Tasting Notes 10

Just one snack today. I'd been intrigued by this packet from the beginning, because I couldn't work out what kind of thing was in it. It felt like a folded cloth - but my best guess was that there was a sachet of powder inside, perhaps for mixing into water.



If I'd bothered to translate the label before opening it (but that would have been boring) I would have known that it contained 不思議食感わた菓子 (mouth wonder candy floss), and if I'd paid heed to "わたパチ" (crackling cotton) in big characters on the front, I might have been prepared for the subsequent fireworks. But probably I wouldn't have believed it anyway. Only ever having eaten candy floss prepared on the spot in fairgrounds, I didn't know it could be folded like a bright pink fan and foil-wrapped for freshness with an eat-by date of September next year, let alone combined with popping candy. Even the sight of a cannibalistic blackcurrant did nothing to prepare me, though no doubt it should have.

I would love to show you the candy floss itself, but I'm afraid I ate the evidence. Delicious, delicious evidence...

Tasting Notes 10

Just one snack today. I'd been intrigued by this packet from the beginning, because I couldn't work out what kind of thing was in it. It felt like a folded cloth - but my best guess was that there was a sachet of powder inside, perhaps for mixing into water.



If I'd bothered to translate the label before opening it (but that would have been boring) I would have known that it contained 不思議食感わた菓子 (mouth wonder candy floss), and if I'd paid heed to "わたパチ" (crackling cotton) in big characters on the front, I might have been prepared for the subsequent fireworks. But probably I wouldn't have believed it anyway. Only ever having eaten candy floss prepared on the spot in fairgrounds, I didn't know it could be folded like a bright pink fan and foil-wrapped for freshness with an eat-by date of September next year, let alone combined with popping candy. Even the sight of a cannibalistic blackcurrant did nothing to prepare me, though no doubt it should have.

I would love to show you the candy floss itself, but I'm afraid I ate the evidence. Delicious, delicious evidence...

Roald Dahl Centenary Conference, Cardiff University, 16-18th June 2016

This is just a PSA. To quote from the website:

This interdisciplinary international conference, held in the city of Roald Dahl’s birth and childhood in his centenary year, will give further impetus to the substantial critical attention devoted to the author’s work by seeking new ways of understanding his achievement and place in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture, broadly considered. The emphasis will be on defamiliarizing Dahl in the very act of bringing him ‘home’. Dahl’s work for children and young adults will, naturally, receive robust attention; innovative crossdisciplinary approaches that encounter his writing through the lens of (for example) illustration, adaptation and performance are particularly welcome. Dahl’s output for adult readers will also be a key focus, as will the need to resist the compartmentalization that sees his books for adults and children as separate imaginative entities. The conference will also consider Dahl’s interventions in other disciplines, from education to medicine, together with his manifold, influential legacies (both enabling and contentious). Discussions of Dahl’s various locations of culture, from Wales to Washington, Tanganyika to Buckinghamshire, Norway to New York, are also sought. The conference will offer opportunities for delegates to visit the places of Dahl’s youth, to examine manuscript and visual material from the archive at Great Missenden, and to enjoy dramatic readings and performances of Dahl’s work.

For more details, including the full Call for Papers, see the conference website. Feel free to share.