Friday Five: Bond Themes

The new James Bond theme is sung by Adele. Now, I've got nothing against Adele. I think she has a great voice, although I don't really like her songs. Teeange angst used to embarrass me even when I was a teenager suffering from it myself. Now it amuses and annoys me in equal measure.

I hate those earnest unrequited love songs (usually sung by women) about how you're yearning forever and he should be so sorry because he doesn't know what he's missing. Yes, he does. 'I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited'? Well, don't, then; he doesn't want you there. 'Without me, his world would go on turning.' Yes, it would. And it does. Stop making a fool of yourself. Get angry; do something about it; and for God's sake, stop whining!

I digress.

The James Bond Theme is not something to be taken lightly. It has a rich pedigree. This is average. It's not as bad as A-ha (shudder) but I don't think it rates among the greats. It has the necessary swooping orchestration and the stand-out powerful voice, but the tempo is constant (and dull), the lyrics are weak and the sex-appeal is entirely absent.

I'm not including the great James Bond Theme from Dr No (1962) in this list, as it is purely about the songs. Nor am I including Another Way to Die from Quantum of Solace (2008) because, although it's a fine song, I don't think it fits as a James Bond theme tune. There are several honourable mentions, and Duran Duran's A View to a Kill would have been sixth with their 80s twist on the classic form, but I set these rules, so I should stick to them.

The 5 Best James Bond Theme Tunes:

1. Nobody Does It Better by Carly Simon from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Indeed. Quintessential Bond. So good.
2. Goldfinger by Dame Shirley Bassey from Goldfinger (1964) - Any of DSB's tracks could be in here (Moonraker and Diamonds are Forever) but this has to be the best. That voice!
3. Live and Let Die by Paul McCartney and Wings from Live and Let Die (1973) - Fabulous tension and drama in this song not to mention groovy backing vocals.
4. Thunderball by Tom Jones from Thunderball (1965) - yet another great composition by John Barry, who seems to be pretty good at this writing sterling theme tunes business.
5. The World is Not Enough by Garbage from The World is Not Enough (1999) - just to prove that there has been a good title track since the seventies, although I'm still waiting for one in this century...

Friday Five: Beetroot Brilliance

I read today that Australians eat more beetroot per capita than any other nation. I have a friend who describes it as the devil’s vegetable (I disagree- that is surely turnip) and another who uses it to make her chocolate cakes moist – no, I don’t know how. I have also heard tell that you can slice it finely and sautee it as a crisp. Personally, I would rather just buy crisps.

And I’ve never been a huge fan of the pickled variety. I do like pickled things – eggs; onions; gherkins; herrings; 40-something year olds in the pub on their birthday – but I think it’s a shame to do that to a vegetable with such inherent vibrant personality.

Aussies (and Kiwis) put it in their hamburgers to make them quintessentially antipodean apparently (and they also often add an egg, which is irrelevant to this post). This seems slightly odd as beetroot is originally a southern European vegetable and is now most commonly found in North America, Central America and Britain.

It has several health-giving properties and is a rich source of anti-oxidants, nutrients and vitamins. Obviously the colour is an issue – it will stain everything you wear or touch it with. Disposable gloves are a good idea, but opening the door wearing red-stained surgical gloves is not, unless you want to get rid of cold-callers of course. I find it also pays to remember you’ve eaten it either you will give yourself one hell of a health scare when you next go to the toilet.

5 Top Ways to Serve Beetroot:

1. Roast it with other winter vegetables with a touch of olive oil and rock salt
2. Turn it into borscht – I prefer it hot with crusty buttered rolls
3. Shredded in a salad, with carrot, fennel, walnuts and feta; colourful and tasty
4. Hummus – add it to the chick peas, olive oil, garlic, lemon, cumin and tahini for a spectacular dip or accompaniment
5. Add it horseradish and ginger for a perfect pink addition to baked salmon

Friday Five: Rent Requirements

We are looking for a place to rent. There are a lot of possibilities, so we have to narrow them down. At the same time it will probably be a short-term lease so we're not looking to stay there forever.

The location is important. I would like somewhere with trees and close proximity to water. It is also paramount that I be able to walk to the shops/cafes and there is a bit of a village feel, rather than a soulless suburb in a cultural wasteland.

