Norn's Notebook

The Food Fights Back

2012-01-16T18:28:00.005Z

Yesterday I cooked the evening meal - now that's not unusual, but the amount of resistance I met with from my ingredients certainly was.

First up was the meat: a neat collar joint of bacon, cooked in the oven in a huff (pastry case). Huff pastry is just water and plain flour (you don't eat it, it's just ye olde equivalent of baking foil) and so there should be nothing to go wrong really, especially as I've made it so many times, having seen it demonstrated by Sara Paston-Williams on tv in the 1980s. I measured the flour, put it in the food processor and added the water: a few whizzes later I found myself looking at something nearer the consistency of paint than dough. Whatte?? Oh well, better add some more flour and hoist it out onto the worktop - oops, still not enough (hastily slosh more flour on until we have a suitably elastic pastry in which to wrap the meat). This accomplished, and the meat in the oven, I also added the jacket potatoes and turned my attention to the apple and rhubarb crumble. Nothing went wrong with that, praise be, it's just a lot of peeling and chopping, though I almost did too much fruit, even for the biggest casserole we have. But then can you have too much crumble? I think I know the answer to that...

Also on the menu were steamed fennel and carrot - I gave up boiling veg years ago when I'd ruined a few saucepans (and nothing burns quite like carrots, on account of the sugar). Anyway, they gave little trouble except that the carrots took longer than usual to cook and so held things up a little. The potatoes, on the other hand, were still like bullets after an hour and a quarter in a hot oven - OK, let's cheat: microwave for a few mins then back to the oven to crisp up.

Final finishing touch: the parsley sauce, which is after all only basic white sauce with chopped parsley added, and I'd quite like a pound coin for every time I've made white sauce. I put the butter on to melt on a low heat, left it for a minute and turned back to it to find that it was already beginning to burn - and continued to, even when I took it off the heat. And admonishing it makes no difference, either, sadly... OK, let's see if we can get away with this - in with the flour, shuffle it about a bit, add the milk. Hmm, this is turning into a meditation over a pan of milk and roux - for the longest time it simply wouldn't thicken, so in desperation I added some butter and flour. I go away for a minute to put a few things on the table, and of course come back to find it's turned into something very like wallpaper paste. OK, more milk - I win! It's no good, food, resistance is futile - we piled our plates high and scoffed the lot.

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T21:13:00.005Z

New Year's Greetings to everyone - may your 2012 be healthy, happy and prosperous - a fab year altogether, in fact.

We will be seeing in the New Year in the comfort of home, as is our custom: I shall toast it in Bacardi and coke, while Keith prefers gin and tonic. Earlier on we had a luscious lamb curry of his concocting, which should perhaps become another New Year's Eve custom, and I finally remembered to put out the hansel money (a custom inherited from my mother). This consists of putting outside the door before midnight on New Year's Eve a coin for every member of the family/ household, and fetching the money in after midnight: this is supposed to make sure that they have enough money for the year. Very much to the point in these times, I'd say!

Festive lights at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington

The Stone Menagerie no 2

2011-12-10T11:45:00.002Z

Two of my favourite creatures in all the vast collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum are these medieval lions, from Southern Italy (their museum numbers are 324-1889 and 324A-1889).

The lions currently reside in the recentishly opened Medieval and Renaissance Galleries (which being a V&A person, I still think of by the working title of Med and Ren), but when I started work they were in the sculpture galleries, and I walked past them most nights on my way out of the building. As the label comments, they are column bearing and likely to have been for an external window or door. While, yes, this no doubt accounts for some of the worn appearance, the fact that most of it is around their heads suggests to me that I am not the first person, nor the last, in the 900 years of their existence who has found them very tactile and wished to run a hand over the luxuriantly carved manes. And as with the dog in Chipping Norton church, ribs and claws are still visible, though in this instance unlikely to have been based on real life - these are more your heraldic or at least symbolic lions, with tails as long as their bodies.

Re-reading: Georgette Heyer x 2

2011-12-04T10:10:00.006Z

These days, where fiction's concerned, I do more re-reading of what's already on my shelves than anything newly acquired.

While that's very unadventurous of me, I'm not really being drawn to any of the new stuff - and I do still look, especially when I'm in South Kensington or Harrow. On the plus side, it's a significant economy of shelf space - I still have books stacked on the stairs for lack of anywhere else (despite having taken at least six boxes' worth to charity shops recently), and I'm still buying non-fiction.

So, what's been re-read recently? A couple of Georgette Heyer's 'Georgians' for a change: The Talisman Ring and Devil's Cub. And (always a test of re-reading) did I still enjoy them? Yes I did, despite having a preference for her 'Regency' titles on the whole. In fact I was surprised at just how much I did enjoy The Talisman Ring: it's a very adroit mixture of a lot of Georgette Heyer's interests , writing genres and favourite character types and situations, many of which she went on developing. The book was published by Heinemann in 1936 (to my further surprise, my copy is not only a hardback but a first edition), and somehow I can just see it sitting in a late 1930s sitting room, even if only as a library copy.

Anyway, to the book itself - a historical detective story, with strong elements of romantic and social comedy. The book opens with the last days of Sylvester, Lord Lavenham, who has been a most outrageous rake in his younger days and is now a most outrageous old man bravely giving death a hard time. In fact he steals the show, for my money, and I much regretted the necessity of his, er, departure so that the plot could proceed.

Sylvester's dying wish is that two of his young relatives, his great nephew Tristram and grand-daughter Eustacie, should marry each other, which looks unlikely to be successful if only because the characters have no real respect for each other. Tristram is one of Heyer's Corinthian heroes, dark, taciturn, intelligent, judicial and more than a bit handy with his fists and firearms - now that's a proper hero, as I and I don't doubt many other female readers have murmured while turning the pages. Eustacie is flighty, emotional, wilful and irritating, rather like her cousin Ludovic (see below) - Tristram would be wasted on her, so it's fortunate that he encounters Miss Sarah Thane, who is tall, venturesome, resourceful, and actually punches an assailant in the face at one point .

Most of the difficulties, however, arise from another grandson, Ludovic, tenth Baron Lavenham on Sylvester's death, whom I have to say I found rather a rather tiresome young person too. Ludovic is on the run from the law, accused of a murder two years previously and needing to prove his innocence and find his missing talisman ring which was the cause of the situation. As if this wasn't enough he is also a smuggler and has been injured in an encounter with the local excisemen. Naturally everything is sorted out in time for a happy ending, largely down to Tristram and Sarah's efforts, but also aided by Sarah's brother Sir Hugh (a marvellous comic character who is clearly related to Lord Rupert Alastair in Devil's Cub) and a supporting cast of The Lower Orders, notably the wonderfully lugubrious Mr Bundy.

Devil's Cub, sequel to These Old Shades, was written four years earlier than The Talisman Ring, and I think it shows. It's still a good enjoyable read, with an attractive heroine in Mary Challoner (set off to great advantage by her avaricious mother, frankly idiotic sister Sophia and spoilt friend Juliana Marling), but I feel it's a little less polished than The Talisman Ring; the 18th centuryisms, carefully researched though they are, I found a little intrusive in this book. The heroine spends most of the second half of the book repeatedly running away from the hero, which I got a little bored with in the end, and a certain amount of skipping set in. Once again the older generation are the scene stealers, especially His Saturnine Grace the Duke of Avon (dressed to kill, in silver lace over black cloth, oh my!), his lovely and volatile wife Leonie and his brother Rupert (whose enthusiasm for alcohol masks a dry wit).

At one point I had most of Georgette Heyer's historical novels, but there are some I found I didn't want to read any more, such as Bath Tangle, which seems to be written between exclamation marks. Those two titles are certainly for the keeping, though.

The Garden Shed - Excavations

2011-12-02T21:24:00.007Z

(A view of garden sheds in the area - ours is barely visible on the right, after years of growing things up it!)

OK, so Mrs Beeton's suggestion for the domestic work on a Wednesday was cleaning the best bedrooms and the windows, but this week we did something a little different. With help from our friend Tom, we emptied the garden shed: very exciting, not, surely? Well, no, but we were not without some trepidation about what we might find in the way of inhabitants...many rodents in this area, and quite a few foxes, for starters.

What's more, we knew there was a hole in the back wall of this historic edifice (complete with asbestos roof, natch) and over the last year the shed has filled up with some four or five inches of soil/compost, as though something were nesting within. Hmmmm. And as is the traditional way with garden sheds, it wasn't exactly clutter-free. We took out two bicycles (Keith's with a chunk out of one wheel!), two bookcases, tins and tins of old paint/ wood sealer/ paint stripper/ barbecue fuel, three thousand (well, that's what it felt like) flowerpots, an oil lamp, assorted bits of watering equipment, six (or was it seven?) defunct pond pumps, a pond hoover (yes, there really are such things), hanging baskets, a quantity (as the auction houses say) of hosepipe, an assortment of garden tools (including a probably 1930s rake we inherited with the house), wooden shelving, and a seemingly infinite supply of deteriorating bags of sand, gravel, grit, cement, cat litter etc.

But in fact all we found by way of creature was one dead rat - and quite enough too, I hear you say. Could have been much worse, of course - but the real acid test will be when we take the edifice down and find anything that may be nestling underneath (see rodents, foxes etc above). Tom's comment was "That was a good job we did there. Of course there's just one trouble with having started it - we have to finish it!".

The Stone Menagerie no 1

2011-09-24T20:43:00.005Z

Well, alabaster, to be absolutely accurate, rather than stone - but I really couldn't resist taking a shot of this carved dog on the Rickardes tomb in Chipping Norton church. The detail is amazing, and it was surely carved from life - you can even see the claws, and I can just imagine the collar with what were probably a gilt brass buckle and matching quatrefoil decorations on the leather. Some sort of bull terrier, I would think - I saw one very similar hanging its head out of a car window only a few days later, looking for things to chase, as it were. Pity this one looks so melancholy (and I wished I could un-muzzle him!), but I suppose he's partly intended as a mourner...

The Ancestors Say Hello

2011-09-15T11:14:00.004Z

Yesterday we had a day in Chipping Norton in search of my Meades ancestors. The weather was bright and breezy and the town looked at its best with all that pale gold stonework reflecting the September sunshine. We made a beeline for the church - often a good place to start anyway, but in this case there was an extra that put a smile on my face straightaway. One of the first things I saw was this inscription:

for all the world like a welcome.

We also found Mowbray Meades on the war memorial plaque, and a group of at least three gravestones to members of the family just outside the door. And Richard Meades who was my great great great great grandfather was the mason who led the rebuilding of the church tower early in the 19th century. Salute!

Electric Flowers?

2011-09-14T20:35:00.003Z

A slightly bizarre image taken at the end of a coach tour during the recent biennial conference of the Anthony Powell Society in London. Not actually electric flowers, despite appearances! (Best effect achieved by clicking on the image to enlarge it).

Woodman, spare that tree!

2011-08-31T20:30:00.005Z

The view from the back of our house in the leafy suburbs - looks quite normal, even fairly civilised, if unexciting. But it isn't as good as it was, alas. The other morning we heard the sound of a chain saw, and realised that the people who live about three houses along, in the road backing on to ours, were cutting down the conifer at the foot of their garden. Oh well, probably Leylandii, so perhaps one can't blame them - though a pity, as the birds seem to like perching in it, even those that are a bit large for it, like the crows! Oh, and they took down the rest, while they were at it, which is why we are now forced to look at the backs of the houses on the other side of these now deceased trees.

OK, so it's delusional to pretend that we're not surrounded by buildings - we live on an estate in a built-up area, for goodness sake. And our neighbours are entitled to do what they like on their own property. But I do regret those trees, as they were part of a screen - in summer you could hardly see any of the nearby houses at all. Now we have an uninterrupted view of the backs of the houses at that edge instead, and the photo really doesn't show how bare it looks. One neighbour recently asked why we have so many trees ourselves - and we could only say that apart from the important benefits to the local wildlife, we've never understood the fascination of gazing upon fences, drainpipes, satellite dishes and washing lines!

Feed Me! Feed Me! (Part 2)

2011-08-09T21:01:00.004Z

This morning I happened to get quite a good portrait of Pussy-next-door, whom I am feeding while my neighbours are away:

Though it has to be said that this is the even more familiar view!

Feed me! Feed me!

2011-08-07T16:41:00.004Z

(Finally managing to break out of the post-employment blogging silence) There are a-many things for me to do in my retirement, but at the moment I seem to spend half my life ministering to critters. This morning I got up and fed the pond fish, the birds in the garden, and four cats (of which more anon) and the long-haired one had to be brushed and have her eyes bathed and her soil tray topped up too. I have just dealt out the second (or is it third?) round of cat treats for three.

When I finish writing this, I shall go next door to feed the long-haired one again and probably change her soil tray, then come back, feed the pond fish, refill seed hoppers for the birds if it will stay dry enough, and feed the three cats again. The increase in cat numbers has come about in two ways - one neighbour came to us a couple of weeks ago and asked if I could feed their cat while they were away. To be sure I had said I would if they could find no-one else, so that's my choice, but I had forgotten that the long coat would need regular grooming, and I had not bargained for the fact that his cat is almost certainly pregnant. I just hope she manages to hold onto the kittens until they come back! The other extra is a stray cat that would like to move in - but that has sto be taken slowly as our two resident pussers are not keen...

So what's not to like, then?

2011-04-25T21:10:00.004Z

OK, it's been less than a month since I retired, so early days, relatively speaking - but so far I really am highly delighted with it. I did think I would be, but some of my colleagues, bless them, seemed quite worried about me, and the professional advice beforehand all seemed to be very much of the 'it will take a long time and an awful lot of adjusting to' variety.

Not so. I am very much enjoying being on what feels like a holiday with pay, after the last thirty-six years of mostly interesting but demanding work. To be sure, there were some brilliant, satisfying and very enjoyable things in there, but precisely because of that, it's easier to let go. I had the great good luck to work with interesting people in a great job and did most of the things I'd wanted, plus a whole heap I'd never even thought of!

And no, I'm not being complacent - I'm only too well aware of my good fortune in having had the life I have had, at least so far. I'm also well aware of the contrast with some of my ancestors. What a difference a pension would have made to William the mason, for one - despite being a skilled craftsman from a successful family, he ended his days in the workhouse.

