L/A/R/K

y'know.....complaining and stuff

Cupcakes

                                   

This cupcake phenomenon is getting way out of hand. Not so long ago, we had fairy cakes and bake sales, sure, but a cake was a cake and the cake was great. Carrot cake, Victoria Sponge, polenta cake, lemon drizzle, even chocolate cake if you like that sort of thing. 

But all of a sudden, cupcakes are IN. Girls can not stop going on about them. I see numerous shady, angled pictures of cupcakes every day on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It is beyond a joke. They have become some sort of symbol to boring girls everywhere for cutness, homeliness and being “naughty” (shudder). All the same sort of girls who looooove to bake and wear nothing but ballet slippers and cropped Topshop leather jackets. Come on, you know the ones. They can go out with their girlfriends and eat cupcakes and post pictures of them while telling everyone how fat they have been that day and and then fall into the shoulder of a boy giggling.

But I just don’t understand it. CUPCAKES ARE NOT NICE. Sponge is good, muffins too, but when heaped with an absurd ratio of claggy, sickening, overly-sweet frosting it’s just a diabetic seizure waiting to happen.

You can cover them with edible glitter, bits of cookie or whatever you like, but they will never escape the fact that they are the cake equivalent of a Mister Whippy 99 dunked in sprinkles. Maybe good for a hit once in a while, but nothing compared to some orange and mascarpone Roskilly’s. 

Hopefully one day this fanaticism will subside, and we can all come together and have a nice, grown-up tarte au citron. 

(p.s I love girls really - not in that way though)

An inexhaustible list of things that annoy me

I’m not sure if it’s that I am really peculiarly prone to disliking things, or that maybe other people just hide their general displeasure with the world better. Possibly it is some innate vanity which so easily stirs the rage within me; that I have the best taste - since it is my own- and therefore something differing from that is inherently wrong and bad.

I have quite a strong moral conviction in the allowance of others to like and do what they so please, even if it is not my own choice, but these niggling pet peeves highlight to my supposedly liberal and understanding self the deep-rooted snobbery and cynicism which I evidently must possess. 

These are a few of the things that drive me absolutely nuts:

- People who say “mooslee” for muesli. 

- People who insist on pronouncing foreign words and names in an excruciating, affected semi-accent. Prime example: chorizo. Yeah I get it that you understand where your sausage is coming from and that you may even have been to spain, but when you’ve bought the damn thing from Morrisons and outside it’s cold and wet and very much England, you just sound like a prick.

- Eating spaghetti with a fork and spoon. NO.

- Whispering voice-overs in ads. Especially when the sound is so compressed that it’s possible to hear the actor’s big damp mouth as if they were right there in your ear. In fact, add to this: anybody whispering in my ear. That is just not on. 

- Another advert no no: stupid kids with stupid kid voices. The Betty Crocker devil’s food cake and Oreo adverts stand alone here. Listening to a self-important little child talk is taxing at the best of times so I don’t really want to be forced to withstand it on my television - especially when said perpetrators seem to have mouths stuffed full of the aforementioned cake at the time of recording. 

- Ketchup and mayonnaise squirted all over chips. ON THE SIDE PEOPLE.

- The dry end of a bad quality baguette. Likewise, any filled pastry in which the ratio of meat/cheese goodness is way below 50/50 - there is nothing worse than a delicious savoury bun let down by a plain and doughy ending.

- People sitting on the outside seat on the bus. Can there be any surer way of knowing someone is a rude, selfish, and doesn’t even care if people know? (At least try to hide it  man)

OK so that’s it for now - trying to recall all of my “pet peeves” is putting me in a bad mood, and it’s sunny outside.

whatweeatinukraine: salmon with salad mix and cherry tomatoes 62 UAH / $7.7 at Oliva, Kiev That looks bloody delicious - I want it now!

whatweeatinukraine:

salmon with salad mix and cherry tomatoes

62 UAH / $7.7 at Oliva, Kiev

That looks bloody delicious - I want it now!

newyorker: “She would leave him, she thought, as soon as the petunias bloomed,” the writer announces, before going on to tell how “she” finally manages to leave behind her petunias and overbearing husband and then tries to make a go of it in New York, only to have her husband drag her back home six days later, crushed and exhausted, reduced to taking a perverse pleasure in thwarting his determination to rescue a garden she knows he cannot abide. “McCarthy is always her best heroine,” someone later observed. And there is much truth to this. But in McCarthy’s best stories no one is spared her irony or her contempt, not even the character she most closely resembles. Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and the Short Story that Ruined a Marriage: http://nyr.kr/KOVhZh

newyorker:

“She would leave him, she thought, as soon as the petunias bloomed,” the writer announces, before going on to tell how “she” finally manages to leave behind her petunias and overbearing husband and then tries to make a go of it in New York, only to have her husband drag her back home six days later, crushed and exhausted, reduced to taking a perverse pleasure in thwarting his determination to rescue a garden she knows he cannot abide. “McCarthy is always her best heroine,” someone later observed. And there is much truth to this. But in McCarthy’s best stories no one is spared her irony or her contempt, not even the character she most closely resembles.

Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and the Short Story that Ruined a Marriage: http://nyr.kr/KOVhZh

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past

—The Great Gatsby

Summer Echoes

With the lengthening of days and warming of temperatures, sound seems to mutate from the dull and tinny silence of winter into a presence that encapsulates the very essence of summer.

I have often wondered whether the heat itself does somehow work to compress and expand summer noises, so that the murmurings of this nostalgic season become fuller and more apparent; swollen with the thick, hot, breath of life that is now creeping out of doors.

Summer has arrived when one can wander down a suburban road, or lay on top of the duvet with the window open, and know at which point you lie in the calender by simply staying still and listening. A distant car, a lawn mower, road works, a bee, a bike chain whirring, an aeroplane….some bored kid pissing off their parent. All somehow louder than they had been before.

The cacophony becomes melodious, bringing with it a familiarity wrought from those same experiences which have been relived over decades and centuries. I remember the feeling of straight-leg jeans and cotton t-shirts over warm, flat-chested skin. Hot brick beneath cold thighs and the damp cool of the earth that sits around the bottom of trees.