postcode wars

Last week I read a Flickr discussion about 'postcode wars', linking to an article on BLDGBLOG. Researchers asked young people in several British cities, including Bristol, to draw maps of their individual urban experience in order to explore micro-territoriality: how people identify with a city when confined largely to their own territories within that city (maybe only a few streets from their homes). For example, some young Londoners have never actually seen the Thames...

They found that in Bristol, where postcode districts are displayed on street signs throughout the city, gangs spray-painted their postcode in rival areas as a form of aggression.

While out photographing with Pete this afternoon we came across a couple of examples (albeit next to each other) in Downleaze, a street in Stoke Bishop. Quite how this affluent middle-class suburb could be a rival to a postcode area on the other side of the city, in this case the more rough-around-the-edges BS5, is a bit beyond me though...

deer

For the past few days I've been walking to my new job almost three miles away. While I'm sure the tiring 50 minute journey is doing me some good, the truth is the bus service here is so bad I just can't face the hassle. On my first day, Monday, I got to the stop at 7.30am (it's quarter of an hour walk away) and waited for 15 minutes. When it did eventually turn up (10 minutes late), the bus pulled in half way up the street behind another two double deckers, let a couple of people off and then assumed nobody wanted to get on. As I rushed up to the bus I was fortunate the driver managed to see me after closing the doors. The journey through the city centre went pretty well until we crossed the river and became stuck in total gridlock. It took 45 minutes to crawl through that and I managed to get into work on time with a couple of minutes to spare.

So early on Wednesday afternoon I decided to walk rather than rely on the bus. My journey takes me through the nice streets of Clifton to the Suspension Bridge, across to the Ashton Court Estate and through the deer park to work. It's a tiring way to start your shift but this final leg, through beautiful countryside with views across the city, almost makes up for it.

It certainly made up for it early on Thursday morning. I set off in cloudy darkness, trudged through Clifton and past lines of traffic clogging up the bridge. But when I got to the meadows of Ashton Court the clouds gave way to the sunrise. And as I walked down through the deer park I found myself alone with a crowd of beautiful red deer. A few looked up as I walked nearer and I managed to get a few shots with my cameraphone. I actually got quite close but they soon moved when they became uncomfortable. Then, as I left them and navigated a slope I was given a great view across the south of the city with the sun rising above. It might just be the one time I was glad I walked to work...

again

Today I had the day off so I gave the breadmaking another go. I managed not to burn it this time so here's the recipe for a basic loaf...

Simple bread recipe

You'll need
500g / 1lb 2oz strong white bread flour
25g / 1oz butter
1 1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp fast action yeast
300ml / 10floz warm water
2 tsp sugar


Method
Mix the flour, sugar and salt together in a large bowl.
Rub in the butter then stir in the yeast.
Stir in the water and mix into dough by hand.
Turn onto a floured surface and knead for 10 minutes.
Flatten the dough out into a circle using your palms. Fold the top half to the middle, then the bottom half over it. Tuck in the bottoms and place in a greased 2lb loaf tin.
Cover with a clean, damp tea towel (to prevent the dough from drying out) and leave in a warm place until doubled in size - about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
Using a very sharp knife or blade create a slash running down the centre of the dough lengthways.
You can also use milk or olive oil to create a glaze at this point (if using olive oil be sure to reglaze as soon as you remove the cooked loaf from the oven).
Preheat the oven to 230 degrees C (450 degrees F, gas mark 8). A few minutes prior to baking place a tray of ice cubes onto the bottom shelf of the oven (the idea here is to create steam in the oven - optional, but makes for a good crust).
Uncover the dough and place in the oven for 30-35 minutes. When the tray of ice has melted (no longer than 10 minutes) this can be removed.
The baked loaf should sound hollow when tapped from beneath.
When ready, remove the loaf from the tin and cool on a rack.

loaf

Ever since our holiday visit to the Town Mill Bakery in Lyme Regis last year I've wanted to bake my own bread. M and me have made some simple flatbreads a few times but, inspired by Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters: the state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own, I finally got around to baking my first loaf on Friday afternoon. I've been meaning to for so long but, when I moved here, I promised myself I'd give it a go at the earliest opportunity.

