Cornflower

Back to school

     School resumed for us in Scotland almost a week ago, and here, bright, clean and capacious is Harriet's new schoolbag - I'd rather like one for myself (and they come in blue) !

     It's back to school for the Cornflower Book Group, too, as next Saturday - 6th. September - we'll be discussing Tobias Wolff's Old School and anyone who hasn't read it will be given a hundred lines. Peter the Flautist and Lindsay Bagshaw had better have done their homework this time and I don't want to hear any feeble excuses such as "I couldn't get the book, Miss" or they'll be in detention (or having a focus session, as it's called nowadays). There'd better be no passing of notes, flicking of ink pellets, or sniggering at the back of the class, either. So I shall expect to see you all here on the 6th. with pencils and critical faculties sharpened - and no cribbing from the reading group guide!

     Joking apart, the Group is open to anyone who wants to read the current month's book (and we're a friendly, welcoming bunch) so please do join in if you'd like to, and as "Old School" is short there's still time to read it for next Saturday. Between now and then, of course, we shall have the Books and Cakes post, our 'virtual afternoon tea'  with appropriate baking to accompany our discussion of the book.

     But before all that, tomorrow is a special day here at Cornflower, so please do pop in then (and you might win something!).

Through remarkable wrought-iron gates

     I've walked through these park gates countless times and often thought of photographing them and I finally got them at dusk the other day. I particularly like the nautilus shape and the thistle at the top, and stepping back you can see they are surmounted by a pediment and a little unicorn.



I had to reject several pictures as they were just a bit too far out of focus, but looking at them again they have a slightly spooky, almost sinister quality which would look very atmospheric on the cover of a book of that type.

The picture below was made by overlaying several shots and that would do for something with a ghostly element in it, I think!



     What is it about gateways that catch the imagination so? Who hasn't peered through a gate and up a long drive trying to catch a glimpse of what lies beyond? They suggest mystery, secrets, something to discover, so they are quite a powerful image. A few years ago I read Sandor Marai's novel Embers, drawn to it partly by its synopsis but almost equally by its cover (click on the link there to see it). I happened to be in a bookshop one day and couldn't remember either author or title but I described the book, lamely, to the assistant ("It's got gates on it") and he knew what I meant and found it for me. Susan Hill's The Risk of Darkness  is another book with a gate on the cover, though of a very different style, as is Kate Morton's The House at Riverton. They all seem to draw the eye and make you want to find out what's inside.

By the way, the post's title comes from Sir John Betjeman's poem "Pot pourri from a Surrey garden".

  

Writer's notes

     I mentioned Dorothy Whipple in passing the other day and I've since read her out-of-print Random commentary  (it's obtainable at a price, or if you're lucky, as I was, from the library).It is a compilation of notes and diary entries written from the 1920s to the end of the war, but there are scarcely any dates and no breaks in the narrative at all, so one paragraph just leads on to the next though the events they decribe may have been months apart.

     Once you've got the rhythm, it's a fascinating insight into a writer's life. Yesterday I was talking about Jennie Rooney's book Inside the Whale and I read that she wrote many of its short chapters during her lunchbreaks while she was working as a lawyer. Dorothy Whipple didn't have a job outwith her writing but she had a husband and a house to run and what is very noticeable about her life - she complains about it frequently - is how difficult she found it to get the time to write. She was constantly interrupted, expected to break off  from what she was doing for casual callers, to entertain people who happened to be in the area, to minister to family and friends, cook endless meals for visitors and no-one seemed to think anything of intruding on her. Given that she was a bestselling author of her day, that is astonishing. However, the other striking feature of the book is just how little confidence she had in her abilities, and perhaps that explains why she wasn't firmer in setting 'work/life boundaries'. Despite the kudos of enormous sales and critical acclaim she didn't really believe in her talent.

