Except it didn’t happen at Christmas. More people than I used to think don’t say ‘there’s no such thing as ghosts,’ grammatically or otherwise. One Catholic, one Lutheran, several nothing really, as if any of that makes any difference. I had it in my head that Catholics aren’t supposed to believe in ghosts apart from the Holy Ghost, but the name is a bit of a give-away in itself.
‘There’s this er, well, there’s this um, not sure how to say this. Ghost then. Ok, ghost. But there’s no such thing as a……”
It must be tricky being a vicar, sometimes. A little like the best religious joke I ever heard, about the little chapel in Ireland where the trainee priest looks up one day and see a man who he thinks is Jesus, glowing, in what was until then an empty pew. The trainee goes to the vestry and finds the priest, asks him what they should do if it is, to be told: “Look busy.”
Aye, it was on a night like this, but I’ve said too much a’ready…
But dear reader, to my story. I was in Scotland a couple of months ago, on the shores of a mist-bound loch. I was leading a tour of 50 people from the US, the Philipines, Canada and Australia. All strangers to each other. Some with no intention of making that otherwise. I Googled the old hotel we were to stay at, to find some local colour I could tell the group about, but all I could find was a tale about a Green Lady someone – and very much only one – had claimed to have seen there once, forty years ago.
I asked the manager there about her, but he didn’t know anything. He asked me not to talk about it, not because it was so dreadful, he said, but because talking about it scared him. So that was all I could tell the group. “Is it like …hanted?” could only be answered with “Maybe. One person a long time ago on a night like this – but I’ve said too much already.”
I didn’t notice some of the group crossing themselves, but there was no more I had to say. I wasn’t going to make things up. I wasn’t that kind of tour guide. Or no more than I had to be, anyway.
I woke up at five. I’d had a strange dream that someone was screaming, close to me. I was on my own and it wasn’t me. It’s when you go to sleep screaming that you need to worry. Just a dream. I went back to sleep for an hour.
It was only when I tried to talk to some of the more talkative holidaymakers that I thought something was a bit wrong. They hadn’t slept, they said. Because of the ghost. And what sleep they had ended at five, when they heard someone screaming in the corridors of the hotel.
Once upon a time when the world was young and even I was younger too, people used to like to stay in on a Saturday night. Not because they’d get mugged or stabbed, or they were worried about drink-driving or they didn’t have any money. They didn’t; only one person ever was in my town and that was when he opened his front door; they weren’t, very; and nobody did, in that order. The past is a different country. They did things differently there. It was great.
The thing I liked them doing differently was having things on TV that were clever, my own definition of cleverness defined as making words dance. I wanted to get down to the Rose & Crown or the Red Lion as much as the next person who wanted to squeeze past Wendy Sedgewick. And no, nowhere else. Except the Lamb on a Monday night because there was what would now be open-mic, and although I didn’t, someone mistook me for someone who ran another club. That matters at 19 in a small Wiltshire town. In those days teens went to pubs.
Yes, I know it was illegal and all that blah. Everyone knew where everyone was and nobody ever got hurt, ever, so tell me the big deal about it. And I wanted to go. But I usually only went after I’d watched The Two Ronnies. Or Morecambe & Wise, both for the same reasons.
They, but in particular Ronnie Barker, made the words dance. Yes, a load of it was about suburban middle-aged dinner parties. Yes, a lot of the women were dressed in long, clingy evening gowns I’d never, ever seen anyone in Trowbridge slipping into, let alone out of. But the words. The words were the thing. And not like that moronic song that asked what are words worth. GEDDIT!!!!????
But hark, I might get to the point of this. I just wrote a screenplay. My first one won a BBC Writers Room competition (actually, as one says). I pitched it to Cascade and astonishingly the first time I pitched a script which was the first one I’d ever written, they didn’t go with it. Life is so unfair, as I didn’t bother to say as I went down Berwick Street and had an espresso at the Italian deli around the corner, same as I’d been meaning to for twenty-odd years. Anyway, after thinking about it for 15 years and fretting at it for two and boring a friend absolutely witless about it for a solid year, six weeks back with pneumonia I decided that I either got it written for another BBC script window deadline or I forgot about it for ever. Promise.
