Brownies- the two-bite variety

Yesterday was gray and blustery, and I was feeling a bored and needed to find something exciting to do. Yes, the trials of a housewife are great…

I suddenly decided I felt like making brownies, but not just any brownies. I wanted to make two-bite brownies, from scratch. Every time I’ve had the store-bought variety, I’ve asked myself why I didn’t just make them, free of the chemicals that prolong their shelf-life into infinity. I knew I had seen a recipe in my cookbook, Home Baking by Alford and Duguid. Judging by the quality of their other recipes, I had faith this would produce the brownies I craved. After meandering through the book’s other yummy recipes, I finally found the brownie recipe, only to realize that it called for bittersweet chocolate, and I didn’t have any in my trusty baking cupboard! Having already been to the grocery store TWICE in one day, I refused to make yet another trip. So the hunt was on for a recipe that called for cocoa powder rather than chocolate.

*Note: You can substitute cocoa powder for chocolate in a recipe, but you have to increase the butter content significantly, and I was unwilling to make the brownies any more calorific than they already would be.

The internet is truly a wonderful thing…I found many recipes for two-bite brownies, most of which sounded suspiciously like any other brownie recipe made in a mini-muffin tray rather than a square pan. I discarded all the low-fat recipes. Why bother?! Here are the brownies I finally made, thanks to Canadian journalist, cookbook writer and blogger, Julie van Rosendaal.

I made them in the silicone mini-muffin cups we got for Christmas last year. By far the one of the best kitchen gadgets we’ve received as a gift, these silicone muffin cups are re-usable, fit into a regular muffin tray, and are much more environmentally friendly than paper cups. Just make sure they don’t accidentally get thrown away! (*Note: They aren’t great for gas ovens, although we’re not sure why. And do not put them into the dishwasher. The smell of the detergent will never go away, leaving you with muffins that always taste a bit soapy.)

 

Two-Bite Brownies

1/4 cup butter, softened

1 1/4 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Beat sugar and butter together until well-blended. Add in the eggs and the vanilla and mix well. In a separate bowl, mix all the dry ingredients together. Add to the butter mixture and mix until there are no more lumps of flour. Spoon into muffin tins (lightly greased), or mini-muffin cups. Bake for 12-15 minutes, but make sure you do not overbake! They will collapse slightly when they come out of the oven, but they still taste delish! Makes 24 mini-muffin size brownies, or 12 large ones (which then are no longer two-bite, but more like four-bite, unless you have a big mouth).

Bran-less Muffins

I was recently told (by the dubious woman at the bank) that since I was unemployed, but married, I must therefore be a homemaker. Yes, you read correctly. Homemaker is indeed an option on the ‘employment status’ drop-down menu on the bank’s account information. I was also told that it was better to be a homemaker than list myself as ‘unemployed’ since “you can’t get anything for saying you’re unemployed.”  This begs the question of what exactly I’ll get for saying I’m a homemaker, but I digress…

In my new role as homemaker, and in order to elevate (or maintain) my status to/as domestic goddess, I decided to wake up early on Monday morning to make muffins for our houseguests. This is also part of the G&C Bed and Breakfast, which is open for business, if anyone fancies a few nights in London.

Craving some healthy bran muffins, I started measuring, weighing, mixing, and attempting to multi-task as I chatted with our friends and helped them find things in the kitchen for their coffee, etc. After carefully filling the muffin cups with the batter and sliding the tray into the oven, I glanced over at the corner of the counter and only then realised my significant error. There was no bran in my bran muffins! The bag of bran sat, sealed shut, where I’d pulled it down from the cupboard earlier. I contemplated scooping the batter out of each cup and adding the bran, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. That said, 75 grams of wheat bran is a significant amount to forget, and I was convinced I had a disaster on my hands. I was most concerned that I had failed miserably in my domestic duties.