But let's focus solely on the house - and preferrably it is a detatched house rather than an appartment or a terrace. Although, of course, we could mostly live anywhere if necessary, there are some things that are very high on the wish list, and yes, I realise this is exactly what we own.

5 Things I Want in a House:

1. Three bedrooms - our room, guest room and office (preferrably one with an ensuite)
2. Open plan living areas - I'm happy to be in the kitchen cooking if I can still mingle with the conversation in the front room; good flow to the outdoor area also works for entertaining
3. A garage or large lockable shed - I don't care about the car, but we need somewhere safe and dry to put the bikes (and the beer)
4. A bath - it's not a bathroom if it hasn't got a bath
5. Must take pets - our cat goes where we go; that really is non-negotiable

Join the Rebellion!

The Rebellion Beer Company have an open day on the first Thursday of the month – for £10 you get five pints and a talk/tour of the brewery. My Dad and I were some of the first there, but eventually there were a few hundred people present; when it rained we all huddled among the brewing equipment to drink our beer without getting wet.

I began with a Blonde (4.3%); ‘using only pale and lager malts, giving the beer a very light golden colour’, it is a fair and refreshing ale, smelling of hay and tasting of summer meadows. I moved on to Flagship (4.2%), a stimulating amber number with strong notes of toasted hazlenuts and a smooth mouthfeel that I considered to be very sessionable. So did many others, apparently, as it was soon sold out. The mild also sold out early on, so I didn’t get to try it on this occasion.

The IPA (3.7%) was so much better than one I had previously had at a pub (I won’t mention the name as I think it may just have been a one-off). It was nutty and tasty with complex flavours. This and the Mutiny were my favourite. The Mutiny is more malty and darker in colour, but the hops add a nice balance and it’s stronger at 4.5%.

(Admission – I was drinking while note-taking through this talk, so some of this may be not entirely factually correct – i.e. made up. Feel free to send in amendments.)

The tour was taken by Mark Gloyens, one of the brewery founders, and, although we had had several beers by now, it was still entertaining and informative. In the 1970s, Britain went from having 7,000 breweries to 200. The big breweries took over (80% were owned by the conglomerates) and it was all about the pubs. In 1989 Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced the beer orders, restricting the number of tied pubs that could be owned by large brewery groups in the UK to 2,000, and required large brewer landlords to allow a guest ale to be sourced by tenants from someone other than their landlord. (Shock – she actually did something decent!) There are now around 400 microbreweries in the country.

Rebellion makes 70,000 pints a week – they use this figure because people can picture it better than 200-300 brewers’ barrels. Next year will be their 20th in business, so a little history...

Two boys from Sir William Borlase’s Grammar School used to perk up to the smell of brewing from local Marlow brewery, Wethered’s (on Wednesday afternoons as I recall – I used to make the detour on my way home from school). The earliest record of a brewer on the site is from Thomas Wethered’s brewing of 1750. However, due to some of the reasons stated above, Wethered’s closed down in 1987, and the town (and local drinkers) suffered. For example, The Hand and Flowers (well-known haunt to all Borlase pupils) had to get their beer from Cheltenham (more than 100km distant).

So one day as the ex-Borlase boys were having a drink after a game of cricket, they promised to re-start Marlow’s brewing industry. 1993 was not a good year for the brewing industry, and the banks wouldn’t give them a £2,000 unsecured loan, so Mark sold his house and used the capital to start the business. He explained that they could double as a brewery museum, since most of their equipment comes from other local breweries which have closed in the last 30 years. Their test-batch was made in second-hand equipment from Courage’s brewhouse in Reading.

They started employing three people and making 5,000 pints a week. Now they produce 70,000 and employ 50 people. As there are about 400 people in attendance at the tour, it’s fair to say they are popular and successful. They sell 20% of their beer in the shop, 20% in bottles, and 60% in pubs. Their recent growth is 15% (through word of mouth, mainly), and they are now at 110% capacity and don’t want to grow any more.

Hence they have made a concerted effort to cut down on ‘exports’, which they consider to be anything outside of Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire. This is because the closer to a brewery it is, the better the cask-conditioned real ale (made with yeast and sugar) will be. To this end, they have stopped selling to supermarkets (except Waitrose) by pushing the price up until the supermarkets stopped buying it.