It has, of course, helped that that I had a great send off with lovely presents, that the weather has been so warm and sunny, and most of all that there's Keith to be with. At the moment we're tackling the mountain of clutter in the study (definitely not a job for the faint-hearted!) and coping with having the bathroom rebuilt, with much disruption. We reward ourselves in between with cooking good food - compliments to the chef for his chicken sag Madras tonight!

Today Is the First Day of the Rest of My Life...

2011-04-01T20:36:00.002Z

...and I feel exhausted! I officially retired from work yesterday, but will have to go in until Tuesday to stand even half a chance of finishing off everything that needs doing, particularly the clearing of my office. Towards this last, tonight I brought home fifteen bags of my own books and files, and it really doesn't seem to have made that much difference.

Amazing what you can accumulate in the course of thirty-two years: knitting needles, sticking plasters, spare shoes and gloves, mugs, forks...erm, and a balloon pump, some fishing line, a bag of 1950s halfpennies...

Eudoria's Broomstick

2011-03-05T22:28:00.004Z

'They had twenty-two pints of beer each and promptly fell asleep', copyright Victor Knowland, and reproduced by kind permission of the author-and-artist's family. (Please do not copy).

Just over two years ago I blogged here about my favourite children's books, including Eudoria's Broomstick by Victor Knowland, and I also mentioned the book as a favourite when I was interviewed by The Guardian last summer. So far so normal.

Then a couple of weeks ago a most delightful and unexpected thing happened - I had a lovely e-mail from Victor Knowland's daughter Adrienne, telling me something of the book's continued use in the family, and the fact that their father had originally read it aloud to her and her siblings at bedtime, which meant that they couldn't wait to get to bed! She also very kindly gave me permission to put up one of the illustrations here - thank you, Adrienne!

Above, therefore, as a tribute to Victor Knowland, is his splendid image, originally done in scraperboard, of the Bus Conductor and the Driver (in the distance) sleeping off their lunch. At this point John, the hero of the book, his ever-hungry duck, Puff, and their companion Legs, a beetle, are travelling in search of Eudoria's lost broomstick, and their bus fares must be paid in food. The Conductor and Driver stop early to consume what they've collected in this way: hors d'oeuvre, turtle soup, fish and chips, roast duck, peas and new potatoes, trifle and cream, steam pudding, jelly and custard, pineapple slices, ice cream, coffee and milk chocolate. A splendid scoff at any time, and particularly considering that the book was published in 1950, when there was still some food rationing in place!

I've got a little list

2011-02-11T21:39:00.004Z

(View from the eastbound platform at Greenford station)

As I expected, things to get done at work before the end of March are stacking up at a rate of knots. In between trying to do six assorted things at once and muttering a fair bit, I'm making a list of the work-connected things I don't think I'll miss:

Going out in pouring rain

Coming home in the dark in winter

Parting with the best part of £150 a month in fares (It's really good value, but...)

Having to grab lunch in a hurry, and eating uninspiring food much of the time

Deadlines, especially for work I didn't want to do in the first place

Meetings, especially those that are shoehorned in between others, take place over lunchtime but don't include refreshments, go on for more than an hour, or take place in spaces that are too hot/ cold/ noisy/ small

Projects I didn't want to be involved in last time, either

Political correctness

Increasingly not having time to do the parts of my job that I love best, and am best at

I may be wrong, of course - perhaps I'll miss them greatly, but I doubt it.

What I probably will miss, against all the odds, is the bit that most people shudder at - an hour on the tube each way every day. Keith went into work with me recently and said he didn't know how I did it at all, leave alone there and back day after day, but of course I started young and have got used to it, and I do it in a state of removed consciousness, so to speak. I get on at Greenford (in the open air) most mornings and sink myself in my paper or book to the extent that I never see the transition to underground tunnel at White City a handful of stops later. And yes, I normally come back to full consciousness at Bank or Liverpool Street so that I don't miss my stop. Believe it or not there are people who are on the tube when I get on and still on when I get off, so there are some who are even madder than I am...

The Road and the Miles to Retirement

2011-01-30T17:13:00.006Z

Well, I suppose that some progress is being made towards my retirement, though probably not enough. My office, which has been described before now as an art installation or a pile of junk, depending on who you ask, still looks as cluttered as ever, despite my best efforts. Work keeps getting in the way, of course.

Going through old documents I would estimate that I must have recycled/ shredded several trees' worth of paper by now (and a comparable amount of space on the computer). I looked at some of this stuff in amazement and wonder why it was committed to paper at such length in the first place, and certainly why I ever kept it afterwards. Again, work gets in the way, I guess - quickest to just file it away.

Rather reprehensibly, I've taken the greatest pleasure of all in tearing up all the writing guidelines - thou shalt not assume that any reader has any knowledge, of any kind, about anything; thou shalt not use ye passive tense; or the word 'which' in clauses (must use 'that'); or any punctuation, apart from full stops or perhaps the odd dash or question mark. Thou shalt, on the other hand, produce labels, text, etc which is cogent, informative and interesting for everybody of any age in roughly a third of the space (and the time) needed for the task, and by the way, your vocabulary and construction are too difficult for ordinary people to understand. (I occasionally erupt over that last one - it's really only crept in in the last ten years, which I think may just say something about dumbing down in education). I prefer to write the piece interestingly first and tailor it afterwards, frankly.

My colleagues are carrying on a touch chronic about the loss of my expertise, which is in its way flattering, but that's how these things happen, much of the time. In fact, as my boss very sensibly remarked, somebody leaving is how other people learn - and I learnt it that way myself.

All the Crispins

2010-12-31T12:03:00.004Z

Among the goodies Keith gave me for Christmas was the one remaining detective novel by Edmund Crispin that I didn't have: The Long Divorce, which is one of his best - hurrah! and other such exclamations. It's always satisfying to get the last of a set of books, especially when it's a previously unread one.

I've been collecting Crispins since the mid 1990s, on the recommendation of another favourite author, Antonia Forrest, who has one of her characters say that she prefers Gervase Fen to Peter Wimsey (but no clue as to author). In those pre-Google days, I was wondering how to find this out most easily when a colleague obligingly took The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin out from the library and passed it to me to read, and the rest is history. Gervase Fen is Professor of English at Oxford University, which seems to interfere delightfully little with his other interests; the same could also be said for his wife, Dorothy, and children (who are quite young in the early books).

There are nine novels: The Case of the Gilded Fly, Holy Disorders, The Moving Toyshop, Swan Song, Love Lies Bleeding, Buried for PLeasure, Frequent Hearses, The Long Divorce and The Glimpses of the Moon; the two collections of short stories are Beware of the Trains and Fen Country. The titles are almost always quotations, and can make little or no sense without recourse to the originals : The Long Divorce, for example, is nothing to do with divorce per se, but is from a speech of Buckingham's in Shakespeare's Henry VIII and does relate to the plot of the novel:
"Go with me, like good angels, to my end;
And, as the long divorce of steel falls on me,
Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice,
And lift my soul to heaven".
(What doesn't relate to the plot in the Felony & Mayhem edition that I have is an emphasis, on the cover and in the blurb, on the cat Lavender, whose psychic gifts, it is claimed, help to unravel the mystery of some unpleasant anonymous letters - just discount that if you read this edition).
Fen appears for most of it under the alias of 'Mr Datchery' (as in The Mystery of Edwin Drood) and has a very enjoyable time ferreting about in everybody else's business in the village of Cotten Abbas. The villagers are mostly what would now be called NIMBYs, and among other things object to the chapel of The Children of Abraham having been built in their midst. On the other hand, maybe they just object to the standard of the congregational singing:
'The key he had set resulted in the low notes being too low for the high voices, and the high notes too high for the low, so that a sinister drone alternated with a surprised mewing; the text selected was of that lengthy narrative sort which almost always has to do with fish, apostles and storms on Galilean lakes; and the total effect gratified Mr Datchery extremely.'

While I wouldn't claim that the novels are all equally good, people who like 'Golden Age' detective novels often do seem to enjoy them. I particularly like this one and Buried for Pleasure (Fen stands for election as an MP), and am pleased that so many of the books have been reissued recently. There's also now a Wikipedia entry on the author, whose real name was (Robert) Bruce Montgomery, and who was also a composer, notably for the British film industry.

Breakfast at Elveden, or Bring on the Peasants, sorry, Pheasants

2010-11-30T12:18:00.003Z

Last Saturday we disregarded all the bad weather doom and gloom on the telly, and set off for Norfolk to visit family. Rather as we'd expected, it was not too bad at all, and the tons of snow that had been talked up were in fact very modest, not to say slightly mean, though it was wonderfully Christmas card-looking in places.

As is not uncommon we allowed ourselves the treat of breakfast at Elveden, in Suffolk (not far from the border with Norfolk) -the Elveden Estate Restaurant does what is quite simply one of the best cooked breakfasts I've ever had, with a delicious combination of eggs, mushrooms, sausages, tomatoes, black pudding, hash brown, bacon and fried bread, for the astonishing price of £7.25. What's more, all the food in the restaurant is sourced from the estate or as from as close by as possible, and is cooked to order, so what you're eating is both fresh and supporting local food production.

The eatery is reached via the food and wine shop, where, well, yes, we usually give in to temptation and buy something, if that's only pork and apple pies for lunch, or fudge for presents (one recent selection being vanilla with cherry and walnut; caramel and cookies; vanilla and chocolate honeycomb; and caramel and chocolate with chocolate pieces). This being autumn, there were some good plump pheasants, so we bought two for dinner on Sunday - yum. Roast in a foil tent and served with jacket potatoes, garlicked roast parsnips, large mushrooms and onion sauce, and even after we'd tucked in, quite a bit over for eating somehow else tonight.

As the East Anglian section of one of my favourite books on dialect 'Yacky Dar, Moy Bewty' by Sam Llewellyn would have it, "Oi loike a pheasant. That eat excellent"!

Rost befe of olde englande

2010-11-14T20:39:00.003Z

Well, not entirely, to be honest - the accompaniments were rather more twenty-first century.

This evening we dined off a succulent piece of beef sirloin, reared by our friend Steve Rawlings before he gave up these entertainments in the face of too much aggro from the food police etc. It was cooked with lamb and rosemary chipolatas (I don't normally mix meats, but had exhumed these from the freezer a couple of days ago and they needed cooking) with some large mushrooms added towards the end. I also cooked cauliflower, garlic potatoes, and onion sauce, and we opened a bottle of red wine - the lovely Chorey-les-Beaune (2008) which takes no effort at all to drink. It was a sort of rehearsal for Christmas, it was that good...

Yes, this was a slightly extravagant meal, but it was demmed tasty, and made a morceau of space in the freezer. It was also better value than the meat I was looking at in M&S yesterday - a depressing selection of the expensive, quick to cook, and no effort required to deal with inconvenient flavour factors like bone or skin. It caused me to realise once and for all that I am not one of their core customers. That seems to be the suited and booted male and its female equivalent. Yes, I see plenty of grannies in there buying food, and Marks do well at providing things for the single person - but from observation the majority of their profit these days surely comes from dinner partyish food needing the minimum of preparation, with cost not really a factor to be considered. There are occasions when I'm grateful for it, but when I retire those are going to be fewer and further between...

.Advanced communications - not

2010-10-30T21:49:00.004Z

Some fairly good examples of 'how not to say it' from the PA system on the Tube (the first three are not new, but are still capable of making me wonder at the thought proceses behind them):

"Please use all available doors" - well, OK, but we'll probably be here until midnight, especially if everyone tries to do this.

"Please use alternate routes" - that doesn't sound like a quick way to get home either...

"Please use all available space" - it's no good, I've tried, but I just can't seem to activate my self-expanding switch.

"The District Line is behind" - behind what?

(Having just left Acton Town on the westbound service) "This is Wood Green" - OK, right line, wrong end (like 20-odd stops away, and getting further by the minute).

"This train is being held here due to a train at Oxford Circus with no movement" - obviously a new model.

This was followed a little later by a very exasperated

"We are still experiencing delays because of this defective train, which is making its way to Liverpool Street where it will be taken out of service AND PUT AWAY IN A SIDING! "- for ever, left up to him, I'd guess.

"Due to a signal failure at Waterloo, the Waterloo & City Line is suspended and a good service is operating on all other lines" - there, I knew it. They don't have enough power to run the whole trainset at once!

And last but certainly not least
"This train will proceed one station at a time" - you don't know how relieved I am to hear that, exciting though it might be to zoom through the seventh dimension over Hammersmith...

Thoughts on a bring- and-share lunch

2010-10-25T20:24:00.004Z

We've just had a bring-and-share lunch at work for one of our interns who's leaving us for her first proper job - congratulations, Kirsty, especially in the current museum climate!

It was a suitably good repast, and a quite glorious mixture - it included a cheese board plus a large bunch of grapes, a large whole pineapple, home-made banoffee cakes, coriander and chilli prawns, home-made pizza, crudités and lots of dips, mediterranean bread, strawberry jam doughnuts, and mozzarella and tomato tart. Apart from bread there really wasn't much left at the end! Oh, and the one thing that my colleagues are quite ludicrously unable to resist (even those who aren't that keen on the sweet stuff, or say that they aren't) is chocolate-covered cinder toffee (aka Crunchie bits).

We've now done enough of these indoor picnics (they're only something we've done fairly recently) that I think we're beginning to know what to bring - there doesn't seem to be much need for bread or meat, for example. We still tend to bring too much food, but too much is better than too little, of course - that just means we graze all day, or the overnight staff get an unexpected bonus, or there's enough food to keep us going into lunch next day.

It is, of course, completely luck of the draw as to the balance of what turns up on the table. In the early days I can remember virtually whole meals of cheese, or cake, and last time we had a lot of falafels (boring) - OK, not exactly a problem, but it's so much more enjoyable when it's more varied. What I particularly like about the idea is that it's so equitable - home-made goodies, smart thinking and sharp-eyed shopping are more likely to bring really good results than just throwing money around.

The Birthweek

2010-10-17T12:47:00.009Z

As my recent birthday didn't work out all that well, I spread it out over the next eight days - so more of a birthweek than a birthday, really. Not that extensions are unheard of anyway - one or two have gone on for a fortnight, and very enjoyable, too.

Anyway, back to this year's. It was a Monday, although I wondered if it really was the right day, because for one thing, the weather was wrong. It was raining. Hard. This is not allowed on my birthday, as my 'natural' present is fine sunny weather - at worst dry with sunny spells, but more usually the sort of glorious autumn weather we got later in the week. Somebody must have miscounted...

