Rurality

Not Your Heart Away

“What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain. The happy highways where I went and cannot come again.”

Housman, The Shropshire Lad

You’ve seen it from a train window, like Ben on his way back from another desultory university interview in Not Your Heart Away. Or looking out through a car windscreen, once, twice, a thousand times and you’re still not really sure what that place is called. Even the time you sat down and looked at a map or Google Earth and worked out the place it probably is, you still know nothing about it. What it’s like. Who lives there. What they care about. Who they loved. You know now that you probably never will.

The spires are the churches that hardly anyone goes to because they forgot what they were for. When they were built they served not just as a place to worship but a place to meet, to talk, to tell stories, a village hall as well as a church. It was probably the one place in the village the squire’s word was only the second most important thing in your life, and the squire didn’t openly cross the parson if he had any sense. Not with all of Rome behind him. That changed, eerily like today. Something of one state was taken by a law decreed by another state. The friends of one kept quiet if they wanted an easy life and the friends of the second got rich. Nothing really changes much.

Change Happens

The farms did though. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks getting to know an old-fashioned farm a few miles from me. They need a business plan to change from being a hobby to a business, so I said I’d help. Because it’s been years since I was anywhere near a farm I’ve gone over and helped round up cows and do the non-milking parts of milking, to see what it is they actually do apart from worship Solihull LandRovers, like all British farmers and unlike all French farmers, who find a two-wheel drive van perfectly adequate for almost anything they ever have to do that doesn’t need a tractor. So I’ve been feeding. Cleaning. Fly-swatting. Walking. Moving straw. Hanging-up the salt lick. It isn’t what anyone would call a skilled job but it doesn’t do itself. And you can do an awful lot of harm by accident if you don’t keep thinking about what you’re doing. It gives you time to do something important though, watching the animals, seeing which one is feeding which calf. Which one that if you notice there’s something going slightly wrong in its life today needn’t cost you a fortune to sort-out next week.

It’s a tiny farming operation, just eight cows and four of them with calves. They only eat grass, no grain and because the soil is so thin down here on this edge of England and it hasn’t really rained for months the cows are being fed hay already, only just past half-way through the year, from big round bales that have to get up to the top field, the same as the salt lick does. Did you remember to bring a knife to cut the plastic off? Did you remember to put the plastic in your pocket? Because the cows are going to eat that if you don’t, and then they’re going to get the plastic stuck in one of their stomachs and that’s going to cost hundreds to fix, or a dead cow. So wake up. It’s not just about chewing straws.

Pushing back

The electric fences are old and sometimes there’s current in ones you were sure were off and no current in ones you needed to be on. You can’t lead a cow unless it’s got a ring through its nose. It’ll go where it wants to, so you need to think about what’s going to make it go where it wants to go. You can push it out of the way if you’ve got something to lever against like a cowshed wall and when you’re stuck between the breezeblocks and the cow you find a certain strength if you’ve any sense, before you promise yourself not to get stuck there again.

The milking machine only does one cow at a time, for the tourists who gather to see how it was done. The little ones are fascinated at the idea of a real cow just feet away from them, and they’d be more fascinated if they were left in the stall with the black and white rescue cow who came from a commercial dairy where by the way she acts the way to get cows moving where you want them was to kick them and flail them with sticks. Still, supermarket milk at 21p a litre to the farmer doesn’t get itself, does it? The old tourists remember, or say they do, but so often when the milk is warm in the churn and everyone is offered a taste the reaction isn’t ‘how delicious,’ which it is, but ‘yuk, it’s not cold.’ Tell me about the thriving food culture in the UK, the one you read about in every Sunday paper, even the tabloids. No, seriously. I’ll listen. I’ve got all day.

It feels like a land of lost content now, with the sun shining. It’ll be a different story of a March morning when the raw rain is sweeping in from the sea and the Spring won’t start. But it comes back to me again and again. One day maybe it won’t burn. One day.

One of those Facebook days

You know how it is

As the cliché goes, it’s complicated. We met about six months ago and argued about almost everything and about two months ago we came to an understanding. It’s very special. Quiet. Grown-up. A lot of the time we don’t say anything. Not very me-words at all. On Sunday we’d both had too much to drink and something was said I took badly. It was my ego that did it. What was said could have been true, just in the context it was said. I took it to mean in every context and I was hurt and upset. I did the stupidest thing I could chose out of my massive long list of utterly stupid things I keep handy, lightly oiled and ready for instant deployment for situations like this. I wrote on Facebook. I deleted it before I could send it. I wrote another, more restrained, much more bitter and pretentiously self-pitying version. I deleted that too.