Our friends were quite sure that the ‘branless bran muffins’ would be fine, and indeed, they were right. They just taste like sweet, molasses-y little cakes with dates. Not bad, but not the healthy start to the day I was hoping they’d be. They look and taste fine, but next time, I’ll make sure I’m less distracted. After all, I do have to maintain my reputation and live up to the standards of my newest occupation…

P.S. Here’s the recipe for the yogurt bran muffins…WITH the bran! Apologies who don’t like weighing their ingredients, but all recipes here are in grams, rather than cups.

Bran Yogurt Muffins

Preheat oven to 375-400F. Prepare muffin tins (grease or line with paper cups).

Stir together 225g flour, 2 tsp baking powder, and 1/2 tsp salt.

In a separate bowl, beat egg with a fork. Add 110-140g brown sugar, 1 tsp vanilla, 1-2 tbsp molasses or honey, 75g WHEAT BRAN or 105g OAT BRAN, 60ml milk and 90ml oil or 85g butter melted.

Spoon 240ml plain yogurt (preferably with bacterial culture) into a jug or bowl. Stir in 1 tsp of baking soda and let it stand for 1-2 minutes. Some yogurts will react vigourously and bubble up (very cool!). Stir yogurt into the egg mixture after a few minutes.

Pour all of the wet ingredients into the dry. Stir until just combined, adding 85-100g of raisins or chopped dates if desired. Ignore any lumps. Spoon into muffin cups and bake for 20-25 minutes until the tops spring back gently when pressed.

Although omitting the bran will not ruin the taste, it is highly recommended that you keep these as BRAN muffins! Enjoy!

Caving in

Well, we did it. After months of resisting the daily barrage of leaflets through our door and insisting that we could do it better ourselves, we caved in and got INDIAN TAKEAWAY. Yes, you read correctly. We opted to get foil containers of ‘curry’ instead of using some of our own spices and culinary skills and making our own tasty delights.

Almost every day, we get takeaway menus dropped through our mailbox. They seem to be getting fancier and glossier as more Indian restaurants vie for the same customers. These menus have provided us with some good laughs (‘motor panner’ and ‘doet coke’ for instance), and encouraged me to think that I could make good money as a menu proof-reader. Nevertheless, a quick glance and the menus reach their end in the recycle bin.

Today, however, we decided to sample from one of Surbiton’s finest. We are spoiled for choice, with 4 Indian restaurants on our high street alone, and several more just around the corner. We went with the second oldest Indian restaurant in Surbiton, assuming that longevity in this fickle market meant quality.

This particular restaurant seems to cover all the bases, with food from all the major regions of India. This is usually cause for suspicion on my part – I imagine a kitchen with large bottles of ‘curry sauce’ labelled with a particular region of India, and a chef who glops a spoonful of any given sauce onto chicken, fish, lamb, or vegetables. Suspicions aside, we ordered a Mangalorean fish curry, an eggplant dish with a mysterious name, saag paneer (spinach and paneer), and a lamb biryani. The additional British quirk is that biryani always come with a complimentary order of vegetable curry. This seems strange, since biryani usually is so flavourful on its own that I can’t see the need for a curry to accompany it.

I am pleased to say that the food was great, particularly the fish curry, which tasted authentically South Indian, although it could have been spicier. As you can see, the food didn’t all look the same, wasn’t that greasy, and everything didn’t taste the same either! Never fear, we’ll still be cooking, but at least now we have an alternative to Village Pizza on days that we really don’t feel like slaving over a hot stove.

Other people’s shopping

One of the things I like most about going grocery shopping (admittedly, there aren’t many of them) is finding a shopping cart, a shopping trolley, as they’re known on Greenwich Mean Time. The particular chain of supermarkets we choose to frequent (let’s call it chain “W”) very conveniently has little clipboards on its carts to which you can attach your shopping list. I find reading through discarded shopping lists a curiously voyeuristic form of entertainment. Glancing through people’s scribbled lists seems somehow a little more personal than sneaking a peek at your fellow shoppers’ chosen items at the checkout. More than their food habits, you can tell whether they were in a rush when they wrote the list, what their choice of scrap paper is, whether they prefer pen, pencil or felt tip, whether they’re the kind of person who crosses off items as they grab them off the shelf, and other interesting insights into their shopping strategies. I have thus resorted to conducting an unofficial poll of other people’s shopping by stealing their discarded shopping lists. I get a mischieveous sense of glee when I spot a cart that has someone’s scrawny piece of paper with their list of scribbles on it. I quickly claim the cart and discreetly put the list in my pocket.

