Chestnuts and Tasty Contrasts

Yesterday evening I was sitting in my kitchen minding the oven. This oven is a piece of crap. It has a safety mechanism so the gas doesn't come out when it's cold, but the mechanism is broken, so the gas doesn't come out at all (unless the knob is held in). So I light the gas, stick the chestnuts in, hold the knob in while I close the door, then hold the knob in using an oven glove and a walking stick stuck into the rug. The walking stick is covered in little metal badges from stately homes round ole England. There's a lot of random stuff like that in our flat.
I settled down with my laptop and some Nathan Barley (hilarious, btw) and waited for my food to cook.
After a while, a collosal thud echoed around the little box of our oven. What the fuck? I pulled off the headphones, moved the laptop, dismantled the ridiculous oven-maintenance contraption, shoved it out the way, and opened the door. The hot air in the oven blasted my eyes. (The oven is stuck on really hot setting). The air in the oven was full of atomised chestnut particles. I'd forgotten to spike the chestnuts. I pulled the tray out and put it on top of the oven.
You'd think that a little chestnut would just pop. You're wrong. They explode better than any other foodstuff (except perhaps tuna, when still in the tin). Two more went off. The whole kitchen was covered in little teeny bits of chestnut. All the washing up Liv had spent so long on. I looked like I had the worst dandruff EVAR.
But they were tasty.




This is also tasty:
For two, you need:

• Paella rice, for two (About 125g, and water, duh)
• 4 Tomatoes
• 1 Lemon
• Salt
• 1 Avocado
• Bacon bits, about 200g (or bacon rashers and scissors)
• Pumpkin seeds, a handful, but they're good so you might want more. (sunflower would do)

First:

• Put the oven on, about 180°C.
• Boil the kettle.
• Dice the tomatoes. You want little chunks about the size of the end of your finger. Cut them on a big plastic board, and keep all the juice.
• Tip all the tomato bits and juice into a big bowl. Add lemon juice and salt to taste. The two tend to cancel one-another out, so be careful how much salt you put in! Put the bowl in the fridge.

Then, all at the same time:

• Put the rice on. You want to cook it until it's sticky and gloopy, not dry.
• Put the pumpkin seeds in the oven. They need to go in for about 10 minutes. Earlier is healthier, but longer is yummier.
• Fry the bacon bits. Make them really crispy.

While that's going on:

• Pop the avocado flesh out. I find it's easiest to take the stone out with my teeth (only when I'm cooking for Liv and me!) Cut it up like you cut up the tomato.

Then:

• Serve it all together. I know the tomato is cold, that's the idea.
• Faff about with pretty presentation a bit, if you're into that.
• Don't allow any condiments! Your creation is perfect.

What Happens When You Die?

Liv has been reading the Diary of Anne Frank. Anne has a lot of time to wonder about the imminent possibility of her own death. Liv asked me if I'm scared of death. Scared of death, no. Scared of dying, yes. And here's where I make up the rest of the conversation:

Why not scared, and why scared?

I'm not scared of death because I don't have a soul. I don't believe anything from my body will persevere after I die.

If you don't have a soul, how can you think? What makes your mind work?

I believe my mind is a biological illusion. It's important for survival and proliferation. Complex minds allowed Homo Sapiens to become the most dominant species on the planet. This kind of advantage would promote evolution of a mind. So we evolved it. I don't claim to know exactly how this evolution took place, or how minds work. But evolution has produced some extremely complex systems and ingenious solutions: for example the internal area of a your circulatory system is the more than that of a football pitch.

"Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he'd never been religious, he realised now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at-odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more."
from Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Are you worried what will happen to your body after you die, or what there will be there?

No worries, because there won't be anything. Not endless blackness, or any similar quantifiable nothingness; but a complete end to me. But I am worried about dying. I don't think it will be fun in any way. Life is everything, I don't believe in anything else, so to lose life is to lose all:

"There is no more deep-seated biological instinct than that which expresses itself as a firm grasp upon life, there is more dignity, as there is more hamnity, in fighting for life than in passive abdication from our most hardly won and most deeply prized possession."
Biology and Man's Estimation of Himself,
by Peter Medawar

And if that all sounded a bit morbid, you could read an Introduction to Atheism! Something yummier tomorrow, I promise!

Snow and Sun