Gareth’s blog

Summer

A topic on which I might write some thoughts when I’m doing something that involves sitting at a computer slightly less so I have marginally more enthusiasm to write here.

I am though alive and predominantly well. My foot hurts but that might be related to a thirteen and a half hour shift to end my six day week. Woops.

There are, however, various photos.

Part 1A Results

Nigella’s chocolate-orange cake

Yesterday I tried baking Nigella Lawson’s chocolate-orange cake. Turned out nicely as well:

Brain scan

Given my current unemployed nature I volunteered for research stuff. I’ve done a couple before and this one was rather similar. Went along to the MRI scanner at the Cognition and Brain Sciences department early in the morning, sat in a scanner for an hour or so. Most of the testing involved me listening to a “word” every five-ish seconds and pressing buttons corresponding to whether I thought the “word” was actually a word ot not.

Not that exciting, but it’s research into how we process speech which could have an interesting results. I got £25 for it and a picture of my brain:

Dating

I did feel sorry for the woman who is suing a dating service for sending her eight unsuitable men. There is a real problem here in that nobody who subscribes to these services—I write after discussing the matter with single friends—ever tells the whole truth. “Good-looking” means “not actually covered in boils and pustules”. GSOH (good sense of humour) means “will make you watch all his collection of Jim Carrey DVDs”. The difficulty is in knowing just how exaggerated and airbrushed the descriptions are. One solution might be to follow the example of the famous Chelsea estate agent Roy Brookes, who went for implacable and very funny honesty in his ads: “Damp infested garret, favoured with view of disused industrial site” … “you could swing only the smallest of cats in the so-called guest bedroom”, and so forth. Customers were so delighted to find that the property was much less horrible than they'd been told that they arrived to inspect in a very receptive mood.

From Simon Hoggart’s column in The Guardian.

Work

Hoorah, back at Waitrose 7–5 on Saturdays from the 22nd. A return, I assume, to meat and fish.

Results

I forgot to say, I got a 2.i. :)