Most of the lists are short, with fewer than ten items on them. That in itself is strange, because ten items can easily fit in a basket, which enables you to use the faster checkouts. Convenience items predominate the lists; milk, bread, eggs and cheese feature prominently. Starches are the dominant food group, particularly pasta, potatoes and rice. Some people encouragingly make lunch for their kids to take to school (“bananas, apples, peanut butter x 2, childrens yog+yog drinks, choc dig./jaffas”), but then sadly disappoint by feeding them rather questionable items at home (“spag. shapes, Bessie Mash x 2, waffles”). Most of the lists are such that you can hardly make a decent recipe out of them, even though you could make it lots of times (“mince lamb/beef, tin toms x 8 [times 8?!?], chick pea x 4, green lentils x 2″ sounds like a lot of stew to me). Others have rather unmentionable items (“decaf, quorn, marg.”). One person wanted to buy a sofa, but then must have thought better of it and decided to buy soda instead. People buy “bog roll” or “loo roll”, but not “toilet paper”. And it’s good to know that people still like an element of surprise in their grocery shopping (“A little something for you”). Some parents have shopping budgets for their kids (“£6 for Freddy, £10 for Theo” – I’m curious to know what Freddy and Theo bought themselves with their allowance. I hope it was something worthwhile, because otherwise all they had to look forward to was garlic, chillis and kidney beans). A torn off bit of notepad paper appears to be the writing material of choice, although a few people use yellow stickies. But my personal favourite is a list written on paper in the shape of a curvaceous womanly figure in a pink flowery party dress from Lady Jayne Ltd.

I’ve often thought of leaving behind a list of my own (“pig intestines, eye of newt, raven’s claw”), although when I bother writing them, they’re invariably in some form of electronic gadget. But with the festive season fast approaching, I might be tempted to leave one with the most important list of all (“…. and a partridge in a pear tree”).

Falling out of the blogging habit

Forgive me, dear readers. I’m embarrassed to say that it’s been 130 days since my last blog entry. I am at risk of being a statistic – one of hundreds of people who start blogs and then let them fade into obscurity. If not for some vigilant readers who send me friendly reminders every once in a while, I’d still be neglecting my blog-duties.

In my defense, however, here’s a brief synopsis of what I’ve been busy doing since March 29, 2009:

1. Getting engaged

2. Planning a wedding for September

3. Finishing, defending, and submitting my thesis

4. Writing 3 papers, 2 of which are now published and 1 that awaits its fate at the hands of the editors. And I thought I wouldn’t become a slave to the ‘publish or perish’ world of academia…

5. Going to Paris for a long weekend with friends from Amsterdam and Canada – four glorious days of friends, sun, food, food, food, and a great apartment in the Marais.

6. Going to Chamonix, France to finally see the Alps in all their glory, including Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. We had 5 days filled with great food, cheese and bread, hiking up mountains, coming down mountains in thunderstorms, and getting lost on a mountain. We wondered if 2 Skor bars and 1 litre of water would see us through a wet and cool night. Thankfully, we didn’t have to find out.

Arc de Triomphe

Metro stop with a great sign!

Mmm…couscous!

The French Alps

Hiking in Chamonix

The ascent of the sandwich

7. Receiving a surprise gift of tickets to see Andy Murray play on Centre Court at Wimbledon. We enjoyed the driest and hottest Wimbledon in years, and were only disappointed that the match didn’t last more than 3 sets. But we’ll remember our amazing seats for years to come. Unfortunately, C is even more determined that I should work full time so he can spend his year traveling the tennis circuit.

8. Reading FOR FUN and generally doing nothing at all, and not feeling guilty about it. It took me a few days after finishing my thesis to realise that I didn’t need to get up every morning and park myself in front of my laptop for 8 hours. After a few days of adjustment, I’m getting quite used to a life of leisure (punctuated with small spells of frantic wedding planning, of course).

