Luke — Write.as

Kraftwerk

When the news broke that Florian Schneider had died I was really gutted. Whilst lockdown is going on I've been a bit randomly emotional anyway and his death had hit me hard. Whilst I'm no way an uberfan of Kraftwerk I do like their music. It is a default for me for background music and one of my perennials on Spotify. The second record I ever bought, at the age of 10 from Woolworths (of course!), was Kraftwerk's The Model. (The first was the theme tune to the movie Flash Gordon but we don't talk about that.) I still love the track today so this video blows my mind: Kraftwerk's The Model played on the 14 bells of Utrecht's Dom Tower. Can't even begin to fathom about how they do that. The fact that pretty much all the music I liked as a teen and young adult was influenced by Kraftwerk shows just how much an influence they had.

100 Days to Offload is a blogging challenge started by Kev Quirk to help get through lockdown. Check https://100daystooffload.com for information.

Saturday was baking day

#100DaysToOffload – Day 19

Lazy day yesterday for me. Actually not that lazy but indulgent is probably the best way to describe it.

Started off by doing back at home pain au chocolates but modifying them with Reese's Pieces peanut butter chips.

the before

They were DELICIOUS.

the after

(Only 3 in the picture as the rest of the family descended on them before I got a photo!)

Then while I was waiting for the bread to proof I made chocolate chip cookies; which handily heated the kitchen and oven up nicely.

yum

Once they came out the oven the bread went in and that came out looking like this:

fresh loaf

Shortly after that loaf came out a friend popped round for a doorstep chat. After showing off the loaf to him he looked really jealous so I gave it to him and made another while watching the resumption of the Bundesliga matches. I was so keen to watch I even paid for the privilege rather than relying on one of the usual snide streaming sites. ; )

More Football

#100DaysToOffload – Day 18

So yesterday's post wasn't what I'd intended to write but serves well as a basis for understanding this post. So my son is football mad and great at football. I know nothing about football. Where do I start with him? First thing to know is football match tickets can be expensive. Silly expensive. About 6 years ago I took him along to Brighton & Hove Albion to watch his first match. We went with my mate Steve, my son's godfather, who happens to love football and play a lot himself. It was a dire match that Brighton lost 0-1. It was cold and raining. If anything I hoped the experience would put my boy off football for life. As we left the ground after the final whistle he turned round and said “that was great!”. Ah oh! So to make life cheaper (paying £40 a pop to entertain a 5 year old for an afternoon wasn't a long term option) I asked about and found out about Whitehawk FC.

(A bit of scene setting: We live in Hove. Hove is nice. It's genteel and middle class and full of yoga instructors. The local corner shop to me sells 3 types of non-dairy milk alternatives and chia seeds. You get the picture? Whitehawk is the other side of town and has the reputation of being the rough part of town. When we first moved down 20 years ago I heard the reputation of Whitehawk and went for a stroll about one day as I love walking around a new area to get to know it. Where I grew up in south London at the time had the highest rates of street robbery in the country and was the epicentre of the London crack trade. Whitehawk in comparison seemed like quite a nice suburb to me so I guess it is all relative though I do understand kids growing up there probably aren't afforded all the opportunities that kids growing up elsewhere in the city might have.)

Whitehawk had always been a small non-league team in the shadow of the Brighton & Hove Albion and had had tiny crowds. In fact [the “Wealdstone Raider” video that went viral])https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealdstone_Raider) about 7 years ago was filmed there. It's a drunk opposition supporter taking the mickey out of Whitehawk saying “you've got no fans” and being aggressive. However some (alledgedly rather dodgy) local businessmen had been pumping into the club and they had had 3 successive promotions in a row to get the National League South. That's the 6th tier of English football and sniffing at professional full-time footballers and real chances of joining the “proper” football league. All of which meant they had a bit of a buzz about them when someone mentioned them to us. One Saturday afternoon I take my son and a couple of his friends along (as kids under 16 were free with a paying adult with my ticket being £12!). Their ground is a bit ramshackle and looked like it was last renovated in the early 90s. Unlike league football you can drink alcohol in sight of the pitch and you aren't allocated seats. In fact the opposite as fans tend to congregate behind the other side's goal which means both sets of fans swap ends at half time. However what struck me the most were the fans there. Forming a large, noisy, cheerful bunch they sung good humoured songs the whole match long. Songs against homophobia and sexism. Funny songs celebrating the players and songs about themselves. And they drank a lot! Here's a recent video all about the Whitehawk fans so you can get the idea. Basically I loved the atmosphere and we became regulars at Whitehawk. (Not diehards but usually a match a month.) My son loved it as he got a lot of freedom there and who doesn't love singing and shouting out loud? Actually I think part of why it is so fun is when else do you get the chance to make so much noise for so long? There's something good for your soul in letting out all that energy in such a positive and noisy way.

