As I said recently, I like to try and do curries from first principles rather than buying pre-constituted sauces. I got this Bangladeshi recipe from here.

Ingredients:

2 medium onions, peeled and finely chopped
2.5cm piece fresh ginger root, peeled and grated
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons chilli powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric
900g lean beef, cut into 2.5cm (1 inch) cubes
3 tablespoons cooking oil
3 green cardamom pods, lightly crushed
1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns
2 fresh green chillies, finely chopped
180ml water
2 medium tomatoes, finely chopped
2 tablespoons tamarind paste
1-3 tablespoons lemon juice (3 tablespoons if you like a sour curry)
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh coriander

Method:

Add the onions, fresh ginger, garlic, salt, chilli powder, cumin, coriander, turmeric and beef to a large bowl, mix well, cover and leave for 60 minutes.

Heat the cooking oil in a large frying pan or saucepan (you need one with a lid) over a medium to high heat. Add the cardamom pods and black peppercorns and fry for 3 minutes, stirring a few times.

Add the beef and its marinade, mix well and sauté for 4-6 minutes until the beef browns, turning often. Add the chillies and water, mix well, bring the ingredients to a simmer, reduce the heat, cover and simmer for 60 minutes, stirring often (add a little more water if the curry becomes too dry).

Add the chopped tomatoes, mix well, increase the heat to high and cook uncovered for 10 minutes, stirring all the time (add a little more water if the curry becomes too dry).

Add the tamarind paste and lemon juice. Mix well followed by fresh coriander. Once done serve hot with rice.

Important note: if you do this at all, you are committing to do it more than once. Tamarind paste in particular comes in quanities much larger than are used for this recipe.

I was not familiar with the concept of a dry marinade – for me a marinade means some degree of liquid, so I was a bt alarmed that there wasn’t anything resembling that in the first stage of cooking. This also meant some pretty vigorous stirring for several minutes after adding the meat to the oil with cardamom and pepper.

However, it worked pretty well, and the quantities given make for a very savoury mix of flavours without being too hot – the chili and garlic seem to meld into the general tastescape, and reviews were favourable. Even little U, taking it very cautiously and frequently asking for WATER, ate her share. So I think I probably will do it more than once.

• How The Hugo Awards Saboteurs Actually Disproved Their Own Best Argument
  
  Charlie Jane reflects.
  (tags: sf sadpuppies )
• Harassment: What do we do?
  
  No easy answers.
  (tags: sf sexandgenderandsexuality )
• I Don’t Read That Stuff
  
  On quality and science fiction.
  (tags: sf )

Current
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
Naamah’s Kiss, by Jacqueline Carey
Space Helmet for a Cow, by Paul Kirkley

Last books finished
Mean Streets, by Terrance Dicks
Buffy: The Lost Slayer: Prophecies, by Christopher Golden
Buffy: The Lost Slayer: Dark Times, by Christopher Golden
The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lampiri
The Tragedy of the Goats, by Francis Hamit
Buffy: The Lost Slayer: King of the Dead, by Christopher Golden
History, by Elsa Morante
Buffy: The Lost Slayer: Original Sins, by Christopher Golden
Erimem: The Last Pharaoh, by Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett 
Transition, by Iain Banks

Next books
11/22/63, by Stephen King
Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller

Books acquired in last week
Erimem: The Last Pharaoh, by Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett 
The Tragedy of the Goats, by Francis Hamit
Darwin’s Island, by Steve Jones
Make Your Brain Work, by Amy Brann
Setting the Truth Free, by Julieann Campbell
Teach Yourself CBT, by Stephanie Fitzgerald
Doctor Who: The Official Quiz Book, by Jacqueline Rayner

A recipe by Mitzie Wilson from Delicious Magazine, which I must obviously look at more often. The claim is that you can prep this meal for four in twenty minutes. I didn’t quite manage it that fast.

