Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

Despite the snow today, summer's definitely coming. I can feel it in the air: there's this frisson of ozone. I can also hear it: the birds are singing. I can see it too: it's light when I go home (usually), and my flowerbed and veggies are starting to wake up.

Summer also means barbeques. Lots of them. It also means some experimentation at Nev's place. Last year we grilled pretty much everything we could lay our hands on, but there was always a trusted favourite that we keep coming back to: the Nev Burger.

I call it the Nev burger, but chances are Nev found it somewhere else. I don't know and I'm not really sure I care. It's delicious.

Here's the recipe. You'll notice that it's a "guy" recipe, in that it doesn't rely on weights and measures in the same way that a "chick" recipe might. In "guy" land, measures are units of booze and weights are things you lift in the gym to pack the burgers you eat onto your Herculean physique.

Back to the recipe (feeds the guys you have over):

• Some ground beef. Maybe half a kilo. Maybe more. Use your judgement.
• Fresh Coriander
• An onion or two
• Garlic
• Some buns
• Lettuce
• Beef Tomatoes
• Creamed Horseradish
• A pack of cheese slices (the plasticky kind)
• Some chilli powder
• Mayo
• Ketchup
• Mustard

Chop the onion and garlic, chuck them into a bowl with the beef. Add some chilli powder and creamed horseradish. The horseradish acts as a flavour enhancer and binder. Chop the coriander. Chuck it in. Chuck some more in. Salt and pepper the mix. Form into patties and chow down with the rest of the ingredients in traditional burger fashion.

Enjoy with a cool, crisp, refreshing beer or a mojito.

I was at a work party the other day in the Barbican. We'd booked out one of the cinemas for the company pow-wow, followed by the arboretum for drinks and nibbles. Magicians and cartoonists worked the room and one of them drew this of me:

I'm as vain as the next guy, I suppose. I wanted a caricature for use on this blog and on Facebook, but I wanted it to look as if it were a caricature of me, rather than, say, Jude Law's Gigolo Joe from the movie A.I.

What do you think?

I honestly thought they were Italians.

I was sitting (yes, sitting! I got lucky!) on the Tube on the way home last night, head buried in the Endymion Omnibus, when a load of rowdy blokes got onto the tube, adding to the already sardine-like quality of the rush-hour crowds. They started singing football songs, which had a south European lilt to them, hence my false assumption: they were Croatian.

Apparently, there was a big football match last night at Wembley. I live fairly near Wembley and I had no clue. This is because I don't follow football. It doesn't interest me in the slightest. In fact, on some level, I'm anti-football. I see people talk for hours about the ins and outs of their sports, applying incredible reasoning and statistical powers to the points-systems and league-tables. At the same time, the real world around them needs these people to apply this deep thought to the real world problems around them.

It's a taboo to talk about sex politics and religion in polite company, but it's OK to talk football. In the end, our public discourse is infantilised.

The Croatians started banging the ceiling of the carriage, singing "We love Croatia, we do!", and some brave Londoners tried to start a counter-chant of "So why don't you fuck off back there then!", but it was a flaccid attempt and the commuters weren't in the mood.

Still, the local pride was still there. After all, London had once been the capital city of an Empire that controlled a quarter of the world's population, and this faded jingoism is now relegated to playing itself out on the football pitch. Perhaps this is better than the fields of Flanders or Omdurman, but the pride's still there and one chap muttered to the other, "They'll be laughing on the other side of their faces after the match".

England lost 3-2 to Croatia. Croatia was all over them like a cheap suit, from what I saw whilst channel-hopping. England was beaten by a country with a population 13 times smaller with an economy 31 times smaller. The Croatians were laughing on the other side of their faces alright -they had to give the other side a rest.

You may know that Dinah always throws awesome parties. This year, her birthday party was held in Knutsford, Cheshire and held jointly with her friend Caz. The theme was "Under the Sea", so I was forced to unleash my inner pirate.

Photos of the event are all over Facebook, but will be posted on this blog shortly.

It's astonishing how a costume can make you enter your character. I was "Yarr'ing" and Shivering me timbers for all it was worth - barfing up bits of lung and vocal chord the next day. It reminds me of a story I read about actors in Lord of the Rings or a similar movie, who actually started to unconsciously segregate themselves according to whether they were Orcs or Elves. Very odd.

OK.

I've been very disparaging about an exhibition at the Tate Modern in a previous post, but I can't help marvelling at this crack. A small crack in one concrete slab has been expanded upon by an artist to stretch the entire length of the Tate's Turbine hall. It's impressive work.

What's nice as well is that although there have been injuries resulting from the crack, the management at the Tate hasn't caved into the Health and Safety brigade and fenced it off.

