a gallimaufry

the last week of brexit?

Of all the Big Dramatic Weeks we’ve had so far with Brexit, this next one may prove to be the Biggest and Most Dramatic. Although the logical action, since Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement, No Deal and a Second Referendum have all been rejected, would be to revoke Article 60 as being the last option left, logic packed up her bags and departed Westminster some time ago along with her good friend common sense.

Instead, it seems almost certain that Theresa May will ask for yet another vote on her WA. Will it pass? Perhaps. Some MPs may choose certainty over further uncertainty, however little they may like the WA. The ERG, who are proving themselves yet again to be not the masterly tacticians they would have us believe, may be realising that this could be their last shot at a ‘hard’ Brexit (hence all that unconvincing waffle about Article 62 of the Vienna Convention). Theresa May is dedicating this weekend to persuading the DUP to back her – who knows what she is promising them, I dread to think. But then again, some MPs may be emboldened by the prospect of a lengthy extension (should the EU grant it) and working towards a cross-party compromise that is more widely palatable to reject the deal again. Then again, if May resigns someone even more inflexible or extreme may replace her. Aaargh! So many games being played...

Whether you are for or against Brexit, it is all pretty stressful, or at least so I find it. The stress is augmented by anger at the cynicism of some MPs, the sheer shoddiness and duplicity. Fellow Brits, how are you coping?

Apart from shouting at screens, I am spending quite a lot of time doing cross-stitch. This is an activity I never would have imagined myself doing. But I am making a cushion cover for my daughter. It is of an owl in the night-time. The design is printed on the canvas and all the wool (enough I hope!) was supplied with the kit, so it’s really so easy that even I can do it. Well, almost, I did absent-mindedly use the wrong colour at one point and have to unpick a lot of it. It seems to hit the same spot as doing a jigsaw puzzle and I find it soothing and addictive.

I am also immersed in an enormous epic fantasy novel, The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. There was a lot of hype about this and it has a nice cover. It is also 800 pages long. When I am faced with the prospect of Nigel Farage or Jacob Rees-Mogg, I run away to another world in which there are dragons and magic and I know that the Nameless One and his cohorts will ultimately be defeated by the forces of good.

I recommend both of these to anyone in the same boat as me. Bon courage, mes amis! How are you getting on?

of damp hens and lavender

It’s Valentine’s Day, the sun is shining and our kitchen is fragrant with the scent of wet hen, since I spent a portion of this morning washing Daisy’s bottom and drying it with the hair-dryer. Meanwhile, my tiny study is fragrant with the scent of dusty lavender, after a book avalanche knocked over a bowl of dried lavender I had imprudently balanced on the edge of the cupboard. The lavender is everywhere: all over the desk, books, heaps of paper and alas inside a drawer or two as well as I hadn’t closed them. I don’t even know where the bowl is, it seems to have slipped into another dimension. Anyway, perhaps this is a hint that I should tidy up.

All of this has turned my thoughts to James Elroy Flecker, and so I thought I would post a bit of ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’ from Hassan here. I became slightly obsessed with James Elroy Flecker as a teenager after my school put on a production of Hassan. It has been a while now though since I read him and while his attitudes towards the Middle East are disappointing to say the very least, the romantic lushness of much of his work cannot be denied.

Everyone rightly knows the beautiful Epilogue, so here is the Prologue.

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
We Poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,—

What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall toward the West:

And there the world’s first huge white-bearded kings
In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep,
And closer round their breasts the ivy clings,
Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.

II

And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than that Orient sand
Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

And now they wait and whiten peaceably,
Those conquerors, those poets, those so far:
They know time comes, not only you and I,
But the whole world shall whiten, here or there

When those long caravans that cross the plain
With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
Put forth no more for glory or for gain,
Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells.

When the great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.

(Uncredited illustration for T.E. Lawrence, An Essay on James Elroy Flecker and Forgotten Warfare; Southampton, Mark Valentine, 1988; found here)

goodbye to january

Hello and happy February!

Sorry I haven’t posted for ages. January and February are my least favourite times of year, dreary and grey, all the fairy lights have been packed away and winter seems to stretch on for ever. I did write a few half-posts, on Brexit, on a couple of the books I’d read, but I lacked the will to finish them.

Anyway, today the sun has been shining and I’ve just baked some flapjacks! Do have one. I hope your 2019 has started well.

(You’ll need a fork.)

I don’t know why I felt the urge to bake flapjacks. Previous attempts have always ended up with something that had to be ‘broken into bars’ with a hammer, proved impermeable to teeth and could have been used as flooring had they been more evenly shaped; the odd pan had to be binned too. But I was inspired by the surprise discovery of two tins of golden syrup at the back of the cupboard. The 2008 ‘anniversary’ tin had been opened and half-used, the contents were now completely hard and blackened, but the ‘use by 2013’ tin was still sealed and what was within looked as I imagined golden syrup to look, so off we went.

(For those who are interested, I used a Mary Berry recipe I found on the internet, but with my previous mishaps in mind I ignored Mary’s advice to cook for 25-35 minutes and instead removed them from our (tiny fan-assisted) oven after 20 minutes. Hence the need for a fork.)

(Also they are very sweet and all your teeth will immediately fall out in horror.)

The Christmas holidays were lovely and I had a fantastic time at New Year as well. I stocked up on some books in charity shops (my favourite find being a 1947 Cresset Press edition of Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne, which I’ve always wanted to read: this edition is illustrated with lovely wood engravings by Claire Oldham). I learnt that just because a ‘journey planning website’ gives you directions to walk along a road doesn’t mean that it’s safe to do so after dark (because it’s actually an A road with no pavement and cars whistling by at 70 mph). I visited Sissinghurst which might not seem the obvious thing to do on New Year’s Day but it is actually very beautiful with no leaves or flowers but patterns of branches. Of course, I had forgotten to bring my camera. It was nice to see Vita Sackville-West’s writing room again and I was charmed to see honey leaking down one wall of the tower – apparently from an old beehive that someone kept on the roof.

To get through this time of year I stockpile ‘easy’ reading, novels with compulsive narratives and not too much darkness, and I reread a lot too. Here are some of my favourites:

• Folk, by Zoe Gilbert
  I loved this, though much of it is very dark. It’s a collection of sort-of fairy-tales about an island community, focusing on different characters in turn and spanning a couple of generations. Like traditional fairy-tales, these are unsentimental and concerned with birth and death, sex, transformation, cruelty and strange kindnesses, but unlike fairy-tales the characters within them have individuality and when misfortune befalls them it is painful to read. The beauty of the natural world is celebrated even though the life scraped from its woods and seas is a hard and difficult life.
• The Gardener and the Carpenter, by Alison Gopnik
  Gopnik is a child psychologist and philosopher, and in this book she examines developmental psychology and evolutionary biology to demonstrate how modern-day ‘parenting’ is wrong-headed. She characterises a lot of parents as being concerned that they must develop a product: control pretty much every aspect of a child’s life so that it will become a happy, socially-acceptable and preferably high-achieving adult. Instead, parents should focus on their relationship with their children and on creating a ‘garden’ where children can learn and explore and become themselves. I was in agreement with her argument before she even made it, and I particularly enjoyed reading about all the evolutionary biology. It’s also made me very slightly less anxious about the amount of time my daughter spends in front of screens.
• The Dragon Hoard, Tanith Lee
  This was an impulse-buy in a charity shop and is a children’s book. On their seventeenth birthday, royal twins Princess Goodness and Prince Jasleth are cursed by Maligna, a distant relative and wicked enchantress. Princess Goodness becomes insanely good and starts giving away everything her family owns; Prince Jasleth turns into a raven every day, but at varying times and for varying durations. So the prince sets out to seek his fortune, which involves joining a quest to recover a dragon’s hoard. A cheerful, bouncing story, it put me slightly in mind of M.M. Kaye’s An Ordinary Princess.

A couple of weeks ago we reached the end of a fifteen-week course I teach every year. It’s a course with fantastic students but I find it very challenging and I have to spend hours and hours finding and making material and preparing for it. So suddenly I have a lot of free time, and this free time I’ve been devoting to revising my children’s book at breakneck speed in order to enter it for The Times and Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition, the deadline for which is the end of February. I am now completely disenchanted with my book but I decided to enter it anyway, what the hell, sorry judges for foisting it on you but at least it’s quite short. Then I am going to get started on another book which I am very excited about writing.

So for the foreseeable future, I’m going to be revising my book. I’m also going to making some cushion covers as we replaced our existing but broken Hideous Sofa with an even more Hideous Sofa and I plan on disguising it as far as possible if I can just find the fabric I have in mind for them.

I won’t be baking...

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)