Ingredients

600g new potatoes, scrubbed and halved, if large
15g butter
25g fresh mint, leaves picked and chopped
4 x 150g lamb steaks
300g cherry tomatoes on the vine
2 tbsp honey
2 tbsp white wine
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 tsp caster sugar
200g fresh or frozen peas

Method

1. Cook the new potatoes in boiling, lightly salted water for 15 minutes, until tender. Drain well and return to the pan. Add the butter and some of the chopped mint. Season well and toss together.
2. Meanwhile, preheat the grill to high. Pop the lamb steaks on the grill rack or a baking tray and season. Cook under the hot grill for 8 minutes, turning halfway, or until tender and cooked medium. Add the tomatoes for the last 2 minutes and grill until blistered. Set aside for 5 minutes, then snip the tomatoes into 4 small sprigs.
3. While the steaks are cooking, place the honey, wine, vinegar and sugar in a small pan. Bring to the boil and cook for 1 minute. Pour into a large jug and allow to cool.
4. Cook the peas in boiling water for 2-3 minutes or until just tender. Drain and cool slightly. Stir into the vinegar mixture, along with the remaining mint. Season to taste.
5. Divide the honey and minted peas between 4 shallow bowls or plates. Add the lamb steaks and cherry tomato sprigs and serve with the minted new potatoes.

Now, bear in mind that in those last five minutes of the cooking process, you are 1) boiling the wine and honey mixture, 2) finishing off the lamb steaks, 3) cooking the peas and 4) messing around with tomatoes. Actually, of course, real life intervenes and you end up doing it seriatim rather than simultaneously. But timing is not crucial, and everything can be kept warm.

The other thing to say is that 25g of mint leaves is a lot of mint, and in fact takes up more volume than 200 g of peas when you first start mixing them.

We needed an extra vegetable dish as well; the peas alone were not really enough. Otherwise, and with a sensible approach to timing, this worked out well, though it’s not spectacular. The lightly grilled tomatoes are a very nice touch.

Building Confidence in Peace, by Erol Kaymak, Alexandros Lordos and Nathalie Tocci
Resolving the Cyprus Conflict: Negotiating History, by Michális Stavrou Michael

I got both of these books during my 2007-10 work on Cyprus, when I was advising the then Turkish Cypriot resident, Mehmet Ali Talat, but never got around to reading them at the time. But things are looking up in Cyprus at present – it’s a bit below the radar screen, given what else is happening in the immediate vicinity, but since the election of Mustafa Akıncı as TRNC president earlier this year, the pace of talks has accelerated and we have seen confidence-building measures such as easing the process of crossing the Green Line and an agreement on EU protection of halloumi/hellem cheese; so it seemed time to dig them out.

Unfortunately the first of these, Building Confidence in Peace, is the first of a two-part research project, and searching my shelves I wasn’t able to find the second part, A People’s Peace for Cyprus, by the same authors (all friends of mine) and the same publisher (my former employers, CEPS). However, it doesn’t really matter; Building Confidence in Peace stands on its own as a detailed analysis of an extensive public opinion poll of both sides in Cyprus, conducted in 2008, and identifying that there remained a common interest in reaching a solution and some common ground – though also a lot of distance, particularly on the role of the Turkish army in a future security agreement. Plenty of data, and I suspect public opinion has converged a little more in the years since, given the continuing ease of communication and the election results favouring pro-settlement parties on both sides.

Resolving the Cyprus Conflict, by Michális Stavrou Michael, was a bit disappointing. I had seen it billed as a remarkable synthesis of the progress of the conflict over the years; in fact it’s at its best in examining the detail of the 1980s and 1990s, which however were the least exciting decades of the problem, and otherwise follows the usual Greek Cypriot line of largely ignoring the Turkish Cypriots, and completely ignoring their internal politics, until the turn of the century. The final historical section, dealing with EU accession and the Annan Plan, is more reportage than analysis, which is an opportunity missed. I was amused to see some of my own words quoted (I had a hand in writing this).

The role of external actors can be very much exaggerated. All the major international players have been positive about reaching a Cyprus deal since roughly 2002, when Erdoğan came to power in Turkey. What has been missing is leadership on both sides of the island willing to do the deal. Just as the Annan Plan process was coming to a close, the Greek Cypriots replaced Clerides with the hardline Papadopoulos in 2003; Christofias, who replaced him in 2008, turned out not to interested in negotiating either; and the Turkish Cypriots reacted in 2010 by voting out the pro-settlement Talat and replacing him with Eroğlu, who shared Christofias’s lack of interest. But the election of Anastasiades in 2013, and of Akıncı earlier this year, has produced for the first time two leaders who won their respective elections as the most pro-solution of the major candidates. There is actually a historic opportunity opening up, and both of these books may be out of date quite soon.