Then I did a hugely uncharacteristic thing and thought about why it bothered me. The answers were pretty simple. Because I had drunk too much. Because I can see how it could have been true. Because of how I took it. Because of the stuff in my head. Because I was thinking like an idiot, projecting my own doubts and insecurities onto the words someone else had said and saying ‘you said that!’

That’s the trouble with words. Once they’re out you can’t decide what anyone else is going to think about them. You can say ‘I didn’t mean it that way’ but it doesn’t matter. Once it’s out you’d better hope the other person thinks the same way you do because there’s nothing else you can do but hope. You can’t decide how someone else is going to interpret your words. You can’t decide how they’re going to feel.

Brand New Degree

Once upon a time someone worked for me who as a brand new graduate said one of the most stupid, 100% gold-plated guaranteed just plain wrong things I have ever heard and trust me, I’ve heard a few: “I say what I like. People have to take me as I am.”

I don’t know what they teach in universities these days, but they don’t. People don’t have to do anything you think they have to do or say they have to do, unless they have a gun at their heads. Even then it’s still their choice, not yours. People don’t have to take you as they are. You don’t have control over what’s in their heads. But you need to be aware of what’s in yours.

So I didn’t send it. Nothing at all. Not even, ‘we need to talk.’ Because we really didn’t, not then. In the morning I checked to make sure I didn’t send the silly, petty, hurting, pathetic thing I’d thought, something more suited to coming out of the mouth of a fourteen year-old than the person I hope is me now. I hadn’t sent it.

Dead dogs in a skip

But it was still a shock when the same person sent me a picture of what looked like dead dogs in a skip on my phone. I thought maybe somehow my message had been sent after all. I thought it was a metaphor, or maybe just an indication of where I should end up along with the dogs for being such an arse. It wasn’t quite the Mafia-style horse’s head on my pillow, but it felt not far off. It was only when I went onto Facebook on a laptop that I could see the whole thing. The dogs weren’t dead although they were in a skip, tied up for transit in a way I can’t see the Royal Veterinary College recommending. The words that weren’t displayed on my phone were on a bigger screen explained what was going on, asking me to make it public.

I did more than that. I tracked down the phone numbers of the people who definitely know what was going on with these dogs and posted it, so they should be getting one or two calls around about now.

I think things are ok with my friend. I hugely hope they are. I really do try not to be a total arse these days. Mostly I think I avoid it. And I’m truly sorry when I don’t. I think I’m finally growing up. A bit, anyway.

Read all about it

I’m not from round ‘ere. Eerily like Ben in Not Your Heart Away, I grew up in a country town. Also like him, I don’t think I knew anything much about the countryside that I hadn’t got second-hand and decades out of date from Thomas Hardy or Housman. The process was helped by my school, the local C of E (it was just the school, not a lifestyle choice. People didn’t have lifestyles in those days) village Primary in Wiltshire, where we learned to read on Dick and Dora. Well, not me, my parents made sure I could read before I went to school. That said, Gibbon’s Decline And Fall was still a bit of a struggle. Dick and Dora wasn’t about co-eds in Minnesota at all, but a reading primer that I later found-out had been replaced everywhere else in 1949.

Well, not at Southwick Primary it hadn’t. It’s fair to say it totally warped my world view. Obviously every decent family had an Aga. Daddy went out to work every day, wearing a suit and tie (brown or dark grey in summer, of course. Why do you ask? Everyone knows that), slipping casually into a pair of flannels and a cardigan when he got home, invariably on time, by steam train. Daddy had a car with running boards and an income sufficient to keep Mummy at home in some style, long before our fetishisation of Agas and vintage cars felt stylish to anyone at all. Dick and Dora the children, (no, one doesn’t talk about contraception. Mummy and Daddy may well be and obviously are quite progressive in that respect, but one simply doesn’t) in their own turn looked after Fluff the cat (also eerily named after my cat, I think) and a dog. I can’t remember what kind of dog it was. Probably an Airedale or something similar, one of those sturdy dogs you used to see on wheels, pushed around as children’s toys. Well, I used to, anyway. It almost certainly wasn’t a Rottweiler or a trendy Iberian waterdog or a pit-bull, muzzled or not.

