More crappy BBC sub-editing.

The headline:

Ex-Irish PM Bertie Ahern to stand down at next election

Yes, the BBC appear to be suggesting that Bertie Ahern is still Prime Minister and used to be Irish.

New life.

It seems only fair, since Daisy's birth was quite excitingly blogged live from here, that her new sister get a mention.

Poppy Antonia Kynaston Reeves was born on the 25th of November. She is very well, thank you, and looks exactly like Daisy, which is no bad thing. She is also a right wee besom. Already.

Long-time readers of this blog may remember from four years back that Vic suffered major health complications exacerbated by a certain amount of NHS awfulness after Daisy's birth, and might even by interested to know that all is well on that front this time around. We can wholeheartedly recommend the treatment you get in an NHS hospital shortly after you've made an official complaint against them. Works wonders.

I'm knackered.

Two adverts that are really annoying me.

Insert useless apology about not blogging for ages here.

OK. Anyway.

First, Dettol. Their Surface Cleanser is being advertised on heavy rotation at the moment, and, apparently, it "kills 99.9% of bacteria, including the flu virus." It's reassuring to see that a company that specialises in disinfectant products is unaware that 100% of bacteria wouldn't include the flu virus, in much the same way that 100% of pigeons doesn't include the Bengal tiger. The correct voiceover should be "Kills 99.9% of bacteria, not including the flu virus, obviously."

And so on to Bailey's. I love Bailey's. It is a quite wonderful drink. But my God, this advert is stupid. These people are having a party and their fridge breaks down or they're too thick to figure out how to use it or something, so they have no ice. So they go outside and break off icicles and use the icicles in their drinks. OK, nice image, very good. But then there's the voiceover: "The time we made our own ice." Well, no. This is in fact the exact opposite of what you've done here. When the fridge works, that's you making your own ice, using the fridge. Unless you've been spending days carefully turning the central heating on and off to jiggle the temperature of your house's roof above and below and above and below freezing in order to get the snow on the roof to repeatedly melt and refreeze at the optimum rate for icicle-creation, no, this is not the time you made your own ice. This ice you're using wasn't made by anyone; it just happened. The correct voiceover would be "The time we didn't make our own ice."

Glad I got that off my chest.

Chinglish from someone who can't spell "China".

The matter at hand.

So I was watching an episode of Castle and it starts with a PG-rated yet highly vigorous sex scene, and it's one of those scenes in which they convey the rumbunctious nature of sex via the medium of breakages, so cups are getting kicked off bedside tables and everything's rattling, etcetera etcetera, and right at the end, climactically, a great thump on the floor causes a couple of pictures to fall off the wall and I immediately, unhesitatingly, think "Well, what bloody idiot put them up? Shoddy job."

And it strikes me that this is how you know for sure middle-age is nearly here.

Better brioche.

I did say I'd keep tinkering, and I have. Here is the new improved bread-machine brioche recipe. I'm very pleased with myself: this stuff is really good.

1 large egg or 2 medium eggs
1/4 tsp vanilla essence
cold milk
1/4 tsp salt
30g diced cold butter
15g brown sugar
35g-40g castor sugar
80g strong white bread flour, sieved
180g plain flour, sieved
for 1 large egg, use 2 3/4 tsp fast-acting yeast
for 2 medium eggs, use 1 tbsp fast-acting yeast

Beat the egg, add the vanilla, then add cold milk to bring the total amount of wet ingredients up to 150ml.

My experiments have shown huge (bad) differences with softened butter, and so I recommend not softening it, but dice it quite small.

I'm using setting 1 on a Morphy Richards machine, which is the setting for a basic small white loaf. To help you tally that with your machine, that is:
Slow knead: 6min
Fast knead: 27min
Rise: 23min
Shape: 20sec
Rise: 64min
Bake: 45min

I'm getting fat here.

It's this sort of thing that makes me wonder whether gods are at work.

Fans of brand names and the theory of nominative determinism will be amused to hear that Reckitt are taking over Durex.

A brioche recipe for bread machines.