• Google loses data as lightning strikes
  
  Belgian weather defeats Big Data.
  (tags: internet belgium )
• The IAEA-Kazakhstan nuclear fuel bank: nuclear gamechanger
  
  Anti-proliferation initiative, part-funded by Warren Buffet.
  (tags: nuclearpower kazakhstan )
• Dublin In 2019 Promo
  
  Bringing Worldcon to Ireland!
  (tags: worldcon ireland )

For those of us who eat pork, there's something very yummy about a decently cooked, moist, juicy gammon joint. I got this recipe from this book and it worked well enough that I will now try more from the same source.

1 joint of ham
1 peeled onion
1 carrot
1 stalk celery
1 bay leaf
8 whole black peppercorns

glaze
2-3 tbsp Demerara sugar
1 tsp mustard powder
12 cloves
250 ml orange juice

sauce
1 Bramley cooking apple, peeled, cored, sliced
300 ml cider
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp wholegrain mustard
2 tsp butter

Soak the joint for 12 hours in two changes of water [I soaked it only for four hours; really unless it is very salty that should be enough].

Place in a large pot, add veg, bay leaf and peppercorns and cover with cold water. Bring to simmering point, simmer for 25 mins per 450g.

Leave to cool a little in its liquid.

Lift out and remove the skin, leaving the fat. Mix the sugar and mustard powder and press all over the skin. [I actually used wet mustard for this phase too, having no mustard powder to hand; not ideal, but it worked OK.]

Cut a lattice into the fat with a sharp knife, and press a clove into each intersection. Place the pan in a roasting tin surrounded by the orange juice, and bake for 20 mins or until the glaze has caramelised.

Sauce: cook the apple in the cider until soft, beat it with a spoon until smooth, add the mustard and sugar, and season to taste.

The biggest problem with the recipe is that it implies you can leave cooking the sauce until the joint is safely in the oven. In fact 20 mins was barely enough to get the apple to soften properly; I should have started it before taking the ham out of the water.

Having said that, gosh, it was very yummy indeed. I served it with potatoes, parsnips and carrots, and everyone seemed to like it very much, including even little U (who however did not accept any of the sauce).

• Almost No One Sided with #GamerGate
  
  Good research.
  (tags: games internet )
• Decertifying the worst voting machine in the US
  
  Old news now, but horrifying.
  (tags: voting internet hacking )
• Will Comet Catalina become visible to the naked eye?
  
  Let’s hope so!
  (tags: astronomy )

• The Dustbin of Geography
  
  Where 0°0’0.0″ really is.
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• Different Beauty, Equal Beauty
  
  Spanish and English.
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• Letter of Recommendation: Uzbek
  
  “since then, I have spoken Uzbek outside the classroom on exactly two occasions”
  (tags: languages )
• The strange death of Labour Britain has a worrying precedent
  
  The legacy of Dangerfield.
  (tags: ukpolitics )

• 2015 Hugo Awards
  
  “Jugger Grimrod” regrets.
  (tags: sf sadpuppies )
• A Rarity Reclaimed: Stolen Stradivarius Recovered After 35 Years : NPR
  
  Fascinating!
  (tags: music crime )
• A Somewhat Illuminating Mess
  
  GamerGate tries to convince media, fails.
  (tags: games internet )

I got to know Francis Hamit last year, when he was one of the regulars in the Loncon 3 press office, and wrote some very nice things about us afterwards.

The Tragedy of the Goats is a short ebook in which the narrator is head of security at a science fiction convention, and has to deal with drink, drugs, a seedy guest of honour, evangelical hotel guests, hostile hotel management, and the public disintegration of the marriage of two key team members. It’s affectionate, and a little old-fashioned, and there’s a mostly happy ending; and anyone who’s been anywhere near running such an event will wince at least twice as the accuracy of his description hits home.

