good morning

Granola (by Jamie Atherton by way of Jamie Oliver)

makes enough to fill one jar

200g rolled oats
150g mixed nuts (hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, brazil nuts)
50g mixed seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, sesame and poppy if you please)
50g dessicated coconut
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
150g (or less if you're us) dried fruit (we use apricots but you could add cranberries or raisins)
5 tablespoons runny honey (or maple syrup)
5 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas 4. Put your dry granola ingredients, including the coconut and cinnamon but not the dried fruit, on a baking tray. Stir well and smooth out. Drizzle with the honey and a little olive oil and and stir again. Place the tray in the preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes. Every 5 minutes or so, take the granola out and stir it, then smooth it down with a wooden spoon and put it back into the oven. While it's toasting, roughly chop up any large dried fruit. When the granola is golden, remove it from the oven, mix in the dried fruit and let it cool down.

Once cooled, serve the granola with milk and/or a dollop of natural yoghurt. We keep it stored in a medium-sized airtight Le Parfait jar.

leapt from the page?

This feels a bit like a TV commercial by the end, but I couldn't help but be reminded of our own drawings when I watched this.

cycle

It's the first chance I've had to write in awhile. It's less grey this morning; I am hoping for a bright and crisp afternoon, my favourite kind.

The radio is playing good stuff: Spiritualized, Magic Numbers, Big Pink, Primal Scream already. (Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is Six Music's "Album of the Day," presumably in anticipation of it being performed in its entirity at The Barbican next month.)

Jamie made toast with marmite. Perhaps a walk later. I've got myself a new wool cap. I'm determined it's not time for coats yet; it's still jacket weather, barely. Wool and flannel and corduroy, plaid and chocolate brown and grey, scratchy and soft, scented with last winter's smells; slightly creased.

I figured I'd use this opportunity to catch up:



Jamie's sister Lucy has opened up a folksy shop called Snow Pony, stocking her originals, editions and a Christmas card set.

We've got a Christmas card set, too!

I realised that I never wrote about our trip California; I can't even deal now... Take a look at Jamie's flickr photos instead. Especially the food photos!!!

I was just going to put in a gratuitous image of the total hotties from The Drums, but now that the DJ says he's got The Drums and The Cure coming up after the news, I have a sort of narrative excuse. I delight in the link. "Tenuous," says Jamie from across the room.



Some awesome kid blogged about our stuff being sold in a design shop on Castro Street in San Francisco, in the location which used to be Harvey Milk's camera shop. Now the really cyclical thing is, after it belonged to Milk but before it became this new design shop, this same space was occupied by a natural beauty products shop called Skin Zone. I worked there for a few months when I first moved to San Francisco. I got to mix my own scented lotions; that part was pretty fun. I remember I made a Goth Love Potion that is probably like the world's least subtle perfume, but me and Tara really liked it at the time.

I've mentioned to you that me and Anh and guest contributors are doing a blog about Los Angeles + London, rather confusingly entitled dotcomdotcodotuk.

My pal Matt Wolf, director of the Arthur Russell documentary Wild Combination, has created a good tumblr of esoteric ephemera; it feels like an awesome fanzine.

We saw a bootleg of Ponyo in Manchester. A brilliant reminder of how high Hayao Miyazake is on our list of influences. Magic.



More on Manchester, soon.

episodes

Late autumn light on our wardrobe; a chubby squirrel photographed a few weeks ago in Bunyan Fields cemetery.

Autumn, that favourite of seasons, sadly does not linger. This year, it appeared to be in a rush. Those trees of gold and red and orange that give a feeling of exhilaration (back-to-school! bonfires!) are now emptied out, already, to be left bare. You can see through the trees in front of our flat. "I do like that you can see the Barbican again," says Jamie. "You can see the lights coming on in the towers."

Nowadays the lights come on by four in the afternoon. The days have become so short. And sometimes it brings you down: You find yourself stepping not on crunchy leaves, but on soggy newspapers. It rains. There's a bit of a lull, after the autumnal anticipation, but before the festive season. Perhaps that is why people force Christmas preparations on us so far in advance.



Anh Do on our couch in early November; the contents of my bag.

I heard John Martyn's "Bless The Weather" on the radio; "sublime," the DJ said when it had finished. I listened to "It's Just The Weather" by Alfie on my headphones. Then I've noticed people turning to wistful girl bands: The Cardigans and The Concretes are being played at the shop where I keep a part-time job; I keep noticing mention of The Sundays. Their composition "Can't Be Sure" pops up on the new James Figurine Covers album. "England, my country, the home of the free, such miserable weather."

So it's less of the dense shoegazing records that sound like smoke and fog (The Verve, Girls and Clientele that brought me into autumn) and more of the snowflake pop that trips across ice and knocks on the door of a house made of candy. "Carnival" by The Cardigans. Add to that some icy disco and the kind of glittering glam that soars like an empty sky. (I've been listening to a lot of Bowie and Suede, too.)


The lovely art couple Quinnford and Scout in our lounge in mid-October.

One solution to the blues is to find a new television series, or revisit one of your favourites. Jamie and I are indulging the full box set of one of our all-time favourite detective shows, Jimmy McGovern's Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane. "This is so melancholy," said Jamie over the first episode last night. Maybe I'm just tired, but the way a passing train or a pair of car headlights is filmed can bring tears to my eyes. The gritty noir footage of Manchester is also helping us psyche up for our first ever trip to that city next weekend. We've also been watching loads of Peep Show off the internet and settling into the quiz shows, Buzzcocks, of course, and Have I Got News For You, as well.

All this TV watching makes me miss Kyle. For months and months when he lived in London, we watched Battlestar Galactica. This carried us from the colder months deep into bright summer. We even skipped a trip to Paris, in part so that we could race through the final episodes of BSG before Kyle moved back to Canada.






Come on over to our house, all you friends who owe us a visit: We light tea candles and make multiple cups of tea. Rooibus, always, for me. We are cooking dark winter foods from deep in the earth. (Remember the link to that article I posted? Did you get around to reading it?) We've got the radio on and people will begin talking about Christmas. The new Ian Brown single, "it's kind of Christmasey," the DJ said today, in that vague way; the way I find "Hitsville U.K." by The Clash to be Christmasey. The kinds of songs Prince Nelly plays. I'll see you later, down the pub.

jay

Our strapping and adventurous friend Jay Simpson stopped through on his way to spending a year in Africa. I kept trying to capture his beautiful eyes with the camera on my mobile phone, which proved a bit of a challenge. I think I finally got it here, up on the top floor of the Tate Modern, across from the windows that look across the Thames. That's all of London reflected in his eyes, then.

Jay reminds me of Errol Flynn.

When we have guests visit, I have come to realise that it can be a challenge to give them a glimpse of the city; London is too meandering, sprawling and diverse. We often bring people up to the top floor of the Tate for a quick, albeit truncated, orientation.

Here, Jay took our photo back.

tapes and tapes

I've always thought Alex Turner was as cute as the Babycham deer, but to be honest no single Arctic Monkeys song has ever quite stuck with me until this one. Bit of a Richard Hawley knockoff, but who's complaining.

Isn't it pretty darn cute that the video was released last month, in sync with the October page of the Atherton Lin calendar?

shelf life

Of course Waitrose vitamins are packaged like Penguin paperbacks.

This one's for Kyle... we miss you here in London.