Fishcakes

BLISS' fishcakes...

...came out a bit hotter than anticipated. They were nice (I tried a few scraps left in the baking tray). Just, well, very, very hot. They were meant to pack bit of a punch, smoked haddock, roughly crushed potato and swede should be able to take some robust seasoning, I thought, and so I seasoned. Robustly.

That turned out to be robust as in 'mouth-searingly almost frighteningly hot'. Nice, just pushing the envelope of BLISS' chilli scale a bit.

In sympathy, I slathered my home made pizza with that chilli oil. 'That' chilli oil being the one that, rather than making things merely oily with a hint of chilli, actually makes things fiercely hot. Unfortunately, it's also the one I always forget is the fiercely hot...etc. It already had three finely chopped small red chillies among the mushrooms and cheese (we're all out of anchovies, unless there's one of those stupidly small and easily hidden tins at the back of a shelf in the fridge – there's only so much turning the place upside down in search of small, oily, salty, fishy kicks I'm prepared to do) so it wasn't exactly crying out for more heat. It was more an act of solidarity than anything else.

There's a set of three of these oils, in bobbly, curvy bottles. Hot, hotter, and very hot. They were labelled something like that. Instantly, the devils on either shoulder came up with a cunning plan: use the very hot one first (about half oil / half dried chillies), then decant hotter into very hot, adding those chillies to the already very hot, and finally...you get the picture. It'll be interesting to try the final topping up.

Watching the rugby...

...R and I hatched a cunning plan. It was during the Welsh and Scottish national anthems. The Scots changed theirs in the seventies to Scotland the Brave, so there's no need for us to stick with the rubbish one we have.

Our idea was this:

Start the world's smallest nation (Google 'Sea World') for a model example.

Invest loads of your own currency (we didn't think this through too deeply, but, hey, your nation, your currency, your printing presses / mint, off you go) in training one athlete to be the world's best at something obscure where there's not too much competition. The Olympics is ideal for this. They love a dumb sport. Solo synchronised swimming? Real tennis? Something like that.

Compose the longest, ever, national anthem.

Not only the longest, but one with several stop / starts, so people repeatedly go: “thank god that's over” and start to sit back down, only for “oh, Jesus, it's only started up again. Who are these people?”.

Then, just to add insult to injury, and noticing that other nations now have their own versions of the Kiwi's Hakka, have one of those, too. A very long, very funny and pretty camp version would be ideal. All that's left to do is settle down in the royal box next to whatever minor dignitaries have been exhumed to sit through said minority sport, and enjoy taking the mickey out of the whole malarkey.