Doing Porridge (Oats Not Time)

My first thought this morning was: nothing beats soya milk for incredibly creamy porridge. Okay, so maybe that's a little white lie for it wasn't my first thought, but I can't remember the thoughts before that and breakfast, after all, is the most important meal of the day. And this morning my thoughts between spoonfuls turned to the texture and why soya milk gives oats an extra creaminess other dairy-free milks don't. Or can't.
I don't have the exact answer to that, though I think it might have something to do with added oils or emulsifiers, since in my unscientific experiments I've found that the milks that list them one, take longer to bind, and two, don't result in a porridge with the same consistency as that made with soya. But where's the logic in that? Because surely emulsifiers are meant to do exactly that: bind?
And this early morning thought was just meant to be a lead-in to a more pressing random thought I wished to discuss, yet here I still am formulating the merits of this milk against that to make a good bowl of porridge, stove-made and not microwave with rolled oats. Instant, what pap! Oat bran, no thanks! Scottish, well yes, but a little beyond my means when I do eat rather a lot of it, and why pay a premium when an essential bag does me very nicely. Flavoured, yuck! Artificial or otherwise, I add my own fresh or dried fruits, nuts, seeds etc to give it oomph and get me through to lunch.
I heard or read there are championships, but I think (the last I heard) even they've gone a bit hipster, whereas I'm more purist or artisan i.e. don't mess with it too much and keep it as a breakfast staple, although I could, if the cupboards were otherwise bare or I was impaired in some way, eat it at other times of the day. My brain however might think: what the hell? I don't recall having my usual download time. Besides, a bowl in the morning is satisfying in an entirely different way to say, a bowl for lunch or dinner. I imagine...I've not tried as it goes against my principles, which if you hadn't gathered I'll tell it to you straight: I'm a principled person. Even surprisingly (and it's a surprise to me too) in the making and eating of porridge, which to those of you who don't eat breakfast AT ALL and race out the door must seem a very trivial matter. 
I've been known to get up at 5am just to ensure I have a warming bowl of porridge with a few pages of whatever I'm reading. A wolfed-down biscuit would never suffice - how do you do it? - and what a hideous way to start the day: on a stomach fuelled with a takeaway latte and sugar-laden muffin. It won't get you far, although perhaps a little further than nothing.
I've never before considered porridge in this much rich detail, and I have to say it's quite fascinating (to me at any rate), although those of you who were possibly expecting a critical review on Porridge, the British sitcom first broadcast in the 1970s, must be, I imagine, sorely disappointed. If of course you're still here. You may have exited the site sharpish, having realised that Ronnie Barker (Fletcher) wasn't going to get a look-in, let alone a well-worded paragraph. Well done though if you're a first timer and have stuck it out. To here at least. Please stay to the ending, not that I can say with any certainty that in doing so your life will be enriched in any way. But if you've got the time, then stay.
Because for a good couple of years porridge has been all the rage. Just wander down supermarket aisles. Do prisons still serve it I wonder? P'raps not if it's hip to like it. And if it is spooned on trays then it's unlikely to come with extras, excluding salt or sugar; it will be plain oats, possibly rather thin, in other words sloppy. How miserable mornings must be for prisoners who, like me, like theirs on the thick side, and have found (as Goldilocks found) there is a fine line to getting it just right. If I had the misfortune to be an inmate in any secure establishment where each morning I faced a very poor gruel, either far too thick or far too thin, or too plain, then that on its own would be enough for me to snap: “Right that's it, I'm going straight! Or at the very least I must get a job in the kitchen.”