My thoughts are with those running Sasquan this coming week. Rather them than me. I recommend they leave reading this until it’s over. Others should try it now.

We had a nice excursion yesterday to Slieve Gullion, the mountain in South Armagh, including the Ballyward Dolmen on its western flank:

My icon for this post is a picture of a favourite County Down attraction, the Legananny Dolmen, taken nine years ago (it’s a lovely place and I went there last summer too):

A sign at Ballyward, just in front of an area of tumbled stones beside the dolmen, solemnly puts forth the view that dolmens were originally part of a larger structure, and were covered wth earth which has worn away or small stones which have been removed.

I have to say I find this profoundly unconvincing. My gut feeling is that these monuments were originally constructed to look much as they do now – striking salutes to the human spirit against the landscape, showing stability over unimaginable lengths of time.

Occam’s Razor surely shaves the notion that they were originally covered by turf or stones pretty close. There are plenty of earth-covered monuments which retain their covering millennia later. And if people over the centuries were removing small stones, why not the big ones as well?

Is there really any evidence that dolmens like Ballyward and Legananny were meant to look different to the way they look now? And if not, why do people believe that they were?

• Worldcon: Winning and Losing
  
  GRRM comments in advance: watch for the Campbell result!
  (tags: sf sadpuppies )
• In 1975, this Kodak employee invented the digital camera. His bosses made him hide it.
  
  Progress.
  (tags: photos technology )
• Why Western Sahara matters, by Jeremy Corbyn
  
  I deeply respect JC as the most engaged UK politician on this issue.
  (tags: ukpolitics westernsahara )
• What Would Happen If the U.S. Congress Killed the Iran Deal?
  
  Bad for the U.S. and for international order.
  (tags: uspolitics iran )
• Sad Puppies, Rabid Chauvinists: Will Raging White Guys Succeed in Hijacking Sci-Fi’s Biggest Awards?
  
  A good summary.
  (tags: sf sadpuppies )

• The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia for Pay
  
  Of course, they don’t just try, they often succeed!
  (tags: wikipedia )
• Search for Missing Woman from 1946 Photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto
  
  *shiver*
  (tags: photos poland wwii )
• Azerbaijan makes a mockery of justice as couple sentenced in political show trial
  
  My friends Leila and Arif jailed on trumped-up charges.
  (tags: azerbaijan humanrights )

The excellent Brussels English-language bookshop, Sterling Books (on Rue du Fosse aux Loups / Wolvengrachtstraat, behind the Munt/Monnaie) had the excellent notion the other day of offering ARCs to interested customers (thanks to Aoife for alerting me). I had previously very much enjoyed two of Shapiro's other Shakespeare books, 1599 and Contested Will (the latter provoking one of the more rancorous comment threads I have had here), so I eagerly grabbed 1606. It will be published in October, and I recommend it to fans of Shakespeare and of Jacobean history. The coming year is going to see a lot of Shakespeariana, with the 400th anniversary of his death next April, and this is a good place to start.

Shapiro looks in great detail at the state of London and England three years into the reign of the new Scottish king, and how this can be demonstrated to have affected Shakespeare's choice of material and approach to King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Chapters of historical scene-setting, on politics, religion, and the economics of the theatre, more or less alternate with chapters about Shakespeare.

Of the three plays, I know only Macbeth well, or thought I did. Of course, a play that starts and ends with the off-stage killings of two Scottish kings has to be seen as a reaction to the Gunpowder Plot the previous year; but Shapiro very impressively threads together Shakespeare's own Warwickwhire connections to the plotters. He also looks at the play's links to witchcraft, including King James' own writings on the subject, and its reflection of the moral panic around "equivocation", the 1606 equivalent of worrying about teenagers running away to join ISIS.

His strongest section, however, is the first chunk about King Lear as a reaction to James' plans to unify Scotland and England (which did not become formal for another century) and also as a reflection of Shakespeare's own economic independence and ability to pursue new dramatic paths, though rooted firmly in his own immediate artistic environment. The division of Britain (ie England and Scotland combined) is a fundamental error which King James is now, by implication, planning to overcome. King Lear is just one of many Shakespeare works to rip off an earlier work by someone else, but in this case he took much more liberty with the plot, in particular giving it a tragic ending. Shapiro convinced me to go and give King Lear another try.

