Legends of the Sun Pig

This is the concert that we originally wanted to see in Brussels, because it was the venue nearest to us on their tour. That sold out while I was in the process of booking tickets. Then we were supposed to see them in Copenhagen, but we decided not to go that far afield when we discovered that they had added a date in Amsterdam! This one. Finally.

Curiously, I remember exactly where I was when I first came across Imagine Dragons. It was in a west-facing room at the Apex Haymarket hotel in Edinburgh, with a partial view of the old Donaldson School, at some point in 2013 (April, May?). Their song “Radioactive” was being used in a TV ad campaign for the Defiance video game. (Back in 2013 I was still in the habit of watching TV on my trips to Scotland. The offensive inanity of BBC Breakfast “News” eventually cured me of that habit.) The ad was running during almost every commercial break. The game looked meh, but the song stuck in my head. I tracked down what the song was, and watched the music video:

I knew Alex and Fiona would enjoy the video, and I showed them when I got back home. They loved it, and they adored the rest of the Night Visions album. The band played Melkweg in Amsterdam in November 2013. That would have been an awesome venue to see them in, but I didn’t notice it in time. They also played the Lowlands festival in 2014, but that wasn’t going to work for us either. I did promise Alex and Fiona that the next time they played the Netherlands, we would definitely go and see them. So that was last Friday.

I had bought five tickets, in case either kid wanted to bring along a friend. Abi was sick on the day, and Alex didn’t want to invite anyone, so Fiona got to bring two of her friends. We drove to the Ziggo Dome and almost got lost on the way! We normally come off the A10 at exit S111, but the Spaklerweg was closed for roadworks southbound. Our phone-based navigation systems kept trying to route us back that way. In the end I took a massive detour, and we ended up lost in Diemen and Duivendrecht before we finally convinced Google to send us to the Arena. We parked just before 20:00, and got to our seats shortly after the start of Sunset Sons’ opening act. We had listened to some of their songs on the way there, and the teenage girls in the back of the car hard had judged them harshly. I liked them, and thought they played an excellent set. They’re in Amsterdam again on 13 April (Melkweg), shortly after the release of their debut album. I might go.

This was the last night of Imagine Dragons’ Smoke and Mirrors tour. Of course they played the song “Amsterdam”, and the crowd went wild for it. The crowd went wild in general. I’m still not crazy about the Ziggo Dome, but the acts I’ve seen there all know how to put on a great show.

1. Shots
2. Trouble
3. It’s Time
4. Forever Young
5. Amsterdam
6. Roots
7. Hopeless Opus
8. Polaroid
9. I’m So Sorry
10. Gold
11. Bleeding Out
12. Second Chances
13. Friction
14. Demons
15. On Top Of The World
16. I Bet My Life
17. Radioactive

Encore:

18. The Fall
19. Dream

Finally, an important life lesson! If you’re going to see a band on the last night of their tour, they might be running short of tour merch. Some T-shirt sizes may be in very short supply. If you have someplace to stash your goods, go to the merch stand before the gig, not at the end!

Two weekends ago we had a family gathering to celebrate my mum’s 70th birthday. Mum & Dad had booked the Marine Villa at Archerfield for the weekend. The four of us flew over to Edinburgh on the Friday evening, with only a minor delay because of Storm Gertrude blowing through earlier that day. Nonetheless, we didn’t get to the villa until after midnight, and we were off to bed almost straight away. (After a quick tour of the villa, which is amazing.)

Our plan for the Saturday was to do a big family dinner, with Dad, Scott, and me each catering one course. Dad did a classic prawn cocktail, Scott made Tom Kerridge’s treacle-cured beef, and I made a trio of sorbets (mango, lemon, and raspberry & lime) for the grown-ups, and Cadbury’s Flake chocolate ice cream for the kids. (I had planned to make some vanilla icre cream as well, but I overcooked the custard and didn’t have enough eggs (or time) to do a second run.

Because I had been helping Alex with his chemistry homework over Christmas, I ended up watching a whole bunch of Brady Haran’s Periodic Videos. I was particularly fascinated with the one where they burn magnesium shavings in a crucible carved out of a block of solid carbon dioxide. “Wouldn’t it be fun to get some magnesium and try that out ourselves?” I thought. “Wouldn’t it be fun to play about with some dry ice?”

Turns out you can just buy dry ice on the internet! It’s not even all that expensive! I had a notion of buying a block of it in the summer and seeing what we could get up to. But then the family dinner came up, and I thought: dry ice ice cream.

I located some recipes for sorbet and ice cream, and practiced them the week before, but just with our standard freezer. The key to good sorbet and ice cream is small ice crystals. The smaller the ice crystals, the smoother the ice cream. You get small ice crystals by churning the mixture as it freezes (in an ice cream maker), thus never giving large crystals a chance to form in the first place, or by freezing it really really quickly. The best way to do this is with liquid nitrogen. You can buy liquid nitrogen on the internet, too, but storing it in the volume that suppliers typically want to sell requires an industrial dewar flask, and they’re expensive. But dry ice also works!

The technique involves grinding the dry ice to powder in a household blender, and gradually adding it to an ice cream or sorbet base in an ordinary mixer. The videos on the internet make it look easy, but we discovered that there are some subtleties involved. In particular: if you add the dry ice powder too quickly and don’t give the mixer enough time to distribute it evenly, it sinks to the bottom of the ice cream mixture and makes a solid frozen crust at the bottom of the mixing bowl. This can bring a small mixer to a worrying halt. It also doesn’t make for a nice, even consistency. I ended up discarding some of the sorbet as a result. If I did this again, I’d be careful to add the dry ice much more slowly, and use a high-powered mixer.

The other thing that some of the recipes and instruction sets warn about is a slight fizz and tang in the finished product. This is because some of the carbon dioxide dissolves in the liquid, just like in a carbonated beverage. When it dissolves, it forms carbonic acid. I made the sorbets in the afternoon and put them in the freezer for a few hours before dinner to try to give any excess carbon dioxide time to escape. Nice theory, but it didn’t quite work. Even the next morning, the left-over sorbet still had a bit of a tang to it.

However! It still tasted great, and it was great fun to make. I bought 15 kg of 3mm dry ice pellets (easier to powderize than a solid block) from dioxice.com. I ordered that much because I wanted to be sure that a) it would last long enough, and b) we had enough to spare that we could have some fun with it as well. And of course we did. Here’s the unboxing video, for example:

In the afternoon we had Rachel Rose round to do a photo shoot for the whole family. She did an amazing job, and we are super happy with the pictures. She took a bunch of traditional group portraits, and a batch of candid shots while we were hanging out and enjoying some birthday cake.

At one point we thought it would be fun to do a sequence of shots, in order of people arriving in Mum’s family. I stitched them together as an animated gif:

The following morning we disposed of the rest of the dry ice responsibly (cough). Then we had brunch at the Archerfield club house, swung through Dirleton so that Alex could capture a few locations for Ingress and hung out with Scott & Ange & Kyle & Rachel in Haddington for a bit before heading back to the airport. Abi and the kids flew back, while I stayed in Edinburgh for a few days of work. Overall, a highly successful birthday weekend.