Mass-produced bread is cheaply (albeit very efficiently) produced, largely tasteless, clammy and riddled with additives. In his Do lecture, Whitley relates how he carried around a commercial loaf for three months during a lecture circuit before it went mouldy - thanks to the cocktail of preservatives it contained. Moreover, three slices of some brands contain more fat than a Mars bar. Aside from flour, water, salt and yeast an average mass-produced loaf will contain fat (to improve volume), flour treatment agent, bleach, reducing agent (for stretchier dough), soya flour, emulsifiers (to enable the dough to hold more gas), preservatives and numerous different enzymes. Quite what a loaf that lasts three months without going mouldy does to your stomach doesn't bear thinking about...

That all said, I eat supermarket loaves all the time. But on Friday I gave breadmaking a go for myself and was enthused by the result. Many people reading this will be wondering what the big deal is: baking a simple loaf isn't difficult, though it's worth taking your time and getting the little details right - for instance, yeast works best at 37 degrees Celsius so I made sure the water was at the correct temperature before mixing; and to make for a better crust I placed a tray of ice cubes in the bottom of the warming oven to create steam.

Everything went to plan until my loaf had been baking for 30 minutes. I'd ramped the oven onto it's maximum setting and placed the tin at the top so I couldn't see the loaf cooking. Mistake. When I checked the top was overcooked so I removed it straight away. The middle was slightly dense when cut and could probably have done with a little more cooking. Still, I was pleased with the result and it tasted okay. Actually, it tasted good! It certainly went well with my fried egg and bacon on Saturday morning...

If anybody is reading this who hasn't tried baking their own bread I can only urge you to give it a go. All you need is some strong white flour, water, a teaspoon of salt and a couple of teaspoons of sugar. After emptying my first loaf from the tin I just wanted to make another right away...

return... over

It was with some regret that my return to Waterstone's ended prematurely last Thursday after I unexpectedly secured a permanent job here in Bristol. Just when I'd become settled in my routine too...

Before I left Brighton friends were divided over whether or not going back was a good idea. I wasn't too bothered about returning to a company that, in the past, had provided me with some great memories, introduced me to some wonderful people but also almost destroyed me. After all, the job isn't that difficult... though I was reminded that it is actually quite stressful.

But overall, my return was a pretty good experience (though having to work til 8 on Saturday evenings wasn't much fun). It's a different company to the one I left six years ago - far more commercial, to the extent that sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking you were actually working for Woolworths. My highlight? Spending an hour sitting through the company Christmas DVD. Unfortunately, the biggest barrier to selling books and by far the most frustrating aspect of bookselling remains the inability to find books in the store - not helped by a cataloguing system that doesn't seem to have changed since the day I left: thus it told me to look for a law textbook in the children's section and managed to classify the hardback and paperback editions of one book in two separate places. Just two of daily examples...

Also, I've been lucky to have met some really nice people during my first six weeks in Bristol - check out the work of three very talented and all-round nice guys: photographer Pete, artist Neil and Guardian illustrator, Barnaby...

Sunday walk

Here's a cameraphone shot from our walk this morning...

faded

We went on another walk this morning up to the Downs, skirting the Avon Gorge and back down through Clifton. On the home stretch M spotted this faded Banksy on a wall...

headless

We went on a wander today - down Park Street, popped in to the library, through Millennium Square to the Arnolfini then to St Nick's Market, lunch in Corn Street and then home again. Down by the harbour was this arresting stencil...

reindeer

Cabot Circus, Bristol, Wednesday 12 November, 4.57pm

house

Yesterday M and me went out to explore the neighbourhood. The idea was to check out the shops along Gloucester Road, a thoroughfare of independent shops that has been called the 'last great British high street', winding it's way north from the city and, to be honest, isn't actually a high street in the true sense. Earlier in the week I had been tipped off about some really good sausages to be had from a couple of butchers in the street and M wanted to check out a nice little foodstore/cafe called Tart. There's also a branch of my favourite coffeeshop, Coffee#1, so having only wandered short stretches of the road on a couple of occasions we were interested to find out what else is going on...