I suppose I really have no excuses now to be absent from the blogging world. Hopefully this post will inspire me to write more. Stay tuned!

Bahir Dar

Situated on the southern tip of Lake Tana, Ethiopia’s largest lake, Bahir Dar was our first stop on our tour of the country’s northern historical circuit. The guide books describe Bahir Dar as a “booming business centre”. You soon learn to take anything the guide books say with a large pinch of salt while travelling around Ethiopia. To place the words “booming” and “business” in the same sentence to describe any town in Ethiopia is to demonstrate a great deal of imagination. Bahir Dar has two dirt roads running through it, continuously travelled by UNAIDS trucks, other NGO trucks, and the crowded minivans that serve as buses.

Having arrived in Bahir Dar a day late after our bmi debacle, we decided to take a raincheck on our friendly hotel host’s persistent offers of a boat tour and instead crash in our hotel room until 3pm, at which time we ventured in search of, yes, you guessed it, food. After some careful cross-referencing of guide books, our first meal in Ethiopia would take place at Tana Pastry, an inconspicuous, two-storey restaurant popular for its fresh fish dishes. Our first meal in Ethiopia would, in fact, turn out to be the best, and would be our introduction to real Ethiopian injera (a ubiquitous (no exaggeration), grey-ish, soft, steamed, hole-y flatbread made from fermented teff flour), and fir-fir, a stew of minced meat or fish cooked in a spicy berbere sauce.

Tana Pastry menu

Fish fir-fir and injera

Fish cutlet

Lake Tana is known for its many orthodox monasteries, almost all of which are dotted around the lake’s many islands. For a fee, a guide will take you around a selection of these, which you can enter (for another fee) and view with the help of the local priest. There are some, however, that allow entry only to men. The monasteries themselves are simple, round mud buildings with thatched roofs. Inside is a square structure, with colourful biblical scenes depicted on all four walls. The interior houses the “holiest of holies”, the most sacred part of the monastery, which only priests can enter. Some of the monasteries also house “treasures”, so it was with great intrigue that we were guided to the “museum” at the Bet Maryam monastery. The local priest made a great show of opening the doors of the museum for us, which constitutes a small glass cabinet with some silver crowns.

Bet Maryam museum of crowns

Monastery paintings

Goatskin book

Thatched roofs

Bahir Dar is also renowned for being close to the source of the Blue Nile, which travels northwest from Lake Tana to join the Nile in neighbouring Sudan. Your boat guide will also take you there, and point to something which he insists is the source of the Blue Nile, but which, as far as you can tell, could just be a bunch of reeds. Allegedly, you can also see hippopotami and crocodiles early in the morning, but we were too late to see these. The lake is also popular with bird watchers and our hotel, located right on the shore, was a perfect place to sit with an afternoon coffee and catch a glimpse of a whole host of colourful and unusual birds.

In Bahir Dar, we also learned of the Ethiopian obsession with gum. Meat and fresh produce may be in short supply, but there is certainly no shortage of gum, in any flavour you might care for, sold by enterprising children eager to make a buck.

Not surprisingly, one great disadvantage of being by the shore is the predominance of mosquitoes. Our hotel room conveniently came with a mosquito net. Unfortunately, it was full of holes, for which we had to devise some ad hoc strategies (tip: band-aids appear to be a popular method of sealing bednet holes. Trust me, it doesn’t work…..).

Things I’d rather do…

…than write my thesis.

1. Bake muffins…it seems that British people have been deluded by Starbucks and other similar chains into believing that ‘American muffins’ are sweet, calorific, cake-like concoctions with lots of chocolate and gooey, jammy fillings. When I first took banana muffins (authentic, Canadian-style ones) to work, my colleagues were incredibly enthusiastic. One person even offered to pay me to bake her muffins every week. It’s so much more exciting than writing a thesis…

2. Clean…anything, really. The bathroom, the living room, the kitchen. Even my previous intense dislike for dusting has disappeared during my recent thesis-writing adventures. As my friend Jill said, writing a thesis can make cleaning your bathroom with a toothbrush seem more appealing. So true…

3. Cook…as the ‘What’s Cooking’ link will illustrate, we’ve been creating lots of culinary delights in our kitchen. Okay, so we’re a little more obsessed with cooking (and photographing what we cook) than some, but if the options are to write or cook, well…the choice is clear.

