I saw a sign...and then another one...

A lovely, new, modern supermarket has just opened near us in Saket. It stocks a range of gourmet imported goods and basic foodstuffs, so your bills aren't so high you need resuscitation afterward. But what really sets Le Marche apart from other shops near us is the refrigeration units are actually cold on the inside. Most of the ones in the shops near us no longer actually refrigerate. When you open the glass door to get your butter, for example, it's already at room temperature. Which might not be exactly what you wanted, especially when it isn't butter you were hoping to buy but frozen peas . Rod has a special name for these kind of refrigeration units. He calls them cupboards.

As I was being driven to the supermarket today I passed a couple of signs worth mentioning. The first was on the hoarding alongside the Metro (train) extension. It read: "A care full man is the best safety device". Me, I'm not sure a man with all the worries of the world on his shoulders is really the safest bloke on the building site, but that wasn't the sign that really tickled me. Across the back window of a car, where Indians often add their name, instead of Ram or Adi or Amit and Arushi (Think Kev and Tanya, or Wayne and Raeleen), someone had decided to put a little ditty. It read: "After the whiskey, Rohit is risky". I wonder if Rohit finds he gets stopped by the police more often these days? Maybe he should try adding a red flashing arrow to draw a little more attention to his bad habits...

Adjectively Speaking

Rod and I were watching a TV channel we don't often view last night, because it was showing the final of the Indian Premier League. The IPL is 20 overs a side, so even I, a decidedly non-cricket fan, find it fast, fun and really rather engaging. At the fall of wicket and at the end of every over, there's a commercial break. As the match reached its climax, and the wickets tumbled (Go Deccan Chargers! Adam Gilchrist - what a star!), we saw lots of commercials. But as we were viewing a channel we don't always see, at least the ads were different from some of those we see so often. One, in particular, grabbed our attention:

Lovely Professional University, Punjab. Transforming Education, Transforming India.

It took us a moment to catch on. They're not adjectives. They're nouns. And really, wouldn't you rather tell people you went to Scunthorpe Polytechnic, than Lovely Professional University?

Fixed!

My DSM is fixed! A little man, with limited English, came to my house yesterday and fixed my sewing machine. His English wasn't limited in the same way most Indians I meet have limited English. He understood the phrase "hook timing". Or at least he nodded sagely as he stuck his finger inside my sewing hook and rotated way too much of it. In fact the problem was the retaining finger had become loose, and wasn't "retaining" anything at all. It turns out it's almost as easy to adjust the retaining finger on a DSM as it is on a longarm, but only if you know how to take the entire base off your sewing machine first. I didn't know how to do this, and, having watched him, I'd lay money on he didn't either. But now I do. He overcharged me enormously by local standards, but I can't imagine I'd have got much servicing done for the equivalent of nine quid back in England. Especially as I didn't have to leave home...

Smoke

We're using the new i Google as a home page on our computer, where we can have lots of little useful applications at a glance before we go off to find the webpage of our desires- news headlines; a four day weather forecast in London, Perth and Delhi; the current time in Delhi, London and Ohio (don't ask me why Ohio, Rod set this up, I don't think we know anyone in Ohio...); a currency converter - lots of useful things.

Well the four day forecast for Delhi is really bothering me today. It's not just that it says the maximum will be 43, and the minimum will be 33 (109 and 91 in farenheit, respectively). That's wrong, obviously. 33 as a minimum temperature is just wrong. What's really, really bothering me is that the current weather conditions are described as smoke. I didn't know smoke was a weather condition. I thought it was a question, as in Smoke? - no thank you, it's a filthy habit or a local news item: building went up in smoke, or just a really good way to serve salmon.

How Embarrassing!

This afternoon, I set up my DSM (domestic sewing machine) to do some piecing. But before I could get onto that, I had a little mending job to do. Thalia is getting taller and has outgrown some trackie bottoms. I offered to turn them into shorts for her. Turning up the second hem, I threw out my hook timing! I didn't hit a pin, it wasn't a chunky seam intersection, it was just two layers of cotton knit! But thrown out it certainly is. It was metal on metal, and the part of the hook race that is supposed to be stationary is moving really far too freely for my liking. This is why quilters don't like mending!!!

What is so embarrassing about the whole affair is that I don't know how to fix it. If it was my 24 inch, industrial sewing head on my 10 foot frame I would have had it up and working again within 10 minutes. This is a much smaller machine, which only sits on my dining table, and while I know how to identify the problem, and how the mechanic (when I find one) will fix it, what he will actually do to make it work again is just beyond me!

If you want to know if your bum looks big in this...

don't ask Keir. He'll tell you the truth, without even a little bit of tact to protect your feelings. He attended a school friend, Daniel's, birthday party last weekend. He came home, bouncing about and covered in paint (it was a swimming/pottery and T-shirt painting party). I asked him did he have fun? His answer:

Oh yeah -there was pizza. Did I have any pizza, Mum? Of course I did. We all did, except Arjun. He doesn't want to get fat. Vijay had five pieces, he's fat already.

As an adult you cringe, but he's not wrong...

*some of the names have been changed. Keir might not have any tact, but I have a little...

We ate red meat!

Well, pork. But it was real pork fillet, and my lord it was yummy! One really good side effect of moving to Hauz Khas is that we're only a 10 minute drive from Jor Bagh market. Even in this heat I reckon it's safe to eat meat that's only been out of refrigeration for 10 minutes or so. The pork fillet was surprisingly inexpensive (less than two quid for 400 grams), considering the general pricing at Jor Bagh's exclusive Steakhouse. The Steakhouse, of course, doesn't sell what you or I would call steaks. They'd be beef, and this is a Hindu establishment. That's why it sells pork. I am told it is possible to get beef in Delhi, but you have to go early in the morning to the Muslim area of Old Delhi and have a good grasp of Hindi. This is hard for me not because I'm not prepared to get up early. It's hard because only Raju has a good grasp of Hindi , and I'm not sure what would offend him more, being made to buy beef, or being made to go to Old Delhi!

