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Some words and phrases go out of date.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.
Fleet Street used to be called the Street of Shame, presumably because a lot of stories were written and/or made-up when the writers were drunk a spokesman said, which used to be an automatic flag for “I totally made that up,” as everyone always knew.
For me, I lost trust in what I hate to call MSM – Mainstream Media – last Bonfire Night. I know that sounds a bit like The Night I Found Out About Santa. But it was. There was a huge demonstration in Westminster, outside the Houses of Parliamment. It was a wholly peaceful demo. But while Twitter and Facebook knew about it from people who were there, it was totally invisible to the BBC. So much so that for over four hours there wasn’t a single mention of it on any BBC website. There are obvious news priorities. There’s a finite amount of print space or website or attention span and an almost infinite amount of news. But it seemed distinctly odd that the BBC had the time and space to drear on about the traditional Bonfire in Lewes but no space at all to even mention 5,000 people outside Parliament. And then Russel Brand turned up.
I don’t like Russel Brand. I confuse him with Russel Grant. I think he has an extremely silly voice. I’m sure neither of those things bother him in the slightest. But what bothered me was the BBC’s capacity to ignore something that demonstrably was important, the Million Mask March, something that was happening in major cities all over the world, and try to divert attention from it, deliberately.
Then today I read about a journalist saying that he was ashamed to be a journalist. You can read the original article here. I thought it was going to be atonement for things like that. A cry for forgiveness, from a profession that decided that it was ok to write down that the Prime Minister threatened BBC journalists in public that if they didn’t toe the line he’d shut the BBC, but it was only ok to write about it after the election, in case it annoyed the Prime Minister. Or maybe, in case his behaviour was so outrageous that he would have lost the election if people knew that the public service broadcaster had been treated like this.
But I was wrong. John Darvall was outraged because other journalists told the truth. Or if they didn’t he doesn’t say what it was they made-up. His daughter was killed in a car crash. He made up a tribute to her, as anyone might, then attributed it to her mother. Which was not true. She might have thought those things about her daughter. She probably did. But she didn’t say them. John Darvall did. Then he pretended someone else did and wanted other journalists to repeat this fiction. His daughter had lived with her mother and step-father since she was three. His daughter and her mother and John Darvall and the step-father didn’t use that word, but that was the fact of it. Cosy sophistry of the order of “I am Polly and Oliver’s father, Simon is their dad” may be fine around the kitchen table and doubtless it was, but it isn’t all that clear when you’re trying to tie things up in 150 words in the Western Evening Press or wherever.
That may well be “always the language we use,” but it isn’t strictly true. Whoever Simon is, he was the poor girl’s stepfather. He and she may not have thought of him as such, nor used the word, but that is what he was. Language really is vital if as the 1,000 words of self-indulgence claims, “we are to understand who we are and what we do. ”
What ‘we’ chiefly do in this case is get irritated because other journalists tell the truth using a word you don’t approve of and write copy for other papers that you think is badly written. John Darvall repeatedly says that untruths were said, but somehow forgets to mention any of them. Not one, in fact. What gets most attention is that other journalists described his ex’s partner as his daughter’s step-father, which he was. And that the step-father, after he’d heard John Darvall on the phone, rang him up later and gave him a bollocking about what other people said.
I don’t know John Darvall. I don’t know anyone involved in this story. I can fully understand why people lash out and say unreasonable things when they’re upset, especially when they have something as serious as sudden death to be upset about. But being ashamed to be a journalist because other journalists use a factual descriptor and you don’t like it, and your ex’s bloke rings you up and goes on at you isn’t anything to do with anyone else. It’s piggy-backing his own daughter’s death to look right-on.
The gist of the problem, the thing that sticks most in John Darvall’s craw, apparently it is ‘they’ said his ex’s partner was the dead daughter’s step-father. Well, he was. Deal with it. It’s not something to be ashamed of. And it’s not as if journalism needs to look far for things to be ashamed of. There are, after all, more shameful things than using truthful words that people don’t like. Except as the journalists on Cameron’s airplane decided, maybe there aren’t.
Tweedledum or Tweedledee, or possibly both, once said to Alice that words meant anything he (or they) wanted them to mean, neither more nor less. As a descriptor for modern media it’s horribly accurate. Words that mean one thing one year mean the opposite the next. War is peace, as Orwell pointed out a long time ago.
Ever get the feeling you’ve been conned?
All three might have been mildly amused by a man having a heart attack this week. Strictly, that wasn’t the nub of the story, although it seemed to be at first glance. After the driver had the heart attack the vehicle drove on and literally into Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Yesterday.
My father had a fatal heart attack and carried on after death much as he’d lived, being an expensive nuisance to other people causing a mess everyone else was expected to sort out and crashing into three cars. I don’t know whether this driver survived. But two things stood out immediately.
