Flight of fancy

Even more incredibly than my last post, I’m currently tapping away at however many thousand metres from some unknown point over China. What a time to be alive.

Used to be a long flight was the perfect excuse to be out of touch from the world for a few hours, but jets are connected to the internet now. Can’t escape it.

It does mean I could try and google the plot of the weird Spanish film I’m watching with my dinner where nothing seems to be happening for the last hour. No wait, something just happened. That was unexpected.

We stopped over in Hong Kong for an hour or so, which was nice. Just long enough to enjoy a can of Coke Plus, which is in a red on white can and has added fibre for some reason. Someone told me it helps to stop the body from absorbing fats. I don’t know whether it’s just enough to cancel out your coke, or whether you could drink it with chips and emerge at the other end slimmer. It’s a whole different world in east Asia you know, decades ahead.

In-flight entertainment

I hate to be the sort of person that does this, but I’m currently corresponding from a little business class perch on the tarmac at Heathrow. I’ve got a booth like one of those American films set in a dreadful office, only this time it’s great that I’ve got little walls and a door that separate me from the rest of the riff-raff.

I’ve got a strategy for the flight – it’s a very long haul trip, and my plan is to try and not sleep so that I’m really tired when I get there and sleep a proper night’s sleep. It’s faintly masochistic and I’m not sure that I’ll actually manage it, but I’ve got a lot of time and a nice long list of films to watch.

A curious case

I am terrible at packing. I can’t focus on what I’ll need, I can’t bear to be without the things I want to take for any length of time before I go. The only answer is to pack hurriedly the night before and hope for the best.

I’ve got a trip coming up tomorrow and I started packing on Saturday, which is unprecedentedly early by my standards. I didn’t make a list, I’m not mad, but I did leave some non-specific gaps in provision that I’ll never remember at a later date.

I’ll overpack if I start too soon. I’ve had to ditch three jumpers and a pair of trousers. I like to take plenty of underwear and enough spares to withstand a display of incontinence that would shame a baby. And far too many shoes.

I’ve managed, after much negotiation with myself, to get me down to a level of baggage that I’m not happy with per se, but that I can just about live with. And that feels like progress.

Today’s the day…

I am currently sitting on a patch of grass next to the Thames somewhere enjoying a picnic – the first of the year, no less.

It’s one of those moments where life is good. Amazing how many of those moments involve me scooping hummus into my mouth now that I think about it.

The sun is beating periodically down (gosh it gets cold when that thing disappears behind a cloud), the insects are flooding the blanket and the birds are a-twittering. Not so much the red kites, which glare from a height and seem to have their beady eyes on our homemade sausage rolls. Joke’s on them when they find out they’re made of Quorn.

There’s something particularly British about this form of picnic. You wait for nice weather and once you’ve decided on a moment then you grit your teeth through whatever comes your way. No rain though today thank goodness, just the odd threatening cloud that’s happy enough to float on and ruin someone else’s day later on.

There are certain rules to these picnics – there are vegetable sticks, hummus, crisps and curled sandwiches. Tiny plastic cups to hold whatever luminescent fizzy drink you’ve squirrelled in the oversized picnic bag. A scotch egg if you’re feeling particularly fancy. My mum used to bring cold sausages on every picnic, though I’ve never seen that repeated.

And then there’s the other rule – the one that guarantees you getting a light sunburn at the first picnic of the year. I’m feeling a little overexposed on my sparse head… must remember my hat next time.

I make some soup

We had some bread to use up this evening so I thought (well, I was told to by my wife) I’d make a nice bit of soup it could be dunked into.

I settled on a tasty leek, potato and carrot recipe that seemed to deftly straddle the seasons – you don’t want to be too hearty in spring, it all gets a bit heavy – and started cooking.

This one just involved chopping all the vegetables and cooking them in a pan before adding some stock and then cooking some more. The recipe said to add milk at this point, but I’m allergic so I chucked in some coconut yoghurt instead.

The final effort was blitzed up with the stick blender, though I was fairly convinced by this point of the dish’s blandness.