So I wrote it. A friend of a friend sent it to Film Suffolk, who seem quite taken with it. In fact, rather more than that. It needs some revision. A German resistance historian loves it. But what I don’t love is people saying “have you read Save The Cat?”
The answer is ‘not yet.’ Not because I think it’s bad – I haven’t read it so I don’t know. Because of this review, one of many.
This book is awesome and totally relevant to writing fiction! This book saved my plot! I had reached a stage in my MS where I had lost sight of what was actually happening. I was writing scenes but I couldn’t see where they would fit in the grand scheme of the story. By reading this book, I could easily see the bigger picture. I was able to put all my chapters into an order and look at the plot as a whole. So I would definitely advise reading it to help save your plot from the death spiral!
You don’t have to do the silly high voice when you say ‘Ahsome!!” but it will probably help. Like toadly. May I?
Don’t make a scene
I was writing scenes but I couldn’t see where they would fit.
Yep. OK. Let me stop you there. I know the reason for this. That’s because you don’t have what writers call “a story.”
I’m sorry to spring all these technical phrases on you like this, but bear with me. I know, because if you had a story you’d know the beginning, the middle and the end of it. Because you couldn’t think of a story that didn’t.
But you don’t really want a story, with that mindset. Instead you want a Paint-By-Numbers Hollywood millionaire kit. And you’ll find that right next to the unicorn horns, Aisle Three.
Right. I’m glad we’ve got that sorted. I’ll have a look at it, ok? I promise. But first, I want to think about the only thing that matters in a story. And that’s whether it’s there or not.
Would you sit and listen to it? Read it? Sit in a cinema and watch it? Because if not then you haven’t got a story and all you’re trying to do is get rich quick. So if you’re sitting comfortably, I’ll begin.
Once upon a time when the world was young and I had more patience and couldn’t tell a story, then I’d have thought deconstruction was a toolkit that could help you build something too. Except as someone whose student grant went to a motorcycle shop one term, I knew something important.
I knew that understanding how a Norton 500 engine comes apart and what all the bits are called – even understanding completely what they do, or what they’re supposed to do – doesn’t mean you can get it back together again. A Norton 500 engine, in case you’re wondering, is something made of metal. A lot more tangible and solid than words.
The Christmas lights are on in Aldeburgh, shining blue and white in the dark. It’s meant to look festive. It just reminds me how empty this place is when the summer’s tourists and weekenders aren’t here. The Christmas tree placed out there on the shingle beach is standing on its own, no lights, no tinsel, surreally placed where no tree ever grew for reasons, as Hunter Thompson used to say, that were never made clear.
It’s lonely. It reminds me of this time last year. I’d met someone again who I used to know but by then she was living in the dark. Smiling, but looking worried and scared almost all of the time. She was crucified with toothache, so much so that she couldn’t arrange a dentist because of the pain. I got her an appointment, drove her there, sat and waited with her so she didn’t have to go in alone. We went across the road to a pub afterwards. She bought a Christmas card there, wrote it on the bar and gave it to me, more a letter than a card.
In all of our time last winter I remember only night or darkening evening or a morning so bone-numbing cold that it might as well have been night, walking her dogs early in the morning, letting myself in quietly so she could sleep an extra hour. Her little dog barked though.
“I knew it was you,” she said. “She only barks for you.”
I miss those dogs and the lights going on in houses we passed as we walked out along the river path, over the narrow plank, so narrow I had to help the little dog become brave enough to cross into fields where there were no footprints, no sgn that anyone had been there since the floods. And later, another day in the teeth of a gale, in bright cold that made you think your fingers might snap off, walking a new path up along the hill, back down by another route, thinking that soon, in just a few weeks there would be bluebells here, the way there were when we met.
The bluebells came but we had gone by then. I never found her again. It was too dark. I hear her still, especially on evenings like this, when the Christmas lights shine in an empty street. I can still hear her footsteps, never in synch with mine.