First, there was huge debate over whether the man should be called a taxi driver. It used to mean a black cab driver who had done the Knowledge and had a proper licence from the Hackney Carriage Office dahn the end of Chapel Market where Sammy Fox’s granny shopped, left then right then there guv, you won’t mind if I drop you here because I can’t get back otherwise what with the traffic and that, I was going down Kings Cross anyway but not this time of the afternoon living out in Essex south of the river nah, I’m not going that way this time of night. I had that Jeremy Clarkson in the back of my cab last week, very clever man. And all that STUFF.
No For Hire sign. No proper cab. So he was a mini-cab, like the dreaded Uber, which seems to be shorthand for the kind of no-insurance but gee-it’s got-a cute-app-plus-its-cheap which is shredding the black cab business, so long as you don’t mind nobody knowing where they’re going and legging it if there’s a traffic accident.
Rather more significant I thought was the fact that the picture showed so many lies we’ve all been told. Back in 2007 two men attempted to massacre people in the main concourse at Glasgow airport by driving a car into it and detonating gas bottles there. No, the big ones. The attack failed, not least because an airport baggage handler headbutted one of the attackers who was already on fire. After that we were told over and over again that airport security blah paramount importance- lessons-will -be -learned – best practice – watchful – security – terrorism – CCTV – vigilance and all the customary words that clearly mean nothing at all.
Because terrorism
Why do I say this? Why do I doubt that when I have to hold my trousers up at airports with my hands like someone on Death Row because my belt has to be interrogated because Terrorism, that this isn’t just a stupid charade that does less than nothing to stop terrorism? Becuase of the picture at the top.
If you go to Edinburgh airport you can get a car near the concourse. There are metal barriers stopping you repeating the attack at Glasgow. There are concrete bollards protecting the main doors, so you definitely can’t drive a car in there, whether you get head-butted or not. At Heathrow T5, obviously none of that matters. This taxi, mini-cab, VW microbus, call it what you like, stopped only because the driver’s foot came off the accelerator. As you can see clearly, it went straight through the puny designed-to-stop-people-only metal railings that were the front-line defence against a car being used to smash straight through the windows onto the concourse. As this vehicle nearly did.
Public response to this? Nothing? Security implications debated all over the media? No. Social media backlash? Well actually yes. I was told this was ‘nothing to do with terrorism’ and I was ‘stupid’ to mention it by someone on Facebook. So that seems to be official. Fifteen years of ‘security’ which has been nothing more than legalised theft of alcohol and perfume bottles over 150 ml at every airport where the G4S personnel don’t fancy doing their own Christmas shopping and the net result is that anybody with access to a car can still stage their own carbon copy of a terrorist attack mounted seven years ago. It isn’t just that it doesn’t matter. That matters in itself. What matters more to me is that nobody is even supposed to notice, or to mention it if they have.
About 17 years ago, 18 maybe, I walked into an almost empty pub where an old man and a fat skinhead were arguing, one summer’s afternoon. The words Hitler Youth were used, which even if it was Hertfordshire, isn’t the norm. That’s when it really kicked off. The old man was incandescent with rage.
Yes, he said, he’d been in the Hitler Youth. He was proud of it. What he was outraged about was being called a Nazi.
Like most people, I believed what I’d been told, pretty much without thinking. There were Nazis and there were Germans but they probably all knew about everything and We were Good and They were Bad and they were all in it together and if they didn’t like Hitler they’d have done something about it… All the usual sloppy, stupid, simplistic thinking that I have no excuse for, as I have none for the childish bullshit I’ve been told.
We are Good. They are Bad. Forever and ever, Amen. It never matters who they are, not least because Their leader is invariably mad. Hussein. Bonaparte. The Kaiser. The Junta. Obviously goes without saying, Hitler. Mad, all of them. The fact that Churchill was drinking more than a bottle of brandy every day has and had no bearing on anything, ever. Because We Are Good.
I listened to the old man explain that you didn’t get a choice about joining the Hitler Youth. You were conscripted on your thirteenth birthday. You got a uniform, a knife, you went to camp and slept in tents, you did singing and marching and bonfires and at thirteen, very little boy got to shoot real pistols and throw real grenades. I remember being thirteen. I can remember how complete I would have felt, as a boy, doing those things.
And I listened to the old man explain how on the last day of his war, in April 1945, with the Americans due to arrive within the hour, the SS arrived instead. They took all of the children up into a field and rummaged around in the dirt until they found what they were looking for, a hatch to a bunker full of brand new guns. They kitted the kids out with steel helmets and grenades and bullets and machine guns and told them to defend the Fatherland and oh look, is that time, love to help but must dash, maybe next time. Do your best boys. And drove off toward the future, leaving the boys to deal with the past.
