88 Percent Perfect
It’s not a complete disaster if you mess this phase up, you’ll just have sticky fingers during the eating phase.
Happy Advent!
And thank you for sharing last week’s post On Sneezing — almost unbelievably, it’s now my second most popular story since moving to Substack over two years ago. Who knew snot could be so compelling? You can check out the rest of my top ten here.
This week has rushed through — two days of outdoor first aid, two evenings of Carbon Literacy and a full body massage leavening the hours of screen-staring.
One significant highlight of the past seven days was calculating a formula that tells me exactly where each of Bob Dylan’s 39 studio albums lies in relation to the others…
Keep scrolling if that’s not your bag because it’s only one of three stories this week — and at least one of the others contains chocolate.
Cue Spreadsheet Geekery
The raw data for my Every Dylan Album formula comes from a personal rating, on a five point scale, of every Dylan song.
SKIPPER. I’d skip this song more times than not. Actively unpleasant.
FILLER. I’d probably leave this song on, but might skip. Unmoved either way.
BOPPER. This song would get me moving pleasantly and possibly singing along.
BANGER. I’d be singing by now. A thoroughly enjoyable experience (the song, not my singing).
KILLER. My life would not be the same without this song. I’d stop what I’m doing to listen and probably rewind when it gets to the end.
WARNING: This scale can only represent my feelings about a song at a particular moment in time. It excludes one very important category: the GROWER.
One example of a Dylan grower is Make You Feel My Love, from Time Out Of Mind. It’s as slushy as you would guess from the title and, until the summer of 2011, was a firm skipper.
Then Adele’s cover of the song came on the cafe radio as I sat waiting for breakfast, utterly exhausted from one of my first bivvies, a long way from home with a long road ahead of me, a couple of weeks after a painful break up. The tears rolled into my sausage and beans. Now it’s an easy banger.
The Secret Formula
I’m tempted to tell you that the Colonel’s formula is top secret, but it’s the first time I’ve ever used the LARGE function (proud!) so here it is in full:
=SUMPRODUCT(LARGE(($'All Songs'.D$2:$'All Songs'.D$1000=B2)*($'All Songs'.H$2:$'All Songs'.H$1000),{1,2,3,4,5}))This formula, as I’m sure you’ve all effortlessly deduced, returns the total score of the five highest rated songs from any particular album.
This is then multiplied by the average song score for the whole album and converted into what I call the ‘Percentage Of Perfection’ — or POP.
See what I did there.
The POP Scale
On the POP scale, Bob’s albums range from a zenith of 88% to a nadir of 11%, with an average of 43%.
That might sound quite low, but remember the five point scale. An album of mostly twos and threes — a not unpleasant, if unmemorable, experience — would score 30%.
A POP score of 43% could be an album that’s got one killer track, a couple of bangers, a couple of boppers and the rest filler. That’s a decent album in my book.
I’ve not got as much raw data on any other artist (and I don’t have time to go through all thirteen Beatles studio albums), but let’s use Arctic Monkeys as a reference:
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not = 73% POP
Favourite Worst Nightmare = 31%
Humbug = 26% (apparently I haven’t listened to it enough 🙄)
AM = 75%
(Side note: these are four of the six albums that Arctic Monkeys released in their first twelve years of operation. By that time, Dylan had released thirteen. Just saying.)
In short, over 60% POP is a sublime album — and Dylan’s done seven of them, as you can see from this chart:
Note: I haven’t scored Columbia’s 1973 rogue outtake album, nor the trilogy of songbook albums Dylan released between 2015 and 2017 because a) I haven’t got them and b) I’ve heard they’re not worth the entry fee.
Scraping The Barrel
You can all guess the highest scoring albums; the real fun is found scraping the barrel at the bottom of the scale.
No surprises to see the universally panned Knocked Out Loaded and Saved down there, but as bad as these (or worse) was an album described by Rolling Stone as ‘a stunning recovery of the lyric and melodic powers that seemed to have all but deserted him’.
