It’s been a sweet time round ours, with all the leftovers from Michel’s coming our way. Girlie, surely, has one sweet tooth.
Strawberry cheesecake for breakfast.
Even before the windfalls she had me, after nagging weeks, beating up a tiramisu. Not that I’d ever made it before, understand. Girlie will not be denied.
Now I’ve had some bloody awful, overpriced tiramisu in my time. This week I discovered there’s no excuse. It’s not hard to make and it’s not hard to make well. The trick is, no matter what recipe you use, double the recommended quantity of marsala wine. Easy. Oh, and make sure the cream is whipped just so – so that little peaks will just stand up when you remove the beater.
From there it’s a kitset job. But let me tell you, the one I made was superb. Coffee and marsala and moscarpone cheese to burn. Rich and wet? Tell me about it.
Ask my mate Angus. He tried some the other night before we embarked on our own private anti-war protest. We decided we wouldn’t stop drinking scotch until the US invasion of Iraq was cancelled. Next thing I remember, my mobile is going off.
“Dad, where are you?”
“Wha? Hrmph. Ah… sorry?”
“Where are you? You’re not upstairs.”
“No, ahh, I’m …” looking around desparately. “I’m somewhere else.”
“Dad it’s twenty past eight, I’m going to school.”
“Right, okay.” Belated realisation. “I’m at Angus’, I’ll be right there.”
Now I haven’t said much about international affairs on these pages, mainly because I’m happy to leave that to Russell, who does it better than anyone else around. In fact, you could consider this the “blog about nothing”, like Seinfeld minus the interesting characters.
The international media pointedly ignored our protest, but Angus and I covered some pretty good ground, I recall, before we collapsed. At one point he broke out a collection of war stories and pointed me to one in particular.
Angus was impressed with Tim O’Brien’s intro to “How to Tell a True War Story”:
“This is true.
I had a buddy in Vietnam. His name was Bob Kiley, but everybody called him Rat.”
Damn good it is, and it goes on. But my eye kept straying to the first paragraph after a break on the next page.
“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behaviour, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie… you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
Prepare yourself for uplifting war stories. They've been stockpiled, like cruise missiles, for a while now. Some are already on their way.