Firstly let me apologise for any spelling errors that may arise during this post – we have finally unpacked our super shiny iMac and I’m not used to the tiny keyboard. I feel it is made for delicate, straw-like fingers to dance over, not having my hairy sausage digits pummel away at it like a sailor applying lip gloss to a £10 hooker. WOW there’s a sentence you didn’t expect.

We bought the Mac because we are pretentious, shallow bastards it is a lot easier to edit the blog photos on, which means you better hurry along and buy a billion copies of my book to pay for the fucker. It wasn’t hard to win Paul round – he has such a love of polished metal and smooth edges that I’m surprised he isn’t dryhumping the Micra on the side. But everything about using a Mac is different from a Windows computer. Even navigating using this tiny mouse is proving a bloody chore, yes it’s fair enough taking away the buttons and relying on me using gestures but so far the only gesture I’ve managed is calling it a dick and scratching my foot with it.

In fact, it almost looks like a sex toy, all slick and polished – but it would be a boring person’s sex toy, something slipped into a pastel handbag and wheeled out between  accountancy seminars at various Days Inn across the country. It would be called something yawnsome like ‘Pleasure Max’ or ‘Orb’. Amateurs. Everyone knows a good sex toy needs to be tapped into the National Grid and come with an instruction manual on DVD, called something like ‘The Ripper’ or ‘Uvula-nudga’. Anyway. One thing I do like is how sharp everything looks – it’s in 5k, which is apparently like HD but even better. Even better than 4k. Great, now when I watch Jeremy Kyle on catch-up I’ll actually be able to see the sheen of smugness that he has in every pore. I just hope the ultra high definition doesn’t turn online pornography (a healthy part of any modern marriage) into a disturbingly accurate affair – god knows bumholes aren’t pretty to look at in soft-focus, let alone splayed in billions of colours and filling the screen like a flattened sea anenome.

The Mac does look good in our new living room, and the good news is that we’re almost finished with decorating. We’ve got someone coming around to hang our artwork on the wall, fix the TV to the wall and various other little odds and sods, someone coming around to fix the alarm and then finally, the house is our own and we don’t have to make small-talk with anyone but the cats every again. Yesterday was a painful case in point – we had a chap around to install new blinds throughout and because I’d responded to his question of ‘How do you like them hung’ with ‘Well’, Paul retired me to the kitchen to research recipes.

What this actually meant was I got to eavesdrop on Paul making small-talk and the good news is that he’s even worse than me at it. Clearly both Paul and the blinds man were hard of hearing because every sentence by one of them was met with a ‘pardon’ from the other, then an ‘EH’, then Paul clearly doing that thing where he hasn’t heard a word of what was said but is too embarrassed to ask him to repeat it. At one point, he answered the question ‘What do you do for a living’ with ‘absolute junkies’ and that killed the conversation dead. Like the good husband that I am, I just spent the two hours laughing into my fist and trying not to fart too loudly.

One thing we’ve learned from all of this decorating is that buying furniture is a bloody chore. We can’t buy stuff in shops because we’re too common for the posh shops and too posh for B&M, so we’re stuck buying things online, which is fine to a point until you order what you think is a cushion and you get a 7ft beanbag delivered. I mean it looks nice enough but work don’t half raise their eyebrows when they have to hoick that into the lift. We’ve bought most of our new stuff from made.com which has been a revelation, but we’ve tried shopping local for all the accessories and bits and bobs. What a waste of time. Since when did it become acceptable to half-arsedly rub a bit of sandpaper over a shitty chest of drawers from IKEA and call it vintage or even worse, distressed. Distressed? I certainly was, I could barely stop the tears. There’s a shop near us absolutely rammed full of the sort of trinkets and sculptures you’d imagine someone who has the word ‘healer’ in their job-title to have littering their house and it is quite genuinely one of the worst places I’ve ever been to. And I’ve been to Southend, remember. (I’m joking, before I get any barely-understandable voicemails left). Who decides that what they really need for their house is a friggin’ incense burner made from a rusty tin and a feeling of malaise? 

My mother, god love her, looks a bit of chintz and tat, saying it makes a home – well, that’s one gene that didn’t make it down the line to me, I can tell you. For a woman of normal, reasonable taste, she refused for all of my teenage life to throw away what I consider to be the ugliest statue I’ve ever seen. It was a grinning monkey dressed as a waiter holding a tray. It looked to all the world like the final thing a demented mind might see before the hands of hell grabbed your ankle. I dreamed of kicking it down the stairs or accidentally setting fire to it (I’m not sure how well stone would burn in a Hotpoint oven but fuck me I longed for the chance to try) but my mother was fair attached to it. A quick look online suggests I can buy one for around £150, which might actually be money well spent if it meant I could fulfil a fantasy. I note you can buy a similar statue in the shape of a rooster – that would certainly be more suited to our house, given how much we’re fans of large cocks in our bedroom, but still.