However, the artist couldn't help herself from emitting some unnecessary arty-guff about how the gap symbolises racial division: representing "the gap between white Europeans and the rest of the world's population". Does this mean that there's a huge gap between white Europeans and Americans? And Japanese? And Australians? Does this mean that there's a huge gap between white Europeans and non-white Europeans?

My advice: Either spend more time on the drivel-text or just forget about it in the first place.

You had me with the crack on its own; although why it cost £300,000 is beyond me.

I'm a genius.

You know this to be true simply because I say it is so.

If you need any proof of my genius, simply ask me, "Ciaran, are you a genius?".

I'll tell you that I am.

Q.E.D.

Tonight, I had occasion to go to The World as a Stage. I went with Rebecca and Rosie, who took part in a piece of art by Roman Ondák. She joined hundreds of others in drawing a picture of the "artist" based solely on a description of him. Not everyone got their work hung in the exhibition: only about 30 were chosen. Rebecca's was one of them. It's obviously a very cool thing to say that you had work on show in the Tate.

What amused me was the writeup for Roman Ondák in the programme. The art by other people was not the only thing in the room. There was also a little video of peoples' feet as they wandered around a gallery with their shoelaces untied. Quoting the programme:

"This quiet act of non-conformity remains ambiguous, suggesting a protest against (or for?) something we can only imagine."

A suggested "protest against (or for?) something we can only imagine"??

Oh please!

What a ridiculous piece of non-commital prose! Why bother? Why not just have an empty room in which to sit and read a good book? Why pulp trees to print flyers with that nonsense? Why not just forget the whole stupid charade in the first place?

The rest of the exhibition went downhill from there, until I came across an interesting timeline/ mural about the Miners' Strike. For such a major incident in my early lifetime, I didn't know much about it, so I read the wall eagerly. At this point, the exhibition was more like a museum piece, so I didn't really see the art in it, but I was lost in there for a good 20 minutes.

Walking between exhibits, we joked that the floor-level lighting in one of the corridors was probably a weird bit of conceptual art. Actually, it was. The Telegraph singled it out as the most compelling piece in the show, no less!

And would you believe it? On going into the exhibition, the attendant who handed out the programmes said to us, "The News at Ten is back!".

I just shrugged, gurgled and moved on.

Rosie didn't, "Sorry? What? What are you talking about?".

"Dunno. They just told me to say it", came the reply.

Apparently, the Telegraph had the answer to this madness:

"What looks at first like a bit of nonsense actually has a purpose – to make you aware that you are leaving one world and entering another, passing from real life into the irrational realms of art.

When I stood at the entrance to the show the attendant said, "Children die in half-term horror", implanting the idea that, by comparison with what happens in real life, the art I was about to see is frivolous and self-indulgent."

"Credo quia absurdum" - "I believe because it is absurd". That seems to be the watchword here, and why I think I'll always have trouble with this bizarre sort of abstract art, or other things that require me to suspend my reason.

Maybe I'm just a grouch…

Still, in that spirit of the absurd: I'm a genius. Credo quia absurdum.

I'm back on Vancouver Island and the road-trip part of my Canadian Adventure is now at an end.

We traveled about 3,000km in all; passing through 2 states and countless towns and cities.

Click on the map below for an interactive version of our route. 

Here's a short video of the car that took us approximately 3,000km across British Columbia and Alberta.

The car is almost as old as I am. Unlike me, however, it got a lot of admiring glances during the trip, including:

• Several people wanting their photo taken with the car.
• Numerous gas station attendants commenting on how much they loved the car.
• And memorably, one roadside worker's jaw dropping as we drove by and murmuring, "Cooooooool…."

We're in Osoyoos. It's in the Okanagan Valley, a desert in the middle of the Rockies.

It's rather incongruous that during the few hours it took to get to Osoyoos from our last stop of Nelson, we were passing through cool forest and snow-capped mountain terrain.

At one point I saw a hobo walking along the road with his dog and a shopping trolley. He was in the middle of nowhere (much of Canada is, it seems). I remember wondering why on earth he was there and where he was going.

Digression aside: on reaching the Okanagan Valley, we found ourselves looking at an arid landscape, which reminded me of a hamada. The clouds don't seem to like this valley very much and there are vineyards everywhere.

It was here that we decided to make a two-day stop. We'd done quite a bit of travelling through the Rockies and for once, I was feeling hot. Osoyoos is lovely and warm and set on a beautiful lake. 

Soon after throwing our bags into the hotel, we headed out to see what was going on in Osoyoos. I didn't hold out much hope: the receptionist's answer to my question about where the action was, was that it was an hour's drive north.