We were also still occasionally going to BHAFC matches as my son was mad for them too so this was all costing me quite a bit! Then in the run up to my son's birthday the club were promoting half season tickets so I got us some primarily just to save money. My son loved the football, I loved having a pie and pint at halftime! At the end of the second season of having season tickets the Albion got promoted to the Premier League. The buzz and celebrations basically cemented me as a football fan and the friends that previously never broached the subject of football with me now started regularly talking to me about it.

We still go along to Whitehawk matches but much less frequently now. Still have the Albion season tickets too but my son (when we're not on lockdown!) trains 3 nights a week with his team and has matches on a Sunday. That's 9 hours a week of football alone plus the time spent watching professional football. It really had become a huge part of my life and I am missing it.

This is one of my 100 Days to Offload posts. It is a blogging challenge started by Kev Quirk. Check https://100daystooffload.com and go score the goal of making your own blog.

Football

#100DaysToOffload – Day 17

It used to be football didn't interest me in the slightest. Not at all. Had no team loyalties, no caring about results. Nothing. When I was little I was rubbish at football and was always the last one picked for teams in PE. I was physical and enjoyed athletics. It wasn't I was anti-sport but just not football. My dad wasn't into football at all so there is that influence too. My mum liked it and her brother always used to take me to matches when we visited at Christmas but I found it all a bit confusing and frightening (this is back in the late 70s and early 80s when football crowds had a certain reputation shall we say!). To add to this my parents were from different parts of the country, I was born up north and then we moved to London where I grew up. So I had no real sense of loyalty to a place, or rooting even, some people have that helps them take pride in their local team. All this meant as an adult approaching middle age I was known as the friend that didn't like football.

Then along comes my son. He is 4 years younger than his older sister and most of the “baby friends” we made when we had her were parents of boys (just the way it turned out). This did mean when we went to the park or round for playdates he ended up playing with older boys. He'd play football with them and by the age of 4 or 5 he could pretty much keep up with them. The assorted dads would say “he'd really good at football” and we'd think “that's nice”. Then he started school and would play with his sister's classmates. As he was little and they were big they usually wouldn't pass to him which meant if he wanted the ball he'd have to get it so he got fearless at tackling. Aged 6 he said he'd like to join a football team. Local grassroots sports teams' websites are atrocious. Really hard to find information so we asked about and got recommended one of the various local teams. Went along to one of their drop in sessions and on the first session got asked if he wanted to join the team. Only later did we learn that that team is notoriously hard to get as they only accept good players. That first season he won Player of the Year and was regularly man of the match. The whole thing was a huge baptism of fire for me as I know literally nothing about football or football terminology. Turns out the team has got 2 ex-pro players' sons in and the majority of the other dads used to play at non-league/county level. Then there is me! Still it was fun to live vicariously through my son's exploits. He did a second season with the local team. That season they won every match they played but 1 and that match they drew. At the end of the season he had a trial at the academy of the local Premier League club academy and out of 300 boys at the trial he was the only 1 they invited back. Proud is an understatement. He's now done 2 season with them and is signed for a third. Obviously he is loving it. At the start it was so surreal to go from playing Mile Oak Wanderers to playing Arsenal or Chelsea but he handled it fine. The one thing we do with him and the academy is try to manage expectations. We take each season as it comes and try to tell him it is just for 1 season and not to expect more. Luckily he is a bit of a renaissance man and is top set at most subjects at school plus he plays trumpet and guitar. If the football doesn't work out I'm sure he'll do OK for a job of some sort.

This post was meant to be about how I got into football and ended up being about how awesome my son is. (He is by the way.) Maybe tomorrow's post will have to be about how I started to enjoy going to football matches and appreciating football matches but guess I wanted to show the extent of just how much and quickly football came to MASSIVE part of my life.

This is one of my 100 Days to Offload posts. It is a blogging challenge started by Kev Quirk. Check https://100daystooffload.com and go score the goal of making your own blog.

Bread

#100DaysToOffload – Day 16

With the obligatory meta-posting that goes with blogs I'd like to say I can't believe that so far I've made it to day 16.