I’m old enough to remember the IRA, the UVF, the Red Army Faction, Scritti Politi and the Miners Strikes. Both of them. All of them, except possibly the band, were supposed to be the worst thing ever, dedicated to destroying our way of life. Then the Ayatollah, Sadam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the guy in Korea and all the other Worst Things Ever.
I grew up near Warminster, where the School of Infantry was and is. The police said there had been a car-chase through the grounds of Longleat house, them chasing the Bader-Meinhof gang. Except Detective Chief Superintendent Dennis Greenslade said that was bollocks when I interviewed him. Whether or not, an Army officer opened his front door one morning and someone shot him dead. It was a time when, when I found a six-wheel armoured car in a shed at the back of the Territorial Army centre where I went to shoot every Thursday evening, I wasn’t really surprised. It’s how things were.
As I got older other things happened. I went to Israel and walked into the middle of an ambush. I went to the US and had police sticking a pistol in my stomach. Years later the US Navy drew on me again. None of these things are fun. My step-sister walked down the street in London and minutes later a car she had walked past exploded. A friend walked past Liberty’s window shortly before it blew out into the street. I was close enough to another bomb to hear the bang and see the black smoke billowing up afterwards.
And none of it works, because governments do not give a stuff whether or not civilians get killed. That’s the way it is. They can’t, apart from anything. The purpose of terrorism is to terrorise. It wasn’t me that said that, it was Lenin, who knew a thing or two about terrorism.
The IRA blew up shed loads of stuff in the UK. It didn’t work because it isn’t supposed to. I don’t understand why people don’t understand this. Dead civilians are dead civilians. People don’t like it but they don’t do anything about it, except run around screaming about freedom while they take some more of their own away. Which is what they’re supposed to do: be terrorised. This isn’t difficult stuff to understand.
The IRA got what they wanted when they blew up Canary Wharf. Suddenly, with the prospect of massive financial damage to the City of London instead of massively permanent damage to ordinary people having a night out, the British government revealed they’d been lying to their own population for years: they did talk to terrorists after all.
I’m not advocating bombing the VAT office, convenient though it might be. But I am sick of the gibberish being spouted on the TV and the radio and the press about how “France is at war with terrorism.” It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like saying you’re at war with the sky, or water, or turquoise.
We kill people every day of the week. We, the UK and the USA, killed over 100,000 civilians in Iraq, without any argument from anybody except maybe it was a lot more people than that, but then, we didn’t count. They literally did not count.
We are asked to believe more and more preposterous nonsense each time. The Twin Towers fall down because a fire burned through steel but it wasn’t hot enough to burn one of the hijackers’ passports. Amazingly and astonishingly, in a terrorist attack literally the day before the G20 conference on terrorism, the day after the entire British press was crowing about the extrajudicial murder of a man their searing analysis dubbed Jihadi John, in case the public couldn’t say his real name and had to be fed baby talk instead, another passport was found at the scene of the crime. A Syrian one, amazingly conveniently, one that even some of the press are now saying may have been fake. So just please, don’t bother telling me about how much you care about it, unless you care about all of it.
I am fed up with this. I am fed up with being lectured on the meaning of global war by people who live with their mum. I am fed up with people advocating the mass murder of other people when their experience of being shot at is playing Call Of Duty. I am fed up with morons killing each other. I am fed up with being told ‘we’ are better than ‘them,’ that when we kill them it’s fine and when they kill us it’s murder and the sky is going to fall in unless we kill more of them. I am fed up because I thought Alf Garnett was dead and instead he’s alive and well on social media. I am fed up with people wrapping themselves in a flag one day and not giving a toss about the murder of the same number of other people literally the day before, when for example, 121 people were killed in Yemen by an Allied US and UK airstrike on a civilian hospital, the same way another hospital was bombarded by Allied artillery for 90 minutes last week.
We still pretend to wonder why these things happen. It’s because they always have and they always will until we stop doing them. Until we stop thinking of them and us. All we ever have is us. All of us. Whoever we are.
Over a hundred people have been killed in an attack in Paris.
