Basil and Books

This afternoon I decided that I wanted to have some pesto pasta. But, seeing as I have a lot of procrastinating to be doing, a quick meal simply wouldn't do; In order to avoid reading about the electoral systems of Ireland, I needed to make it from scratch. All the pesto recipes that I could find involved a blender, which I don't have.

I was about to completely abandon the idea when I realised that pesto probably came a long time before the blender, and there's bound to be another way of making it. Hence the following:

Parmesan, pine nuts, olive oil, salt, garlic, and basil

I stripped half of the leaves from a conveniently-nearby basil plant, and gathered them together on a chopping board. I then started to chop them, which took a surprisingly long time, and I frequently almost lost the tips of my fingers. I think I must have cut some of the leaves so small that they were invisible to the naked eye; a lot of them seemed to disappear. Hmm.

The mysterious disappearing-basil.

I similarly chopped up the pine nuts and garlic (fingers still intact), and grated some parmesan into the same bowl, before adding some olive oil, salt and pepper then mixing it all up.

Before mixing.

After a lot of mixing and mashing the paste against the side of the bowl to make it look more pesto-y, I put the pasta on the hob while the pesto basilified itself a bit more.

It was meant to be an artistic angle. But no, just blurry.

To try and make it authentically Italian (and bear it in mind I've never been to Italy in my life), I added some fresh mozzarella to the top, cracked an egg yolk into the middle, then spent probably-too-long toying with the idea of putting an decorative basil leaf on the top. I didn't.

It looks like an incredibly mouldy fried egg.

It tasted surprisingly nice, considering there was no real recipe or plan. If anything, it might've even been a bit too basil-ly. The most important thing though, is that it took at least 30 minutes to do. Which meant 30 minutes less of revising electoral systems.

After dinner, I reluctantly returned to revision, and went back to poring over countless articles about electoral reform in Ireland. The author of the first book I read...?

Basil Chubb.

Career Ideas

Now that I can see again, and haven't (yet) repeated the weekend's eye incident, I've been spending a lot of time trying to start a 3000-word essay on the French Revolution. It's not a particularly exciting essay, but it's either that or doing real revision, which is infinitely worse.

Robespierre. It's his fault I have to write an essay.

Occasionally, to put off doing the essay, I've been looking at possible job options. I graduate in two months' time; real-life is creeping steadily closer. My career ideas, however, have been getting increasingly far-fetched and ridiculous. In the past couple of months, I have considered the following:

• Astronaut
• Crocodile sanctuary-man
• Café owner in South America
• Farmer (ploughing looks fun)
• Author
• Postman (of a new, yet-to-be-made Royal Mail competitor)
• Fighter pilot (but not a killing one. A friendly one)
• Lock-keeper

A decent amount of variation, I think, although I'm not sure of the salary of some of them. I can't imagine being a lock-keeper pays particularly well, for instance. However, if I combined it with being an author, while farming a patch of watercress in the lock, for I could probably make a reasonable living.

On another, completely-unrelated note, there was a nice sunset over Reading a couple of days ago. One that deserved being photographed, I reckoned. Here it is:

Reading at sunset (massive amounts of crime not pictured).

Now, enough procrastination. Back to the essay. Otherwise I'll never be able to keep that lock.

.

Je suis dans la bibliotheque.

So, the Easter break is already here. Unfortunately it won't be a break at all. In the space of three weeks in May, I'll be spending a good few hours sitting in various buldings around campus, and determining the direction of the rest of my life with a few badly-written essays.

Most of my waking hours are going to be spent in this building:

Five floors. 1.2 million books. Nowhere near enough plug sockets.

The trouble is, just because i'm in the library doesn't mean I'm actually doing anything useful. Last week I spent at least an hour poring over a map from 1939, simply to see if I could find my house. I couldn't. And just yesterday I spent the majority of the morning looking out of the window, watching people's reactions upon finding out the cash machine had run out of money. Most seemed to just walk away; one man decided the money was probably hiding somehwere, and proceeded to look around the corner before returning and peering at the screen.

Another highlight of a 'revision' day last week was when this decided to fly over:

It's an airship. I think.

Obviously, it wouldn't suffice to simply look at it, then get back to work. Oh no, I had to take a photo, wonder what the difference between an airship and a blimp is,research it, look at how much they cost to run, watch videos of blimps being inflated, then wonder what the French word for 'blimp' is. All while I was meant to be writing an essay on constitutional reform.

It's going to be a long time until Easter...