I’ve decided to try my hand at growing my own veg. I’ve been wanting to do this for years but have always been put off either because I haven’t had a proper garden or because I’ve been renting and wouldn’t be around to see the fruits (or vegetables) of my labour. This year, though, I’ve decided to go for it and create a garden-free and movable veg patch in a variety of pots. Last weekend, with a little help from my mum, I planted broad beans, rocket, lettuce, spinach, chives, dill, purple sprouting broccoli, yellow peppers, chilli peppers and basil. And so far, so good – after 10 days the only ones that haven’t shown any sign of sprouting are the peppers.

I have no idea when any of it will be ready, or even how much there will be (for my first attempt I planted 150 basil plants by accident). But I’ve surprised myself with just how much I can’t wait to find out.

So, between all the baking (the cake, on its second attempt, did turn out ok) and the reading, I have also been doing some real work, culminating in this article on how to clean up your online reputation in the Guardian.

I’ve also done a few news shifts for the Irish Daily Mail and covered such exciting stories as the proposed Anthony Gormley sculpture in the River Liffey, a fire at a recycling plant in Lismore and Aer Lingus’s increased fuel charges. I will post the resulting articles on my portfolio page (when I work out how) as bizarrely the Irish Daily Mail don’t appear to have their own website. Enjoy!

I am RUBBISH at following recipes. I’m not sure why – I can read, I have a logical brain and I can follow instructions – but I just find it incredibly difficult to follow a recipe. I’m sure it’s partly that I’m much better at processing verbal information (audio-recipes anyone?) and partly because I don’t have a way of marking where I am, with the result that I read the same line over and over until I can’t be bothered any more and just make it up myself.

In everyday cooking, I can get away with this. It turns out that when baking, I can’t. On my rare attempts to bake over the years I have produced the following:

1) A giant biscuit – it turns out you can’t produce a feather-light sponge by mixing in the flour halfway through the baking time when you realise it’s still in the weighing scales and the cake’s in the oven.

2) A crunchy chocolate cake – apparently you can’t substitute granulated sugar when you don’t have any of the caster variety. To be fair it was delicious, just an odd texture.

3) (Today) Two dense halves of a Victoria ’sponge’. It seems that when a recipe says to add baking powder, it probably means it.

There’s been a bit of a blogging hiatus as I’ve been coming to grips with my new life in a new city but more of that later. In the meantime, I came across a reading list circulating around blogs against which you can ‘measure’ how widely read you are. Totally pointless but I love lists. Actually I believe it started out as part of the American Big Read project, to encourage people to read more.

Here’s what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

Here’s mine:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 [Catch-22 - Joseph Heller]
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 [Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier]
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 The Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 [The Secret History - Donna Tartt]
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 [A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry]
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

42. Could do better, although the average (in America) is apparently six. Surely not?

There were a few on there that I started and put down, like – I’m ashamed to say it – The Colour Purple. There’s also a couple that I really can’t face: yes, Ulysses, I’m referring to you.

I particularly like the fact you have to italicise the ones you intend to read because it forces you to admit that despite feeling you ’should’ read more of them, the reality is that you’re probably not going to.

Anyway, the final part of the game is to pass the list on by tagging and so I’m going to tag Pennie and Jess, both of whom I suspect are far better read than me.

A few weeks ago I interviewed Allen Blighe, aka the Spook of the Thirteenth Lock, about his excellent new album. The interview’s below and I would highly recommend the album if you want to hear what talented young chaps in Dublin get up to these days…

Speaking to the Spook

The first song he remembers hearing is The Chieftans’ version of Mná na hEireann, so it’s little surprise that Allen Blighe has drawn heavily on Irish folk influences in the debut and self-titled album of his new band The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock.

“What I was trying to do was to write songs in the folk idiom and fuse them with more modern rock, such as post rock”, explain Blighe. By doing this he feels he is following a “time-honoured tradition of people taking folk music and trying to modernise it”, citing bands such as Planxty, Thin Lizzy and Horslips as influences. “It’s something very obvious but that someone hasn’t done successfully in a long time”.

