard. You are inexperienced, lazy, too short. But the reality is I can do these things. I can get to work on time. I freaking well can do two things at once, I have a degree from one of the top ten universities in the country. I can even manage to put on a bunny suit and look fun.

Mostly this occurs not with the more difficult jobs but with the simpler ones. When I turned up for a days work in a kitchen the woman who'd called the agency looked distressed when she discovered I hadn't worked in a "real" kitchen before. I was nonetheless very successful. Two of the jobs I have not managed to be hired for I think are the result of being too middle class. Too qualified. They imagine that a lovelier better swankier job will suddenly come up and I will put down the mop and rush off to be a receptionist or a retail assistant.

I find myself wading through a sea of forms. Looking for work in a proactive way is essentially the same as having full time administrative work. Daily data entry, telephone conversations and print outs. I'm running a mini-business from my bedroom but unfortunately there's no money to be had in it.

At the back of my mind in all of this is how horrifically messed up my life is because instead of pursuing the sciences: subjects I was very apt and had potential in. I plumped for arts subjects. If five years ago someone had told me this would be the end result. Perhaps I would have directed my studies a different way. Perhaps not; I was a stubborn child. Although it may not have helped me permanently at least I would have had the opportunity to carry on at university, at least for another year. As I find myself reading more and more science literature, I wonder if physics would have been a better choice. I am frustrated that I am being made to feel this way by a government which does not value education nearly as much as it pretends. A government which has completely devalued our degrees, and now leaves me on the brink of being unable to afford a house; let alone lurpak.

In which our protagonist gets a day's work and sore ankles.

I was very happily woken up this morning by a job agency telling me I could have a day's work.

I'm going to be a dinner lady for the day. I really hope that the agency continues to find me temporary work, and that it follows the kind of careers you considered when you were a kid. So tomorrow I will be a dinner lady, the day after, a lawyer, then an actress. And so on. Next week: Fire woman, police woman, nurse, doctor, builder, business woman. It would be a lot more interesting than just getting an office job.

Meanwhile: Admiral's log day 2

good things:

- Tap rehearsal: Much practice is required for the new steps, but all will be well.

- A bit of reading.

- Seeing my lovely, positive supervisor.

- Chinese night: Not nearly as racist as it might be construed, good company, great food.

- Ringing home.

bad things:

- not much to report. Someone threw a banana skin out of the second floor window: jack asses.

In which our entrepid adventurer escapes from tumblr into unemployment.

Admiral's Log Day One.

"In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. 'So I shall be as warm here as I was in the old room,' thought Alice: 'warmer, in fact, because there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can't get at me!'"

Lewis Carroll Through the Looking Glass

To those who may be confused. I am not an admiral at all: It is an anagram of my name.

Tumblr is shit. I've travelled through the looking glass to place which looks very similar, but noticeably warmer and less... casual. Less pretty too. But I am willing to forgo prettiness for substance. Blog mirrors life. Please comment. Please get involved. I have been talking to nothing, and no-one for too long. Unlike escaping Alice you can get at me.

In return I will try to be interesting. I have recently finished my degree. If I get a decent part time job I can continue my studies. I would rather not think about the alternative. In the meantime I have devised a list I will call it the Admiral's plans:

1. Video games: Little King's Story/ DJ Hero/ Viva Pinata: Not necessarily completable but certainly satisfying.

2. Baking: There is nothing like baking cakes: it is so productive and satisfying.

3. Learn to lead properly: Woodstock Salsa is coming up and I better get good quick. Plus I'd like to be able to start thinking about the salsa music itself. I'm sure that leading makes you better at following. I just need to work out how it does.

4. Woodstock tap: This is slightly different to the salsa, because it's much more intricate and based on memorising the hundreds of individual movements.

5. The I-am-going-to-hell reading list:

- The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

- The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

- Modern Science Writing Anthology

- Lolita - Vladmir Nabokov

- Ulysses - James Joyce

Books I've had on my shelf for ages and have been meaning to read; But not found the time. There are many other books I could add from my everlasting still to be read list but these are the best books for burning. They really get a fire going.

6. Dungeons and Dragons: play in Bob's game, write a couple of one-offs.

As you can no doubt see this eclectic and fascinating list will provide me with entertainment in between the hours of searching for a job (and house). But probably won't help to get rid of the lump in my throat for not being quite as clever or brilliant as I have always assumed.

The Admiral.