Web Development by Alistair Robinson

1. Toe

We’ve all got things. You’ve probably got a thing. I know I’ve got several things. One is that I can move the little toe of my left foot so that it’s…well, just watch the footage below.

Can anyone else do this? I would be (mildly) interested to know.

2. Whelk

Whelks! What a great idea. Wow, we’re so adventurous. Aren’t we just the coolest goddam cool urbanite gourmet jelly beans in town? Well…

After a bit of sunbathing in the garden we hopped on a bus up to Stockbridge to mooch, josh, eat, drink, make hay, chat, and drink. First stop fishmonger and it’s always the same: what to get? Do I gotta know before I get in the shop? Apparently so, so:

Er, let’s try some whelks

Ten whelks in a bag. Stuck them in the cellar at St Bernards bar, time to look around some shops, but suddenly I’m on fire with the desire: I gotta have pizza, so Pizza Express, sitting outside, by the Water of Leith, bottle of wine, amazing pizzas (artichoke is my current favourite vegetable (vegetable?)), first-class chat. Ann hit with the inspiration let’s call Annie, see if she wants to come for a drink.

Avoca was the venue, the personnel: Ann and Annie and me, the refreshment: three bottles of shiraz, and subjects under discussion included underwear, nostalgic stockbridge reminiscences and heaps of gossip. I was happy enough to sit back and listen.

Whelk-related excitement and trepidation was building, and one more bottle would’ve been a step too far, so it was back to the pub to pick up said molluscs, and back home to cook said shell-bound blighters.

Ann handled the cooking. Spaghetti with a light olive-oil and chilli sauce. Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, so see below for the whelk-verdict:

We’ve come to vainly pride ourselves on our willingness to try anything and on our love of all kinds of food, so it was fun, liberating and extremely funny to find something so utterly fucking disgusting.

3. Porridge

The title of this post is a phrase uttered by the inimitable Andrew Murdoch in a normal-enough conversation (the explanation is too mundane to include in this blog, but suffice to say he was not being deliberately surreal), and I thought – and said at the time – that he must be the first person in history to say it. I was wrong, as a google will prove.

It’s easy to produce a phrase that is novel, never been said before, though it’s not always the ones you assume. Anyway, it’s all down to the combinatorial nature of language. Stephen Pinker says:

The infinite use of finite media distinguishes the human brain from virtually all the artificial language devices…

And also from animal communication, which has a finite repertoire, or “an analog signal that registers the magnitude of some state”, or “random variations on a theme”.

I thought that Jo, an e-commerce and marketing guru of my acquaintance, had been similarly original in the Hallion courtyard a couple of weeks ago. Derek and I were trying to describe the Ready Brek adverts from – when was it, the 80s? In these adverts, after eating said oaty breakfast food, children are protected from the cold on their way to school by an orange aura. Jo is Australian and so has little knowledge of such matters. Incidentally, Derek had explained earlier that he uses such an aura to protect him from the rain and as an aid to levitation – uses never originally claimed by the manufacturers but clearly very real to him.

Jo: So it’s like a porridge-induced force-field?

I said, as I had to Andy, that it was the first time in history that anybody had said that. But again I was wrong, because it appears in this Scotsman article. Remarkable partly because it was written probably just a few hundred metres away only a few months ago. In fact, it calls for some kind of joint celebration. It was Adrian Mather who wrote the article. Adrian: if you read this, get in touch.

Messed around with a photo I took of some trees, so now it almost looks like some of the rock formations in Bryce Canyon, Utah, silhouetted against a sky set ablaze by the setting sun.

Posted in food, humour, personal | 2 Comments »