It’s all very well giving someone a box of 12 assorted eggs, especially when some of them feature an interesting and un-easterish pentacle design;
but it’s disappointing when they prove to be only half an egg each. 
Uborka has declared it National Duck Day, and today we are going to learn more than we wanted to know about ducks. To receive your cocktail, please waddle, quacking, to the table with your name on it. We have three tables today: the Sophisticated Swans; the Cosmopolitan Crested Ducks, and the Orville Table of Disrepute. I could stop writing now, because clearly you can already guess who will be allocated to which table.
For those who have already drunk too much to figure that out, I’ll describe them for you.
Sophisticated Swans
Obviously Mark, Mrs Mark, and duckling Mark will take up most of this table with their posh wine and designer shoes. Your wine is served just as you like it, and accompanied by slivers of finely baked crostini with duck liver pate and other nice spreads. The mallardly elegant Dr Pockless has put in an appearance today, and can sit here as long as he doesn’t draw on the linen napkins. And could you save a place for Turquoise Lisa and her brood.
I hope the company at the other tables is not too… unsavoury.
Cosmopolitan Crested Ducks
This is the table for Lori and as many of her cosmopolitan family as she wishes to include, with english sparkling wine on ice waiting for Madame Manda to finish her marathon. Here is where you sponsor her for the awesome feat of running to space, for sex. I hope you ladies don’t mind if I park Sevitz and Pete, aka the chick and the duck here; you’ll agree they don’t belong on the sophisticated table. Please also welcome back hero of this week’s interview, that old coot Mike.
Your snack is roasted duck leg with rosti and braised red cabbage, which is one of my favourite things ever.
Orville’s Table of Disrepute
The cultural reference may well be lost on some of the frinkers at this table, as will most other things, considering the quantities of booze, any booze, they are planning to put away. America has had a shocking week, and Krissa will be drowning sorrows for the entire nation, alongside Asta and Pixeldiva.
You’ll also notice a long line of those moreish espresso martinis for Anna, a merganser of the finer type.
They’re going to need a lot of cubes of stale bread to soak that lot up.
Bottoms up!
As requested by Lyle, this week’s cocktails are themed around the Anatidae family of birds. Please order your ducks at the bar.
As the weather starts to warm up, this is an ideal time to clean the dust out of the inside of your computer. Dust buildup is an impediment to cooling and ventilation, meaning that your computer runs hotter. This means that the fans are working overtime, so the computer will be noisier, and also the extra heat will shorten the lifespan of the components, and also increase the likelihood of a sudden catastrophic failure.
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What is this funny black duck?
Are you living in the same place as in 2004/05?Well, it’s two places of course – but yes, we are still in central Nottingham during the week and the Derbyshire cottage at weekends. That said, we often extend our weekends, working from Derbyshire on Mondays, and occasionally on Fridays as well. The Nottingham office closed last April, and after two or three months commuting to the new base office in Leeds – two and a half hours from door to door, each way, feel my pain – the powers-that-be decreed that working from home was fine after all. So now I just have social isolation to combat.
This might change later in the year, though. K will soon be required to spend an uncertain amount of time at an office near Leeds, so adjustments may be made. But this also depends on work factors from my side, which are as yet far from clear. It’s complicated, as nobody said in 2004/05.
I think you would. I still sport a full head of hair –although it’s a lot greyer round the sides than it used to be – and my girth remains acceptably trim. One significant adjustment: I’ve switched from lenses to specs, which might throw you off the scent. (On the rare occasions when I can be arsed to put my lenses in, I am regularly blanked in public, so it probably works both ways.) I mostly wore lenses to look hot and shaggable, but I’m blissfully unencumbered by such considerations these days. Unless I’m in XXL.
Spotify Premium on the iPhone. At the cottage, I stream it via Bluetooth to a DAC, which is plugged into the multi-room hi-fi. It sounds every bit as good as CDs. I still buy CDs, due to some quaint residual notion that artists should be compensated, but they don’t get played much.
My original blog is still there, but since Blogger withdrew FTP support, I can no longer update it. I started a WordPress blog, but I never update it. Sometimes, I even have to Google for the URL.
I started a community blog for our village in March 2008, and it’s still going very strongly indeed, with multiple new posts daily. I’m part of a team of five, and we all put a huge amount of time and effort into it. So I’m still blogging all the time, but not in a style that Troubled Diva readers would recognise.
I’ve also been maintaining a press archive blog since 2009. Nobody reads it, but I like to have all my writing in one place.
