Seven minutes to midnight. Still so much to do. I promised myself I'd read The Beach. Not enough light, no chair, I think that's why I've not been reading as much as I used to over the past two years. Two years! It's taken me this long to realise that the arm chair I used to sit in, with the huge lamp behind it facilitated my reading at home. And without those daily Tube journeys I seldom read there anymore either. Not that I've ever been caught without a book in my possession. I've finished two Fitzgerald's this year. One may have been a story collection, but it still counts. What else? The Man Who Was Thursday, Of Mice And Men, Bluebeard? Any others? I'm finishing Generation of Swine and Gatsby (again), and, yes, Sun Tzu, and East of Eden are being attacked with lessening surety every few days or so.

But I'm muttering nonsense now. I've no time. Those tasks I needed to complete. I see now I'll be awake for some hours more. Idle foolishness earlier today. I can't fight it any longer. I'm a night owl. A creature of the night. I want to sleep all day warmed by the sun and work all through the night. Wrapped against the cool rain. Devils let me spoil inventiveness here. It doesn't require the same sort of coherency as The Work. Who's to say it needs any coherency at all? Its just the mad ramblings of someone who really ought to know better.

And now to get that work done.

I shall update something soon.

Everyone listen!

Poirot 2011/2012(?)

Well I've waited and waited. And I check the site quite a lot, but now with SOAS officially out for winter break I doubt any revisions will be completed before mid-January. And anyway, it was 'aired' in its current form like two weeks ago now, if 'aired' is the correct form for being played through some speakers in a room.

So without any further delay, I am proud to be able to post the SOAS Lit-Soc's effort at Mutual Radio's audio-play, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot in The Case of the Careless Client.

For comparison, I've also managed to find a recording of one of the original broadcasts from 1945 which I think I found on the Internet Archive and here it is for your further listening pleasure. I didn't actually look for  this at all until after we'd finished recording. However, I did listen to it before I heard our new one. I think we did rather a good job. And I definitely think that some of our more melodramatic moments work better.

Poirot 1945

Thinking about it, it feels kind of strange to think that this is a new recording of something that first was recorded almost seventy years ago. I know that we can listen to music that was written hundreds of years ago, watch Shakespearean plays but this has a sort of temporality where its so close because its within living memory, but actually is very far removed from the present. That said, I always think that the ability to read truly ancient texts in the original language is about the coolest thing possible since we are really moving two, three, four, or five thousand years into the past.

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Damnit. I've tried! I've really tried. But now, really, the sun is rising. This is getting too late. Why does WordPress have a 6MB upload limit? Especially when my host is claiming a 25MB limit. Though that doesn't help either since the new play is 29MB. I don't want to make a youtube account, it doesn't even have any pictures to go with it!

...Hopefully I'll be more inclined to deal with this madness sooner rather than later.

Update: Later that night. Realised I could link the '45 one to where I originally got it. I'm sure when SOAS Radio has it I can probably do the same for the new one, but I'd prefer to be able to 'release' it earlier.

But since I'm going to post the promise here, perhaps I will actually get around to it. So without further delay, my planned website posts for the Winter Season, that I definitely will manage to do even if I have to write them away from the internet and put off writing something better:

1. Another couple of recipes: Including ones that I've cooked this time. I actually have been making some sweet foods recently. I made a big cake, a lemon meringue pie, and a whole bunch of chocolate brownies, and they all went down a storm! I think there are some pictures of them around, so I'll have to repost (and make another pie, it tasted awesome!).
2. Re-post some of the cool photos that I bothered to put onto facebook over here. This basically is like three separate posts. So... because I can't figure out how to double layer numbered lists in wordpress right now I guess I'll list them below...
3. Two (or maybe one big one) about some karaoke sessions. These were really fun, in and around central London, though one only kinda counts as karaoke because while I did sing there were a bunch of guys wielding plastic instruments all around. It was playing Rock Band on a stage, and didn't feel embarrassing at all after the fourth vodka.
4. An origami post. I've been making a few origami things, and while I'm not sure about the legality of posting folding instructions, some of the final models have looked quite nice and I'd like to share them. I have sent a few to people, but pictures are okay too sometimes.
5. I guess two Lit-Soc posts? I need to promote the radio play, which I intend to do this weekend even if its not been officially launched yet. We recorded a new version of an old Mutual recording of Poirot. I think that our Poirot has a better accent that Harold Hubert, and it all sounds really nice, even with my awful acting! Also I feel the need to push sketches again. There's a new magazine which I edited(!?) and I'm working on revising the first anthology to get some pictures in there, a bunch of new works and hopefully some support from SOAS for it.

I'm not going to say anymore than these because this actually looks like quite a lot already. I would post a deadline, but each one really needs one and I'm not sure in which order I want to post all of these.

A better post next time I hope!

I've also had some fun in the last two weeks attending the Centre for the Study of Japanese Religions events, that I never managed to make it to while actually a student. They were really fun actually, I hope to make as many events as possible this year, especially if the Lit-Soc meetings are happening on Thursdays, so I'll have double reason to get into SOAS as a sketchy graduate who just can't get enough of the University he just spent three years avoiding like the plague.

Last weeks CSJR lecture was on Printing and the Visual Representation of Linguistic Data in the Discovery of Ancient Japan. Which sounds really intense! But was really about how a couple of Japanese scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries essentially created the modern way of translating ancient texts written in Chinese script into Japanese. It was very interesting, but I did prefer the first lecture, which was on Practising Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Symbol, Prayer, and Mirror. It was given by Professor Ikuo Higashibaba of Tenri University in Nara Prefecture, and it looked at some of the practicalities of Japanese Christians under the Tokugawa shogunate. There was some cool stuff about the different prayers that were being said and how they evolved over time, especially ones that were just vocalisations of the original latin prayer instead of a proper translation, and these mirrors that look plain but when you shine a light on them reflect an image of the crucifixion.

So now I'm really far away from what I was going to type about. To distract myself, and actually get something good done instead of just moping around waiting for stuff to happen, I'm going to type up some of the old handwritten Cookery Books that my grandmother wrote and I found over the summer. Hopefully it won't take too long, and I'll be able to put it into lulu and have some really nice books to help remember her by.

I've done a few recipes so far and I'm going to share one or two here every once in a while until they're completed. So for now enjoy her recipe for a Vegetable Risotto.

Cooking Time: Approximately 30 minutes

4 Servings

• 1 Onion
• 3 Tomatoes
• 4oz Mushrooms
• 2 Tablespoons Oil
• 1 Small Green Pepper
• 6oz Rice
• ¾ Pint Water
• Seasoning
• Grated Parmesan Cheese

I've also got to share some awesome links! Until I get my website sorted so I can put these into a more permanent space this will have to do!

ajhumphreys - My Sensei's website! It's just got renovated in full html which, in the world of crazed php and the like, I think looks really classy. I helped to edit the two pieces up under 'Writing' at the moment, they're little children's stories which almost demand to be illustrated. Someone illustrate them!

magpiemind - This is the blog of the new Lit-Soc President, though she's not linked the Anthology on there yet! The reviews are pretty cool.

sketches - I think you know by now what this is. But more people need to buy it, it must be read! £5 (+£3 shipping) isn't much for a book at all, just last week I was in Waterstone's and there was some piss-poor pulp novels for sale at £10, even more for US imports even though most of the US books had British printed versions on other shelves for like £4 less.

Okay, so now I'm going to climb next door and strangle the workmen who have been hitting my walls for the last six weeks.