The New Thought Fox

Civilisation.

2012-01-21T23:58:00.002Z

The British Museum is one of my all time favourite places. I find history fascinating, and am in awe of the ingenuity of our species throughout time. Vast palace without metal tools? Sorted, 2,500 years ago. Symmetrical, polished stone statues three times the height of a man made of a rock found many miles from where you want it? We've got this, 3,500 years ago. Beautiful polished axe heads made of hard and beautiful greenstone taking hundreds of hours to make? We did that, 5,000 years ago. And you can still see these thing. We made beautiful things, perfect things, way back before we had running water or cures for diseases or reliable long distance communication - at the same time women ground wheat for flour by hand, on their knees, for so many hours every day that it permanently damaged their skeletons. They would be breathtaking achievements today, but so much bigger then.

The mummies bother me - dead bodies on display like this - but that thought forces another: that's a person. What would he think of me, of this, of us? What would strike him most about today, if he got up and dug his eyes out of that canopic jar over there, untangled all his layers of bandages and wasn't too distracted by the fact somebody had pulled his brain out through his nose with a hook...?

Nanowrimo...

2011-11-06T20:08:00.004Z

I should say, I'm not doing it. I feel I'd be setting myself up for failure, though kudos to those who do, like Hannah here, who might kill for this if she ever sees it...

(Hannah is beautiful, for reference, see here, even if she is dressed as a zombie.)

I had half a mind earlier this week to try and write a blog post every day or similar, but I decided that was probably too much. I wrote an epic 2,750 word email yesterday, and today I read much less of a book about investment. I did get to eat this brilliant cinnamon bun though. The Nordic Bakery is brilliant...

Before all of that, and nearly too late - I made possibly my all time favourite thing to make...

...mincemeat. I love Christmas cooking. And soon, I will make stollen.

A Zombie Tea Party

2011-11-01T23:30:00.001Z

Courtesy of Graham

I love being a host. It's so satisfying to put a group of people in a room and and watch them talk. I love feeding them, and talking to them, and introducing them to one another. I love being the catalyst, the centre of the web. It's what I loved about producing theatre - being the facilitator, creating the space and conditions for other people to do things, which in turn makes something larger than the sum of its parts. It's what is fun about being a civil servant, in a way, and why I want to run a food businesss - the creation of conditions for good things to happen.

We got it right with this party - all the time we spent sending invitations designed to make people laugh, ratchetting up enthusiasm, making cake, well and truly paid off.

The house was full, everyone talked, the pumpkins were carved, the skulls were decorated, games were played. People met new people.

Another one of Graham's. (They're mine...)

Great evening.

Getting up at 5.30 on your birthday, or How To Make Croissants...

2011-10-30T18:34:00.002Z

We all know I love to bake. I would be a whole lot fatter without my work colleagues to help. There are certain traditional times when everyone brings in something edible into the office: birthdays, and when they come back from holidays. I add in 'whenever I feel like baking' to that list...and that's often. So when I get to one of the times when everyone brings things in, I'm on my mettle to produce something a bit more....so I spent 3 days making croissants for my birthday.

It began on Friday night, when I mixed sourdough leaven and yeast poolish (batters made of flour, water and wild or cultured yeast).

Leaven - sourdough batter, made with equal parts water and 00 flour and a spoonful of my sourdough culture. Poolish is
identical, but switch a tiny amount of commercial yeast for the culture. I have no idea why it should be called poolish....

It finished as the sun came up on my birthday. In fact. this is what before dawn on your birthday looks like if it's mid October and you live in London:

Monday 17th October, about 7.20am.

Croissants are a bit of a faff, even for somebody who really doesn't think that 24 hours is too long to wait for a loaf of bread. You make something a bit like a baguette dough (so that's very soft and very white)...

Dough bulk rising.

and you roll it out, plonk a slab of butter in the middle and wrap it up like a parcel...

Laminating croissant dough with butter: and roll and fold and roll and fold and roll and fold and...

...and you roll it and fold it twice every half hour, for 3 hours, until, eventually, you're allowed to shape them.

Aren't they cute? I was aiming for mini ones, but they baked up to suitable breakfast size...

It was Sunday evening by this stage - I could probably have got to this point 24 hours earlier but I wanted to make sure I could bake them on Monday morning, because who wants a day old croissant? I was going out with my friends to have brunch on Sunday, too, so it's a good job the dough is pretty forgiving - you can put it in the freezer and things to slow it down. Next time I make them though I want to do what they tell me about when I bake them, because I'm hopeful that will just perfect the texture.

On Monday morning, they looked like this:

All glazed up.

And they baked beautifully. Everybody thought I was mad, but *I* was the one who spent a whole hour on the bus with the heady smell of fresh croissants warm on my lap instead of stinky London morning commuters.

I'm not going to try and write out the recipe, it would take too much explanation. Tom and I have a new Bible -

It's really excellent, if you're into this kind of thing. Lots of detail, lots of explanation, lots of wonderful photos. I think the croissant recipe would probably total about 20 pages, but it's hard to count and certainly not that hard to do. This is the second time I've made this recipe and they really did come out well. I am beginning to think I might make a few changes next time, because I'm not getting just the texture I want, but I need more time for that - and a lot of people to eat them...

There are a few more photos here.

Sunday Afternoon.

2011-09-12T22:00:00.000+01:00

I bought a coat - a spy coat. Trench coat. Double-breasted, mid length, mac. Inspector Gadget, or flasher chic if you forget the trilby. They're everywhere right now. I've been looking for one for a while, and my housemate handed me a 30% off, one day only, voucher for Gap he didn't think he would be using. I went to get out of the house, and because I thought they'd probably have something. I found the coat. It was grey rather than the traditional camel colour I really wanted - which was a bit of an issue as a friend has a similar item. Anyway. I put it on. It fitted pretty well and I liked the longish length it had going. I took an iPhone picture in the mirror to send to Tom for Opinions. I wandered around the shop for a while clutching the coat and waiting for an answer. After 10 minutes I had exhausted the shop and decided just to buy the coat. 30% is a good deal, and it's just on today, and it IS the kind of coat I've been looking for, and I don't spend THAT much time with the friend. As I leave, I get a text. 'Out with Jenn, we both agree the coat is only so-so.' I turn around and go back into the shop. I know I will never wear the coat. I tell the cashier that a friend has just told me she owns the exact same coat, because saying 'my boyfriend doesn't really like it' sounds even more dumb. He gives me an odd look, but returns it for me...7 whole minutes after he sold it to me.

I text Tom the story. His response: I love you. I tell him that he's the only person on earth who would...

What To Do With Monster.

2011-09-12T21:38:00.003+01:00

I went on holiday for a month. It was hot and sunny in the south of France, and damp and English in London. My garden has become a jungle, and everything is a size bigger than it should be.

There are mushrooms three inches across under the birch trees and clearly the homes of gnomes, a bright yellow pumpkin as big as my head which looks like a roc's egg, runner beans 18 inches long and fat with big purple beans, where the snails haven't got them - and under the parasol leaves near the front of the vegetable patch I found Monster.

Monster is a courgette. Monster weighs 1.5kg, or 3.5lb in old money. Monster is practically as long as my arm. My dad told me not to take him on a train because he might get classed as an offensive weapon. Who could possibly be offended by Monster?!

His eating demanded ceremony and attention. I didn't think he was going to get cooked at all, my week is so busy. Today my curry date (third in a week, but all delicious) cancelled a little to my relief. I will see the friend next week for idli and dosai, and we will be both be relaxed and ready. All the way home on the bus I pondered. I googled and thought and risked antagonising the motion sickness and the smelly man with ear hair who sat beside me for a while.

Monster: roasted with lemon and rosemary; stuffed with crispy sausagemeat, chilli and pear.

I knew there was going to be sausage, but it took a Nigel Slater recipe, obviously, to tell me that I wanted it to be *crispy*. The rest is my idea...

Marrow with crispy sausage and pear
Serves 2 very hungry people, or 3 with a salad
1 large courgette, or several smaller ones, weighing about 1kg in total after trimming.
Rosemary sprigs (about six 2 inch ones)
1 lemon
olive oil
8 butcher's sausages, around 400g
1 hard conference pear
1 tbsp coarsely chopped parsley
1 small red chilli
3 cloves garlic
Sea salt and black pepper

Preheat the oven to 220℃. Cut the courgette into 3 inch lengths, and then in half vertically. With a spoon, scrape out the spongy inner flesh (and add to your compost to feed to next year's Monster). In a large bowl, toss the pieces with a couple of spoonsful of oil, the zest of the lemon, plenty of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Place the pieces skin side up in a heavy roasting tin or casserole dish and tuck rosemary sprigs all around and inside. Bake for 20 minutes, or until beginning to colour, then flip the pieces over. It will probably take 40 minutes all told, it's done when a fork goes all the way through easily but don't overdo it.

Meanwhile, chop the chilli and garlic finely. Strip the sausagemeat out of the skins. Heat a spoonful of oil in a cast iron pan until shimmering and crumble the meat into it - you may need two pans, or to do this in batches. If you crowd the pan the meat will steam and not go crispy. Try not to disturb it too much until it has begun to caramelise. Get it nice and brown, adding the garlic and chilli for the final 5 minutes. As it fries, chop the pear into quarters, core and slice each quarter into pieces half a centimetre thick. Remove the meat to a dish and keep warm. In the same pan, fry the pear until it takes a little colour, then add the juice of half the lemon and let it evaporate. Add plenty of salt and pepper, and return the sausage to the pan to combine. Stir in the parsley. Taste for seasoning.

When the marrow is cooked, discard the rosemary and serve with the meat.

No word processor.

2010-09-12T21:45:00.000+01:00

Did you ever play 'should've said'? Probably not, though you might have seen it, if improvised comedy is your thing. In Edinburgh and a few other places. A scene is started between two performers - about anything at all, usually the audience is asked for a prompt. At interesting moments, or boring moments, or any time at all that they feel like it, the audience can call out 'should've said' and the person who has just said something must say something different. With good performers, it means you can get all the funnies possible out of a given position or character or whatever. It's great.

I play it in my head all the time. I guess everyone does - that argument you had with someone where, when you leave, you think of all the smart and cunning things you should have said. Or probably shouldn't have said. Or would never have had the guts to say. Wish you had had the guts to say. Going back to insert a paragraph, to edit in a more pleasing turn of phrase. I'm not really sure where to go with this except that it's an interesting sort of thought. What's done stays happen, you can't change it, there's no point agonising? Maybe that's the virtue of it. Handwritten, or on a typewriter - ink directly onto paper, anyway. No virtual words, just indelible ones, albeit in an ink that seems to run when it gets time on it.

Sometimes I go back to diary entries and read over them. I have diaries of one sort or another going back years. They have varying degrees of secrecy depending on my mood at the time. When I'm sad, it gets locked away and nobody can read it, but when I'm happy the world knows. Is that the right way around? Probably. But I'm always amazed at how inaccurately I remember things, how memory mangles things. Sometimes the edit process has come in and I 'remember' saying or hearing things that weren't heard or said. Somethings that were a big deal when I was 17 I don't even remember at all now; the entries in the diary, that I thought would point me exactly to the right memory, elicit nothing. I have prided myself on quite a good memory for events, the facts of them. Something about feeling compelled to take notes all the time. Even if I don't ACTUALLY write things up, I still sort of feel that I am. Maybe that's actually the problem? When I write things down I'm automatically composing. That probably makes sense. Anyone who reads and has an interest in words is hard pushed not to polish their own, I suspect.

It's interesting to think that everybody is probably writing in just such an inaccurate way as I am. Newspapers. Diaries. Reports. No matter how factual one tries to be, words are about atmosphere. They pass a value judgment no matter how colourless they're meant to be. Totally untrustworthy. And we can't totally unpick them, either. No matter how carefully they are taken apart and cleaned and twisted and turned around and examined, all we have to discuss them with are more words.

Too sleepy for the end of this thought. I have spent a long time thinking about memory, but I am also spending time in this job thinking about history. A lot of history comes from governments, and here I am writing things that contribute to that history. My words, my spin, my impressions. I have more opportunity to use them than I did before, and they count for more. It might not be fiction writing or poetry, but my typing is more weighted than it was before. And not by much. I'm not running the world. I'm interpreting it and smoothing it and shaping it, which seems pretty powerful from my desk next to the printer on the third floor.

Ecclesiastes 3.1-8

2010-09-08T21:03:00.003+01:00

¹To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
²A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
³A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
⁴A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
⁵A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
⁶A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
⁷A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
⁸A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

I got to read this once in Chapel. Hard to do in a way that makes it mean anything, I found, mostly because varying your tone in way that differentiates one pair of phrases from another rapidly becomes difficult. All of those repetitions don't mean the same in the way you might expect them to, either. Well. They're all about balance of one sort or another and there's solace in that rather Buddhist idea. That everything has its opposite, that generally the good times and the bad times go together and nobody gets just one or the other. I'm not sure that a piece of practical criticism is right. I was tempted. I suspect there are a dozen sermons you could find on every line, not to mention on the whole passage. It's a bit hackneyed, really. But the aphorisms have a place in a secular existence. Sometimes you need to start from the bottom up. Sometimes you get to reap the rewards. Sometimes you have to cry to remember how to be happy. Sometimes you have to throw stuff away. Sometimes you need to let your hair down. Sometimes it's for you. Sometimes it's for others. Sometimes things are over.

Sometimes they start fresh and new and full of promise. Optimism. Hope. Smiles.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh*

2010-09-08T20:51:00.001+01:00

It's September. Things always happen in September. The real New Year is now, when the weather is uncertain and the holiday is over. Lives grow across the winter while the crops have their sleep, and lives rest in the summer while the plants race. The old academic year of northern Europe is built as much around the fact that children were available to study in the winter time when the land was quiet as it is around the religious calendar. At school it always felt as though a labour in the dark and the cold would reach its full growth when the sun shone again. I work best now - a rush of energy from here to Christmas and then Christmas to Easter, and then a final push to put the gloss on the fruit before the laze of the summer. A rhythm as old as myself and much older.

So it's good to be starting a new job now. Great, in fact. The first-day-of-school feeling is the same as it ever was - nervous excitement combined with a desire to apply oneself. A summer over and term begun. This position is a totally new world for me, alien in the extreme. It's so different from anything else I have done or could be doing. I have responsibility. Things I do will make a real difference to society if not individuals. That feeling goes through the place - it's not a job you do unless you care a bit. It makes the atmosphere wonderful.

It's not a time to peep, though peeping is all you can do to begin with. Everything is changing. [Everything is always changing. Maybe one should never peep?] I am applying last year's lessons, about openness and optimism and smiling at strangers. This year's curriculum is about purpose and collaboration and maybe ambition. Bring it on.

*Ecclesiates 3.4 (King James Version)

A recent revelation.

2010-08-23T11:37:00.000+01:00

I realised that if I had a child, it wouldn't be mine it would be ours - of me and its father (or other mother, but that's getting more complex). I wouldn't be alone with it. Sounds silly, right? Yes. Amazing how obvious it sounds. But to know it properly felt very strange. It was one of those dreamlike moments where there is a sudden certainty. I imagine those who have true religious faith have that feeling sometimes. It wasn't such a terrifying idea any more, the being solely responsible for another human being thing, because I wouldn't be solely responsible. It halves the burden, like a partnership is meant to - and you have to have some knowledge of a truly mutual relationship to understand that. It's only fairly recently that I've begun to have some inkling as to what one of them might be, too.

Not that I'm certain about the procreation thing. Apart from the biological icky (of which there is plenty...piles, peeing, sleeplessness, nappies, GIVING BIRTH and so on) and even with the sharing element, it's still an enormous thing, the biggest life change I think it must ever be possible to make. You get over the icky, I guess. Plenty of elements of being human are icky. As well as personal responsibility there are more peripheral moral or social elements too. Hard to think about them, though - human society since the beginning has been about the raising of children, always. It's one of the basic purposes of civilisation. Perhaps the basic purpose. Now, though, one might think about pressure on resources and levels of pollution and so on, and whether it is possible to justify having a child in that environment. And one also might wonder how we as a nation or indeed wider western society can support our ever greying population if we, those of us in our twenties and thirties, don't have children. I don't know if the two sides of that quite cancel out.

I have been saying for a while that I'd like to foster children. Again, there's a selfishness there - if I have care of a child that is not my own flesh and blood, I do not have the same expectation for it or want the same things from it. I'm not expecting it to enjoy the same things I enjoy or follow the same paths I did - its aptitudes will not be mine. I will be forced much more to take the child as the starting point, not my own hopes for it. Of course I would hope I could do that with a biological child as well, but I can see ways it would be much more difficult. I'm sure there's an element of contrariness, too. There is in nearly everything I do however much I want to dodge it - 'everyone else wants this, therefore I want something different'. It's not the same as never ordering the same as anyone else in a restaurant though. It would be nice to do some good. I've had a lot. Some kids get abandoned at the age of 3. I suspect that it would require some large lifestyle shifting. I haven't researched it enough, it's not as though it's something I am in any way ready for now, and probably not for another decade.

I'm less anti than I was. I used to say nevernevernever. It's hard to imagine having kids later in your life because it's very difficult to comprehend where you will be later in your life, particularly when you're still a kid yourself. I'm still a kid myself. Aren't I? I feel like a kid. I find myself thinking about it more and more. There's 30, that magic number after which incidences of genetic malfunction increase dramatically. It's four and a bit years away. Boys don't have that deadline. I sort of feel I have to have made a decision by then, I guess. Four and a bit years often doesn't seem long enough. I fall back like everyone else on 'wait and see'. I don't want to miss now in worrying about then. But I don't want to miss then for being too caught up in now.

Experimental Cheesemaking.

2010-07-18T13:23:00.002+01:00

On Thursday, Joy invited me to make cheese. This is something I've often thought about but never actually done. I'm not entirely sure why - fresh cheeses turn out to be astoundingly simple to make. I don't think I'll ever buy ricotta again, though mozzarella will take some practice.

Goodness me but it was fun to play with though, the mozzarella. You get to a point where you have to heat it up and knead and stretch it just like you would bread in order to develop those long stretchy strings that are characteristic. What you see above is Joy, hands protected by ice cube bags, squishing a large ball of nearly cheese...it had a fantastic texture. However, we don't think we did this bit totally right - too much kneading and not enough stretching is the theory, and definitely we need to experiment again.

The first problem we encountered when we sat down to make our cheese was how much raw material to use. The mozzarella recipe called for one gallon, that is *eight pints* of whole milk. That's a lotta milk. And it didn't tell us how much it made, either. We didn't want to be drowning in little white mozzarella balls... The ricotta recipe called for two quart, which is a little more civilised at four pints, but still. In the end we halved both recipes, which meant that we made about two of the fist sized commercial balls of mozzarella you get, and around 275g of ricotta (1 cup). Manageable amounts.

That still left us buying 6 pints of milk. Lots. Mind you, milk is hardly an expensive ingredient if you're going to play with something. But it brings home how much we as a society must use, really.

So. The ricotta is easyeasy. I don't think I'll ever buy it again, it was so easy. The recipe I used was one I clipped from a few lines on David Lebovitz's wonderful blog, that runs as follows:

Ingredients
2 pints whole milk
1 cup plain whole-milk yogurt (we used greek yoghurt and omitted the cream)
Optional: 1/2 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon white vinegar (another recipe suggests using 2 tsp lemon juice)
½ teaspoon salt

Method
In a large pot, bring the milk, yogurt, heavy cream (if using), vinegar, and salt to a boil. Very gently boil for one to two minutes, until the milk is curdled.

(looks horrid, right?)

Meanwhile, line a strainer with a few layers of cheesecloth (we actually HAD cheesecloth, I always find it hard to get hold of - a very old very clean worn cotton/linen tea towel also works, it's usually possible to find something) and set it over a deep bowl. Pour the milk mixture into the strainer and let drain for 15 minutes. Gather the cheesecloth around the curds and squeeze gently to extract any excess liquid.

Storage: Homemade ricotta is best served slightly warm, although it can be refrigerated for up to three days, if desired.

This tasted fantastic. We ate quite a lot of it just standing there. Joy turned it into a rather lovely looking cheesecake afterwards, with raspberries.

The mozzarella recipe came from this book by Barbara Kingsolver, which looks lovely and which I will borrow from Joy at some point when I can reliably be in the same county for any length of time.

It's an American book, but lovely. The mozzarella recipe called for rennet and citric acid, which took a little finding. Big supermarkets sometimes have the rennet, as do health food shops. We pinched a little citric acid from a friend (Mr Loxley) who had been using it for making elderflower cordial, but otherwise would have resorted to the internet. Apparently it's quite hard to get hold of because it's a substance used to cut drugs with. We did not cut drugs, just cheese. Anyway. You also need a temperature probe. Joy bought one this time, I keep breaking them. Not sure what to do about that... Recipe follows:

Ingredients
4 pints fresh whole milk (not UHT or anything)
¾ teaspoon citric acid, dissolved in 50ml of cold water - used bottled, unchlorinated water
¹⁄8 teaspoon liquid rennet dissolved in 50ml cold water (again, mineral water) - we found that the VegeRen we were using seemed to have a different concentration to the stuff the recipe was apparently using, and so just had to guess. We used 30 drops in the end, which was probably too much, I'm not sure. I want to read a bit more about the enzyme action - I THINK you can probably just keep adding until it suddenly starts to curdle, because I think it's a catalysis reaction going on but I need to know more. Anyone with any ideas let me know...
1 tsp salt

Method
Heat the milk to 55 degrees Fahrenheit on the stove (not much more than it's likely to be anyway if it's just come out of the supermarket fridge) and then add the citric acid. At 88 degrees it should begin to curdle. Add the rennet and keep heating to just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (that's body heat, folks on the metric side of the sea, not boiling point!). At this point the mixture in your pan should be proper curds and watery whey. It's meant to look like this, it's not off milk... Scoop out the curds with a slotted spoon and press them together, squeezing out and pouring off as much whey as really possible as you do so. Microwave the cheese on high for 30 seconds (the recipe says 1 minute, but we halved it, so we were guessing again at this point) and remove and knead a little to remove more whey. This can get warm, hence Joy's use of plastic bags to protect her hands in the picture above. Gloves would have been more elegant, but we didn't have any. Heat again for 30 seconds and knead. You're trying to get it to stretch a bit, so heat it once or twice more until you can get it to stretch like mozzarella should, like toffee or melted sugar at the right point. It should go shiny. We didn't do quite enough of this and have ended up with a cheese closer to paneer - perfectly edible but not really pizza or salad quality. I used half of my ball to make an uninspiring pasta bake, but am going to use the other as paneer and put it in a muttar aloo curry (pea and potato, but it sounds better like that...).

All in all great fun, and like I said the ricotta in particular is a perfect recipe. To be repeated.

I write like...

2010-07-18T09:48:00.001+01:00

I write like
Neil Gaiman

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

NB: This was based on a piece of a story I wrote - the last blog post came up with someone I'd never even heard of. But then famously, Neil Gaiman himself hasn't come up as himself...

London Calling?

2010-07-13T15:45:00.001+01:00

I came back from San Francisco and I hated London. I've never had that feeling about London before, but where it had always been exciting and vibrant, it was suddenly closed in and narrow and full of hollow people. I'm sure that in large part the reason for this was what I'd left behind in San Francisco. Who. But more than that. I loved how, at least in the parts I was hanging out in, I could really feel that it was a city for everyone, from all walks of life and all backgrounds. The London I know is a homogeneous place of well educated well off people - often monotonous and at worst stagnant.

I fully admit that this is a mere impression, limited as much by my own background and what I have so far found in London. There's a lot more to the place than the people on the train and the people in the offices in the City, but they are the ones I see all the time. And they all have more to them I would hope than the commute, the job and an expensive bed they hardly see. I'm just worried that many of them don't. I love my friends, and I know them well enough to know that they have dreams that go further than what they happen to be doing right now. That the job isn't the be all and end all. We are all of us in that circle the middle class products of a middle class upbringing and a thorough education. Factory made, almost. There hasn't been a lot of space for mutation or variation to appear. I guess I'm concerned that where such things do appear they are either ignored or papered over, rather than grown and developed and encouraged and valued.

[Ha. Picking something more or less at random to listen to while writing, I hit The Clash and find myself listening to London Calling, all about the other bits of London - which definitely exist even if I don't see them so much for myself.]

It's comforting and reassuring and impervious and safe, that fairly moneyed, fairly engaging existence. That's good as far as it goes. I'm very lucky indeed to have been born when I was to who I was, I know that. I'm allowed to be a free independent modern woman, able to make my own living. But it's a well-worn path - exactly what each of us was expected to do when our parents sent us all off at good schools at the age of 4. The people who start out as the children of one earnings bracket step up to take their parents' places. They even do the very same jobs their parents do. Both of my close lawyer friends are the children of lawyers. Of course there are logical reasons for this to happen even though we all might rather it was rather less rigid than it seems to be. Elaine (who is Irish) said to me a few months ago that she was always amazed at how class ridden British* society is, how little social mobility there is. I am intrigued to find that it is less so in other countries, though relieved that it isn't the same everywhere - perhaps Britain can change.

