Back to School

I'm on a learning kick at the moment.

Paul and I are learning Spanish together, and I'm currently working my way through Learn Ancient Greek by Peter Jones. Yes, Ancient Greek. It was a whim inspired by Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History, a literary thriller about a group of US college students who murder a colleague. And, erm, speek ancient Greek quite a bit. The general reaction of my friends when I said I was thinking of learning it was 'um, why?' And I can entirely understand that reaction.

But the book was quite reasonable, so even if I didn't get past the alphabet, it wouldn't matter too much. In theory. In practice, I wasn't prepared for how much I'm actually enjoying this. Every night on the tube I'm scribbling out my little translations while the person sitting next to me gawps at my notebook thinking 'WTF? And the mornings too -- I was gutted this morning because I couldn't get a seat, and couldn't carry on with chapter 3.

There's something immensely fun about learning for the pure sake of learning. Let's face it, what use is ancient Greek to me really? Spanish I can use, even if the extent of it is ordering beer and tapas (and I can do that now). But that's not the point, is it? I'm doing this because I want to learn something new. And there's nothing newer than ancient Greek, right?

I also want to learn to cook. I can sort of cook at the moment, in that I can fling together a soup from a bunch of vegies and some pasta. I operate under the school of 'chuck everything in'. Beans, pasta, bacon, onions. Lots of onions. And garlic. Don't forget the garlic. But I don't know that I could say that I know how to cook.

Paul bought me Jamie Oliver's new opus last night, and we've had a brief flick through it. This is part of his attempt to get the whole nation cooking. Simple looking recipes, basic with reasonable ingredients. I have some reservations about the show -- in it, I've heard, he takes a woman who has almost never given her children a home-cooked meal in their lives and shown her how to make spaghetti meatballs. Lovely, wonderful, fabulous. Except then he returns to her later and they're back on junky takeaways because she's overwhelmed and is struggling to pay the bills. He's trying to get the nation to cook, but who is going to buy this book? Not the people who really need it, evidently. They're not going to pay out £25 (although admittedly mine was a tenner from Sainsburys. Pukka!) on a cookery book, are they?

While I don't mind Jamie Oliver and quite like his books/shows I do find the implication that he's on a purely humanitarian mission slightly tiresome. He is, after all, making quite a lot of money from these books -- let's not forget that, although it's great that he's trying to increase awareness,

The book itself seems pretty good although I need to sit down and read it cover to cover. He asks you to pledge learn one recipe (at least) from each chapter and then teach them to someone else. I'm not sure about the second half of that pledge, but I would definitely like to spread my cooking horizons and try cooking more than soups and the odd stews.

Here's to learning something new.