Pig Sty Avenue

I've got about 50 maris peer (2nd earlies) chitted and ready to go, and it's not raining, and I've got the day off, so it's looking like I'll get them in this afternoon. But before I don the gardening togs and head off to the plot, I'm going to do a wee Critical (-ish) Discourse Analysis on the chitting question as represented online. Googling I got more than 300k results, with this one top, "How to grow potatoes" .  It carries advertising. It makes several assertions: you'll be hard pressed to find commercial growers chitting, for example. Really, how do we know that?  But if that's true, why should allotmenteers?  It suggests recycling egg boxes for chitting, which is what I do, but also tells you it's possible to use seed trees, or even (ffs) wooden chitting trays, and gives links to sites that will sell you these commodities, both at Suttons Seeds, (though I notice the wooden chitting trays send you to a not-found page, perhaps no on...

This is a transcript I've done of the first part of the interview which relates to language testing of applicants for spousal visas. Please feel free to use this for research, but do tell me you find any proofing/transcription errors. Whole interview is here: https://youtu.be/Ukz7s_eGQK8 MONTAGUE: Let’s stort [sic] start on this question of language. How are you proposing that this could work? How do you find out which Muslim women are not fluent and go about, what, forcing them to learn English? CAMERON: What we’ve been doing is, er, getting-going round communities and trying to look at the level of segregation and the problems that there are, and the statistics are clear, that there are thirty eight thousand Muslim women who really don’t speak hardly any English at all, and perhaps as many as a hundred and ninety thousand who speak it very badly. And this is about building a more integrated, cohesive, one-nation country where there’s genuine opportunity for people because of...

It's good to know I'm not the only one who assumed that Jeremy Hunt was worse than his famous brother, Warwick.

On the BBC you can get the live video with Radio 5 commentary.

I've been meaning to get a copy of Macdonald's Revolution in the Head since it came out. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was only £3 in HMV yesterday, and I got a copy. Later I realized that the price drop is no doubt connected to the release of the remastered albums coming up on 9th September (9/9/9, geddit?) Hmm. So I've also pre-ordered the remastered Please Please Me, as the first step in another collection. Much more than that, if one was born in 1960, this formed a big part of that soundtrack of childhood. And The Beatles phenomenon was always at the interstices of musical genius and capitalist greed. The 60s nostalgia has been going on for a week or so: I've been listening a lot to the BBC Hendrix CD. Probably not the best performances, those sessions didn't have the thoroughness of a full studio recording or the energy of a live one, but they're great fun nontheless.

Our internet connexion here seems to improve over time, though not without the occasional step backward. Now I'm able to listen live to the BBC, (and I must get speakers today...). That's great, but when the connexion was slow, and listen live sounded like a dalek in a metal tank underwater, I got into BBC podcasts. It took some patience, a half hour programme could take 90 minutes to download, so one had to plan ahead. But once downloaded, I could sync it to my phone, put in the head phones, light up the pipe and look out onto the North African night, watching for the Scops Owl , and listen to Front Row , or Start The Week , or... The Archers . I've been listening to The Archers (which has got a comprehensive website , btw,) since I got my first radio at eleven years old, (my parents aren't Radio 4 people). Since then, I've listened to it on and off. Sometimes, several years will go by when I hardly here an episode, when I've been living abroad. But...

WTF is this all about? I'm a Brit abroad wanting to watch a bit of telly... AND, I pay my Licence back home, I might add, whilst I'm here. But oh, no. Bastards. Thanks to khadijateri for the heads up on this. Nice way of spreading our culture abroad, eh?

Usually The Food Programme gets on my nerves - like a lot of Radio 4, though I love it dearly, it's so middle class. However, it was interesting this morning, interviewing Michael Pollan about the shite we eat. What he said is all true, of course: we should just eat real, food (anything with more than five ingredients is unlikely to be worthwhile), and a lot of the supermarket food isn't actually anything your great-granny would recognise as such. And with the allotment and being an adequate cook I'm well onto the case, but the trouble is finding the time. I'm looking forward to retirement before we can really eat well. Or a lottery win. Mind you, the food in Libya's good. This contract, we have a house with a kitchen and a garden, and I'm looking forward to learning the Arabic for food names and eating really well. And as the allotment and the chickens are going to be in The Old Man's hands for the next couple of years, I might even get some chicken...

Pig Sty Avenue is three today! That's rather whiskery for a blog, eh? Back in November 2004 , we were getting ready for our wedding, I was having a break from Libya, and The Bairn was a twinkle in my eye. I notice that I was wowed by the concept of In Our Time as a podcast, and that I couldn't do an embedded link. Now, there are masses of podcasts from the BBC . And I can embed my links like nobody's business.

...the BBC have used one of my photos !