Tom put it the best - 'people are following life, not chasing it'. It's very easy to keep putting one foot in front of the other along the clear course and never to look to right or left. I don't want to be that person. I want to take in the view at the very least and wonder all the time about whether it would be better to drop out of the race and try out the path I can see over there. It's not the path itself that is wrong, it is the blind choosing of it. The passivity of never imagining anything different. I should say that I haven't had this conversation with any of these people - it may very well be that everybody I know has thought long and hard about what else they could be doing and is well aware of what else is out there and how other people live, for them to choose if they want to. It's what I'm doing, after all, or will be if my civil service job ever materialises. I am not in any way indicting or judging my friends for following it. Just hoping that they are active in choice.

But it is awkward to keep looking around you. I remember a conversation I had with my dad when I was 14 or so, when I said I believed that there was always hope, whatever happened. He said that that was an uncomfortable way to live because it meant that one would never be content with what one actually had. Maybe the day-dreaming about life as a chef or a gardener, both of which are well outside the ordered 9am to 1am city job spec, is the same - never content with the good of what is in front of me, not quite grateful for what I have. I'm trying to avoid that too, without numbing myself. Perhaps what I'm really saying is something I've talked about before, about ringing everything out of every experience and being aware of what experiences are available - not letting them roll on by without a glance.

*Yes, British. I think this certainly still happens in Scotland and Northern Ireland and Wales, too. The Irish Republic is different.

Melon Seed Horchata

2010-07-09T16:08:00.000+01:00

I have been tidying my house today. It's been a bit of a mammoth undertaking. The bathrooms still need scrubbing and the kitchen floor needs doing and there's laundry all over the living room, but it's better than it was. I don't feel like I'm living in such a pit. Of course, there are still some exploding sacks of clothes belonging to a brother and his girlfriend stuffed into a corner and more bedding than can be shaken at with a stick on one of the beds, but it's tidier. I even re-filed my cookery books and sorted out the wheat of elderly bank statements from the chaff of envelopes. I haven't hoovered; I HAVE made horchata. Not the rice based cinnamon flavoured stuff I had in San Francisco, which was delicious, but something identifiably from the same family. I bought a melon yesterday. I'm currently very very poor, due to a small amount of miscalculation and the impulse purchase of a corset, so any fruit I buy has to be vetted carefully and on offer before I shell out, and the eating of it has to be planned such that I eat it when it's perfect not wasting anything.

I've been wanting to play some more with my new cookery book ever since I got back; something about the amazing weather in south east England at the moment. And I had a melon. At the back of the book is a very simple recipe for melon seed horchata, that neatly takes in my need for a cool drink, my adoration of melons and my reluctance to waste the smallest part of a beautifully ripe piece of fruit. All you do is lift out the seeds and pulp from the middle as you would ordinarily, but for each cup of fruit add an equal volume of water, 1½ tablespoons of sugar and 1½ teaspoons of lime juice. You then blend the mixture until it's as fine as can reasonably achieved in a home machine and leave the lot to muddle in the fridge for half an hour. Then you strain it (ideally through muslin), add ice and enjoy. If you really wanted to, I suspect it would be fantastic with a shot of tequila. It has a great texture, a little like coconut milk in its smoothness but with a wonderful aroma of melon.

One or two things: my one ordinary sized galia melon made 1 cup of horchata, which isn't much. Use more melons, or possibly freeze the pulp until you have enough for a sensible amount. It also had a slightly bitter aftertaste. I'm debating what is likely to have caused this and have several thoughts, the most likely being that it sat longer than half an hour in the fridge and various tannin-type things might have leached out of the seeds. I also didn't use the melon variety specified by the recipe, which was cantaloupe. The stripy orange fleshed melons, iconic to me of holidays in France when I was a child, are by far my favourite variety (though I love all of them), but it's very hard to get decent ones in England. I bought one in San Francisco, seduced by the unbelievable scent as I walked past them. The ones in Tescos yesterday smelled of cardboard. Even carried carefully home and placed gently on the windowsill for a few days, they would never emit that amazing Mediterranean perfume. So. I didn't buy one. I bought the only galia I could find that smelled of flowers, and left it in the sun all day. It is a pretty good piece of fruit. I am not sure whether the seeds are likely to be much different between the two varieties, but it's certainly possible that one will produce a slightly less bitter drink than the other. I shall be hoarding melon seeds for as long as they're on offer, and trying out different varieties - everything with the pale yellow, thin skinned seeds has got to be worth a go, but I think that it's probably not worth bothering with watermelon. Better to puree the flesh in that case and drink that (definitely with lime and tequila, in that case...).

Best of British, on July the 5th.

2010-07-06T13:50:00.000+01:00

We don't have a day for Britishness in this country. St George's Day doesn't exactly count - the saint is patron of at least a dozen countries and has no actual connection to the place itself. He is a guy that we liked originally because he appeared a couple of times as a sort of omen of good fortune in various battles of the medieval period. It's not a holiday. There are no speeches. A few people wave a few flags with more gusto than normal and primary school children listen to an exciting fairy tale about a man who stopped young women being sacrificed to a dragon. It's more 'patriotic' to remember the day as Shakespeare's birthday. At least he was British. Anyway, he's only the patron of England; as a nation, we're divided even on that.

I feel most patriotic I suppose on Remembrance Day - Armistice Day, the Day of Peace In Flanders Fields. Is it still about the war, where we did stand hopelessly against what seemed impossible odds and triumphed at the last minute to limp from the ashes? Are my impressions out of date? Perhaps. The modern Brit abroad is arrogant and drunk, and I am ashamed of that. Do we still stand for Right, like we tried to do in the 40s? Not that it was or is ever that clear cut. We laugh at our spectacular losses in sport - we're almost proud of them. They represent that wartime Britishness, in a way. Something about not succeeding but doggedly trying anyway. Other countries celebrate winners, but we celebrate the 'glorious' defeats, the underdogs, the never-had-a-chance-but-at-least-they-trieds. We call it stoicism and resignation and determination and maybe it is, but it allows us to be defeatist and pessimistic and dour yet full of injured innocence. Expecting the worst allows occasional moments of glory to be that much more exciting for being unexpected, I suppose. The British character is a figure of Romance - often self-deprecating to the point of false modesty. Strange how close humility and pride are.

I was surprised to find myself proud of my country, in an emotional way rather than a logical one it's true, but still. Maybe I could use the loaded 'love', which suggests a blind admiration for the place which overlooks or diminishes the faults, rather than the word 'proud', which to me anyway suggests the application of judgment. I assumed I wasn't. I'm as prepared as the next person, British or foreign, to poke fun at the place and its silly traditions and attitudes myself, but I seem to object to other people doing the same sometimes. And I look at that feeling and I am faintly ashamed of it. We are a small place with a big ego. Ego is unattractive, though I would perhaps rather have an honest ego than a false modesty. In some places we have influence. We ought to be a wise country given our age and our history and I wonder whether we are. I would like for the things we've had happen to us and the things we've made happen and their consequences have educated us a little. I'd like for them to have educated the rest of the world too - we are the best example* since the Romans of what happens in a large empire. I'm pretty sure it hasn't. Depressing to realise. The way that no westerner is able to win an Afghan war yet people keep trying is my favourite example of an inability to take note of the past.

Celebrating Britain is a bit naff. We're embarrassed about it. Maybe we should be embarrassed. But maybe if we were proud we would endeavour to keep the place as something of which to be proud. Do we do that? Maybe, sometimes. I want to be proud of a country that went from arrogant racism to full acceptance and integration of other races and cultures. Proud of somewhere that learns from its mistakes, laughs at itself, values itself and works always to care for the innocent whoever they are.

*That's 'best example', not 'best' example; there is a lot wrong with our colonial past, I just mean that we have had the farshest reaching empire in the world in recent centuries, and hence when examining the subject of empire the first place to look is the state of Britain, c. 1850.

Somebody pressed the accelerator.

2010-06-20T01:51:00.000+01:00

And time disappeared. San Francisco is a fantastic place. It's like falling down the rabbit hole - it never pays to assume anything about anybody, no matter how ordinary they might seem at first. Everyone has a story and an idea. Everybody is involved in a cause. Everybody makes and does. Everyone is determinedly and unselfconsciously individual. Everybody (*everybody*) does yoga. I've never come across anywhere where it was so difficult to buy food that wasn't organic. Nobody runs with a crowd. Where is the crowd?

It couldn't exist in England. We are too cynical, too into bathos, too proud. Too concerned with the neighbours and keeping up with the Joneses. I guess that is true in a large number of places in this country too, but not, I have the impression, in urban California. I kind of miss the self-deprecating British humour, I think in the right dosage it can generate humility and hence tolerance (we often get it wrong and use it to support arrogance or discourage ambition, both of which damage our society). Not that San Francisco is in any way intolerant. We could do with a bit of optimism back home; we lack it. A really big bit.

Things I have learned in San Francisco, so far, with 10 days left to go:
- How to smile at strangers.
- Most people, really, are friendly if you talk to them right.
- Kung Fu.

- How to paint a wall (they're different to stages).

- Quirky people are most people, if you find the right space for them.
- What hemlock looks like.

- How to change a bike tyre.
- How to fit new brake blocks.

- That however tired you are, the view from the top is worth the effort of the harder path.

- What a beaver* looks like!

- Constant searching for betterment prevents enjoyment of the now.
- It is possible to conform to being a non-conformist.

More things.

*Behave.

I'm in San Francisco!

2010-05-02T17:14:00.001+01:00

Carrying on a whirlwind romance. Living in an appartment that has a bath with clawed feet and a woman who practises rope dancing in the front room, the whole owned by an ethnomusicologist. With plans to try every burrito in the city. And taco. And pupusa. And tamale. And wander about and watch the scenery. And go walking in some parks. And learn to surf. Hopefully, it's a last hurrah before the new job, but even if it isn't quite that it will still be amazing.

Didn't bring a digital camera, only filmy ones. iPhone blogging or stealing Tom's camera will ensue. Ta ta, I need to go and find some clothes then some brunch...

Mussels and Scones: a Cornish spring

2010-04-10T12:20:00.000+01:00

...so I got distracted. Sometime I might tell you about him. I have actually been writing a blog post, but it's very long, currently imageless, and about my confusion over Ireland and Irish history. I'll finish it at some point and post it for everyone to skip. In the mean time, spring leapt up and came crashing into consciousness. Easter. Sunshine. BOOM. Amazing. I went to Cornwall for a week to walk the dogs and eat yellow food (Simnel cake and ice cream lemon meringue pie) and watch Jeeves and Wooster and get drenched to the skin without freezing and paddle in the sea to the perturbation of the canines and commune with the llamas and get adored and attacked by turns by the cats and have all my family around for approximately four hours and eat too much chocolate and generally get excited about the turning of the English seasons. It was great.

Something I've been meaning to do for ages has been to pick mussels off the beach and cook them myself. The Cornish coast is ideal for this - it's a rocky shore, but there are are some quite deep beaches which means that there are rocks exposed only for half an hour or so at low tide and also the water is relatively warm. I think it's those two things which lead to the wild mussels down there being nearly as big as the farmed ones which are under water all the time. I didn't pick anything that was much smaller than my thumb, and that was easy to do.

There are a couple of beaches I've had my eyes on for a year or two actually, to pick mussels from, but circumstances like the tide, the weather and not having a bag with me have hindered me a bit. This time, however, I finally got around to it on Holywell beach. The dogs were bemused as to why we were spending 20 minutes standing around by some rocks when there were a whole load of interesting bits of seaweed on the tideline, not to mention bunnies in the dunes. Rocky noticed me pulling things off the rocks. I think he thought that they must be like blackberries, which he loves and picks for himself whenever he can. He tried to pull off a few for himself but decided that they were better to roll in than to eat. Kiri used to eat barnacles off rocks, it's true, but never managed mussels...

Mussels are easy to cook. There are schools of thought about whether you need to soak them in salted water with flour or oatmeal overnight before you eat them or not. I did soak them, more because I didn't want to eat them until the next day than anything else, and they were pretty grit free so I have nothing much to add to the lore on that. I ended up with a mixing bowl full of molluscs - I guess something in the region of 6 or 7 pints or two ish kilos, but that's just a guess. Enough to make a good sized starter for five, anyway. The only time consuming part of the whole process is cleaning them. You have to go through the bowl and pull of the 'beards' or 'byssus' by which they attach themselves to the rock and scrape off the barnacles (which introduce grit,), and throw away any that don't close when tapped. I guess that took me 40 minutes or so.

I then chopped about 8 shallots and a couple of cloves of garlic and softened them in olive oil. I added a wine glass full of white wine, a bay leaf, some black pepper and the clean mussels. I clapped the lid on and left it for five minutes, by which point all the shells had opened. I transferred the mussels into hot bowls and stirred some double cream (optional) and a large handful of chopped parsley into the juices. After heating through, I poured this over each portion of shellfish and served the lot with hot french bread. It's possibly my favourite dish to eat ever.

My next ambition with mussels is to cook them actually ON the beach - picking them and then barbecuing them until they open, and then dipping the meat into garlic and parsley butter. Heaven. My next wild caught shellfish plan revolves around trying to catch some crayfish in the old mill stream that runs across my parents' garden...

I had an American in Cornwall. I needed to illustrate what a cream tea is, which meant I made scones to serve with strawberry jam and clotted cream.

I firmly believe that there is little point in scones beyond vast quantities of strawberry jam and clotted cream. If you can't get good versions of both, don't bother. Handily, the West Country is brilliant at both. The scone recipe I used came out of the 'The Dairy Cookbook', which is older than I am and only still has covers because the bookcase holds all the parts of it together.

It has recipes for all the old fashioned things (provided they contain dairy) that one actually needs now and again and which new books rarely contain. I think you can probably read the recipe in the (rather dark, sorry) photograph, but I edit it very slightly:

350g self-raising flour (or plain flour with 2.5 tsp of baking powder)
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp caster sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
75g butter
175 ml milk, plus extra as needed and for brushing

Jam and (clotted) cream to serve

Preheat the oven to 230°C, with two or three large baking sheet inside. Sift together the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder several times to ensure they are well combined. Rub in the butter until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs, and then add the milk a little at a time until a smooth dough is achieved. Knead lightly (scones are in theory better the less you handle the dough) until smooth, adding more milk if required.

Roll out the dough to around 1.5 cm thick and cut rounds about 5 centimetres across. Brush each with a little milk and sprinkle lightly with sugar to give a crunchy sweet top to each scone. Transfer them to the hot baking sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes until well browned. Cool on racks and eat while still warm, with jam and cream.

Adventures.

2010-03-07T23:42:00.000Z

(here)

Well. On the 29th of January Charissa and Tedd arrived from Florida. On the 31st of January we went for a drive of 2,500 miles and got back on Valentine's Day. And then we all went to Cambridge and picked up some other People We Know - and a few we didn't until that day. Over the next three weeks there were always people sleeping on floors, in Cambridge or St Albans or London. Often they were me. Rarely just me. There were folk songs and whiskey at 3am. There was charades in a room with 6 nationalities, 12 or so people and around 30 degrees of various sorts. The kind of game where C19th literature of any of 5 at least cultures would be guessed instantly and references to popular culture led to 10 minutes of head scratching and incredulous cries of 'that's a FILM?'. There has been poetry and cellos and theatre and home made bread. And photographs and home developing. And concerts and gigs and alwaysmusic, written or sung or chosen with purpose always by people I know. There have been black tie parties and rainy walks around London for art galleries and cake. There was a WEDDING. There have been strangers who became friends never to be forgotten. Old friends and new friends and new places and thinking and the watching of the spring.

And today is the first evening I'm spending alone in my house since the 28th January.

Goodness.

I'm not done yet. This is a lull between Trips. There are more friends here this week, and there are Plans for Dublin in a few weeks. The prospect of spending time with yet more of the best people in the world makes everything wonderful.

I'm feeling peaceful. I've had a crazy month or two - in a different way from the ones before. There have been adventures of all the best kinds, in contrast to angst and aching and a freezing of the limbs that characterised the time before. I feel spring cleaned and awoken. There's a whole world full of things to see and do. I have been trapped in this house; it has been awkward and cold and dark and confused, and now it is full of possibilities again. There might be Paris (three months, to learn) and San Francisco (three or six weeks, to know). But those aren't the point really. The new beginning that I have needed for half a year or more feels like it might be here, despite the fact that I still have no prospect of a job in the nearest future. 2010 is finally here. I finally feel that I can look at 2009 with objectivity, and see its pure highs and lows without feeling them all at once.

LOOK WHAT I DID!

2010-03-02T20:59:00.002Z

This is a shot from my very first ever roll of film I developed myself. Ilford FP4 Plus (125 speed) was already my favourite film, and I just became more in love with it than I was before. I don't like the graininess of faster film, I'd rather just try and adapt my photography to suit. I like being able to get the kind of clarity I achieved on the rose petals here and contrasting it with the softness of the out of focus tulips. At least, today that's how I feel. I have a couple of rolls of 400 I'm playing with at the moment.

This roll is from my Minolta, since Graham's Voigtlander is sick at the moment. I had been a bit nervy about another roll of black and whites going through the Minolta, because the ones from the last roll (which granted sat about for too long before it was developed, and was 400 speed as well) came out a bit anaemic for my taste. These? Contrast is great! There are a few smudges on them and the odd little crease, but so far no scratches AT ALL. I can fix the smudges (by polishing the negs) and sort of like the creases (see left hand side of first shot). The hard scratch lines across my shots when I've had them developed by shops with machines were making me sad. These gentler and more organic imperfections I mind less. Probably mostly because I made them myself.

Developing is FUN. Not difficult, it's just a question of measuring out chemicals and jiggling things for the right length of time. It's exciting though - you go into your bathroom and keep the light off and carefully block up all the gaps around the door with towels, then you pry your film out of its pregnant canister. You wind it onto the reel, hoping that it won't get stuck. You shut it into the tank, and turn the light on. Then there's the arcane bit with the chemicals. And then you can take the lid off and rinse it. And THEN...you can unwind the sticky negatives from the reel and hang them, using hairgrips, from a piece of string tied between the light fitting and the curtain rail - and you can look at the shots! And try and work out which ones are the good ones and which ones you really like...

There are quite a lot of variables in developing, in terms of times and temperatures as well as film and chemicals and so on. I'm so looking forward to doing more. Though I have just had it pointed out to me that the film I've stuck into the Minolta just now, while still be B&W, requires a different not-so-easy-at-home process. Bah. Need to finish it quickly and put another one in. Which means I will have to send it away. Which means it'll get scratched. Which is very irritating.

All of this is Tom's fault. Well. It's sort of Graham's fault as well, that I was interested in doing my own development at all, and his fault that I have a scanner. But it's TOM'S fault that I have kit and chemicals and confidence to try for myself. Thanks Tom and Graham!

(Tom)

Playing with cake.

2010-03-01T14:16:00.001Z

David Lebovitz writes my favourite food blog of the internet. There are competitors, it's true, but I love David's style, his pictures, his character and his beautiful recipes. He's a guy from San Francisco living in Paris, which makes for amusements all by itself. When I was there the other week I explored a few places more or less entirely on his recommendation. I was also haunted by the exciting sort of feeling that I might run into the guy - Paris and its food has become so tightly linked to him and his writing in my mind. (Actually, he was away while I was there, but still...) He has worked as a professional chef, and now seems to make a living from writing books and blog posts. When I am busy or on holiday and my feed reader goes berserk and tells me I have 800+ unread items to go through, his posts are some of the few that I make sure I read before hitting the 'mark all as read' button. [I keep meaning to send him some suet and a proper recipe for mincemeat next Advent, rather than the Delia one he tried which makes no sense. ]

I haven't made a great many of his recipes, it has to be said, mostly because I don't make dessert that often and that is his speciality. However, when I AM looking for something sweet, it's definitely a go to sort of place. I trust his recipes to work, unlike quite a lot of the internet. I recently adapted this recipe to christen my ice cream maker, and it was divine (all I did was switch the milk chocolate for dark and leave out the pepper, nice though it sounded, because I wanted something to go with ginger-chilli caramel sauce and pepper was an unnecessary extra...). I have plans about using this macaron recipe on the next batch of ice cream's left over egg whites. Determined to crack macarons.

One thing I'd had my eye on for ages though was just a simple recipe for chocolate yogurt snack cakes. That doesn't even link to his site, but to someone else's (also a great blog, by the way, but it doesn't suit me quite the way David's does). It comes from a book of his which I've just purchased. I've made them twice now, the first straight up and the second time adding a soft centre. I found them a little dry, that was the thing. They're good as a base, and they have a great crumbly texture, but they didn't come out as moist as I want in a muffin - which could well be explained by my use of low fat yoghurt. I also had two open jars of Nutella (or store own brand variant) in my cupboard, product of living in a house that nobody actually lives in for more than a month or two at a time at the moment. So...I froze teaspoons full of Nutella on a baking sheet lined with greaseproof the night before I wanted to bake. I followed the recipe and made the batter. I half filled the papers, poked in a chocolate-hazelnut ice cube and covered the it over with more batter and baked as directed.

(Was still having camera issues at this point. Not sure why everything I took that day was out of focus...)

They came out brilliantly, particularly when still warm with a spoonful of crème fraîche. Now I need to find other things I can use to make soft centres for muffins. I could make an ordinary ganache with chocolate and cream and flavour it all kinds of ways, then freeze and bake like this, but I want to work out a way of doing it with something like lemon curd. No idea how that might work though - either the freezing or the cooking of lemon curd. It's sort of a delicate concoction. But if I could figure that out, there's a whole world of fruit fillings out there, too. Jam is too sweet I think, at least for me. Apple puree is pretty easy. Hmm...

Cooking for the jet-lagged.

2010-03-01T13:20:00.000Z

I actually thought really hard about this. You kind of have to, if people are going to do you the honour of travelling 4,349 miles (7,000 km, 7,654,240 yards, 275,552,640 inches, 699,903,706 cm) to stay with you. What would I want to eat when I'd been on a plane for all that time? Nothing complicated. Nothing unfamiliar. Something sustaining but not heavy. Real Food, to counteract fake plastic plane food.

Chicken Stew, with Homemade Bacon, Leeks and Mushrooms...

(Every picture I took of this meal turned out to be out of focus, hence they're all going to be tiny...)

I love stew. I've said this before. This might not be a quick meal to prepare, but it's not complex. It's amazing what happens when you just leave something in the oven for a while.

For about 6 people, or 3 with masses of leftovers
1 of those packets of thighs and drumsticks that have four or so of each - free range, obviously. Or 1 whole free range chicken, jointed, if feeling energetic. Bone in is important, but frankly any sort of chicken portion would be fine
250g bacon lardons
3 large leeks
450g mushrooms (any field sort - chestnut or mini portabellos would be extravagant)
500ml good chicken stock, either home-made or using an organic cube
3 or 4 bushy sprigs of thyme
50g butter
Olive oil, black pepper

Prep the veg. Cut the darkest green parts off the tops of the leeks and about half a centimetre off the root end. Slice them in half lengthwise and fan each half out under the tap to clean it. Slide the leaves back together and slice crosswise into centimetre slices. Cut the mushrooms into quarters unless very small or very large.

In a large heavy casserole, melt the butter with a splash of olive oil to keep it from burning. Gently fry the leeks without colouring for around 20 minutes until soft. In the meantime, in another pan over high heat, brown the chicken with a little olive oil in batches. Remove to a plate. Turn the heat down and without cleaning the pan fry the bacon until coloured on all sides and the fat is beginning to run. Remove to a plate. Fry the mushrooms in the fat that ran out of the two meats.

By now, the leeks will have softened. Turn the oven on to 150℃. Combine as best you can the chicken, bacon, and mushrooms with the leeks in the large casserole. Tuck in the thyme sprigs and add a generous grind of black pepper. Don't add salt at this stage, unless you know that the bacon you're using isn't that salty - my homemade had plenty for the whole dish. Pour over the stock and top up with boiling water (and maybe a glass of white wine) until the meat is virtually covered. Bring the lot to the boil and then put it in the oven for around an hour. Test to see if the meat is falling off the chicken bones, it might need another half an hour.

....with mustard mashed potatoes to soak up the juice

Mustard mash is my favourite sort. I loved mashed potato when I was a kid, it was my favourite sort. It even beat roast. Still does. One of those other things I learned to make when I was very young, along with custard. Sunday lunchtime in my mum's kitchen aged around 8.

For 6 or thereabouts
6 large baking potatoes, peeled and diced
1 fat clove of garlic, peeled
As much crème fraîche as you can fit on a dessert spoon (optional, you could use greek yogurt or just leave it out)
50g butter
Milk
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tsp grainy mustard - I have some that's JUST grains, no mustard liquidy stuff, which is very mild

Put the potatoes and garlic in cold water with a pinch of salt and bring to the boil. Cook until soft right through. Drain and mash with the butter. Add the crème fraîche and stir, and as much milk as required to bring it to a smooth consistency. Season to taste with mustard, salt and pepper.

I could eat mashed potato and the juice from the stew together forever.