Nope. Not in my world. Infidels (1983) is shite. Yes: even Jokerman. I don’t get it.
Instead of leaving you on a downer, I’ll leave you with three pearls cast into the swineyard of three otherwise scarcely redeemable Dylan albums:
Dark Eyes from Empire Burlesque (1985, 24%)
Forgetful Heart from Together Through Life (2009, 24%)
Blind Willie McTell cut (cut!) from Infidels (1983, 11%)
Litigation not education on Dartmoor
Dartmoor is the only place in England where wild camping is allowed without seeking permission from the landowner.
Unfortunately, reactionary forces are trying to ban camping in many of the most popular places on Dartmoor, including around the quarries of Foggintor, where I spent my first night’s wild camping on the moor in 2020.
It’s a beautiful spot and, crucially, it’s easily accessible from the road on foot or bike.
It’s an area where many people like myself will have had their first wild camps before building the confidence and the skills needed to safely camp in the more extreme environments of the open moor.
I understand the reasons why the Dartmoor National Park Authority are trying to curtail our right to the land: humans inevitably damage the environment they travel through.
But the popularity of Dartmoor after the easing of lockdown restrictions in the summer of 2020 need not be the trigger for ranger patrols and keep out signs.
First time or inexperienced campers can be the most destructive because they simply don’t know how to behave in the outdoors yet.
So teach them.
(Did I mention that I’m an outdoor instructor?)
The Dartmoor National Park Authority has also identified a problem with ‘fly camping’ — disposible dump and run campers — as well as with hordes of revelling ravers.
These problems crop up where there is immediate road access. So is there reallly any need to change the byelaws when camping within 100 metres from a road is already banned? Not to mention the byelaws that prohibit noise disturbance.
Even so, similarly popular areas near to roads, towns and rivers have also been removed from the proposed camping map. It amounts to an 8 percent cut in the allowed camping area.
This doesn’t sound like much, but if those areas are where first time campers are most likely to be able to access, then it’s a huge barrier for people ‘not like us’.
The outcome of these proposed changes is that campers who are not white, wealthy and middle class enough will be discouraged from communing with one of our last expanses of wilderness.
How depressing.
Other proposed changes to the Dartmoor access byelaws include:
A clear ban on van or car-based camping, and even the occupation of a parked vehicle after 9pm. So I can’t prepare a bit of night nav or stargaze under some of the only dark skies in England?
A ban on tents of more than 3 people and groups larger than 6 people. So what — no families, no school groups, no Ten Tors expeditions?
A ban on hammocks suspended from trees. Fair enough. I’m not sure this needs to be in place for the biologically dead pine plantations, but byelaws aren’t built for nuance.
A ban on the gathering of fuel, as well as the lighting and tending of a fire. Camping stoves are still fine. I get it, but this is another byelaw that falls under the heading of ‘litigation, not education’.
A ban on mass participation activities involving more than 50 walkers or 30 cyclists.
A clarification and extension of the ban on paid guides and instructors. This inexplicable byelaw is ignored by almost every single school expedition, but hey.
A ban on the use of drones. At last! Now if they could only ban those blasted military helicopters who strafed my peaceful walk up Cocks Hill…
100 Days of Adventure
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Only 9 more to go! I’ve still got plans to go to Paris in December, but if you have ideas or invitations for adventures in the final month (!) of the year, please reply or comment.
Thought for Food #3: Vegan Dark Chocolate Hobnobs
Hobnobs are vegan. Chocolate Hobnobs are not, thanks to the inclusion of something called ‘butter oil’ or ‘anhydrous milk fat’ in the chocolate coating.
This recipe began as your humble author melting a load of proper dark chocolate (naturally vegan) over a load of ordinary Hobnobs.
Delicious. Especially when sneezing one’s head off on Dartmoor.
However: as soon as one starts perusing lists of ingredients, one can’t help wondering whether one couldn’t do better one’s self.