In any case, we found a bar or two and the usual depressing series of chain "restaurants". I'm both fascinated and horrified by the prevalance of these places. I'm fascinated because I can't understand how one town can possibly justify having a dozen hamburger "restaurants, which all feature essentially the same menu. I'm horrified because I've been eating on the cheap and now have a lot of running and swimming to do when I get home.

Undaunted, we made a base of operations at a local pub in Osoyoos: had a bit of lunch and shot a bit of pool.

Pretty soon, we were playing pool with a Floridian called James. He was passing through for work. He's a cartographer, and his work involves driving around the world and place pyramidal mirrors at selected points so that a special aeroplane can fly over and fire lasers at his mirrors in order to create accurate physical maps. 

Several hours in, we were shooting pool with lots of different people from around Osoyoos, and before we knew it, we were holding court at a table surrounded by locals. Even the manageress joined us and started buying us shooters.

But nobody knew what they were letting themselves in for when the Karaoke started.

Nev and I dominated the proceedings: belting out horribly atonal renditions of Bohemian Rhapsody, some Depeche Mode, some Guns and Roses and Dennis Leary's famous crowd-pleaser. I was also dragged up to duet with a gravelly-voiced woman who later gave me her email address. It began, "whackedgranny@…".

The Floridian joined us back at our hotel room after last orders. Unfortunately, so did two other people from the bar, so copious drinking on the balcony overlooking the lake ensued but was marred by having to make a near-herculean effort to drive the gatecrashers out.

The next morning, we headed down to the local Smitty's "family restaurant" (greasy spoon to you and me). We looked awful and felt worse.

Looking across the restaurant, there were several families in their Sunday Best and clearly having a wholesome family meal after church. And here we were, having just got out of bed and suffering for the sin of drink:

"Let there be wine, women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after." - Byron

The food was a stodge-a-thon. I had pancakes with maple syrup and lots of smoked pig. Nev had the same but with potatoes and toast instead of the pancakes. Neither of us could finish our food.

People here seem to have a real obsession with food: every table had a little collection of Trivial Pursuit cards. Perhaps this was in keeping with the "family restaurant" theme. One of the questions on the Trivial Pursuit cards read:

"What was the Boston Chicken chain renamed, after branching out into other entrees?"

Stumbling out of Smitty's, we lurched back to the hotel and passed the hobo we'd seen the day before in the middle of nowhere.  

Aside from a very sore head, I've no idea how much that night of boozing cost us. In true Gonzo style, we had bade gladhandedly farewell to all before walking confidently out of the bar, and leaving our tab behind.

Hopefully our sheer charisma was reward enough…

During the past two days, I've travelled about 400km and experienced two different ways of looking at the world.

The first was when Nev and I had just finished climbing Tunnel Mountain, just outside Banff. During the 2.3km climb, we were overtaken by some rather nubile young ladies. "If only We were a bit younger" we thought, referring, of course, to our fitness and ability to keep up with them back in the days when, five years or so ago, we were training hard at full-contact karate.

When I got to the top, I had a good sit down and admired the view (photos to be added later). The girls, however, were far ahead of their teacher, who joined them to give them a little talk at the summit about the beautiful valley they lived in, as well as giving them a bit of a historical perspective on the area. Apparently, Queen Victoria herself had come to the top of the mountain and had sat upon a purpose-built throne, cut into the mountain, to survey her domininon.

At one point, one of the students remarked that one learns something new every day. The teacher responded that it is important to learn something new about oneself every day.

To the cynical British ear, this was a little cheesy, but why should this be the case?

I've spoken to many people who have commented on how refreshing it is to have been to North America (lumping the USA and Canada together here) and have been exposed to the wonderful optimism and "can-do" spirit out there.

I was impressed by the respect and positive attitude of the class on that summit. My inspiration towards perhaps one day becoming a teacher was renewed.

I'm now in Crowsnest Pass. We're now on our Westbound stretch back to Vancouver Island.

Nev and I just had a wonderful rib dinner. What's very, very nice about going out in Canada is that wherever we seem to go, we end up falling into random chats with strangers. This time, we joined a couple at their table.

The couple was an ex-pat from the UK and her Canadian boyfriend of several years. They were charming and wonderful company.

What was interesting, however,  was that the expat was probably the most negative person I've spoken to on my trip: everything from the car we were driving, to London living, to the hicksville quality of the locals was subject to some sort of derision.

Is this tendency to play down the good things in life and focus on the bad a peculiarly British phenomenon?

Is my last question yet another self-effacing jab at the British psyche?

Will my questions never cease?