Eudoria's Broomstick

'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

(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

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

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

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

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

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...