They met their schoolmaster coming up the lane as they were taking their weapons back to the village. In the old man’s words, he beat the shit out of them, made them throw all the guns in the ditch and sent them home. He saved all of their lives. The Americans arrived on time, within the hour, riding jeeps with machine guns mounted on top. He said they looked as if they were wetting themselves. They would have shot everybody.
I never knew the old man’s name. He might be dead by now. If he isn’t perhaps one day he will see the thing I’ve been working on, the story of that day. It has other people’s stories in it as well, other real lives. A story of a man who made one silly joke and was going to be shot for it when the partisans attacked and he found himself walking 700 kilometres home to Bremen. A story about the Swing Kids, the Heinies, the Eidelweiss Pirates, Hans Falada, Sophie Scholl, all the other people our inane propaganda wants to airbrush out of our reality, because they don’t fit our children’s story: we are good. They are bad.
Life doesn’t work like that. When we lose the truth we cheat ourselves. So this is for Janni Schenck. I don’t know the old man’s name. I never did. But whenever I think about this story, that’s the name that comes to me, through 70 years of lies.
I don’t know when people started hating food. I had a fantastic dinner yesterday, a fairly ordinary spag bol sauce albeit using venison mince and – gasp!! – a veggie stock-cube along with Worcestershire sauce, with furmity. I liked it so much that I said so on Facebook.
One person said they didn’t ever want to see such a thing again. Another told me to fuck off. The first one I blocked, not least because I don’t want anyone posting Our Brave Boys knee-jerk seasonal adulation on their time-line anywhere near mine. The second I know as a farmer and I know what she meant. Which is ok. Mostly.
What isn’t is people thinking that anything doesn’t come out of a packet is suspect. There is a distinct meme running through what passes for contemporary life that the only good food comes from a factory. At the same time that the number of TV programmes about food increases, so does the number of ready-meals and cook-at-home pizzas sold. Tabloids scream that if people used all the spices Jamie Oliver does it would cost a whole week’s JSA. Which if you used all of all of the herbs in his kitchen it undoubtedly would, but nobody would ever need to go and buy them all in one go anyway. The fact that every packet of processed food, the kind that directly leads to coronary heart disease, Type II diabetes and ADHD has a list of ingredients far more disturbing than a pinch of oregano and half a nutmeg, grated, is irrelevant. Since when did nutmeg buy any advertising space?
What was really surprising was the horror about furmity. As you remember from school, when you had to read Thomas Hardy and snore through The Mayor of Casterbridge, or watch it on TV one Sunday afternoon to be polite to your girlfriend’s parents before they went out for the evening and you could maybe listen to that new Santana album again but shut up until they’ve gone or they’ll hear you, furmity was what got Michael Henchard into trouble. It also made a success of him for the next twenty years, which isn’t bad going for some raisins. Admittedly, I’m biased. A friend once lived in Thomas Hardy’s sister’s schoolhouse and his was our country in our twenties. We read every single book. Not so much because they were great books, I think, but because they were about our land. A half-mythical place. The place we were from. But anyway.
“Separate the egg yolks, you say, Ezekiel? I suppose I could do meringues with the whites. ‘Tis a mortal pity to waste they,” said Henchard.
My Furmity Recipe
Put some cracked wheat (bulgar) in a pan of water overnight. I have two measurements, “some” and “many.” This is “some.” Maybe two handfuls. 200g if you want to be picky about it. Don’t be.
Next day, drain the water off. Find some cinnamon in the back of the cupboard. And some raisins. Oh and there might be some allspice there as well.
Those walnuts you tried to pickle in port might be an idea too.
Or pine nuts.
Some of that ginger cordial because frankly I can’t see what else you’re going to do with it. Or why you bought it, to be honest.
Why DID you, anyway?
It’s like that knock-off Microplane grater you got in Paris, isn’t it? Except that at least you’re going to use that in (8).
Microplane half a nutmeg into the mixture.
Oh the mixture of all of it. What did you think you were going to do with it?
Add some almond milk. You could make it but it would be far more sensible to use some soya almond milk stuff.
Enough to cover it, obviously. Have you never cooked anything before?
Some of that ginger puree. About two-thirds of the nearest spoon in the drawer, which happens to be a soup spoon. Well, wash it then.
Add some brown sugar. Not the granulated stuff. You can’t do anything except apple sandwiches with that. About 50 grammes.
Two egg yolks. Separating them out using the two half shells looks really cheffy. I’m not convinced they actually add much to the experience though.
Heat it. Don’t let it boil. Just get it hot enough to burn your tongue on.
Eat it.
Henchard added rum to his and sold his wife, prompting two decades of abstinence in a nicely moral plot. The taste is amazing, layer on layer of complexity and warmth. The ginger isn’t part of any traditional recipe, or rather the Waitrose one I cribbed from, but I was trying to go for tastes that might be found in a country kitchen of Henchard’s time. Or if they might possibly not have had ginger root, at least they would have known about it.