It was also a Tube Strike day: I had to take Harry-the-Cat to the vet first thing. Eight thirty came and went, with no sign of the cab I'd booked. Eventually it arrived three-quarters of an hour late - extra traffic on the roads because of the strike, which I guess is unsurprising. Oh well, I'd warned the vets, and they were being very accommodating, so let's see if we can get through this without any more ado. Part way up the main road, the driver's radio station of choice came up with Credence Clearwater Revival's 'Bad Moon on the Rise'. I smiled at the cheerful tune, as ever, and its combination with the disaster-laden lyrics (earthquakes, lightning, hurricanes, floods etc) until we got to "Hope you have got your things together/ Hope you are quite prepared to die". Now look here, guys, that's enough!

I suppose it may account for the fact that when we got there the driver tried to be helpful and back onto the forecourt so I had less far to carry the basket. Unfortunately, he backed into a lamp post instead...fortunately he was doing virtually nil mph, so no injuries. I was lucky, as I had been about to get out, and wasn't wearing a seat belt at that point. He was not lucky, having got a sizeable dent in the back of his people carrier. Oh well, the rest of the day was uneventful: Keith had the bad luck to be unwell, so we ate nothing fancy by way of food, but he still managed to arrange presents and cards for me, which were doubly appreciated, and I did get some other nice ones - thanks, everyone!

It was an odd week - a South Kensington day on the Tuesday; in at the museum on Wednesday, and lunch with a friend at Nico's Grill (steak sandwiches and chips to die for); and a retirement seminar on the Thursday and Friday (held at the National Liberal Club, which has rather stunning Victorian/ Edwardian interiors; the food's not bad, either, notably the fish and chips). Retirement isn't until next year, but it's as well to get any help offered, I figure, and in the current financial climate I can see next year's event being scaled back somewhat.

Having thus barely seen my colleagues, I went out for lunch on the following Monday with the team I work with. Someone suggested Pellici's (trad caff plus native Italian), which we all like. Even the member of the team who was heavily pregnant with twins was particularly keen to go ("It'll be my last chance to go there for a bit" she predicted, all too accurately), and soon we were all excavating large helpings of steak pie etc - there's a plate under there somewhere, I'm sure! The follow up was that the twins started to arrive the next day - must have been the walk back afterwards...or something energising about steak pie ?

(A squirrel in Bethnal Green Gardens ponders his local menu)

More time out of the office

2010-10-09T21:17:00.004Z

Must be something in the air - I'm certainly not seeing that much of my normal working environment at the moment. I was back on the Embankment on Thursday and Friday, and took the opportunity to explore a bit more and take further pictures of Buckingham Gate. I was intrigued by it, as I often am with gates and windows:

Mind, it looks a bit sepulchral from the back, which is how I first saw it, from Buckingham Street:

Altogether more imposing from the front, though:

It was originally the watergate for York House, which was owned at that point by the Villiers family, so yes, clearly designed to indicate that here lived "an enormous swell". And yes, this is the area of the streets that spelled out the name and title of George Villiers Duke of Buckingham - it's a shame that Of Alley got re-named York Place, I say.

Time out of the office

2010-09-29T21:04:00.007Z

Off to Mile End this morning - OK, so it's only one step further on the tube than usual, and surely it's all built-up, grimy inner city blocks? Well, no - just beyond the 'Banana ' Bridge (yes, it has a curved yellow underside) on Mile End Road, is an extensive park with fountains and some rather large iris, as in the photos. (Admittedly I'm cheating a bit here, as they were taken a couple of months ago - it was not good photography weather for most of this morning!)

Mind you, there's no limit to the excitement, really - on Monday afternoon I had to visit a learning charity on the Embankment, and couldn't help but admire Victoria Embankment Gardens, especially the rather flamboyant Buckingham Gate, built in 1626 (pictures later). It's a pity that most people know only the big royal parks, like Green Park, but I do love these smaller ones - so much more character, and often quite unexpected detours on the way through crowded areas that have little or no greenery visible.

The weekend's nosh

2010-09-27T20:56:00.005Z

The weekend's nosh had a distinctively Italian theme, at least in the evenings - hot cross buns, mince pies, and ham and cheese and pickled walnuts with bread the rest of the time being about as English as you can get, after all.

Sunday evening's effort was a mere bacon risotto (and delicious, but quite usual), but Saturday evening's was the piece of resistance, as it were. When last we were in Waitrose, we spotted some pig shins treated in the same way as Osso Bucco, and decided to give them a try. We no longer eat veal, so I refreshed my memory of cooking this dish by consulting the blessed Jane Grigson, whose method I had used in the days of my yoof. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that I couldn't find the recipe under 'O' for Ossi or Osso, but had to look under 'veal' instead...Anyway, it was much as I'd thought, and dead simple: season and brown the slices of shin in olive oil, add a large glass of white wine, cook for a bit, and add a pint of tomato sauce (or a tin of tomatoes and some sliced onion if you're a lazy cook like me). Cook slowly in the oven until done (and scoff with red cabbage and garlic potatoes in this instance). The meat was almost meltingly tender, and we didn't neglect the marrow in the bones, either - I have eaten a great deal worse (and for far more money) in restaurants.

What I did not do was to serve it with chopped parsley and lemon rind on top, as recommended - some of us know when to leave well alone.

A former needlewoman writes...

2010-09-25T17:37:00.002Z

It's a favourite saying of mine that you never know what you've got till you look, but even I was taken aback to realise how much fabric, ribbons, wool etc I've got stashed away. My fit of domestic virtue last week end took me as far as looking at the contents of the wardrobe in the spare room, and I couldn't fail to notice that lot - especially as a cascade of printed cottons, needlecord, silks, dress patterns and a tin of buttons (ouch) fell out onto my head! Fortunately I was sitting on the floor at the time...

Back in my twenties and thirties I made a lot of my own clothes and had time to spare for other hobbies: I spent quite a lot of time on train journeys, didn't have a computer, and hadn't got seriously stuck into the unknown bits of my family history. If I'm realistic, the best thing I can do with most of this stuff is offer it to my colleagues who do craft activities with the families who visit the museum, and any that they don't want can go to the wondrously named Scrap Project - they really do seem able to use most things of this sort, and even come to collect it if we let them know there's a consignment. I'll be keeping the patchwork stuff - oh, and that dress length of Thai silk, though...

Oh, virtue...but only temporarily

2010-09-19T10:29:00.002Z

Yesterday Keith and I and our friend Tom (who does our garden maintenance) set out for Norwich to do a bit of maintenance at Keith's mother's bungalow. It's on the market, so hopefully our work may encourage buyers.

The main effort was with the garden (nine sacks of hedge prunings, dead leaves, dying-off grasses etc) and for good measure I also hoovered the floors inside and wiped down a few surfaces. Mercifully Tom tackled the lawns and hedge - which last is the developer's original planting, and is a densely set mix of privet and cotoneaster, now enthusiastically interwoven. To say that it's resistant would be an understatement - frankly nothing short of a rhinocerous could get through it, and one of the neighbours told us that he'd only been able to remove his with the aid of a mechanical digger!
NB We were clearly not meant to notice how many of the neighbours suddenly found pressing maintenance work of their own at the front of their properties, thus getting themselves a good view of what was going on. Meanwhile Keith went off to visit Dora at her new home, taking the things on her shopping list (all fun stuff to buy, majoring in jam, jelly babies, mango chutney etc).

We picknicked on sandwiches from M&S - it's actually little more expensive than buying the ingredients and saves a whole heap of time - and rewarded ourselves for the day's efforts with an excellent pub dinner at the White Lodge on the road into Attleborough. I felt I'd earned my chips, so to speak, but it's amazing how easy it is to clean a house with no furniture in it, and this surge of housework and gardening maintenance will probably not be translated into a similar effort with our own dez rez...

Walnut and Honey Scones

2010-09-12T16:39:00.000Z

One of my favourite cookery books is 'Farmhouse Cooking' by Mary Norwak and Babs Honey (paperbacked by Sphere Books in 1973). This is sadly (but perhaps unsurprisingly, given the plethora of cookery books published in the last decade or two) out of print.

It's a two-volume set with so many recipes it would probably take some years to work through all of them, but the recipe I've probably used more often than any other is the one for walnut and honey scones:
1 pound of self-raising flour
1 level teaspoon of salt
4 ounces of butter (or margerine, but I prefer butter)
2 level tablespoons of caster sugar
2 ounces of finely chopped walnuts (I usually use 4 ounces!)
2 tablespoons of clear honey
10 tablespoons of cold milk
Sift flour and salt into a basin and rub in the butter. Add the sugar and walnuts and mix to a soft but not sticky dough with the honey and milk. Turn onto a lightly floured surface, knead quickly and roll out to half-inch thickness. Cut into rounds and put on greased baking sheet. Brush tops with milk or beaten egg and bake at 425 degrees F or Gas Mark 7 for 10 minutes.

To my way of thinking this is all easiest done in a food processor: same ingredients and method, but put sugar in with flour, salt and fat, and run for a short time on 5/ medium speed until blended. Add honey, then trickle milk in while running machine on 2/ slow speed until mixed into a ball, and add nuts by hand during the kneading. These are also very good made with four ounces of mixed chopped almonds and glace cherries, with a little almond essence in the milk.

All is safely gathered in...

2010-09-06T21:52:00.004Z

We came back from our short holiday in Rye on Friday still talking about what a good time we'd had with our friends Katy, Tilly, Tallulah and Oscar. It was one of the best visits we've had, and that's saying something.

No sooner were we back than the harvest had to be got in. We've already had the gooseberries, but here are the apples (variety James Grieve) picked by our friend Tom. I gathered what are probably the last of the blackberries, and our neighbours gave us some of their Victoria plums. All very skrumshus, to be Daisy Ashford about it, and free into the bargain! I must try to cook the windfalls soon - my favourite way with cooking apples is to butter them: to a pan of chopped and peeled apples, add a glass of white wine and two good thick slices of salted butter, plus a couple of tablespoons of sugar if known to be wanted for sweet purposes, and cook until softly chunky - for me the butter rounds out the taste of the apple.

Only in this country, no.2

2010-06-14T21:07:00.001Z

Following on from the knitted oranges and lemons at St Martin Orgar, one (or even two) of the less well known things which may be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London. These memorials to dogs of Sir Henry Cole, former Director of the museum, are in the Quadrangle. Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the custom was not kept up...

You mean people still do this?

2010-04-19T21:01:00.004Z

Ooh look, a train station! The Gare du Nord in Paris, to be precise. Not very long ago, either. So, contrary to the current television news coverage, it is still possible to get about without flying.

Listening to BBC Breakfast this morning, it was borne in upon me to what extent the right to take a plane absolutely everywhere really is taken for granted now. Woeful tales of coming from Rome by train, crossing the Channel by boat, and going to Belfast via Scotland (Stranraer) - sheer torture, evidently. Any of these was quite normal even twenty years ago, because flying was so expensive, and they could actually be the most pleasant and meaningful ways of getting there. Yes, I love flying, but my journeys by land and sea were considerable adventures in their own right, and a real indication that I'd travelled hundreds of miles - I don't suppose I'll ever forget the moonlit journey to Stranraer to catch the ferry to Belfast, or getting on board a ferry from a motorboat off the coast of Norway, or seeing the hustle and bustle of Basle station in the early hours of the morning. Clearly sometimes a flight is justified, and I sympathise enormously with those travellers who are now stranded, but maybe we need to go back to the significance of the journey as part of a holiday, rather than just rushing to get there?

Tales from the shredder

2010-02-16T20:13:00.003Z

Last week I spent an extremely therapeutic hour throwing out old documents, and took one sentence at random from each:

After five years a distributed mini and micro computer network would have been set up with 72 terminals. The world has changed. I do not want to say more on this for now. Work and responsibility to be divided equally between workers and management coperating together in close interdependence. What steps can you take to maximise positive and minimise negative impact of personality type mix? In 55 minutes from now there will be a fresh egg affixed by string from the ceiling. Whatever you are looking for, our online search facility provides a quick and easy source of inspiration. Think of the Angel of the North. See Efficiency and Effectiveness.

I'm not sure whether this says a lot or nothing at all!

The last of the snow?

2010-01-17T17:25:00.002Z

I hope so. I hate to sound like the grown-ups in my childhood, but it was an absolute nuisance in the end. Too much ice and not enough snow, for a start. “I ’ave ad eeenough” as one of my V&A colleagues used to declare. Snow in London always gets dirty and slushy very quickly, anyway, even if when it first falls it can look quite picturesque - as here on the palms in Bethnal Green Gardens last Tuesday morning, with the red brick of the Museum in the background for contrast. It did one very useful thing, too, which was to light up the park after sunset – normally the centre is ‘orribly dark then, but people were walking across quite happily. You still run the risk of being shut in for the night, so I wouldn’t, but at least you’d probably be visible to the parks staff who lock up.

Snow out in the ‘West London Alps’ is a bit different – plodding up and down the side road where we live was really quite tiring all week, even when suitably shod, and there were odd patches lingering in the shade until yesterday.

Oranges and Lemons

2010-01-01T21:52:00.003Z

Recently I had to do a BBC Radio London Interview with Max Hutchinson about the origins of the traditional rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons'. This was an outside recording in Martin Lane, in the City of London: I was the first to arrive, and had just succeeded in walking straight past the rendezvous point - what little was left of the church of St Martin Orgar - when my attention was grabbed by this knitted set of oranges and lemons adorning the railings. Only in this country, surely!

'Oranges and Lemons' was always one of my favourites as a child, and not only for "Here comes a chopper to chop off your head" (though that did play a large part). There are several versions of the words, but they all chime - and we concluded that the rhyme had been made up largely for the pure pleasure of the sounds, although it may possibly have had some part of its origin in inter-parish rivalry, perhaps over monetary matters.

Strange Dreams

2009-11-22T11:17:00.001Z

No idea why, but there seems to be a deal of strange dreaming going on here at the moment. My waking dream this morning, for example, involved a team-building exercise for work – not the stuff of strange dreams? You don’t know our training section, but anyway…this one looked like a something out of Hieronymus Bosch crossed with Breughel. A lot of brightly coloured figures were being active in a large grassy landscape – over in the distance, for example, I could see a team of people, including a retired colleague, moving a telegraph pole about while blindfolded by hoods over their heads. “Oh dear” I thought “Halina wanted a peaceful retirement”.