Predictably, there are immediate calls to bomb somewhere. Anywhere. Syria. That’s this week’s country that ‘they’ come from. Before that it was supposed to be Iraq and before that it was supposed to be Afghanistan. Both times we invaded the country. We bombed it. Somehow, they keep on coming and we pretend we don’t know why.
Bombing is what we do best. It won the Second World War. It is also precisely and utterly and completely useless as a response to asymmetric threats – ones where the enemy doesn’t conveniently wear a different shaped hat.
The Facts
Allied air power was decisive. Its victory was complete. It brought the economy that sustained the enemy’s armed forces to virtual collapse. It brought home to …people the full impact of modern war with all its horror and suffering. Its imprint will be lasting.
Domination of the air was essential. Without it, attacks on the basic economy of the enemy could not have been delivered in sufficient force and with sufficient freedom to bring effective and lasting results.
The mental reaction of ….people to air attack is significant. Under ruthless control they showed surprising resistance to the terror and hardships of repeated air attack, to the destruction of their homes and belongings and to the conditions under which they were reduced to live. Their morale, their belief in ultimate victory of satisfactory compromise and their confidence in their leaders declined, but they continued to work efficiently as long as the physical means of production remained. The power of a police state over its people cannot be over-emphasised.
The most serious (air) attacks were those which destroyed the industry or service which most indispensably served other industries. Whatever the target system, no indispensible industry was permanently put out of commission by a single attack. Persistent re-attack was necessary.
This was the conclusion of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, dated September 30, 1945 that I just happened to have about my person, as you do. It was put together by a team of over 1,000 observers, documenting records not just in England and the US, but in smashed German town halls and burned out bunkers. Three of the team were killed getting this information. That’s how close to the front line they operated. They wanted the absolute facts to justify the greatest expenditure on bombing the world had seen.
It was headed up by J K Galbraith. Earlier in the war he had calculated the optimal number of machine guns the B17 bomber should carry to balance the weight of the guns and their ammunition needed to defend the aircraft against the weight of the bombs or fuel the aircraft could carry if it didn’t have any guns at all.
His career was derailed by this report. The US Army Airforce, struggling to break free of the Army and become an independent organisation (as it did) did not appreciate a report saying that basically, bombing doesn’t work unless you bomb an entire country flat. And even then, the people left will pretty much carry on as normal, as best they can. This was not what the high command wanted to hear. At all.
As it isn’t now. Bombing is a nice, simple solution. It looks good on TV. You can interview Our Brave Boys in their multi-million pound aircraft and talk about knights of the air and evoke the Battle of Britain, as British politicians have already done. And unless you bomb an entire country out of the twentieth century, it’s not going to work. Bombing Syria ignores the fact that a lot of it is already bombed flat. It ignores the fact that the main industry is oil and we certainly are not going to start bombing that. Turkey already buys oil from ISIS, which isn’t something you’ll see in the tabloids a lot, although the story has been in the Financial Times for weeks.
And anyway, we’re supposed to be ‘liberating’ the Syrians, which is quite difficult to do if we’ve killed them all in airstrikes, notwithstanding that last year David Cameron wanted to go to war on the same side as ISIS, who according to Senator Rand Paul and others has been massively helped by the United States government. General Wesley Clerk has gone on record saying that US allies created ISIS. He also said the decision to go to war with Iraq was made because nobody knew what else to do, but they had to look busy.
So some people got killed on what had been a good night out and they will again. They always have. It’s what humans do. It is a total tragedy for everyone involved. The bigger tragedy is we never do anything to stop it happening. Just bomb some more.
The great lesson to be learned in the battered towns of England and the ruined cities of Germany is that the best way to win a war is to prevent it from occurring. That must be the ultimate end to which our best efforts are devoted.
Nobody wanted to hear that then. Nobody wants to hear it now. This is our tragedy, the one that really affects us all.