4. Talk to my plants…having no outside garden, and limited window-sills means that I’m beginning to experiment with what I can grow indoors. Our two original orchids have become three after I re-potted them, and they need careful tending. A mysterious accident with a very old money plant (from C’s grandfather) meant we had to carefully re-pot it. All that shock naturally means it needs extra attention. Or so I like to tell myself…

5. Grow chilies…we picked up seeds for Serrano chilies at a Mexican restaurant recently (check it out at http://www.wahaca.co.uk/) and planted them. We now have 8 seedlings, which need extra attention in this cloudy climate. This means watching them regularly, turning the pot so they don’t lean too much into the sun, counting how many new plants we have every day, and checking periodically through the day for new sprouts. We eagerly await the day when we can harvest our bountiful crop of spicy goodness…

This list grows daily. So does my list of ailments that seem to afflict PhD students. With two of my fellow sufferers, I will be writing an important scientific article on the physical and psychological hazards of doing a PhD. Stay tuned for more details. Maybe if my research doesn’t get published, this will.

Who are the people on your train?

(With apologies to Sesame Street)…

Who are the people on your commuter train?

Oh, who are the people on your commuter train?

Who are the people on your commuter train?

The people that you meet each day?

Okay, ‘meet’ might be a stretch. You rarely meet people on the train. You observe people as they endure the daily commute.

There’s the pre-10am crowd, dressed in suits, carrying laptops, and all but 2% wearing long, black overcoats. Taking a train before 10am means giving up any sense of personal space. Literally nose-to-armpit with no room to manoeuvre.

The far more entertaining crowd stumbles onto the last few trains at Waterloo, some time between 11 and 11:30pm. Miss the last train home and you’re faced with a 2 1/2 hour bus ride home, IF there even is a bus to your home. Many people in the late-night crowd wouldn’t pass a breathalyser test if they had to take one. While you will get a seat on the late-night train, you’re likely to be assaulted by the smell of Burger King. There’s probably other fast food too, but it seems Burger King odours overpower all others. (Note – there’s no McDonald’s in Waterloo, which is why there’s no McSmell).

I was never quite sure about the late-night, drunken, french-fry eating crowd, but I’ve come to realize that they provide great entertainment. Take for example the couple behind our seats a few weeks ago.

Take one slightly intoxicated computer geek with his nose buried in a tech magazine of some sort (I couldn’t quite read the title as I looked through the crack between our seats) with a bag from, where else, Burger King.  Add a more intoxicated girl (definitely couldn’t see her face through the seat crack) who collapses into the seat next to Computer Geek. She is on the phone, relating the trying events of her evening, culminating with a sorrowful account of how she hadn’t eaten since lunch time and was literally about to collapse of starvation. Is Drunk Girl a bit of Drama Queen? Hard to say…. In comes Computer Geek, displaying a sort of chivalry and gallantry rarely seen these days. He offers Drunk Girl his Bacon Double Cheeseburger. She protests, he insists, she claims to feel guilty depriving him of his food, he responds by suggesting she needs it more than he does. And so it goes…and Drunk Girl eats the burger, eternally grateful, relaying the story to Friend on Phone the whole time. Computer Geek and Drunk Girl strike up a friendly conversation, culminating in an invitation from Drunk Girl to her Singles-Only Valentine’s Day dinner the next night. They exchange phone numbers, she tells Computer Geek that he really SHOULD take her up on the offer (after all, she says, he has nothing better to do, right?). It’s poetic…literally. She tells him that in 2008, Valentine’s Day was supposed to be great (and was everything but great), but this year, 2009, Valentine’s Day will be just fine. Using this logic, Computer Geek really should come to the party (says Drunk Girl).