 
     She comes across as unpretentious, caring, modest and serious in a good way. She took pleasure from simple things, had a great love of nature, and was a keen observer of people and places - she far preferred creating character to devising plot, for instance. Her domestic life and her writing constantly overlap so for example she says "The house is full of the smell of boiling marmalade which I am making while thinking of They Were Sisters, trying to make out what their names are", and feeling very tired and flat and longing for proper rest she describes The Priory (in progress) as "a kind of chess-board view of life".
    There is a great deal in the book worth quoting, but here is a passage Dorothy Whipple herself noted particularly and describes as the best advice to any writer that she has come across:
".....the study of other men's works, except by the way, is the surest manner of killing the power to do things for oneself....doing is the sole parent of doing, and creating a little the only way of learning how to create more".

We'll meet again

 

   
 "He looked like an elbow patch on a tweed jacket, battered and obvious, and not quite whole".
That's one of the many lines in Jennie Rooney's Inside the Whale which Alan Bennett himself might have written - stylistically the book is often worthy of him. That's high praise indeed from me but I think this novel merits it - it's very sharp, original, beautifully observed and skilfully put together, and it has a warmth about it which balances its often sadly poignant timbre and makes for an excellent read.



     It's the dual narrative of Stevie and Michael: the former measuring out her life - not with Eliot's coffee spoons - but in the large print fiction section of her local library, the latter in hospital now, remembering his past while ' in conversation' with the young woman who is looking after him. Stevie and Michael have a shared history; brought together by the war, they were then separated by it in sad circumstances, but neither can ever forget the other, and now is the time - for one of them - to make amends.



     It's a touching book, full of humour, written with a fine emotional poise and an eye for things which sets it apart from so many others. As a first novel it's highly accomplished and one of my best books of the year so far, not because it's big and showy, but because its scale is small and as such it's tightly written and perfectly formed.
     Here's a passage from the beginning of the book - Stevie remembers being at home when war was declared: "It was generally assumed, although never openly admitted, that if any part of the house were going to be invaded, it would undoubtedly be the front room. It had the nice curtains, after all". Victoria Wood could have written that. So the tone of the book is set - domestic, intimate, gently introspective - and all shaped by a lithe and interested mind. Do read it!


 

Rapt

   

Let it not be said that we don't keep up with the modern idiom here on Cornflower, nor that the range of this site isn't sometimes surprising. Today, for your delectation, I bring you a couple of examples of 'contemporary style in song', but this is not just for the sake of it, there are underlying educational messages, too!
     First off, physics. My lack of knowledge of this subject stems from a couple of dull years in senior school when we worked from the misleadingly named (brown, if I remember correctly) textbook, "Physics is Fun";  all that electron/neutron stuff failed to excite me and I dropped it and its fellow sciences at the earliest opportunity. But nowadays physicists are playing with toys on a scale far removed from the old Van de Graaff machine, and the magnets they use are not wee things with 'Duracell' on the side. We are talking about The Big Stuff here, so if you want a reductionist version of what must surely be the largest experiment in the world given a musical interpretation, have a look at this. (My thanks to Peter the Flautist for that link - he's involved in the science, if not the rap).
    Still in the same vein but changing to a part of the curriculum I'm more familiar with, what can I say about this version of a very famous poem?
    Words may have failed me with that one, but the next clip is a classic, written long before raps were ever devised but yet, to my ears, sounding remarkably similar in style. M.C. Auden, anyone? (Bet he didn't scratch his records).

Later: it seems this post is more topical than I thought as Sir Ian McKellen is rapping away, too!

Just for you

    Ever since I got Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook I've been meaning to try her Blackcurrant and Almond Cake, and this morning I did. Below is the picture from the facing page of the book, Sarah in her garden, preparing the blackcurrants for the kitchen.



Rather more mundanely, I went to Tesco to get mine, resorting to a mixture of frozen summer fruits when no fresh blackcurrants were to be had (but then I avoided all the stripping and topping and tailing).



As I write this the cake has just come out of the oven and is cooling, but I had to try a piece - valiantly, selflessly consumer-testing the warmly fragrant confection solely for the benefit of Cornflower readers - what would I not do for you?
The recipe suggests dusting with icing sugar before serving, but for now I had it just as it comes and it's excellent. This is definitely a cake to repeat: very moist, buttery, almondy with a little vanilla, and enough tang from the fruit to balance the sweetness, and you can have it as a pudding, too.



Did I mention serving it with cream? That would involve a return trip to Tesco and I couldn't possibly; well maybe, since it's you.....

 

Wordplay explained

     I couldn't include any text in the post below, for some reason, so here are the explanatory notes.
The pictures are 'word clouds' created on the site Wordle (and thanks to Natalie for the link). You type in words or the url of a blog, etc. and Wordle makes the cloud which you can then customise. I had a play and made four. The top one is the result of submitting this blog's url, the middle two are random words, while the bottom one is formed from a book review I've just written (If you click on them you'll get a bigger version). Just a bit of fun!

Wordplay

 

Attagirl!

 

 

     A friend asked me recently why I enjoy listening to writers talk about their books; what does it add, he wanted to know. I went today to hear Margaret Atwood, and I pondered his questions as I sat in the audience. My acquaintance with her work is slight as I've read only one of her novels, the superb Alias Grace (which the Book Group discussed at the beginning of the year) and her non-fiction Negotiating with the Dead, but I know much about her range and reputation.
    Today she read part of an unfinished short story - and she admitted she hasn't finished it because she doesn't know which way to take it and says it may get no further and lie in a drawer ! - she talked a bit about the writing process and a lot about her background, her family, the things which influenced her in her career path. She is a very funny lady with a dry wit and a laidback style and that combined with both wide and deep intelligence make her a pleasure to listen to.
     She discussed her invention LongPen which is now finding uses far beyond authors' signing sessions, the interruption to her publishing schedule caused by the US presidential election and the effect of that on the smoke alarm system in a Canadian hotel; how to make crystals with a supersaturated salt solution, and where to go (she discovered this for research purposes only, of course) if you want to get revenge on someone. She drew on elements of her grandparents' lives when writing Alias Grace, and she mentioned the quilts, which are a recurring motif in the book, though their precise significance wasn't touched on. So the hour was hugely varied, interesting and enjoyable and will, I think, inform in a subtle way my reading of her work. But even without 'enhancing' for me any future Atwood books, being there was great fun, and that's as good a reason as any for going, don't you think?

Uniformity

       I paid an interesting visit to the school outfitters yesterday, buying several items of uniform for child number three. The fashion-conscious Harriet (12 going on 25) is harder to suit than her siblings, and while I naively thought that uniform is uniform and there's no room for stylistic preferences because everything is prescribed, it seems I am wrong. The length of leg of tracksuit trousers, for example, is determined by how low on the hips they are worn - the waistband certainly does not go at the waist, it just isn't done, I'm told. Likewise, the fit of the shorts, shirt, blazer even is not simply a matter of 'room for growth' but degree of looseness/tightness according to current trends. We were lucky to be served by a young woman who with considerable diplomatic skill managed to accommodate my need for the boringly practical 'garments which will last' while assuring Miss Harriet that in them she still looked 'cool'.

  
    Those 'stuck' in uniform may yearn for the freedom to wear whatever they want. I have that licence but find, contrarily, that what I wear becomes a uniform of sorts. Jeans and shirts do the job for me, and guess what colour predominates - even the jewellery is often blue!



As the work I do is done at home it doesn't require any formality of dress; I can throw on what I like and I don't want to have to think too much about it because if I did I'd agonise all day - believe me!
Am I unusual, I wonder, or do we all - really - prefer a uniform of sorts?



Do you have to wear a uniform, or do you choose to wear a 'uniform', either at work or at home?

Later:

Curzon's comment is spot on. I put her point to Harriet who answered "What about mass individuality?" Hm.

Recondite recipes

     Over at Books do furnish a room, Lindsay has been talking about that nourishing delicacy calves' foot jelly, commonly made by those ministering to invalids in novels which also feature smelling salts.
Here's the man himself at dinner recently choosing his pudding to match his clothing: strawberry tempura with chocolate sauce complemented our hero's pink linen shirt, captured ineptly in the far-from-up-to-scratch photograph. Having cooked for Lindsay for many years - not as his personal chef, I hasten to add - I know he enjoys good food (though his taste in beverages is suspect...), so I've offered to make the calves' foot jelly if he will agree to eat it. I've consulted Andre Simon's A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy and found a recipe which involves a five hour simmer and the use of egg shells for clarifying purposes with sherry and lemon for flavouring, then there's this one which requires isinglass: "an expensive, pure form of gelatin found in the swim bladders of sturgeon", according to Kate Colquhoun's most enticing Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking which I've been dipping into with great interest.


     Agnes Jekyll (sister-in-law of the more famous Gertrude) gives a recipe for Natural Meat Jelly in her wonderful Kitchen Essays in the section titled "For the too fat". !
Moving swiftly on, permit me a digression from the jelly theme to quote Mrs. Jekyll on cake. For a festive occasion, she suggests her "Super-Chocolate Cake", which is very similar to this one but includes sal volatile (for its leavening properties, I think, rather than its revivifying ones) and then she follows that with something a little less decadent and extravagant, describing its ideal consumers thus: "Lest this last calls for a reproach from the thrifty, here is a nice useful cake suited to the Rector's five o'clock call, or the ladies of the local political organisation in conclave....." Would that I could assign a similar 'target market' to the baking posts here at Cornflower.

Back to Kate Colquhoun, and returning neatly to where we started, she mentions an addition to the seventeenth century pantry: "Isinglass was joined by the extraordinary gelling qualities of a new ingredient: hartshorn, shavings from the antlers of deer that were also used in the production of ammonia for smelling salts".

     So, while I put the butcher on standby with the calves' feet and check to see if our local Waitrose is fully stocked in the "Recherche Items" line, I'll await your pleasure, Lindsay!

 

Seeing ghosts

     An enthralling account of a very unusual and symbiotic working relationship, Jennie Erdal's memoir Ghosting: A Double Life tells of her many years as translator, editor and amanuensis to a well-known and flamboyant London publisher. Although her employer's identity is no secret, he is referred to throughout the book as "Tiger", while she in turn was always "Beloved", and theirs was not an ordinary partnership. She became his ghostwriter, producing articles, interviews, and eventually novels, all of which appeared under Tiger's name. The effort was a collaborative one, though the hard grind of putting the words on paper and adopting a male perspective was her job alone, never acknowledged publicly nor even in private where Tiger talked only of "us" and "we", never "you".

    The book is at times highly comic, affecting and, ultimately, very sad. Tiger supported his right-hand woman when her personal life was in crisis, and though he was obsessive, impossibly demanding, fastidious and tiresome, she seems to have developed a great affection for him, and there's a warm side to the story which occasionally thaws the cooler 'distance' from which she tends to write. But in the end, enough was enough, and when Jennie resigned, Tiger announced his retirement from literary life. The book's final sentence says it all: "Things would never be different again".

    For all his faults, the bold and brilliant Tiger dazzles. The writer herself - perhaps too practised in concealing her true identity - is harder for the reader to grasp, and I sensed a lot left unsaid. Of course any book of this type must be selective in its content, but there was a striking contrast between longish passages about her childhood, the relevance of which was often social commentary, and puzzlingly little about her adult life outwith work. Beyond that, precisely what she felt and thought about this extraordinary man and what she did for him remains shiftingly obscure. That said, this is a book I read with pleasure and would read again; the ghost might then become more visible.

Do admit!

   

 

     A hectic afternoon and evening yesterday dashing hither and yon. I'm far from being a social butterfly but I had several places to be as well as things to do at home in between so it was all a bit of a scurry. The highlight of the day - far and away - was to see the wonderful Deborah Devonshire, dowager duchess, youngest Mitford, "Debo" herself, in conversation with Magnus Linklater and Charlotte Mosley on the subject of Charlotte's book The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. This was a huge treat for me (and Simon, you'd have loved it, too) as she was everything I'd expected and more. It is to my great regret that though I stood in the signing queue after the event for quite some time I had to leave before I reached its head so I didn't get to meet her, and I mind that, I really do!

     Accused by her sister Nancy of being illiterate, she was nonetheless suspected by family and friends of being a secret reader, and while others pretend to have read books they haven't so much as opened, Debo pretends not to have read a great deal she actually has. But joking apart, she's a consummate businesswoman (naming Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Ginger and Pickles as the best book on retailing ever written) and a woman of immense natural funniness and straightforward charm. 

     I'm in danger of boring my family by constantly trying to read aloud to them excerpts from the letters while being unable to speak for laughing. The editor's job must have been extraordinarily difficult as the book's 800 pages reproduce only a tiny percentage of the 12,000 letters (yes, that figure is correct) the sisters sent one another, but they wrote so well and with such wit, warmth and candour that compiling it must have been a hugely enjoyable task.

     To whom does Debo write now, I wonder, as her sisters are all gone, and what would her parents, the famous Muv and Farve, make of the intense interest in - and even industry surrounding - their daughters' lives?

   

Not cricket

    Just down the road from Cornflower HQ, Scotland and England are playing cricket in a one day international. You can keep up with the score and commentary here, though by the look of the weather there may not be any play as it's raining pretty steadily and the light is poor. Had it been a glorious summer's day I'd have enjoyed a spell at the ground to watch the match and would have taken some of these muffins, fresh from the oven, by way of a picnic.


    They are courgette, spring onion and cheddar muffins, quick and straightforward to make, and very tasty. I'd add some cayenne pepper to them next time, but otherwise would stick to the recipe as given.


The rain has eased a bit but it looks as though we'll be picnicing inside today.

Later: Having seen the score, it's probably just as well. Oh dear.

Plot points

     A very entertaining evening at the Book Festival yesterday in the company of two writers whose books I haven't read (yet) but who were so engaging in their own right that they are way up on the TBR list. Gregory Norminton was new to me. He read the opening passage of his latest novel, Serious Things, and he'd drawn in the audience in moments. I rushed home to look up his back catalogue and found that his range is impressive and intriguing, and I've added Ghost Portrait to my wishlist, too. Sophie Hannah's work I did know by reputation - a fine one - and she read from her most recent novel The Point of Rescue. Her thrillers (many will know Little Face and Hurting Distance already) describe ordinary people in desperate situations, reacting in ways they would never normally contemplate, and as such, plot is key to her books.
     For Gregory Norminton, the character is their fate, though slow revelations drive the book (and he says he gets good ideas while in the bath!), but Sophie Hannah maintains that no matter how interesting a character is, they must be doing something interesting, so plot is all-important. Narrative satisfaction is paramount for Sophie, and she looks to find a mystery which she can solve along with her protagonists, preparing a 50 page dossier with every aspect of the story mapped out before she begins to write the book.
    There was a discussion of literary influences and inspirations, and these ranged from J.G. Ballard's short stories to Enid Blyton's Secret Seven books (a great place to start for the young, aspiring crime writer, apparently) and on to Agatha Christie and more recently Barbara Vine's A Dark-adapted Eye which Sophie says has "perfect shape and clear rhythm", as in a poem.
    The event was very good-humoured, lively and much enjoyed by an appreciative audience who will have come away enthusing  - and surely that's the point!