I’ve never completely shut myself off to the possibility of re-starting Troubled Diva, though. Much as I love Twitter, it’s terribly transient. (Blogs feel like vinyl; Twitter’s more like a streaming service.) But my whole conception of writing has changed since I started doing it semi-professionally, and I’m not sure I could recapture the innocence (and the adverbs, oh, the adverbs!) of my old blogging voice. And then there’s the whole “over-sharing” thing to consider. Printed bylines do rather change the game, over-sharing-wise. I could go on about this all day, you know.
The achievement that makes me most proud is starting the village blog, as it really has helped foster a closer sense of community. We even inspired the Archers scriptwriters to start their own Ambridge blog, but they let it lapse. Lightweights.
But I’ve already mentioned that, so let’s think of something else. I published a book in a week for charity, and it raised a healthy amount of cash. I danced on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, thus turning myself into Art for an hour. And I wrote a feature for The Guardian on the rising fortunes of Nottingham’s music scene, which a) had a huge impact locally (people still talk about it, 18 months later), b) opened my eyes and ears to the ever-increasing pool of amazing musical talent on my own doorstep, and c) brought me right into the heart of that community, which has been an utter joy. So I think that’s the one that I’d like to celebrate here.
Indeed it was. My gig reviews on the blog led to an approach from the local paper in early 2006, and my Eurovision posts led to a commission from Slate in the same year. One of my interviews for the local paper – which I’d re-blogged elsewhere – led to an approach from Guardian Film & Music, doubtless helped by the fact that it was an interview with the lead singer of the editor’s favourite band. Looking back, I think I was passive-aggressively auditioning for The Guardian, but I wasn’t fully conscious of that at the time.
I like reviewing big pop shows at the Capital FM Arena, and not taking them totally seriously. For instance, I loved writing this review of a recent Justin Bieber show. My other favourite thing is appearing on the radio: BBC Radio Nottingham get me in on Monday mornings every few weeks, to discuss events in the weekend’s news. This is fun, because it forces me to form instant opinions on subjects that I’ve never thought much about before. (One week, I even had to become a football pundit; that concentrated the mind quite wonderfully.) It turns out that I seem to be more articulate in front of a radio microphone than in regular conversation. This is a strange discovery.
Oh God, don’t mention Shirt Off My Back! That’s the one that still makes me cringe, to be honest with you. My favourite was probably Which Decade Is Tops For Pops, which ran every year. (I started it up again in another place, but hit a wall. That also still makes me cringe.) Guest Weeks were also huge fun, especially when I guested on my own blog as a fictitious friend. That was the closest I ever got to sex-blogging. Give a man a mask, and he will tell the truth.
Having served the cocktails at their online engagement party – my all-time fondest memory of Uborka v1.0 – I’d like you to interview Stuart and Krissa, the living embodiments of Love At First Sight. I suspect that you’re just going to ask them the same questions that you asked me and Mark, but a little more gentle probing into the divine machinations of their Deep and Abiding Union wouldn’t go amiss, I guess…
Karen and I have a somewhat completist attitude to television. If we’re going to watch a programme, then we’ll watch it from the first episode to the last (or until we get bored). We’re not the kind of people to dip into a programme – by our standards, if we’re not driven to make sure that we’ve seen every single episode, then the programme can’t be good enough. After all, there’s no shortage of good programmes (if you know where to look and who to ask) so there’s always a new boy jostling for his chance to shine.
A fairly recent addition to our current roster was Sons of Anarchy. This covers the story of a fictional motorcycle club in a fictional town called Charming in a fictional state called California. The central character, Jax Teller, is the vice president in this club. His father, now deceased, was one of the founding members of the club, and his mother is now married to the current president (also a founding member).
The first couple of series revolve a lot around the relationships between these three, and how they fit into the club. We’re currently up to series three (of five) which has brought about something of a change of location and a change of pace – in my opinion, to its detriment, but I’ve been reassured that it’s working up to something big, and so I’m sitting tight.
It has elements of The Sopranos (family interactions, frequent violence, central characters are portrayed somewhat sympathetically but have both good and bad aspects of their character) and elements of True Blood (small town community and politics, frequent violence). I’m really looking forward to the next series, and getting back up to the standard that I enjoyed in the first two.
More mini-reviews of TV shows to follow in the coming weeks…
Do you watch Sons of Anarchy too? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Dorset Dinosaur Egg
This egg from Chococo was spectacularly good, from its tasteful plain cardboard packaging to its multi-layered crispy shell. Its surface was prettily marbled, and it cracked after a few bashes against the coffee table to reveal small chocolate dinosaurs and fossils inside, which were delicious.
We ate it while watching particularly poor episodes of The Sopranos and MASH, and then went to bed early.