There was a giant flower, a dianthus, I think, which was a meeting point, and I went over there to meet the rest of my team (I think I ended up in the wrong one, but that’s dreams for you). We were given some lines out of context from essays which had been submitted previously and had to do something with them.
Examples included “…1135 was bigger than the previous one…” and (my favourite)
“That way it’s easier for the mice to meet the chickens – and vice versa”. I think I’d better remember that one – it’s slightly zen and the sort of strange thing that occasionally comes in useful.

Family History – the Oxfordshire Connection

2009-08-09T10:39:00.001Z

I have to admit to very much enjoying the Oxfordshire section of my family, about whom I knew very little until recently. Not to take away anything from the long-loved Suffolk and Scottish folk, but it’s nice to have a bit of variety, after all, and this lot certainly provide it.

I’m particularly diverted by my great great great grandmother Elizabeth (née Burman) and her second husband. She was born in 1802, married William Meades and had four children, and was widowed in her early thirties. She then married John Harwood, a stone mason from Charlbury thirteen years her junior, so only about ten years older than her eldest son (William the mason, as I always think of him). She then had three more sons: George who was also a mason; Henry, who was a photographer; and Alfred, who among other things ran an eating house in Shoreditch.

John Harwood may even have been a Freemason as well as a mason, which would have helped, but he does seem to have had the three things I always feel you need to get on in life: ability, persistence and luck. He kept a shop in Chipping Norton as well, and the family, including his younger step-daughter Sarah, evidently helped to run it. It was probably something fairly general to begin with, but by 1871 it was a toy shop (!) and he then went into dealing in furniture. That business lasted for some years, and was evidently so profitable that he and Elizabeth eventually retired to Worcester and lived on their own income. She died there at 89, and at some point he moved back to Chipping Norton, married a sprightly young thing in her late sixties called Hannah, and died aged 81 in 1903.

Obviously the paper records aren’t going to tell you what the man was really like, or how happy he and Elizabeth were. It wasn’t all roses, as their youngest son and some of their grandchildren predeceased them, for example, but some of the later Meades family history is really rather grim, and it makes a pleasant change to read about two people who were apparently prosperous and healthy, and lived to a ripe old age.

Family History and the Census

2009-07-31T12:24:00.000Z

When I’m beavering away at reading Census returns as part of my researches into family history, I often find myself wondering about the event as it actually happened, as well as occasionally puzzling over what was recorded. Were my relatives co-operative or (as I suspect in at least some cases) a bit bolshie about officialdom poking its nose in?

It can’t always have been easy for the enumerators or the enumerated. There were surely many conversations conducted through closed doors, or on the doorstep in inhospitable weather, and/ or with rising irritation on both sides. Even something as simple as having a head cold, or having some teeth missing may have had a bearing on what was heard and recorded. Either or both parties may have been tired, hard of hearing, had an accent the other found difficult to understand, or simply misunderstood the question asked or the answer given. William Meades the stone mason always gives his place of birth as Oxford/ City of Oxford until 1901 when it suddenly becomes Chipping Norton (which is probably correct). Admittedly not that far away, but a sufficiently different response to be surprising. I’m sure that sometimes the question about birthplace was asked or understood to be not ‘where were you born?’ but ‘where are you from?’ – potentially rather different, especially if you’d moved area.

If you add to the complications the larger households ( often including step relatives, in-laws, extended family, and lodgers/ visitors) and the fact that the 19th century respondents were not at all accustomed, as we are, to having to give name, place and date of birth on a regular basis, then it’s no wonder that mistakes were made. William Meades had at least twelve children by two wives (the first of whom died at 32) and lived in at least three places, Oxford, West Ham and Lowestoft, so I’m not entirely surprised that the odd inconsistency creeps in. In an age when personal possession of certificates was unusual you would also be dependent on other people to tell you your correct birth information – and if one or both parents were dead, that simply might not be possible. As I doubt many people bothered to keep a record of things like children’s date and place of birth (or even full names), that’s even more room for variation. I don’t, incidentally, agree that most ordinary people were absolutely illiterate before about 1870, as is often confidently stated. Signing a mark rather than a name when a birth, marriage or death is registered is sometimes cited, but all this demonstrates is that the vicars and registrars at least sometimes made a tactful assumption – and you probably wouldn’t question their authority. Many people knew enough to write their names and read a newspaper, at least, though obviously the standard varied enormously.

All this is without the later mistakes made in transcription, of course – understandable in some cases, though not all. Even if you write Jemima Dunnett as something that looks like ‘Gerunia’ (and it does), it’s never going to be likely that her daughter will be called Manuel (Hannah, actually). But some of it is uncommonly hard to decipher: I always remember an editor’s comment, admittedly about earlier church registers reprinted by the Harleian Society: “the chirography and orthography at this period are both infamous” and feel it’s sometimes equally applicable!

A Rosario by any other name…

2009-07-26T14:25:00.001Z

…though as it happens there isn’t one among my colleagues - but we do run to a good many of the more unusual names. OK, you’d expect that in an internationally known institution, especially as one section has a deliberate policy of taking interns from other countries, but even when you take out people like Rocio (Spanish), Reino (Dutch), Piera (Italian), Cesar (Peruvian) and Metaxia (Greek); and Ananda, Santina and Shalom have left, you’ve still got a good few. While most of them are just not very often met with (Albertina, Boris, Dominica, Ghislaine, Morna, Rhian, Sorrel) there are some I’ve never come across as first names before (Glenna, Gordana, Jevon, Sonnet).

And in an age which appears to prize such things, I think a few must have been made up: Tawn, for example, although we don’t really have anything to beat some I’ve come across doing family record searches (Candelena, Carkus, Catcheta, Zebulon…). I think first prize for unusualness goes to Gates, though, especially as this is as a female name.

Talking of family history, some unusual forenames from the Lowestoft, sorry, Waveney Cemetery database…

Female: Redalpra, Othelia, Keterah, Aholibamah, Scyllia, Okilinia, Claratina, Happy, Malguala, Bondella, Aloysia Jeanette, Germaine, Azalia, Redelpha

Male: Maldwyn, Admiral, Pompa, Alderman, Raisin Punt, Beziah, Julino, Auger, Rebel, Paris

Some of these are just the result of reading the more obscure bits of the Bible, of course: I have a few on my own family tree, including one Jedidah Chamberlain (born about 1726). She fortunately didn’t appear to have any male relatives called Jedediah – now that would have been confusing. And Pompa is most probably Pompey said with a good Suffolk accent!

I particularly enjoyed (and no, not in a sneery way) Narcissi Lenor (Harvey), Wonderful Smith (who was an RNVR Chief Yeoman of Signals) and Edward Christmas White.

Dressed up and dressed down

2009-07-10T13:16:00.002Z

Having cast doubt in an earlier posting on the current British ability to do formal wear really well these days, I’m very cheered by much of the informal clothing I’m seeing around in London this summer. Good colour combinations, comfortably cut (but not scruffy) garments, some imaginative mixes, above all, people actually looking as if they’re enjoying what they’re wearing. I think we’re getting better at this sort of clothing instead, perhaps – and in future commentators will say things like “Oh, yes, that sort of badly put together casual look is typical of 1995–2005, before people learnt to be happier about what they wore”.

Maybe it’s partly because although there are fashionable elements, there isn’t really one distinctively fashionable look any more – you know, more people may actually be wearing what they prefer and what suits them – we can hope so, anyway. Yes, of course there are always some fashion disasters to be seen, but they can be amusing, apart from the fact that if you really want to wear bright orange tights, or your clothes (apparently) inside out, or stick wooden wedges in your shoes (all of which I’ve seen recently) it is your right to do so.

And of course, some fine weather helps, although everybody still seemed to be putting a good face on it on Tuesday, when the heavens opened and all those summery clothes got soaked. I should have known better than to comment to my colleagues as we left work that evening “Oh look, it’s more or less stopped raining…”

Food and Cookery Notes:

2009-07-01T13:51:00.002Z

Some favourite foods: avocado, chocolate, potato, chicken – OK, shades of Nigel Slater, but wotthehell, archie, wotthehell…

Hass avocado for choice – the ones with the knobbly dark skins. Richer flavour and texture, easier to peel, not so difficult to ripen, tending to have smaller stones in relation to the amount of fruit. None of the fancy stuff, thanks (if life’s too short to stuff a mushroom, then it’s definitely too short to torture an avocado). Spooned out with mayonnaise for preference, though very good in salads and sandwiches, of course. Mmmmmm…

Dark chocolate rather than milk or white, although I do love frozen Cadbury’s Caramel* bars and my newsagent keeps a consignment of them in the freezer for me! I’m enough of a chocoholic that I’m not that keen on things made with chocolate, either – there is no substitute for eating the real thing, though I have been known to eat chocolate sandwiches. Sachertorte, brownies, or a rich chocolate mousse are about the best of the exceptions; I don’t like chocolate ice-cream, and think chocolate yoghourt is an abomination!
*Caramel is another favourite, come to think of it

The potato is a wondrous thing, God wot. Chips, jacket potatoes, crisps, mashed, roast, steamed…though I do think getting the right variety for the purpose is important.
Marshall’s potato prejudices: floury potatoes for mashed and jacket (though Cyprus new are OK for jacket). I still buy King Edwards for choice, since if they’re sliced thin, cooked and drained, a lazy cook like me can add a bit of butter and milk and just turn a fork round the pan a few times to get mash, and none of all this cafuffle with ricers, mashers, processors etc. Waxy potatoes (Charlotte, Nicola, Carlingford) for everything else.
Potatoes to avoid, in my not-so-humble opinion: Arran Pilot, Nadine, Estima – all totally tasteless, and Estima seem to take forever to cook, too

I prefer chips to french fries (and definitely don’t count the reconstituted ones you get in burger establishments). I don’t eat crisps very often, but it’s usually salt and vinegar when I do – and no, not balsamic vinegar, for heaven’s sake, nor have I ever got my teeth round all this ‘smoked chicken tikka barbecue cocktail flavour’ rubbish. Mashed potatoes are wonderful provided they’re made with the right kind of potatoes and aren’t processed to death, and can always be added to with garlic, cheese etc. Roast potatoes aren’t actually my favourite form, as they are with so many people – I’d always rather eat baked garlic potatoes or even steamed spuds with mint and butter if we’re talking accompaniments to a joint of meat. Oh, and I always prefer to put some potato in a curry, since apart from liking the taste, it means I can use the water from cooking them in making the curry – nice glossy finish.

Chicken – as long as it’s been allowed to lead a normal life, that is, so it has some flavour and texture, as well as sitting rather better with my conscience. As a child I usually requested a birthday meal of cold chicken, with strawberries for ‘afters’, and I still marginally prefer cold chicken to hot. A good chicken curry with lots of turmeric takes a lot of resisting, though, as does chicken cooked in just about any white wine/ mushroom/ butter sauce.

This drool-fest has probably been brought on by a lunch consisting of convenient but not good quality food – some rather uninspired sandwiches bought in a hurry after a meeting that took up most of the middle of the day.

If you want an excuse…

2009-06-21T22:21:00.002Z

"These underwritten be the perilous days, for to take any sickness in, or be hurt in, or to be wedded on, or to take any journey upon, or to begin any work on, that he would well speed. The number of these days be in the year 32; they be these:
In January be seven: 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 15
In February be three: 6, 7, 18
In March be three: 1, 6, 8
In April be two: 6, 11
In May be three: 5, 6, 7
In June be two: 7, 15
In July be two: 5, 19
In August be two: 15, 19
In September be two: 6, 7
In October be one: 6
In November be two: 15, 16
In December be three: 15, 16, 17"

This is from my commonplace book, and no source is recorded. As I started writing in it in April 1974, and my reading at that point was still pretty eclectic, heaven knows where I found it, and I certainly can’t remember. It sounds like Thomas Tusser, but I suspect it’s actually that prolific author A Non.

I have to say that I've never paid it the slightest attention, beyond being pleased my birthday isn't included!

Costume Curator’s Holiday

2009-06-16T20:28:00.003Z

I couldn’t better Keith’s description of yesterday afternoon’s Garter Service at Windsor Castle (at Zen Mischief), but have to say that I did have a wonderful time pursuing my lifelong habit of looking at what people are wearing.

Fashion commentators tend to agree that the British do formal wear better than casual. Maybe. There were certainly some nice effects, and they weren’t all on the young and slender, either. On the whole I thought the simpler female outfits and hats were the better, like the plain pink linen suit and matching hat on a woman about my age four or five seats to my right. Men had the choice of morning dress or lounge suit – there were some top hats, but not many.

As to the fashion victims, there were some exceedingly irritating pieces of ditsy headgear – I don’t think they merit the word ‘hat’, although one older woman was wearing a frothy confection which looked like vintage 20s or 30s court dress to me, the kind worn with a long dress in the daytime – and it really suited her. There was one hat which had coy veiling effects but did nothing at all to conceal the constant smirk on its wearer’s face, and one which had all the appearance of being decorated with a dead Yorkshire terrier! Frills and feathered hair slides do better on the under-thirties and best of all on the under fifteens, I feel. I’m old-fashioned enough not to like bare arms in a formal religious setting, especially when the dress looks like underwear, like the example in front of me. And one female across the aisle seemed to be having a size competition between her hat, her bosom and her knees!

The official stuff was the most eye-catching, of course. There’s no competing with the likes of Garter robes, Heralds’ tabards, Yeoman Warders' ruffs (glory be, they still prop them up at the back with a piccadill, of which no genuine 16th or 17th century examples survive!), and the like. I look at the band of the Household Cavalry and marvel at the sheer amount of gold braid and wire worked on their outfits – apparently a skill which is now in very short supply.

Apparently the tradition of an annual Garter procession and service only dates back just over 60 years. You’d never think it, is all I can say!

Clothes shopping

2009-06-14T21:47:00.000Z

I decided to devote some energy to clothes shopping yesterday afternoon. While I did actually spend some money – which is far from always the case – I have seldom seen such an acreage of things I would never want to wear.

Apart from a lot of horrible synthetic fabrics and unflattering colours (orange, mustard, chartreuse) a number of my pet hates were visible – frilled T-shirts, tops ornamented with beads and paste ‘gems’, cropped trousers, jackets with ‘skirt’ cuffs. And I especially dislike holding a garment up to the light and being able to see through it (and we’re talking T-shirts and cardigans here, not nighties). Yes, I look better in substantial stuff anyway, but to me flimsy equals bad value. Some of these things are going to look wrecked by the time they’ve been worn twice, and even worse if they’re washed.

