Perfect Day

Book of the Week: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Watching the Remembrance Day service just now. Very moving – can feel myself tearing up. I’m not even a citizen of this country, but I can feel that deep emotion and pride in remembering the thousands who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. I like how instead of a sense of Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori, people just come to remember and honour their fallen comrades. It’s a national-scale event, but you can see for many, it’s a very personal affair. But this post isn’t about Remembrance Day, it’s about a day I want to remember.

We had the most perfect Saturday yesterday. The weekend really started after a magnificent Indian dinner on Friday night, after which we were supposed to have gone for Tom Stade at the Carnegie Hall, but didn’t, due to my bad sense of timing and food taking a while to arrive. (I wanted to watch the 6pm news on the Commonwealth Games going to Glasgow – yay!) We came home and after some wonderful together time (been a while), had an early night.

An early morning, a leisurely washing of laundry, then it was off to the Dunfermline’s farmers market at the Glen Gates where we had an early but most gorgeous lunch of Arbroath smokies. Absolutely delectable. Literally fresh out of the pit, with juices trickling down the paper as we walked into Pittencrieff Park to look for a seat. It’s been almost a year since we’ve had smokies and these were the very best – Iain R. Spink’s award-winning fillets. Fabulous. My salivary glands are going into overdrive just writing about them just now.

Then we went into Edinburgh to watch 30 Days of Night – not as good as the graphic novel, but still entertaining. Could have been tighter and more suspenseful. There wasn’t enough tension as I’d hoped – I do like a good scare, to the point where I can’t even watch it any more. The last two movies to have that effect on me were The Ring and Blair Witch – I actually switched off the latter about 10 minutes from the end, I was so freaked out. The vampires weren’t as pale or otherworldly or threatening either; they just looked like they had some sort of congenital defect. Gareth made a silly joke though, when Barrow was in flames: “It’s Barrow-in-Furness!”

Post-movie, had a round of rock-paper-scissors to decide whether to watch Ratatouille or go to Borders and do a bit of research for our planned big fat round-the-world trip. (Probably the next biggest step of my life after the decision to move here.) Borders won, and a very good call it was, too – we spend a fantastic two hours at Fort Kinnaird looking at atlases and travel books, and, in my case, cookbooks (I’m getting so domesticated!) and lovely, luscious history books. Found a to-die-for Eyewitness Travellers’ Atlas chocked full of dream routes and columns of sights down the side of each map featured. £70 in bookshops, £45 on Amazon, so you know where we’ll be getting it. I’d forgotten how much fun it was to browse through the travel section. Gotta save up for a very cool AA Truckers GB Road Atlas – 1½ miles to an inch!

The only downside was getting stuck on the bypass for nearly 45 minutes on the way home – went all the way to Tranent and back. When we got home, we went round to Happy Palace for a delicious takeaway – chicken and mushrooms for Gareth, Singapore fried rice (extra spicy, no char siu) for me. Saw a bit of X Factor in-house as well, and the proprietors must have heard us bitching about the lack of prawn crackers because there was a huge-ass bag of them with our order.

Came home and watched the rest of X Factor, and continued with our Still Game odyssey after our showers. I’m really enjoying Still Game. It’s very funny, very earthy and very Scottish. There have been a number of quality phrases scattered throughout the episodes – “spooky bitch” and “foosty pish”, to name but two. Like with 24 and Lost (of which we’ve watched five and two series respectively), I’ll be very sorry when we come to the last episode. Then it was aff to bed.

Am about a third through The God Delusion just now. Not really sure what to make of it – Richard Dawkins does make a very persuasive case. I don’t know if I’ll come to any sort of epiphany after reading it, though (just realised that it’s ironic how I’ve just used a word with religious connotations to describe what could possibly be a shift towards a non-religious state of mind). Could say that I’m too far brainwashed, or indoctrinated, or whatever. I don’t see why science and religion are incompatible, I do believe that God exists but at the same time I can see how evolution is a more logical process than intelligent design. Perhaps I don’t have the intellectual capacity to figure it all out, or lack conviction one way or the other. Perhaps I’m more agnostic than I think I am, I dunno.

Factoids of the Week:
The word “pepper” comes from “pippali”, the Hindi word for black peppercorns.

The oldest surviving Indian restaurant in the UK is Veeraswamy in Regent Street, London. Established in 1926, it also claims to be the oldest Indian restaurant in the world… but I’m not sure of that, coming from Malaysia…

Still more reasons dogs are better than cats (like we didn’t already know that!): dogs can have blood of any type if it’s just one transfusion, but cats need to be type-matched. And sniffer dogs can smell out a termite.

Having sex daily can improve a man’s sperm quality and increase their partner’s chances of getting pregnant. Hmmm…

At the other end of the spectrum, a bdelloid rotifer is a pond-dwelling organism that has survived 80 million years without having sex.