I was less convinced that there is all that much that is interesting to say about Antony and Cleopatra. Shapiro makes a more than valiant effort, looking at the complex politics around marriage in the Jacobean court and also at how Shakespeare tended to write sequels almost immediately, rather than leave them several years as he did in this case (if you consider Antony and Cleopatra a sequel to Julius Cæsar). But basically, it's a less engaging play than the other two.

Shapiro's core case is that we neglect the reign of James VI and I unfairly, as a footnote between the Virgin Queen and the Civil War. There was a lot going on in England in the years after 1603, and that includes some of the greatest works of England's greatest writer. I'm convinced.

• A Milestone in Africa: No Polio Cases in a Year
  
  Hooray!
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• More on apologies and consequences
  
  Comparing Antonelli and Requires Hate.
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• My Query Letter for Ancillary Justice
  
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• Why can’t Britain build enough homes to meet demand?
  
  BBC asks a good question.
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Current
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
History, by Elsa Morante
Mean Streets, by Terrance Dicks

Last books finished
A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England, by Suzannah Lipscomb
The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris
Selected Essays, by Virginia Woolf

Next books
The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lampiri
Naamah’s Kiss, by Jacqueline Carey

Books acquired in last week
A Star Chamber Court in Ireland: The Court of Castle Chamber, 1571-1641, by Jon G. Crawford

My admission a few years back that I hadn’t read this evoked responses of varying enthusiasm. It’s Silverberg’s most popular novel by far on both LibraryThing and Goodreads, and I had really really intended to read it when it first came out in 1980, but somehow never got round to it. (Memory is tricky – I was sure I’d seen Dave Langford reviewing it in White Dwarf around that time, but it looks like he didn’t.)

Anyway, it was a serious effort to shift Silverberg’s output from SF to big commercial fantasy, clearly drawing on older models, particularly Zelazny (amnesiac hero discovers that his crown has been usurped) and Vance (adventures across a world of varying magical creatures). We’ve had an awful lot more of that kind of thing since, and though some of it has been done better, most of it has been done worse. The setting of the multi-species travelling circus is nicely developed. The general thrust is uplifting – it’s not just about divine right of kings, it’s also about earning the right to rule through sufficient popular support (and, er, winning the battle at the end of the book). It was as much fun as I hoped it would be, but I don’t feel any particular urge to track down and read the sequels.

I don’t identify myself as particularly British, being a Belfast Catholic and naturalised Belgian citizen, but I still have the passport, and these are fun questions.

1. Marmite- love or hate?
Yuck yuck yuck. I have met very few non-Brits who like it.

2. Marmalade- thick cut or thin cut?
Thick!

3. Porridge- made with milk or water?
Actually I prefer to use about half and half.

4. Do you like salt, sugar or honey on your porridge?
Sugar.

5. Loose tea or teabags?
Bags.

6. Where on your door is your letterbox?
In the garden.

7. What’s your favourite curry?
Difficult choice – I like them all! Possibly Jalfrezi.

8. What age is the place where you live?
1930s, as was the house I grew up in.

9. Where do the folks running your local corner shop come from?
Belgium.

10. Instant or fresh coffee?
Instant.

11. How far are you from the sea?
Right now, about 30 km. At home, if you count the Schelde estuary, about 90 km.

12. Have you travelled via Eurostar?
All the time!

13. If you were going to travel abroad, where’s the nearest country to you?
I live abroad! We are a hair’s breadth closer to the Dutch than the French border.

14. If you’re female (or possible even some males) do you carry a handbag?
I have done in the past, but these days I just wear a jacket with decent pockets.

15. Do you have a garden? What do you like growing?
Yes. Grass.

16. Full cream, semi skimmed or skimmed?
Full cream.

17. Which London terminal would you travel into if going to the capital?
St Pancras International.

18. Is there a local greasy spoon where you live?
A Turkish pizzeria. They do chips, of course, cos Belgium.

19. Do you keep Euros in the house?
Yeah, cos Belgium!

20. Does your home town have a Latin, Gaelic or Welsh alternative name?
The town of my birth was originally Béal Feirste. The town where I live was unknown to Romans, Gaels or Welsh, though we do have Roman-era tumuli in the woods.