Anyhow down to business. There were all the jokey comments and recipes posted at the start of lockdown for people keeping a sourdough culture but I've been backing bread at home for years. When they first become popular (maybe 25 years ago?) someone bought me a breadmaker as a gift. I loved it and used it regularly until it died about 10 years later. Then after that I did have a sourdough culture but worked out pretty soon that essentially I'm quite a lazy baker. That and my wife not being able to resist eating all the bread as soon as it is out of oven (which OBVIOUSLY made it my fault she put on weight) soon put an end to that. What changed it for me was the no-knead recipe that was published about 6 years ago in the New York Times. Bread-making where you do pretty much nothing and still get an amazing loaf? Yes please, sign me up! Since then I've had bursts of regularly baking versus periods of only occasionally. Recently however my go-to for bread recipes is Trine Hahnemann's Scandinavian Baking.

book cover

It also introduced me to using fresh yeast when baking. Fresh yeast is odd and squidgy and smells like a brewery. First of all I could only source it in poncy health shops where it cost a fortune then I discovered it was available in all the local Polski skleps (Polish grocery shops) at about half the price. Result. So whilst I've not seen any yeast or flour in a supermarket since the end of March I've been going to the Polish shop and picking yeast up regularly. The local independent bakery sells flour on a Friday so I've been down to stock up.

Reason I'm waffling all this? Today I made 2 rustic* baguettes we used for sandwiches at lunchtime and I was really proud of them. (*Rustic as they were quite misshapen and lumpy but still tasty.). I didn't even think about getting a photo until they all gone, sorry.

This is one of my 100 Days to Offload posts. It is a blogging challenge started by Kev Quirk. Check https://100daystooffload.com for tasty recipes and see if they fancy cooking up a blog yourself.

Following On

#100DaysToOffload – Day 15

The book I'm currently reading is “Following On” by Emma John. It's about the author's obsession with the English cricket team in the 90's (when the English cricket team were arguably one of the worst national sides in the world).

book cover

It's a mix of a memoir with her interviewing some of the cricketeers from the team to ask their recollections. So far it is very enjoyable and light-hearted with lots of self-depreciation.

To be honest it is making me miss cricket a lot. Whilst I'm not a big fan of Test cricket or county cricket I do enjoy 1 day matches and love T20. That all started when I broke my ankle in 3 places a few years ago and pretty much was confined to the sofa for 3 months whilst waiting for it to heal up. I discovered Indian Premier League cricket which was just the entertainment I needed. Whilst cricket traditionalists think of T20 as “fizzy keg” cricket it does it for me. Last summer I had a season pass for all the Sussex Cricket Club T20 games as their ground is only a 15 minute walk from my house and I had already booked 2 tickets for this summer. Actually I had wanted to get a season pass again but they all sold out in before my January payday came and I could afford it! Oh well. Like the football cricket isn't currently cancelled and is instead postponed so maybe I'll still get to go.

This is one of my 100 Days to Offload posts. It is a blogging challenge started by Kev Quirk. Check https://100daystooffload.com for more info. Or don't. See if I care.

I Hate Printers

#100DaysToOffload – Day 14

When I did desktop support there were 2 types of jobs I always hated: PDAs and printers. Thankfully PDAs went out of fashion a decade ago but printers are still with us. I moved out of desktop support a while ago and now my work has an external contract for the printing service (they run the print server, accounting software and maintain the devices) so largely it is all out of my life.

Until a few years ago we'd never had a printer at home and either Mrs Luke or myself would just take advantage of the printers at work. We never took the advantage too much but if we needed boarding passes or tickets to something printed we'd just do it through our office printer with no harm done. However once our eldest started senior school she would need to print things off for homework several times a week and often would leave it to the last minute. This would cause all sorts of bother and anguish as we usually couldn't print it until we were back in the office. So to create domestic bliss we bought a printer. Just a cheapo HP from Currys for £29. What I liked most about this was the HP Instant Ink. Yes yes I know it is like DRM for ink cartridges but this is something I am more than happy to trade off on if it means we pay £1.99 a month and get new cartridges posted to us automatically when we needed them. This printer worked fine for 3 years and I had actually softened my stance on printers thinking modern ones were not that bad at all really. Then disaster struck and our cheapo printer died! The rollers and motor seemed knackered probably from all the extra usage it had had over the past 2 months. Now that everyone is working at home budget printers are pretty much sold out everywhere or twice the price they were in February but got another HP delivered a the weekend.

HP have done the thing of “simplifying” the software so much it is actually hard to do anything, like turning off direct wifi printing or setting security, but after a while of fighting it we will have domestic harmony again.

I hate printers.

I am taking in the 100 Days to Offload blogging challenge set by Kev Quirk, so there. https://100daystooffload.com if you fancy printing off the challenge to read later.

The Beauty of Maps

#100DaysToOffload – Day 13

As a child I used to love looking through our Reader's Digest Illustrated Atlas of the World. Found it fascinating looking at all the different countries and cities. As an adult I very much enjoyed reading Prisoners of Geography Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global Politics, by Tim Marshall and was gutted to miss out on a talk by Tim Marshall at the British Library at the start of the year as it was on the same day as my daughter's birthday. She still moans about how my son & I went to watch football on the afternoon of her birthday once so I'm not risking that again! So the short BBC series The Beauty of Maps has been right up my street. There's only 4 episodes so you can watch them all in a evening if you wanted and it covers the both the history of map making and also the stories behind the maps. Very much recommend it for some lockdown viewing (whilst we still have lockdown left).