However he wasn’t always so passionate about folk music. “It’s very easy to become disconnected (with folk music) and not really understand it. For years I didn’t really get Irish folk and Irish trad and then I had one of these Eureka moments when I heard The Chieftans again and became a bit obsessed with Irish folk music. I started listening to it as much as possible.”

Blighe teamed up with producer Enda Bates and enlisted the skills of former Steerage members Brian O’Higgins and Donnchadh Hoey. The resulting album, which took just under a year to make, is a heady mix of haunting folk music with strong post-rock ties, which swells and develops with each listen.

The strong folk tradition of story-telling is something Blighe has consciously followed, reflecting his desire for authenticity as well as his interest in the history of the genre. He speaks animatedly of the time when folk songs were distributed in freesheets and how this contributed to the recording of history. “In a lot of instances these songs would survive a lot longer than any historical documents so they were very much a way of telling stories that everybody can understand and the vast majority of people can relate to. The stories survived a lot longer than they otherwise would have.”

The use of music as a medium of retelling political and historical events is evident in songs such as Pimlico, which tells the story of the execution of Robert Emmet and was inspired by a local festival commemorating the anniversary. As for a central theme to the album, Blighe sums this up in one word: “struggle”.

One of the defining features of Blighe’s music is his use of unusual instruments. His favourite is a four-string tenor banjo but also plays some less associated with Irish folk such as the Russian-invented Theremin and the Indian Esraj. So how do these fit in with the Irish tradition?

“I think the Irish form can be very successfully fused in with different folk forms from around the world,” says Blighe. He cites the band Mozaik, who combine traditional Celtic sounds with East-European folk. “Listening to that music made me aware that if you look at the folk music around Europe, indeed around the world, you can see the cultural links and that’s what I find fascinating.”

However, Blighe knows he could face the wrath of purists the world over if he doesn’t play the instruments sympathetically. “It is a dangerous thing to do – if you do it disrespectfully. There’s also a danger of becoming gimmicky when you buy (an instrument like that) and don’t actually properly intend to play it so I put the time in to learn how best to play each of the instruments. With the Esraj, I’m only just learning how to do that at the moment so I’m going to unleash it soon if I get the chance.”

The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock is out now on Transduction records.

I’ve been to three very different gigs in the past three weeks. Each of them has taught me a little something.

Crystal Castles

• Glo-sticks are back!
• Dancing to Atari noises is more fun than it should be
• I’m definitely a decade older than I used to be

Spook of the Thirteenth Lock

• You CAN rock out with a banjo
• People in Dublin have an encyclopedic knowledge of music
• A couple of sticks of incense does not conceal smelly drains

The Gutter Twins

• There’s a fine line between looking really cool and looking really awkward
• Just because someone is a rubbish singer one night doesn’t mean you should rule them out altogether
• Music, beer and jumping up and down with a rucksack on makes some people really happy

Well, here I am. A fully-fledged Dubliner, complete with PPS number, bank account, new phone and tax credits – all astonishingly painless to set up. Mind you, in a country where 739,000 of the 4.3m population are immigrants who arrived in the last 10 years, it’s perhaps unsurprising that they have their arrivals process down to a fine art.

What has been unexpectedly much harder is extricating myself from the UK – in particular my mobile phone contract. I started the process to end my contract two months ago; today after five phone calls and several thousand touch-tones choices I appear to be back, as they say, to square one.

Of course I understand why companies don’t want people to leave. But I don’t understand what they think they will gain by making it so incredibly difficult. I certainly haven’t emerged battered and bruised after my tussles with the (laughingly named) customer service department thinking: “Fair’s fair chaps, I tried my hardest but you won in the end. I now have a renewed respect for your tenacity and ability to hide the correct contact number on your website, only for me to then find out I need to write in to a postal address – brilliant! I think I’ll upgrade.”