Cut to: a few months ago... I discovered that one of my all-time favourite tv shows of my brother's and my youth, The Young Ones, was filmed in Bristol. Back in the day we could quote huge swathes of any episode (and probably still can now). We'd videorecord the episodes and watch them over and over. Sometimes we'd autistically navigate to specific scenes and watch those over and over too: forwarding, playing, rewinding, playing. Several years ago my brother bought me DVDs of both series. Then when I moved I left them with him. I wish I hadn't now...

After consulting the web I was surprised to see that many seminal locations are just a short walk away from the area of the city I'm now living in. Several are in the vicinity of Gloucester Road so we took a slight detour on our walk yesterday morning. After a 15 minute walk and a few consultations of the A-Z it wasn't difficult to find probably the main location from the show - the Young Ones' student house. It's located in Bishopston, a pleasant leafy suburb. As we walked through winding, typically-hilly Bristol streets, my heart started to beat a little faster the nearer we got. That may have been down to the fact that we'd passed a child repeatedly calling out "Daddy! Daddy!" only to pass, on the opposite side of the road, two identically-clothed children stood in a garden with one blowing on a flute. Unnerving. But I put the excitement and nervousness down to the show being a massive part of my life as an 11 year-old: visiting the house where Rik, Neil, Mike and Vyvyan looned about in the early eighties had become a kind of pilgrimage for me.

However, I'm sad to say it was ultimately rather disappointing. The morning was dreary, rain was spitting and I'd brought the wrong lens for my camera - so the photo I took had to be taken halfway down the street with a huge tree in the middle of the frame. Stood outside were a couple of To Let signs and I found it slightly disappointing that anybody who could fork out the rent could live there - that it wasn't owned by a fan of the show who'd invite visitors like me in to relate stories about Madness performing Our House in the street outside. As M remarked, even we could rent one of the flats...!

By the time we reached Gloucester Road we were drenched. Before heading for the refuge of Coffee #1 we passed another famous Young Ones location: Bristol North Baths was used as a police station in one episode and a bank in another. There's also a launderette in the road that did actually feature as a launderette in an episode, but anxious to escape the rain, it slipped my mind. In fact, our trip came to a premature end due to the weather and, having had coffee, we returned home in the end.

Anyway, I'll endeavour to go back on a nicer day and get some more filming location shots around Gloucester Road and elsewhere in the city. And I'll take the right lens next time too...

Laura

I've never understood why people will pay good money to go to a gig and then spend the evening talking through the music. My experience of Laura Marling's gig at the Trinity Centre on Friday was somewhat marred by loud conversations, hijinks from a few excitable rugby types and a constant slamming door. It was all a bit of a shame because I thoroughly enjoyed the music - at times all out foot-tapping country, others quiet and acoustic. I'd never heard of Laura Marling before M booked the tickets. Nice evening, shame about the people that really should have just settled for a night down the pub...

2.7 for 08.30

I've just been trying to figure out how to get to my new job for 8.30am when I start in a couple of weeks...

By foot it's 2.7 miles which probably works out at around 50 minutes. Exhausting but do-able as long as it's not raining.
By bus it's a 15 minute walk to the stop where there's just one service that is scheduled to get to my destination in time - and due to the dire public transport system and chronic traffic problems in Bristol it'll definitely be touch and go...
I guess I could get a bike. But to be honest the prospect of navigating the rush-hour traffic here is terrifying.
No wonder everybody seems to drive everywhere in Bristol...