We were tempted to follow them home (one of us certain that they’d go home together, the other a bit more sceptical), but Computer Geek got on a bus, and Drunk Girl went in the other direction. Did he text her, as he promised? Did he go to Balham for the party? We’ll never know. But the beauty of the late-night train is that there are always conversations like this on which we can eavesdrop.

Amman to Addis, via Cairo (with spoilers…)

OK, clearly we must  get things moving here. It’s been eight months and we still haven’t arrived in Ethiopia. And we have a whole bunch of Ethiopia blog posts that have been sitting in the ‘Drafts’ folder, waiting to be posted. So here, in non-movie script form, is a summary of the rest of our ill-fated journey.

So, like, this Australian doctor dude we told you about, he was like a total time freak, y’know? He was, like, paranoid he was gonna miss his flight, so on our tour of Amman, he kept saying to the driver make sure we, like, get to the hotel by 6pm, man, ‘cos our flight leaves at 10pm and we have to be at the airport by 8pm. And the driver kept saying, like, yes, yes, my friend, no problem, and then kept, like, driving us to all these souvenir stores to buy, like, dead sea exfoliating cream and mosaic jars and stuff. And then we get to our hotel and, like, this American dude on our flight who’d stayed in the hotel comes running out of the lobby and he’s like, guys, like, hurry up, the airline called and they’re, like, saying that they’re putting us on a flight that leaves at 8pm so we have to go to the airport right now! So we run up to our rooms and, y’know, like, shove all our stuff into our bags and run back down to the bus and at the airport, this bmi dude takes us through security and tells us to, like, line up at the royal jordanian check-in, and we’re like, why are we lining up at the royal jordanian check-in and he’s, like, just wait here, they’ll give you your tickets. So we, like, wait, and wait, and wait, and it’s like, 8pm now and we’re still waiting in the same spot we were when we got there, and we’re, like, totally starving, right? ‘Cos, y’know, we’ve, like, eaten nothing for eight hours, and we’re all scraping the bottom of our bags to find stuff to eat, and we’d, like, made some granola bars that we’d brought, so we’re sharing them out with 20 other starving people. And THEN, one of the guys says that they’re putting us on a flight to Addis, via CAIRO!! Like, Egypt, man, where the pyramids are and stuff! Unreal! So I’m, like, cool, maybe we’ll get stranded in Cairo, too, so we can see the pyramids! And G’s like, dude, that’s, like, so NOT funny! And then this American lady starts, like, totally ranting at the airline dude, ‘cos they wouldn’t give us boarding passes for our connecting flight from Cairo to Addis, and she’s like, well, when we get to Cairo, who’s gonna look out for us? Who’s gonna make sure we get on that flight? And they airline guy’s like, chill out lady! Everything’s gonna be A-okay. But now you must hurry, flight’s about to leave. So we’re, like, bombing it down through some more security to the gate, and we get herded on to this plane and two hours later we get to Cairo, and of course, nobody tells us where we’re supposed to go, right, so we just get on this shuttle bus to the terminal, and get off, and then someone’s, like, no, not here! So we get back on the bus and drive off somewhere else, and then get off, and then this Irish woman who’s travelling with us is, like, wait! my stroller, where’s my stroller! So she, like, has to go back to the plane to find her stroller, and we to through some other security check and join another line and get told to wait. So we, like, wait and wait and wait. And we’re asking this Egypt Air guy about our boarding passes and he’s like, I need to see your tickets, and we’re like, dude, we don’t have tickets, our flight was cancelled in Amman, and he’s like, wait here, and we’re like, that’s all we’ve been doing is wait here! And then 20 minutes later, he, like, pulls out a wad of boarding passes that have been sitting behind his desk all this time and he starts calling out our names and giving them to us! And the guy’s not even checking our passports or nuttin’! And then he says, now you must hurry, flight’s leaving soon! And we’re like, yeah, well if you’d given us our freakin’ boarding passes earlier we wouldn’t have to hurry. So we’re bombing it down through some other security check, make it on the plane, and we take off and we can see the pyramids at night and stuff and it’s all cool. But THEN, we get to Addis airport and we’d already missed our connecting flight to Bahir Dar with Ethiopian Airlines by a day, right, so we go to the Ethiopian Airlines desk and they’re like, well we can re-book you but you’ll have to pay a penalty and we’re like, but dudes! It’s not even our fault, right? And they’re like, well you didn’t  fly here with Ethiopian, so it’s not our problem, you’ll have to go through immigration and go to the bmi desk. So we go through immigration and look for the bmi desk and it’s, like, 3am by now, right? So we go to the bmi window and there’s some guy tapping at a computer and we start telling him our whole ordeal and he’s like, dudes, I don’t even work here, my flight got cancelled and I’m just helping myself to this computer to see if I can find another flight! But then this bmi woman comes up and she’s like, well our only responsibility is to get you here, so you’ll just have to pay the penalty and try and claim it back from bmi. So now we’re like, stuck in some airport in some strange country in the middle of the night, and we’re starving, and we haven’t slept, and there’s no flights out till 7.30am, right, so we’re like sitting on some crappy chairs, trying to get some sleep, and then I see some guy sitting at the Ethiopian check-in desk, so I go up to him and ask him if he can re-book our flights, and he’s like, I’m just security. So we’re waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and then at about 5.30am the check-in desks open and we ask the guy if he can re-book our flight and he says there’s a flight at 7.45am, but it’s full, so we have to wait until everyone checks in to see if there’s seats available. So we’re waiting, and waiting and waiting, and then finally he calls over and he’s like. I have two tickets for you, so now you take this paper, go over there, pay your penalty, come back here and I give you your boarding passes. So I pay, take the receipt back, get our boarding passes, and the guy’s like, but you must hurry now, flight’s about to leave! And I’m like, yeah, whatever…..