It’s really easy to cook and like a lot of recipes that people say “I haven’t got time to do all that,” it actually takes about five minutes. Most of the ‘time’ is overnight while it’s soaking up water and you’re not doing anything to do with cooking then. I didn’t think I’d like that sweet-and-meat thing that seems to have been so popular in medieval cookery. It still is if you go to Moro or eat duck pancakes with plum sauce. But still quite hard to see why it should irritate people so much. Apart from the fact it’s not Pot Noodle.
The word doesn’t mean what you think it does. It’s nothing to do with people who used to do little documentaries about cars and order four racks of lamb in restaurants, then eat it all themselves. Oh because I know, ok? It’s nothing to do with Harry Sodding Potter.
Nothing whatsoever ever to do with at all.
It means what it says, which is nothing to do with the cheery, bluff figure in the films. It means ridden by a hag. Which isn’t much fun. I didn’t know until I read up on it how widespread it is. Hag-ridden is a feature of Icelandic literature, although why that should be I don’t understand. It’s a waking dream, a sleep state, a hallucination. A nightmare. And it’s usually utterly terrifying. I had one last night.
The first time was at university. It happened twice within a month or so, both times in the same room. A woman appeared in the corner of my room, near the door, tiny. She grew bigger as she came towards me. I couldn’t move. I wanted to. I wanted not to be there more than I’d wanted almost anything. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move as she sat on my chest. I wanted to hurt her, hit her, anything to get her off me because I couldn’t breathe but if I moved I might make her worse and I couldn’t imagine anything worse than her. And most of all, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t twist her off me or raise my arm or cry out. I never can. Then she was gone and I was trying to breath at about double the rate I normally do, pouring sweat, shaking. Terrified. I was nineteen in a hall of residence. I thought it was haunted.
It wasn’t, or perhaps I was. It happened again in another bedroom, then again ten years later. It’s only happened once when another person was there, which is interesting in itself, not least as there is a German tradition that these dreams afflict those who sleep alone. Whether they’re cause or effect is another matter. It isn’t like a dream, where you know it’s a dream. It’s real, or it feels completely real, because the worst thing about it is you feel as if you’re completely awake. Except you can’t move at all. And you can feel the weight of the woman on your bed. On you.
Apparently it’s not just me.
Last night I dealt with it, but it was different, as different as it could possibly be. I’ve been a bit ill. It’s just flu but it’s been going on for a while and I’ve been working on something I needed to do and got sunk into it probably a little too much and my sleep has been shot to pieces. Maybe that’s part of it.
I got to bed about half-past nine. I put the lights out at eleven. I thought I woke about three. My old cat was there. I stroked him under his chin and rubbed his ears, stroked his back, avoided his tummy because he never, ever liked being stroked there. I think he was very, very ticklish. I knew he was dead, but he was alive. It was so, so good to see him, for both of us. I can’t remember waking up feeling so loved and feeling so loving, bathed in warmth, unconditionally. As I played with him I could feel when she came into the room. I didn’t see her. I thought perhaps one of the other cats might have jumped onto the bed, but all of them were always smaller than my big cat, and he wasn’t as big as her. She was there again and again she grew and got heavier. Then heavier and larger.
The last time it happened I managed, just about managed to remember this was a dream. That it wasn’t real. That even though I couldn’t move, that even though her weight was growing and she was getting bigger and bigger, pushing me into the bed in a way I don’t welcome women grinding me into beds, that even though I was starting to feel I couldn’t breathe, I managed to remember this was just a dream. A horrible, frightening dream, but still a dream I was ultimately in charge of, a dream I could control. Above all, a dream where I could decide if I wanted to be frightened or not. Because it was a dream.
I managed it last night. It is not easy. The fear still comes, especially when you start to feel you can’t breath, the weight is there on the bed, growing and you can see all around you, can see nothing has fallen on you, that it isn’t a heavy book you’ve forgotten you were reading when you went to sleep. But I woke up still feeling the love of my old cat, who died eight years ago, the glowing warmth and all-enveloping trust and wanting nothing more than just for that moment to go on for ever, the way it never can. As nothing can. Including nightmares.
A note
According to the unimpeachable source which is Wikipedia, the word nightmare derives from mara, a Scandinavian mythological term referring to a spirit sent to torment or suffocate sleepers.
The painting is Fuseli’s The Nightmare. He painted it in 1781 in several different versions, all of which scandalised polite society at a time when The Rivalswas as racy as it got. There were engravings of it, cartoons, satires and downright rip-offs of it. It depicts the imagery of the woman’s dream at the same time as the woman herself. I think this is why it was so successful; it plugs straight into the experience itself, a place where there is no border between waking reality and the neverland of dreaming. This is the realm of faery, the disputed territory between our world and another, where each of us wanders alone and unprotected at night.