As an aside I do feel a bit sad my kids only experience maps on phone or tablet screens. We do have a couple of atlases but they've literally never shown any interest in them.

Now this is a story all about how My life got flipped turned upside down And I'd like to take a minute just sit right there I'll tell you how I started doing https://100daystooffload.com

Ozymandias

#100DaysToOffload – Day 12

Early on into lockdown I got an email from my stepdad asking me to join a 'poetry exchange' (you can tell it was started by an older person as otherwise it would be a WhatsApp message or Facebook post!). It's one of those chain/pass-along emails but entirely harmless. Here's the text (with email addresses removed):

Dear Friends

I invite you to join a collective, constructive, and hopefully uplifting, exchange. It’s a one-time thing and we hope you will participate. We have picked those we think would be willing and would make it fun.

Please send a poem to the person whose name is in position 1 below (even if you don’t know them) with the email subject “Poem Exchange”. It should be a favourite text/verse/meditation that has affected you in difficult times. Or not. Don’t agonise over it.

After you’ve sent the short poem/verse/quote etc to the person in position 1, and only that person, copy this letter into a new email. Move my name to position 1 and put your name in position 2. Only my name and your name should show in the new email. Send it to 20-ish friends BCC (blind copy).

Seldom does anyone drop out because we all need new pleasures. The turnaround is fast, as there are only two names on the list, and you only have to do it once.

Stay safe and well and pass it on even if like me your favourite poem dates from the age 11/12.

As it seemed a pleasant thing to do I joined in and sent it on and also sent my favourite poem which is Percy Shelley's Ozymandias.

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The only other poem I considered with the opening monologue from the film Trainspotting written by screenwriter John Hodge. Most people can remember the opening part but probably don't recall the last few sentences which are really grim.

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself.

Choose your future.

Choose life.

As for the poetry exchange I think I got maybe 5 sent to me and I had sent it to about 12 people I think. Trouble is I don't actually have that many friend's email addresses as it is all phone numbers or social media profiles. None of the ones I received were particularly memorable but I did enjoy reading them all.

Now this is a story all about how My life got flipped turned upside down And I'd like to take a minute just sit right there I'll tell you how I started doing https://100daystooffload.com

Bin raider

#100DaysToOffload – Day 11

When I was little we were quite hard up. My whole school career I qualified for free dinners. My mum however was very resourceful and frugal and would often take things others had thrown out. She was forever diving into skips or getting me to carry some item home. Trips to the dump would end up with her bringing more home than we took in the first place. As a kid it would embarrass me immensely and I'd be going “please don't Mum”. Naturally she didn't listen a word I said.

Fast forward to my adulthood and I myself do this all the time. Started when I moved to Brighton 20 years ago as there is quite a neighbourly culture of leaving decent quality unwanted items outside with a “please take” note on. We had a hand-me-down sofa for out first flat and when we finally replaced it we put it outside. Over the next few years I saw that sofa left outside various properties on the surrounding streets at least twice.

Where we live now there are communal bins at the end of the road and they are a goldmine! There was a bag that caught my eye as it looked out of place in placed in a bin so I picked it up and it contained various bits and bobs. Looked like someone had moved out and left some stuff behind so someone had chucked it. Amongst the stuff were various designer bandanas/scarves, a digital camera and an ipod! The ipod was old and not working but I googled the model and it turned out there was an Apple recall for that exact model which was finishing that week. I sent it off and Apple sent me a brand new ipod in return. Result! That went straight onto eBay though usually I only get bits I can use myself and don't go looking for items to sell.

Another time I was passing some small business units and could see workmen chucking loads of stuff out. Seems a company had gone bust or not paid their rent so were being cleared out. That got me 3 laptops that were about a year old each.

There's at least a dozen things in our kitchen that I've squirrelled away (that's what my wife calls it, probably as it sounds more pleasant than bin raiding) and various others around the house. Got a beautiful late 60's/early 70's pottery plant pot on my window sill that I found. Whilst everyone is on lockdown they're all sorting out their cupboards and drawers so there is plenty to be found at the moment. This week alone I've got a hanging plant basket (needed one for some mint plants), some fake battery powered candles (bit odd but mrs Luke has some already and really likes them – which totally surprised me as I thought she'd think they were naff) and these beauties:

lovely pair

It's so easy to visualise the adverts for these in the back of the Sunday supplements. The one with the floating disembodied head is particularly surreal. (For reference I like them ironically, the naffness is the charm.)

100 Days to offload is a blogging challenge started by Kevin Quirk. Check out https://100daystooffload.com to see if you are tempted to join in yourself.