I chucked in a splosh of Maggi and some salt and began hoping for the best. Whether that was anything to do with it or not I was delighted to taste the soup and realise that it was actually pretty decent.

No interesting moral to the story I’m afraid, just me having dinner.

Birthday celebrations

Today was (and indeed remains) Mrs Burnett’s birthday – an unfortunate clash of professional requirements (I was working) meant that we didn’t get to spend the day together, but I did get to hear her crashing through the house while she got ready to go out.

They’re funny things, birthdays, especially the older you get. I’ve never cared for them particularly – just sitting around getting older doesn’t feel like a particular achievement, and we all have enough of a sense of self-preservation that there’s no skill in having done so. There are any number of people older than me, though I guess if I hung on long enough I might find myself in that excessively exclusive club where you’re the single oldest person on the entire planet.

Not that I would want to be, mind, but the odds aren’t exactly stacked in my favour, not the way I eat. I don’t mind my age as a number as long as there’s some reasonable consensus that I don’t look as old as I actually am. While I type Mrs Burnett is engaged in a passive aggressive fight with the cat over the space on her side of the bed (the cat’s), which is proof if it were needed that age brings you no privilege.

I'm on the train

I just had to pop down to London to pick up my passport because some embassy only went and stuck a piece of paper in it.

It’s amazing the power of that piece of paper, the amount of work that many people have poured in so that this piece of paper could be glued in by an anonymous bureaucrat on a completely random page that’s hard to find (near the back).

The resources expended, the boxes ticked. The heads scratched, frankly. I’ve never been that good with administration and I’m a disaster at filling out forms. I’ve had to scan things, ask for documents, I’ve had to make up find out important information. It’s been a mission.

Despite all that, I think what swung it for me was the fact that a hidden but powerfully influential figure in the concealing shadows of a far flung foreign ministry was persuaded by another powerful friend of mine (I’ve not met them yet mind) to put a little pressure on the right place. I don’t think I mean literally, but you never really know. It pays to have friends in high places, I find. Mostly from my experience of not having friends in high places.

I shan’t tell you where I’m going, because it’s more interesting and mysterious that way. Unless you have access to my work calendar, which is neither interesting nor mysterious.

Put to the test

Today I went to a top secret test track for a shoot with work, it was very exciting. The shoot itself wasn’t particularly secret, in fact the whole thing was captured nicely on video. The place we were at is used by carmakers and manufacturers of various wheeled machines to test them before letting them loose on public roads.

It’s all very sensible, these things need to be checked out before they’re made available to the public. The funny thing about the place is the great emphasis they place on security – stickers on your phone cameras and the like – because said carmakers are very keen for people not to see their new cars being tested in a state of unreadiness.

I’d love to tell you about all the fun things I saw, but I can’t. Not because of the rules, but just because I don’t know anything about anything. Who can tell what a car is once they put a bit of black and white camouflage round the exterior? It’s ingenious really.

Whoops

See what I did there? I missed a day. Just plain forgot to write, which means I have failed my 2026 New Year’s resolution. Accustomed as I am to dismal failure, however, I shall take it on my prominent fuzzy chin and keep pressing on.

Part of the reason I forgot was because we were entertaining, and the food I prepared was especially delicious, so I’m going to share it with you as a treat.

We had puy lentils, which I started off by preparing a little mirepoix (I cooked finely diced onion, celery and carrot until they were all soft and that, but not caramelised), to which I added three little cupfuls of puy lentils.

A splash of red wine was next, I cooked that down for a minute, added some seasoning (salt, pepper, a bay leaf, some dried herbs and a splosh of Maggi when Mrs Burnett wasn’t looking), covered the whole mélange in water and let it simmer a while.

Alongside this I was also preparing some delicious roast potatoes – I like to cut them fairly small, but I do not parboil them. I drop them into a preheated tray with plenty of oil, burning myself several times in the process, and cook the potatoes at 220ºC for as long as I dare, taking them out of the oven a few times during the process to turn them over and make sure they don’t all stick to the bottom.

At the final turn I like to add some salt, a few drops of balsamic vinegar and a little paprika to give it all a little character. Voila, bon appétit.