Why do people take pictures?

2010-02-25T14:32:00.003Z

I've been on holiday. It's been amazing. There have been adventures across Europe with people of at least 4 nationalities. I have made a lot of bread and muffins and stew. There has been history and music and charades and poetry and culture.

The film camera I had been wanting to use to record it all started sulking on day three. I was sad. Instead, I fell back on my trusty little digital that I've been using for ages, my iPhone, and a Holga (not developed yet). I was disappointed not to be able to take some nice black and whites, but there were compensations - like the shot above. I was pleased with it. It's not in focus. You can't see anyone's face. Bits are over-exposed. But I think those are the things that make it more interesting. You have to work at it. The colours and the shapes are pretty. It has movement. Admittedly, a lot of this was chance and I had to take a few shots to get one I liked.

I guess people take pictures for different reasons. *I* take pictures for different reasons. If I'm posting a recipe, I take pictures of the dish for illustration or direction - recording-type purposes. If I'm taking pictures when I'm out, I want more than just a record of what I saw - unless what I saw was worth it all by itself. I want a capture of a moment or a place or a time or a mood. I want thought not just a picture.

This piece of graffiti was on the wall beside one of the gates to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and was one of my favourites of the whole trip (it means 'Silence! We're asleep!', or thereabouts). I guess the shot is a record, but I thought it was an interesting enough subject in itself to justify my taking a picture of it. It really needs some trimming to remove the fence on the right, which is a distraction, but I don't think it really detracts from the interest of the subject.

The second shot, of a road in Pompeii, is a bridge between 'record' and 'arty', I guess. It is a record of me being in Pompeii, but I was also trying to find a way of capturing some of the essence of the day - the light, the fact that I was standing on the same road that people had used 2000 years ago before the looming mountain blew her top, the emptiness of the place and the scale of the tragedy. Taking pictures of every piece of coloured fresco left behind on the walls wouldn't have had any of that. Besides, most of such things are fenced off and badly lit - photographers taking pictures for postcards can get in closer and light things properly and take far better shots than I can of those things and their work is on the internet. I could take the picture anyway - when I'm using a digital camera, it's not like taking pictures costs me anything - but what would it achieve? Would I ever look at it again? Unlikely. Would anyone else? Maybe I'd show something particularly exciting to other people, to give them a flavour of what I've seen and pass on my enthusiasm, but they aren't going to want to see 50 shots of bits of ruin. I'd be bored - why would any of my friends be any different?

Every tourist has a digital camera. That's a given. A really hefty proportion of them have digital SLRs. I'm sure a lot of them do think about what they are pushing the shutter for and why, but the vast majority of pictures I saw being taken weren't ones I would have wanted to see afterwards. The instinctive 'see something famous or ancient or beautiful; quick push a button and move on' I find faintly offensive - especially when the subject genuinely IS ancient or beautiful. Where is the reverence? Where is the appreciation? In Pompeii especially, you're looking at somewhere thousands of people died. That's a big deal. I went to the Musèe D'Orsay while I was in Paris. It contains some of the greatest masterpieces of European art of the last 200 years. It's a fantastic experience, even crammed as it was the day I was there. At every picture, there was a bundle of tourists taking pictures. Clickclickclick. WHY? What purpose does it serve? How is your little photo, with its bad angle and reflection and other people around you, remotely doing justice to this work?

Don't get a better camera. Take better pictures. Ones that make the world more interesting or add something, not ones that reduce it. Enhance. Appreciate. An aim for life...

All the way.

2010-02-05T18:03:00.002Z

As it left a drear English January, lukewarm tea and kitchen towel sky, the journey went from barely controlled skim along steely French rails to careening skid as frosted ice blue Alps launched it over brand new born Italy glittering in the sunlight of a hundred thousand walnut sized oranges. A swallow dive into the glare in the Bay of Naples, sinking into blue-green with the weight of years of old-new, must float to break an oiled sky punctured by neon jazz and a spatter of dark eyes. The destroyer lady drives out and draws on and the ants of the crumbling palazzos set pyres of yesterdays and graffiti the morning - dawn of the instant and no more tomorrow.

Chicken Curry

2010-01-27T13:11:00.003Z

(It's hard to photograph curry looking appetising.)

Ok. This time I have nobody to blame my recipe backlog on. It's just built up. I was sort of waiting for the bacon to be cured before writing about it, and then I made this the other day and only found time today... But! This is the best chicken curry I ever made, and I made it more or less by accident.

A few weeks ago, I wanted a stir fry. Just...did. I was also feeling extravagant, which meant that my stir fry needed meat in. Chicken breasts are depressingly easy to cook into dry blandness, and frankly are expensive. I buy chicken thighs, or thighs and drumsticks, which seem to be given away for pennies even if they're organic. They won't be dry when you cook them, and you have bones for making stock and thereby making the money go further. I buy them bone in. It's a faff to de-bone them, especially the drumsticks. But it's so worth it. You need 20 minutes to do a pack of 4 thighs and 4 legs, and a sharp small knife and something to listen to you while you do it. Also, not to care that much about what it's going to look like. Learning the anatomy of a chicken leg will take one attempt. Mind out for the sharp pin bone that's sometimes in the drumstick, it's easy to break it and leave it in the meat.

(Today is *caption* day. See that little dried chilli in there? I grew it. From a seed. And then I dried it myself. It makes me very proud.)

But...what you get is bones. I'm actually more interested in the bones than the meat. Stock freak. It takes an evening to make stock. About 5 minutes prep if you have the bones ready, then 4 hours of simmering while you do something else. For an ordinary western-type stock, you'd need to have bones, celery, onion, carrot, peppercorns (no salt) and bay in there. This stock, when I made it, was going to be a noodle soup, so the ingredients you see above are an onion stuck with 4 cloves, a star anise, a dried lime (optional, but I like them - don't use a fresh lime the pith makes it too bitter), a two cubic inch piece of root ginger peeled and coarsely sliced, and a couple of dried chillies. I covered it with water and simmered as slow as possible. The house smelled wonderful. Then, I drained it and reduced it (boiled until smaller) so that it would fit in a container in the freezer.

(stock)

Now, the intention was going to be to make that stock into noodle soup - a mixture of stir fried mushrooms, pak choi and spring onion combined with noodles cooked in the stock, all seasoned with soy sauce, lime juice, sesame oil and sweet chilli sauce. Clean easy dinner. BUT. I was going through the freezer the other day and found a tub of cooked off chana dal (yellow split peas), the remaining boned out chicken pieces and the stock. In my head, it all became curry.

The chana dal is easy, by the way. Buy a packet (world food aisle, or wherever the pulses are. World food aisle will be cheaper...), follow instructions (soak overnight, boil). I could have boiled some red lentils instead while I was cooking the other bits - they don't need soaking and cook in half an hour or so. They would have been nearly as good, but the stew would have been less thick. I just happened to have some on hand.

Ok. So. This recipe is long and complicated. Except it wasn't. I had the components for it on hand from other cooking I'd done in the past. Which is the reason that I always cook off the entire packet of anything that needs soaking when I have the time, or boil up my chicken bones for stock on an evening I'm in, and freeze them in batches. It's not putting extra time into a specific recipe, it's just making use of the time I have, I guess. But. I will try and repeat this dish in the future and I won't have those things in my freezer. Then, I'll use an (organic) chicken stock cube and boil up my red lentils as and when I need to cook. I'm sure it'll still be fine. If I can remember what I did this time around, anyway. In reading the H-FW book, I discovered a recipe for a tikka marinade, which is the point of that stage. Pieces of chicken coated in salt, pepper and garam masala and then fried would also be fine, I'm sure, to cut another step out.

Chicken Tikka Dansak, sort of
Ingredients
For the chicken tikka marinade, with a nod to H F-W:
½ a teaspoon salt
1 tbsp yoghurt
½ tbsp lemon/lime juice
1 tbsp garam masala
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp ground fenugreek
A golf ball sized piece of root ginger, coarsely grated (I also keep ginger ready grated in ice cube trays in the freezer...anal? Moi?)
2 large garlic cloves, crushed/chopped
1 hot green chilli, finely sliced (also in the freezer - who the h*ll can use all of one of those bags of hot little chillies they sell in the supermarkets before they go off?!)
1 tbsp flavourless oil

For the curry:
The meat from 3 large free range chicken thighs, skin on - around 300g, cut into large pieces (about 4 per thigh)
2 large onions, sliced into thin half moons
4 large cloves of garlic, crushed/chopped
2 cubic inches or thereabouts of fresh ginger, peeled and coarsely grated
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp ground fenugreek
1 tsp turmeric
½ tsp ground star anise, or half a one
6 green cardamon pods, crushed enough to break them open
1 tbsp garam masala
2 small hot green chillies, stalks removed and cut into three or so large pieces each
1 tin chopped tomatoes
250g (dry weight) chana dal or yellow split peas, cooked to the consistency of mashed potato (see the back of the packet), or the same weight of red lentils cooked in unsalted water until completely soft and as thick as possible without burning them (don't add too much water to start with and keep topping up until they're done)
1 litre good quality organic or home-made chicken stock, ideally with the Eastern spices as described above
Salt, freshly ground black pepper
Around a teaspoonful of sugar
Juice of 2 limes
3 tbsp flavourless oil

Combine the marinade ingredients and rub well into the chicken pieces. Marinade pieces overnight or not less than 5 hours. Makes the fridge smell good. When you start the sauce, preheat the oven to 230℃.

Make the sauce. Heat the oil in a very large pan and add the cumin seeds. Fry for a few seconds and then add the onion and a pinch of salt and stir well. When the onions are translucent, add the ginger (reserving one teaspoonful), garlic and chillies. Fry again for a minute and stir in the dry spices and whole ones, and a grind of black pepper. Stir to combine. It shouldn't look dry at this point, if it does add some more oil or it will burn. Stir in the chopped tomatoes and bring to the boil. Simmer for around 15 minutes, tasting after 10. Add half the sugar to bring out the flavour of the tomatoes, and taste to see if the flavour is strong enough - it might want more garam masala. This sauce is going to thin down considerably with other ingredients, so it needs to be strong at this point. Set aside.

Spread the chicken pieces onto a baking sheet and roast in the preheated oven for 5 minutes at 230℃ and then 15 minutes at 200℃.

While the chicken is in the oven, bring the tomato sauce back to the boil and stir in the cooked pulses. Add any left over marinade from the chicken. When it is simmering, add in the stock until a sauce consistency is reached - you might not need it all. If you add too much, boil until it reduces and thickens, stirring to stop it burning. Taste - the pulses will mean it wants more salt, sugar and most of the lime juice (reserve half a lime for the end). If it's not spicy enough, add some cayenne pepper. Simmer for 5 more minutes, and then add in the cooked chicken tikka and any scrapings from the tray. Simmer for 5 more minutes and then stir in the reserved lime juice and ginger. If you discover it's too spicy, stir in some yoghurt or some cream and heat very gently (don't boil).

Serve with rice. I ate this with Carl last night, and I decided I was so pleased with it that it merited a trip to the curry house around the corner to buy it some nan and some onion bhajis, too...

BACON (and the store cupboard quick supper of choice)

2010-01-27T11:33:00.002Z

I was given this book for my birthday 3 months ago by my friend Martin, with whom I lived for about half of last year. He's the most foodie of any of my friends, including those who work in kitchens. We like Martin, he's ace. He'd been given a copy himself the Christmas before and had noted quite how much I read it and decided I should have my own copy. Ace. It's already had more use (in terms of actual following of recipes as opposed to reading over breakfast for ideas) than many other books I've owned for years.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is an odd chap, but his is a life I'd like to lead. Yes, he's a TV cook, which isn't the interesting bit. He has a farm in Devon where he produces rare breed high welfare meat. He gives the impression of being more keen amateur than professional chef - an enthusiast. He did training with Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers of the River Cafe, who were also responsible for Jamie Oliver. I'd love to eat at their restaurant, they appear to be the grandparents of the modern British food movement. His food is hearty and exuberant and emphasises all the things that I think are fundamental to the way we eat: it should taste good, it should be respectful of ingredients particularly if any of those ingredients came from an animal, it should show an awareness of tradition but not be bound by it. This book expounds his 'nose to tail' eating philosophy as well as underlining the importance of understanding meat and meat production in order to make best use of what is a precious resource - which we have the privilege and not the right to eat. ...having said that, I'm still not keen on most offal. One day, I will own a cat and a dog and they will eat the offal of the animal and I will eat the rest, and everyone will be happy. Ish. It's not like I wouldn't be feeding the pets anyway... I need to learn to like offal.

(finished product)

I had a go at making bacon from this a year or so ago, with a good piece of free range pork belly I picked up at the Cambridge Sunday Farmer's Market. It was a reasonably successful essay and taught me a few things for this time around - for a start, buy a decent sized piece of belly. A kilo, at least. The tiny piece I used before was clearly an end, very thin, which meant that I actually needed to cure it for far less time than I did. H F-W in the book suggests buying a whole belly, weighing in at, at a guess 5 odd kilos. No. I don't need that much bacon. I don't have ROOM for so much bacon. I guess that's a problem with the book, really. It assumes you need to feed 20 people at a time and have outbuildings with chest freezers and smokers and space to hang hams and pheasants. I live in a flat in the centre of town. My parents have most of those things, but even down there I wouldn't want to hang anything that needed somewhere dry in the llama/STUFF shed. Not because of the llamas, but because it's so DAMP in that valley. Anyway. Everything is scaleable, and it is useful on occasion to know how to spit roast a pig over a wood fire in order to feed 90 people. (This is quite high up my List Of Things To Do Someday - possibly in the ADC yard next summer.) I bought a piece of pork belly from this butcher in a village not far from here. When my mum first stopped eating factory farmed meat getting on for 15 years or so ago now, this company was about the only place selling higher welfare stuff and the two local shops (there are outlets all over the country now) were weekly pilgrimage spots. They still guarantee meat of higher welfare than practically anywhere else. It's not cheap, mind! Pork belly is a cheap cut always, but my 1.3kg came in at £15... But pork is second only to chicken in the levels of abuse meted out to the animals, and therefore I'm prepared to try that much harder and pay that much more to get it. Plus, you never need a great deal of bacon in any dish to make it 'bacon-y', so this should last me some time.

(naked belly, as it came)

The actual process of making bacon is very simple indeed. It takes little prep time and no special equipment or unusual ingredients. It is true that we're only talking about what might properly be called 'salt pork' here - I prefer it smoked myself, particularly for adding to things. However, I haven't got a cold smoker or anywhere to light a fire and hang the meat for 24 hours. One day... So. You have your piece of belly. Now, the cure. Essentially, this is 2 parts coarse salt to 1 part dark brown sugar with some flavourings. The book recommends a couple of bay leaves handful of juniper berries but I'd run out of the latter so opted instead for 5 or 6 cloves and a few blades of star anise, aniseed always being a good flavour with pork. I used 100g of salt and 50g of dark brown sugar at first but I had to make up another batch with 50g of salt and 25g of sugar and some more of the flavourings after a few days. I ground up the spices and the bay leaves with a bit of the salt in a pestle and mortar and mixed it all together. It was sitting on the side in my kitchen for the days I was curing the pork and kept getting added to other things because it smelled fantastic.

All you do is take handfuls of the cure and rub it into all sides of the meat. Stick it in the fridge, covered with paper or loosely with clingfilm (not sealed, that's how you grow bugs...). Walk away. Come back tomorrow, drain of the liquid drawn off by the salt, rub in more cure. Go away. Repeat for about 5 days total. You can go on longer, which will increase the keeping quality, but it will become only fit for stews and not for frying up. THAT is it. How easy is that? And what you get at the end is this:

(large pieces here for freezing, little bits are quite large lardons for a stew I'm planning for when Charissa! and! Tedd! get! here! on! Friday!. Chicken, leek, mushroom, bacon, since you ask. If I'm not too excited by visitors to take photos, I will blog that too...)

A few notes:

H F-W suggests adding a pinch of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to the cure. This is what keeps the bacon pink when you cook it, instead of turning grey the way pork normally does. However - saltpetre is a controlled substance because it's one of the ingredients of gunpowder. My mum has a salt beef recipe I adore that has saltpetre in and which she hasn't made for ages in part because getting hold of this is hard. However - the average butcher can source it. She suggested smiling nicely and they might give you a tiny amount if they're reasonably sure you're not going to blow anyone up. I don't think it's worth the hassle.
When I first made this, I left the belly meat-side down, skin-side up in the cure. This meant that the skin dried out and was actually impossible to cut let alone eat or use once the meat was cured. This time, I scored the skin into rectangles (the size in the last photo) just in case, and made sure I put it skin-side down so that it sat in the liquid drawn out. The scoring probably helped the cure to penetrate as well, and anyway the skin wasn't so hard this time. So. Skin-side down.
The little pieces I fried up just now to taste from my 6ish day cure were quite salty but no more so than the most salty commercial cures. Edible, certainly. The aniseed edge came through nicely. Next time, I think I'll try smoked paprika and fennel seed along with the bay in the cure. I like the aniseed note, and I'm hoping that the smoked paprika will add an edge of smokiness that I'm longing for in my bacon...

As for what to DO with home-made bacon. Well. I have ambitions around chicken casserole and baked beans, but the way I most usually eat bacon is as part of the immediate I-need-food-now meal below:

Pasta, Pesto, Peas, Preserved Pork Product (...by which I mean bacon. Or salami. Or chorizo. What it says, really. All work great)

Ingredients
Erm. These are above, really. There isn't much more to it. But...for one person I use:
75-100g pasta
A small mug of frozen peas
1 rasher of bacon, about 35g at a guess? Or an inch of sausage. As much as you like is fine, but I hoard my meat products and use them sparingly...
A large teaspoonful of green pesto. Or red. Or even just a clove of garlic chopped small and some olive oil. (If just garlic, fry it for a few seconds (no more) with the bacon.)
Black pepper
Oil for frying

Boil the pasta in salted water, adding the peas for the last few minutes before it's ready.
Meanwhile, shred the pork into tiny pieces. I'm virtually always doing this from something I've taken straight from the freezer (I freeze bacon in single rashers, or use a large knife and brute force and hack pieces off the frozen together lump...), which means I can get pieces a few millimetres square - just so long as they're quite small so that every forkful of pasta will have a bit of bacon in it. Fry in a small amount of olive oil until the fat runs and it goes brown and crispy.
Drain the pasta and peas and return them to the pan. Scrape in the bacon bits and any fat in the pan. Stir in pesto. Grind over pepper. Eat as fast as you can because you have to be somewhere else, being grateful that proper supper took you all of 10 minutes to make. Don't forget to soak the pan with the pesto in it, that stuff's a pain to wash up...

Landing Light - Don Paterson

2010-01-21T17:42:00.002Z

This collection won both the Whitbread Prize and the T.S. Eliot in 2003, which is a bit epic. And it IS great, despite the hole-picking I'm going through to try and appreciate it properly. It lacked for me the stand out numbers I have usually found in collections that blow me away and which I usually use as a jumping off point for understanding the whys of a book. It seems characterised more by tension and disparity than by an arching unity of idea. I enjoyed it, and I need to read it a few more times - I can see the artistry, but I'm not in love. That's such a personal thing with poetry. It's an intimate exercise, the creative collaboration between poet and reader creates something that nobody else can experience and which neither expected. The rhythms must echo in both, the allusions cast shadows in both imaginations, the imagery or the subject matter must whir in the lives of each. There must be a stretching of minds, but that stretchin can sometimes lead to jumps that are too big to follow.

The poems flit from form to form - there are poems in Scots and English, some tell stories and some contemplate the soul, there is a translation (very free, as far as I can remember - my reading of Dante is many years old) of the forest of the suicides part of the Inferno and two poems described as 'after Rilke', there is a highly erotic poem that is nonetheless addressed to children. Such variety is impressive. This is why I can't find a real coherency in the collection I think. It is undeniable that the man is a master of his art, but the poems don't stir or transfix me the way I want them to. There is enormous skill with the language but it isn't foregrounded (which I usually love). Subtle and probably lifelike and therefore difficult? Or difficult to appreciate on one reading. More work required.

The Wreck
But what lovers we were, what lovers,
even when it was all over -

the deadweight, bull-black wines we swung
towards each other rang and rang

like bells of blood, our own great hearts.
We slung the drunk boat out of port

and watched or unreal sober life
unmoor, a continent of grief;

the candlelight strange on out faces
like the tiny silent blazes

and coruscations of its wars.
We blew them out and took the stairs

into the night for the night's work,
stripped off in the timbered dark,

gently hooked each other on
like aqualungs, and thundered down

to mine our lovely secret wreck.
We surfaced later, breathless, back

to back, then made our way alone
up the mined beach of the dawn.

Don Paterson, from Landing Light (London, 2003)

In fact, just typing that out has made it more meaningful to me. But even so the imagery is tangled. The first part reflects the security of falling in love quite clearly despite the mixed metaphors - but the symbolism becomes less clear as the poem goes on. The slipperiness of metaphor is one of the central joys of the poem. Of course there is so much more to poetry than 'de-coding', but it's a natural thing to do when faced with words that seem to go somewhere and then slip sideways or turn back on themselves - and that's the fun part, that keeps the interest and piques curiosity. It is there. Perhaps comprehension is just further off than I'm used to? Or not as natural to me as I have found with my favourites?

Truancy...

2010-01-18T22:41:00.005Z

...I've been posting some very long and moderately complicated thoughts about agnosticism over on Philip's blog. Which is my excuse for not having had anything serious to put here for a little while. There are a lot of words in those comments, but the whole conversation is one that I feel coalesces some old thoughts quite neatly. It addresses why, for me, agnostic is all that I can be, despite leanings towards atheism. I will always sit on the fence. I will never say never. It might be a little uncomfortable, but you get a good view from every angle.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

(Hamlet 1:5:166-7)

It's been a long time since I read any Hume - he's an interesting member of the C18th British Empiricists that I could never muster much enthusiasm for at university. They make some very interesting points as a group, but for the most part I wish they would say it in one tenth or less of the volume of Latinate prose.

I've also been playing with a film scanner lent me by the inimitable Graham. I'm pleased with the results, and I'm learning masses about processing quality, film speeds and their effects and what difference a camera makes. See some of my favourites scattered through this post from the last month or so, posted purely for self-gratification plskthanxbi...

P.S. Tomorrow, I intend to make crumpets and start making bacon. And read some more of some of the many decent books sitting on top of my wardrobe to read... Usual blog fodder again :-).

URGENT BERRY SPONGE & CUSTARD

2010-01-13T18:33:00.001Z

OR:
What To Do When Your Dad's Here For Dinner.

My dad turns up at this flat every couple of weeks. This is fine. It's his flat. I just use it while I'm waiting for the next job. But I feed him. Which is also fine, because I like to cook. Sometimes he takes me for a curry, but I do try and cook because curry every two weeks would be bad for me.

But I tend to forget that he eats lots. Also fine. But I have to remember that he eats twice what I eat, and that therefore I need to create food accordingly. I'm not always very good at this. When I opened the fridge at four o'clock this afternoon and looked at the quantity of chilli I was planning to use to feed us, along with the couple of bits of cornbread I didn't already freeze and thought about how much rice I could decently serve as well - I realised I was short about a third of a meal. Hence the emergency berry sponge.

The only useful thing I remember learning in school food tech lessons was one throwaway remark by a teacher, who said that sponge cake was equal weights of eggs, flour, butter and sugar, plus a pinch of salt and some raising agent (1rounded tsp to every 100g of plain flour, or just use self-raising). I hardly ever look at another recipe now, if I just want sponge. Oh I tweak it - the equal quantities version always works out a little dry, so I add whatever dairy I have on hand until it's a little looser. Ideally it would be cream, but usually it's some sort of yoghurt. That's quite a good one, because the acid helps the raising agent and cakes rise more. Sometimes I've added fruit purees to it (as for an apple crumble cake, or raspberry cupcakes), often I sub some of the flour for cocoa to make chocolate cake. It's a great base, and it works even if it's not perfect. It has the enormous benefit of being easily memorable, so that you never need to look anything up.

My freezer virtually always has frozen berries in it. I love them. I defrost a few with a spoonful of sugar and add a dollop of yoghurt and often call it lunch, or a sauce for something else, or a way of getting vitamins. They're handy. They aren't necessary for this recipe - jam would frankly have done. Or golden syrup and pineapple rings. Or apple sauce. Or pears. Or nothing at all.

Berry Sponge Pudding

Ingredients

1 medium free range/organic egg

50g butter

50g caster sugar

50g self-raising flour

½ tsp baking powder

Pinch salt

A spoonful of low-fat yoghurt to loosen

Enough frozen mixed berries to cover the bottom of whatever dish you are using (my flan dish above is about 20cm across, and I probably used 200g of berries)

Vanilla or regular sugar to sprinkle over - around 3 tbsp

Preheat the oven to 200℃. Put the berries in the dish and sprinkle with sugar. Microwave on high for 2 minutes, just to defrost them a bit. Cream together the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Beat in the egg, then sift in the flour, baking powder and salt. Beat in the yoghurt if it needs it, just so it isn't so stiff. Carefully blob the cake mix on top of the berries - it won't be neat, and you can't just dump it all in and spread it out. Don't worry about the edges, it'll spread out. Bake in a preheated oven until golden brown and a skewer inserted comes out clean - around 15 minutes.

And because I was making this for my dad, I had to make custard. Daddy likes custard. Which meant I had to go and buy cornflour, so I could have come up with a better dessert altogether. Ah well. The following is my mother's custard recipe, which isn't nearly as rich as most of the ones on the web, but which means you can indulge without worrying too much. It's the first thing I ever learnt to cook, I used to eat it on its own.

Real Custard
Ingredients
½ a pint milk (I actually used *1%* for this)
1 egg
1 tsp cornflour
1 dessertspoonful sugar
Drop of vanilla essence (optional)

In a small pan, bring most of the milk to a gentle simmer - just bubbles around the edge. Keep back about a spoonful of the milk and dissolve the cornflour in it. When it's smooth, whisk in the egg and sugar until smooth again. When the milk is hot, carefully pour it into the egg mixture, whisking as you go, then pour the lot back into the pan, still whisking. Carefully heat until it's close to the boil again and has thickened a bit - it should just coat the back of a spoon.

A recipe backlog: All Tedd's Fault.

2010-01-06T15:18:00.003Z

I came online to post my Recent Experiment With Bread, because Tedd has pestered me at least 5 times in the last 36 hours for pictures of it. But when I came up upload photos from my camera, I discovered that I also had pictures for parsnip soup and for chocolate brownies. So...here is a full January lunch menu.

No-Knead Bread

This is a recipe I bookmarked to try ages and ages ago - I'd love to make bread more often than I do, but the full 15 minutes of kneading is something I get very fed up with. It would be ok if I could see the results in my bread, but no matter how much I do I always end up with something as dense as a brick. THIS recipe, though, does away with the kneading AND gives you something that's soft and beautiful to eat at the other end. Various blogs were enthusiastic about it but I never thought anything of that - food blogs are always enthusiastic. But this is the grail of bread cookery. I adapted this recipe from the NY Times into something using real measurements (muttermuttervolumemeasurementsforthingswhosevolumechangesmuttermutter). I was faintly scandalised to discover while so doing that even British and American cup measures are different. Grr. Anyway. This is what I did.

Ingredients
360g strong white bread flour
3.5g (half a sachet) instant yeast
1 tsp salt
390ml water
Optional: 2 tbsp olive oil

Method
Combine all ingredients in a bowl, stirring to break up lumps. This will create something more like a batter than a dough. Cover with clingfilm and leave in a warm place (these are hard to find in my flat under 5 inches of snow and rising, but I chose the airing cupboard in the end) for 12 or better 18 hours.

Scrape the dough out of its bowl, into another one lined with very well floured cotton tea towel and leave to rise for another two hours. [The original recipe's dough was clearly drier than mine - it suggested that you would be able to tip the dough out onto a floured surface and then shape it...that wasn't going to happen with mine. I think that the purpose is the 'knocking back' part of any bread recipe. If my dough was this wet again, a good stir would have fulfilled that part and that's all I'll do next time. I don't think I'd change the recipe much - it was the wetness that leads this to be such a brilliantly airy loaf.]

Half an hour before the end of the rising time, pre-heat the oven to a blissful 230℃. Put a smallish cast iron lidded pot (mine is a 20cm Le Creuset casserole) in to heat up too.
When things are up to temperature, remove the pot from the oven and upend the dough into it. Bake with the lid on for 30 minutes and then 15 with the lid off. It should sound hollow when tapped with a fingernail and be nicely browned on top. Cool on a wire rack to prevent condensation forming.

This is the best loaf of bread I've ever made, not an ounce of doubt.

Spiced Parsnip, Apple and Chestnut Soup

I was reading recipe magazines of my mother's when I was in Cornwall at Christmas, and this soup featured in one of them. I can't remember anything at all apart from the title. My mum did actually make it, and it was lovely. I had bookmarked it as a Thing To Do With The Apple In The Fridge And The Leftover Chestnuts From London Christmas, and proceeded to make up my own version last week.

Ingredients
Oil for frying
1 large white onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 tsp garam masala
4 medium parsnips, peeled and with woody core removed before roughly chopping.
1 small bramley apple, peeled, cored and roughly chopped
250g prepared and vac-packed chestnuts, roughly chopped
1 good quality chicken or vegetable stock cube, or 500ml good stock
A slug of wine or cider vinegar
Cayenne pepper to taste
Salt and pepper

Method
I probably can't just say 'make soup', can I? Fry the onion and garlic until softened but not coloured then stir in the garam masala, add the apple and parsnips. Combine and fry for a few minutes. Crumble in the stock cube and follow with 750ml of boiling water, or add the hot stock and 250ml of boiling water. Bring to the boil and add the chestnuts. When the parsnip pieces appear to be cooked and the apple has softened (about 15 minutes), blitz with a stick blender and add more water if the texture demands it. Add salt, pepper and cayenne to taste. If it's too sweet, temper it with a spoonful or two of vinegar.

Eat with the aforementioned bread. Not that I did, I had some from a farmer's market leftover, so used that. However, there are 3 portions of this in the freezer, for which I can use my own bread.

Spiced chocolate brownies, with apologies (again) to Nigel Slater

...And apologies to everyone for the photo. Didn't get that right. But I think you can see quite how dark these brownies came out, and how moist they are, which is the point. I've put this recipe down before with slightly different spices. I guess it doesn't matter that much what you use, they just accent the chocolate.

...the chocolate is important. My new discovery this time was M&S's organic fairtrade cocoa - which is as dark as I've ever seen cocoa. It beats Green & Black's hands down. It has just become my go-to chocolate baking ingredient. You can also just about see the Willie's Cacao in the back, which I didn't use, and the SO organic/fairtrade and the Valrhona cooks chocolate in the front, which I did. Everyone knows the difference good quality makes to the taste of chocolate itself, and it's hardly likely to be different in baking...

I am unapologetic about posting this again. I adore it.

Ingredients

300g caster cugar

250g softened butter

250g high quality dark chocolate

3 large f/r eggs, plus one extra yolk

60g high quality cocoa

60g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder
Pinch salt
1 tsp cayenne pepper (for quite hot brownies), half a teaspoon each of ground cinnamon and ground nutmet

Method
Preheat the oven to 180℃. Line a large deep baking tray (around 30cm x 20cm). Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Melt 200g of the chocolate in the microwave in 30 second bursts. Beat an egg at a time into the butter and sugar, finishing with the yolk. Fold in the melted chocolate. Chop the remaining chocolate into gravel sized pieces. Sift the dry ingredients into the wet and taste to adjust the spice levels. Fold in the chocolate chips and turn the lot into a tin. Bake for 25 minutes, remembering that these should still be a bit damp in the middle, though not actually raw. Leave to cool in the tin, they'll fall apart if you take them out too early...

BONUS RECIPE!!!!

This actually hardly counts. I just hate to throw away that last leftover egg white when I make the brownies. The other day, I went downstairs for a glass of water and opened the fridge to think about what to make for dinner. There was that last white sitting there alone and patient in its bowl. I took pity. I weighed out 40g of caster sugar (it was only a medium egg, or I'd have used 50g), turned the oven on to 120℃ and dug out a whisk. I beat the white into stiff peaks and then beat in the sugar until glossy. I dolloped teaspoons of the mixture onto baking paper in a tin and baked them until faintly golden and dry - probably 15 minutes? When they were in the oven, I realised I was thirsty. 10 minutes previously, I had come down for a drink. Now, I had meringues...

Names.

2010-01-04T23:20:00.003Z

'O, be some other name!

What's in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet!'

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2 (~1595)

'Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping.'

Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

'There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.'

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1984)

I'm sort of struggling to write this. As a post, it's been burning up my brain for a week or more. Self-knowledge and honesty are such important concepts to me (even if I'm not necessarily that good at them) and these three quotations about naming cut straight to the heart of it. That's kind of the trouble, what is there left for me to say? They aren't explicit, perhaps, but they are so brilliantly put - I don't want to write in my standard clinical argumentative essay style. I probably will anyway. Stop and read the quotations again?

Each of the three authors has a clear understanding of what a name is and isn't. Shakespeare, via the innocent Juliet, points out to us what ought to be obvious but so often isn't or wasn't - that there is more to a person than what label they happen to be wearing. In Le Guin's Earthsea universe, the secret names of the characters give those who know them power over the one who is known. This author doesn't invite us to plumb the symbolism as such, these are children's stories. The tone of them though is so philosophical that it's hard to resist. Her thought resonates very strongly, when you look at it, with that which Winterson expresses a decade and a half later - of the word 'name' being a cipher for something approaching 'the true understanding of the individual'. Through them all, the progression runs, 'if a name is not the essence of the thing in itself, then what is? Where is concept which defines us, the thing that we understand when think of the name we use to describe it? That is what we really understand when we think of somebody's name, and the better we know that person, the closer to their true 'name' we get.'

It's very exposing to feel that someone knows you completely, right down to the core - which feeds back into the Le Guin concept. If someone knows your 'name', that defining combination of emotions and thoughts and history that is you, where all your levers are and what to push when, then they have great power over you, 'your life in their keeping' as she says. Brought out of the magic and into real life, Winterson's thesis is to seek for someone who knows her that completely, in order that they might restore her to herself when she is lost - a person who has the time and energy and ability to find out that kernel of the self and can be trusted with the delicate centre of identity, so that there can be someone else to guard it.

Back in Le Guin's fantasy, there is a point when the central character is suffering great guilt, and in his moment of self doubt another boy tells him his true name and hence cedes the first boy power over him:
'Thus to Ged who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given that gift which only a friend can
give, the proof of unshaken, unshakable trust.'
A willingness to be known is a gift to give as well as an invitation to give back. It is love, to know and understand one another that deeply, to accept the huge trust, the power and the responsibility, and to reply in kind to show that you recognise it for what it is. That's the point.

Bean burgers.

2010-01-01T13:48:00.004Z

Apparently, I haven't posted a bean burger recipe on this blog. That must mean it's on the other one. How peculiar. Bean burgers are the apogee of vegetarian cuisine in the books of many people I know. They were certainly the most popular thing I ever made in Edinburgh when I was cooking for PGP. I think if I ever asked Carl what he'd like me to cook him (as opposed to saying, 'I'll make this, that's ok isn't it?'), this would be the answer every time. I've refined the recipe through the years, and the following was pronounced the best yet when I cooked them for him as an early New Year thing the other night. I'm sure I read a recipe once upon a time, but I think that I can confidently call these 'mine' now.

I guess it looks like a complicated recipe. It's not, most of it is spoonfuls of spices. This is cheap crowd-pleaser food, which could even be vegan if you roll them in seasoned flour at the end instead of egg and breadcrumbs and leave out the haloumi.

Makes 8 burgers (feeds 4, very well indeed)
400g tin red kidney beans in water, drained
400g tin borlotti beans in water, drained (or other firm beans - butter beans or more kidney beans, or haricots all work)
2 large onions, very finely diced
4 fat cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tsp chilli flakes
2 tsp cumin seeds
½ tsp ground turmeric
½ tsp ground coriander seeds
50g coriander leaves, finely chopped, or 25g coriander and 25g parsley
Juice of half a lime
Salt to taste
250g or so of breadcrumbs
2 eggs
Oil for frying

To serve, and these are important:
Burger buns
Lettuce
Grilled pepper slices
Haloumi cheese, in 5mm slices and fried for a few seconds until it has some colour
Hot sauce - Nandos is traditional, but I was given some Cornish stuff for Christmas so we had that.

Fry the onion and garlic until translucent. Add the cumin, ground coriander, chilli flakes and turmeric and fry for another 30 seconds. Might need a bit more oil. Take it off the heat and allow to cool while you mash the beans roughly with a potato masher. You could do it in a food processor but don't make puree. Add in the onion mix and combine everything. Add the green herbs and the lime juice and taste - it will need salt. The mixture should only hold together when you squeeze it; it should be on the dry side. It probably won't be at this stage unless you add a couple of tablespoons of breadcrumbs, so do that.

Beat the eggs and pour them into a shallow dish. On a second dish, spread out the rest of the breadcrumbs. Make small palm sized burgers from the mix, pressing it together firmly. Dip each one into the beaten egg and then into the crumbs. Press the crumbs on firmly, then dip again into the egg and back into the crumbs. Press it all together again and put the complete patty on a plate. Repeat until you have 8 burgers, and then put them in the fridge for a few minutes while prepping the haloumi and the salad to go with.

Shallow fry the burgers until brown on all sides. That includes the sides...this balancing act was actually quite easy to achieve...

Heap up a bun with a burger, a couple of slices of haloumi, some pepper slices, some lettuce and a slug of hot sauce. Feed to Carl, or friend of your choice.

Books 2009

2010-01-01T12:00:00.003Z

I won't do this next year - it's long and unwieldy and close to unreadable. Some of these books have had write-ups in posts of their own anyway. I started off intending just to write one line responses to books, but that was never really going to last. It's not an exhaustive list, either - I've forgotten about it a time or two. It's close, though. Doesn't contain any audiobooks, of which there have probably been about the same number. I'm mildly impressed by how much of the below is actually literature. This is the first year since I graduated that I've felt able to read 'serious' books and I'm definitely glad of it. Lots of poetry. Lots of books I've read more than once to get the hang of them.

Queendom Come - Ellen Galford. Silly, queer, political satire; not high art but engaging.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café - Fannie Flagg. People, living, growing and being; one of the best books of all time, even if never recognised as great literature.
Rapture (poetry) - Carol Ann Duffy. A love story enacted in luminous verse.
The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett. The attractions of literature for one like the Queen - interesting but a little didactic.
4.48 Psychosis, Crave (plays) - Sarah Kane. Pictures of confusion and of what it means to crave. Plays.
Orlando - Virginia Woolf. Epic life - time, gender and roles.
American Gods - Neil Gaiman. Not his best - the story doesn't hang together completely. It feels a bit contrived, and the idea is actually close to that of 'Anansi Boys'. Still, Gaiman's imagination is second to none. Magical realism - Salman Rushdie lite.
The Price of Salt - Patricia Highsmith. Took me ages to read this. It's modernist, albeit late. I enjoyed it's melancholia and it's exagerrated sense of the importance of self and the flow of emotion. It guess it's that which made it feel modernist to me - the influence of psychoanalysis is strong. It's a small story, and it stays that was until the last 10 or so pages. In the last paragraph it turns around and decides to have the couple getting back together. I felt I was being given a slapdash happy ending, with all the build up being to an unfulfilled but more wordly heroine left me at the end. Instead she goes back to her lover and I was left thinking that the two of them didn't really sound like they had a relationship that was viable. Maybe that was the point. Not about falling in love well, not about growing as a person but about making mistakes and getting hurt like everyone else? Very un-American for an American novel. Not that I know masses and masses about American literature, but still. I'm glad I read it, but I won't recommend it to many. I'm trying to decide if I think it's art or not.
Casino Royale - Ian Fleming. Fun. Bond. Anything else important?
Things the Grandchildren Should Know - Mark Oliver Everett. This is the guy who is the band Eels. It's his life story. Crazy family. Crazy life. It was fascinating in a voyeuristic kind of way. There are bits of it that make me think I wouldn't like him in real life. It's just a bit pretentious. But. The guy writes well, the story is interesting and he writes about a concert I was at which was pretty cool.
Affinity - Sarah Waters. I enjoyed this, despite or because of its slowness. This time the miserable end annoyed me as much as the happy end of 'The Price of Salt'. Do I just not like surprises? In contrast, though, the end was superbly constructed. I didn't dislike it from the point of view of the writing, just found it unsatisfying. I do not need reminding that humans are base and cruel to one another. It is nice to see some nobility in people no matter how miserable the storyline I suppose.
Mean Time, Standing Female Nude (poetry) - Carol Ann Duffy. Carol Ann Duffy has just been made poet laureate, so it took me quite some time to get hold of these two collections. Neither is as strong as 'Rapture', but both show a poet with great emotional depth. But they made me want the directness and the exuberance of 'Rapture'. The emotions contained in these are purely just not as attractive, I think.
Alias Grace - Margaret Attwood. I nearly put this down a couple of times while I was reading, but at other times I couldn't put it down at all. I found it unsatisfying, in the way that books that have elements of true stories in them can be. It's about a suspected murderess in prison in C19th Canada. I found the character of Grace intriguing, and I was gripped by trying to understand for myself whether or not she IS guilty. That is the book's central strength. I was turned off by some of the sex. It's not usually something that bothers me in books, provided it feels relevant. It didn't, here. The affair with the landlady seemed so totally extraneous. The rather hopeless doctor would be rather hopeless with or without it. The main end it seemed to serve was to afford Grace an opportunity to tell us that she doesn't believe it of him and helps her air of naivete...but that doesn't need the underlining. At first glance, the analysis of mental illness seems to be trying to put the didactic point to the reader that 'There are more things in heaven and earth...'. I think, though, that the effect is to attack our modern scientific certainties. In our desire to believe in Grace, we want to believe in a sort of illness that our modern viewpoint doesn't allow to be possible. It unbalances us and forces to ask questions in the way the Victorian Canadians would have done. This is a good book with great writing, there is no doubt about that. But it is unsatisfying, perhaps because it is unsettling. I am still dwelling on it, so it has staying power, but it's not something I will read again or necessarily recommend.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day - Winifred Watson. A lovely Cinderella fairytale, about how someone on whom life has always dropped the worst parts of itself is suddenly rewarded.
Cleansed (play) - Sarah Kane. I picked up my Sarah Kane collection intending to read 'Crave' and '4.48 Psychosis' again but 'Cleansed' caught my eye as I flicked through. It's a difficult play - I think the most difficult she wrote. You know where you are with 'Crave' and '4.48'...granted that's 'nowhere' or more properly 'inside someone's head', but 'Cleansed' is limbo. Everybody is sinister and vulnerable and weak and powerful. Each has powers to hurt the other and each has powers to break them. People change gender and become one another. Everybody is tortured. There is blood and gore and violence and pain, but the link between beauty and pain is drawn in detail. I don't understand it. Don't know where to unpick it - which is odd for me because usually there's SOMETHING. I find reflections of living...moments of beauty and reality in the harsh dystopia Kane writes. There's less a plot than characters, but the characters are so mutable. I've seen it performed once, beautifully, in a studio in Cambridge. Not quite there but nearly. Some of the sublime imagery was done fantastically well, but it was halting. But then the play itself is halting and jerky. It is about the transience yet transcendence of beauty, I suspect. I'd love to see it again done well - I'm usually so suspicious of people putting on Kane's plays unless I know something about them...too often they're emo university students trying to put on something 'edgy', lacking a sympathy for the text. I have seen all of her plays live (there are only five, two of which I've seen twice and one of which I was involved in the production though only as an ASM, plus a short film which I haven't seen), sometimes better done than others. The performance of 'Cleansed' remains my favourite, though it was nearly 5 years ago now and it's fading a bit. Reading it helped to fill a hole last night, letting me re-connect with living a little after feeling left behind. Being left behind is part of life, I suppose.
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson. I keep reading this - I'm pretty sure I've read it more than once this year. It is beautifully written, and I find it enormously comforting to read. Horrible things happen, but it is full of hope. It is convinced of the transcendence of love and has enormously high standards. It is confused and young but passionate. It is it think the greatest book I have ever read.
The Man With Night Sweats (poetry) - Thom Gunn. This is inspired, some of the best I've read this year. Up there with Plath's Ariel and Duffy's Rapture in the 'best of all time'. It's about love and emotion and feeling and moments and being alive.
Wish I Was Here (short stories) - Jackie Kay. Short stories about endings of long relationships, all of them. The ways of losing someone, of watching your lover fall out of love with you and into love with someone else. Painful, poignant - deeply affecting, even if you weren't where I've been this year. And beautiful to read them mostly about gay people. Honest and true and unpretentious. So they're painful stories for the subject matter, and somehow safe for the settings.
Trumpet - Jackie Kay. I enjoyed this, but not as much as Wish I was Here. It's beautiful, but it was lacking the focus of the short stories. It's a fabulous story, and totally intriguing.
The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers. Turn of the century spy story, set in the Baltic. Fantastic swashbuckling fun and an interesting insight into the pre-war hysteria there was surrounding the German Imperialist threat.
Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett. New Discworld - liked for Discworld. Felt odd to read, though. I suspect his view of things is changing given his current situation.
Why Don't You Stop Talking? (short stories) - Jackie Kay. Not as good as 'Wish I Was Here' - she clearly progressed. This get a bit samey after a while. I suspect though it would be more meaningful if I was older. Beautiful, but not so touching.
Sweeping Up Glass - Carolyn Wall. A great read - not perfect, but a brilliant story and some lovely characters. Just the pace, I think that was off - the big events were dismissed a bit quickly. Something like that.
The Sandman - Preludes & Nocturnes (graphic novel) - Neil Gaiman. What it says, really. I enjoyed these and will be looking for more. Even if I just killed any shred of street cred I ever had...
Domes of Fire, The Shining Ones - David Eddings. These are of that trashy fantasy genre that I usually don't bother with any more (Discworld is not trash), but since I'm in Cornwall and didn't have enough books with me, I had to make do with what was on my brothers' bookshelves. They're great stories, I'll give them that, but I do want to tear apart so many things about them. Necessary light relief, at this point.
Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf. I need to read this again, sometime. Because it treads so close to poetry, it's hard to absorb all at once at the end of the day after a dinner featuring alcohol. I'm glad I have, though. Maybe because it was on my mind after Sweeping up Glass, but the pace of Woolf's novels is always interesting. Time is difficult and fascinating for her. Think I've already written that particular essay, though, with regard to To The Lighthouse for which it is even more apt.
The Mating Season - P. G. Wodehouse - Jeeves and Wooster. Not sure I've actually READ one before, as opposed to watching them on telly or hearing the audiobooks. A good value light romp, without so much farce that I can't bear it...
Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll - I'm glad I read these again, and in the context of the strange man that Carroll was. They're so peculiar. The only time has anyone sat down and written a dream with success, I think.
Lighthousekeeping - Jeanette Winterson. I read this twice - finished it, turned it over, started again, in a day. It's a beautiful thing. It's not as complete, somehow, as Oranges, which I'm sure is intentional, but it's beautiful. It's about love and stories and a guiding lights, and it's wonderful.
Birthday Letters (poetry) - Ted Hughes. I have a problem with this book. I did last time I tried to read it, too. I think it's because it's not really put together as a collection of poetry. It has one central idea but it is drastically over-worked. I got further this time I think than I did previously, before I realised I was reading it merely because I didn't want to not finish it. I have probably another twenty poems left - which I will read, because there might be a few more gems in the last pages as there are in the earlier ones and which I have not yet found. There is a reason to read it, but I'm not sure that I will attempt to read it cover to cover again.
The Man With Night Sweats (poetry) - Thom Gunn. Again. Just because it's hugely comforting.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Next - Ken Kesey. I loved this. I wasn't expecting to, actually. And I started it about 3 months ago and didn't get into it for ages. The first part is all pretty grim, actually, but that just makes the second half all the more euphoric by contrast. It's amazing. A little Messianic, perhaps (one man, saves all, by death...), but it is amazing. The characters are great and the proposition is great. Definitely a recommendation.
Measure for Measure - William Shakespeare (play). I read this after I'd written the post on the quote from it. I'm not entirely convinced on the plot front, but the text is fantastic. It teases out questions of integrity and morality far more effectively than I could. It doesn't provide answers, which is how it fits into the 'problem play' area of Shakespeare's oeuvre, but it's brilliantly thought provoking. Aside from the quotation I blogged about, my other favourite line image is of being 'desperately mortal' which is used to describe the murderer Barnardine when the Duke disguised as Friar Lodowick asks his character.
A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula le Guin. I loved this, as a peaceful and easy thing to read in a week of running about and seeing people. The style is somewhat Tolkeinian, though the plot doesn't owe him anything at all. I'm looking forward to the next two books.

As the year breaks, I'm reading:
Three Lives - Gertrude Stein
The Man With Night Sweats (poetry) - Thom Gunn. Again.
Letters To A Young Poet (unsurprisingly, letters...) - Rainer Maria Rilke.
Landing Light (poetry) - Don Paterson.

As far as things I intend to read next year go, well here is a good place to start - not that it's exhaustive. It contains all the things I want to read that, obviously, I don't own... Reading is good.

I cannot save the world.

2009-12-25T18:33:00.002Z

I cannot stop the planet warming and rescue the polar bears and the rhinos. I cannot stop women being raped in Africa. I cannot stop rape. I cannot stop children dying from hunger in Africa or India or England or America or anywhere else. I cannot knock together the heads of Israel and Palestine. I cannot 'solve' Iraq. Or Afghanistan. I cannot give every accused a fair trial. I cannot restore those who died before their time. I cannot stop chickens being boxed into tiny cages and fed hormones or prevent pigs being crated up for all of their short lives. I cannot release all of the people in prison for political reasons. I cannot force nations to grant rights to homosexuals or bisexuals or transexuals. I cannot cure AIDS. Or wipe out cholera or the common cold. I cannot protect children from abuse. I cannot look after all the ancient monuments in danger. I cannot save the rainforests or the blue whale. I cannot repopulate the oceans. I cannot clothe and feed and house all the people on the streets at Christmas time. I cannot fund the arts. I cannot find an alternative to fossil fuels. I cannot give second chances to all the ones that flunked the first time, no matter what the reason. I cannot care for everyone. I cannot hold everyone. I cannot save everyone. I cannot save everything.

I don't believe that this guy, God or Man or Baby, did or will or could, either. I find it inspiring that he tried - that someone had the attention of the world long enough to suggest it might be a good thing for us all to try, and I find it a worthy aim and outcome for a religion if people still try and follow that example and make things better - even if I know for myself that he was no more than a person in history, and even if they sometimes make things worse. Better some than not at all.

I will not let all of these hundreds of thousands of cannots run my life - I could panic and cry for the vastnesses of each of them, no matter all of them. Sometimes I do. I try - but so often it feels like sandpapering a mountain. Two choices: turn my back totally, or do a tiny bit for everything, hoping to find one thing that will make it feel like I did something worthy of being here.

Hidden in the dark musics of the season, like when the Cathedral Choir were singing their haunting Dove Mass to me and following it up with rhinestone carols as I was more than half asleep in Truro's twee Victorian church.

What a hug is.

2009-12-23T12:13:00.002Z

The Hug
It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

Thom Gunn, from The Man With Night Sweats

This is perhaps my favourite full length poem from this collection, which I've quoted before. It's a beautiful, peaceful image a relationship. Safe, close, warm, held and loved, yet still surprised and surprising. I also love the idea of a 'grand passion...become familial'. He's a very direct poet - there's no beating about the bush or confusion in his imagery. The poetry comes from such subtle use of words that you barely notice how your reactions are steered. I particularly like the use of the words 'stay' and 'dry' in the last line, which seem to me to suggest something of death. The whole seems to conjure up something of Larkin's 1964 poem 'An Arundel Tomb', though that might just be me:

An Arundel Tomb
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd —
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin, from The Whitsun Weddings (London, 1964)

Taking pictures.

2009-12-22T00:03:00.000Z

I love taking pictures. Partly, I like the recording nature of it – I've always been one for salting away experiences to come back to later. That's not a small part of the reason I've always had diaries and blogs and things; ever since I was about 12 I've written pretty regularly about things that were happening to me. That Wordsworth quotation I've talked about before from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, about poetry being 'the overflow of powerful feeling remembered in tranquillity is relevant, I think – something about re-living, re-interpreting, making peace and learning might be some explanation as to why, along with a nebulous feeling that there might be some kind of quiz at the end and I ought to take notes. It's kind of strange to go back and read what was bothering me when I was 16. There are events in that year's diary that were clearly central to my existence that I cannot recall at all now – arguments with friends and places I went and things I did. Which just goes to show how little grown ups really remember about what it was like to be a teenager at school and the effect that inter-friend rows or worries about grades or whether that boy liked you or what your friends thought about what you were wearing had on your life. You learn to deal and your dramas gain context but such things are never actually easy - when you're that young it's so much more powerful for being new. That was the year I had been given a day by day journal, and I did write in it every day. Highlights* include my GCSEs and losing my virginity. I've just been given another daily journal for Christmas, so we'll see whether I can manage to keep it again. The way I write has changed a lot though. I have this for anything contemplative and my journals tend to be angsty and aggressively personal, for working out the things that bother me. We shall see.

Photos are part of the record-keeping, the knowing what the world looked like and felt like at a particular time in my history, our history. If they can be beautiful to look at too, that's an advantage. They can't be lie. Even Photoshop can't really lie, you can always tell. That expression on that person's face is really there. He really did spill a pint over her just when you pressed the shutter.

I'm not qualified to discuss graphic art. Mostly, I don't get it. Oh, I have some understanding I think about perspective and spacing and light and colour and even composition when I'm thinking hard so that I take pictures that are usually conventional and can sometimes be nice or maybe even engaging to look at if I get a good one, but I don't understand the context of it all. Of where pictures might fit in the timeline of other pictures, of what the journey is in history – where from, where to and why. Why people pay such large sums of money for things very often eludes me. Why is that black canvas with red squares on it worth so much, when you get right down to it? Is it exclusivity – the fact that you have something that everybody wants? I look at pictures for a mood or a story, in much the same way that I might read a poem but much less hard. If I saw something perfect for the purpose, I would buy something to hang on the wall – but that would be to reduce something that might contain a great deal of social comment to a mere ornament...wouldn't it? Maybe not. It would depend how I looked at it – whether or not it just became a thing. But I probably wouldn't buy something truly disturbing to hang on my wall. I may well buy a copy of a book I found disturbing – that would be a reason to buy it. There's more of the argument about the function of art in there but I need to do more reading before I talk about it again.

There seems to be an obsession in photography with the capture of the moment. Which makes sense – the two biggest things it has going for it as an art-form are accuracy and speed. The best pictures I've seen seem to be where that aim is most clearly realised. Sometimes that means a picture where you can look at something for a long time that you can only see for a split second in the world, or a picture that shows you something you wouldn't think to look at because your eyes pass over it, or a shot that makes you re-evaluate something (object, person, concept, anything) that you know well because it's taken in a strange light or at a strange angle or out of context of out of focus - just a little twisted away from your own view of things. Much like the best literature, I guess. Those pictures have stories. They are the ones you're still thinking about a week later. This is why I object to overly posed, or at least badly posed, photos – it's not a moment that you get in a posed photo, unless it's done brilliantly. Which it can be. Just...it isn't usually, even by people who should know what they're doing.

Graham and I went round the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize Exhibition at the NPG yesterday. The shot that won was of a teenage swimmer preparing for the Olympics. It was a great photo – it was. The girl was there dressed in a swimming costume, not looking like a model and looking very seriously straight out at us. She was sharp in focus and the background was nicely blurred. Everything was blue. She had a plastic foot. Graham was suggesting cynically that this was why that portrait had won. It was engaging as a shot, I guess. I can remember the expression on the girl's face even now, and I can't have been looking at it for more than a minute or so. But t the time I wasn't grabbed at all, for all I stood looking at it trying to understand how it was 'better' than the shots around it for a while. Sitting here now, I can feel more in the picture than I did then, though I now might be imagining it – they didn't have a postcard for me to buy. Out of context, I can see that there is a story in the determination of a teenage girl training to be the best in the world. The foot is irrelevant in that context. I'm also haunted by a shot of a boyish girl with scars all over her arms and a portrait of a large and starched black woman sitting on a bench outside a house with two identically dressed little girls either side of her who are both laughing and crying. The first one affected me partly for the very naked portrayal of self-harm, which gave the picture a story that wasn't a subtle one – I'm wondering if that was partly why it didn't win, it was about the subject rather than the photograph, if that follows. The second – maybe too much risk of sensationalism or something patronising? It wasn't either of those things. I'm just struck, like Graham was, by how politically correct the winner was in the face of the rest, many of which drew the eye and the mind much more immediately.

There were other quite dark shots that show the more unpleasant things that humans are, and there was one that we thought was hilarious – of the head and torso of a very happy model, wearing nothing except a belt and a Native American head-dress. Little in the way of thought to the last but it was fun. I think the technically 'good' pictures that don't arrest your thought might as well be illustrations – which isn't necessarily to belittle them, just to ask, yet again, what makes it art? I take illustrations, usually – often deliberately ('I need a picture of this cabbage in order to write about it'; 'I want always to remember that this is how my dog plays on the beach'; 'this walk on this coastline has been beautiful and the light is beautiful and I want to remember it'). Graham takes pictures that talk a bit more, unless for similar reasons he wants an illustration. There is no reason why one shouldn't do both or either both in the same shot. In different contexts, the same picture could be both. That's the thing about a great portrait, I guess – you might have taken this picture of Granny, but it might also speak beyond that surface. There might be a captured expression, or a way of sitting, or a mood, that says something greater about her or about age or about England or about anything else. I want to see the pictures that draw thoughts on the walls.

It's a free exhibition and well worth a glance if you have an hour to spare on Charing Cross Road.

*There should be an 'ironic' html tag.

'The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?'

2009-12-21T23:55:00.000Z

From Measure for Measure, 2.2.169

This quotation occurs just after Isabella has been pleading for her brother's life with Angelo, the Duke's draconian deputy. It's a very difficult question to answer, either in the context of marriage (M4M is all about marriage, or if you re-write it like we did, it can be all about the acceptance of homosexual or otherwise queer relationships in a conservative society) or more generally. It depends a lot on what your feelings about marriage are in the first place, I suppose. How seriously do we take the 'til death do us part' stuff these days, really? Is the bond of marriage as much of a big deal as that, really? Should two people stay together even beyond the point when the relationship makes either of them happy purely because they are married?*

There's a chunk of me that doesn't feel allowed to talk about this – I've never been married. I've never, finally, made the decision that yes, this person is forever. All I need or want, always. I might have felt that a time or two, but that's not the same as standing up in front of somebody legal and signing to that effect. That's a big, big deal, that declaration. The very fact that I feel like that, despite the way that marriages are contracted and dissolved in secular Western societies, says that it's still an important institution – to use myself as litmus for Everyone, anyway. If you're going to get up there and have all of those people watching you, you owe it to yourself and everyone else, let alone to your partner, to really mean it, aside from any legalities. It demands that you trust the other person enough, too, to be making the same enormous commitment that you are. You both have to know all the way through yourselves that This Is It. It can't be a time that you hide behind yourself and allow the bullish part of yourself to chivvy the undecided and probably more rational part of you to go through with it. The whole thing is about complete and total trust – for oneself and one's own feelings as well as for the fact that the other person is interrogating themselves just as deeply...which is the scary part.

Is that a fanciful ideal, to believe that people should and do really, truly feel to the bottom of themselves and line up every layer of their minds to check that they aren't fooling themselves, and really can and do trust other people to do the same? Personal integrity and everything. Some people probably know instinctively what they're thinking, I'm probably the odd one out there. But I'm sure there are hundreds of people who drift towards marriage because it's The Next Thing and then live happily ever after - but then there are hundreds of people who never live their lives right to their full extent. The people who just skim their own feelings and understanding, who are content with the surface of life. I'm not sure whether it shows that I'm a cynic to believe that there are many of such people or that I'm an optimist to believe more and more that those people might be the minority...at least of the people that I know. Those skimmers might be 'content', but are they ever happy? I've said before that I'll cope with the lows of a life lived as fully as I personally can, without actually imagining extra drama in the name of 'living', to gain the highs at least for a few more years, but that's another story.

But why do relationships where that commitment has been made honestly eventually shatter? Where there hasn't been total honesty with the self and then one another, things are a bit different. I suppose one often feels that one has been honest to in the first place and then finds that one hasn't? But also, how much do people change? If you've been happy with someone for three years is it reasonable to believe that you will always be happy with them? [I'm applying scientific terms to emotions again. I wonder if that's a bad habit or a sane thing to do?] CAN you just outgrow someone, like you might in a short-term relationship of some sort? Why shouldn't you be able to? Is it more that you always outgrow people but then re-learn the loving them part, and that's what keeps a relationship going? Could that be the point in a way of such a tight institution as marriage? I suspect it has to be that.

But it all depends on the sort of the 'outgrowing' I guess. If it's just a question of finding that in your mutual life you have arrived at incompatible points then that is surely where you might re-learn the original loving in the new context. The trouble is that I don't think usually people can see that sort of drifting apart until it's too late. It's perfectly possible for the first realisation that something was wrong before to come from the revelation of somebody's infidelity. The point then is surely not the affair itself but what it means for the original relationship. The person who is 'cheating', to use the most judging synonym out there, might be so horrified by the fact of what they've done that their original relationship will actually be better off...something about realising the value of what you have. But the other side is that one realises what is missing from the prior relationship...which might on some level be a good thing for the individuals involved too. Either way, it ought to lead, admittedly through fire, to the possibility of a better future. Having seen some of that, though, I think that logic glosses far too much of the pain in all of this. Which doesn't invalidate the conclusions, but it does colour them.

[Ok. I still hate the language I'm using in this discussion...but if I don't make it sound clinical, it will sound insincere. As it is, I sound too definite in my wandering attempt to understand some of this, even with the volume of question marks I've used...]

All of which is a long way back around to asking – 'the tempter or the tempted, who sins most?' How much blame can be attached to the 'other (wo)man'? Is it their fault that someone else was tempted? Is it their responsibility to safeguard the relationship of the 'tempted' party? In modern times we only have a generally accepted societal framework for such moral questions, but to take the Shakespearean quotation in context is to require us to address the deeply Christian setting of the period in which it was written. The 'tempter' then is always the Satan and the snake in the Garden, and hence ought inherently to be the evil one; Eve is the 'tempted', and while she is clearly regarded as a sinner throughout the Bible, she is also the mother of the race and the reason for the existence of Christ and so on and thus is an ambiguous figure. With that simplistic rationalisation, we seem invited to make the tempter the greater sinner. However, the snake in the Garden was deliberate in the temptation of Eve; he was all out for her downfall. Shakespeare underlines the ambiguity – clear in his question is the fact that both parties sin and the only query is around which one is more sinful. The question brings us up a little short. Is the 'tempter' really such a Satanic character? Is the 'tempted' really as innocent as Eve was when the snake came to her? How many affairees are really likely to be setting out to break up a home? I'm sure there are people who do go out to sleep with someone married or not, but I find it hard to believe that most people looking for love and happiness (surely 90% of world) would set their sights on something so sure to generate heartbreak and recriminations somewhere along the line. In real life, the ordinary affairee might be guilty of not caring rather than active sin. But a sin by omission is still a sin in most religions. In our society, is it? Well, yes, but I don't think it's such a big thing as it might be to the religious. Perhaps they could be blamed for not stepping back quickly enough, not pro-actively defending the relationship in which they are the intruder. But 'intruder' too suggests action and intention which may well not be there. Is it ever our responsibility to save people from themselves? UK old-style socialist (nanny-state) politics would suggest that sometimes it is The Socially Acceptable Right Thing To Do. But that doesn't reduce the fact that Sometimes Things Happen. Don't They?

It's too circumstantial. Who is the seducer? IS there a seducer? Does ANYTHING Just Happen? How often is there equal blame? Won't it usually be uneven, but be random as to who? Is there a general skew? Is there some sort non-relational standard against which all of these things should be set? The very fact that Shakespeare poses the question in such a way in a deeply religious age again underlines the fact that religion doesn't have an easy and satisfying answer...why should our much more woolly modern consensus-morality be any clearer?

*At no point in this am I thinking about how this applies to couples with children. That's a totally different kettle of fish. It's not just about two independent grown ups then; the obligations have much more to owe to the innocent kids than they do to anyone else.

What Is Paranoia...?

2009-12-18T23:37:00.003Z

I hate this. The crackly nervous adrenaline fight-flight tension preparation with no rational prompt. Of having every little thing around me needle-sharp in my awareness and without able to focus on anything for more than a glance because it's too much to fit in all at once. Everybody else thinks I'm tired, but I'm standing with my back to the wall and my arms folded and my head down looking drawn because some little part of me is trying to be aware of what everyone around me is doing or thinking or wanting and how it reflects back at me and what I should do about it and what might happen next, and if I huddle in this corner I can keep my back safe to a wall and I need not listen to behind me as well, and if I look unwelcoming and half-asleep I might be able to be quiet and things might settle again. And if somebody talks to me, I can hardly finish sentences because I forget the ends because my mind has moved from the current situation to the maybes and the mights and the musts of the next thing - to 'I must remember that' or 'I wonder if that happened I should check' and 'I haven't got a list but we need that mustn't forget' and 'that's a silly thing to say' and 'you can't say that' and 'what does she think of you now?' and 'that time I did that thing, that many years ago, I shouldn't have done that'. And then, there's the guilt for not paying attention or for having forgotten something or for not gauging a reaction properly or for wondering how to escape because wanting to escape is rude.

I end up frozen, not wanting to talk to someone because I don't want to say or do something that makes me feel wrong and silly and annoying and a waste of space, but I want to talk to them because they are my friend and they love me and if I can see that they love me I can be ok. Which is the constant need for affirmation. Which wears out everyone involved. But I WANT to talk to people. I like people. I like being close to people and laughing and making them laugh or making them feel loved because that is validating for me, and helps things fade from red alert to at least amber for that minute. Which sounds bad, in a way, but it's only doing something for other people that they do for me. It's going to someone for a hug for your benefit not theirs. But - it's balanced; it's for both. So the fact that my mind is telling me that I should be feeling guilty for that thought I should push away. Right? And then I tie myself tighter and tighter in knots and this is the direction that leads to self-harm because that is the thing that cuts through the circling paranoia and punishes the nebulous guilt and lets it be over. The handbiting and the teethclenching and the remains of the fingernails driven into whatever skin they can reach, and, eventually somewhere along the line if I can't get away and lose the control totally, razor blades and new scars and new reasons never to go swimming. And the new guilt for the loss of control. Getting unbelievably, falling-over, drunk and then sobbing myself out somebody is not a better way of dealing. It's not fair on the people I do it to. And if I get that drunk when there isn't anyone to sob on, and it's not a question that the people wouldn't I know that it's a question of going home to an empty house, then that's when things got very bad that time. Which is why I dont' do it then. Which is where it comes to being unfair and manipulative. And the circle locks again...

This jitteriness is the reason I'm good at planning and details and make a good producer and project manager, because if you're in the habit of imagining every possible scenario, you are well-practiced at it. So maybe I should just deal. Better. Because somewhere in existence it serves a purpose. Everyone has these feelings. I just have bad coping mechanisms. So I should find better ones. I feel guilty for not having better ways of coping. I don't have real panic attacks, as such, not really frequently anyway. I just just end up unable to extract myself from a circle. I can still function. None of this is life threatening or even debilitating, really. I have no excuses. I'm just not a good person. I must be a better person. I must stop that thought. I CAN stop that thought. But every time something goes faintly 'wrong' I feel my stomach swoop like a downhill rollercoaster and losing control would be so easy.

Why am I writing this online and not a journal? A feeling that it's less like clapping a lid on the steaming pan and waiting for the explosion, I think. Trying to remember that this is ordinary, that other people are this person too, that I'm not special and that I'm not this person all the time.

Greens for Tea.

2009-12-13T22:21:00.002Z

I love green - the colour. I like to wear it and I like it around me. I never used to when I was a kid and you had to pick a favourite colour, I used to say there was too much of it and that it was boring, but I have updated my views on a few things since the age of seven and this is one of them.

I also like most green food. At least the kind that's supposed to be green. I'd be worried about green meat. So should you be. I virtually never make salad, because lettuce is dull and I don't have the patience or the appetite to use many varieties in one bowl because then it goes on for ages. Cabbage, however, in every single form available, I adore. This morning, I went to the St Albans Farmers' Market, which I haven't done in a serious way I think at all. I wanted to see what was there and ideally buy some good quality high welfare meat. I glanced at the veg stall without much expectation, and picked up the above beautiful bunch. It's cavolo nero, Italian 'black cabbage', which I've read about a number of times as supposed to be the sort of kale most worth looking for. I don't think I've ever actually eaten it, but I knew I ought to, as a big green stuff fan. The leaves are long and pointed, with a prominent rib down each. It looks a little like savoy cabbage but because it doesn't have a core it doesn't have tough outer leaves and a bitter centre to worry about. At 90p a bunch, it looked like a good idea.

But then, what to do with it? It was clearly very fresh, the leaves squeaked and were almost tacky to the touch, and the whole bunch was pert and solid and didn't wave about when I carried it, and it was an incredible colour - more navy blue than any shade of green, under the bloom. I extracted about 10 spear-leaves and removed the thick rib from the centre of each one. I sliced up an inch of French saucisson sec that I happened to have (a rasher or two of bacon would have done just as well) and fried it in a glug or two of olive oil with a crumbled (homegrown, home-dried!) chilli. When it was nearly crispy, I stuck in a sliced clove of garlic until faintly golden. I hoicked out the aromatics and added the well washed and still damp greens sliced crosswise into inch sections, along with a sprinkle of salt. Once the pieces were all covered in flavoured oil, I covered the lot with a metal plate and added a little water around the edges. After about 2 minutes, I pulled the lid off and added back the sausage and the garlic slices.

Another slug of better olive oil, some salt and pepper, a grating of parmesan, a glass of white wine on the side and this was PROPER food. You could leave out the pork and up the parmesan and it would still be good if you wanted to edge further in a vegetarian direction (you'd need veggie parmesan for purists). I debated a drop of lemon juice but that makes green things yellow, even if they taste good that way. The whole thing would be nearly as good with savoy cabbage but the risk of it being tough might be distinct. Cook for longer. This was fresh and crisp without being hard to chew in any way. Maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to make food that's not silly just for myself after all. Hope.

Books.

2009-12-12T21:37:00.002Z

I adore books. Today, I finally got around to sorting the ones in this flat out. It's a strange place, this, because it contains stuff belonging to all members of my family which, with the exception of myself, they aren't currently using. It's things they haven't got rid of but only need intermittently or not at all. There's a lot of un-thrown-away rubbish, or things left here like a very elderly pair of slippers belonging to my dad or the largest pans we own as a family, 'because I need something when I'm there'. When I got here, there were 6 loaves of bread in the freezer some of which have been there for months and months (becoming breadcrumbs by degrees). And around the same number of 2-pint containers of milk, half used and frozen 'for next time'. I have forbidden anyone buying either of those staples until the freezer is under control...

The books aren't that different. I found a heap of Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie and P. D. James that belong to my mum and her crime obsession. I organised the cookery books that belong mostly to my next brother and me to discover quite how many duplicates we have between us. He's living in college at the moment so all his cooking stuff is here. Still.

There isn't really excuse for the following, though.

That's *three* copies of The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, first published in 1903. It's a relatively little-read early spy novel written at a period that was (rightfully) fearful of German imperial ambitions westward over the North Sea. It's actually a wonderful read, if you like an action story. That is no reason to have copies from re-issues in, respectively, each of 1955, 1978 and 1998. And I first met it as an audiobook, too, which means we have it FOUR times. I suspect the older two belong to my dad and my mum, and the newest one is mine. Still. Not really an excuse. For Harry Potter we have three copies of each of the last two novels. That's one for each child, though I suppose that makes sense - we were all living in different counties when those two were published. I also have the first book in Latin, but that's beside the point.

The duplication is hindering my ability to file things. I always have this problem. I suppose I have around two thirds of my books here, and the rest on shelves in Cornwall. Down there, where I have room for them, they're orderly - divided by genre and then alphabetised. Here, I've done my best. Adult fiction is downstairs, along with maps and travel, reference, drama, biography, interesting non-fiction ('coffee table') and most poetry. Up here beside me is the complete Discworld, 'young adult' fiction (that's the aforementioned Harry Potter*, Philip Pullman, Jonathan Stroud and a few other things - there isn't much space after Terry Pratchett), the irrelevant non-fiction and poetry anthologies. The main issue is that every single shelf is double-stacked, which means that A-E is behind F-K, etc, and hard to get to and hard to re-shelve. I haven't labelled things. I'm debating it. My family might upset things if they don't notice. I understand librarians and their constant air of irritation. It's taken me all day to do this and I hate the thought of it being disturbed. But I suspect that labelling things might be taken amiss, too...they aren't quite all mine.

I adore books. It's why I did a degree in English. I love them for escapism, I love them for learning, I love them for poetry and music and understanding and knowledge and information and discussion and ideas and new thoughts and hope and different moods and people and places to reflect back to myself. I get totally and utterly lost in stories, I always have. It's what makes me unbelievably irritating to watch films with - I jump, and gasp and mutter and have to resist shouting encouragement or warnings or advice to on-screen characters even in crowded cinemas. I usually fail when sitting on a sofa. That world onscreen is real. And I feel bereft when I finish a book, or a film, almost without exception. Putting one down in the middle used to be a very rare occurrence indeed, until my education led to more discerning tastes. Even now though, I'll probably read the book I've got and then not bother with anything else the author has written unless influenced by some trusted friend. Once a book is started I feel an obligation to it to finish it. It's a thing as a whole and never in parts - what comes after modifies what happened to begin with; you can rarely say with any authority that you don't like a book when you've only read half of it, you didn't look at the whole thing. That irritating foible of style might turn out to be magically transformed later in the tale into something of purpose. The only exception to this rule is something like a poetry or short story anthology, put together by an independent editor or team. Any set put together by a single author ought to hold together as a whole, like an album does. The best of them create something greater than the sum of their parts. I've never had that feeling about a multi-author collection, there's just too much disparity of style and preoccupation.

I do read several things at once, though, because what I read needs to reflect my mood or I will fidget and not do whatever doesn't fit justice. I tend to have a volume of poetry, something new to me - probably loosely-defined as 'literature' - and something familiar (still might be some sort of classic or modern classic) or otherwise simpler on the go all at once and will flit between them. That's often influenced by which is lightest. I read a lot of poetry collections on trains because they're so little. I actually don't get on with bookshops and browsing them, it isn't how I read. I follow threads, looking for influences on favourite authors or books I've heard reviewed or discussed or which come from the same family as something else I love. I have never been at a loose end for something to read next, not since I first picked up a book. I have a very well tended Amazon wishlist, which represents fairly accurately preoccupations of the moment, though with a bias towards to trashy because I let myself buy less of it - the 'worthy' stuff gets bought more often.

I virtually never read books created for 'art' that were originally published in a foreign language (non-fiction or criticism is different). Translation is a difficult and valuable skill, granted, but to my mind it will always muddy whatever the original text said. Some might argue that translated works should be regarded as something in their own right, and maybe they should, but I don't want my closeness to a text mediated by somebody else. There was a point that I kept making over and over in one paper of my degree, and I can't now find the reference - about the fact that no reader can truly approach a text in total isolation as advocated by the enormously influential New Critics of the early C20th. How you understand a given word in a given position is always governed by where you have seen that word, that phrase, a similar word, a rhyming phrase, the same idea, a contrary idea, used in what you have read before - which is influenced by your historical moment, your employment, your gender, your education, your class, what you're listening to...right down to what the weather outside is doing and maybe even what colour pants you put on this morning.** A translation means that someone else's unique position in time is already influencing how the text can be interpreted, and so one individual's unified creation becomes clouded. At some stage, maybe I'll learn enough of a foreign language to read well in it, but it hasn't happened yet. It requires total immersion, I think, to get to the point where your mind feels the connections between things instinctively. Mind you, there are advantages to being an outsider - I, reading American novels for example, will understand them very differently to someone from that nationality, and it is from such oppositions that the most interesting ideas come from, I guess. What I read won't be what you read, and from what we each comprehend from a text will a more full and more interesting reading, conversation, philosophy come***. That is a strong reason for the existence of criticism, for me****. To do with the exchange of ideas is central in really good criticism and the reason that I read essays on texts I'm interested in, still - even if I'm not writing essays any more.

All of which is a way of justifying the enormously large collection of books I have and will continue to have. They comfort me and connect me to the world around me and I think they're great.

More about the function of art, from me. I meant it when I said I was keen.

*I keep thinking 'that is the type of thing I'd usually find a reference link for'. But it's Harry Potter. No.
**I think this possibly wanders around the edges of Derridan Deconstructionism, should anyone be remotely interested. Lots of fairly nihilist Post-Structuralist Post-Modernist philosophy about the instability and eventual futility of human endeavour. Fascinating, but a little dark.
***Edward Said definitely discusses the idea that the Critic should always be in opposition to society in order to be of any use. Which kind of makes sense. References... I *think* this will be in The World, The Text, and the Critic but I couldn't swear to it...
****There's a very great deal to say about the function of criticism - which really means the function and influence of art and literature...the discussion of the POINT of reading. Academics have been studying it for centuries, which always seems a little uncomfortable to me. All those discussions could boil down to a justification for their existence, on one level. In modern times (as opposed to the Greeks), the conversation comes into its own in the Victorian period with Matthew Arnold's seminal essay 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' (1864), particularly 'the idea of a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas.' I find it absolutely fascinating and wrote my dissertation on the function of art and whether or not it is or even remotely should be regarded as philosophy. I'm aware that other people wouldn't find it quite so interesting, though...

Stew; soup.

2009-12-11T23:59:00.003Z

I'm not a soup gal. It's a thing. I never have been. Call it 'stew' and I'm there every time. I adore that stuff, more or less whatever meat or fish was used to make it. I would choose a stew almost every time over more or less any other sort of meal. Long, slow cooked meat falling into a nicely flavoured sauce, and all that. And apart from anything else, they're easy:

Harissa Lamb, adapted from Nigel Slater's 'Real Fast Food' (For two, with leftovers)
1 half leg or 2 shanks of lamb
1 medium onion
3 cloves garlic
1 aubergine
1 tsp cumin seeds
3 tsp harissa paste
1 tin chopped tomatoes (400g)

Slice onion and mince garlic. Chop the aubergine (that's an eggplant to you foreigners...) into inch cubes. Salt the meat, then brown in a large casserole. Remove and brown the aubergine (you'll need more oil). Turn the heat down and fry the onions, garlic and cumin seeds until wilted. Add the harissa, some salt and pepper and the tomatoes. and bring to the boil. Stir in the aubergine and then poke the lamb back in. Fill the tin with boiling water and add that, too (mind fingers). Bring to the boil, then stick it in a low oven (150 degrees centigrade, ish) for about 2 hours, checking once in a while that it hasn't dried out (add more water). It's done when the meat falls off the bone when you poke it with a fork...

But sometimes...I want something less meaty. Vegetarian stews rarely cut it, they don't have the depth of flavour that you get from meat, even if you try to (not quite literally) beef them up by adding Marmite. I think I need a greater well-flavoured-sauce-to-chunks ratio than I can get from veg. Probably, I just want the meat fat to thicken my sauce. On occasion when I've had any dripping, I've done that. I have tried (not necessarily that hard) to make vegetable soup-stews that cut the mustard. The only one I've found that comes close is a tomatoey harira adapted from this book, but I so rarely have the quantities of fresh parsley and coriander around to make that (something close to 70g of each...) and it wouldn't be the same without. It is basically a mixture of cumin-y tomatoes, chickpeas, and the aformentioned green herbs.

Also in that book is a rather unappetising recipe for taco soup - which looks like soggy tacos in a bowl of watery broth. Not attractive to the thick-and-flavourful-sauce enthusiast (card carrying member). While drifting around The Pioneer Woman's recipe world bit, I saw another recipe for taco soup, this time one that was essentially chilli (close to my favourite food) with extra stock in it to make it soupy - it's similar right down to the recommended accompaniments. It contains quite a lot of pre-packaged stuff, which needless to say isn't really available in British supermarkets. Also, it contained actual beef, which is expensive and I regard as unnecessary except for special occasions. But the concept? That looked good. This evening, leaving Cambridge for St Albans circa 7:30 (it's an hour's drive home) post carol service, I discovered I was craving it. The signs looked good:
- Already cooked off pinto beans in freezer (I buy a packet then cook the whole thing on an evening I'm in, then bag them up and freeze them. I always cook them until they're more or less mush, and they're perfect for this. I realise that they make tins of them, but I'm a purist.)
- Tins of tomatoes in cupboard
- More onions and garlic than I ever know what to do with
- Yesterday's discovery that the following can now be bought at Tescos:

(I know that few others will be quite so excited by this. It's stock, yes. I don't eat meat unless it's come from animals that have been reared to better-than-industrial standards - I don't want to be responsible for battery chicken. This stuff is Really Good Stock, is inexpensive, AND is free range. Tescos should be encouraged.)

- The fact that I would *drive past* a Tescos on the way home, and could get stock, and, better, tortilla chips.

So, at half past nine this evening, I began to make soup. Onions and garlic were chopped small and fried in a large pot until translucent. The packet of fajita mix (only ever the Discovery brand, which seems to be made of real food and doesn't contain MSG) was stirred in. The tomatoes were added. A potato masher was applied when they appeared to be recalcitrantly large. The stock was sloshed in and brought to the boil. Once I'd got to this point, my bag of beans had just about finished in the microwave and was glopped in. Tasting revealed the need for half a teaspoon of Marmite (that would be 'yeast extract', nothing weird if you never met it) and some salt. I could have added the limes I bought for this purpose but I forgot. That would have reduced the need for salt. When hot through, it was ladled into a bowl, covered with grated cheese and a handful of tortilla chips was crumbled over that.

I had seconds, despite there being no hunger-need to. Pleased with self. To be honest, the whole excuse in the first place, beyond needing something healthy and with vegetables, was the existence of that stock and a gravy I made with it yesterday. I did also buy some organic stock cubes both vegetarian and chickeny for further experimentation - I want to see what happens when I make it truly vegetarian. Need to cook more beans first. And eat this batch - I think there's about 8 portions here...

Every little thing.

2009-12-09T23:56:00.005Z

It's funny what makes a day brilliant, really. Buying a pheasant helped make mine:

- Finding own way to butcher's even with not much of a map and never having driven into that part of the country (tick!)
- Hoping that they had a pheasant and them having a pheasant (tick!)
- Them splitting some bacon for me into the tiny quantity I wanted to buy (tick!)
- Two minutes conversation with the butcher about roasting times for said bird that made me feel like a grown up (tick!)
- Finding way home, despite not LOOKING at the map (tick!)

On top of all of that, the day began incredibly early with breakfast at Tatties with Leigh, which was a totally wonderful way of starting, then running into Sam who said I can sing a *carol service* on Friday and gave me an amazing hug, which was EXCITING, and then seeing Carl and finishing the Christmas shopping by dipping into gifty arty shops, which was pretty and fun and peaceful. And I came home and went for a full 40 minutes long fast run that made me feel like I'd beaten something. And my daddy bought me a train ticket home for Christmas and found out that the cheapest available is a first class one. And I went to the (Abbey) theatre and saw a mass of people I love dearly, including some I haven't seen for a whole! eight! years! and told them about exciting things like driving to Pompeii and auditioning for choirs (not yet, and only if I'm brave).

And tomorrow, I'm cooking the pheasant and seeing Martin. And on Sunday I will see more people I love at the theatre. And Tuesday? Tuesday, I'm going to the SEASIDE. In December. !! *AND* may be having the first of two Christmas dinners of next week, depending on the timings.

So...I'm less phased than I might be by the fact that I have found out that a close friend is pretty ill, another friend appears to have been pretty ill but I know no details, by the fact (not on the same level) that I couldn't find Jerusalem artichokes in Sainsburys, by the fact that people I'm dying to talk to and adore can't get onto the internet to talk to me (or, indeed, do anything). I will find out, if appropriate, what is going on in people's lives and then bake for them, also if appropriate, and tell them all I love them because I can't do much else but I do make amazing brownies (one day that post will have pictures...which sounds like an excuse).

Bed.

Withnail & I, with extra Shakespeare

2009-12-06T19:14:00.002Z

I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god - the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

I've been watching Withnail & I. I don't know what to make of it, though I think that's a traditional reaction to that film. I spent most of the film feeling sorry for Monty, and for Marwood ('...& I'), though obviously it's Withnail you watch. It doesn't tell you enough. There's more story. One shouldn't feel sorry for any of the characters - one shouldn't like them, because one can see that there is a lot of less likeable stuff in them that is barely shown. You know that Marwood is junkie enough for paranoia, you know that Monty is predatory - you know that Withnail could be respected as talented man and certainly one with character and courage. In some ways he would have been redeemed had they chosen to finish the film the way I think the book does, with his suicide. His decision to die would have validated him and credited him with some integrity. The film is like a Beckett play, but with more context than one ever gets from those. Absurdist.

The Hamlet quotation, above, ends the film. I have always remembered the image as 'stellar promontory' rather than 'sterile'. I think the former concept would probably be an impossible one for Shakespeare to come up with - his was still a period that believed in the spheres of the heavens rather than understanding the universe as orbs floating in a void as we do now. For him, the most desolate place imaginable was a spur of headland flung far out into the sea, weather-swept and on which nothing was able to survive. To me, from the vantage point of a new millennium, it seems more appropriate when looking for true sterility to conjure up a rock in space, totally dead, totally barren, totally cold, projected into nowhere, anchorless, helpless, dust among the stars. The feeling is the same, but as the world has become a smaller place since the C17th, so the universe has got larger and our place in it has become infinitely less significant; after all we no longer believe, for the most part, that the world was created by a beneficent entity purely for us. Shifting from the terrestrial to the universal seems appropriate, with that shift in context. Anywhere on earth is not remote, not really. Anywhere in space - is. I sort of hope that Shakespeare wouldn't mind too much my mis-rememberance of his line, because from my moment of history my image can go some way towards re-investing his with the power that 400 years has leached from it.

The Macbeth quotation is mostly there because it is probably my favourite piece of Shakespeare to say aloud. It follows almost naturally from the Hamlet speech, though the art in it is greater as might be expected from the one in metre and the other in prose. Both deal with isolation and desolation and the insignificance of man in the face of time and situation. Macbeth is over-dramatic (and over-quoted and almost hackneyed, now) but the image of 'all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death' is speaking - each of us guides each other, a day at a time, towards each individual's death. Shakespeare expresses both the futility and the camaraderie of the human experience in the space of ten words. We are reminded how hopeless our lives are, but also that we are all in it together and we have little but one another. It's arguably an odd sentiment from the character of Macbeth, but ultimate poetry.

Potential

2009-12-05T18:23:00.004Z

Once drained, what was once filled once only
once again waits – once more less and more than once before.
Once filled and once drained, at once ware of potence and impotence, wonder
on what once upon a time it was that once one wished one would wake
From or to.

Unfilled free for future or once full with fulfilment;
Full filled in, but – fulfilling fulfilled and filled maybe willing but too full
To be filled, so

When world-whirled we will st-st-stutter to a stop-start start.

Lighthousekeeping

2009-11-30T00:01:00.003Z

     It was a long story, and like most of the stories in the world, never finished. There was an ending - there always is - but the story went on past the ending - it always does.

(...)

Pew - why didn't my mother marry my father?

She never had time. he came and went.
Why didn't Babel Dark marry Molly?
He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.
But they might not be telling you the truth.
Never mind that. You tell them the truth.
What do you mean?
You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.
So what should I say?
When?
When I love someone?
You should say it.

(...)

     There is is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story waits to be heard.
     Some people say that the best stories have no words. They weren't brought up to Lighthousekeeping. It is true that words drops away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit the template called language.
I know that. But I know something else too, because I was brought up to Lighthousekeeping. Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the relief of silence. And then, very quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

(...)

     I copied the stories out as fast as I could, but all I had so far were endless beginnings.

(...)

     The rest of my life. I have never rested, always run, run so fast that the sun can't make a shadow. Well, here I am - mid-way, lost in a dark wood - this selva oscura, without a torch, a guide, or even a bird.

(...)

     'Do you know the story of Jekyll and Hyde?'
     'Of course.'
     'Well then - to avoid either extreme, it is necessary to find all the lives in between.'

(...)

     'What did you do before this?'
     'I was married. Then I wasn't married any more. Tipped up, flung out, recognise that?'
     I did.
     'End of story. Gotta start again. Gotta be positive. Gotta move on. Don't look back. No regrets.'

     That's how he said it. He said it like a mantra. I wonder how many times a day he had to say it to make it true? It was a poultice over his heart.

     I don't know how to poultice my heart.

(...)

     After the Talking Bird, the nice man at the Tavistock Clinic kept asking me why I stole books and birds, though I had only ever stolen one of each.
     I told him it was about meaning, and he suggested, very politely, that might be a kind of psychosis.
     'You think that meaning is psychosis?'
     'An obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life, might be understood as psychosis, yes.'
     'I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.'
     He twiddled his pencil. His nails were very clean.
     'I am only asking questions.'
   'So am I.'
     There was a pause.
     I said, 'How would you define psychosis?'
     He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil: Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
   Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.'

(...)

     In the morning I was woken early by the chromatic bell of the Orthodox Church.
     I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.

(...)

   What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

     I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don't expect to be happy. I don't imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don't think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies.
   My little orbit of life circles love. I daren't get any closer. I'm not a mystic seeking final communion. I don't go out without SPF 15. I protect myself.
   But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love - all love - love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a café. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do.

From Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson, first published in 2004 by Fourth Estate

This is a book about love, what it is how it is where it is. She is best at that. As a novel, it's uncomfortable, or unconventional, or both. Like Oranges, which I found a more complete read in its way because it is more coherent and the story itself is less a cipher than this one it, it is philosophical. It is episodic, with the plot-story broken up by an outside sequence of images and with reflective passages. The thing I like about both of them is how honest they feel. One shouldn't usually read the author into a novel, but the direct nature of the first person narrative and the tangible emotions of the speaker almost force you to in this one. Details like the age of Silver, born in 1959 in Winterson's own birth year, invite parallels that are hard to throw off. I'm not looking for a connection with an author through a work, but I love it when I find it, provided it is done well. You are reading a story, and then you are almost reading a letter hidden for you personally among the pages - it's that once-removed connection that I joy on finding in these novels. The feeling of being spoken to, included, important, valued, worth talking to. There is great poetry and great thinking and not insignificant plots and characters behind both Oranges and Lighthousekeeping, and differently behind Sexing the Cherry, which didn't draw me into itself in the same way that the other two did though I think that is to do with its subject matter being removed from my personal habitual preoccupations, but I think that I have identified why I finish them and turn them over to start again - because when someone writes you an honest, clear, direct, heartfelt, emotional letter, when someone opens themselves like that to you and makes you feel like the recipient of a gift of themselves, you start again. I have a series of half-composed replies in my mind. Part of me is tempted to write them, just to see what coalesces from them. Maybe even send one, you never know. Does the honesty in her novels imply that she is receptive to it from others? And what is the worst that could happen? No reply and she assumes I'm a little batty. Which, let's face it, I am, but still. Knowing my luck, she'd think that and then I'd actually meet her... Pipe dreams.

Epigram

2009-11-24T11:04:00.000Z

May the Lord in his long silence
remember all of us.

Last lines of 'Heaven' from the collection The Russian Jerusalem by Elaine Feinstein

I prefer this little couplet in isolation than in context - the 'us' mentioned in the poem could be 'poets' and I don't like the exclusionist overtones of that. Without the preceding lines, there is an Eliot-like quality to this that rails against and yet is drawn to religious feeling. The 'Lord' is silent, and long has been, but the prayerful syntax asks for his attention nonetheless. It is conflicted, which has always seemed to me the most appropriate attitude to religion.

Projects, Plans and Propositions.

2009-11-23T18:18:00.001Z

In theory, I have some work this week...it's just that it's going to be very last minute if it does show up. This means I'm sitting in my flat idling away hours - which is an activity I find difficult. Letting time go without making use of it I object to. Nothing should be undertaken with the sole aim of 'passing the time'. 'Resting', that's different. That has a purpose. It's a gap between doing things, recuperation and preparation and all of that. I've DONE that, now. I've been to Cornwall and exercised and read trashy novels and slept a lot. I've had the holiday. I now want Tasks and Projects. I'd like to go to Jersey and visit Eleanor (school friend), who has achieved possibly the most jammy junior doctor posting in the country, but I can't because I don't want to miss my opportunity to do Constructive Work...even if it is data analysis for comms companies as opposed to anything really worthy. I'm planning Dublin to see Elaine in January, partly with the aim of persuading her we should be housemates in London. But that's AGES away.

I started making the above jumper a good year ago. Ages and ages. Like, the last time Eleanor was in Cornwall and we went to the Isles of Scilly - which was Sept 2008. AGES. In fairness, I have been a little busy since then and I made a large mistake that meant I had to re-do a load of it. It is a measure of how little I've had to do recently that it's about half as big again today as it was two weeks ago. Lots of Time Team and train journeys have contributed, and it IS good that it's getting further and further along, but it's a mark of the fact that I haven't been doing any writing - which is something I was bookmarking this patch of time for. I had been looking forward to a concerted period of writing poems, to really try and practice that and see if I can't improve and expand what I do. I have no great pretensions, I think, to much in the way of grandeur for my writing, but the poetry is the bit that I'd most like to develop...only I'm very shy about it. Posting bits and pieces on here is one thing. If people read them, they rarely if ever comment; I never know what they think. I'm not brave enough to actually ask (this still isn't me asking, but if any of my ~10 readers ever had a comment about anything I have ever written I am *always* interested in it) - there's a small part of me that *likes* not knowing if people skip over them, or read them and think nothing of them, or read them and just think they're angsty and lacking in any real skill with it. So. I have been planning that I might to put together maybe 20 poems that I like enough to actually *ask* for responses about. ...But now it comes to it? I haven't got the energy to start. There are reasons, I suspect, to do with feeling unsettled and uncertain about the future right now - I haven't even done much in the way of diary entry writing, which is weird for me. It's just not helpful...I'm not going to get an opportunity like this again. I intend to change this.

The SoD was always the boundary to my holiday. Having had the weekend to recover from that (and I needed that...I was hoping that hangovers would get easier with age, but it turns out they just get worse), Playtime Stops Now.

The plan, then. I am NOT going to waste this chance. I am going to structure my time. Yes. I am going to get up at a sensible time, and go to bed at a sensible time. I'm not usually too bad at those, I'm just bad at actually sleeping when I'm *in* my bed.* Therefore, I am going to drink less caffeinated tea (I drink very little of that anyway, but my favourite right now does actually have enough in that it affects me - I'm migrating to fennel tea instead, which looks even MORE like wee in the cup, but tastes great and only involves fennel seeds), drink less whisk(e)y and go running every day. This will generate some energy levels and not be bad either for my weight or my fitness. And I am only going to watch telly after 6pm. This was a rule my mother used to insist on when we were teenagers, and it still feels naughty to watch things during the day, despite the fact that I am still just about young enough to still glory in the rebellion. I am either going to Read Improving Books (Alice in Wonderland counts), or write, for most of the day. I know that I have long been harbouring an ambition to watch all sixteen series of Time Team all the way through, but it's not that constructive a proposition unless I ever actually MEET Tony Robinson (I would LOVE to meet Tony Robinson in person - I wonder if he's at all a nice guy? He's certainly done a lot with his life).

...writing this here is by way of spurring myself to fulfill it. If I write my plans down, particularly somewhere public, this will hopefully mean I carry them out. Let us see...

*Ha ha. Yes. Thank you for the funny joke. Am single, recall. It's just that I'm a light sleeper.

Cooking for Christmas

2009-11-19T23:00:00.003Z

I've been in Cornwall for the last ten days, walking and playing with the large number of pets my family possess. Sometimes, this involved danger:

This photo was taken as Tolly was exploding out of his box towards me. I have plenty of scratches, but he had a whale of a time. He LOVES boxes. You only need to point one out to him and he's straight inside, and he'll stay there for AGES. If you torment and tease him, usually all that happens is that he pokes a paw out. He'll rarely be driven to move.

I also reaffirmed my status with my dogs - taking Rocky to beaches makes him one happy spaniel*:

And Cornwall can be breathtaking. Liz was staying with me for the first few days, so I had an excuse to walk the whole way around the Roseland peninsula...

...AND Sennen Cove, right down by Land's End. I think this is the Longships Lighthouse, flung out beyond the end of the peninsula...next stop America, kind of thing:

After Liz went, I had been planning some Get My Life In Order time. That didn't really happen. Cornwall always does this. It's so far removed from all the things I have to think about and plan and organise and sort that planning to get Life Admin stuff when I'm there is a bit hopeless. I was going to write Lists and personal diary entries and book plane tickets and things. In fact, I didn't. I walked the dogs some more and read some trashy novels. I got a break. Sadly, this didn't make anything magically get done before I got back to something approaching the real world here in St Albans.

My mum asked me to do some of the Christmas cooking. I think she thought she was asking me a favour. I love doing this kind of thing, and I had the most marvellous excuse for it. She has some ancient Christmas recipe books, and getting them out is a talisman all by itself. This one has notes in it dated 1984, the year I was born. She was making things from it with a month-old baby in a cradle somewhere. I love the eternity of Christmas. It's reassuring in its regularity and reliability. The traditions are a comforting thing to have nestled in the winter, and it's an excuse for fantastic music which never hurts. I never do this cooking, my mum does. Sometimes I've made mincemeat when I know I won't be home for long, but never the things that are so much for the day itself.

Mincemeat is actually a very simple thing. Delia has a peculiar recipe that involves cooking it, which from all reports I've heard doesn't work at all. This one, above, works perfectly. I've actually got a jar of the batch I made last year still left - it'll almost certainly be none the worse for an extra twelve months' maturation, and I'll make a batch of mince pies sometime after Advent actually starts. For the record, mid-November is NOT the time for mince pies. It's such an ancient thing, dating from the fifteenth century. It's doesn't involve meat in the same way that it did then, unless you don't use vegetarian suet and the recipe has changed in other ways too, but it's still identifiable. It's good to feel rooted to something.

I made a Delia Christmas Cake, skipping out glacé pineapple because I don't like it. That's one of the reasons I love this cooking... I made Christmas puddings, and hovered around them for the six hours they steamed for. My hands were sticky with chopping cherries and candied peel. The kitchen smelled of Calvados. I even remembered to make a wish while I stirred the pudding mixture.

And so the wheel turns and we carry on...

Even if I wish it would do that more slowly, sometimes.

*Even if he IS out of focus. We were in a cave - it was raining. It didn't hinder the small dog's enjoyment of sand.

And has it come to this?

2009-11-15T21:25:00.004Z

I really never intended to stoop to posting song lyrics, but since this is Paul Simon I choose to believe it's poetry. It is poetry. I've muttered about adoring the album Graceland before. Here's the song of the same name. The words are inspired.

The Mississippi delta was shining like a national guitar
I am following the river down the highway through the cradle of the civil war
I'm going to Graceland, Graceland!
In Memphis Tennessee I'm going to Graceland
Poor boys and pilgrims with families and we are going to Graceland
My travelling companion is nine years old - he is the child of my first marriage
But I've reason to believe we both will be received in Graceland

She comes back to tell me she's gone
As if I didn't know that - as if I didn't know my own bed
As if I'd never noticed the way she brushed her hair from her forehead
And she said losing love is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you're blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow

I'm going to Graceland
Memphis Tennessee I'm going to Graceland
Poor boys and pilgrims with families and we are going to Graceland

And my travelling companions are ghosts and empty sockets
I'm looking at ghosts and empties
But I've reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland

There is a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline
And sometimes when I'm falling, flying or tumbling in turmoil I say
Woah, so this is what she means - she means we're bouncing into Graceland
And I see losing love is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you're blown apart
Everybody feels the wind blow

In Graceland, in Graceland
I'm going to Graceland
For reasons I cannot explain there's some part of me wants to see Graceland
And I may be obliged to defend every love, every ending - or maybe there's no obligations now
Maybe I've a reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland

Title track of album Graceland (1986) by Paul Simon

If I wasn't in Cornwall, I would be trawling through my T.S. Eliot for something I can half remember, too - but I don't have a copy down here and I want it on the page and not on a screen. AND Thom Gunn. Actually, despite the fact that a goodly chunk of my luggage was taken up by books I didn't bring nearly enough and certainly not enough of the right ones. I've been reduced to reading not very sophisticated fantasy from my brothers' bookshelves. It's mostly there because at one stage or other I passed it on to them - in all fairness - but it's definitely hackneyed now.

Empty Tomb
Walls bleed us yellow in squares I'd papered over with postcards.
Our room is throbbing, still aching, still groaning still
With the things of us leached in
who now drip back burning the blistered paint.
The once hallow space hollow –
our womb, its progeny untimely torn and
Dead at the leaving.

Dalek Snail Cake?

2009-10-25T08:56:00.002Z

It was my birthday last Saturday, which was four days before Traci left the country on Wednesday - so we had an enormous party...it seemed the least we could do. We borrowed some bits and pieces from the ADC (we love John, and knowing all the management there) - like the festooooon (You Must Say It So) above, and a UV tube to make our glow-in-the-dark-gin-and-tonic-jelly glow. About half past ten, though, Hugh sat on that. *rolls eyes*. And then left in a hurry to catch the last train back to London. *rolls eyes*. The festoon made the garden look fantastic and I'm annoyed I failed at pictures for it - we trailed it out of our bedroom window, along the perspex roof above the grape vine and then into the trees in the garden - so everything was pink and orange.

It was a great night, and a wonderful climax to our time in Argyle Street. I like this house and it's location. I hate trying to park round here, but that's another story. I have loved living with Traci and Carl. It's a family of a house, and I like that. We eat together, stare at TV together, have parties together. One of the things I'm least looking forward to is living on my own without even the ratties for company.

It hasn't really sunk in yet that Traci won't be back from the US in 'just a few weeks', which is what I sort of think my head has been believing. Have to get used to the idea that I'm not going to see a great deal of her face to face for the next 18 months or so. She doesn't really believe, I think, that how happy I have been in the last year is down to her presence in my life. Even far away, she's still part of my existence and that is unbelievably important to me. Expect many pointless pieces of post, Traci...

I mostly wanted to share with you the following.

Bet nobody ELSE, chef's girlfriend or not, has EVER had a Dalek Snail made out of chocolate and glued together with seas of caramel icing crafted in their honour.

Dorie.

2009-10-18T23:10:00.000+01:00

She was a privilege to know. One of those people who makes things better by their presence. Fascinated by everyone and everything around her. Glamorous and beautiful and funny yet still approachable. She has left us poorer by her going, but immeasurably richer by the time she spent with us.

I want that life. I want to be 90, adored and adoring and living life at 2000 miles an hour - all there in the mind, and virtually all there in body until the last moment. If she wasn't an advert for living as hard as possible, then there isn't one. She had incredible energy.

When I first heard, last weekend, it didn't sink in. My first thoughts were about thinking that, for Dorie, this wasn't such a bad end. There is no tragedy here. It was a life full to bursting from end to end. This wasn't someone torn away by illness or accident, or a mixed up kid in their 20s - like too many funerals I've been to in the last few years. This was an opportunity to celebrate somebody who had been all they could be. It took the really beautiful funeral for me to really register I'd lost. It's strange like that, that it takes so long to notice something's gone.

I met Dorie at a vulnerable point in my teens, when I needed sound and sane advice and a rock of stability - and there she was. 82, I think, when I met her - to my 17. 65 years between us and I would still count her a close friend, to be trusted with any secrets I had. She was directing a play I was in - the best play by a considerable distance I have ever been in, thanks in no small part to her and the company she assembled and manoeuvred with consummate ease and glee. The cast was made up of some of the best actors I've met anywhere, nearly all women. I was playing a Jewish child shipped out of Germany on the Kindertransport, who grows up in England. The people around me played my mother, my foster mother and my grown-up self. Acting an intense and emotional script with a close cast is strange, particularly when you're all women - you begin to blur the lines of character and reality. I ended up with a lot of older women who were used to thinking themselves into my mothers, and that spread into the real world. I'm still grateful for the friends I made doing that show. And in the middle of this was Dorie - in control, mothering all of us. I remember sitting at her feet and listening in awe to her tell us stories of the reality of the war - because she had been there and was old enough to remember it already an adult. She lived in London during the Blitz, and worked across Europe during and after - and she had the ability to convey some of that to us. I loved the link to the past, from someone so definitely caught up in the now.

I saw a lot of her in the two or three years or so I was in St Albans after that show. We did another show together, a less intense but still great one one. I had begun to slide into the worst of the depression patches that I had and it was harder, but she was still there and caring about me. I might have been no relation and young enough to be her grandchild. I remember her coming to a rehearsal still with a curler in her hair and being mortified when she noticed. It was very funny, in a way - but it worried me that she might actually become old. She never did though. She gave me pieces of advice that I'll never forget. Or not even advice. We'd be talking about something and she'd say something starting, 'but of course...' and I'd have a new way of understanding things.

She touched a lot of lives. The crematorium (she never did believe in God, though I know she envied those who did) was packed - people standing. That was tribute enough. There were tears from nearly everyone around me, including me. Not for Dorie. How could you cry for her? She'd hate that. But for our loss. For a figure at our centres that just made life better.

If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone
Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice
But be the usual selves that I have known
Weep if you must
Parting is hell
But life goes on
So sing as well.

Joyce Grenfell

Hot Chocolate, but this time with PICTURES.

2009-10-11T15:06:00.001+01:00

It's cold. This is official. The rats have been afforded a bed inside beside the radiator a few nights this week after I took pity on them in their semi-outdoor cage. It's that annoying time of the year when the temperatures have dropped but Great St Mary's haven't yet deemed it time to turn on the heating...so I have to wear MANY layers for choir practice, and dig out all the jumpers I possess that don't have hoods so that I can keep them on under my cassock. So far, I have only worn my boots for church and not for anything else. Gah. Cold.

So today, in between two hefty services at GSM, I decided it was time for the first mug of hot chocolate of the autumn.

Hot chocolate is not a good thing to be drinking if one sings as much as I am going to be this week (BIG service this evening, rehearsals on Tuesday and Wednesday for a concert on Thursday, practice on Friday and then Evensong next Sunday as well - with lots of drinking on Saturday for age-related reasons), especially if your throat is already gunky. But I always WANT it when I have a bit of a cold. Something wrong there.

My hot chocolate is not very sweet, and it's spicy with chilli, cinnamon and nutmeg - so it's not the cloying sickly drink that many think it is. If it's sweet I'm after, I just up the quantity of honey... I never measure things for it - it's all about finding the best personal combination. And making sure that what you're drinking looks like hot chocolate not insipid mud in water.

I like Willie's Cacao. It's amazing. No sugar, so you can regulate the sweetness properly, and the chocolate itself is incredibly flavourful - some of the 100% stuff you buy just tastes of cardboard. I have a few bars, because at present they aren't stocked at all that many places I visit very often and I only use them for hot chocolate because it's the best way I've found to really appreciate the flavour. Tescos do a really nice 85% Ecuadorian fairtrade that I intend to start using for hot chocolate when I've run out of Willie's...but that doesn't last as long in the cupboard because I tend to just eat that neat. I supplement the really expensive chocolate with a spoonful of good cocoa powder, too. You can have it as chocolatey as you like without feeling as guilty that it's costing a fortune...

The spices I have vary. If I'm in a real hurry, it's just cayenne and mixed spice. Usually though, I add cayenne, cinnamon and nutmeg. Sometimes I switch some raisiny ancho chilli powder for some of the cayenne, but I'm nearly out of that so I'm saving it for brownies. I think it works out at around a quarter of a teaspoon of cayenne (more of ancho, it's not that hot), half a teaspoon of cinnamon and some grated fresh nutmeg, but I always taste and then add more. I like it to be really spicy.

I sweeten it with honey. It feels wrong to add sugar, though there's not any reason that it should. I only ever have honey for cooking with, so I see no reason to hoard it for toast or anything. I find I use more than I think I ought to need to sweeten something. But I guess it goes to show how MUCH sugar there is in commercial hot chocolate when I see how much I have to add to this to take it away from the edge of bitter in comparison. I nearly only ever use green (semi-skimmed) milk, because there's never anything else in the house and I'm not usually after a really heavy creamy thing.

After finding all the bits, it's all about whisking. Whisking makes it frothy. And watching it, so that it doesn't boil. It needs to get to the edge of boiling, but not ACTUALLY boiling, or it stains the stove brown. Whisking makes it frothy. Most things look better over the top of a chocolate moustache.

Two weeks.

2009-10-07T14:57:00.005+01:00

It's creeping up behind me. Three weeks seems a long time. The three weeks left before I finish at work seem to stretch into eternity. That's partly because I've got MASSES of work to do and the mental piles are tottering around my ears...and mass clearly equates to length.

Two weeks is tomorrow.

I'll be doing something else - sales analysis for a theatre. Working out a glitzy bit of number crunching on a new piece of software. Walking to work. Drifting around the supermarket. Planning a party. And then...

Two weeks.

My birthday is less far away than that. I hate my birthday, it reminds me of all the things I haven't done yet. I discovered yesterday that someone I sat through classes with at uni has not only founded a reasonably well known and certainly very outspoken climate change activists group - but has written a book about it. I am in awe. And support what she's doing, definitely. She keeps inviting me to events on Facebook, though I suspect she doesn't know who I am or where I came from in her life. But I am a little jealous.

Two weeks.

I hate deadlines. At least the ones that are to do with life and not to do with work. With work, they're ok. I like to plan, and generally make sure the decks are cleared down enough that I finish things well in advance to leave time for things to go wrong. Even if that actually isn't a very efficient use of time. But in life? I never have strong enough plans to work out what I should have done when far enough in advance, so when New Year and my birthday go whizzing by I'm always left with a nebulous guilt for Things Not Done. It's too late for me to write a book before my birthday (still an ambition - maybe I will have written one before ONE of my birthdays?), and I think it's probably too late for me to do a ton of the things with Traci I wanted to do before she goes...we don't have time, and what time we have we need to fill with packing and admin.

She goes in two weeks, and we have no idea when she might come home.

I'm going to miss her like crazy.

Green Tomato Pickle

2009-10-03T19:32:00.001+01:00

Hmm. I just looked at the last date stamp. I guess it's partly to do with making the most of Traci not working and being home briefly before she heads back to the States at the end of the month. The blog comes second to real life sometimes.

I finally came to the conclusion that tomato season was Over. It's been going on a while, but it's definitely past now. Chilli season hasn't gone yet - they're still ripening on the plants. It's probably time they made it down off the roof though. There were MANY tomatoes still green - next time, I shall endeavor not to be moving house in June and hence able to plant them out in mid May, which would mean they'd have a few more weeks growing time than this year. My San Marzanos didn't really ripen at all, which was a shame. They did grow huge great tomatoes though, too good to miss, so I picked The Lot. Everything I could find that was still on the plants.

...this resulted in three kilos of under ripe fruit. THREE KILOS! That's masses. Handily, green tomatoes are useful things. I've made them into the base for chilli before, and when there are fewer I've made fried green tomatoes (remember folks: this is what happens when you live with someone from the American South...). This time, 1kg became half of a green tomato and split pea curry. It had the texture of mashed potato but it tasted good. Copious quantities of garam masala, chillies, garlic, ginger, curry leaves and coconut milk make ANYTHING taste ace. Slightly sour, slightly sweet green tomatoes are great for currying.

1kg made enough for two of us to stuff ourselves AND put two more meals worth in the freezer. I wasn't making the rest of these into curry, nor could I face eating nothing but sour green tomatoes for two weeks. So. An experiment in preserving has ensued. I don't really eat the kind of chutney you have with cheese sandwiches. Less that I don't like it, more that its space in my life is very nicely filled with Marmite" (mmmm marmite). I do, though, love to have pickle with my curries - pre-made ones from the supermarket start to taste closer to real when you have pickle with them. Home-made ones that miss the mark slightly come alive with a bit of pickle. So that was my choice.

The internet wasn't particularly good on pickle recipes. We found this one, but if you read it you'll see that the ingredients in the list don't actually match what's going on in the directions. I sort of figured something out when we got to it, anyway - it's mostly just useful for approximate quantities of vinegar and oil. It would have been good for salt, too, except I was left guessing at that... I also had a guess at the correct method for sterilising and sealing kilner jars - it seems to have worked, but there may well be better ways and it's not like I've kept anything in them for very long yet...

Green Tomato Pickle

I made this in 1kg batches, it was simpler that way. For 2kg of fruit I used 3 3inch tall kilner jars and 4 little 250ml (ish) jam jars. I'd probably just use whatever empty jars with metal lids I had to hand doing this again though - screw top jars are fine.

1 kg green tomatoes, diced. I'm pretty sure it would work with regular tomatoes, too, but it would obviously be sweeter.
2 tsp very finely chopped garlic
2 tsp very finely chopped ginger
1 tsp ground fenugreek
1 tbsp mustard seeds (I used a mix of black and yellow because that's what I had...)
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1 cup (235ml) sunflower/vegetable oil
1 cup white vinegar (I used malt, because it's what was in the cupboard...)
A handful of curry leaves - ask any Indian grocer, they really make a difference.
12 inch long hot green chillies, stems cut off but otherwise left whole
1 tsp hot chilli powder
Salt - around 1 and a half tsp? You'll have to taste. It's a condiment, salty is ok.

Boil your jars and lids for the time it takes to do everything else.

Heat the oil and add the whole spices. Fry for a few minutes then add the ginger and garlic and fry for a few more minutes. Add the tomatoes and chillies and stir to coat, making sure the seeds are well distributed. Cook for about ten minutes until the fruit has begun to soften and the oil is floating on the top. Add the ground spices and stir again, then add the vinegar, salt and curry leaves. Stir to combine and turn off the heat. Remove the jars from their water bath using tongs and drain out enough water to fill every jar that fitted in the pot. Fill them, and then return them to the water bath with their lids closed but not tightly - the point of the subsequent boiling is to evacuate the air still inside the jars so the lid has to open a crack to let the air move. Boil them for 10 minutes, then carefully remove and tighten the lids. When they cool, they'll suck the lids tightly closed and hopefully seal nicely for 3-6 months. The high acid content should help keep them good for a while.

By the way? The drips from this tasted ACE. Not that spicy yet, but they should pack a punch after a week or two I think. YUM.

British Library

2009-09-13T16:38:00.002+01:00

It is a nest of the many alone,
All drawn to the honeycomb honeytrap -
Each grub has a cell with a single chair
And wireless umbilical wires one in.
Only a wanderer may spot the world
In laptop facets of the compound eye.
None leave nothing achieved solo again,
Progress mired by ink-trailed squared stacked paper.

And two found it. One another. Lips press
And smiles spread like wings filling the great room
As sunlight pouring through cathedral glass
Making beauty of a tawdry husk of stone.

I left smiling. Industry unaided
Did not enjoin such cheerful joy so shared .

Day of writing.

2009-09-13T16:01:00.002+01:00

When I was at the NPG the other day, I was browsing in the gift shop trying not to buy too many postcards. I picked up Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats just to flick through while I was there. The poems of his I've read have been good, but nothing has gripped me absolutely. Then I found the following, after which the book came away with me:

Barren Leaves
Spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling:
Wet dreams, wet dreams, in libraries congealing.

That's all there is of it, just those two lines. The first is a quotation from Wordsworth's 'Preface to the Lyrical Ballads', which can be regarded as one of the first attempts to define what poetry should be in the modern age. Gunn's irreverent second line subverts the high minded Romantic ideal of poetry, poking fun at the old master and his own profession. It reinterprets poetry for our time, basely humanising it. The feminine rhyme in the couplet underlines the self-deprecating mood, as does the title - written down, left on shelves, and poetry loses its immediacy. A spurt of emotion, left for others to re-invigorate or not as they choose. Gunn even seems to be suggesting that those overflows of feeling, like spent semen, is un-recoverable. I love it.

And THEN, there were more, still about writing.

JVC
He concentrated, as he ought,
On fitting language to his thought
And getting all the rhymes correct,
Thus exercising intellect
In such a space, in such a fashion,
He concentrated into passion.

This time, it's a much more positive picture of poetry - the compression of thought into language results in 'passion' at the end. The writer character in this poem succeeds in creating something. Refining thought into poetry. The full Wordsworth quotation given in part in 'Barren Leaves' is as follows:

"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."*

Gunn's poem describes this process almost exactly.

Finally, another two-liner:

Jamesian
Their relationship consisted
In discussing if it existed.

I assume the title refers to Henry James...whose work I have never read. Anyone who makes a point of style out of long sentences doesn't immediately attract me to read him. But I do know that his novels spend a lot of time examining personal relationships...navel gazing, really. Gunn's couplet here doesn't make me any more likely to read any James, it has to be said. But it's an interesting concept of a relationship and the traps that it might be possible to fall into - style over substance, and all that. Too much thinking and not enough living.

I haven't finished the collection yet. There are more poems I'll quote when I have, I think, that aren't so comedic. I would recommend this to anyone at all though. It's accessible, joyous poetry. Exuberant and boisterous. Fun to part of. Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and the rest of them are great, don't get me wrong at all, but they require the right mood for reading. From what I've seen of this collection of Gunn's so far, you could pick it up any time and anywhere and take something away from it. Fantastic artistry.

*The full text of the 'Preface to the Lyrical Ballads' can be found here, for anyone who has time for that kind of thing.

I don't really have anything to say about this.

2009-09-13T12:03:00.000+01:00

Except that it tasted good.

Living in Cambridge is like living in a commune.

2009-09-13T11:56:00.001+01:00

At least, it is for me. No house I've lived in feels like home, but the city does. Guess that's understandable when you look at the number of places I've lived in in the 5 years I've been here.

I was cycling up to Great St Mary's to sing for one of the more peculiar weddings I've ever been involved with yesterday morning quite early for a Saturday (rehearsal started at 10). September is really here in the mornings - I'm pleased to see it. It was cool and quiet in town. No tourists, no students. The city takes a breath before diving into the new day term year.

I can go to places and know I'll see someone I know. I can feel a sense of possession of the place. It is mine and I am its, at least for now. It is intensely familiar, after the closeness of our relationship. My life has been played out against a backdrop of the ancient and the beautiful in a large but tight knit community.

I will miss it, this place. It is enormously strong, but also very peaceful. I need not to be here any more, this much I am certain of. I need to look outwards and upwards and destroy the comfort zones and start somewhere fresh. I will visit, and it will take a while for the bond to breakdown, but then I will be just a visitor. I don't think it will ever make me feel trapped the way St Albans does. Maybe sometime I'll come back here. It's a wonderful place.

Ain't I a woman?

2009-09-12T14:45:00.001+01:00

I took a couple of days off this week. I had been going to take the week off and Traci and I were going to go away, but she's headed off to France to see an old friend before she has to leave Europe sometime next month. I could have cancelled all of the leave, but I was dying for a break and anyway had a lot of things to do - like take vast quantities of stuff to charity shops and start the long and drawn out process of shipping my books somewhere they'll be safe while I bum around the globe for 6 or 8 months. Yesterday, I decided that a holiday was a holiday and I was going to do something with it that I wanted to do and damn everyone else and all my chores. I took some books down to St Albans and then took the train from there to St Pancras and the tube from there to Leicester Square.

And I went to the National Portrait Gallery. I like the NPG. It's not too big, unlike the National Gallery next door, and it's easier to get your head around a more focused form of art than the enormous and wide ranging collections you find in the bigger London galleries. A portrait is a portrait. These days, a lot of them are photographic and I like that. Even the ones that aren't are quite accessible. Also, you get the double interest of the technical and artistic brilliance of the picture itself combined with an interest in the subject. It's about biography as well as art.

I wandered around the Gay Icons exhibition which I've read a few reviews of. It was put together by a panel of ten selectors, all prominent public gay figures, asked to select six people from the last 150 years, who may or may not themselves be gay, whom they regard as inspirational. I hadn't heard of a lot of the people quoted, though I had heard of most of the selectors. There were few restrictions placed on the selectors, which meant a nicely diverse range of figures quoted. Lots of artists of one sort or another - from porn stars to drag queens to poets and composers, sports people, martyrs like Alan Turing and Harvey Milk, activists like Peter Tatchell who work for gay rights and others who have worked for other causes - Nelson Mandela for example, and various feminists, anti-slavery campaigners and racial equality advocates. The downtrodden and discriminated against everywhere united in the commonality of struggle, I guess.

But the one story that touched me above all others was that of Sojourner Truth, one of Jackie Kay's choices. She was a former slave who worked for the abolition of the practice. The following speech is attributed to her, given at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio on the 29th of May, 1851.

"Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear de lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen 'em mos' all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?"

This is an extract of the version recorded by Frances Gage (see article here) and is almost certainly not historically accurate - but isn't it fantastic? No matter how she said it and what she said, isn't it incredible that a former black female slave in mid-nineteenth century America should have been able to get up and make such a speech? She must have been a formidable lady. She'd have been in her late 50s by this point, having been freed around 25 years previously. Most slaves didn't live that long. To have gone through so much with so little - and to have stood up before men and women of both colours and spoken like that. We who live today have so much to be grateful for. Not that there aren't things to struggle for still - in the West, gay partnership rights across Europe and America, healthcare reform in the US, freedom of speech and rights for women everywhere top a very long list for me - but how far we have come.

This last picture is the Brunswick Centre. I was wandering back to Kings Cross through Bloomsbury, turned a corner, and there it was.

Highly susceptible to guilt.

2009-09-01T12:53:00.006+01:00

Sometimes I feel too nice. Too prepared to lie down and be walked over. Too prepared to be the one apologising. To be the one who puts others in front. To be the one who isn't asking. To be giving while others take. Too much turning the other cheek. And I follow those feelings up with noticing how self-centred and cruel they are. By not wanting to be the person I would be if I behaved like that. By not wanting to feel bad for it afterwards. 'I'm not nice! I'm just...highly susceptible to guilt.'* I'm sure I don't always succeed. Sometimes I wish I didn't. Wish I didn't feel compelled to be nice. I don't want to be nice any more. But what does not being nice achieve? More heartache all round, for everyone including me.

Being nice feels great sometimes. Sometimes it's almost selfish, like wanting to give people things to see them being happy and get the glow of knowing you did that - but that makes everyone happy, so it doesn't matter that it goes both ways. And then self-sacrifice has its own appeal. Martyrdom. But then there's resentfully being nice...being nice because there's no practical choice otherwise. Because you can't stand to feel the guilt. Because you can see that being unpleasant would have the sole effect of relieving your feelings and causing pain without advancing the situation. Trapped in being nice. Because you love someone and that makes the guilt far deeper. And no matter what happens, you love them and try and do the best for them even though it doesn't feel like the best thing to do for yourself. Even if at some level it is. And feel like a doormat and left behind and lost and not understanding why you aren't behaving differently. Because you can't behave differently because there is no way of being different. Alternatives aren't alternatives.

I'm not sure if this sort of nice scores you any points. Does it put you ahead for round two? I'm not sure if it doesn't leave you open to more prone silence in the future. But I don't want to be the person who doesn't at least try to be nice. Head down and keep walking. Slow and steady wins the race and all that. But I'm not sure the world works like that, no matter how many world religions would like it to be so.

I don't want to be a cruel person. I want to be a fair person. I want to be a nice person. I want to be a kind person. I want to be trusted and safe. I want to put others first. Because that's what we're all taught when we're tiny. Sometimes, I wish I didn't. I think it might be easier if I wasn't susceptible to guilt. But I am. And I will carry on trying to be those things, even it means I do end up with a reputation as unflappable and strong. I don't feel either of those things.

*Wonderfalls. Possibly the best TV show ever made. Only available in American DVD format, so you need a region-free player or Linux and a techie to watch it outside of the US but SO worth it. Seriously. I wish they'd made more than one series. And I'm annoyed that Carl got that tagline into his email signature before I'd watched that far so I couldn't use it myself...

Until the wind changes.

2009-08-29T19:31:00.003+01:00

Once again my life is turning over. I'm not the person I was even a year ago, though I suppose that's true for everyone. For me, it's especially so. One year ago, for starters, I was still pretending half to myself and certainly to the world that I was straight. It's taken me most the year to be able to say that I'm not to the great wide internet. Still not comfortable with it, really, but I guess nobody ever is. I'm sticking with the 'bi' label for the time being but we'll see how that goes.

One year ago I had never really fallen in love - loved people, certainly, but not fallen heart and soul.

One year ago I was jumping about from pillar to post, blown about by winds not of my own devising. This year, I might not like the place I am very much at the moment and I might not be very confident about how the places I am going will turn out, but I am here of my own volition. I am living somewhere I chose. I am choosing to leave my job and look for something else. I am choosing to take a great big break before I start in the Civil Service sometime next year. And I feel that I have achieved something this year in actually getting that damned job.

I'm done with Cambridge for the moment. My last night here will be the 31st of October, though I will feel like I've gone by then because I intend to stay with people that day having moved out of Argyle Street the day before. I might come back sometime - it's a fantastic city and the people are wonderful. I love some things about living here. But I need a break from it. I need to be away from the pressure cooker of excellence that is both stimulating and exhausting. I need to break from the people and the situations. I need to be somewhere bigger, where there are different people and different things to do. I will miss it hugely, especially when I'm trying to build a new life somewhere else and definitely when I'm back in St Albans or Cornwall trying to find something to do until somewhere between April and October when my life will be purposeful again.

I have become something, this year. More myself, less hidden. I have acknowledged parts of me and stopped apologising for them. Not in any way all of them. Self-confidence for me seems likely to be always a bit difficult and actually I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't want to be so confident in myself that I stop questioning ways I behave and think with regard to the world and my place in it. It is part of that recognition of who I am that I want to get a tattoo. I have never wanted that kind of permanent change to my actual body before - I've even talked about it on here. But this is sort of different. It's an affirmation - a revelation, not a concealment, as I seem to have envisioned it in the past. I am going to do that, I think, if Traci will come with me and it doesn't prove too scary to walk through the door.

Odd that I hate the New Year posts in January that I feel compelled into. This moment, the end of the summer and the descent back to the winter feels like the natural moment of change. Things are in flux - the year is turning, I can feel the summer heat fading and the autumn earlier nights are here and coming in fast. I guess it's always been the moment of change - it's September on Tuesday, and a new school year starts. I always enjoyed the first day back at school.

I sang at a wedding today, feeling shattered by a very difficult week indeed. It was pretty hard going, actually. Odd that it was 'One More Step Along The World I Go' (very slow and not very good tune recording here, though I'm pretty certain that practically EVERYONE sang that at school and still knows it by heart) that I found the hardest to get through. I needed to do something. I bought a bag, which I do kind of need because my beloved blue handbag is getting pretty tatty, but it didn't fill the hole. I needed to make a statement to myself. Do something slightly crazy to stave off doing something truly crazy. So here's the haircut. What do you think? The woman who cut it looked horror struck when I first said 'same length all over, a couple of inches long'. She said it wouldn't look very feminine, and suggested a bob instead. I wasn't wedded to my idea, really, I just didn't know how to picture a bob. It was never boy hair I was after, just something that will look neater and more like I take care of it than my usual bird's nest, and would be the change I need in my life.

This still doesn't feel like my head. She showed me the back of it and it looks like someone else. I've NEVER had my hair this short. The closest it got was chin-length when I was 12 and I didn't like it then. This, I'm quite pleased with. It won't look like this after I've slept on it and brushed it and washed it, but I think the shape will be ok. My curls are a quite enthusiastic when I give them a chance. We'll see. It's definitely not what I had before. Comments appreciated...

Also, it turns out that it's bloody hard to take photos of yourself in the mirror.

I've been calling it grown up hair to myself. I haven't got the little girl long hair I've had for years, that I always wanted when I was tiny and never could grow. That part of my life is over. Here is something different. I am something different.

Plant to Plate.

2009-08-29T18:50:00.004+01:00

It's been too wet. Our grapes that grew so beautifully all split. It's a shame - I tried one or two that weren't split and they're really lovely. They're actually a purple variety and perfect for eating if a bit seedy - I assumed they'd be a sour wine-type. We had to cut them all down and bin them, but they did look pretty.

The tomatoes, though, have been a bit of a triumph so far - I'm really pleased. These are 'Gardener's Delight', with some unidentified cherries thrown in for good measure. My more interesting varieties so far haven't ripened very well, but we'll see. I have a couple of stripey ones that look like they will, and with any luck some of the big San Marzano plums I planted will do too. I don't mind too much if they don't, because there are fab things you can do with green tomatoes - I'm particularly keen to try the curry.

Our chillies are still purple, but they'll ripen in time - I've had those plants a couple of years now so I know how they'll behave. This year's chillies and the peppers are barely more than seedlings...I'm not sure what I do about those. I'm moving in two months (yes, really, again...) so we'll see how they look then. I might give them to my mum if she can find space for them. Hopefully we'll get a few green peppers in say November...! I should probably have planted them out earlier. Seeds can go into compost in February and no later next year, then hopefully they'll be big enough to plant out by the time it gets warm. The tomatillos are still growing...we'll see how that goes...

Blackberries have come and gone, too. Traci and I actually got around to picking some this year - we meant to last year but failed. I've never been a big jam person, but I did want to try cordial with them. I drink a fair amount of squash of one sort or another, and having something made of blackberries sounded great. I made the most enormous mess cooking them - I stained EVERYTHING a deep, dark purple. I have just ascertained though that with plenty of Vanish these stains seem to be happy to come out of even my pale grey tracksuit bottoms, though I have not yet succeeded in getting them out of the wooden chopping board...maybe I should try Vanish on that, too.
They SMELL incredible - of roses...which shouldn't be a huge surprise because the plants are related. And I didn't really mind the stains when this colour is so amazing. I'd have them cooking all the time if I could, I think.

I had a flick through some recipes on the net, but I didn't see any I was particularly keen on. I didn't want to adulterate the flavour of the fruit with spices as some recipes do - I've had spiced blackberry squash before and it's been a bit too cloying. This is a purer flavour. I suspect I added too much sugar (though hopefully this will mean it keeps better), and this somewhat overwhelms the flavour of the berries. The smell is still incredible, and it's not too cloying either as a drink when diluted with sparkling water. It's amazing, that black purple colour doesn't get any less when you water it down...it just stays black. It's less translucent than coke!

I didn't take proper measurements I'm afraid. I know I used around 2 1/2 litres of blackberries and probably around 400g of sugar maybe less. I was walking a line between trying not to make it too sweet and getting enough sugar into it that it would preserve it a bit.

I boiled the fruit in a large heavy bottomed pot - I didn't need any water as it was already pretty juicy in there. I let it boil until it seemed more liquid than solid, and then added the sugar and boiled for a bit longer to let it dissolve. I then strained it through a sieve and then muslin. This was the part where I made such a mess - my sieve kept slipping and the sheer quantity to be strained meant that it went everywhere. Persevering, I eventually ended up with a thick dark syrup which I bottled in this rather lovely old olive oil bottle that I'd sterilised with boiling water.

It's been in the fridge ever since, and I don't think I'd want to store it out of the fridge. I've been drinking it with my dinner, and we made a cocktail with it, tequila, the juice of a lime and some fizzy water that was pretty nice, too. And it's virtually free!

2009-08-25T08:04:00.002+01:00

:-(.

Apple Crumble Cake

2009-08-22T12:54:00.005+01:00

Work had a barbecue on Monday, to welcome our new members of staff. We're only a tiny company (6 and a half with the newbies), so there were partners and The Cambridge Arts Marketing Mafia and assorted hangers-on. It was a nice evening. Lots of wine. Being able to leave work at 4, too. Though when I walked through the door of my bosses' house, I was greeted with, 'Hazel! Ah! ...if I give you a glass of wine will you make me another chart?' Typical...!

Anyway, the point was that we left with a party bag. A party bag full of cooking apples from the tree in another guest's garden. ACE FREE STUFF. And an excuse to make apple cake, which I love. That the combination of buttery cake and soft moist tart apple with a hint of cinnamon is a great one is hardly earth shattering news. I was thinking that I'd see if there were things I could do to add texture to it, hence the nutty crumble topping. What I really was thinking about was adding caramelised walnuts instead, but this was hindered by the fact I only had chopped mixed nuts in the cupboard, not walnut pieces, and also that I needed the cake baked quickly because I'd promised a friend tea and cake at three in the afternoon, and she changed the time to 10:30 in the morning! No disaster, except for me skinning the top of my middle finger with my brand new and hence very sharp indeed peeler.

Ingredients
3 small bramley apples, about the size of a girly fist. Didn't weigh them, sorry...
Juice of half a lemon to coat the apple pieces and stop them browning
2 medium free range eggs
4 oz butter
4 oz plain flour (actually, I think half wholemeal flour here might be a nice way of giving this more texture)
4 oz soft brown sugar
2 scant tsp baking powder
Half a tsp of salt

For the crumble:
4 tbsp plain flour
2 tbsp icing sugar
2 tbsp (about half an ounce) butter
2 tbsp chopped mixed nuts

Preheat the oven to 180 degree centigrade, or about gas mark 4. I hate my gas oven.

You will also need a tin around 6 inches in diameter and at least 1 and a half inches deep, lined with baking parchment. My cake overflowed - I might make it in a square tin another time to avoid that.

First, the apples. Peel them, without getting blood all over everywhere. Try to keep your fingers intact, or when you put a plaster on the subsequent cut, your pet rats will think it's a wonderful toy and try to pull it off and chew it and generally be fascinated by it. Cut two of them into quarters and core them, then into eighths and into rough dice and add to a pan with about 100ml water. Cook until soft right through and looking saucy. Quarter and dice the third apple and cover with lemon juice.

For the crumble, rub together the butter, flour and icing sugar until it resemble clumpy breadcrumbs, then stir in the nuts.

For the cake, cream together the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy, then beat in one egg. Sift in about a quarter of the flour, beat, then add the other egg and beat. Sift in the rest of the flour, baking powder and salt and combine. Fold in the apple pieces (not the juice) and add two heaped tablespoons of the apple puree. (This probably won't be all of the puree, but the rest is an awesome thing to add to yoghurt with a bit of sugar.)

Pour the batter into the prepared tin and cover with the crumble mixture. Bake for 30-35 minutes, checking towards the end. The top where the cake mixture pokes through should be nicely browned and a bit cracked. A knife should come out without uncooked cake mixture on it, but it will probably still be a bit wet because of the fruit.

Final acceptance.

2009-08-20T20:33:00.005+01:00

Actually, this guy is nothing to do with anything I want to talk about. AND I think it's probably a girl, not even a guy. She's turned up three or four times in the evenings about 10ish. I wonder if her owner goes to sleep or kicks her out or something. We nearly always leave our back doors open, and she just pootles in and makes herself at home. She's pretty keen on the fridge. She thinks it's great. I offered her a bit of sardine from out of said machine though, and she turned up her nose at it. Ah well. I think she's lonely. She mostly just sits and purrs at us. She is without a doubt the single biggest cat I've ever met. She's a bit fat, but she's BIG too - her paws are bigger than an inch across. Hefty. I like having a cat around. In theory, we aren't allowed pets inside, (the rats are technically 'outside' - this was the agreement with the landlord), but since our house is being repossessed at the moment and the landlord seems to have gone totally AWOL I've given up even thinking about it. But my new friend, nice though she is, wasn't the point.

I want to get my hair cut. Properly short. Every time I say that to people around me, they say, 'So...you like girls now and need to have the hair to match?' Which kind of annoys me. Partly because it's true, and I hate to be so predictable. It's not that I want to conform with any stereotypes - exactly the opposite, out of pure contrariness*.

I have been progressively getting my hair cut shorter for the last couple of years in any case, but it hasn't been exactly drastic. I'm annoyed with how tatty it looks when it's long. This picture by the the inimitable Mr Allsop is in many ways a really lovely picture. But my hair's a STATE.

It's quite thin, though the curls means it doesn't necessarily look it. Partly it's that I just don't get it cut often enough and rats' tails is what happens to my hair if I don't get it cut enough. It breaks easily. It's shorter than that now, but it's still that wispy no matter what I do.

My thought is that cutting it short will help it seem less thin and pathetic. The curl means it shouldn't go flat and JUST ick. And if it does, I learnt about mousse. I might not be very girly, but I did figure that one about.

It is about coming out, somewhere along the line. Something about being different and making a statement. Same as the vague but fairly insistent desire for a tattoo, I think. 'I have decided this, now let me show that it means something'. An acceptance. I'm WAY too shy for the tattoo. I'll look at pictures of them and think about it, but the actual walking into a shop and saying 'draw this on my skin' is too much involvement from someone else. Getting my hair cut is pretty ordinary, though. I'd shave my head, except I'd get more questions.

I think I want something like the same length all over, about 2-3 inches, to give it space to curl. I don't know. I might just go for more short and quite layered. Don't know. It'll probably wait for a while until I actually leave Baker Richards (at the end of October...crazy...).

...thoughts on the hair style, anyone?

*True story: I vividly remember being in year 2 (I called it J3 back then, and I was 6 going on 7, for any foreigners) at school and being asked to make something that measured wind direction. I can't even remember now what everyone else made - something with paddles, I'm pretty sure - but I very deliberately didn't go with what was the only really sensible idea given the materials we had because I wanted to be 'different', and failed the test totally. I remember reading the comments my teacher was writing down over her shoulder. Being Contrary Is Not Always The Answer. It's amazing how often I've failed to take note of this since then.

Cornwall and coriander.

2009-08-05T22:35:00.002+01:00

Traci and I and several of my friends from college were in Cornwall this weekend. It was all a bit epic and involved my brother losing his glasses in the sea and Mel having nightmares about Leonbergers. Good fun was had by all. I shan't forget Jenny and her fear of mud. I totally failed to take *any* photos whatsoever, which was a bit hopeless. Kate did though, if you can see them on Facebook. We ate a lot and went swimming in the sea and the Londoners learnt a little bit about the country.

...and on the (very foggy) way home, we went to the Eden shop. I love going there, it's a fantastic place. Sadly it appears to have realised that it can make money out of the tourists and it's less of a good place to go to buy presents than it was, but it's still an ace place to get unusual plants and seeds. I bought a Vietnamese coriander. I've wanted one for *ages*, ever since I first saw one at Eden a year or two ago. My problem with ordinary coriander is that you basically need to grow it like cress in order for it to be of any use, and I am not reliable enough in my need for coriander to be able to grow it and use it in that way. This stuff doesn't taste quite like ordinary coriander, but it's similar enough to fill the hole. Plus, it means I can make Vietnamese spring rolls, which I adore and would LOVE to be able to make properly. Not for a while. My little plant, while big for a little plant and probably prepared to explode bigger (they do that, apparently, I might have a bush of it 90cm tall!!), is not ready for much in the way of harvesting yet. Soonsoon...

Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

2009-08-04T16:09:00.007+01:00

Been a while since a poetry post. I clearly miss my degree too much. Enjoy the pretty poem if the analysis is too self-indulgent!

Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real something has yet to be known,
(How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and mock me!
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them,)
May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed but seem) as from my present point of view, and might prove (as of course they would) nought of what they appear, or nought anyhow, from entirely changed points of view;
To me these and the like of these are curiosly answer'd by my lovers, my dear friends,
When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surround us and pervade us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I require nothing further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.

Walt Whitman, from Calamus (1860)

Apparently, this is J. K. Rowling's favourite poem. That article says it's in Leaves of Grass but my collection clearly says Calamus so I went with that. And well she might pick it as a favourite. I don't know much Whitman and bookmarked this to read after someone mentioned it on Twitter. If someone mentions something as a favourite then I'm usually curious to see why, especially when it's not something I know a great deal about. Whitman was too American to feature on my course at university and I haven't really found a good way in yet.

This poem is fantastic. If you just read it for sense, you get the fact that the speaker finds the world confusing, but that it's all ok when he has a friend, a lover, with him. So far, so good. I'm not sure that it's the sort of thing the British Romantics were much into, though it's hard to say. The style is so different from that of, say, Tennyson who was writing at the same time, or of Wordsworth who was a little earlier. I don't recall this sense of vulnerability in Tennyson or Wordsworth, or even this much positivity for much of the time. Admittedly, I found both of them too wet and self-conscious and frankly emo to persuade myself to study them too long so I will freely accept correction on that subject. I love that last line though. When I first read it, I thought 'wedding poem' because of that fantastic sentiment there, though it would have to be perfectly read to convey the sense of it to anyone just listening and not following it along on paper. All the huge questions of existence are resolved by the presence of another and by the fact that they are there with you. What better summing up of a true relationship can there be? It's wedding season at Great St Mary's again, and I shall await someone choosing something other than 1 Corinthians 13 probably in vain...

Wikipedia suggests that Whitman might be regarded as the father of blank verse - look at the line length in the poem and the lack of strong rhythmic, rhyming or even strong structural devices. It's real blank verse in that sense, but far from prose because of the conscious syntax and even type-setting. The hyphenation of 'may-be' all the way through apart from the first instance seems unlikely to be a mere whimsy of the period or of the later editor. Again, I haven't studied Whitman or American writing of this period, so it's possibly that 'may-be' was habitually hyphenated, but even if it was I like that it forces you to take more time over the phrase - both when reading to oneself or out loud. 'Maybe' is synonymous with 'might' in modern parlance. The way we use and understand the word today doesn't emphasise the permissive element in the word 'may'. Today's use seems to allow us to sit back and let things happen. The quick way that we throw the word about means that we never stop to savour the fact that there are several outcomes to something. This construction is more conscious of the fact that something may be or may not be. Whitman achieves what I have there with six words and italics in two words an a hyphen, and then intensifies the uncertainty by repeating it through the poem. Suddenly, it is more important to us that things have more than one possible outcome and that the speaker and we as readers are more uncomfortable about that. This level of confusion and concern is important because it heightens the relief we feel with the speaker when we discover that love and friendship are the things required for peace.

But the construction of uncertainty doesn't end with 'may-be' - he uses the phrase in conjunction with 'doubtless', 'may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions'. What are we supposed to make of that? Are they apparitions? The juxtaposition of the certainty and the uncertainty only makes our understanding even more slippery. And their are other things, like beginning the poem in the middle of a sentence that is never complete. In fact, all four of the first four lines are dependent clauses without an independent to stand with. They are all missing bits, and we are wrong-footed from the outset. The first nine lines proper of the poem are long run-ons, with interruptions in parentheses. They are hard to follow and one has to read them several times in order to unravel which clauses might go with which. The word 'nought' appears where one might expect 'naught' - the two words are similar but they don't mean the same. How does one resolve it? I went to read the poem in other locations to check that they were printed right. 'Nought' is a number; 'naught' is nothing. We don't normally draw a line between the two that says they are the same thing. ARE they the same thing? It opens more questions.

The second part of the poem is clear. The clauses are easily resolved into sentences albeit still long and complex ones that make sense and follow through, in contrast to the first part. There are no interruptions and no 'may-bes'. Clarity exists in the structure as well as in the sense of the words. It is as though the presence of the friend resolves the potentially complex syntax as well as the 'big questions'. It is all this that makes this poetry not blank verse. The emotional journey of the poem is greatly intensified by the poet's manipulation of our ability to comprehend it. I love it. It's so clever and so well done, and the sentiment is a beautiful one - for all it's a fairly twee resolution of the 'existential angst' theme that so much poetry relies on.

Other people's roof-top tomatoes

2009-07-27T18:19:00.006+01:00

There really aren't many cities ANYWHERE where people actually live on narrowboats any more. One of them is Cambridge. The Cam is a dozy little river and everyone jokes about it being dirty. It's pretty full of bikes (like everywhere else in the city), but as rivers go it's pretty clean I think. If you have got drunk and gone punting and bridge-jumping, and then drunk too much Cam water...that's a whole different thing. It has fish and birds and all sorts. At least ones that can cope with the tourists. And people really, genuinely, live on it, in the way that they have continually since probably forever. Though they do have things like solar panels now, and cabins bigger than 10' by 5'.

This guy is growing rainbow chard, as well as tomatoes and some other stuff. Not sure you can see it in the picture but he is. I planted some, but in the previous house. I'll have to go and see how it's doing when I head over for dinner this week. He wasn't the only one, either.

"Take heart for Mrs Pankhurst has been clapped in irons again!"

2009-07-19T16:43:00.007+01:00

I never understood that line from Mary Poppins when I was a kid. I didn't know the history or who Mrs Pankhurst was. That film did ensure that I remembered the name though, even if I didn't know why. I found this postcard yesterday (at Ark in Cambrige, which is a shop I love but where I virtually never buy anything...it has lots of things I'd love to own but which are ultimately useless). It was probably the prompt for the last post, but I felt it deserved something of its own.

I realised that while I know the basic story - that Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragettes fought violently for the right of women to vote - I know very little about the woman herself. I found this picture intriguing. Doesn't she look proud? And direct? And elegant and somehow modern? She's looking straight at you, and it's a demanding look. I imagine she must have been a terrible woman to meet. A bit like Margaret Thatcher but if possible even more driven. Her wikipedia article shows how single-minded she was and how much she expected of the people around her, her family and by no means least of herself.

The status quo at the turn of the century was that women were inferior to men, incapable of performing the same tasks as men and fundamentally endowed with fewer mental facilities in the same way that they were physically weaker. Pankhurst's own parents didn't educate their daughters to be more than home-makers - they learnt needlework and music while the boys had the academic education. And from this, she rebelled. Rebelled such that she was arrested and went on hunger strike on numerous occasions. Some suffragettes were force fed, though the wiki article doesn't suggest conclusively that Pankhurst herself was. All around her, people decried both her cause and her methods. And they WERE extreme, but given how many times the women's suffrage bill was presented in Parliament didn't they have to be? And what other ways were there for her to fight? They didn't HAVE the vote, so they couldn't choose to vote for parties that supported their cause, much as black people in America couldn't vote to change things over there. At least people fighting for gay rights can actually use their votes to express their opinions.

It must have seemed an impossible project, to change the minds of those confirmed in a belief that women were second. I would have looked at it, been sad, but not seen anywhere to start with changing it. She, and others like her, did a very great thing. Every woman should be profoundly grateful to all she achieved...we would not be where we are now without them.

I'm going to try and do more reading...talking to Elaine last night, I found out she had *taught* a *course* on British history at the turn of the century...so I have a Queens Belfast approved reading list. I will be breaking into the History and English Faculties as soon as I establish when they're open in the holidays. I might even look in to whether I can get readers' rights in the UL.

I have a thing about postcards.

2009-07-19T15:15:00.007+01:00

Or rather, just cards in general. I still have nearly every birthday card I've ever been given, though I think they're in Cornwall somewhere. I started running out of space, so unless they were particularly important I began tearing the pictures apart from the backs and recycling the backs. I have some great ones. The postcard thing is slightly different, because it's about images I've chosen for myself. It still have the odd separated birthday card in it, or cards people have sent me and even the odd flyer or leaflet if it had a particularly good image. I have one photo taken by Graham, that fits in seamlessly. I have an ambition of one day wallpapering them all to a suitable wall, but in the meantime, I use the wardrobes.

It probably doesn't look like it, but they're quite carefully arranged. The idea isn't to have areas that are all the same colour or that are too busy. New cards often mean rearranging what's already there so that the newcomer fits. The too busy is a big factor in how I choose images to go in. It's much more effective to have a very simple image on each card, because it gets too hard to see otherwise.

This one is pretty simple - just one object to catch your eye in a sea of more detailed images. It's a flyer from The Baltic Centre in Gateshead. I went to a conference there a year ago, and spent a good hour or two in their shop - they had a Yoshitomo Nara exhibition on, so it was pretty cool. I love the doll - the cynicism and the cartoon aspect of it.

Can't get more simple than that, and it goes quite well with this one:

My favourite (at least at the moment...) is this one:

I found it in a tiny art gallery come shop called Frank in Whitstable. I bought about 5 cards in there and found I'd spent about £20. I have forbidden myself even looking at that site properly because I KNOW I'll spend more money.

My postcards range from the abstract (thank you Charissa!) to the silly, from adverts to Darwin and from The Wildlife Photographer of the Year to Joan Collins. I love buying them. It's surprising how much money you can spend on postcards. I don't intend to get into that antiques game, I just find it a nice way of remembering great images.

I pick them up in art galleries, from racks of flyers, from quirky bookshops and gift shops. People SEND me them sometimes...that's exciting. Interesting images from all periods, cultures and places. I remember pretty much where they all came from too. They're an extension of my own photography, part of the same thing. An easy way of having a record of a beautiful thing or place, but also a window into a different time and place. How ELSE could I have a picture of Joan Collins rehearsing dance routines from Seven Thieves alongside pineapples growing at Heligan?

...So. Pretty pictures. If you see one that you think I'd like, post it! And I'll send something back. Then EVERYONE can have quirky collections of of pictures to cover their wardrobes with...