In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

Last night, I had tamsanger and her friends Miriam (whom I think I've seen posting as meerium on Tam's LJ) and Bro (who doesn't have an LJ, but had pretty much been persuaded to get one by the end of the evening) round for dinner.

Apart from a round of burnt toast which happened while I was quickly brushing my hair in the bathroom (and before my guests arrived), it all seemed to go off rather well. And before any snide comments are made: no, I did not serve my guests beans on toast, or anything of the kind. In fact, the menu was:

Starter: baked cherry tomatoes and halloumi cheese on what a restaurant would call 'grilled French bread' (i.e. toast).

Main: a spiced bean goulash, featuring chick-peas, red kidney beans, tomatoes, celery, peppers, onion, garlic and similar.

Dessert: proper home-baked pavlova, with raspberries and blueberries as the topping.

(All vegetarian, because two of my guests were). It all came out to my satisfaction, and everyone else seemed to enjoy it, which was good. Meanwhile the pay-off for me was that I got to meet two nice new people!

Miriam has done a doctorate in popular music at Liverpool, and is now back in her native Belfast working for what I think she said was called the Northern Ireland Music Commission. This is about promoting local music in NI, and includes her helping to run Valid.Pop: a club night which I've heard some of my other Belfast friends mention. She seemed a very lovely, chatty girl, who I'll definitely look forward to seeing more of (although I probably won't be going to Valid.Pop this week, given I've already promised to go to Ophelia's Wake tonight).

Bro is a fellow-PhD student of Tam's, also in the Sociology Dept, and is researching barriers which people with sensory disabilities have to overcome when going into Further and Higher Education. Bro has a profound hearing loss herself, which I presume is much of what inspired her to choose this research project. Bro was a lovely dinner guest to have round as well, although I guess that in a dinner-party situation where there are three other people talking, it must be harder for her to participate in the conversation than it is for the other people. I would probably need to talk to her in a one-to-one situation to get to know her a bit better. Anyway, hopefully that will happen over time.

We all had to get into work the next day, so we called it a night fairly early (about 10pm), which was quite good as it meant I was even able to get all the washing-up done before I went to bed. There wasn't much in the way of left-overs (grump!), but I was left with half the pavlova, so a hefty slice of that constituted my breakfast this morning (schlurp!). My guests were also each polite enough to bring a bottle of wine along, but unfortunately restrained and sober enough that we only managed to get through one bottle between us over the course of the evening! Since I'd got two bottles in for the occasion myself, that means I now have four left this morning. Ah well, it can go towards the house-warming when I have it: it's still a plan, but is on hold while I sort out various bits and bobs with my own life, and wait for a weekend when people I know round here look like they'll be free (which could take a while).

Finally: Tam, do you have a pigeon-hole in Sociology that I can send stuff to via internal mail? I photocopied the recipe for the goulash thing for you, so can post it to you today.

-----

EDIT: I have just actually looked up meerium's LJ, and the Valid.Pop poster there tells me I've definitely got the right person!