Ideally they don’t want to sell Rebellion further than a distance of 30 miles from the brewery. They maintain that if you go to Yorkshire there will be a microbrewery within 20 miles selling beer as good as (or possibly even better than) theirs, and they would rather you drink that and keep the local microbrewing industry alive.

They paid the same duty rate as big breweries, which almost caused them to close ten years ago, and then Gordon Brown as Chancellor introduced progressive beer duty relief for small breweries in 2002. The measure halves duty tax for brewers making less than 50,000 litres a week, and tapers duty up to 300,000 litres. Rebellion now pays 60% of the duty, and all their profit comes from duty saved.

Twenty years ago the boys took a strain of yeast from another brewery (RHC Brewery in North Somerset, I think) and kept it alive. It has naturally mutated over the past two decades and has become specifically Rebellion Yeast, which has been put in the DNA bank so that it will remain the same and result in consistency of brewing.

At Rebellion the water is ‘Burtonised’ – a process by which sulphate is added (often in the form of gypsum) to bring out the flavour of the hops. Many minerals have been removed by the chalky Chiltern water and need to be replaced. (Burton-on-Trent brewed what was deemed perfect pale ale in the early eighteenth century, and people have attempted to recreate that water ever since.) The calcium reduces the pH which should be about 4 for beer (wine is 3); if it is too high the beer will be soapy, so sulphate is added. The final fermentation of the beer is completed at between 10-12°, and then an opened cask of beer needs to be drunk in two days – happy to help!

Friday Five: P52

As part of international book week, a diversion has been doing the rounds of Facebook, which goes like this: take the book next to you. Go to page 52, fifth sentence and post. Don't mention the title of the book.

Being as I write in my office, I am surrounded by dictionaries, encyclopaedia, and various other reference books, so I picked the top five books from the stack beside my bed instead.

5 Random Sentences:

1. "The remarkable similarity between this course of proceeding and that adopted by their Great Ancestor beneath the vaults of Parliament House at Westminster, is too obvious and too full of interest, to stand in need of comment."
2. "I turned from the contemplation of it to another photograph - one of my father - in a silver frame on the dressing-table."
3. "Even its origin has been granted literary associations."
4. "Ten neighbours were listed, who were also disturbed by his habit of 'deliberately exposing himself naked in a most indecent posture situation and practice to divers liege subjects both male and female'."
5. "She and I weren't all that close, and, to be honest, when she arrived I felt as if I knew Helene Baltru better than my own flesh and blood."

My father says he reads a sentence at random to see if he thinks the book will inspire him. I'm not sure that any of those sound particularly inspirational on their own. And that is the danger of taking something out of context.

Quote for Today: Healthy Living

"If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer." - Clement Freud: broadcaster, writer, politician, chef

Friday Five: Magic Music Moments

It seems that an alarming number of my posts are inspired by obituaries, which really isn't me being morbid - it's just the way things happen sometimes! The latest is Hal David, who was best known as the lyricist to Burt Bacharach's music, and died aged 91.

One of his biggest hits was Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head (from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) for which he won an Oscar with Bacharach. The pair also wrote I Say a Little Prayer, which was used to sensational effect in My Best Friend's Wedding.

So I thought about the best use of music in film, and just to give myself some rules, or guidelines as I prefer to call them, it can't be a song specifically written for the film (which rules out Vangelis' Chariots of Fire or Mark Knopfler's Theme from Local Hero, which are otherwise both excellent), but an existing song used in a powerful way.

5 Great Musical Moments in Film:

1. Lust for Life - Iggy Pop (Trainspotting) - "Choose life!"
2. You've Lost That Loving Feeling (Top Gun) - tremendously cheesy but brilliantly memorable
3. Paper Planes - M.I.A. (Slumdog Millionaire) - I loved this song when I first heard it, and when I saw it used in this film, I loved it even more
4. Right Here; Right Now - Fat Boy Slim (There's Only One Jimmy Grimble) - "I've got a better offer"
5. Where is My Mind? - The Pixies (Fight Club) - "Trust me, everything's going to be fine"