Generalising

I wasn’t going to write up this recipe, but today I changed my mind, as you will see!

You need:

-four chicken breasts, boneless and skinless;
-an onion;
-three garlic cloves;
-three tablespoons of honey;
-half a lime;
-two handfuls of dried apricots;
-some ground cinnamon;
-black pepper;
-two chicken stock cubes
-some type of cooking oil.

Chop the chicken into bite-sized pieces and fry in your oil on a high heat, so it cooks through quickly. Once it’s done or nearly done, set it aside in a wee bowl. Chop your onion into half-slices, crush the garlic cloves and fry them up in the same pan until the onion pieces are translucent.

Slice the apricots finely and throw them in the pan, add a few shakes of ground cinnamon, a few shakes of brown pepper, and turn the heat down so the apricots start to get properly squishy.

Then make up the stock. You want it to be thick, so put two stock cubes into one mug of boiling water. Stir this, throw it into the pan and then put the chicken back in.

Stir this well, put your three tablespoons of honey in to thicken it all, and squeeze the juice of the lime in as well. Stir, stir, stir, stir, and turn the heat up so the liquid starts bubbling off. Once most of it’s gone, turn it right down and let it all jellify nicely until there’s no liquid left, just nice squishy apricot-y sauce.

Serve with rice.

This is much more complicated than my usual recipes, which is why I wasn’t going to post it originally – this series is meant to be based on a theme of delicious food you can make fast and simply – but it’s truly, truly tasty and not that difficult to make. It feeds two, if you have plenty of rice, and leaves a bit. The bit that’s left, you let cool and then put in a plastic lunchbox with two handfuls of chopped lettuce, half a chopped cucumber and the rice that’s left, plus another squeeze of lime. Eat after a long morning of classes and make happy, happy noises. So good, especially after the flavours have soaked in.

My next project: slow-roasted tomatoes. These look wonderful, but I haven’t tried them yet because I haven’t been home for seven hours together since I saw the recipe! But I will be soon, and in the meantime have done two dry runs: chopped tomatoes with black pepper roasted for an hour at 140 degrees. The first lot I put in pasta with feta cheese and olive oil (delicious!) and the second lot went in a sandwich with mozarella and honey-roast ham (also delicious).

Really, this eating-lunch lark is a dream.

In the comments on the previous post, cim notes:

It’s interesting that most ways of splitting the local authority into two seats by drawing an approximate straight line along ward boundaries give either LD+LD or LD+Con (the latter being the D’Hondt allocation), whereas this particular method gives Lab+LD or Lab+Con.

It’s better than what goes on in US redistricting, but it still highlights the need for PR over 5-6 seat constituencies so that the exact boundary lines make less difference.

So, let’s see what happens using the full set of eight North Yorks seats.

2005: Five Conservative, one LD, two Labour. Of those, only Scarborough (Con 2.5% over Lab) & Selby (Lab 1% over Con) could really be called a marginal. Total four solid and one marginal Conservative, one solid LD, one solid and one marginal Labour.

Notional 2005 after changes: York Central Labour, York Outer LD by a tiny margin (.4%) over Con. Selby & Scarborough remain marginals, but Selby is now marginal Con with Labour second (4.5%). Otherwise comfortably blue; so three solid and two marginal Conservative, one solid Labour, one solid and one intensely marginal LD.

What would PR give us?

Total votes cast in the region, 379,135, of which 165,550 (43.7%) Conservative, 105,858 Labour (27.9%), 93,828 Liberal Democrat (24.75%), 13,899 everyone else (3.7%). Eight seats, so… probably four Conservative, two Labour, two Liberal Democrat.

Both constituency systems favour the Conservatives over this. The 2005 system leaves them with a good chance at five (1% up) or six (3%) and safe on four even if losing five points; the 2010 system makes it even easier to grab the sixth seat, just needing a fraction of a point, but a loss of five points would reduce them to three, with three Labour and two LD. The net result is more favourable to the Conservatives than it deserves, but also more volatile and sensitive to the shifting electorate, which is quite interesting. I suppose part of the point is to have fewer safe seats.

Clearing out a drawer of papers today, we discovered two old banknotes, probably a gift from a far-flung relative many many years ago.

The astute reader will notice “Reserve Bank of Rhodesia” at the top of these; they were the banknotes hastily printed after UDI in 1966.

The Rhodesian pound became the Rhodesian dollar, which became the Zimbabwean dollar – which, famously, then was redenominated three times before effectively ceasing to exist last April, at a ratio of about 250 to the US dollar.