Mother, if you’re reading this, it really is your only decorating faux-pas.

Tonight’s recipe then. As part of Musclefood’s generous care package, we were given some of their pork loin steaks to try. I struggle with pork, I always think that unless it is done really well, you might as well chew your arm. It’s what I imagine human flesh to taste like. Nevertheless, these steaks looked juicy and plump, just how we liked them. You can buy Musclefood’s pork steaks right here along with all their other marvellous meats. It’ll open in a new tab, don’t worry. I know I might sound like a corporate shill but I promise you, if they tasted like farts and nothingness, I’d tell you. As it is, they’re thick as a sadist’s slipper and juicier than a happy orange. Or something. Actually thinking about it, they’re no more expensive for pork than Tesco, so you’ll be reet. Take a look!

A bit of research was done as to what we can cook with them and Paul came up with a recipe for ‘Cuban Mojito pork’. The only thing I associate with Cuba, because I always revert lazily to stereotypes, is cigars. They’re about the only thing I occasionally miss about smoking. Before I joined my current job, I almost took up a job managing a cigar and pipe shop in Newcastle. How different my life could have been, dispensing cherry tobacco to whiskery old buggers and burning my eyebrows with the cigar lighters. 

Paul and I used to be members of a mail order cigar club that would send out a variety of different cigars every month – I always remember one month they sent a cigar that looked like a bloody roll of carpet – I could barely get it in my mouth, and let me tell you, that’s a problem I almost never have. It took about ten minutes to light the bugger (I had to use the grill function on the oven) and it was enjoyable for approximately sixteen seconds before the emphysema kicked in. There’s something inherently butch about cigars, well, decent cigars – mincing along with a Café Crème  that you’ve lit with a novelty lighter shaped like a phallus doesn’t quite have the same gravitas. 

Oh, if you’re wondering how this is mojito, well, I dunno. It has mint in it. There’s no alcohol in it, so if you’re shaking your way through this blog entry in the hope of getting a fix, have yourself a morning gin and a packet of Polos and get a grip.

to make cuban mojito pork, you’re gonna need:

• 1 tbsp olive oil (6 syns)
• 1 tbsp orange zest
• 150ml of orange juice (we use Tropicano 50/50, which is 1 syn per 100ml) (1.5 syns)
• 50g coriander leaves  (a good handful)
• 5g mint leaves  (about 8 big leaves)
• 8 garlic cloves
• 2 tsp dried oregano
• 2 tsp cumin
• salt and pepper
• pack of pork steaks

to make cuban mojito pork, you should:

• add all of the ingredients (except the pork, salt and pepper) into a food processor and pulse until everything is finely chopped into a nice green paste that you definitely wouldn’t like oozing out of any hole on your body
• if you don’t have a food processor simply chop the coriander and mint, and grate the garlic and mix together
• pour the mixture a into a sandwich bag or sealed container, add the pork and mix everything together
• leave for a few hours, or overnight in the fridge
• when ready to cook, preheat the oven to 220 degrees
• remove the pork from the mixture and discard the remaining marinade (you’ll actually lose a few syns this way, hence I’m only putting this down as 1.5 syns each)
• place the pork onto a rack over a baking tray and add salt and pepper, just a pinch of each mind
• roast the pork for around twenty minutes until it is lightly browned
• reduce the heat to 190 degrees and cook for another ten minutes
• transfer the meat onto a chopping board, cover with foil and let it rest for twenty minutes – don’t worry if it’s black – that’s intentional!
• serve with plain rice and pineapple salsa.

hang on, pineapple salsa? shit-a-doo, forgot to give you that recipe. OK, you’ll need:

• a few rings of fresh pineapple (use the rest in a fruit salad)
• two ripe tomatoes
• half an onion, chopped
• handful of coriander leaves
• one green chilli
• 1/2tsp of cumin
• 1/2tsp of salt to taste
• 1 minced garlic clove

to make pineapple salsa, you’ll need to:

• chop everything into uniform small cubes
• mix
• put in your mouth
• enjoy
• turn into poo

Easy!

Fuck me ragged, that was a long entry, was it not? I spoil you.

J