That’s how I wanted it to start. The story I never wrote, maybe because someone had already written it and it was called Maybe I’ll Come Home In The Spring, or it could have been called Two Lane Blacktop, or it could have been Jeff Buckley singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, or a 17 year-old’s winter afternoon at the Cross Keys and the Red Lion and what from here looks like a phantom cavalcade of BSA A10s and Vauxhall Vivas, a Renault 5, a Bonneville Triton, a couple of Minis and A-roads that killed people back then.
We knew where the crashes had been, the place where the car burned, the turning the car had come out of in front of the lorry, the spot where the road was covered in Maltesers one morning going to school, Star’s field, the dead cats by the road now and then, half something to feel sorry for, half something to be afraid of. The sports field where the flower show was every year, where the puffball mushrooms grew, where we kicked them thinking they were poison, the tiny muddy medieval lane stiled with stones each end where adder berries grew shining red against the grass. The place I grew up. The place I’m still from, even though I can never go back there because it isn’t there.
Sometimes I can still feel that mood,almost. The hope. The passing show. A girl called Emma – and there were lots of girls called Emma and Sally and Sandy and Wendy in those days, where I was, where I lived – once said it: “All of the best times are sad. You know that.” And I sort of did, even then.
And sad because although they’ll always be with you, these memories of all of us driving from one pub to another, girls riding pillion with their blond hair streaming a foot behind them in the 70mph slipstream of that winter afternoon, the smell of hot oil violent against the smell of cold fields, although we’ll always have that, those of us still alive and maybe for all I know the others too, that’s the rub. We’ll always have that. And although the Red Lion’s shut now the last decade and a half, it’s not that. We can’t go back because we can’t go back.
I was discussing the use of English today, touching lightly on the devastating potential of the word “actually,” a topic never even mentioned in TEFL course books, which is a surprising omission, actually. You see what I did there?
Some words and phrases go out of date. Describing something as ‘spruced up’ when you mean making something smarter instantly labels you irredeemably 1950s, but in an odd, other side of the Iron Curtain sort of way, as if you popped round to Kim Philby’s Moscow flat for a chat rather too often. Personally, I think Leslie Phillip’s English is as near the apogee of sophistication as it gets, but I’m old and irritating anyway.
https://youtu.be/Wdysfh8r6ZA
Actually, accent, for some (well, ok, me then) is as important as what’s actually said, actually. Thinking about it reminded me of a time I was trying to get hold of someone I didn’t know and had never met. I’d just bought something on eBay and was trying to go and collect it from the person at work, but I only had his home number. I rang it. A woman answered, with a kind of voice and accent that wasn’t mine.
I explained I just needed to phone her husband, it turned out, about the thing he’d just sold me. Yes, he’d mentioned it. She didn’t say actually. I sometimes get a bit hazy with names. Especially when I don’t really need to know them or think I don’t, which has the same effect.
He’s at work. Ok, I said, should I call him there? She needed to find his work number.
It’s Steve Nidge.
The woman went off to get the rest of the number.
The English among you, or at least those who have a passing familiarity with Hertfordshire and/or me will know what was going to happen.
So, I said. Do I ask for Steve?
Sorry?
Steve, I said. He’s your husband’s boss, is he? I ask for him and he what, gets him to come to the phone? Ok.
She had no idea what I was talking about. I had no idea why she had no idea. Our common language had dumped us into a conversational cul-de-sac that neither of us could see any possible way out of.
It’s just one of the things that foreigners find so hard to understand: if you’re English, foreigners are always foreigners. It doesn’t matter if they’re living in their own country as they have for 3,000 years and you just got off the plane there. They are foreign. No English person ever is. But that doesn’t mean we all speak the same language.
Even when we say ‘Of course, there I suppose we’re foreign to them!!’ but it can’t really be said without at least a widening of the eyes and a little jutting of the chin if not a little shriek of laughter to show it couldn’t really be true. Not really. It’s English, you see. It’s how she is spoke. I wrote about it once, myself. It’s as much what isn’t said.
I discovered Hans Falada via a friend, who recommended Alone In Berlin. I say recommended – she insisted I read it, not least because a relative of hers had died in circumstances not entirely dissimilar to those of the hero and heroine who fell foul of the Gestapo. As another relative had captained the ship that captured the Enigma machine, maybe history balanced that one up a little. But irrelevant. Little Man, What Now? is nothing like Alone In Berlin. Nothing.
OK, the central characters are firmly at the bottom end of the social scale again and the latter half of the book is firmly set in Berlin, but a Berlin of straggling suburbs and allotments rather than the tram-infested zentrum.
This is about poverty and hopelessness and despair and struggling to survive and being a tiny, disregarded, probably un-necessary cog in a huge machine that you can’t see the purpose of. And at exactly the same time it isn’t. It’s a love story, not just of the Little Man for his Lambchen, but a story about love and trust and faith in each other. It’s intensely moving, not just because you know with each passing page that as the characters know too, their world won’t last but unlike them, you know why and how and what’s going to happen.
The Nazis are going to get in. Berlin is going to be demolished. The Little Man is going to be drafted. Lambchen is almost certainly going to be raped and the rest of the world is going to look the other way then pretend it didn’t really happen for the rest of time, because of what some politicians she had no control over did. And then the Russians are going to cut their country in two and if Pinneburg and Emma and their son, the Shrimp, somehow survive then they’re going to be living in the GDR until the Wall comes down, when they will be in their 80s.
But somehow, you get the feeling that maybe, just maybe they might get through even all of this, all of these horrors they don’t even know about, that Hans Falada didn’t know about, back in 1932 when this was written. And if they don’t, or didn’t, you feel that they did their best. And that’s pretty much all anyone can do.
Don’t be put off by the fact that this was the book that lead directly to Hans Falada’s death. It sold massively. So much so that it was turned into a film. In Hollywood. By Jews. You see the problem? You would have done if you lived in Germany in the mid-1930s.
Don’t be put off by the age of this book. The view from the bottom of the 99% upwards could have been written last week. Ignore the fact you’ve never heard of this book. Ignore the fact it was written in German. It will leave you quiet and sad and happy at the same time, wondering if maybe, just possibly, love will find a way after all.
It’s Rememberance Sunday. The Prime Minister has gone to the Cenotaph and done his very best SadFace, even if being David Cameron he looks like an eight year old who can’t tell Nanny he needs a new dog because he wasn’t supposed to set light to the old one in the first place.
Without the slightest sense of irony the BBC are happily broadcasting stories explaining why we have to invade Syria despite the fact that hardly anyone can even point to it on a map without names on it because as usual, “they” are threatening to destroy ‘our way of life.’ Unlike say, a Home Secretary demanding to be able to see exactly which websites you visited, when, all of you. Perhaps like Patrick Rock, one of David Cameron’s special advisors, who collected child sex images on his computer, but somehow that wasn’t specifically mentioned. When it comes to destroying our way of life we don’t need any help from outside, thanks.We’ve got it. If you want a job doing properly you do it yourself.
Meanwhile a Russian airplane has exploded in Egypt because the airport security is a joke, as everyone has known for always, so it’s going to be another bonanza at Luton for airport security who were wondering what they were going to do about Christmas again.
Everyone I know who has left the army tells the same story. One word out of place and you aren’t just out on your ear but the roof will fall on you. ‘ The Army won’t just turn its back. It’ll stab you in yours.
I remember being told about a soldier in Northern Ireland whose officer was shot and down on the ground. The soldier jumped into the armoured car they had which happened to have a .50 Browning on top and opened fire at the flats where the shots had come from. Brownings are serious kit. There is nothing on a High Street you could hide behind that would save you. The shooting stopped, chiefly because the flat disintegrated, along with whoever was doing the shooting.
The army thought, in the circumstances, that things could have been done a little more discretely. So they asked the soldier to resign. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong so he wasn’t inclined to do this having done pretty archetypal soldier stuff. OK, said the army. We’ll give your name to the Press when they ask what happened. Your choice.
Someone told me how he personally got turned over when Operation Stakeknife was being investigated. He was arrested by Special Branch in his flat, mob-handed and armed with sub-machineguns. He said he was quite flattered that they obviously thought he was Jason Bourne instead of just a fairly junior staff officer. He was only reaching for his jumper as it turned out, which was why he was able to tell me the story. They hung him out to dry. He hadn’t done anything, he wasn’t charged with anything, he’d served in Afghanistan and Iraq, killed people and almost been killed. The Army made it impossible for him to carry on there. The Prime Minister personally apologised to the journalist involved. The person I talked to is still waiting.
Another word for nothing left to lose
We pretend to remember. We don’t want to, or only to spin it into a version that suits the government better. The BBC’s Cenotaph broadcast this morning talked about ‘the dead of two World Wars,’ as they always do, then slipped in the compulsory bit about protecting our freedom, then reminded us that he who seeks peace must prepare for war/it isn’t over yet/brave little Belgium/Our Brave Boys are still dying by telling us about the two RAF men killed in Afghanistan last month.
Which only begged two questions, the first being since when did the Afghan crusade had the moral equivalence of World War Two, although the reasoning of Saudi Arabians working from Germany and living in the US with flame-proof passports justified invading Afghanistan and Iraq in much the same way that shooting an arch-duke in Sarajevo inevitably meant UK conscripts defending a canal in Flanders. Obvious, really.
The other question unaddressed by the BBC was exactly what the two RAF men were doing there, given that the Afghan campaign was supposed to have ended in 2014. Since they weren’t by definition ‘defending freedom’ (because freedom won, remember?) it would be quite hard to see how their deaths were the same thing at all. The British Army lost more people to traffic accidents in Afghanistan than it did to any enemy.
But it doesn’t matter. We’re wallowing in young men’s blood for another year, dipping our hands like Jacqui Kennedy screaming out of the car in Dallas, but without the few shreds of dignity she had left, nor the justification. So far as I can see, we always will.
I only really got into making soup this year. Right now I’m sort-of in bed with sort-of pneumonia. I got flu four weeks ago, I’ve felt like crap ever since and when my legs started tingling with the assorted toxins sluicing through them two mornings in a row and I felt dog-tired all the time I thought it was time to go to the doctor.
It might be pneumonia, it might not, but it’s certainly a week’s worth of oxicillin. And more feeling like crap. I bought a pheasant on Monday because at my decidedly rural farmers’ auction place they cost £2.50 and obviously they’ve never been near a factory farm or a slaughterhouse, but even though it was de-feathered and gutted I just haven’t felt like doing it. Or pretty much anything else. But you still have to eat and this is good for you, really tasty and added bonus, really, really cheap. And anyone can do it. Really anyone.
Soak 2/3 of a packet of red lentils overnight. They’re about 80p a packet.
Chop up half a cabbage. Cabbages are about 50p.
If you want to be fancy soften some onions in the big green Le Creuset. I used to have some money, once upon a time.
Add the lentils and the cabbage and fill the saucepan to within about an inch of the top. Whack it on full.
Add mixed herbs, pepper, maybe cumin but I didn’t this time. I’m thinking of adding caraway or dill, but I’m not entirely sure about that. Didn’t this time.
Add a tin of tomatoes. Again, farmers’ auction market, three tins for £1. And a veggie stock cube.
Boil it.
Once it’s boiled for about 20 minutes use the fifteen year-old Braun wand whizzer to mulch it all up. That’s probably the best kitchen aid I have. Certainly the one I use most.
Leave it to simmer on minimum.
Now make your dumplings. 100g self-raising flour, 50g vegetarian suet. I mean, you wouldn’t use real suet, would you? Really? Well, they’re your arteries I suppose. Sprinkle some more mixed herbs in. If you wish. Whether or not you do, add about half a teaspoon of baking powder or bicarb.
Add some water, not too much, and stir the mix until it congeals into one big ball. Split that into four. Put the four flour balls into the simmering soup.
Then go away. Give it about half an hour. The dumplings will more than double in size. I like them like this, but you may want a little less expandy baking powder. If you have to chew them they’re not done. But they will be.
That’s it. Soup and dumplings. Really, really nice. And about as complicated as I can do today.
