Posts by Gareth
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One observation on curries in New Zealand: when we arrived here 21 years ago, there were very few Indian restaurants in ChCh. The best we found was run by a Fijian Indian family, and to someone accustomed to the standard British curry menu (which is rooted in Bangladesh, cf Rick Stein's India), their food was... odd. Delicious, but odd. They told me that most Indian chefs of the time were from Fiji.
Over the next 10 years, there was an explosion in the number of Indian restaurants, but this time the chefs actually came from India. Again, the food was often delicious - and arguably more authentic than Brit curry - but it didn't take them long to work out that a good proportion of their customers were either UK expats or NZrs who cut their curry teeth in Britain, and so their menus evolved more towards the British/Bangladeshi norm.
One dish that never made the trip was the one I ate the most in my earlier life: chicken dhansak. This - in its Brit curry form - is basically tarka dhall with chicken, sweetened and soured a bit. Proper sub-continental dhansak is a lot more complex, but you know, you likes what you know, and I'm pleased to report that the chef at the Curry'n'Kebabs in Amberley is now producing a rather good off-menu version. You'll have to try it, Nik... ;-)
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Joe Meek was certainly instrumental (sorry) in introducing all sorts of sound effects and recording techniques to the charts. He was what you might call a character...
His biggest hit eerily prefigured the White Stripes...
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Being a beardless grey beard, mine are the Cuban missile crisis and the very real fear that we were all going to die in a flash. I would have been 8. We lived near a rocket testing range, so this didn't seem unlikely. I asked my dad about nuclear bombs and politics, and he said that the Tories wanted more bombs, while Labour wanted to ban them. Sage advice that proved formative in terms of my political views...
I also dimly remember something about satellites, and standing with mum and dad in a Hebridean back garden looking up at the stars expecting to be able to see them whizz above us. I thought this might be Sputnik 1, but I would have been far too young at the time, so it was probably...
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Capture: Very Vintage, in reply to Nora Leggs,
We have white wisteria waterfalls at the moment...
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Can't do vintage. Can do spring...
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Thanks for the Cortez. Mr Young has more chins than I recall, but still has that golden touch.
More Barn!
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Hard News: Friday Music: A beat is more…, in reply to bob daktari,
Well, I could hear that with my deaf ear, so it must be good...
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Hard News: Friday Music: A beat is more…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
It's a deaf sentence (David Lodge book - very funny).
Apparently they can trigger the little hair cells to regrow in mice. And the recent progress in linking cochlear implants with iPhones is encouraging. I think computational hearing is going to be very interesting - think hearing aids that can do sound sculpting on the fly.
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Over the last ten years I have become, to all intents and purposes, deaf in my left ear. Thus my views on listening to music have changed, as have my preferred methods. There is a certain irony in all this, given that for a good chunk of my younger years I wrote about, published about, obsessed about hi-fi. And then there's the tinnitus...
These days, being deeply rural and possessed of much grass that requires mowing, I spend a lot of summer time listening via a recently obsoleted iPod Shuffle, wishing it would do mono.. In the office, the iMac provides music via some slightly better than average computer speakers, and in the kitchen an old radio and an old Apple Airport serves John Campbell while cooking, and occasionally something more outrageous via AirPlay. But the recent revelation, and remember I can no longer opine on stereo imaging, is the Naim Muso Qb, which does TV sound, streams my iTunes library, and annoys SWMBO, even though she be asleep at the other end of the house...
Works wonders with your veg chopping
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I'm waiting for Trump to declare that they will be "fast followers"...