Chaps’s hats were expected to blow off in Spring gales as March roared in like a lion and went out like a lamb and somehow that was something to do with the lamb of god. Houses had fences around them, gardens provided eggs and vegetables as well as flowers and umbrellas (remember them?) blew inside out, usually in November, unless you were lucky enough to get one through to March, when the lamb/lion combination would mean another visit to the umbrella shop.

It marked me. In almost every garden I’ve ever had it hasn’t felt right unless there was rhubarb and mint growing and let’s face it, that isn’t the hardest stuff to grow on any rubbishy old soil. (Gardening tip: plant it. Leave it alone until it’s ready to eat. Eat it. You will have more rhubarb and mint than you know what to do with). One of the most pathetic things I ever saw was coupled with hearing one of them. The pub chef was walking down to the shop while someone told me what a great chef he was. When he came back he’d bought a jar of ready-mixed mint sauce. Obviously the pub had run out of vinegar, sugar and the bushels of the stuff growing practically everywhere. Maybe he’d read the new Janet and John books instead. I never have. Spiritually as well as at Southwick Primary, they were after my time. Childhood leaves its mark, good or bad. But adulthood is its own responsibility.

Wrong-footed

I heard there was a lunch at a club I belong to, but I wasn’t sure when or exactly where. I asked a friend who’s a member. She said she’d email me, at two email addresses she had for me, but I didn’t get either one. I emailed the founder of the club. Sure! Great to see you! It’s at this address, five miles away, noon Sunday.

My friend said she’d see me at the thing there in the afternoon. Did it go on after lunch? Did lunch sort of evolve into whatever was after lunch? Did I have time to cycle there so I could drink, or should I go and get petrol for something I had to do first thing tomorrow morning and the little yellow petrol pump has been lit up on the dashboard on and off for the past two days? And what to wear, anyway? It was an Arts Club lunch, so what do you wear that says “artistic’ that doesn’t say ‘old queen”?

I’ve nothing against old queens per se, except a firm belief that anyone’s sexuality is absolutely no business of anyone else whatsoever. I’ve always believed there was a lot to be said for the policy the US Army had towards gay personnel: don’t ask, don’t tell, not because it’ll frighten the horses but because it’s none of my damn business or anybody else’s who chooses to put what where with another consenting adult. But I still didn’t want to look like an old queen, so the ironic cravat was out. They don’t do ironic very well in rural Suffolk, even at the seaside.

Settled on an ironed check shirt instead, summer-weight trousers, suede Oxfords, light blue check Burlington socks (yes I know. It’s an ’80s thing. What about it?), silver Liberty cufflinks. Rejected the cotton jacket. Rejected the rather nice and now somehow improbably vintage Italian silk tie that was a hunting trophy from the ‘80s. (No sweetheart, when you give someone else someone else’s handmade tie you don’t get it back just because they remember where they left it. Call me unreasonable. And do your own explaining). Is it going to rain? Don’t know. Is there time to get petrol? There’s not going to be time not to, with a 6 am start to get raw milk to market tomorrow. It’s what used to be called a mixed and varied life, these days.

I was driving down the road when I realised I didn’t actually want to go to lunch. I don’t eat slaughterhouse meat and I’m not even going to start on about farmed salmon because I have other stuff to do this afternoon. And I was looking forward to the rocket, cous-cous, tomato-stewed beans, cos and lentils with sourdough and the humous I’d made two days ago and needed eating up in the comfort of my own garden while the weather holds, with the chickens and some wine and a book. Except someone came round unexpectedly last night and in the course of the two hours of the half hour she could stay for we somehow drank the bottle of wine that was the only one I had in the house. Chateau-bottled red, since you ask. Co-op. £5.99. Not as grand as it sounded, is it? Really, really very nice though, but maybe that was the company it was drunk in.

Got to the lunch predictably too late so didn’t go in. Saw that the afternoon thing was an outdoor jazz picnic (Nice!) with people trooping down to the sea carrying deck-chairs and picnic rugs. It was one of the only times I didn’t even have a sheet of plastic in the boot of the car let along anything more comfortable to sit on. So home after snagging a bottle of Duoro. Slight bridling at £8.99 until I reasoned that was two and a half pints of something much less nice in the pub. And while obviously the pub is there for more than just drinking we don’t want to attract too much attention, do we, two days in a row? So home, thinking about changing into stuff I can sit on grass in. The weather looks as if it’s thinking about changing too, hence lunch with myself. It’s half-past one. Pub’s still open. And what to do?

Clouded hills

I cycled nine miles to a friend’s farm the other evening to be there for a meeting at seven. We were going to discuss the business plan I’m writing for her, changing her experimental pastoral herd to one that can sustain a modest living for more than just the cows.