21. Do you have a well known local artist or author?
We live near a university town which was the centre of Flemish culture for centuries.

22. Do you have a favourite Corrie character?
No.

23. Are your kitchen sink taps separate or a mixer?
Mixer.

24. Do you have a favourite brand of blended tea?
Does English Breakfast count?

25. What’s in your attic if you have one?
The debris of past lives.

26. If you go out for a cream tea, what jam do you like on your scone?
Strawberry.

27. Talking of scones- scon or scown? Jam or cream first?
Scon. Jam.

28. Barth or bath?
/baːθ/

29. Carstle or castle?
/ˈkasəl/

30. What flavour of crisps do you favour?
Salt and vinegar.

31. If you go to the chippie, what do you like with your chips?
Cod; salt and vinegar.

32. Take away, take out or carry out?
Takeaway.

33. If you have one, what colour is your wheelie bin?
No.

34. What colour skips does your local skip hire use?
Blue, I think.

35. Do you celebrate Guy Fawkes?
Never. (Except that I sympathise with him.)

36. Dettol or TCP?
Neither.

37. Do you have a bidet in the bathroom?
We did when we moved in but took it out.

38. Do you prefer courgettes or aubergines?
I rarely cook one without the other! I like the contrasting textures and flavours in the same dish.

39. In the ‘real world’ Do you have friends of other nationalities? Which nationalities?
Yes; many.

40. Do you have a holy book of any sort in the house?
Multiple Bibles from Mrs ‘s preaching days.

41. Do you prefer a hankie or tissues?
Hankie.

42. Are you a fan of crumpets? What do you like on them?
Haven’t had them for years. I just like melted butter on them.

43. Doorbell, knocker or both?
Knocker.

44. Do you own a car? What sort?
Rented VW Sharan (renting cars long term is fiscally advantageous in Belgium).

45. What sort of pants do you guys prefer? Y fronts or boxers?
Boxers.

46. Anyone still a fan of suspenders?
If that means braces, no; if garters, yes.

47. Do you have a favourite quote from the bard?
It’s not certain that this is Shakespeare: it’s Thomas More’s speech about immigrants and refugees written in Hand D in the manuscript, the longest sample that we have of his handwriting (if it’s him). Chills down the back, with special contemporary relevance:

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got?  I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

48. Do you like toasted muffins?
As with crumpets. 

49. Do you think a traditional trifle should contain jelly?
Yes.

50. Do you attend regular religious worship? Of what kind?
Not any more. Was brought up Catholic, disgusted by church’s response on sexual abuse, no other real alternative where we live.

• Attack on the pentagon results in discovery of new mathematical tile
  
  That’s “pentagon” with a small “p”.
  (tags: mathematics )
• Azerbaijan: a journalist dies
  
  And the @khadija0576 trial continues.
  (tags: azerbaijan humanrights )

Another recipe that I found in my files, not sure where from.

Ingredients (serves 2; I did double quantities)
2 pork escalopes
1 leek, washed and sliced
125 ml white wine
1 tbsp wholegrain mustard
50 ml chicken stock
1 tbsp double cream
Fresh basil, sliced
Salt
Pepper
Lemon juice
Olive oil
Boiled rice

Season and fry the pork escalopes in a pan over medium heat until nicely golden and cooked through. Put to the side and keep warm.

Put the leek slices into the pan and fry for 5 – 6 minutes. Add the wine and reduce by two thirds. Stir in the mustard, stock and cream. Season to taste. Let this bubble away for a couple of minutes. Add the basil and a good squeeze of lemon juice.

Serve the pork and sauce with rice.

Two problematic moments. First, I find it difficult to judge when the meat is “nicely golden and cooked through”. Another time, to avoid that hassle, I might cut it into strips to stir fry. Second, there’s not a lot of fat and moisture left over to fry the chopped leaks in for a full 5-6 minutes. I kept stirring, but the leek was pretty brown well before the five-minute mark.