K and I are going to a formal occasion (ladies are requested to wear hats!) tomorrow, and I think the newest thing I shall be wearing are my sandals, bought last year. If I could wear shoes at the moment then it would be courts, and the newest thing would probably be my evening jacket, which is about four years old. My dress is circa 1989 Laura Ashley, and I haven’t yet seen another one I like as well – but then contrary to what all the marketing types in the fashion industry would insist, I like my clothes so much (when I do buy them) that I want them to last for ever.

Quite a week…

2009-06-03T22:36:00.004Z

Monday was my last day of the time I’d negotiated working at home, so I took the cats to the vet for their anti-flea shots before starting on the day's tasks. Poor Sal, disturbed from her bed, arrived with a soiled cat box, as so often.

On Tuesday I saw the podiatrist, who seems quite pleased with the foot, then on to the GP’s for the practice nurse to remove a tick that had attached itself to my scalp the day before (presumably in our lovely hairy garden). Ouch. Then on to the main museum for Opinions afternoon.

And today I was back in the office for the first time in a fortnight, apart from one day last week, tackling the Backlog, along with a fairly hefting meeting that had been brought forward by four hours. What a good job I enjoy my work – didn’t it feel odd to be back, though, and it’s only Wednesday…feels more like Friday and three-quarters.

A Minor Procedure

2009-05-27T11:51:00.004Z

Last Tuesday morning it was off to the Clementine Churchill Hospital just up the road for (quote) a minor procedure - the permanent removal, sorry, ablation, of the nail on my right big toe. ‘The Clem’ (as the cab drivers tend to call it) looks exactly like a conference centre, both within and without, all pastel walls and art overkill, with strategically placed plants, but it is both clean and pleasant, with very friendly staff, and I know my way round, give or take a rebuilt bit or two.

Because the procedure only needed a local anaesthetic, it was a live broadcast, as it were: the podiatrist is a cheerful type and chatted away to all of us between bits, including a horror he’d heard recently about an anaesthetised patient coming to in the middle of a foot op and doing a runner! As he said, how do you proceed? You’ve lost the sterile environment, so you can’t just carry on with the op, but because it involved bone breaking, you can’t leave it either. Maybe they should fit operating tables with safety belts…very pre-Victorian!

Anyway, the offending nail (which had regrown from the last time in rather saurian form, as below) went into the bin with a satisfactory clang, and phenol was applied to dissolve the root. Off to Recovery, with coffee and bourbon biscuits, and home again by half past ten. I had to go to a hospital at Bushey to see the podiatrist at his clinic there for a follow-up next morning, and he was almost unbelievably bright and cheerful for eight thirty in the morning – but at least that’s better than the medics who look as though they’re about to take coffin measurements! And the hospital, though equally modern, isn’t as well laid out or as welcoming as ‘the Clem’ – can’t even provide you with old magazines to read while you wait! – so he did redress the balance a bit.

The whole business now is to keep it from getting infected, since it’s an open wound, and bleeds fairly readily – although that is probably not a bad thing at this stage, if rather annoying. I’m working at home at the moment, and am certainly not looking forward to taking it on the tube. I have always so much work to do actually at work, that I shall have to make the attempt tomorrow, but Mr Les is taking me there by car (sadly no longer the Merc, but no matter).

Meanwhile, it is not painful, much to my surprise, especially after the previous experience some years ago – but then that was a purely surgical procedure and the area was probably infected despite a prepatory course of antibiotics. I suspect I shall get heartily bored with wearing sandals over the next six weeks, but at least it’s summer, and it will be brilliant if the treatment works.

The Cat Sat on the Rat (Warning, this is revolting)

2009-05-25T21:30:00.005Z

…But not hard enough – yes, Harry brought us in another live young rat some days ago and laid it down. Although injured, after a moment or two it declined to remain recumbent, and ran for cover in the front room, yelling defiance. Harry found this quite upsetting.

I wasn’t mad keen, either. And I don’t suppose the rat was very happy, come to that, but it did have its revenge later. We both tried to catch it, and in the end I moved quite a bit of stuff around, in an effort to stop it doing something unhandy like getting behind the fish tank, or the books. No luck, anyway, so we both gave up in the end. Harry subsequently brought me a dead rat – his intentions are good, but We Have Been Here Before. “I don’t think that’s the same one, is it, Harry?” “Well. It’s as good as, anyway.” Hmmm.

Sure enough, after a while, I noticed that I was seeing more flies about than I would normally expect. Uh-oh…and then we smelt a (dead) rat, quite literally, so one of the Bank Holiday afternoon’s tasks was to locate it and deal with it. And where had it died? Why, in the middle of the stuff I had piled up on the sofa, of course. Most fortunately, we have a large cotton ‘throw’ over the sofa, which contained most of the (ahem) fall-out. Unfortunately, it’s cream-coloured, but thank heaven for washing machines and modern detergents.

Ewwww, gross!

The Forelog (as opposed to The Prologue)

2009-05-19T21:28:00.002Z

The backlog is what you come back to when you’ve been away, the forelog is what you have to work through before you go (a useful phrase gathered from someone from the publishing trade that we once met on holiday – thank you, Elizabeth). As I’m working at home for a few days consequent upon having a ‘minor procedure’ on my right foot (permanent removal of nail on big toe) (for the second time), I did have a forelog this week.

A large chunk of it consisted of preparatory work for the annual mini audit of the collections: basically, on a notified day, Records Section pick fifty objects at close of play and then come to us next day to see whether those objects (a) are where the record says they are (b) carry a museum number and (c) have a full record. Hours of fun for all concerned…well, it is of course a very important thing to do, and at least we no longer have to do the whole collection every five years. It’s at times like this that the quality (or otherwise) of the computerised record really shows up, though - when you have literally dozens of examples of something on a shelf, ‘Doll, German, 19th century’ isn’t a lot of use, although there are often fuller records in the old registers. Probably the least helpful one we’ve come across so far consisted of the single word ‘Christmas’…

I also had the usual routine things like e-mails and phone calls to respond to, and finished off the day with an interesting challenge, which fell to me to answer as the longest-serving member of staff. Our shop manageress came to find me as she had a customer who had last come to London as a child about twenty five years ago and remembered her grandfather taking her to see a doll exhibition in a museum. But was it our museum she had visited? After a quick look in the exhibitions files (we had two doll exhibitions in the 1980s, apart from the fact that many people can’t differentiate between temporary exhibitions and permanent displays) I went up to see the visitor. It turned out that the museum she had visited had had a carousel in the grounds – not ours, then. I suggested that it was most likely that she had visited the London Toy and Model Museum. “A very tall narrow house full of toys and dolls, near Paddington Station – it had lots of stairs, and you would have had to climb up and down between four floors, from recollection”. “Yes, it was a house – and just as you describe – I’d forgotten the stairs”. That’s the difference between our ages on visiting – her ten year old legs barely noticed, my thirtyish ones were already complaining. Sadly, I couldn’t send her off for a re-visit, as it no longer exists: an independent museum, its owners eventually sold it, and the collections went to Japan, while the house is probably worth six fortunes on the property market even now. But at least these days it’s quite likely that somewhere on the Web she’ll find some references, or other people who remember the place.

A life outside the news

2009-05-18T13:40:00.002Z

It puzzles me sometimes. I watch the news on television, and I often struggle to relate it to real life, at least as lived in our house.

Millions raised for this or that disaster: not from us (we continue to support the charities we normally do – they need to be kept going too).

People are confused – sorry, Confused. It doesn’t matter what it’s about, either. Heaven help us, people are even confused about the effects of alcohol, I don’t know how, considering that never a week goes by without someone, usually several someones, bobbing up to tell us about the awful effects of drinking. It’s even bad for you if you don’t do it, which must be some kind of record. We continue to have a bottle of wine between us a few times a week with food, as we always have.

Everybody is in trouble with debt. Happily, not here, or at least not yet. And not if we can help it.. But then we didn’t even like having a mortgage (which is only organised debt, after all) and paid it off as soon as we could. Cautious Baskets R Us.

Everybody wants a second home, or a property abroad, or property to rent. Really? One house is quite enough to look after, thank you, even before these Credit Crunched times. And you can only live in one at a time, anyway.

Shoppers are having a spending spree on the high street. Or not. Meanwhile, we continue as normal. I still spend money on books and food, and now and again buy a few new clothes or some piece of domestic equipment. But I really prefer to buy things that will last – I ‘ve never been able to understand shopaholicism, except as a mental disorder, and I certainly don’t understand the craze for having everything new all the time.

I don’t think this is just us, either. I guess I first really noticed this phenomenon in a major way in connection with Princess Diana’s death. The country was prostrate with grief, we were told – life had virtually come to a standstill, with memorial tributes and people sobbing into their hankies wherever you went. Well, no, actually: OK, maybe this will be more visible when I get to work. The citizens of Bethnal Green are perhaps more inclined to wear their hearts on their sleeves than many. Nope, not a thing. And this is the area that was brought to a standstill for the Kray brothers’ funerals, too. I gather that when Diana died it was fairly awful for the staff at Kensington Palace, who had to spend hours mopping up tearful visitors, but that was where she lived, after all.

The media do a superb job of making things up out of whole cloth, sometimes.

Paperweights?

2009-05-06T21:10:00.004Z

Lyme Regis harbour at sunset

Notre Dame de Paris

Mallow on the banks of the Tweed

Rubbish on the towpath, Greenford

Photographic magic circles - some more possible paperweights, just as Jilly commented at jillysheep

Newcastle and Berwick

2009-05-03T21:36:00.006Z

What on earth...?

Which is what I found myself wondering when I came across this just now among my photographs from a trip to Newcastle and Berwick a few years ago...Oh yes, now I remember, a sideways view, through a rain-spattered bus window, of the letters STO from the road markings for a Bus Stop!

On the day I went to Berwick (birthplace of my great Grandmother Ann Wood Outlaw - now there's a great surname if you come from the borders!) I was taken by the colourful display of luggage on this stall in the street market, and subsequently made it into a circle using some of the options on PaintShop...

With the Beatles

2009-04-25T21:59:00.002Z

...was the only way I could answer the questions in the Meme KCM tagged me with at Zen Mischief

1. Are you a male or female: Girl
2. Describe yourself: I Am the Walrus
3. How do you feel about yourself: I Feel Fine
4. Describe your parents: That Means a Lot
5. Describe your ex boyfriend/ girlfriends: I Should Have Known Better
6. Describe your current boy/ girl situation: All My Loving
7.Describe your current location: Octopus’s Garden
8.Describe where you want to be: Norwegian Wood
9. Your best friend(s) is/ are: In My Life
10. Your favourite colour is: Yellow Submarine
11.You know that: Tomorrow Never Knows
12. If your life was a television show what would it be called: Eight Days a Week
13. What is Life to You: Magical Mystery Tour
14. What is the best advice you have to give: Let It Be

Reading Up an Appetite

2009-04-13T15:21:00.004Z

Still with Mrs Beeton, the editor of a recent edition of Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Nicola Humble, commented

"Household Management must rank as one of the great unread classics. Everyone has heard of it, a number of people own a copy (often an early twentieth-century edition, much expanded and bearing little relationship to Beeton’s original text), but it is rarely considered as anything other than a culinary curiosity."
(Oxford World’s Classics, 2000)

While I think I’ve never made anything from a Beeton recipe, I’ve certainly enjoyed reading the book many times over the years (and yes, it is an Edwardian version, with colour plates of some incredibly fancy food). But then I shared with my mother the habit of reading cookery books for pleasure rather than use, and still have her reading collection (she didn’t have a using one, while I haven’t quite got to that point). It includes the aforementioned Mrs Beeton, ‘Tante Marie’s French Kitchen’ (even if I never get round to making Gateau St Honoré for my birthday, I’ve imagined it), ‘Continental Cookery for the English Table’ by Edith Siepen (1915) ‘Selfridge’s New Model Cookery’ of 1929 (bring on the Mint Juleps) and the delightfully titled ‘Emelie Waller’s Cookery and Kitchen Book for Slender Purses’ (1935).

Books about food (as opposed to actual cookery books) seem to be rather more usual than they were in my childhood. One recent example I have is Nigel Slater’s ‘Eating for England’ (2007), in which one of the more telling things is his pair of stereotypical lists of British picnic food, then and now: ‘then’ is boiled ham; tongue; salad cream and iceberg lettuce; cress, beetroot, cucumber; bread and butter; lemon barley water, Vimto, Mateus rosé; strawberries and cream; Neapolitan ice-cream. ‘Now’ sounds almost ridiculously decadent, with its chargrilled squid, fresh chillies, rocket; buffalo mozzarella, basil, tomatoes; grilled chicken, olives, lemon, rosemary; focaccia, thin-crust pizza; goats’ cheeses; pannacotta; peaches, melon, raspberries; Prosecco, Pinot Grigio. A bit exaggerated? Sure. But there’s a lot of truth in it, if only that we’re rather used to having all this variety, often at relatively low cost, at any time of the year.

Some of the older examples of books about food strike me as even more remarkable reading, and two by novelists come to mind: Stephen Lister’s ‘Fit for a Bishop: or How to Keep a Fat Priest in Prime Condition’ and Nicolas Freeling’s ‘Kitchen Book’. Lister was bravely writing in the late 1950s, about Mediterranean food, for a UK audience who could buy olive oil only in tiny bottles at the chemist’s, profoundly mistrusted the mere mention of garlic, and had probably never heard of half the foods he mentions – quiche lorraine, anyone? People must have bought it, though, if only as a curiosity, or thinking it was another of his ‘St Monique’ books, as there was a sequel ‘More Fit for a Bishop: How to Maintain Champagne Tastes on a Beer Income’.

While saying that it is not a cookery book, he does include recipes, including an extraordinary-sounding one for a pudding which he tentatively calls Angel’s Whispers and describes as being “coils rather like bedsprings but with a quite different flavour” – basically a batter of egg yolks, evaporated milk and flour, injected in dollops into a pan of smoking hot oil from a syringe, and deep-fried. Edible chemistry, that one, clearly.

Freeling published ‘Kitchen Book’ about twelve years later, when we’d moved on a bit gastronomically, though the British weakness for gimmicky dishes like Chicken Maryland still gave him plenty of scope for satirical comment - and to think we still had the pleasures of baked bean pizza to come...

