hands on

Feeling moderately better. It's a revolting cold, just squats in your sinus chambers like some horrid monster, and one day you feel like it's shrinking, and the next it grows until you think your head will explode. Today hasn't been so bad, and I hope tomorrow will be even better. I'm trying to kill the monster with olive leaf extract and lashings of garlic.

In the meantime, I've been kind on myself. Lots of rest, lots of nice food, not too much rushing around. I quite like cooking when I'm feeling poorly, and I managed the best risotto I've ever made a few days ago: chicken with fennel, lemon and garlic. It was stunning, and I think it's because I added lemon juice and garlic every time I added stock, so the flavour built up slowly and strongly. Yum! [PS: made it again last night, and remembered that the other WOW factor is adding lots and lots of ripped up fresh herbs -- marjoram and sage -- and stirring through just before serving. Plus fresh black pepper.]

Today I wasn't so kind: I took Bumblebee to see This is It, the Michael Jackson movie. Sigh. All I can say is that it was just like a Michael Jackson album: lots of schmaltzy crap interspersed with moments of absolute brilliance. By the end of the movie you've had quite enough, and I was relieved to be out of the cinema. The excess! The money spent! I kept thinking about the sheer amount of power and resources going into his method of spreading the word about saving the planet. The tears of gratitude shed by the dancers when they found out that they were in the show... the way you could tell that MJ (as they all called him) didn't like to touch or be touched, no matter how many times he said 'I love you'. And his hands...

I came home and started telling BB how I'd become mesmerised by MJ's hands... great big slabs of capability, they were, and strange on such a slight dreamy frame. BB surprised me by barking out a laugh, and told me that just today he'd listened to Ricky Gervais et al saying exactly the same thing!



Blimey. Honestly, I couldn't stop looking at them, and it was obvious that he was quite aware of their size and has practiced hard at keeping them unobtrusive in his dance moves. He had bandages on the tips of his right hand through much of the movie, and I wondered if he'd been trying to stop biting his nails in preparation for the concert series?

I'm sure the concerts would have been amazing. He was planning to put so much energy into them that I doubt, if he'd not died when he did, that he would have lived through the entire run of 50. What impressed me most was that he didn't rehearse to recorded tracks... it was all live, live, live, and he was quite a perfectionist. If only he'd kept away from doing long, tedious, overblown ballads! So boring, so unnecessary. So him.

Lastly, we've rediscovered real-life Scrabble. I've dusted off the old set, sewn up a pretty cloth bag for the tiles, and I'm 'versing' (as the twelve-year-olds say) anyone who will play me, and teaching Bumblebee how to play (and to stop saying 'I'll verse you', which makes me think of hard-core poetry slams). Byrd turns out to be a very good RL player, for all his lazy typing facade; BB is highly competitive, and if he loses, he'll fret until he wins the next game soundly. Me? My style is fairly laid back, because I just like the actual playing, but if I get a whiff of success, I'm capable of raw aggression and smugness :)