Do those ordinary Hobnobs really need palm oil, sugar and partially inverted sugar syrup? I suspect not. Hence: this recipe.
Hob, nob, is his word; give’t or take’t
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Ingredients
Makes a baker’s dozen of large-ish vegan dark chocolate hobnobs.
150g oats (small grade, not jumbo)
75g flour (plain or wholemeal)
80g rice syrup (about 4 tablespoons)
75g vegan block
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
100g proper dark chocolate — I used 85%
Optional: pinch of ginger
Optional: tablespoon of coconut oil
The Biscuit Phase
Adapted from BBC Good Food
Preheat the oven to 180°C (fan). Next time I’ll experiment with baking them for longer at a lower temperature — maybe even as low as 150°C.
Line a large baking sheet with that brown parchment baking paper stuff.
Beat the vegan block until it starts to behave. Add the rice syrup and mix well.
Combine the flour, oats and bicarbonate of soda in a separate bowl.
Add the dry mixture to the wet mixture a bit at a time, ensuring you mix well to incorporate all the ingredients together.
Next time, I’ll wrap this dough in cling film and put it into the fridge for as long as I can bear — this recipe promises crumblier results.
Roll the mixture into 13 little balls.
Smoosh each ball into round biscuit shapes onto the baking sheet. Repeat until mixture is all used up.
Bake in the oven (middle shelf) for 13 minutes or until golden brown. They’ll still be a bit soft, so don’t be fooled — they’re done.
Allow to cool completely. 40 minutes is more than enough (I forgot about them).
The Chocolate Phase
The key here is to avoid un-tempering the chocolate — tempering is how it stays solid at room temperature. It’s not a complete disaster if you mess this phase up, you’ll just have sticky fingers during the eating phase.
The following, rather delicate, method was adapted from eHow, of all places. You might prefer to melt your chocolate with a tablespoon of coconut oil in 30 second blasts in the microwave, as per this recipe — but be careful not to overheat the concoction.
Put only two-thirds of the chocolate into a glass vessal (I use a measuring jug).
Put that vessal into a saucepan of water and gently heat the whole kit and kaboodle.
Allow the chocolate to melt gently, without stirring, until it is nearly melted.
After a gentle stir, allow the chocolate to continue melting.
When the chocolate is fully melted, carefully remove the glass vessal from the saucepan and slowly stir in the remaining chocolate a few pieces at a time, stirring with each addition, until it’s all completely melted.
When all of the chocolate has been incorporated, dab a small amount of the chocolate onto the inside of your wrist. If the chocolate is slightly cooler than your body temperature, it is ready to use.
Add a pinch of ginger if you're feeling that way inclined
Pour the chocolate over the top of the biscuits or dip the biscuits into the chocolate — whichever makes more sense to you.
Leave the biscuits to cool. In theory, if you’ve tempered the chocolate correctly, the coating will become solid at room temperature. I whacked mine in the fridge because I was desperate.
Whatever you do, make sure that you either leave the biscuits on the parchment paper or you wipe the melted chocolate away from the base of the biscuits, otherwise they’ll stick to the tray and break when you attempt to scoff them into your mouth.
The Eating Phase
Compared to normal Hobnobs, these taste quite savoury, but quite delicious.
In reality, I’m not sure how ‘savoury’ these biscuits really are.
They might have nearly 30% less sugar content than a McVities, but there’s still 3.2g of sugar per biscuit from the rice syrup and another 1g or so from the dark chocolate coating.
We’re down to slightly shy of one teaspoon of sugar per biscuit!
Actually, that’s still loads, isn’t it? Enjoy!
We’re doing another Thighs of Steel Cycle ‘Club’ party ride in London on Sunday — everyone is welcome. Meet 10am at Wimbledon Station for a 30km pootle around Richmond. Bring mulled things.
If I don’t see you there, have a great weekend.
Big love,
dc: