Cornflower

Bits and pieces, ups and downs

     A busy week here made all the more trying by over-zealous workmen accidentally breaking through one of our ceilings. Yes, what was up is now down! The hole (very ugly hence no picture, but it's just to the left of the rose, above) isn't huge, though the amount of dust and rubble it created was and much of it landed on our off-white settee whose covers I had washed only the previous day. Such is life. As I write, the plasterer is here, and the painter will have to follow.

     That was a down, but up-wise, yesterday's sock is progressing and I think I've got the leaf motif centred on the instep which is what I'd intended - a minor triumph to keep me going. Zoe asked about the purple needles I'm using:

They are Boye dpns (2.75mm) and I got them from Natalie at The Yarn Yard, where I also got this:

scrumptiously soft and sproingy merino in a shade called Jadestone.

Those are perfect colours for William who will at last get something hand-knitted for him by his mother.

      Talking of mothers doing things for their children, has anyone else been asked this morning to fit in a dash to a shop which sells cat ears? Harriet is going 'guising' this evening (though it's 'trick or treating' in her parlance) and lacks ears for her black cat outfit. She tells me she tried to make a set, along with a bat, in design technology class yesterday but when she put them in the thing which heats the plastic (note my grasp of the technical, there) to make it malleable, they "bent the wrong way". I'll have to see what I can do, but only after I've had my coffee (and this is definitely a two-biscuit morning!!).

      And on the subject of not letting people down, apologies to anyone who has sent an email or left a comment and not yet had a reply. The mail program is working at a snail's pace, and I am even slower!

Getting ideas (above my station)

     I must have had a rush of blood to the head because I've decided to devise my own sock pattern! It should be pointed out that my sock-knitting career is all of a year old and encompasses a mere five pairs, so I am hardly an expert, but then I reason that you learn by doing and have to start somewhere, so I thought I'd have a go.

     On the needles is the prototype sock which I'm making up as I go along - I'll discover as it progresses whether the construction works and how the design looks. If it's all a disaster then I'll have lost nothing but a bit of time and some leftover yarn; if it turns out as I hope, I'll make a proper pair with some special yarn yet to be bought.

I've started with a six-pointed cuff and a leaf detail repeating three times round the leg. So far so good; when I reach the heel it may be another story!

Bank statement

     Some of the largest and grandest buildings in Edinburgh are - or were - banks, but even the more humble branches were built with architectural flair or an eye for design which seems absent from the modern ones which are generally bland, and plastic-y, both outside and in.

     We passed three banks on a walk to our local shops yesterday, the one pictured above (which wouldn't look out of place in "Camberwick Green" or "Trumpton") is the former Edinburgh Savings Bank, now a pizza restaurant.

     This thistle adorns a still-functioning bank (hurrah!)

while this detail frames the entrance to a 1930s bank which now houses a firm of solicitors.

     As more and more banks close branches and deal with customers via call-centres, their scope for creating solid, impressive buildings - at least those to which the public are admitted - diminishes, and the mahogany counters, the panelling and the fine finishes (not to mention mosaics such as one on the other side of town with its quotation from "The Merchant of Venice", "Thrift is blessing"!) will sadly vanish.

Take your partners

     "Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them". That line appears in a later volume of Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time", but I came across it this morning as I finished Volume III of the series, The Acceptance World. Append the word "Discuss" and you have an interesting exam question; as it is, and in terms of this sequential work, it is well said.

     I've already mentioned my reactions to Books I & II here: briefly, I couldn't 'get' the first but found the second much more free, more engaging, and altogether brighter and more brilliant, and my keenness to proceed hasn't diminished with the latest one. In fact, from unpromising foundations, and dull but necessary scaffolding work, I now see that Powell is building an edifice remarkable in scope and span. It's becoming much more recognisable for what it actually is, or will be, and whether, in terms of the above quotation, my talent as I reader is growing, or whether I'm just getting the gist now, I am quite the convert!

    Powell is clearly expressing his own thoughts through his main character, Nicholas Jenkins, when he says "I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed ......Intricacies of social life make Engish habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony - in which all classes of this island converse - upset the normal emphasis of reported speech." Despite these constraints, and perhaps because we are shown the world of the book through Jenkins's eyes, patterns, devices, diagrams are showing up and the sense of the beautifully constructed whole is coming through, so that complexity notwithstanding, it's very fine.

 

  A word on Hilary Spurling's handbook to the series, Invitation to the Dance. Although I'm only a quarter of the way through the whole oeuvre, I'm finding it a very useful reminder of various details, and I'm sure it will prove invaluable as I go on.

Red leaves

"They turn up the dead leaves, the russet and red leaves...."

That's a line from "The Puk-Wudjies" by Patrick Reginald Chambers (you can read the rest of the poem here)

This site is usually pretty blue, but today we've made a seasonal shift to the other end of the spectrum.

"Four dark red oak leaves", Georgia O'Keeffe

Tile with foliate design by William de Morgan

Watercolour, Japanese School "Poppies" (they look like leaves to me).

Going round the block

     I seem to have a bad case of Blogger's Block this morning. As I post here daily, I have a lot of "column inches" to fill, and usually no difficulty in doing so, but today my list of possible topics is uninspiring. As this site is partly for my own benefit as a record of what I'm doing, the content requires little or no thought because it is what's happening chez Cornflower. Nothing much is going on here today, so I'm stuck and that's why there are only pictures of root vegetables! (We ate these little Milan turnips with braised lamb shanks and beans, but I thought their colours made them photogenic enough to appear here in their own right).

     Apologies, then, for a bit of a miscellany.

      On the reading front, The Acceptance World is coming along very nicely. Powell's writing resembles a perfectly laid table - everything one needs is there, precisely positioned, beautifully arranged. Much is promised for the rest of the series.

      Yesterday's cake has been all but polished off and a repeat performance requested. A note on that (which I'll add to the recipe itself): better to use the 6/6/6/ and 3 eggs quantity of mixture, rather than the 4/4/4/ and 2. I hope that makes sense, if not please let me know.

      If you can catch this afternoon's Dorothy Whipple story on Radio 4, do so. I know her superb novels: Someone at a Distance, They Were Sisters, The Priory and They Knew Mr.Knight - J.B. Priestley called her "the Jane Austen of the twentieth century" - and the two short stories I heard earlier in the week show her mastery of that medium as well.

     On the subject of mastery, I heard Bryn Terfel singing from Schubert's "Standchen" in the car on my way to school the other day. It was a piece I know well and in a lesser singer could have been so much background music. As it was, it was quite sublime. Not that his talent is in any doubt, but to make me sit up and take notice (while in traffic, too) and hear things within the music which I'd not heard brought out before, is quite special.

      And from the mighty Terfel back to humble turnips. Let's hope I can break through the block and find something more interesting to say tomorrow!   

    

Toffee apple cake - live

     We have cooking apples from my parents' garden, so some have gone into a cake which is in the oven as I write. This is 'live baking' with the added frisson of excitement in that I just made up the recipe as I went along - it could be a disaster, in which case I shall own up here later!

     I stewed the apples with soft dark brown sugar - hence the toffee 'note' - and then added cinnamon. The cake mixture itself incorporates ground almonds and cardamom. I put a layer of the apple puree in between two layers of the sponge, sprinkled the top with a little more of the dark sugar and have set it to bake for 30 - 40 minutes.

     When it's done, and cool enough to cut,  I'll have a piece and give you the verdict. If it's any good I'll post the recipe, and if it's not I'll stick to other people's!

See you later.

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It worked! There's a link to the recipe in the left-hand sidebar.

Seek and ye shall find

 

     I've mentioned before that some people arrive at Cornflower by means of google searches which are not going to produce, on these pages at least, what they are actually looking for. There have been more over the last few days, and like figures in the mist, the results offered by the search engines seem to be rather vague and insubstantial. For instance, whoever fetched up here looking for "Francesco the three-legged man" will have been disappointed, likewise the seeker of "The man wreathed in seaweed ". Yes, I have mentioned Francesco da Mosto, but he has the usual two legs, and while I've also referred to the Isle of Man's three-legged emblem, and pictured Seaweed the Otter, I can't provide them in the combination actually sought.

     Celebrity information is another area that draws people in. I wasn't aware that I'd become the fount of all knowledge on famous actors, but I've had hits from people looking for "Hugh Laurie's favourite music" and "Hugh Laurie Steinway piano"; then there's "Colin Firth Chiswick address" - sorry, I can't help you there.      

      "Freddie Mercury hoovering" was one which appeared on my referrals page the other day; I think it was the video for "I want to break free" the person had in mind, but sadly they won't find Freddie in a frock on this website.

     While I'm all for the excellent combination of literature and good food, I hadn't expected to be the repository for information on "Porridge Anthony Powell" or "Anthony Powell jam", but perhaps my Powellite friend Lindsay Bagshaw will know what that is all about. Do breakfast foods have some significance in A Dance to the Music of Time that I've yet to discover?

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    The pictures were taken this morning - it was just above freezing and the mist was eerily thick.

Leaves from books (part II)

     Time for the second lot of book-related questions from Charity's meme - I shan't tag anyone directly for this, but if you want to, do put your own responses in the comments here.

I'd love someone to invent a bookish gadget that.... would enable me to read more books than I do. Perhaps better time-management skills are what I need.

The smell of an old book reminds me of.....My grandparents' house. While the grown-ups talked, I would sit on the floor behind the settee and go through the contents of the big bookcase. They were double-stacked, but I came to know every volume, from copies of " Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wind in the Willows" which my father and his siblings had had as children, to my grandfather's medical books (the gruesome pictures held a certain fascination), classics such as Austen, Trollope and Tolstoy, more recent authors like Buchan and du Maurier. There were books on history, cricket, gardening, Edinburgh, poetry, and while I read few, I dipped into many. I had my own little world behind that settee.

If I could be the lead character in a book it would be... My mind goes blank when faced with questions such as this. She's not a lead character as such, but I thought Northey in Nancy Mitford's Don't Tell Alfred [appalling cover but super book] was wonderful, so much so that we wanted to name our first daughter after her and would have done so had we not decided to spare her the endless explanations that would have entailed!

The most overestimated book is...I'll change that to very popular or much-hyped books which have left me distinctly underwhelmed: The Shadow of the Wind, The Reading Groupand another novel which topped the bestseller list for ages but whose title and author are apparently forgettable (all three books were passed to the charity shop where I hope they found readers more appreciative of their merits).

I hate it when a book....disappoints. I don't like wasting time or money on something which doesn't repay that investment. I am very careful about choosing books - either for myself or others - and feel quite miffed when my verdict is it's not worth reading. It doesn't happen often, but when it does I wonder how the publishing world really operates, and the recent stories about agents and publishers being sent sections of Jane Austen and of a Booker prize-winning novel only to reject them out of hand speaks volumes!

Recipe

     Several people asked about the recipe for Christmas pudding which I mentioned the other day. If you click on the link on the left hand sidebar (just above 'Current Reading') you should find it.

Case notes

     Does anyone else suffer from any stationery-related afflictions such as "notebookitis"?

     I am a collector of notebooks. It's not just to do with the blank pages and the possibilities that exist for filling them, it's partly their aesthetic value and partly, I think, some need in me to record things. I'm not obsessive (well, maybe I am) but there are certain subjects which I like to keep tabs on in notebooks.

     This chronic condition had its onset in childhood and hasn't abated since. I have lots and I buy (or am given) more. The one pictured above has handcut pages, a silk ribbon marker and is bound in soft leather. I've had it for some years, and use it as a type of jounal, but it was a long time before I could bring myself to sully its pages, so lovely is it. [Clearly some psychoanalysis needed there].

     That's a Persephone notebook with its own bookmark and Duncan Grant endpaper. It's still blank as I haven't yet found quite the right use for it. [Related condition: perfectionism.]

     In the more utilitarian line, I have three Moleskines: one small one which lives in my bag and is for 'random jottings', and two bigger ones which I use for notes about books. One is a reading record - just title, author and date finished, the other is for quotations, or ideas which strike me when I'm reading.

     Above is my current main reading notebook. It's spiral bound and has a plastic cover so it's robust enough to survive being carted back and forth in my handbag and in it go detailed notes made about every book I read.

     The condition appears to be genetic and my daughters have clearly inherited it; stationery shops draw us like magnets. But is it only women who are affected by notebookitis or can men succumb, too? How many men keep a journal (I know one who does) and for those who do, does the book itself matter? If it is a rare male pursuit, why is that? And for those of us who now have whole websites as extensions of our notebooks, is the condition becoming altogether more serious?

     "What's your favourite disease?" asked Harriet at lunch yesterday (she wants to be a doctor). "Something that's easily cured" I said. The prognosis for my notebook affliction doesn't look great.

Paired off

     No "Second Sock Syndrome" here, we have a pair! Hot off the 2.5 mm needles this morning is the second "Child's First Sock in Shell Pattern" from Nancy Bush's excellent Knitting Vintage Socks. They fit my size four feet and took under one and a half skeins of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock (shade 34 'Tahoe') - most kindly sent to me by Avice.

     These were interesting knitting: some concentration required, but very clear instructions, and a good result.

     The book includes a timeline which gives some period details for the era in which the patterns were first published. These socks, for example, came out in 1899 around the same time as aspirin and the hand-held electric hair-dryer were invented.        

     It's almost exactly a year since I made my first socks, and no-one was more amazed than I was when I finished them and they worked! Today's are the fifth pair (three of the five have come from Nancy Bush's book), and I'm looking forward to starting the sixth (and that means I can go and buy some more yarn!).

Boy's service

     "In this book are just a few events noted by a young boy who became a man long before his time and who lost his youth in the service of his country."

     These words are from the preface to Len Chester's Bugle Boy, his account of his life as a boy bugler in the Royal Marines. Joining the service in 1939 at the age of only fourteen, under five feet tall, a lad with little or no experience of the adult world let alone a world at war, Len served at Eastney Barracks, Portsmouth, before being based at bleak Scapa Flow, and then becoming part of the dire and dangerous Arctic Convoys.

     Len's beautifully easy conversational style marks him out as a natural story-teller, and I could happily read him for hours, so engaging is he. He brings wit and warmth to a subject which is harsh and often tragic and in doing so he achieves that most important of objectives: to make us aware of, and remember, the people and events of which he writes.

    As H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh remarks in his Foreword to the book, "Future historians may concentrate on the broader issues of the war, but it is reminiscences like these which will give them the opportunity to include the human dimension", and a very human story this is.

     Here is the the author himself, proudly wearing campaign medals and the off-white beret of the Arctic Convoy. Thank goodness his family nagged him to write down his stories of that character-forming episode of his life, for they truly are well worth reading.

The proof of the pudding

     There's a great line (indeed, many great lines) in Jane Gardam's superb new collection of short stories The People on Privilege Hill: during a discussion on food, someone refers to Virginia Woolf - "She wasn't much of a cook... but you don't expect it when people have inner lives." Proving that competence in matters cerebral and culinary can and often do go together, Mr. C. has been doing the preliminary stage of the Christmas pudding making this morning, helped by his glamorous assistant, Harriet.

The recipe we have used for years comes from the 1989 Midwinter Supplement to A la Carte magazine (anyone remember that publication?) and requires the mixture to stand overnight so that the fruit absorbs a lot of the liquid (15 fl.oz. of Guinness and 5 tblsps. brandy).

The one change we make is to use golden syrup instead of treacle - I dislike treacle and think the pudding is quite dark enough in flavour without it!

 

      Even at this early stage, the mixture smells wonderful; the combination of ginger, cinnamon and allspice with the zest of the lemon and orange is so appetising. Tomorrow it will be steamed for 4 to 5 hours and then it will have a further 2 to 3 hours' cooking on Christmas morning.

      Back to Jane Gardam to finish (and I wonder if she's a good cook because she must have a rich inner life to write as she does). Here's a scene at a college reunion: "....they realised that Lily Strang must be 'Lily Strang', whose novels sold all over the world in twenty-seven languages and were in every supermarket beside the sweets. When you looked, you could tell the earrings could be Hermes."

Taking a leaf out of a book

     Charity tagged me recently for a bookish meme and here are some of my answers (more another day).

Hardcover or paperback, and why? I like hardbacks if they are true doorstops of books, the thicker the better, or if they are of exceptional quality (physically, that is) with ribbon markers, beautiful paper, lovely endpapers or jacket design. Given that I almost always carry a book in my bag - and sometimes more than one - paperbacks are more practical. No broken spines, coffee stains or dog-eared corners, though - I truly dislike scruffy books.

If I were to own a bookshop, I would call it....When my children were younger I loved the idea of having a children's bookshop [Vanessa is about to open one here in Edinburgh, which is great news]. It would have been called "Howletts'" with no originality whatsoever, except that the shop's emblem would have been an owl (the word being part of the name and an owlet being a little owl) wearing glasses and holding an open book.

My favourite quotation from a book is...impossible to choose. I keep a notebook in which I jot down particularly good lines, some of which wouldn't mean much or stand as well out of context. The opening paragraph (almost the first page) of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love is so right for that book (and if you follow the link there to its Amazon listing, please ignore the atrocious cover and equally bad synopsis; a book as good as that one is deserves much better).

The author I'd love to have lunch with is...Again, how to choose? P. D. James is a fascinating lady and would be an excellent lunch companion, I'm sure. Her Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography reveals a lot about the way her mind works; she is very clever, quick and sharp, has a keen sense of humour and is a person of great humanity.

If I were going to a deserted island and could take only one book apart from a survival manual it would be... Most likely my omnibus edition of "The Pursuit of Love" and Love in a Cold Climate (N.B. this cover, etc. is much better!). I've read it many times, but it never fails to delight me, move me, and make me laugh helplessly.