Summer's nearly here; the planes are coming back to practise whatever it is they practise.

Anyway, it's Mez time... (dued, xxx)


1)Risotto ai porcini or al tartufo? Discuss.
Oooooh, topical. I made risotto ai funghi this evening. Porcini mushrooms are slimy. Even grilled, they have slimy insides. I am not keen on that. It makes me think of the underside of a snail. Raw. Ewwww. Cubed.
I am not really the world's biggest lover of mushrooms, unless they are boring old tasteless white button ones, or champignons, as they call them here in a vain attempt to make them seem more exotic. Tonight's risotto had porcini and some other funghi. It was average, apart from the slimy bits. They were distinctly below par.
However, I could wax lyrical about the truffle (tartufo) forever. It grows locally. I could take healthy bites out of a white truffle, if I could afford a whole one. They go for more than gold, which begs the question: are truffles so good because they are expensive or is it the other way around? One thing is certain: they taste a hell of a lot better than they smell!
I wouldn't waste my white truffle on a risotto, though, the black summer truffles, more like the ones you see in France, are good for risotto; white truffle is for grating fresh over home-made tagliatelle, with liberal amounts of melted butter and washed down with a Brunello...Roll on November...

2)Do you collect anything?
No, aside from unpaid bills and credit card statements. Seriously, though, I am not one of life's collectors, as I have a tendency to hoard things. All the things. They are like a security blanket. My things. God, I sound like Gollem and his precious! I suppose it is because there are items that have been a constant in my life, when people never have, places never were. I could take things with me, like some kind of variegated, multi-form security blanket; my own little snail shell. Isn't it funny how one person's bauble or bibelot can mean a whole home to someone else..?

3)Wet grass after it's rained or freshly mown grass. Which smell do you prefer?
I love both. I love the dusty, airy smell of grass that has just been cut and I love the earthy, damp and clingy smell of it when it's wet.
I still prefer petrichor to the smell of grass though.

4)What was/is your favourite bedtime story?
Thumbelina. I was three. I made my mum, or my granddad usually, read it to me every night. It wasn't even a particularly good copy. Once of those A4 sized affairs, cardboard and cheap paper affairs. It was blue. Thumbelina had black hair and these huge blue eyes. And she got butterfly wings in the end when she married the fairy prince. She got to fly to Africa on a swallow.
I will never forget that book. It was when they found out that not only did I know all the words in it, but that I could recognise the same words elsewhere. And more words besides. They stopped reading to me at bedtime after that. I was given my choice of book and told to get on with it. Thumbelina was the gateway to a whole new world that only I could inhabit, but it opened that gate much too soon and made bedtime that whole lot more scary.

5)Lots of people want Thatcher to die. Are you in that camp? Or do you think wishing death on people, even if they've done loads of bad stuff, is kind of bad form?
I don't actually really care if she lives or dies. I would care about her getting a state funeral, would care about people turning out to lionise the lady, when there is no virtue there to extol. But that is just my opinion.
I think wishing death on people is a waste of time, even if they have done a whole load of bad stuff; the most I can manage is thinking that the world would have been a better place without them in the first place. Superstition here says that if you wish harm on a person, it will come back to you and I don't really want that to happen, do I? Of course, I have a comfortable seat on the fence for the very reason that no one has done any seriously bad stuff to me; how can I know that I wouldn't rethink this whole viewpoint if anybody ever did?

To make up for the lack of inspiration and for a lack of Franks of late, this is the very best thing that a Frank could ever have done.