And for those who were wondering, I cooked the pork fillet in a sauce of apples, mustard and kwark (local cream cheese). Yes, Julie, I made a substitution (when do I ever not?) ...but I wouldn't have used double cream even if I was at home!

Election Time

Today's the final day of voting in the Indian General Election. Hooray! I know India's a big country, with an even bigger population, but voting began over a month ago, and I'm getting mighty bored by it all. The newspapers are full of page after page of who is cosying up to who and who's likely to garner a few extra votes by giving out free alcohol. So not exactly subtle electioneering. But it has led to some fun headlines, like "Left is Now Right for a Desperate PM". I'm a bit confused, because only yesterday "Left was the Centre Ground".

India has some unusual electoral laws. You can't stand for election if you're a convicted criminal, as Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt found out. He's spent some time behind bars for gun running. His fault, he committed this crime so long ago it his case had reached the courts, and he'd been found guilty and served time. But there's away around this - it's not unusual for it to take 7 years or more for a case to reach trial. Commit your crimes and then stand for parliament while you're waiting. It's what they do in Bihar, over a third of the politicians in this state are awaiting trial - corruption, extortion, murder. Just the usual stuff.

There's barely any space left in the papers for the regular features, like what Pakistan is lying about now (because according to the Indian papers, and Raju, there's always something), and the exciting lives of Bollywood stars - who's been seen with who, and who actually ate food at a function. Not all the actresses do. It's really "in" to faint on movie sets. Obviously there's still cricket on the back pages...it's the Indian Premier League (albeit in South Africa, because of fears there would not be enough police available to keep the peace during both the elections and the cricket.) Maybe if the politicians gave out less alcohol it would make policing a little easier...

I Hasn't Bin Drinkin, Hofficer...

We all like it when our friends do well, but when is it not a good idea to celebrate a colleague's promotion? Maybe when he's a police officer, and you're the on-duty Station House Officer. In this morning's newspaper I read the story of Rajesh Kumar Nathani. Now Mr Nathani has risen to a position of authority in the police in North West Delhi. Good for him, and good that he is happy to welcome others into a similar level of authority. Not so good that he was on duty at the time, and was found drunk during a vigilance raid on his police station on Sunday night. When I say found drunk, the vigilance raiders didn't catch him and his fellow officers drinking. The booze had run out by then. But when asked to explain the reek of alcohol emanating from his body, Station House Officer Nathani was unable to. He also refused a medical examination to determine if he had been imbibing. He jumped in his car to drive away, and drove straight into the police station wall. Reader, I will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions...

Daas Boat

Keir's reading a book at the moment which is really holding his interest. It's "Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets". The plot in brief - a couple of schoolboys have accidentally created an army of evil, vicious, talking toilets which are intent on taking over the world. Will Captain Underpants save the day? Would it be giving the game away to say there's another three books in the series... Anyway, you're all wondering why I'm telling you this (except anyone who's been a parent of an eight year old boy obviously - they know how compelling toilet jokes are to this group), well the other evening Keir's bathroom was taken over by something as unexpected and frightening as a talking toilet.

It all started so innocently, like these things do. Keir had just had a shower, and I'd gone in to turn off the shower taps, which are pretty stiff. I left Keir in the bathroom drying himself. All was well. Then Keir yelped, and burst out of the bathroom. As the bathroom door opened, I was covered from waist to knees in a moving plume of really quite warm water. Then there was a loud bang, the bathroom went dark, and the water spurted at me again. So I grabbed Keir, put him behind me, closed the bathroom door and called for Rod. Seemed like the best thing to do at the time.

Rod opened the bathroom door, got covered from waist to knees in really quite warm water, and shut the door. He called for a torch. Because we have so many power cuts we have lots of torches, and they've even got live batteries in them. So armed with a torch he opened the door and we tried to find where the water was coming from, while staying out of range of the plume. It wasn't the shower, nor the basin. Eventually we spotted the culprit. One of the pipes into the hot water cylinder had come out of its socket on the wall near the ceiling. Now that we knew where the water was coming from, Rod had to enter the bathroom to try and stop it. Rod said later: "I felt like an actor in one of those disaster movies, when the submarine has been torpedoed and there's water pouring in to the vessel, and the hero has to go in to stop the leak so everyone is saved and I get the girl". Anyway, our hero climbed onto the toilet seat and isolated the water supply to the hot water cylinder and the water stopped gushing. Not quite as glamorous as they do it in the movies, but it worked. Then we had to try to clean up the bathroom. Thankfully Indian bathrooms are designed to get quite wet. Because no Indian maid, reknowned for being very generous with water while cleaning, has ever been quite this generous in a bathroom before. A day later, once the room was dry we had to go in and change all the lightbulbs. They had shattered in the incident. Still waiting for the plumber to come and reconnect the hot water cylinder. Hopefully he'll do a decent job - this is one movie that can do without a sequel.

And then it rained

And weren't we grateful! After days and days of extreme heat the long awaited rain came. The kids had to go outside to celebrate. But we did it quickly, before the hail started :-) They don't call us Fairweathers for nothing...

It's really been very difficult getting much done in the last week. 44.3 degrees (that's 112) is really rather draining. Thalia keeps telling me the heat is ridiculous, and she's not wrong...