Anyone who's ever tried looking up bread-machine recipes ont' Web knows that there are thousands of them out there. Except not, for some reason, for brioche. I've done plenty of searching and found only three or four, and, quite frankly, have found none of them to be up to much. So I've been experimenting for the last few days and have wasted quite literally a tenner's worth of ingredients to bring you this, a brioche recipe for bread machines that is not too bad at all. I certainly intend to eat vast amounts of it.

1 large egg
1/4 tsp vanilla essence
cold milk
1/2 tsp salt
30g diced cold butter
15g brown sugar
35g castor sugar
40g strong white bread flour, sieved
210g plain flour, sieved
2 1/4 tsp fast-acting yeast

Beat the egg, add the vanilla, then add cold milk to bring the total amount of wet ingredients up to 150ml.

My experiments have shown huge (bad) differences with softened butter, and so I recommend not softening it, but dice it quite small.

The amount of flour may be slightly out. Keep an eye on it during the kneading and add an extra sprinkling if you think it's necessary. The consistency of the dough should be pretty soft and a bit sticky and should start out rather wet but should still eventually coalesce into one neat ball.

I'm using setting 1 on a Morphy Richards machine, which is the setting for a basic small white loaf. To help you tally that with your machine, that is:
Slow knead: 6min
Fast knead: 27min
Rise: 23min
Shape: 20sec
Rise: 64min
Bake: 45min

The crust is, I think, not quite right, but the overall results are perfectly good enough for dipping into hot chocolate.

I'm going to go on tweaking this and will provide updates if I manage to make any more improvements. Do feel free to email me with any cunning suggestions you may have.

Enjoy.


Update:

I have improved on this now. Here's the better version.

Translation and explanation.

Yet more world-class journalism from the BBC:

The wives and girlfriends of Spanish players, known as esposas y novias (wives and girlfriends)

Only half a sentence, yet I could write pages about the myriad layers of wrongness within it. But won't.

Unjustified.

Let's just take Saville's "facts" as read. He is, after all, a judge, and his job is to presume innocence and only declare as fact that which is proven — which puts those who are willing to tell the truth about their actions at some disadvantage. So fair enough: we'll say the facts are as Saville describes them. His reasoning is still bollocks.

Those rules of war so disdained by the Left when considering our enemies are there for a reason. Yes, if you keep chucking paras into crowds of civilians with terrorists hiding amongst them, sooner or later you'll have an atrocity on your hands. Which is precisely why not wearing uniform is a war crime, why hiding amongst civilians is a war crime, and why the traditional (and legal) punishment for being caught by the enemy out of uniform on a battlefield is summary execution. I believe Saville is right that the soldiers who fired had no reason to suspect that the particular individuals they killed were about to attack them. But the cases of Martin McGuinness — who had a Tommy gun but didn't directly use it in a way that justified the soldiers' opening fire — and Gerald Donaghy — who had nail bombs but was not shot because he had nail bombs — show the absurdity of it all.

No. The fact that Donaghy had nail bombs and was dressed as a civilian and was in a crowd of civilians may not be why he was shot at that moment by that particular bullet by that soldier, but it is very much why soldiers were pointing guns at civilians in the first place. Does anyone seriously think Bloody Sunday or anything like it would have happened had the IRA worn uniforms that distinguished them from ordinary members of the public and refrained from mixing with the general public while on duty? That the army, faced with an identifiable enemy on a battlefield and an entirely separate crowd of civilians several miles away, would have chosen to shoot at the civilians? To ask the question is to ridicule it.

Remember this the next time some romantic eejit excuses "asymetrical warfare". Of course fighting out of uniform gives you a huge advantage; of course hiding amongst non-combatants gives you a huge advantage. Such tactics would give anyone — the British, the Israelis, the Americans — the same advantages, yet they don't use them. There's a reason why civilised people disallow such behaviour, and that is that every single time you step into battle disguised as just another member of the public, you make Bloody Sunday more likely.

Just because it's someone else's fault, doesn't mean it's not yours too.