However, the medley of flavours chucked in from that point on worked a treat. I was worried that there was too much mustard, but the cooking process seemed to mellow it; the lemon and basil at the very end gives it a real lift, almost joyous.

I served it with potatoes. It would have been better with rice per the recipe. But people seemed to like it.

This is an expansion of Kennedy's short 2014 ebook The Death Pit (I seem to be one of the few people who read it), featuring the Fourth Doctor immediately after The Deadly Assassin, investigating horrible deaths and strange goings on at a Scottish golf course. It includes all of the good stuff from the earlier version and quite a lot more incidental detail. Not much more to say than that it is very entertaining and catches the mid-Fourth Doctor era well, with perhaps a few nods to how the world has changed since the mid-1970s.

Isn't it interesting that the only two Doctor Who novels published this year both feature the Fourth Doctor, the other being City of Death? And it's also interesting that the show has been much more successful at getting women who are big names in written fiction to write novels for it (last year’s Time Trips sequence featured Kennedy, Jenny Colgan, Trudi Canavan, Cecelia Ahern, Joanne Harris and Stella Duffy) than at getting women who are any sort of name in television to write scripts (Catherine Tregenna and Sarah Dollard’s episodes this year will be the first by women since Helen Raynor in 2008).

Anyway, three more Twelfth Doctor novels to look forward to next month, one of them by .

A nice little book to go with the film, though this is not a novelisation but a biography of Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue by his grandson (who never knew him) and a Sunday Times journalist. It's a fascinating and intricate story of reverse migration – at a time when Australia was still absorbing newcomers from Britain, Logue and his family went in the opposite driection, to try and carve out a career in a new field for which he had no professional qualifications; and he succeeded, and what's more, he made a lot of people's lives better, one of whom unexpectedly became King of England.

The film, of course, telescoped the time line and injected dramatic elements to the story where they were needed. One of the most cheering things to find out was that Logue and the Duke of York were friends pretty much from the start; the plotline of the duke needing to be convinced that Logue's therapy was worth trying was more or less invented for dramatic licence. It is, however, true that Logue was in attendance for the new king's first radio speeches from Sandringham. It was also rather heartwarming to read their continued warm correspondence even after the king no longer needed Logue's professional services.

I thought I spotted a Northern Ireland link, but it turned out to be bogus: in the mid-1920s the comptroller of the Duke of York's household was one Captain Basil Brooke. Was this, I wondered, the future Prime Minister of Northern Ireland? Wikipedia seemed to indicate a gap in his political career in the mid-1920s which was just the right fit; also his highest military rank, achieved in 1920, was Captain. However, further digging revealed that the comptroller was a navy man (and in fairness an exalted naval captain is a more likely candidate for uch a post than a humble army captain), who was Rear Admiral Sir Basil Brooke by 1928. Wikipedia lists two Royal Navy officers of that name and roughly the right age, one born in 188 and one born in 1895, but neither of them seemed quite right – certainly neither was a Rear Admiral in 1928. It turns out that the royal official was yet another naval Basil Brooke, the first cousin once removed of the future Northern Ireland Prime Minister, born in 1876 and living until 1945. His wife Olave is the subject of a painting by Australian artist George W. Lambert, The Red Shawl.

• The Antonelli Affair
  
  Aaron pulls it all together. What a record of #sadpuppies achievement!
  (tags: sadpuppies )
• Sasquan statement on Lou Antonelli and David Gerrold
  
  Precedent set; or maybe not.
  (tags: sf sadpuppies )

Gosh, I'm way behind on book-blogging – about a dozen books read in the last couple of weeks which I want to tell you all about…

The first of these is Mary Roach's new book about the human digestive system, Gulp. It is generally entertaining rather than enlightening, a decent addition to her previous work on sex and space. Indeed, the latter of those two had quite a lot to say about zero-gravity poo; Gulp has even more to say about poo, in more familiar circumstances. But she starts further up the alimentary canal, with explorations of taste and nutrition. There is perhaps a little more than I would have wanted to read about competitive eating and empirical tests of stomach capacity in living humans. As ever, she manages to make the scientists researching this vital issue come alive, with asides about, for instance, whether live oysters are conscious of being eaten (probably not). I am also now much better informed about the fine muscle control of the teeth and jaw at one end (think of the microsecond decisions that must be made when crunching popcorn) and the anus at the other.