If we follow through each of the redenominations, taking the fiction it remains a functioning unit of currency, then… £1 10s Rhodesian turns into $3 Rhodesian, then $3 Zimbabwean, then – it rapidly becomes silly – $0.03 Zimbabwean (2006), $3×10^-13 Zimbabwean (2008), and finally $3×10^-25 Zimbabwean (2009); on 12th April 2009, the last day of it remaining in existence, it would thus be worth 1.2×10^-27 US dollars, or just under 8×10^-28 British pounds.

It’s hard to give the context for just how small that is. If you could somehow find an Indian ten-paise coin, probably among the lowest value currency units still circulating in any number, it’d be worth ~$0.0025; two trillion trillion times more than the nominal value of the two banknotes. (For comparison, the entire world economy is worth a mere thirty million trillion times the ten-paise coin…) The famous German post-WWI hyperinflation over three years only devalued the currency by 10¹²; this is quite literally a million million times worse. The only currency which collapsed further seems to be the Hungarian pengő, which over five years during and after WWII devalued by 10²⁹.

Things I did not know until two minutes ago: the newly created York Outer constituency is circular, entirely surrounding the York Central seat:

([source]. There’s a more detailed map here, for those wondering how the ward boundaries work out)

Intriguing. The net result is one safe Labour seat and one probable Liberal-Tory marginal; I wonder what would have happened with an east-west or north-south split.

This is an interesting little document.

If the election is called tomorrow morning for 6 May – which, finally, it looks like it will be – then this lays out the notional timetable of significant events during the next month.

• 20 April – last day to register to vote or request a postal vote; also, the last day to nominate yourself as a candidate.

• 27 April – last day to apply for a proxy vote
• …unless you get knocked down walking to the polling station in the morning; you can apply for an emergency proxy vote for medical reasons as late as 5pm on polling day

For the local elections, the deadlines are the same; 20 April to get on the register or get a postal vote, 27 April for proxy requests, and polling on 6 May.

Go forth and register!

Locke Lamora is a Gentleman Bastard. So is this book, on the whole: on the one hand, there is the Tolkienesque worldbuilding, the ancient mythical race, the ancient high-fantastical city and on the other hand, there is the unexpected dialogue, which is all piss and vinegar and people saying fuck, shit and arse. Together they make a kind of alchemical steampunk, a believable mess of well-though through fantasy and likeable, engaging characters.

The plot, let’s be clear – it’s a heist movie. Locke Lamora is a thief, his gang of Gentleman Bastards are thieves. They steal from the rich and they don’t give to the poor. Their schemes to get rich are complex confidence tricks, and the joy the author must have taken in thinking them up shines through the pages, and rollicks the story through the first few hundred pages – after that the novel darkens and the body count rises, and it becomes less likeable, but no less good a novel. The main plot is interspersed with interludes from the main characters’ backstories and details about the world in which they live, and while I think the placement and distribution of these is clumsy, they’re enjoyable for all that.

There are the usual first-novel flaws – sometimes the prose is too flowery, sometimes the dialogue is wooden or could be easily elided – but in my mind, the greatest issue with this book is its distinct lack of female characters. There basically aren’t any of note – there is a woman who never appears but conveniently exists for Locke to pine over, there is another woman who makes a couple of token appearances before being summarily killed in aid of male character development, there’s another who is the usual fantasy-world prostitute. The situation improves slightly as the novel progresses – it even passes the Bechdel test, a mere ten pages from the end – but generally it does read a little like boys’ own fantasy in this regard, which is offputting.

But – it’s fun. And I shall read the next one with interest.

Photographs from the trip to follow (when I’ve sorted them out). For now… well, it’s raining, but it was a beautiful sunny spring morning when I got up. Time for an old piece of seasonal humour.

A quick recap of the context. Through what can best be described as Insistently Being An Annoying Bugger in the mid-1930s, the author A. P. Herbert found himself campaiging on a number of politically small causes, but ones dear to the heart of many. My personal favourite was his proposal for reforming the licensing laws; the proposed Refreshment Bill had exactly one section, which proposed that “the laws of England regarding [the sale of alcohol] … shall be made, mutatis mutandis, the same as those of France”. This, like his attempt to force reform of the same legislation by causing criminal charges to be brought against the House of Commons – it reached the High Court, and just contemplate the majestic beauty of that for a second – was unsurprisingly unsuccessful. (Within a year, he would be sitting as the Member of Parliament for Oxford University; within two, he would single-handedly have pushed through a far-reaching reform of the English divorce law as an independent backbencher. Never let it be said that a quixotic campaign carried out by a non-politician has no chance…) As a part of this, he found himself drafting a vast number of proposed Bills.

Herbert was, at the time, best known for his light verse. It was, perhaps, inevitable that these two streams should coincide, in…

WHEREAS in every lawn and bed the plucky crocus lifts his head…