Roast beef of Olde England

For the first time for well over a year we had a substantial roast beef yesterday, a fore rib from the butcher in Manor Green Road. In the opinion of the butcher, the beef was too young and should have been hung for longer before sale, but I disregarded his opinion on the grounds that I do not like my beef well hung, certainly not as well hung as the stuff Sainsbury's describe as heritage beef.

I went for just the one rib, which the butcher managed to make come in between two and two and a half inches thick and weigh 7lbs 2oz. Maybe twice the size expected, so rather large for the originally intended purpose, but spot on for the eventual purpose.

Cooking time arrived at by 20 minutes to the pound plus 30 minutes resting (a concept, despite the amount of beef that I have cooked, which I have only recently come around to. How could I have waited so long?) minus 20 minutes deduction for high surface area (relative to that, say, of a sphere of beef), making 2 hours 30 minutes at 175C. Fan oven started maybe 10 minutes before the beef.

Took the beef out of the oven towards the end of the cooking time to baste it. Took the beef out of the oven at the end of the cooking time to plate it for its rest. This also liberated the roasting dish for confection of gravy.

Meat turned out brown (rather than pink) and reasonably moist. A little overcooked to my mind, but quite eatable with the four of us doing more than half of it. Accompanied by separately boiled white rice, green cabbage and yellow swede. Various puddings and wines, some flat, some with bubbles.

Later on, suitably replete, turned the pages of the NYRB to come across something called the IAT, the implicit association test, devised to winkle one's unconscious prejudices out of one, about blacks, olds or whatever. Sufficiently interested to visit the site (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ ) this morning to take one of the more anodyne tests and was pleased to get an anodyne result. No horrors lurking under those particular covers.

PS: Windows 8 still doing OK, maybe running faster, even if I have still failed to crack the password on wake problem. And despite interesting messages saying that the PC will reboot in 2 days to complete the update process, which I read to mean that the PC will somehow spontaneously reboot itself for this purpose, whereas the meaning presumably intended is that should I happen to reboot on that day, the PC will take the opportunity to complete the update etc. Maybe they don't do English in Seattle any more.