As usual when reading about the chef’s working life, I really wonder how anybody can stand it at all (Bill Buford’s ‘Heat’, published in 2006, is particularly masochistic in detailing the burns, the cuts, the impossible hours, the abusive bosses). But Freeling’s time in the kitchens of French hotels reads so vividly: the larger than life characters (staff and guests alike), the ingenious way dishes can be constructed from almost nothing (‘rien se perd’), the kitchens and the grandiose buildings, the way the cooks all spoke the kitchen lingua franca called sabir. My favourite chapter describes how in a freak instance they ran out of curry one lunchtime: he asks the Chef Monsieur Bonvalet (sarcastically nicknamed ‘Dad’) if he will declare it unavailable:
“No no – make more – I help”
Might have known – the roast lamb could always be sold again, but when would come another day so golden for making a profit on scraps? Bonepickings were scoured from every corner of the larder, cooks crowded round to Dad’s howls, and the soup-cook’s reserves were raided.
“But I got no more onions”
“Give more colly, va.” He was quartering potatoes with of all things a long ham knife.
“I got no more potatoes”
“Give them rice” screamed Dad. Two boys were sent staggering to the sink with a big pot.
“Come lazy ones, fainéants, fesses d’huitres, no wash off, no put kalt wasser, égouttez, drain and servir like so.”
Curry was served on flat dishes, in soup bowls, in cloche covers; it was war, it was splendid. At three in the afternoon there was rice all over the floor.
“We sell good” said Dad, satisfied for once to his very depths, and bought us all a beer.

Fortunately, during the writing of this blog I have been sustained by lunch of home baked bread and ham, and fourses of coffee and Fudge’s succulent Belgian chocolate florentines…

The trivial round, the common task...

2009-04-05T18:01:00.001Z

In a break in the hen stuff (i e domestic tasks), I wondered what Mrs Beeton recommended for the day…

Monday – The home washing
Tuesday – Sweeping and cleaning of servants’ bedrooms or one or two other rooms, and stairs cleaned down to lower floor
Wednesday – The sweeping and cleaning of best bedrooms, and windows
Thursday – Cleaning and turning out of cupboards, and cleaning of passages and remaining stairs
Friday - Sweeping and cleaning of drawing room, and cleaning of silver
Saturday – Sweeping and cleaning of dining room and kitchen, tins, coppers, &c.
Besides these daily tasks mentioned, must be reckoned the bed-making, the dusting, the cooking and washing-up, and all the hundred and one things that have to be accomplished in the smallest of households…

I like that last comment – it has a slightly exasperated tone about it, and I'm sure young Isabella would rather have been playing the piano. If I have difficulty getting to sleep, I count the number of these sort of things I’ve had to do for the day!

Oh Ingerlund, Are Wunderful, OhIngerlundAreWunderful…

2009-04-02T11:18:00.001Z

Well, OK, maybe it wasn’t a very good idea to go home on the Metropolitan Line last night, as the train passes through Wembley Park tube station, and England were playing the Ukraine at Wembley stadium. Nor was it a good idea to be carrying a large string bag of food, including fruit. But it was interesting. Sort of.

It all began quite quietly, too. A few fans got on at Liverpool Street, normally dressed, but talking a bit louder than usual. I gave them a wide berth, and went to stand by the door. By the time we left King’s Cross we’d been joined by the cabaret , who were wearing white plastic hats with the St George’s cross on them, and jumping up and down and singing at full throttle (with actions). At this point I more or less gave up on The Times crossword and involuntarily went into folklore mode. I was amused to hear that they only reliably knew four tunes:
The J P Sousa march Stars and Stripes Forever
When the Saints Go Marching In
She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes
The National Anthem.

Many of the chants can be adapted to fit any of the first three, and they apparently sang whichever one took the fancy. Unsurprisingly the lyrics aren’t exactly taxing, either: even the infamous ‘Vindaloo’ song, which after all doesn’t consist of very much more, was reduced to the phrases ‘nah nah nah’ and ‘Vindaloo’, sung to Tune 1 (or was it Tune 2? – hard to tell by that stage).
Last night’s favourite (Tune 3, of course) was
There were ten German bombers in the air/ There were ten German bombers in the air
There were ten German Bombers, ten German Bombers, ten German Bombers in the air
And the RAF from England shot them down/ And the RAF from England shot them down/ And the RAF from England, RAF from England, RAF from England shot them down
(definitely ear worm territory, unfortunately).

At Finchley Road, on surged vast numbers of the Desperate (and muscular): We Must Get On This Train, And What’s More We’re Going To. I’m quite strong, and not small, and even I was rolled round and jammed against the partition so that I couldn’t move: how long can you hang on to the shopping but keep the extremities from going numb? Though at least nobody’s hands ended up where they shouldn’t, and it meant that we were no longer being bounced up and down by the singers, since they couldn’t move either. Then the train stopped at Wembley Park, thousands of people got out of my compartment (that’s certainly what it felt like), and the three of us who were left relaxed and sat down…

The elusive grandfather

2009-03-28T23:30:00.004Z

Got him! I finally found the date of death of my paternal grandfather, William George Oldman: registered in Lothingland in the 3rd quarter of 1936. I was beginning to think that he was either immortal, or had spontaneously combusted! Nobody seemed to know exactly when it was that he died, and I’ve more or less run out of relatives to ask.

The death date isn’t that important in the general scheme of things, but it was exasperating (not to mention untidy) for one thing, and for another led me to wonder all sorts of things – had he died outside England, perhaps (since I knew that he used to go as far as Lerwick in the course of his work for a company that supplied coal to the fishing industry), or had he even absconded? If so I would have expected my father to have used it in trying to help heal a rift on the other side of the family.

Heaven knows why the date was so difficult to find: just about every genealogical database I looked in drew a blank, even over a range of years, and I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t find any record of his death. It didn’t help that I had been told that it was about 1932-33, or that William and George were such popular names; even Oldman isn’t that unusual a surname if you come from Norfolk or Suffolk. I’ll probably send off for the death certificate, even though probable cause of death isn’t hard to guess, given his size, evident love of cigarettes, and the fact that heart problems run in the family.

Ah well, now for the other great family mystery – did my grandmother Ayers have any more children after she left my grandfather?

Origami for cats

2009-03-23T21:43:00.003Z

What's a pusser to do when the weather's bad? Sally's predecessor, Pickle, had basketwork as a hobby - undoing it, that is. Sal prefers something a bit less energetic, like rearranging the mats in the bathroom...

Spend money to help the economy? Well, OK, but on what?

2009-03-12T14:52:00.000Z

There’s a nice long list of things I won’t be blowing it on, that’s for sure:

Having my nails wrapped (I don’t even like long nails, really, leave alone having something stuck under them to make me look like some kind of calcium freak)

Having my eyebrows threaded (what???)

Buying a designer handbag (It costs how much? C’mon, it’s a bag, for heaven’s sake. I put bus tickets and sandwich wrappers in it)

Sessions on a sun bed (even leaving out the skin cancer risk) (I am pale and proud of it)

Taking out a gym subscription (I. DO. NOT. DO. EXERCISE) (if you work in a museum, that’s enough to be going on with, frankly)

Taking out a subscription to WeightWatchers (OR DIETS)

Detoxing (an even more stupendous con than designer bags)

Taking up golf (if sailing is standing under a shower tearing up banknotes, I hate to think what golf is)

Vertiginous heels a la Victoria Beckham (as illustrated on Zen Mischief recently – nuf said)

Anything described as (quote) Must Have

I’m sure there are others, too, lots of ‘em. Maybe the peeps at the auction I went to in January had the right idea – though I do begrudge the buyer’s premium and VAT – at least those are things you can take pleasure in owning, and can sell again if you change your mind.

A bit of an enigma

2009-02-28T22:00:00.001Z

Some time ago I happened upon these two pairs of shoes left on the pavement - not outside the mosque, but outside the back gate of the museum. I have no idea why they were left there - I suppose one pair could have been abandoned as uncomfortable, but two? They were gone by the next day...

Fiction: twenty five favourites

2009-02-27T21:42:00.004Z

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813)
Collected Ghost Stories, M R James (1931)
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons (1932)
The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L Sayers (1934)
The Laird and the Lady, Joan Grant (1949)
The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey (1951)
The Tiger in the Smoke, Margery Allingham (1952)
Cotillion, Georgette Heyer (1953)
The Once and Future King, T H White (1958)
Love on a Branch Line, John Hadleigh (1959)
Too Many Ghosts, Paul Gallico (1961)
Tree and Leaf, J R R Tolkien (1964)
The House on the Strand, Daphne du Maurier (1969)
The Ringed Castle, Dorothy Dunnett (1971)
Thomas the Fish, Diana Morgan (1976)
Glimpses of the Moon, Edmund Crispin (1977)
The Roses of Picardie, Simon Raven (1979)
Flying to Nowhere, John Fuller (1983)
Noah’s Ark, Barbara Trapido (1984)
One Thing Leading to Another, Sylvia Townsend Warner (1984)
Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd (1985)
Knots & Crosses, Ian Rankin (1987)
Unaccustomed Spirits, Elizabeth Pewsey (1997)
Unicorn’s Blood, Patricia Finney (1998)
The Book of Dave, Will Self (2006)

That was hard!

Quite a lot of it at one extreme or the other, it appears: happy and joyful (or at least humorous) or distinctly Gothic. It leaves out an awful lot of favourites, like Elizabeth Goudge’s Towers in the Mist, and like Jilly in her jillysheep blog, I often found it difficult to choose among a series or an author’s work, like which of Dorothy Dunnett’s ‘Lymond’ books to go for. And the M R James and the Sylvia Townsend Warner are short stories rather than novels, of course.

Apart from the Will Self, what about the last ten years’ worth, you may ask? That was when I finally tipped over into reading more non-fiction – cue yet another list, perhaps.

Children's Books

2009-02-24T21:15:00.009Z

I'm not absolutely sure, and I've put them in date order because order of preference is too hard, but I think these might be the ones I'd keep from my collection of nigh on two thousand, if I could have only twenty five. It would be a devilish hard choice, mind!

Alice Through the Looking Glass Lewis Carroll (1864)
(or Thogh the Looking Glass, as I was convinced it was called on first reading, aged seven)

Eight Cousins (or possibly An Old-Fashioned Girl) Louisa M Alcott (1875)
(Both much nicer than Little Women, in my not so humble opinion)

Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard Eleanor Farjeon (1921)

Bunkle Butts In M Pardoe (1943)

The Little White Horse Elizabeth Goudge (1946)
(still the favourite!)

The Lost Staircase Elinor M Brent-Dyer (1946)
(Brent-Dyer in a more romantic/ historic mood)

Eudoria’s Broomstick Victor Knowland (1950)

(totally obscure fantasy adventure, but with typically postwar emphasis on food - especially steamed puddings, for some reason)

A Swarm in May William Mayne (1955)

The Warden’s Niece Gillian Avery (1963)
(I had the opportunity of telling the author how much I loved it and she was disappointed because it was one she'd written so long ago!)

Nurse Matilda Christianna Brand (1964)
(always makes me think of my hordes of cousins, knowing the author was similarly placed)

Bottersnikes and Gumbles A S Wakefield (1967)
(more fantasy - the cranky snikes versus the jolly gumbles in the Australian Bush)

The Owl Service Alan Garner (1967)
(still one of the most haunting things I've ever read)

A Wizard of Earthsea Ursula K Le Guin (1968)

Creed Country Jenny Overton (1969)
(family dynamics and historical research, so two favourite themes combined)

Septimus and the Danedyke Mystery Stephen Chance (1971)
(about as much a children's book as Garner's are...)

The Cuckoo Tree Joan Aiken (1971)

The Cricket Term Antonia Forest (1974)

Robinsheugh Eileen Dunlop (1975)
(more time travel, this time in Scotland)

The Bassumtyte Treasure Jane Curry (1978)
(the one I always read when I'm ill, for some reason: it always takes me out of myself, perhaps because of the time travel/ reincarnation element)

A Midsummer Night’s Death K M Peyton (1978)

Fire and Hemlock Diana Wynne Jones (1984)
(technically by far the best of her books - this one's literature, to my mind)

The Hounds of the Morrigan Pat O’Shea (1985)

They Do Things Differently There Jan Mark (1994)
(completely surreal!)

Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code Eoin Colfer (2003)

The New Policeman Kate Thompson (2007)
Celtic fantasy with lots of Irish traditional tunes woven in

What I noticed when I first attempted this exercise was the preponderance of 1960s and 70s titles - so books I'd encountered in my teens and twenties rather than my childhood. Sadly, I notice that I’ve virtually given up on contemporary children’s books, apart from those by authors whose work I already know (always happy to read Diana Wynne Jones, Eoin Colfer, Kate Thompson), which is a great shame. But too many of the current crop are all alike to me – too often I find that fifteen or twenty pages in I’m struggling to remember the characters’ names – and can’t feel very bothered about them anyway. That's a fairly unfortunate observation when you consider that one of my favourite genres is fantasy, which should be memorable if nothing else.

Publishers are far too obviously desperate to find the next J K Rowling. There actually may not be one, guys, or at least not for a bit. I’d say the previous comparable equivalent was Enid Blyton, and she published her last full length work in 1965!

Idiolect – It’s the way I speak, innit?

2009-02-15T22:26:00.001Z

I’ve long been aware of idiolect, or personal vocabulary, and fascinated by it. Not so much words or phrases which are unique to somebody – they’d obviously be part of it, but are only a tiny percentage – but what makes your vocabulary yours. Constructions, choice of words, aberrations, idioms. Shibboleths come into it, too, obviously: many English-speaking Canadians pronounce the word ‘about’ as ‘aboat’ for example, to the extent that if I do hear it I find I’m usually listening to a Canadian, or at least a person who has lived in Canada or spent a lot of time with Canadians. Speaking of which, a former colleague of Keith’s, who was a translator and linguistics expert, once said to me that he would always have known that I was East Anglian. Well, OK, I though, but you have been told, and you’re East Anglian yourself, so that’s hardly surprising. Then he went on to ask – at which point I nearly yelled with surprise, since he had no way of knowing that – “How come you’ve spent so much time with Irish people?”

I do draw the line at pulling out a notebook and writing down what people are saying to me, as was the practice of a German room-mate I once had. Still, that was a question of trying to improve her vocabulary in a foreign language, which is perhaps a bit more understandable (I wonder if she still remembers an expression our Welsh room-mate used of the doctor’s receptionist “Oh she’s a real nasty old piece of knitting”?). That Civil Service hostel I inhabited in my middle twenties certainly had a varied and changing population, and my idiolect still carries some of the souvenirs, such as the useful verb ‘to broddle’ (to dig/ poke about in order to find something), as contributed by my Yorkshire-born friend Sheila Mary.