It was a sunny, late June evening and the back-from work rush-hour was starting in Butley. There must have been four cars altogether, two behind me and two coming towards me, one of them waiting to turn into the side-road on my left.

It was a little red car, about 15 years old by the P-plate. The woman driving it was a bit tanned, wearing shades with her hair in a top-knot. All the car windows were down and there was music blasting out. I didn’t recognise it at first. You don’t normally hear anything in Butley. When the Butley Oyster was open there used to be old photos on the wall, memories of a time when things ever happened in this tiny, usually silent village. The pub used to be confused with the Butley Oysterage at Orford, four miles away, famous for its food and when people from London phoned to try to book a table, the landlady, who never, ever served food, thought it was terribly clever and amusing to pretend she’d never heard of the Oysterage and that she had no idea what anyone was talking about. We simply roared. Odd that the pub is shut now. But like most of Suffolk, despite what the more moronic inhabitants like to pretend, it hasn’t always been like this at all.

The photos on the wall of the pub proved it. All of them in black and white, faded with time. One of them showed a crashed Heinkel in a field, a wrecked German bomber surrounded by British policemen, civilians and a man in un buttoned RAF tunic, holding a machine-gun from the aircraft at waist-level, pretending to be Jimmy Cagney over 70 years ago. The other photo I always noticed was from the same period, when Suffolk expected to be the front line and over-run. Especially this part of Suffolk. This whole area was off-limits to civilians for most of the war. Whole villages were simply confiscated and everyone told to leave for the duration. Iken was one, where thousands of Allied troops charged up the beaches of the Alde in practice for Normandy. Shingle Street, just a few miles away, was another and to this day, no-one really knows what happened there, nor whether or not there really was a German landing that resulted in hundreds of burned bodies being washed up along the shoreline. The photo showed the local Home Guard unit, the men too old or too young or too infirm for active service, kitted out in their uncomfortable-looking serge uniforms and re-cycled WW1 Lee-Enfield rifles, leftovers from the War to end all Wars.

There are lots of sad things about old photos, not least the fact that in any photo seventy years old, its likely that even the youngest people are actuarially likely to be dead. But there was always another sadness about this photo of the halt and the lame. The Home Guard were by definition the men who couldn’t join the regular Army. The sad thing was the number of them in the photo, more old and young, more men unfit for active service than live in the whole village today.

Suffolk more than many rural places has changed. The communities are fragmented. If you’re young you have to move away because there are no jobs. If you’re old you almost certainly didn’t make your money in the area and want to preserve the picture postcard fantasy that ‘it’s always been like this,’ without inconvenient children playing or teenagers snogging each others faces off in the bus shelter, thank-you very much. Without any motorways and a farcical, un-commutable railway service that means the 97 mile journey to London takes around two and a half hours, once the farms mechanised there simply wasn’t anything for anyone to do. The farms weren’t the bulwark of society people like to pretend. They got rid of the horses and got rid of the men who worked on farms. That got rid of the whole point of most of these villages. The people drifted away, apart from the ones too old to do anything except hang on in the twilight of rural zombie world until the end.

We will not sleep

The music was still hammering out of the little red car when I recognised what it was the girl with the top-knot and the shades was listening to somewhat unbelievably: Jerusalem. William Blake wrote the lyrics, one of the weirdest artists and poets who ever lived in the middle of London. I used to walk past where his house had been most days, just round the corner from where Karl Marx lived in a two-room flat writing so passionately about the exploitation of the proletariat that he got his maid pregnant. The song became the anthem of the Labour Party long before Blair re-branded it Tory-Lite (‘I’m Bombin ’ It’™). But it used to mean something, Blake’s Albion, the Labour-landslide 1945 generation’s self-reward for its blood sacrifice twice in what was so obviously not then an average lifetime.

Blake must always have sat uncomfortably with the buttoned-up church folk. Like Dickens, he only once saw a ghost and then one no-one else saw or had ever heard of. He and his wife once sunbathed naked at a time when most decent people didn’t even take their clothes off to wash once a week. And the paintings, the poems about tigers, the rays of sun, the tablets of stone, the amazement and the wonder that radiates from everything this strange man painted and wrote, the power of the imagery and the dark undertow beneath dull little rhymes about diseased roses and flying worms. All of this, belting out of an old Nissan in a country lane one Friday teatime.

That Sort Of Girl

It definitely is my age. I’ve been thinking about sex more than recently. Well, my age and other stuff, anyway.

Back in the impossibly long-ago days when Ben scored his hat-trick, having sex with (always called “sleeping with” when everyone knew sleep was not involved) three separate girls in a month and only one of them his official girlfriend, sex was supposed to be part of the revolution. In Ben’s parents’ world of doodlebugs and rationing, sex was something people did in wartime because they thought they might die the next day. After the war, when people regularly died from a host of things that would make headlines today such as tuberculosis or measles or smog in London, decent people didn’t until they were married, all through the 1950s. As the poet Larkin (not to be confused with Lorca, quite a different thing altogether) noted, sex began with the Beatles in about 1963, which was quite late for him.

Poppy’s happy, enthusiastically guilt-free bisexuality was illegal until she was ten years old in 1969. Or rather if she’d been born a boy it would have been. The story goes that nobody could think of a way to tell Queen Victoria that girls left on their own when their men-folk went out for a spot of peasant-shooting sometimes found novel ways to keep themselves amused so when male homosexuality was made illegal (man, how straight is that?) there was no mention of female hom0sexuality on the statute because it officially didn’t exist. Like most stories it’s probably at least half wrong. In certain circles an Albert is a male piercing with attaches the penis to the scrotum with a small chain. Its name comes from that of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert of the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. The reader may draw his or her own conclusions about how restrained the late Queen’s sex life actually was from that fact alone.

Of course, there were dangers. The biggest one was unpleasantness when a girlfriend found out their boyfriend was nobbing someone else, a devastating event which ended sometimes in tears and occasionally even outright public sarcasm. At least in Ben and Claire’s circles, the idea of attacking anybody because two people had got temporarily mixed-up about where one ended and the other began never crossed anyone’s mind. The other not-very-huge risk was clap, the joke non-specific word for what usually turned out to be Non-Specific Urethritis, a bit of an itch, a genital irritation which a ten-day course of antibiotics cleared up with no further ill-effects provided the patient remembered not to drink alcohol and took all the tablets. Unbelievably now, that really was about as bad as it got. There must, somewhere, have still been people with real, really mess-you-up sexually-transmitted diseases, but back then a lot of people thought the worst one you could get was marriage.

Sex was revolution. Sex was not being your parents. Not-death, a loose, wild, necessarily messy stain-on-the-HP sofa Richard Brautigan un-death, the totally naked rejection of the suffocating not-in-front-of-the-children, please-and-thank-you mind-your-manners Terry and June suburbia of the soul that no-body could be bothered to realise was the only sane reaction of a 1940s generation for whom heaven really was a place where nothing ever happened, because so much else already had. To their children, the Bens and Claires, Theresas and Petes, the Lizs and Poppies, each in their different ways unchained if not unhinged by free prescriptions of oral contraceptives, sex was kicking out the jambs, which had nothing at all to do with the Women’s Institute. Suddenly, nice girls did, enthusiastically, shamelessly, happily, almost entirely because they almost certainly wouldn’t get pregnant by accident. It was stepping over the traces, changing everything for freedom, if not for god, Harry and St George and in those days at least, freedom wasn’t just another word for nothing left to lose. Someone of Ben’s generation still believed at least one party had to say they loved the other one before they got their kit off; at least one of them was genuinely shocked when after they announced they were quite keen on a boy they’d met but didn’t know what to do about it another girl simply said ‘why don’t you just fuck him?’ It wasn’t Poppy, although it sounds very much like her. In fifteen years, half a generation, from the introduction of oral contraceptives the world changed from one where officially no-one did to everybody did. As Wordsworth said before Thatcher invented AIDS and condoms and girls who went to Art School, bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. And in that respect at least, to be young was very heaven.

Off the rails

I think it’s my age. I’ve been thinking about delinquency. Just a phase I’m going through, probably.

Reading Not Your Heart Away poses some problems for God-fearing folk who saw England as a land where laws were supposed to be upheld, where decent girls didn’t, where the consequences of pre-marital sex were not just pregnancy and disease but much more importantly to some, shame and ruin. Alongside the “moral” issues (who decides on morality? Oh anyone, don’t worry about that, so long as they can say with a straight face that that’s what God meant) there is also a measure of straightforward criminality.

Under-age drinking. Landlords tolerating (or pretending not to know about ) it. Drug-taking. Being drunk in a public place. Having sex ditto. Possession of a controlled substance. Possibly (pending the outcome of luckily fictional) blood tests, drunk driving.

The victims of crime were variously unhappy. Theresa was in tears realising not only that Ben was never going to put a ring on her finger but also fancied someone else a lot more than her. Ben himself, who tended to blame Claire for messing his life up for ever when really, he did it to himself. Liz, but only in the sense that she was just pissed-off with Ben being an idiot, poncing around with rich girls. Poor Claire seems the most damaged, her whole life in free-fall after her parents decided provincial pettiness about who puts what where belonged with steam trains, the Home Service and rationing, all of which they remembered.

Some characters’s lives changed hugely for the better in the same atmosphere. Poppy, for example, who might once have faced a cloistered life, bursting exuberantly out of the closet with no apparent harm to herself or anyone else. Liz herself, who was mostly just irritated with Ben and waiting for the revolution she thought would topple the likes of Claire and her kind forever. Bad luck Liz. There was going to be a revolution but you didn’t know it would do exactly the opposite of what you hoped.

Talking About A Revolution

Another revolution is going on now. One where part-time policemen can decide whether you should be allowed to say things they object to in public not just then and there (Ben’s generation were just told to shut up and piss off home) but for up to three years. If you don’t like it you can go to prison. Think I’m making this up? Sadly, I’m not. It’s all over the news, or it would be if the BBC didn’t feel the Royal Baby (capitals to match its divinity please) was more newsworthy. Maybe it’s the same revolution that was starting back then.

It certainly isn’t the one Ben and his friends had any idea was going to happen. Back in the days when Tina Turner’s We Don’t Need Another Hero, (‘a bit political,’ as Ben Elton used to say) Adam Ant (Thatcherite motto: your money or your life, although in the Falklands in 1982 she wanted both) and Haysi Fantayzee (John Wayne – bad. Anal sex – sorry, the jury’s still out on that one) were political voices in the land, in retrospect John Otway much more than Billy Bragg captured the true spirit of the 1980s revolution when he sang about the ongoing oppression of the rural poor by the bourgeoisie. (“Louisa said: Get me a saddle boy, and go and mount my horse. You and me together are going for a ride”). Gleefully, a whole generation grabbed its Ray-Bans and jumped into its Volkswagen Golf.

And what a ride it was. In a very few short years Ben’s generation dumped the leftover trappings of an alternative society founded on strawberry cigarette papers and patchouli, love, peace, unrestrained sex and gentle law-breaking. They swapped all of that for mortgages within a few years of graduation, silly spectacles, red braces and AIDS. A lot of them became seriously better-off in the process. A lot of them still mourn the freedoms that were lost.

Our Daily Mail

I love croissants. Always have. I’m not talking about the powdery cold pretendy left-overs wrapped in plastic (bread hates plastic. It’s entirely mutual) that grace supermarket shelves. Real ones. Fresh ones. When I lived in North London there was a bakery about 200 yards up the road from my flat. When some poor Lynne or Tansy or oh-so-wow Miguette (yes, I know. Result and so on) had been inveigled into visiting what was on inspection so definitely not my very groovy pad, at least she got fresh croissants and strawberries in the morning, to add a really uncomfortable sugar-rush to the four pints of Stella hangover and the bone-adjusting discomfort of the futon I’d made.

In some ways sadly, Time moves on. The bakery closed because people who liked croissants moved out and the parking was a nightmare. I sometimes got them in hotels, but mostly they were disappointing. It never really struck me that I could make them myself. I knew there was steam involved somewhere, but putting aside visions of exploding bricks shattering all over my kitchen I thought what consumerism encourages you to think: it’s too difficult for me, I’d better buy it. And then this week a strange and disturbing thing happened from which I may never recover. I read something useful in the Daily Mail.

Read All About It

To be fair, it wasn’t the actual Daily Mail, but a tiny supplement specifically about baking breads someone who cares gave me. Early on in the little book there was a croissant recipe. Yeah, right, I thought. Diana was murdered by MI5. And Cameron’s got soul. It wasn’t even 200 words but it was a revelation. Like most baking, most of it is waiting, not actually doing anything. Actual doing stuff time, maybe 10 minutes at the outside. Time overall, a day and a half, one way or the other. The longest bit was just mixing the dough right at the beginning. About three minutes and like all baking the quantities are important. Not to get all Heston Blumenthal, but baking is one area of cooking where you can’t just use the ‘some’ principle (as in ‘peel some potatoes.’ How many? Well, how many do you want? That many.) Roll out the dough to about 1cm thick and put five ounces of butter in it. No, it’s not unhealthy. If you were going to eat this every day it would be. You’re not. So don’t get precious.

Fold it on itself then do it again. Stick it in the fridge overnight. Next day, roll it out and fold it again. 20 minutes later do it again. 20 minutes after that, do it again. Forty minutes after that, roll it out thinner than I did, cut it into triangles wider than I did and roll them up, so the pointy bit is last. Now the technical bit.

You know that wonderful crunchy thing the very best croissants have? That’s mostly because they’re fresh. That salty undertone to the rich taste? The glaze. Oh how very technical that sounds. Beat an egg in a bowl. Add a pinch of salt. Brush it over the rolls while you’re waiting until they’re starting to push their folds apart and the oven gets hot. Do the steam thing, preferably in a proper French steam oven if you’re Mme Poilane, one of the very realest food heroes, or by chucking a cup of cold water into the roasting tray you left in the oven while it gets hot if you’re me and your daddy didn’t have a helicopter, forgot how to fly it and left you a bakery.

Twenty minutes later you can say “Croissants? With maybe some honey, or perhaps some gooseberry confiture? Baby?” Use the only two decent matching coffee cups and saucers you have. And of course, don’t forget the strawberries.

Heston Services

If you shop at Waitrose (and dear reader, it is a truth universally acknowledge that one does not admit to shopping anywhere else) you’ll have seen Waitrose Weekend, the free newspaper-style magazine with cooking tips and as they would never say in public, so much more.

This week along with the butterflied lamb with fig glaze (What? No, if you’ve got something to say then just say it. I’m waiting….) there’s a feature on how utterly crap, damaging to reality, truth and a genuine business culture The Apprentice actually is along with a thing about Aggers and cricket. So far so excellent. Cricket, and in particular Radio 4’s surreal commentaries on it where the on-air appreciation of cakes baked by deranged listeners and sent to the men in their 80s broadcasting as they chortle over a cup of tea at world-class schoolboy humour (“the batsman’s Holding, the bowler’s Willy”) is far and away the best athletic sport, chiefly because sloggers like Botham aside it doesn’t look very athletic. Sitting in a deckchair it all looks so gentle any spectator can think ‘I could do that. If I could be bothered to stand up. Maybe I’ll have another cup of tea first.’ I once tried to introduce a Scottish woman to the serene loveliness of an English village cricket match. It was the first time I’d really appreciated how much Lewis Carrol had put into the game.

‘Why’s that stupit man with all the hats wearing a dress?’

The umpire had decided to wear the hat of everyone who had decided their hat was too hot or got in the way and handed it to him. He’d also decided to wear shorts, a deplorable practice in cricket but let’s face it, they weren’t playing at the Oval. He’d then worn his white warehouse coat, as umpire and the hem of the coat was longer than his shorts. Not a dress. But it did look as if the local transsexual had branched out with a multiple hat fetish, to be fair. The next comment was much more damning.

‘If they put their back intae ut this could be over in haffanoor.’

I tried to explain that running when you hit the ball, well, that was really for professionals on TV, and that running was antithetical to cricket, where the cucumber sandwiches and the gossip around the pavillion, where the tea-urn is probably more important than the urn the Ashes are kept in, is all much more important than the crass vulgarity of actually winning the game. Cricket is – well cricket is for sitting on a deckchair in the sun and languid clapping, reflecting on the inanities of sports that involve strenuous effort like cheering. The Zen contemplation of the red, white and green. If the Rastafari flag is gold for the sun, red for the blood of the martyrs and green for the green fields of Ethiopia (notwithstanding that Hailie Selassie, the Lion of Judah, spent a fair bit of time in a nice early-Victorian stone villa in Bath) then cricket’s iconography symbolises the red of the ball that hit you in the side of the head on a playing field when you were fourteen and looking at Teresa Powell playing volleyball instead of fielding properly, (if you kept your eyes open Bennett this wouldn’t have happened. You’re letting your team down. There’s nothing wrong with you…), white for the colour the knee pads used to be, the only pad you could find that had buckles on all of its straps and green for the grass stains you hoped you might get on your whites when volleyball was over in a summer long ago. The smell of long-dead bowlers and boyhood and loss and the wheel of life anthem for doomed youth that gently haunts every cobweb in every village Pav. I tried to translate this into Scottish but I think it lost something along the way.

No. What irritated me about Waitrose Weekend (and let’s face it, so far so lovely) was Heston Blumenthal. To be fair, either of those two words irritates me intensely, let alone both together. Heston Blumenthal is a self-consciously ‘wacky’ (no, there really isn’t an N in the word, officially) celebrity chef who looks like a dick and plays with food. You won’t hear anything about provenance or terroir or grass feeding or ethical standards in Heston’s cooking. Or the food poisoning that sent literally hundreds of his customers to the bathroom all night that the local Environmental Health Officers in Bray felt shouldn’t close his restaurant but one hundredth of which would have shut a burger van for good. All you ever hear about “Heston’s” food is exactly that – how he’s put his own unique stamp on it. Because that’s obviously the most important thing.

“In his Heston from Waitrose Salted Caramel Popcorn Ice Cream the chef manages to contain everything that’s great about the movies.’ Does he? Does he really? He combines the burning, corrosive madness of the English Patient with the whimsical fun of banditry in Butch Cassidy and the seen-it-all Bogart and the beautiful-and-dead appeal of James Dean and the institutionalised crushing brutality of The Hill in a bag of popcorn? Not bad going, Heston. Maybe next time you could add a soupcon of Bad Wives from the Vivid studio. That might lend a little ‘ow you say, piquancy.

“In a television advert for Waitrose… the chef is shown being inspired by popcorn-like meteors on a trip to the cinema.” I think Waitrose will find they’ve actually paid for an advert for the chef, not for themselves at all, notwithstanding that after The Triffids a lot of people look at meteors with a distinct unease. But that could just be the popcorn, of course. Exactly what a popcorn-like meteor is, or how it inspires anyone is quickly brushed aside.

“The chef, who is famous for molecular gastronomy” (like every other chef on the planet, but let’s put that aside too, along with food poisoning, which is obviously now officially in the Rude To Mention It category) ‘reveals…he had this idea. Why not take my love of ice-cream and my childhood love of cinema and just stick them all together?”

No Heston. Just stop right there. The real question is why do that, not why not? Let’s ignore the fact that corn is one of the very worst things you can eat, in terms not just of the economics of its production but also what it does to you. Corn syrup, anyone? With a side order of Type Two diabetes? Coming right up.

It’s the sheer mind-warping inanity, the look-at-me-look-at-me playing with food I object to. Why not take my love of Biggles books and rice and um, eat it on an airplane? Oh wait, that’s been done. Ok, here’s one. Why not take my love of Gerry Anderson’s puppets and sandwiches and er, make a balsa wood sandwich with a string filling? Yeah baby! Behave! Now we’re cooking with gas. Molecularly. Like no-one else does.

Next week Heston shows us a protein shake any man can make in five minutes with an old copy of Penthouse. As Waitrose Weekend hopefully doesn’t say.

The backstory

The screenplay of Not Your Heart Away went off to a proper, professional script-editor a few weeks ago. For flattering but still unknown reasons despite doing this all of a very long day for a living she wanted to have a look at my attempt at a screenplay to see if Ben’s longing for Claire’s jeans and their contents might be visualised in a format conducive to people paying £10 to eat popcorn in the dark.

Several people have said the beginning of the book is confusing. So did the script-doctor. Not because it was, in a Donnie Darko sense. (Come on, that whole film was confusing). But because unlike the book, you don’t get any time to explain things. You can’t say what a character thinks, unless he says it or sees it, so you can hear it or see it too. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but only if you know what you’re looking at. So the backstory needs filling in.

Where are we now?

Why is Claire where she is? I think that’s explained as the film unwinds, but why is Ben the way he is? And Liz? And Pete? And Poppy? Again, Poppy, being essentially anyone (yes, as in anyone would do, and if they’re funny and into Ben then so much the better, but let’s not kid ourselves about him. He might be the romantic lead but he’s not a romantic hero. He’s 19, for heaven’s sake. What were you expecting, Lord Byron in Levis?) she doesn’t need so much explanation, but the three main characters, they certainly do if we’re ever going to find out why they act like that.

Only one person reviewing the book has commented on Liz’s love for Ben, which I certainly intended to show when I wrote it but no-one has picked up on at all, save one of the most forthright reviewers. So even there, in book form, the backstory isn’t complete.

I’m finding the same with a new screenplay I’m trying to write, (School Lane) about a German boy who I met in a pub when he was an old man. Every time I start writing it I get the first scene down and then think: ‘that’s not the first scene. We need a first scene before the first scene, to see how they got there.’ That’s four times, so far and I don’t think it’s any nearer being the first scene yet.

Maybe that’s the secret. Start at the end and work backwards. Then at least I’ll know how it turns out.