I happened to be on an intercontinental plane flight suffering from a minor gastric upset as I read this, and it did take my mind off my discomfort by encouraging me to consider the bigger picture. Recommended for anyone with a sufficiently strong stomach.

Like many of you, I knew the late Susan Sheridan as Trillian on the original radio version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – though I also enjoyed her in a Big Finish audio a while back.

Her website links to the above video of her work on animated films – spefically, the Moomins, Disney’s The Black Cauldron and Noddy. The Black Cauldron looks particularly good, and I’ll try to find an opportunity to watch it.

• Bring Moldova Back From the Brink
  
  A call from the Council of Europe.
  (tags: moldova )
• A Statement about Lou Antonelli, Lakeside Circus, Harassment and Safety
  
  This is what the #sadpuppies campaign has enabled.
  (tags: sadpuppies )
• Europe’s migration crisis: how well do you know the facts?
  
  8/10.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics migration )
• Pattern Matching: Lou Antonelli and the Sad Puppies
  
  What @eilatan thinks is going on.
  (tags: sadpuppies sf )
• A Brief History of Time
  
  Great piece by @gerrylynch!
  (tags: historyofscience )

Tried this one tonight. No idea where I got it from – it was in my recipes folder from several years ago.

20g flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
Curry powder
1 kg shoulder lamb chops, boned
2 medium onions, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
500 ml chicken stock (NB – I used much less)
Rind of 1 lemon, finely shredded
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
20g seedless raisins
3 large firm bananas
1 lemon juice
30g butter, melted
20g light brown sugar
Hot cooked rice

Oven: 175°C

Cut the lamb into 2cm chunks. Combine the flour, salt, and pepper with one tablespoon curry powder and mix well. Toss the lamb cubes in the mixture until coated. Brown in a heavy saucepan, using a little oil if necessary.

Add the onions and saute, stirring occasionally, for ten minutes. Skim off any excess fat (I didn’t have any). Add the celery, chicken stock, lemon rind and ginger. Cover and simmer for fifty minutes. Add the raisins and simmer for fifteen minutes more, or until very tender.

While the lamb is cooking, cut the bananas in 1 cm thick slices diagonally. Put in a 20 cm pie pan and sprinkle with the lemon juice, butter, and the brown sugar mixed with one teaspoon curry powder.

Bake for fifteen to twenty minutes, or until lightly browned and glazed. Serve the lamb stew over hot cooked rice and top with the curried bananas. Serves six.

I served it also with two hearty vegetables; broccoli and swede (aka rutabaga).

Comment: I am generally a bit suspicious of curry powder – I prefer to do my own spice mix from first principles – but I was not inclined to work too hard this evening, so I used it anyway.

The hairiest moment was the nonchalant instruction to brown the curry/flour coated meat chunks in a heavy pan. The recipe clearly implies that only wimps would use cooking oil at this stage. Well, I’m a wimp, and even so kept scraping away at the pan with my wooden spoon to prevent the flour from sticking and burning – successfully, I’m glad to say.

My biggest concern, as ever with a stew recipe, was that the stew would be too runny and the meat too hard. I think it would have benefited from another 15 mins but basically it had reached the point where it was fine after an hour and a bit. The amount of liquid recommended in the recipe, 500ml, is absurd; half of that was quite enough.

The bananas are sheer genius and lift what’s basically a rather average curry recipe into something quite special. Bananas should be used more often in savoury recipes; they add a great texture to a main dish. Because of the bananas, I felt justified in not being too adventurous with the spices. A touch of allspice, cardamom or fenugreek might have helped though.

The family enjoyed it. It took quite a long time, but not really a lot of work, so I will probably try it again some time.

• The Holy Book versus the bank book
  
  Tales from the Coffee Shop on form again.
  (tags: cyprus )
• Brian Aldiss: pioneer of British sci-fi
  
  About to turn 90; great interview with @telegraph.
  (tags: sf )