Spice Island

Every now and again you find a local restaurant which is genuinely reputable. The sort of establishment to which you look forward to returning. Don’t mistake me, I’ve not yet joined the ranks of the grand-a-night diners! However, I do enjoy good tasty food, professional service, consistency and value. I suppose I ought to have put consistency first on that list as to my mind knowing what you are going to get is very important. Perhaps my sense of adventure is deficient but I like knowing that my lamb dansak will taste very similar to the last one.

Hector Stops Hectoring

Little more than a note today. I noticed with some unease that Hector Sants has stepped down as the chief executive of the Financial Services Authority. You may not have noticed, you may not care, but for someone who has been doing a decent job, who has for a considerable period stressed that he would remain in post until the summer? This may be an uncomfortable portent of what is to come.

Catching Up

It is not without come considerable feelings of guilt and mispleasure that I must admit the lapse in my effort to update the Big Hungry Giant every day. If you noticed then thank you.

Let’s see what we can do to get back on track. If you have suggestions about the sort of things you would like to see more of here then let me know. Big HUngry Giant remains a little too amorphous at the moment.

Almost Walking

My daughter is coming up to eleven months old and with the aid of a walker is proudly toddling about the place. It’s wonderful. I’m not sold on the idea that she herself realises how momentous a step this is. To see her standing upright, knuckles white and smile broad, taking uncertain steps with increasing confidence is a great pleasure. Like so many events I am witness to at present it stirs up thoughts about child development, education and the ever-so-slightly-uncertain future that youngsters face.

Fun with helium balloons

In the nineties, there were all sorts of warnings associated with breathing Helium gas. It’s pretty common stuff so despite the risk of blue lips or passing out everyone has had a go at the squeaky voice gas. Everyone that is apart from Joe Pasquale, who from birth never needed any.  In short anyone who is anyone at all has given in and had a go at some point. For most of us it’s before we even make it to being teenagers. For some, well, it lasts a lot longer.

Quiet Sundays

As a youth I was often told that Sunday was a day of rest. As an adult I have learned that this isn’t the whole truth. Some of it seemed pretty straight forward and then turned out to be anything other than simple. Take the injunction against buying things on Sundays for instance. As a child this meant that you don’t stop at the Supermarket, you could only use the petrol, later diesel, in the tank and if you didn’t have some desired comestible, you went without. Period. Credit goes to the parent here, we followed this rule religiously (yes I see the humour there) and as an adult the habit remains. But what does it really mean to keep the Sabbath Day holy in 2010?

Photography in London

At a friends daughter’s birthday party I was introduced to Andrei Razumov. For a while I thought he was just another parent but when the usual preliminaries were out of the way he produced one of those nondescript black bags which always contains a gem of a camera or some other technological marvel. I hadn’t realised before, but the practised ease with which a professional handles their camera and equipment is readily apparent. I didn’t need to be told that Andrei was good at his craft. As soon as he started looking for angles and backgrounds I realised that this man clearly had the photographers eye for colour and composition too.

The Bostonians

What an epic sense of relief? Not relief to have finished; relief to have begun. Henry James has, to my view, climbed to sit in the lonely company of the other authors who are, I consider, capable of ending a book appropriately. The Bostonian’s gentle paragraphs, characters, scenes, ideas and plot fell, with delightful tenderness, through my eyes like rain on the desert. I cannot say enough to recommend this book, nor to express my personal sense of gratitude that I have been led to return to the literature of this period. You don’t find too many identified as an interlocutress in the popular fiction of today!

Data Protection Day

Today is Data Protection Day. After the unremitting years of divisive persecution, estrangement, and torrid treatment of the poor, helpless, inanimate stuff, a special body has been created within the European apparatus to protect the recently determined rights of data. After some initial confusion, revolving around what some considered the eponymous personage at the focus of this event, a character from Star Trek: The Next Generation and the luridly absurd proposition that this celebration of warnings and hyperbole could in some way involve helping to control practically the access to personal information submitted to government bodies in good faith.

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