I’m not sure that that one hasn’t passed into the ecolect (what the household speaks), actually. In almost thirty years it’s inevitable that Keith and I have caught usages such as ‘a driddle’, ‘never ask’, ‘meesen’ (mice), ‘chop chop’ and ‘no-brainer; from each other, and coined a few between us. “What is Termite soup?” asked our friend Victor, looking bemusedly at the joint shopping list. But then Victor himself was one of those astonishing people who not only speak several languages, and manage to keep them separate, but can just switch in and out of them. My spoken idiolect has too much mixing of languages in it, and definitely too many bastardisations (even if they are deliberate). Trouble is, these things can be surprisingly memorable. Typos from letters of enquiry, for example, such as musume, everlope and samp. And then there are the ones which start as mis-read words and then stick – that’s a category all on its own, though I know I’m not alone there. Yesterday a friend mis-read ‘Pie of the Day’ as ‘Pig of the Day’ on a menu, for example, and we all agreed that his version sounded much better…

A little light shopping

2009-01-25T16:19:00.004Z

It was off to Christie’s at South Kensington for a bit last week (viewing on Monday and bidding on Tuesday and Wednesday). I’ve been bidding at sales for about thirty years, but this was a bit out of the ordinary, especially for one person’s collection: there was an overwhelming amount of stuff there, with everything from a stately Elizabethan court portrait, seventeenth century beds and medieval stained glass panels to pincushions, irons and kitchen ladles. Roger Warner (1913-2008) was a well-known and highly respected antiques dealer, this was all from his house in Oxfordshire, and my first reaction was “Was there anything (in the fine and decorative arts) that this man didn’t collect?” Not really…fortunately my colleagues and I had combed through the lusciously illustrated catalogue well in advance, and honed it down to just four lots out of six hundred and odd. Yes, that’s hard – but having limited (and public) money to spend concentrates the mind wonderfully…

Come Tuesday morning and I decided to be there early as usual for the 10.30 start: even after all these years, bidding on behalf of the museum is still a bit nerve-wracking (will I miss the right thing, bid for the wrong thing, overbid, or even just fail?) and I don’t need any extra pressure from being late. And that was just as well – these days prior registration is compulsory, and as I was bidding on behalf of a third party there were extra arrangements to put in place. By 10.30 the queue at the registration desk was still so long as to need a delay in the start of the sale so that everybody could be dealt with. I was also glad that I’d asked about the lunch break beforehand, as I was warned that there probably wouldn’t be one. Cue extra supplies, and gratefulness that there are loos on the premises!

We got the flavour of the day right at the start when Lot 1, an oak chest of ca 1540, went for a hammer price of the top of its estimate (£6000). I usually feel a bit sorry for the vendors of the first few lots, as bidding often takes a while to get going, but not on this occasion. It got absolutely lunatic in places – as the day progressed, things routinely went for double (and in some cases ten times) the top of their estimates. Naturally, all this extra interest slowed things up a bit, especially with telephone and online bidding included. Online bidding has speeded up considerably since it was introduced, but two telephone bidders against each other is the pits – so painfully slow and long drawn-out that I’ve known the auctioneer to recommend “Talk among yourselves” to those present. Telephone bidders always seem to have bottomless pockets, too, and I’m sure some of it is not so much “I really want that” as “I really don’t want X to have it”. I left at about five o’clock and they were still hard at it (I had visions of it going on all evening, which it may well have done).

I’d achieved the first of our items, a deportment board, fairly early on, and for just over half of what we’d allowed – oh good. I’d missed acquiring the second (a Victorian painting of a girl with a doll) by a country mile, as it went for three times its upper estimate – oh bad. Never mind, I consoled myself, it would have needed some conservation, and the money will give me a bit more leeway (with my boss’s agreement) for the following day's bids of 18th century layette pincushions (above) and a lavishly equipped 19th century educational specimen box – and although things had calmed down considerably by then, and I was successful with both bids, I needed it. I mean, I know early 18th century furniture is much rarer than most people realise, but I still have no idea why somebody paid £3000 (nearly £4000 when you add the buyer’s premium and VAT) for a single 1720 chair, and I was not alone in this. The bidding on the first day apparently amounted to £1.6 million pounds, and I really don’t want to hear the words ‘credit crunch’ again any time soon…

Short memories?

2009-01-11T14:45:00.004Z

It isn't just that so many people are carrying on something chronic about the cold weather - look, it's winter, OK? I am beginning to think that ninety-five percent of the populace has no long-term memory left, or at least nothing that will take them back beyond, say, two years without some form of assistance. Even the elder brethren can't seem to remember that we had snow in South-east England only a few years ago (here's Sally investigating in the garden in 2004) , leave alone anything further back, like the hard winter of 1962-63, or as Simon Barnes pointed out the other day in the Times, 1947.

But it's not just the weather. All sorts of things have dropped outside the radar, from mortgages not being easy to get (even from your own bank or building society) to the idea that a long-established business might fail or that all foods are not always available all the year round at a price to suit every customer's budget. The media have always been keen to talk about "Thatcher's children" - I wonder has the time come to talk of "Blair's children" - those who instinctively dislike the past and its lessons, and think only of tomorrow and the new credit card?

Autumn Colour II

2009-01-05T21:00:00.003Z

...and one of the most colourful of the acers. This one was an end of season bargain which we thought might not even survive when we unwrapped it!

Autumn Colour

2009-01-04T22:47:00.002Z

For a bit of winter cheer - the crab apple in the garden during autumn.

The Yule Days

2008-12-30T22:44:00.001Z

This Scottish equivalent of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ is from Popular Rhymes of Scotland by Robert Chambers (1870 version, though I would think the rhyme is much older than that). I’ve often thought that both songs could have served as a challenge in how well Christmas/ Yule revellers could carry their drink – especially as most people can’t even get the Twelve Days of Christmas straight when sober…

The king sent his lady on the first Yule Day
A papingo-aye*.
Who learns my carol and carries it away?

So far so easy. But by the end of the song, we’re up to

The king sent his lady on the thirteenth Yule Day
Three stalks o’ merry corn, three maids a-merry dancing,
Three hinds a-merry hunting, an Arabian baboon**,
Three swans a-merry swimming,
Three ducks a-merry laying, a bull that was brown,
Three goldspinks, three starlings, a goose that was gray,
Three plovers, three partridges, a papingo-aye.
Who learns my carol and carries it away?

*a parrot (as you do)

** don’t ask

And a Happy New Year to all our readers…

Music on the Brain

2008-12-03T15:36:00.003Z

This is something I’ve had for years – the tune or song or poem, usually in fragmentary form, that keeps repeating insistently in one’s head - though I only recently found out the word for it: earworm, from the German ohrwurm. Well, yes, OK, that’s how it gets in there in the first place, but that’s not how it actually works, of course. The thing is in your mind, not your ear.

Dr James Kellaris of the University of Cincinnati is credited with the Cognitive Itch theory – some tunes have properties which act on the brain as histamines do on the skin, and one instinctively ‘scratches’ (replicates) them. I’m marginally more convinced by Daniel Wegner’s theory of ironic process, which suggests a failure of mental control – in order to get the tune off the brain, you have to repeat it. But even that doesn’t sound like the whole story, if only because not all earworms, or indeed earworm hearers, are alike.

Some people call it ‘last tune’ syndrome because it often is the last one that you heard – but not necessarily. A true, really persistent, damn-this-bloody-tune-go-away earworm can be unbelievably hard to shift, even if you hear something else you prefer. Some people find that completing it (or listening to a complete version of it) does the trick; others manage to substitute a different one, or leave it to go away – but there’s no foolproof solution and probably no such thing as a welcome earworm in the end. I doubt that there’s anything that I could bear to hear in perpetuity, not even the tunes in Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.

In general the more persistent ones are well known to the hearer. You might get an attractive new tune in there, and even encourage it, but unless you hear it a quite a bit more very soon, it will often be ousted fairly quickly by something easier to remember. ‘Lisa Lân’, a Welsh folk song that I’d never heard before, though I managed to keep it for a while, was rapidly replaced by two much more familiar Irish ones with some similarities of tune and theme: ‘My Lagan Love’ and ‘She Moved Through the Fair’ (and yes, they were still there the next morning, along with bits of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, which is always quite persistent once it occurs).

The worst of it is when it’s something that you really can’t stand in the first place. There are some I run a million miles from, metaphorically speaking, and am courting disaster by even writing about. ‘Sugar Sugar’ by the Archies is one, and Middle of the Road’s ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’; just about anything by Abba is a risk, though I don’t mind those, really, but top of the list for me is almost certainly The Carpenters’ ‘Goodbye to Love’ – “No one ever cared if I should live or die…There are no tomorrows for this heart of mine” (why not just go and slit your wrists now?). Bah, humbug! I hate it!

A former colleague, of whom I was otherwise very fond, used to drive me distracted by singing her earworm out loud, probably quite unconsciously. She had just the one, and it was The Inkspots’ 1940s hit ‘I don’t want to set the world on fire’ – which would have been fine, if a bit repetitious, but it was just that one line of it, nothing more. One day I did try joining in with the next line to see if it would jog her a bit further, but it was no use. She was stuck in that particular groove and we just had to hope that the Welfare Officer would never hear her…

Why?

2008-12-01T17:38:00.001Z

You do have to wonder about what some people do, but still I’d like to know:

Why put on a pair of smart new (usually black) shoes or boots and leave the whopping great white price stickers on the soles for the rest of us to see?

Why stand on a cliff edge or go up a church tower if you know you can’t stand heights and don’t have to be there?

Or continue watching a television programme or reading a book that offends?

Why break the news of your parent’s death to a family friend by inscribing it in a birthday card you send them, especially when prefaced “I know you won’t like to hear it this way, but…”

Why stop the minute you step off an escalator? It’s about as sensible as slamming on the brakes on a motorway, especially without checking who’s behind – what are they supposed to do to stop being moved forward? For those behind the one who suddenly stops, it’s frightening enough on a short escalator (in a department store, for example) and bloody terrifying on a long one, like some of the London Underground ones. And infinitely worse going up, of course – much further to fall. And before anyone says it, in my experience it never is people with e g mobility difficulties or small children who are the perpetrators.

Why tell a secret to someone at the top of your voice in public? An extreme version of this is the person who feigns sick leave and then brags about it on the web, or even worse, the person who is being interviewed for television, and naively adds at the end of some indiscreet comment “But I could never tell my mother/ husband/ employer/ whoever” – oh, right, but haven’t you just done that? Even if they’re not watching, somebody will tell them. It’s not advisable to assume nobody can understand you, just because you’re not speaking the language of the country you’re in, or you’re with non-natives. Yelling secrets to somebody above the noise of the tube or train isn’t terribly bright, either: “Do you know X?” ”Ooh, yes, I had a fling with him once – but don’t tell anybody!!!” Don’t tell anybody? Don’t tell anybody???? She’s just told a hundred people, but her mate’s supposed to be sworn to secrecy? Of course a carriage full of passengers doesn’t count, and it won’t mean anything to anyone. Except that it may well do…

If Only It Were Always That Easy…

2008-11-16T12:26:00.001Z

Yesterday morning I finally got round to taking the cats to the vet for their annual jabs and check-up, and six-monthly anti-flea shots. I always do this with a slight reluctance, since it can be quite an undertaking. For one thing, these days the vets have an appointments-only system. Can’t blame them for that, as the surgery almost always used to overrun, but it does mean that it matters if we’re late or don’t make it (can’t find cats, cab arrives late or not at all). It also means doing it on a Saturday (and they, and we, get very booked up) or taking half a day’s leave because my place of work is the other side of London and I can’t otherwise get home in time (OK, so that’s my choice). Then Sally finds the whole business so stressful that she often arrives with a soiled container, which I feel equally awful about on three counts: the cab driver has to get rid of the smell from his vehicle, the nurses always clean and reline the container (even to the extent of replacing the towel once recently), and it causes Sal extra distress. So I starve them after midnight and try to encourage use of a soil tray before we go, all of which they are deeply unimpressed by. Then the appointments tend to run late, which means sending the cab driver away and often having to wait quite a while for another when we’ve finished.

But anyway. Yesterday it went just about as smoothly as could be. Found and boxed the cats – OK, so it took two of us, and there had to be Deep Excavations (Sally from behind a pile of boxes, Harry from behind the television). And just how is it that when you try to put them in their carriers, the cats always have eight legs apiece, each of which is at least a foot long and at right angles to their bodies? But we set off in good time (even if I did forget their record books in the euphoria), arrived early with no mishaps of any kind, and were seen early, too, for oce. They haven’t put on any weight, despite eating for England at the moment, and passed their checkups apart from the fact that Sally will need a tooth extracting (Louise the vet tells me that there have been attempts to fill cats’ teeth, but that they tend to lick the fillings out!). Harry (world’s huggiest cat) had his usual fan club session with the female members of staff, who fell for him in a big way earlier this year when he spent some weeks with them having a bladder problem sorted out. A short wait for our driver to return, we arrived back and the mogs were tucking into breakfast, all within an hour of leaving!

I’m sure that at least part of what helped was that we were being chauffeured by our friend Les, who drives a Mercedes, thus providing a smooth ride. You can’t say our cats don’t have good taste!

Autumn Bites!

2008-11-08T21:37:00.000Z

Autumn Bites!

As the weather has been so iffy recently (it’s a bit much when we can’t even have a decent September!), time to bring on the appropriate sustenance. Recently on the menu here:

‘Beef and Salad’ casserole (beef, tomatoes, peppers, fennel, onions, garlic)
Garlic potatoes
Red cabbage
Ham and pasta, with olives, tomatoes, garlic
Jacket potatoes with chilli beef
Home-made soup
Vegetable curry (has to include potatoes and butterbeans)
Lemony roast chicken
Mince pies
Apple and cherry brandy crumble (seriously good!)

Which reminds me - mince pies, like hot cross buns, can be bought all year round these days, of course. An interesting way of wiping out a seasonal custom!

Outside in

2008-10-20T13:41:00.002Z

As the media hunts desperately for some way of refuting the charge that they are stoking up the economic crisis, and the accompanying anxiety, alarm and despair, I thought I’d try something a bit more traditional.