An Extreme Weather Event…

…or How London Came To A Grinding Halt.

Step 1: Forecast heavy snow for two days. Watch as some people act like the armageddon is coming. Watch as others treat it like another erroneous forecast from the Met Office. They are famous, after all, for issuing forecasts like ‘Bright and sunny with some cloud and some rain. Generally fine.’

Step 2: Witness large clumps of snow falling from the sky. The ground is lightly covered with white flecks. Canadians call this a mere dusting and get on with things. Britons say, ‘Wow, it’s really coming down hard!’ They walk around with heavy parkas and umbrellas. Umbrellas?!

Step 3: Wake up, look outside, and see snow everywhere. About 10cm of it. It’s eerily silent. Turn on the radio or the TV. All you hear about is the snow. There is no other news. Major roads like the M25 are backed up for 7 miles or more. Schools across the nation are shut. Trains cease to operate. London buses – yes, those large, red, double-decker things – are no longer running. The London Underground suspends most of its trains. My first question…isn’t the Underground, well, UNDER the ground? Turns out that it’s also partially ABOVE ground. If falling leaves can cause delays on the Underground, imagine what snow can do. And here’s just how much snow fell in this great city:

Outside our front door

Step 4: Turn on your computer and receive a flurry of emails from the university telling people to go home, or not to come in at all. Libraries are closed. Cafeterias across campus are closed because no groceries were delivered. The M25 is still backed up. London has become a ghost-town.

Step 5: Laugh, I mean, really LAUGH, when the BBC weather woman says that with the wind chill, the temperature in London will be a BITTERLY COLD -5C!!  Yes, that’s right. It was bitterly cold. HA HA HA HA…sorry…

Step 6: Think back to the great snow storm of 1999 in Toronto when they called in the army to help dig themselves out. The rest of Canada laughed and mocked Torontonians. Then again, they did have over 80cm of snow. London had 15cm at the most. This city, however, appears to have few snow plows. And despite the repeated forecast, sanding of roads appears to be a slow process. A BBC radio announcer on Day 2 of the Extreme Weather Event, in response to the wide-spread criticism about London’s lack of preparedness for the snow, says, ‘It is not beyond the wit of man to put grit on the roads.’ Only on the BBC…

Step 7: If there’s snow, then what choice do you have, but to play in it?! Here’s what we did in the London Snow Storm of 2009: