a gallimaufry

what happened in september

(Fluffy Chicken ruling the roost)

Well. That was a busy few weeks. Going back to work after the summer holidays is always a shock to the system (yes I know your heart bleeds for us poor teachers) but it’s been extra specially busy this year partly because I stood in for a colleague who had paternity leave and partly because our school is merging with two others and this involves synthesising all our ways of doing things, which basically boils down to a lot of extra paperwork, never my strongest point.

As I glare at the computer screen and try to look brave in front of new students, cobwebs and cat hair have silted up round the house, there are muddy pawprints in the bath and on every flat surface there seems to be a pile of paper, a miniature stable made from cardboard boxes, a plastic-bottle spaceship or a doll’s encampment. I have also blown up my lovely new food mixery thing, which I bought after this unfortunate incident, and had a first driving lesson which was pretty terrifying for all concerned including the trees.

Meanwhile in the garden, all those weeds who were discouraged from sprouting by the horrifically hot summer have now burst forth with a vengeance everywhere. Last night on Gardener’s World Monty Don told us we should never let weeds get out of hand but should tackle them a little and often; I had to sigh and eat some cheese.

(A rare flower among the weeds)

When I have time to read, it’s mainly been detective novels I’ve purloined from the charity shop and I don’t have anything particular to say about them. I’ve also read Saplings by Noel Streatfeild, The Outcast by Sadie Jones (both of which treated the effect on children of a parent’s sudden death), Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood and The Changeling by Victor Lavalle. The first two explore the effects on children of a parent’s sudden death, the third examines father–child relationships in a clever retelling of The Tempest, although it’s not the main theme of novel, and The Changeling explores the darker side of fatherhood. I hadn’t thought about these connexions until now but they are there. I have written half a confused post about The Changeling but I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it.

Meanwhile, Frosty Chicken spent most of her days brooding.

However, last week she finally left the nest box and returned to the world of general hen business along with the others.

(Clara, Not Speaking to anyone)

In cat news, Clara remained aloof for a week or so but has slowly thawed, at least to Nala. The two of them play with each other, though it’s usually a chasing game that looks as if it teeters on the edge of not being a game. Clara continued to hate Olaf for much longer and I cannot say they are best friends now but all three cats will sleep on the same bed or in the same room together so I feel that all will be well.

(The only time Nala is still enough for a photograph is when she is asleep)

(One of Nala’s collections) (She didn’t arrange it, I should add)

Nala has turned out to be a big baby; she rushes about crazily and then falls asleep on someone and then bounces up again and bounds away. She collects things. She wags her tail like a puppy and is the most frightful thief and greedy-guts. She ate a frying-pan full of bacon which K had foolishly left unattended and will creep up on the unwary and try to bat food out of their hands with a sneaky yet very effective paw.

(Olaf, pretending he hasn’t just embarrassingly fallen out of the walnut tree in front of lots of people)

Olaf, apart from a disturbing taste for cellophane, is more discriminating in his eating habits. He rather views himself as Nala and Clara’s lord and master and simply expects to have the best place on the favourite blanket and first dibs on any food that’s going. However, he is also completely craven when it comes to children. He adores my daughter and loves being petted and spoilt by her and her friends, hurrying up to them when most cats flee in horror at the prospect of being clasped, kissed, bellowed at and bossed about.

(Spot the cats) (There are no prizes though)

Life is easing up a bit and I am feeling more chirpy; I still have to vanquish the combined evils of digital and planning but I am sure the forces of light are with me.

could this be the least attractive pudding ever?

 

I mean, I admit I haven’t done it any favours in my choice of serving bowl (well, there wasn’t really a choice, it was that or nothing). But I don’t think it’s supposed to look like that...

Should you be wondering, I made it using a jar from the Hema (on offer! For one euro!). On the label it does actually clearly call itself ‘Bavarois’ but my eye was drawn to ‘Blueberry Cheesecake’ underneath it. Now I suspect that is the flavour of bavarois, but at the time I thought that it was cheesecake mix. Cheesecake, yum! First mistake.

I had to whip 500ml of cream, so I got out the electric handwhisk, conveniently forgetting that I had had a little accident with it the last time I used it. After a nasty burning smell, one of the whisky attachments thingies flying out across the kitchen, and inflicting a minor electric shock on myself, I realised it was beyond hope. So I got out the balloon whisk and sat down to whisk by hand (surprisingly messy).

Just as I was thinking, ‘Oh good, this is finally thickening up before my arm falls off’, the cream separated and started turning into butter. Why was that? I’m thinking it was the heat, it is quite warm here. It certainly wasn’t from over-enthusiastic whisking.

It is hot and I’d used up all the cream in the house so as the buttery/whey mix didn’t actually taste bad I decided to throw caution to the winds and the contents of the jar into the bowl. And so you see the result. The English translation on the label cheerily suggests that ‘For an extra attractive touch, pipe a rosette of whipped cream on top before serving’ but I won’t be doing that thanks anyway. I’ve put it into the fridge. Perhaps it will magically transform into something tasty and less reminiscent of blackberry vomit.

cats, salt, mermaids

There’s a thunderstorm cracking on at the moment, bringing welcome rain and cool after some very very hot days. ‘Isn’t it dangerous to be working on a computer during a thunderstorm, Helen?’ I hear you cry. I expect so, but it’s all in a day’s work for a book blogger. If I disappear mid-sentence, you’ll know my house has been struck.

Not everyone is welcoming the storm though. It seems to have made the cats bad-tempered, and they actually fought in the kitchen a few minutes ago. Poor Mister Puss, erstwhile tough guy, hid under a cupboard, hissing, while Clara, puffed out to almost the size of a normal cat, stalked up and down with lashing tail.

Here she is on Saturday morning demonstrating her strange attraction to our paddling pool. (This is the second paddling pool we have owned, since she riddled the first one with punctures from her tiny claws scrambling up it – what cat seriously climbs up paddling pools don’t they all hate water? – and even this one has been patched a few times due to her insatiable but spiky love.)

In the chicken coop, friendship has triumphed. Fluffy feels no further threat to her queenship and stopped being mean to Frosty some time ago. Phew.

Anyway, moving on, some of you probably already know that the independent Norfolk publisher Salt has asked readers for help: if you’ve ever considered buying one of their books, now is the time to do it. Here is the page with the explanation and a list of fifty of their highlights. You can order direct from them or from a bookshop. They have a really interesting list, including fiction, poetry and literary criticism, with a crime fiction list, and their better-known authors include Meike Ziervogel and Lesley Glaister, plus Christina James’s series about DI Tim Yates.

I’ve ordered a copy of Simon Okotie’s In the Absence of Absalon, about an investigator looking into a series of disappearances. Nicholas Lezard, whose taste in books is always impeccable, wrote about it: ‘This is literature as insanity, the mind stuck in an endless loop – focused, it would appear, too closely on the job at hand. The detective story as existential crisis took form with Beckett’s Molloy more than 60 years ago; and the concept of the novel as crazed digression was first incarnated in Tristram Shandy, over 250 years ago. Okotie is in very good company – and has also set himself a high bar. He succeeds. Superbly.’ So if you feel like taking a punt on an author or book you haven’t previously come across, today’s the day to do it...

Finally, look look! After 150 years I finally finished sewing a mermaid doll for my daughter. I call her Rasta Mermaid, but she has now been named Stella, which I fear is only going to lead to trouble in E’s bedroom since her purple unicorn is also called Stella. The curious thing is that I made her from a pattern (in Jane Bull’s Crafty Dolls, though I made her hair using the method described here) and yet she is still bizarrely wonky. Truly, I am terrible at sewing. She is wearing a jacket made from a pattern in the same book. My mother says that mermaids don’t wear jackets; she is quite right but dolls are more fun with clothes. I wanted to give her a brooch too but E felt that was overkill.

Here she is again with her little sister, also modified from a pattern in that book, but this time (mainly) by E. I helped a bit. Instead of 150 years, she took us about an hour. The little sister has had about five names, I can’t keep up. I’m now working on a home for them, a tarted-up cardboard box, to be honest, but fortunately E is easily pleased.

what shall helen read? April edition

A brief moment of sunshine here in Belgium! Everyone got very excited and rushed into their gardens; the air rang with the sound of lawn mowers and children, and in the evening barbeques were lit and cold beers enjoyed.

I planted some pansies from the market and did battle with weeds; I also washed a chicken bottom (Daisy’s, should you be interested). Clara pranced about with a pigeon’s tail-feather in her mouth, the closest she has ever got to actually catching one and you’d have thought she had slain an army of eagles the way she was carrying on, rushing up to people waving the feather at them and squeaking. She has now left the feather ostentatiously in the middle of the lawn and has been walking past it and then acting surprised and catching it again. I have not spotted the denuded pigeon yet.

 

So, back to ‘what shall helen read?’ The idea behind this reading plan is that every month I dig out a pile of books I’ve had for ages and never read, and you all vote on which one I should read. Then I read it and write about it here. I’ve been working in decades, starting with the 2010s (for which I read Hot Milk by Deborah Levy); last time was the 2000s and I read Andrea Levy’s Small Island.

Somewhat to my surprise this project has been encouraging me to read a lot more of my TBR books, not just the winners. I’ve now read two more of the 2010s novels (After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry and Small Change for Stuart by Lissa Evans: I enjoyed both of them) and one of the 2000s (Half in Love by Justin Cartwright, which was so good that I am keen to read The Song Before it is Sung). On the other hand, Olive Kitteridge is on the charity-shop pile: I have read a little and didn’t feel terribly excited by it, and I am sure that I can find another copy fairly easily should I ever change my mind.

We’ll skip over March, which never happened, ahem, and glide on to April and the 1990s. There are no Levys in this pile, which consists of:

• George Mackay Brown, Beside the Ocean of Time. I actually have no idea why I have never read this as it is exactly my cup of tea: ‘Thorfinn, a crofter’s son living on the remote island of Norday, is a dreamy boy [...] Closing his eyes in the 1930s he dreams of crossing the ‘fish-fraught’ ocean with Viking raiders. Falling asleep to the monotonous tones of a history lesson he finds himself running from the press gang into the arms of a beautiful seal-maiden who longs to return to the sea. War and adventure, the struggles of great men and the everyday toil of the fisherfolk, Thorfinn dreams the sweep of Norday’s history, its life and its inevitable death...’
• John Fuller, The Worm and the Star. According to the blurb, this book ‘pioneers a new literary form: the book composed of very short stories’ which ‘rove, with hurtling changes of perspective, over myth, sex, science fiction, the Middle East, boredom, beauty, grossness, global history, childhood, music and death’. Intriguing! But, it seems, not intriguing enough for me to have read it. Yet.
• Dominique Sigaud, Somewhere in a Desert. This takes place at the end of the Gulf War. ‘In prose of extraordinary clarity and power Dominique Sigaud tells [a] soldier’s story and those of the people who have encountered him in his last hours of life and in the days that followed his death. The mystery and horror of war are revealed through the eyes of this Unknown Soldier.’ I bought my copy from Ipswich Library for 30p, I see; its enthusiastic puffs include one by Beryl Bainbridge but my squeamishness has so far held me back from reading it.
• Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres. I don’t suppose this needs an introduction; it’s Smiley’s Pulitzer-winning re-telling of King Lear. I think I bought it (from a remainder bookshop!) because everyone else told me it was brilliant and not because I actually felt a great urge to read it. But perhaps now is the time to get on with it?
• William Trevor, After Rain. William Trevor was a Big Name in the 1990s; like A Thousand Acres, this book was bought because I felt I ‘ought’ to read it. Also the cover is very pretty and I have always been a fool for a pretty cover.

So, which of these should I read? All of them look good and I feel much more enthused about them than about the 2000s contenders I listed last time.

new friends

I haven’t written about the hens here for a while. Sadly, my favourite (don’t tell the others) hen Flower died last summer, leaving Fluffy and her foster-mother Daisy. Now that Daisy has decided to retire from laying, we have been relying on Fluffy for all our eggs, and demand has easily outstripped supply (especially since cold wet winter days do not seem to be days on which hens feel any great urge to pop out an egg).

So on Tuesday we introduced some new chicken friends to the run. Daisy and Fluffy gave them the traditional hen welcome. It is not much fun receiving a traditional hen welcome. A traditional hen welcome is a welcome that shows you who is boss hen (not you) and what your place in the pecking order is (the bottom). This makes acquiring new chickens a rather bittersweet experience.

Here are Fluffy and Daisy, on meeting their new friends. See that mean look in their eyes? They were not pleased.

Here is Frosty.

And here is Speckle. She was so terrified by her new home she could hardly stand up at first. Then she hid behind the hen house. (Don’t worry, she does actually have two legs.)

(I did not name them. Nor did I name Daisy or Fluffy. Just to be clear about that.)

Fluffy was very aggressive and pecked and attacked both Frosty and Speckle that first evening. Frosty did not appreciate this and soon there was a lot of shouting, hen and human. Speckle fled from everyone. Fluffy calmed down. Everyone with feathers went to bed in the hen house except Speckle, who wandered around in the gloaming, moaning gently to herself. I put her in the hen house with the others but she continued to wander around in there, whinging. NB It is not a good idea to keep bullies awake by wandering about whinging, and pretty soon Daisy and Fluffy were making cross noises. I shut the door so that no light could enter the hen house, and everyone was quiet and still.

Shutting the hens in meant rising early to let them out again. Fortunately in this I was assisted by the roofers working on the house next door, who thoughtfully arrived with their radio and crane at 6.30 am.

Since then I am pleased to report that there has been an uneasy peace in the chicken run. Frosty and Speckle keep their distance from Fluffy and Daisy. Fluffy ignores Frosty and Speckle. Daisy makes the odd darting run at them just to remind them of their place. Frosty strolls about, curious about everything, and shouts at Daisy. Speckle mainly hides behind Frosty, or even under her, and nearly had a nervous breakdown when a pigeon flew overhead. I do worry a bit for Speckle. Just now, however, she had relaxed enough to take a dust bath.

Mister Puss has been keeping an eye on these chicken shenanigans, but experience has told him to give hens a wide berth.

unexpected rejoicing!

I’ve been rather quiet here because over the last week I have made a concerted effort to study the Belgian Highway Code for the theory part of the driving-licence exam.

I have been intending to do this (on and off, more off than on because in my heart of hearts I am terrified of driving) for about a hundred years. I think everyone who knows me had given up hope I would ever actually do it.

But suddenly I thought – Bugger it, I’ll just do it. So I did.

And I’ve passed! No one is more surprised than I am. So, here’s a picture of me in about four months’ time... (from here). Watch out, Belgium.

Happy Easter, everyone!

merry Christmas!

Whatever your plans for the holidays may be, I hope that they are filled with joy!

(Picture by Edward Gorey)

champagne & roses

I’m very sorry that I haven’t been replying to all your lovely comments, and I promise I shall answer them very soon. On Friday I made an honest man of K and we got married. It was lovely!

a long and rather boring post about bookshelves

It’s been a little while since I last posted here. Since then, the US has leapt into a handcart and gone hurtling off to Hell. It is so much worse, and progressing so much faster, than I had feared. It’s almost laughable, it’s so bad. Meanwhile, Britain’s future under Brexit looks worse and worse but for some reason we’re going to plough ahead with it instead of admitting it’s a Bad Plan. And in further happy news, many environmental scientists think we’ve gone so far that we won’t be able to limit global warming to 2^oC. Basically, my friends, it’s the end of the world as we know it.

(I can’t find a source for this piece of marginalia, please tell me if you know it)

Among other things – like working – why wasn’t I born to wealth and idleness? – I’ve been bravely engaging with this depressing state of affairs by re-arranging my books. The sky may fall in but at least I’ll be able to lay my hand on my Renaissance poetry as I expire. I was driven to it by too much ogling of Simon’s posts on Other People’s Bookshelves. After reading every single one, I was forced to conclude that Other People’s Bookshelves tend to look much nicer than mine, which have a stuffed-into-every-available-space air to them. They also tend have fewer thick black cobwebs and bits of spider dinners and less dust clinging to the pages. And then, if I’m tidying and cleaning, maybe I should cull a bit too. Viewed practically, I can’t reread all of these books before I die, especially as tempting new books keep being published all the time.

The first thing to do was to think about ordering. I had a large wall of books, which was divided into non-fiction, poetry and drama, and fiction, all then arranged alphabetically by author. There’s a small bookcase in the kitchen, containing gardening books, travel, a paltry few cookery books, books on making stuff. There’s another bookcase in the sitting-room in which my daughter’s books and my art books strive for mastery. My unread books were all crammed into the icy cupboard I pompously refer to as my ‘study’. I never seemed to read any of them... And then in the attic were boxes of children’s books, and let’s not even think about the books still at my parents’ house in Britain...

I decided that, in addition to needing to tidy and cull my books, the TBR system wasn’t working and ordering things alphabetically was boring. (Is this my midlife crisis? Deciding that my shelving system lacks thrills?) Ignoring the art books and the books in the kitchen for the time being, I planned to group the non-fiction by subject and then shelve all the literature – poetry, prose and fiction – chronologically. Great idea, eh? What could go wrong?

This is what happened.

(Well, this is not what happened – if only it had been like this! Edouard John Menta, Maid Reading in a Library, oil on panel, shamelessly filched from Harriet)

First I tackled the non-fiction. That was fun! I’d forgotten how many interesting books I owned, read and unread. All muddled up together, I hadn’t been able to find anything nor looked very much. But now, sitting with their friends, they look much more attractive. There’s a group of wimminy writer books, which includes diaries and biographies and Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, May Sarton, Maya Angelou – also a biography of Ottoline Morrell – but not Lesley Blanche. She’s with the Imperialist travellers, along with Emily Eden and White Mughals, and I put Edward Saïd there too to keep an eye on them. There’s a group of books on Nigeria and another on witchy books, of which I have a surprisingly large number. Perhaps I should change my job.

But I didn’t find many books I wanted to get rid of, though I suspect deep in my heart that I may not ever get round to reading some of them even once.

And it took a loong time....

Then I started on the Everything Else. There are a lot more of them, and unfortunately despite my Cunning Plan to pile some books horizontally and divest myself of others, I didn’t seem to have any more space for them. Possibly a bit less, as, since I was going to get rid of so many books, I had acquired a few replacements, and then, you know, it was Christmas, and then all the bad news in the world and all the great books other people seemed to be reading and writing about...

It turns out that shelving your books chronologically is not a straightforward task after all. For a start, do you choose publication date or composition date for your chronology? Because some novels weren’t published in their authors’ lifetimes, and some earlier texts weren’t published until hundreds of years after they were originally written, yet it would look odd to stick Anna Weamys’s continuation of Sidney’s Arcadia in the twentieth century. On the other hand, how would I know when most of them were originally written – copyright pages give the year of publication and there is no way I am going to faff around trying to find out when pen was originally set to paper for hundreds and hundreds of books.

(Meanwhile, I brought down the boxes of children’s books and stuffed them in one of the bookcases in the study any old how. They look frightful. I haven’t photographed them. I can’t sort them out because I’d have to remove them from the bookcase and I can’t currently reach said bookcase because in front of it are stacks of Everything Else and books I am contemplating culling but can’t quite decide on. Ah well. Later.)

Other problems with my wonderful new system were arising. First, what to do about collected works? Second, checking all the dates and comparing them with other books was taking ages, and I’d open a book, look at the date and forget it as soon as the book was closed.

And then, what a lot of good books I have! Oh, I remember this one, gosh it’s years since I read it, let me see, will I ever read it again? Let’s have a look... Hmmm... Oh no, it’s time to collect E from school, where has the afternoon gone? Definitely need to keep this one anyway... (No, the culling part of the operation has gone extremely badly.)

The end result has been the Fudge System. It’s not strictly chronological, I’ve grouped the books into eras and then arranged them sort of chronologically (publication or composition date according to where they seemed happiest) and sort of by size (for the horizontal ones). I haven’t finished yet, but so far I am really liking the result. I tend to read books according to my mood and now it’s easier to find something that fits. The only possible disadvantage is that now that the TBRs are mingled among my already-read books, I can’t easily see how many there are and there may be less restraint around the acquiring of new books. On the other hand, it will encourage me to handle all my books more, and be content with what I already have, which can only be a good thing.

Still, as I say, I haven’t finished yet. What will happen when I reach the end of the available shelf space with a hundred or so homeless books? Who knows... Maybe you can distract me in the interim by writing about how you shelve your books, possibly posting a few photographs, you know we all want to see them and it is after all the reason I wrote this post...

merry Christmas!

(Bicci di Lorenzo, Nativity, 1430/1435)

It’s the shortest, darkest day of the year today, and very cold and frosty. I’ve been meaning to write something here, but never seem to have had the time. Triumphs at work – I finally learnt how to use the laminating machine – have been offset by disasters – I locked myself in the staff loos and had to be rescued by Eric the handyman with a hammer. Clara fell off the porch roof – she gave a terrible cat shriek and I saw her tabby body plummet past the window – but it is indeed true that cats land on their feet and she was perfectly fine. And who else was on the porch roof? Yes, ’twas next-door’s black cat, Mister Puss’s nemesis in the ongoing Cat Wars which shake this neighbourhood and leave clumps of orange and black fur strewn across our garden. Did Clara fall, or was she pushed? She’s not saying, and Mister Puss is too busy washing his bum to investigate.

Nothing says Christmas like a novel about the possible end of days, so I am reading The Place of the Lion, a hypnotically bonkers novel by Charles Williams in which angels in the forms of Archetypes infiltrate the world, which cannot handle them. The cats are swinging on the Christmas tree, half my Christmas presents haven’t been delivered (and whoops, I forgot to order some others), the charming little Richmond Maids of Honour I baked for my students look leprous and have massive holes in them, my daughter is singing Christmas carols but replacing half the words with ‘poo’ which apparently is a hilarious thing to do; in other words, life here is much as usual and we are very lucky to have that. I hope that you are all similarly fortunate and my thoughts are with those who are not. I wish you all a very merry Christmas, full of peace and joy and Brussels sprouts. Keep away from the eggnog though, that’s vile stuff.