On my desk at work is a Thorson’s pocket edition of some of the Dalai Lama’s writings, and I sometimes open it at random, in the way rural communities used to use their Bibles. The results are never less than interesting, and sometimes strikingly appropriate – unsurprisingly, as this is a form of dowsing “Please give me what I need”. Today I found myself reading a passage which contained the following

…No matter how forceful [suffering and anxiety] is, it cannot destroy the supreme source of my happiness, which is my calmness of mind. This is something an external enemy cannot destroy. Our country can be invaded, our possessions can be destroyed, our friends can be killed, but these are secondary for our mental happiness….

He goes on to say that the ultimate source of mental happiness is a person’s peace of mind, and the only thing which can destroy that is their anger – very Buddhist, yes, and it takes a lot more detachment than many of us have (me included) to achieve that level of serenity. The Christian approach is God-centred – external but not of this world: my Bible similarly opened at random came up with “I will mention the loving kindnesses of the Lord…in all their affliction he was afflicted…and he bare them and carried them all the days of old” (Isaiah chapter 63). Or if u knowz Lolcat , hooz God is Ceilin(g) Cat:
Im gonna tell ov teh kindnesez ov the lord…In all their distres he 2 wuz distresd…He liftd them up an carrid them All the dais ov old…”

But whatever you feed it with, my instincts are that the mechanism for happiness is internal, which is by no means confined to Buddhism. My personal anthology also contains a Wiccan tenet that I wrote there many years ago:

If ye find it not within, so ye shall find it not without.

In the first year at Grammar School in 1963

2008-10-06T20:54:00.003Z

So many new things to learn: parsing, theorems, contours, declensions, hockey, javelin-throwing, threading a sewing machine…and later on, magnetic poles, precipitation, dinghy sailing, paper sculpture, soused herrings, and Rumanian dancing, among other things.

Recently I managed to decipher our first year timetable from a sheet in my geometry set*, and it looks pretty hefting stuff for a bunch of eleven-year-olds. Day 1 was the real killer: Maths, Geography, French, History, Latin, English, and more French, all in the same room. The other days did at least have a small amount of moving about, and some less academic subjects (double Art on Day 2, Singing and PE on 3, Art and Music on 4, double Games on 5, and double Needlework on 6, although it’s debatable how much light relief some of that was). This was a rotating timetable, which I can't believe was unique to my school, but I've never heard of anyone else using it: first week days 1-5, second week days 61234, and so on).

*The geometry set was, needless to state, a proper one, with a pair of compasses which had a good long sharp metal point, and a pair of dividers which had two good long sharp metal points (all the better to prod things with, my dear). I recently bought the current version by the same maker (Helix) – the compasses have a pathetically tiny point, to the extent that I’m surprised it holds position on the paper at all, and the dividers are conspicuous by their absence. It does at least still come in a metal box, not a plastic one, which was a pleasant surprise, although you don’t get the nice stencil with the retorts and flasks and things any more (presumably because nobody in their right minds is going to let the little dears loose with real scientific experiments and equipment these days).

Months and Days

2008-10-06T19:56:00.000Z

Oh dear – time running away again. I’d intended to post these weeks ago…

There is a whole clutch of rhymes, sayings and beliefs relating to months and days, apart from the well-known ‘Thirty days hath September’ and Monday’s child is fair of face’:

A man had better ne’er been born
Than to have his nails on a Sunday shorn;
Cut them on Monday, cut them for health;
Cut them on Tuesday, cut them for wealth;
Cut them on Wednesday, cut them for news;
Cut them on Thursday for a new pair of shoes;
Cut them on Friday, cut them for Sorrow;
Cut them on Saturday, see your sweetheart tomorrow

Some, but not all of which are similar to a rhyme about days for marrying:

Monday for health,
Tuesday for wealth,
Wednesday the best day of all.
Thursday for crosses,
Friday for losses,
Saturday no luck at all.

While we’re heading for the church (or equivalent):

A January bride will be a prudent housewife and sweet of temper
A February bride will be a gentle and affectionate wife and a loving mother
A March bride will be a frivolous chattermag, given to quarrelling
An April bride is inconstant, not overwise, and only fairly good looking
A May bride is fair of face, sweet-tempered, and contented
A June bride is impetuous and open-handed
A July bride is handsome but quick of temper
An August bride is sweet-tempered and active
A September bride is discreet and forthcoming, beloved of all
An October bride is fair of face, affectionate but jealous
A November bride is open-handed and kind-hearted but inclined to be lawless
A December bride is graceful in person, fond of novelty, fascinating but a spendthrift

And if you want to wash your best clothes for the occasion:

They that wash on Monday have all the week to dry;
They that wash on Tuesday, they have pretty nigh;
They that wash on Wednesady have half the week past;
They that wash on Thursday are pretty near the last;
They that wash on Friday wash for need;
And they that wash on Saturday are sluts indeed.

Whatever would Mrs Beeton have said?

A few more scribblings from the notebook

2008-07-30T22:28:00.001Z

Odd words (more than they look, perhaps?)
A-bun-dance
Car-nation
Leg-end
Mode-sty
Ava-rice
Re-pud-i-ate

Places which are things:
Ash, Ebony, Rye, Beer, Ore, Ham, Stone, Cork, Rock, Bean, Minster, Capstone, Tong, Wainscot, Boot, Leek…and of course, Chipshop.

Places which sound like people:
Leonard Stanley, Margaret Marsh, Terry Lugg, George Nympton, Cherry Hinton, Edith Weston, Martin Husingtree.

Prompted by Jilly over at Jillysheep writing about odd names, some right names for the job (all encountered in the course of my first job many years ago):
Mr Roach the fisherman, Mr Stamp the postman, Mrs Waterman the baths attendant, Mrs Nursey the child-minder, Mr Highway the driving instructor, Mr Lockett the prison warder…

Tiger Tails, anyone?

2008-07-23T22:55:00.000Z

The other day I came across a list of what the tuck shop at my school stocked in May 1968:

Crisps (plain, cheese and onion, salt and vinegar, Oxo, chicken, and smoky bacon)
Wagon Wheels
Captain Scarlet biscuits
Chocolate digestive biscuits (plain and milk)
Capri biscuits
‘Goblins’
‘Tiger Tails’
(Twiglets too, sometimes)

So that’s the healthy eating options taken care of, then…

Not that school dinners at the time were a whole lot better, as just about anyone who ate them will remember. They should really have been described as ‘heritage food’, as they still fairly faithfully reflected their Edwardian origins:

Monday: Liver and bacon, potatoes, carrots; jam tart, custard
Tuesday: Rissole, potatoes, peas; jam roly poly, custard
Wednesday: Shepherd’s pie, swede; blancmange
Thursday: Steak and kidney pie, potatoes, carrots; rice and apple
Friday: Fish and chips; fruit salad, custard

But then as now, the financial pressures on the school cooks who fed us were considerable. They had derisory budgets to buy the food with, and perhaps it was no surprise that they occasionally came up with the odd, well, oddity, such as hamburger shortcake (scones on greasy mince) or fruit cocktail flan (a few pieces of tinned fruit in a glutinous sauce on stiff pastry). They did some good things too - the fish wasn’t bad, actually, and always fresh, as school was in the east coast port of Lowestoft; but my real favourite was cheese and potato pie, which was so smooth I think it must have been made with mashed potato and cheese sauce.

Anyway, see you at the tuck shop afterwards…

2008-07-06T23:04:00.001Z

A few translations, or what you see is not always what you get…

Occasionally it’s handy to wrap up what you’re saying, as in

Thank you for your helpful fax/ letter/ e-mail [You mean I’ve got to do something about this?]

Sorry, I evidently didn’t explain that well [Listen up, Cloth-Ears]

We’re having limited success with x [It isn’t working]

It was good of you to go into so much detail [I can’t believe that anyone can whinge at such length]

See what support X needs [Find out what X is doing and stop him or her]

I feel someone else should be given the chance to do this [I don’t want to]

Can you improve on that price, please? [I want to pay less]

(Special one for contractors, this) Can I help you? [Who the hell are you and what the blazes do you think you’re doing?]

2008-07-03T21:35:00.004Z

A book meme

which kcm at Zen Mischief Weblog has tagged me to complete:

So many contenders for most of these, mind…

One book that changed your life: The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, first read as a library book when I was eight, and many times since. It was perfect for me, and the first book that I loved so much that I wanted to buy it for myself.

One book that you have read more than once: Cotillion by Georgette Heyer. Funny and well plotted and the (early 19th century) clothes worn and bought by the characters are to die for!

One book that you would want on a desert island: The King's England, edited by Arthur Mee (all forty-odd volumes!). If restricted to a single volume, then one of John Hadfield’s anthologies such as A Book of Beauty.

One book that made you laugh: Where Did It All Go Right? by Andrew Collins, about being a child in the 1970s.

One book that made you cry: Rose in Bloom by Louisa M Alcott – the deathbed scene is a real three hanky job.

One book you can’t read: War and Peace, though admittedly it’s a long time since I tried.

One book you wish you'd written: Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones.

One book you wish had never been written: I wouldn’t say that of any book, but there are some I wish I’d never read, like The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, which I find profoundly disturbing. If that’s a classic children’s book, thank goodness I never came across it as a child!

One book you're reading: Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

One book you're going to read: Barnard Letters, edited by Anthony Powell

2008-06-21T09:56:00.001Z

21st JUNE 2008

Having said previously that parts of Barons Court seemed so dead, I suspect that some of the problem is that there aren’t enough of the useful businesses that help to define an area and make a community flourish: no banks/ building societies, no post office, no branches of chain stores like Boots or Woolworths. I don’t entirely agree with those who wring their hands over the sameness of our high streets: we need a balance of individual shops and the things you find everywhere. If you don’t have any of the latter, people tend to shop outside the area, which just sends it further into what my mother used to describe as ‘bankruptcy terrace’ syndrome – where no business tends to thrive, large numbers of shops stand empty and increasingly shabby, and anyone trying to open a new one is unlikely to succeed. The other thing I find over-simplistic in all of this is the idea that lots of independent shops must mean that the area is well provided for. Again, we need balance: if what you have is primarily ‘pound shops’ and general dealers, that’s just as bad as too many supermarkets and chain stores. And what many areas are now missing are the really useful independent shops which often provide a far better service than the supermarkets and chain stores anyway: bakers, butchers, chemists, greengrocers, shoe shops, and so on.

Still, it’s no good just blaming Tesco and Starbucks. If we want something different, I think something needs to be done about the costly bureaucracy independent retailers have to cope with. I grew up with my parents’ floristry business, and it was bad then, but it’s worse now: VAT returns, punitive bank charges, credit card fraud and the more insane bits of hygiene and health and safety legislation, to name but some of what faces the local shopkeeper.

Finally, on a more positive note, and to give credit where it’s due, there’s an absolutely cracking independent butcher’s shop close to Barons Court station: H G Walter, in Palliser Road (020 7385 6466). It cheered me up no end to walk in there and see the display of superb organic meat, ranging from the beautiful plain steaks and joints (like venison from Windsor Great Park) to the restaurant type fancied-up (stuffed noisettes of lamb etc). Not as cheap as the supermarket, of course, but handled with much more respect throughout – and I don’t think good meat should be cheap because that invariably means poorer quality rearing. Good value is more to the point: a small amount of their meat would satisfy even a hungry appetite far better than a large amount of the factory-reared stuff, and if necessary you accompany it with other filling things like bean salad or more veg.

9 JUNE 2008

2008-06-09T22:00:00.002Z

My, how time flies when you’re enjoying yourself! That’s right, work has just got in the way of normal life for some months. Though I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit that I have enjoyed some of it at least: rediscovering some skills I haven’t used for some time and actually finishing two major (book-related) projects, for instance. There was also the challenge of working for a month off-site and fitting into a different group of colleagues. Character-forming, eh?

But it was weird the way it ate into real life, cumulatively, sneakily. In the end I found myself with no time or energy to do a lot of the things I would normally do: go to the bank, get my hair cut, shop for anything other than essentials, go out at lunchtime to get something to eat and some fresh air. And the second project, the off-site one, left me with a deep loathing of the trek between Barons Court tube station and Blythe Road, which is odd, because I usually enjoy walking, and even took some photos of the area. I’ve been over there briefly before and remember I disliked it then, though not as much – but the area just seems so dead. As far as I know, practically the whole of Kensington was fields and market gardens until the mid 19th century, but undoubtedly Peter Ackroyd is right and areas of London have distinct atmospheres, some of which are easier to live with than others. This time it eventually made me explore a bit and find other routes I’m happier with.

2007-03-11T16:47:00.000Z

Where to start? Good question. Maybe for the sake of getting something down I'll put in a few of the overhearings and observations that have amused/ startled me:

There was this vision walking into the tube station ahead of me a few weeks ago: bit like a younger version of Gregor Fisher, but with a mohican haircut and pubic beard, and sundry piercings about the head. He wore bondage trousers (the sort with a back flap and a strap connecting the legs) and hefting boots with a good deal of metalware about them. The first woman I came to by the ticket office looked a bit shellshocked, and I nodded in his direction as he moved toward the escalator and commented "Quite a vision, eh?" She nodded, and then said impressively "But did you see the front?" "No, I was behind him" Her eyes widened and she said " 'E 'ad a fong!" I possibly looked a bit blank, so she added "Y'know, like a woman's fong ("Oh, a thong, I see") - and it was all spiked!!!!" "Ooer - bit of a challenge, then?" I saw the front later on, when I got down to the platform, and it wasn't so much a fong as a pair of trunks with spikes, including between the legs, apparently. Come to think of it, I had noticed that he had a particularly wide-legged rolling walk, so I suppose that was the cause...

The weather not having been too brilliant last week, a concerned dog owner was moved to ask someone he met in the street " 'Ere, mate wheredya get ya dog's coat?" (as in waterproof fabric, not fur). "Scotland" came the reply. "I 'adn't fought of going that far" "No, tell yer what, there's one place I know does 'em for awsses, an' they do 'em for dogs an' all" "Awsses?" "Yeah, you know, like them blankets they put over 'em - they do 'em smaller for dogs".

I love quasi-official notices - the sort of thing that somebody in management concocts and puts up in a hurry before someone can complain, or worse, sue, but which nobody puts through a sense check first:
"The main public toilets on the station are closed from 8th March for approximately eight weeks whilst major refurbishment is taking place. Alternative facilities are available in the roadway by Platform 1"
(Liverpool Street station)
"As a result of vandalism, please take extra care when using the station footbridge"
(Greenford Station). (Note: This is extreme vandalism - Greenford station doesn't have a footbridge...)