Month: December 2024

What wine goes with turkey?

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas Day and are enjoying the 12 day feast. We had a quiet one in our new house, with Carol and Terry. Mandy went to school with Carol some fifty years ago, and I met them forty years ago. I have happy memories of Carol visiting us in Holland in the early nineties, and our toddler Robert following her around the flat going “Darrel, Darrel” which was as close to her name as he could get.

I cooked a very traditional Christmas lunch – turkey, vast numbers of pigs in blankets, stuffing balls, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, sprouts with chestnuts and bacon, cauliflower and broccoli in cheese sauce, mashed swede and carrot, gravy, cranberry sauce and the contentious bread sauce, I say contentious because for many it is a pointless, flavourless sauce. But for me it makes Christmas. We once stayed over Christmas in a very fancy hotel, and I rang them in advance to make sure we could get bread sauce. Yummy.

Everyone drank what they wanted. Terry and Mandy had champagne. Carol was driving and had a heavy cold so drank water. And I wanted wine. The question was which wine. Over the years I have read many opinions on the best wine to drink with turkey. Some say a crisp Chardonnay – maybe a Chablis. Others opt for a light red such as a Pinot Noir. Others agree with Mandy that Champagne cannot be beaten. But I really wanted a Chateau Musar.

Musar is my favourite wine. It comes from Lebanon, fairly near the holy land, so I suppose has a geographical connection with Christmas. But I just love the taste – deep, rich and powerful. It is everything that experts would say does not go with turkey – likely to take over the mouth taste instead of allowing you to enjoy the meat.

I called my younger son, Martin, to ask his advice, He used to be a sommelier and really knows his stuff. I think he was spot on when he said “It really does not go with turkey, but you should always remember that wine is meant to be enjoyed, and you should have whatever you enjoy.”

So I did. A 2005 vintage bottle that I had been saving. The cork was soft and broke up with the corkscrew, but the wine itself was not corked. I sieved it twice to remove the sediment and bits of floating cork, and then poured it fast into a decanter to introduce more air. To me it tasted wonderful. Maybe it did not go with turkey but I loved my Christmas dinner and I loved my wine.

What did you do for Christmas? I hope that as for me, happy memories were made. Join me next week for a brand new year.

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Why do we have so much stuff?

Living on a narrowboat for most of the year, we have become very good at minimising the things we need to live. We have a rule that if we buy something new for the boat, something else has to go. The result is that although it is a small space, we have everything we need to live, and is does not look cluttered.

So why is it that moving house this week, we have so so so much stuff? I cannot believe how many boxes I have unpacked. And I still have rooms full of more boxes, and a garage packed to the roof.

The trouble is that we have lived in large houses for years and years. I believe that people fill the space they live in. Whether it is a small narrowboat, or a mansion. Over time cupboards get filled and spaces get occupied. Our new house is still big but not as big as the one we had in Scotland. We probably should have got rid of half the stuff when we moved out, but we didn’t. So now we have boxes and boxes of things we do not need. I estimate four or five times too many glasses, four times too many mugs, five times too much linen. And don’t even mention the shoes! We have hundreds of DVDs that we never watch, four sets of crockery, a chesterfield sofa and chair we don’t need, boxes of stationery from the loft. The list goes on.

So the next couple of days are about getting lounge, kitchen and two bedrooms ready for use at Christmas. Then I will methodically do the rest of the house, room by room, box by box. That will leave me January to work my way through the garage. Charity shops will be deluged by me, as will the local tip.

The real question is whether Mandy and I can be more disciplined in the future. I’d like to use that narrowboat rule on the house. One thing in and one thing out. I certainly don’t ever want to see this many boxes again!

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Homeless but not houseless

In July I wrote a blog entitled “Houseless not homeless”. We had just sold our house in Scotland and were going to be living on our narrowboat full time. We had no house but we had a home on the boat. Last Friday we completed the purchase of a new house in Lancashire. It is lovely but we couldn’t schedule the removal company to bring our stuff out of storage till next week, and so this week we have had a house but not a home.

My brother in law installing my new wardrobes – thanks Steve

It has been a strange week. There has been plenty to do, from building wardrobes, to connecting the internet, to sorting out address changes. It has been fun. But I have been to and fro between the house, the boat and my in laws, who live close by. So I have felt unsettled. For ten days I do not know where my home is.

Since I retired we have had a routine of spending the summer in the boat and the winter in a house. In my unconscious mind I have seamlessly switched “home” from one to the other. We have also travelled quite a lot but that was never a problem because I knew where home was. The cliché is that “home is where the heart is”. I think home provides the foundations that allow me to be carefree and adventurous. It is family, it is relationships, and it is also a location.

So this week has felt really quite odd. But next week should be amazing. The removal people will arrive on Tuesday morning and Mandy has kindly offered to stay at the boat with the dogs for a couple of days more while I break the back of the unpacking. I am looking forward to working out where things go. I am looking forward to setting things up. And most of all I am looking forward to building a home.

What do you think about “home”? Is it just where you happen to live or is it so much more?

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Should I embrace or dread AI?

Everywhere I look in the last year I seem to see references to AI. Whether it is articles about how AI will take over the world, or adverts saying that products from cars to insurance are “powered” by AI. How am I supposed to feel – scared or excited?

The first thing to say is that automation is not AI. We have had automation since the industrial revolution, and computer automation since the 1950s. It has certainly taken jobs away. We don’t need thousands of hand weavers anymore and we don’t need clerks in companies adding up accounts. But it has also created new jobs, and has grown our economies, creating wealth. I have to confess a self interest here because my career was based on installing automation in companies, from writing software to control water and gas networks, to managing projects to sell more products to customers, and ending with making it faster and more reliable to make payments.

Real AI does much more than this. Instead of following instructions created by people, it analyses vast amounts of data to create new ideas. For instance we have all heard of AI identifying new indicators of cancers, allowing them to be treated much sooner. This is what makes it a threat to jobs that previously seemed immune to automation. My dentist said to me a few months ago that his role would never be taken over by AI because he had thirty years experience and had treated thousands of patients. He is wrong. Probably in the next ten years we will see AI dentist robots using consolidated thousands of years of knowledge and the data from millions of patients. This will allow them to be more accurate and to give less invasive treatments.

Even creative roles are likely to be automated with new AI. We are already beginning to see early versions of books and films written by AI. So far they are not great but they will get there. And the roles around the creatives will certainly disappear. Why do you need film executives to use their “guts” to identify which projects to green light, when an AI can use the experience of the whole industry to say what will work and what will not. This does not mean AI will just repeat the past. It can spot new trends much faster than any person.

That all sounds pretty terrifying, but so far, AI seems to be adding rather than taking away. The new AI summaries at the top of Google do not replace the search, but add to them. AI assistants are helping journalists write better articles. Children are able to write better homework. Is that cheating? That reminds me of when I was a child and using a calculator was considered cheating. We were supposed to use log books. Why?

Unfortunately I am still not sure whether I should dread or embrace AI. I asked Chat GPT which told me “AI, like any powerful technology, is a double edged sword. Embracing it thoughtfully while addressing its risks is the wisest path.” Hmmm.

Oh by the way, why have I included a photo of a spitfire in Lytham St Annes at sunrise? I took it last week, and then used AI on my phone in five seconds to remove the pole that holds up the aeroplane in Lytham Park. That was pretty cool. I also generated a whole image below using Gencraft AI, but that seems to be missing a tailplane. Maybe AI is not perfect yet.

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