The Gestation of a Banoffee Pie
Yesterday, in full view of darling daughter, I opened the kitchen drawer that contains fruit. Laying there were eight leopard-print bananas.
"Those bananas need using up," quoth I. Daughter's face transforms into one of delight. Oh birdsweat, realises Conrad, I have stepped into a confectionary ambush.
"Shall I make a Banoffee Pi-'
'YES! Yes yes yes!'
So here we are. I've made the biscuit base, probably the trickiest bit. The toffee has been cooked and poured into the base. Now we wait for thirty minutes before doing the banana and whipped cream.
Deep Thoughts of a Dark Nature
Once I park up in the morning it's a 15 minute walk to the office, which I utilise as Thinking Time. Occasionally the thoughts are about work - much to my surprise I seem to be a real Company Man - but more frequently they concern the gigantic hex-and-counter wargame I'm designing, or that zombie novel I always bang on about.
Current design dilemma - how to treat infantry battalions who have had divisional machine-gun units dispersed to them. This reflects real life, where a Major-general might instruct MG companies to be attached to individual battalions instead of being brigaded together in one giant unit. My resolution, derived whilst walking into Hanover Street, is that the individual battalions ought to get the ability to project their MG fire along a single line of hexes. On the other hand, if they all stick together as the Divisional MG unit, then they get a "fan" of hexes, and they can also carry out barrage fire -
British MG team in action. Note lack of Brodie-pattern helmet, and since the photographer would have been standing out in the open six feet above the position, this is likely a training photograph. Notice, too, the emergency tripod located under the water jacket.
Come back, stop falling asleep! This is fascinating stuff, really -
Murder! Mystery! Mjolnir!
Hastily adding another article, I have recently been reading detective fiction recommended by other members of the Great War Forum**. Philip Kerr writes about detective/private eye Bernie Gunther from late Weimar Republic to pre-Castro Cuba in what someone must have decided was to be designed purely for the entertainment of Conrad. Jolly decent stuff. Then we have "Bryant and May", by Christopher Fowler, two antiquated detectives solving bizarre crimes in novels where London is as much a character as anyone else.
The "Mjolnir" bit comes apropos*** of Scandinavian crime fiction. I have read several Jo Nesbo novels about Harry Hole - not entirely sure how Norwegians pronounce that surname and if they relate to it's base Anglo-Saxon slang interpretation - although no Stig Larrson or whatever about hives and beekeeping, and have only just discovered Sjowall and Wahloo. These latter were husband and wife, who set out to map contemporary Sweden via the milieu *4 of detective novels. I watched a film featuring Bruce Dern and Walter Matthau that was based on S & W's "Laughing Policeman" without realising it until a few weeks ago. I think S & W were rather egging the pudding about how awful and deadbeat and ennui-laden contemporary Sweden was - the novels are set in the late 1960's and early 70's - but they are jolly good reads.
Imagine this - in Swedish (minus dayglo ties).
* Who are not very productive. Last album was how many years ago?
** A thoroughly splendid forum for absolutely everything to do with World War One
*** Not a word I get to use often.
*4 A word I get to use even less often than "apropos"
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