Ian's Likes

Chocolate	I've always loved chocolate. Milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white chocolate. My current favourite snack bars are probably Toblerone, Boost and Kit-Kat chunky.
Music	The world would be a much poorer place without music. Here are some of my favourites.
Kitchen Gadgets	I love rummaging around kitchen shops and kitchen sections of shops looking at whizzy gadgets for doing all those things that you never realised that you wanted to do until you found a gadget for doing it. Most of them end up in the drawer and never get used, of course, or they don’t work properly, or quickly fall to pieces.
Dishwashers	I used to quite like washing up, but not any more!. After using a dishwasher for a few years I wouldn’t want to go back to doing it by hand - as we found out recently when it broke down! All that time standing there at the sink scrubbing away. Mind you it still takes quite a while to load up and unload a dishwasher. I'm still waiting for them to invent one that goes around collecting all the dirty dishes and then puts them back in the cupboards when they’re washed.
Ceramic Hobs	I used to like gas, rather than electric, to cook with. But that was before I used a ceramic hob. They’re great. They don’t take much longer to heat up than gas, and they are so easy to clean. After a few years use ours still comes up looking brand new after a quick scrub with the hob-cleaning liquid. Which is more than I can say for the grime and gunk that collects on gas cookers and other types of electric cookers.
Fire	I’ve always been fascinated by fire, ever since I was a kid. I used to like making cardboard models and setting them alight. I could have made an excellent pyromaniac if I'd put my mind to it.
Blue glass	I don’t quite know why, but there’s something wonderful about things made of blue glass. Not any other colours, it has to be blue. Blue just has that air of strangeness about it, a mystical unreal quality when the light shines through it. It's hard to describe.
Snow	I’ve always loved the snow. A blanket of white covering everything, all bright and shiny in the sunlight. We don’t seem to get very much these days though. I remember stomping through knee deep drifts when I was a kid, but now we’re lucky if we get a few inches. (As the actress said to the bishop!)
School puddings	I remember school puddings with great fondness. (Except the ones with currants and sultanas, yuck!). I really loved those big troughs they used to have full of rice pudding or semolina, with thick chunky skins on. I often had second, third, and fourth helpings. And that pink, brown and yellow cakey stuff with custard - the pink custard and chocolate custards were great (but not the yellow, that was too thin and had lumps in). Also I remember the yorkshire puddings they used to have. Served in a flat tray. You used to get a small rectangle, which was never enough! That was the best tasting yorkshire pudding I’ve ever had. But I’ve never figured out how they used to make them so nice.
Pies	I just love pies. There’s something about pastry - I just love it. I’m not too bothered about what’s in the pie, I just like the pastry.
Water	Rivers, lakes, streams I like them all. But nothing quite compares with a flooded carpark. I used to love stomping around in puddles when I was young, and a flooded carpark is the best puddle of all. I just get these strange urges to put fish in the puddles, I'm not sure why.
The Farside	This is the kind of humour I like. Gary Larson's Farside cartoons. Excellent, wry humour. Great stuff.
Playdough smell	The smell of this stuff is odd, but there's something about it. I don't know if it's the actual chemical itself or just the associations with childhood, but I love it.
Pound shops	I love going round pound shops. There's now at least four of them in the centre of Nottingham. It's amazing how much useless tat you can get for 10 quid. Yes I know most of it doesn't even work, or falls to bits after using it once, and the quality of the items is non existent - but they only cost a pound! It's a bargain! How can you not buy it?