Picture credit: Porridge, Main Title. Source: Wikipedia

Tum Te Dum

Nothing happens when you want it to; everything occurs when you don't. The first brings boredom and restlessness, the second cussing, out loud and mostly to whatever four walls you're contained in, unless your 'thing' is to blow up at inanimate objects.
Life is not a game, it's a lesson in patience.
No, not cards, though in youth (and I've been told not just my own) they killed many a bored hour especially if you only had yourself to play against, but forbearance. And that's a far worse word to describe patience, for it can't be mistaken for anything but a delay, a another wait which though it might be short can feel long, or it goes on so long the thing you're waiting for is forgotten so that when it finally occurs it either comes as a surprise or brings dismay.
And when the thing, the event, the person is not just late, it's too late the excitement you might have felt had it arrived on schedule (to your exacting timetable) has diminished as something else came along and took its place; and if that's the case it can set off a whole sequence of emotions, none of which you want but are now beset by and which set you squirming.
However, when the thing is held in thought and much anticipated, its arrival no matter how late is always welcomed. Just as if it's materialised from a dream: you never thought the day would come etc. And yet the journey from order to delivery is a trial, which few have the patience for.
If you've always been a bit short in temper and short with time, then having to exercise a weak, or even non-existent, trait means holding your tongue when it doesn't want to be held; means humming tum te dum when really you want to scream; means feeling under duress but being unable to show it because if you did you'd just look like a child having a tantrum. And God Forbid that should take place in a public space like an auditorium or the lino floor of a frozen food retailer.
The aforementioned weren't just examples but also real incidents which I would like to point out happened when I was a toddler, and toddlers, as most adults know, have short fuses. Some adults do too but most aren't prone to such displays, (I should hope not!) though can behave appallingly at times. Ask my mother. Childhood is never far away when your parents are around, even if the roles have somewhat reversed, where the gap has narrowed to the extent that each family member (senior and junior) regress in each other's company, and yes, it does make for a very confused state of affairs.
That, however, is a family matter I probably shouldn't have shared. But what's done is done. So, let us go back to forbearance, which coincidentally babying or parenting calls for. Rather a lot of too. Huh, that only occurred to me now, and at the same moment as: don't try to type in the dark. My accuracy rate has plummeted. Severely. Backspace. Backspace.
Patience is a virtue. No it's not, it's a goddam nuisance. Something you're told you should have. Or try to encourage if it doesn't come naturally. Well, it's never come organically to me. Discipline, yes; I can withhold myself from anything even if I don't really want to but have made up my mind to, although others I know label that as 'stubborn', so yes, I guess you can say I'm that too. You never can see (or will admit to readily) these qualities in yourself, though you might be quick to see them in somebody else. Of course, there are those who will be kinder and will call these idiosyncrasies, as if they're endearing. Some are, some are mildly irritating, some are infuriating and raise more than tuts and eye-rolls as your tolerance reaches its upper limit.
It's how quickly you lose it that's interesting...great sitcom moments would be born if you were stood outside your own body. For your annoyance can be directed at you with no other involved: nobody else in the room but a ball of fire manically humming tum te dum, tum te dum, dum, dum, dum...in the hope this will instead reduce you to a bed of orange-red embers.

Picture credit: The Banquet, 1958, Rene Magritte

The Cold Eyes of Octopi

“They're wonderful animals, delicate, complicated and shy.” so says Doc in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday. Now, you might think, if you were unaware of the context, he's talking of women, but no, Doc is referring to octopi, which being a science enthusiast (as was Steinbeck) it was not, I think, an attempt to discuss women in veiled terms. However, as the reader, it struck me that such a description could also be applied to roughly half the female population, by the male sex, because I think women would be less likely to say it of themselves, though it would be a rather antiquated view.
I, however, would put up my hand and say it's true, of myself anyway, and only in regard to the complicated and shy. I wouldn't have a problem with it, yet it would fall short to say it of all women. Yet I'm confusing the matter because let's be clear Steinbeck doesn't. It just got me thinking, particularly since we now live in a very politically-correct world, and where free speech and sensitivity are at all time high. Censorship is not, I think, very far away. And what a sad day that will be, and all because people can't police themselves in public forums and mistake free speech for abuse; or think that once-used terms, now considered 'offensive', should be banned from thought, from speech, from print. Each year we inch that bit closer to George Orwell's 1984, and to a repeat of history. That is, however, what living is: repeats. Similar circumstances coming round...
Different times, but people, fundamentally, are the same; react to situations as they might have done in other eras – with or against, in the middle, rise up against a dictator or follow his lead, refuse to be conquered or admit defeat and give victory to the conqueror. You don't realise history is being made nor realise the part you played until you look back on it. The pivotal moment only spotted after; often a long time after when historians have some hard facts and can piece it together: this piece fits here, that piece slots in there. If that hadn't happened or because of that etc. I wonder how these times, in time, will be considered, or we as a people.
No, you need a cold eye for history, not a dispassionate one, but an eye that's not too close to it, not going through it, because there will be propaganda you might not see clearly whilst in its throes. Like fake news, which once that term was brought out nearly everything was declared to be, because whatever suits purposes people use. And it's so easy for establishments and people in positions of power, or wanting to be, to wrest control of and, in some way, gain from.

