Monthly Archives: February 2012

Every workplace should have a choir. Fact.

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Choirs seem to be something of a ‘big thing’ at the moment. It wasn’t so long ago that a game of Word Association Football involving the word ‘choir’ would have thrown up ‘church’, ‘male voice’, ‘school’, ‘ladies’, ‘gospel’… and probably not a lot else. Well, maybe ‘Sister Act’. Then Only Men Aloud happened. And Glee. And the lovely Gareth Malone and his Military Wives Choir.  Now they’re everywhere – including where I work!

I love singing – I sing everywhere: in the shower, in the car, in the kitchen, you name it. I was in my school choir, then I was in my university’s gospel choir and then, apart from a brief spell in my local community choir, I was bereft of choir-iness, specifically of the funky,  fun, upbeat kind. Now, thanks to an amazing company called Sing and Inspire and the lovely people who work there and come into our office every Monday lunchtime, I have the afore-mentioned funky, fun, upbeat choir I was after! I was listening to Radio 2 the other day and two songs from our set list came on in a row – now that’s what I’m talking about!

Seriously, any bosses or office managers reading this, if you haven’t got one, get one – they make employees like me very happy indeed :D

Stupidly Simple Burgers

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The other day we fancied burgers so I decided to see if I could make some. From scratch. Without a recipe. And I could!

What you’ll need to make two whopping burgers:

500g decent steak mince (I did say they were whopping)
Some salt and black pepper
Two cloves crushed garlic
Some olive oil
Some mild chilli powder (for a bit of added flavour)

How to make them:

Put all the ingredients into a bowl and mix them together for a bit.

Use your hands to squidge roughly half of the mixture into a rough burger shape and place onto a grill pan. Repeat for the other half. They’ll now look a bit like this:

Burgers on the grill

Grill for 15-20 minutes and serve in your bread product of choice with whatever you like to have with burgers – we went for crusty rolls from the Co-op and chunky chips from McCain  :D

It really is that easy, and it took less time to make them than it would have taken to rummage through the five drawers in our freezer looking for ready made ones, or pop out to the shops to buy fresh ones. I call that a win :)

Body Combat

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Tonight, at least in part because a couple of girls I work with enjoy it, I swapped my usual* Thursday night Zumba-in-the-dark for Body Combat to see what it was like and change things up a bit.

Turns out that Body Combat is a much, much harder workout than Zumba – I was ready for the cool down about 10 minutes in and I can already feel my arms, legs and abs planning their payback assault on me for when I wake up tomorrow. Enjoyed it though so have booked up for next week – assuming I can move again by then.

*If you can refer to ‘went once’ as ‘usual’, which you probably can’t.

My love is like a daffodil

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It’s been a while now since I’ve written any poetry, or anything for that matter (combination of being busy with other things and just generally not having anything leap out at me to write about) so when it was decided to hold a Valentine’s themed poetry competition at work I thought I’d enter and see where it got me. Turns out, it got me first place, and I’m now the proud owner of a Love2Shop voucher as a result – go me! :D

I’ve pasted the poem below – it was one of those when the first line just sort of jumped into my head, which gave me an idea (in this case, that a parody of ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ but with a Welsh slant might be fun) and then the rest very quickly tumbled together, so it only took about ten minutes to write – ten minutes well spent as it happens!

My love is like a daffodil (with apologies to Robert Burns)

My love is like a daffodil
That’s newly sprung in Splott :
My love is like that Calon Lan
That’s sung by choirs a lot.

Aye, tidy you are, my lovely lad,
And much in love am I:
And I’ll adore you still, my boy,
Till Cardiff Bay runs dry.

Till Cardiff Bay runs dry, my boy,
And the barrage rusts with rain:
And I’ll adore you still, my boy,
While it rains, then rains again.

So hwyl fawr, for now, my love,
I must cross the Bridge a while!
But I’ll pay the toll to come on back,
Though it be to Barry Isle.

© Catherine Smith