Too much distance though can change history. The interpretation of it, which in my opinion, is dangerous, particularly if it's less given to understanding and more to condemning or rewriting to make it more or less acceptable. This can also change the views of the people who were in it, if they're still living. Societal attitudes can make people agree: Yes, that's how it was, because the actual experience can be a fog. A pea-souper where action and thinking are somehow not recorded as they would have been had life been quieter. Or they can recede, not forgotten but less vivid, and so doubts of how it was creep in. But I've said all this before elsewhere as it's a personal bugbear, so won't go on.

No movement or attitude that grew from another time, and is still around, is what it once was or set out to be. Feminism's not, the EU's certainly not, and student unions are a product of young minds, which, too often, are overly concerned with contemporary life and how they're seen so they ban or boycott everything and anything that goes against their values, often without giving the subject a fair hearing. How can you learn if all your energies are thrown instead into protesting? How would we get anywhere if we didn't stop to listen and consider? Outspokenness or rebellion doesn't breed tolerance; it can even lead to the opposite.
But then, how exactly did this internalized (and now publicized) debate develop from a sentence about octopi? Because as animals they divide opinion: fascinate and repel.

Picture credit: Octopus Biology, Ernst Haeckel

C'mon On Feet

Everyone needs a day, a whole day, at home. Sometimes. Or maybe weekly. For reasons best known to that person: to unwind from a week of hell, to clear domestic build-up and bills, to wear indoor clothes and go make-up or contact lens free and have bed-hair, to get creative in the kitchen or read without interruptions, and probably most of all to have peace and quiet, or at least a tolerable volume of background noise. Though the last is not easy to achieve if only walls separate you from adjoining flats' washing machines, music systems and TVs. It's true, a noise not caused by you can be distressing, but outside the building there's the perpetrators: people. Hundreds, thousands, millions of them. The scale doesn't really matter if they constitute what you think of as a crowd.
Why the sudden interest in people going about their business or congregating in public places? Because I learned a new word whilst I was in Highsmith Country, Suffolk to be exact, which I hadn't heard or seen before: Ochlophobe. But before I explain that, I should mention it's not a Suffolk term nor is it Highsmithian, and that's Patricia Highsmith, the novelist and crime writer, whose country I was revisiting at the time. No, it's a recognised fear, which of course Highsmith specialises in, of mob-like crowds. And I got to wondering, after a day spent at home, if I had it. Or at the very least some shadow of that fear.
Is there a range? I'll assume there is because I don't know anybody expert enough to ask, not that I want to denigrate what is for somebody else a real concern. It's just sometimes after a whole day at home, it's harder to go out the following, but I don't think that's ochlophobe territory though the push to confront it is probably similar. There have been moments where I've been dressed and ready and at the door when I've thought: do I really want to? do I really need to? can it wait, be put off to the next?, and if the answer to the last is: it can, then occasionally I've given in. Whilst other times I've shaken it off, telling myself: C'mon on feet, which those in the know will recognise as a Labyrinth line. Google it – the late David Bowie was fantastic – as I can't afford the detour in this semi-serious autobiographical piece.
So, on those days when I stop in what is it that, ahem, stops me? I suddenly realise I'm not in the mood to be around Joe Public and it's a mood that will vanish, as others do, if I force myself out. Whereas the passing-through mood is like a scudding cloud i.e. by the time I'm out in the open it will have gone. Of course, there are days when you don't have that luxury, where you just have to cross your fingers and hope for the best.
Mood aside, I generally prefer to avoid crowds, but then I think that preference depends on your definition of mob: how large they are in number and if, for example, they're well mannered, rather than boisterous or braying. For a true ochlophobist, my guess is that wouldn't matter, the same symptoms of fear would arise. For me however, some situations are cope-able and some decidedly not, and then there are those you're unsure of and have to try. And keep trying, if only to raise the bar a little.
I hate feeling crammed in, squeezed or squashed. Of being pressed up against somebody, of having someone pressed up against me. The two scenarios aren't the same: the first can't be helped for there's hardly any breathing room, let alone a space for a body, and the second, when you're not the presser, feels like a deliberate invasion. Your instinct is to fidget and find a pocket but you can't, and so you reverse that attitude: go rigid and hold everything in. Does anybody find that enjoyable? Well, the perverse might do...those who like commutes, sporting events, sales or ticketing queues , and protest marches (you thought I meant something else, didn't you?) and yet, I don't really think that's an ochlophobist complaint, at least not in the manner I've described it: as dislikeable but not panicked like any animal caught or caged.
The eyes have it, that fear of bodies if escape is impossible and the feet can't break into a quick walk or run, though a sweat might come with the heart pulsating, fooled by twitching muscles.

Picture credit:The Umbrellas, Pierre Auguste Renoir