Jam tomorrow: a tale of disappointment

In the old days, students wrote or typed their essays, and submitted the results as physical objects.[1] The staff read the essays, marked them, and returned these self-same objects to the students, possibly even meeting them to discuss, clarify or build upon their comments. Vast quantities of paper were sacrificed, but broadly this system seemed to meet the needs of all concerned. Then, at some point in the early noughties, one of the minions (whose only job is to spoon liquid over the twitching body of the Creature, of which more later) overstepped the boundaries of his job description, and the world of marking was changed forever.

The Creature, whose existence I infer from what I see around me in the university, is the malevolent controlling force that propels the institution along in ever-stupider directions: a vast, grub-like being that lives in the bowels of Senate House, covered with electrodes and feeding on despair. Suggest other explanations if you wish: none of them can explain all the quirks and details satisfactorily. Perhaps the Creature was relaxing after a hard Friday afternoon digesting a junior member of staff from Personnel, who had dared to point out that a three-hour meeting is at least two-and-a-half-hours too long; or perhaps Personnel no longer have meetings, but simply gather into piles to sleep. Either way, I sense that the Creature was itself drowsy and unfocused, luxuriating in the sensation of the fluid moving around its vat, eyes closed, tentacles relaxed. The electrodes that hook it up to (among other things) the university timetabling software were, I fancy, relatively quiet. This lulled the spooning minion into a false sense of security, and he spoke without considering the consequences of his actions.

Balthazar (Buffy, season three). Put tentacles where the arms are, the buttocks at the back and a load of electrodes on each slimy fold, and you have the Creature.

‘Minion,’ mumbled the Creature, who has never troubled to learn the names of those who serve him, ‘do you know how old I am?’

‘Nearly one hundred, O Great One,’ replied the minion (let’s call him Gavin). ‘Your centenary is only a few years away. But everybody is living longer these days. I was reading on the internet the other day that–’ A tentacle flopped out of the vat, seizing Gavin by the face and arresting him in the middle of his (no doubt very tedious) sentence. ‘A moment, minion. What is … the internet?’

At the end of the ensuing conversation with the luckless Gavin, the Creature issued a mad decree: that all the world should be taxed that the university couldn’t consider itself modern (modern!) unless all written work was submitted, marked and returned online.[2] As the Creature’s decrees go, this is only mildly mad; my personal favourite is still the edict we had in 2008 to combat the financial crisis by buying cheaper pens. In theory, online submission and marking makes a lot of sense. Certainly it is a case of fixing something that wasn’t broken, but there are obvious advantages. However, in practice it has turned a pleasantly cathartic task into something that makes one chew one’s desk in frustration. The Online Learning Environment (which absolutely nobody refers to as ‘olé!’) is a joyless, counter-intuitive piece of crap. Having clicked through half a dozen screens to get to the blasted essays, each one appears in a window much smaller than one would like. The staff member can then mark up the text by attaching comments (slowly, laboriously) and scrolling through the paragraphs, fingers curled and wizened, all the time remembering that one’s New Year Resolution for the last four years has been to spend less time looking at screens. Marking up this way isn’t anything like as quick or useful as (say) using a red pen on some actual paper, or tracked changes in Word, and very often one simply gives up recording the more minor things. There is also no straightforward way to do detailed work, such as punctuating a sentence or suggesting words that could usefully have been removed from a paragraph, and the autosave doesn’t work properly, periodically tossing one out of the system without warning, like a crotchety bull tossing an inept matador out of the ring (olé!). Having read and marked an essay after a fashion, one is then required to give feedback under a set of meaningless headings, record one’s mark in several places, and then, exhausted, sweaty, and with a lingering sense of doubt that this exercise has achieved anything very much, move onto the next essay. Our marking system was, I suggest, developed by the same moron that put together the online ordering system for purchasing jam jars at my hitherto preferred jam jar emporium.

As I am fond of remarking in fits of false modesty, some can sing; some can dance; and some can make preserves. Happily, I can do all three (simultaneously if required). Making jam, jelly, curd and marmalade is, however, something I can do well. This not just any old jam, jelly, curd and marmalade: these are the finest fruit-based preserves known to man. Late summer is the time to make jam with soft fruit, and the point at which the season turns from autumn to winter is when I make jelly out of hard fruit such as quinces and crabapples.[3] January is for marmalade, because Seville oranges and bergamot (also called Marrakesh lemons, which I prefer as it’s in keeping with Seville oranges) are in season. Marmalade requires three categories of ingredient (fruit, sugar, and liquid) and I like to experiment with all of them. This year, for example, I am attempting three concurrent batches, the first of which contained Seville oranges, lemons, demerara sugar and six pints of ginger tea. One can only eat so much marmalade, and I give a lot of it away. After devouring the smashing orangey bit in the middle, people are often thoughtful enough to return the jars to me, but even so I thought it was high time I bought some more, and ordered forty-five online. That was a week ago, and the third batch of marmalade remains unmade, for reasons that will become apparent in what follows.

Friday
Jam jars arrive. The Seville oranges are looking a bit peaky, but I have time to make the marmalade on Saturday while Giant Bear is at a train thing.

Saturday
Marmalade Tide! Seville orange peel is fairly tough and needs to be cooked down for around an hour, so while it simmered away, I tore open the faintly jingly box. There are my three racks of jars; there are the six ‘fancy’ jars I’ve ordered to give to people who are Extra Special; and there is the delivery note. However, like snake eyes, my jars have no lids.

I manage to scrape together a motley crew of jars while the marmalade cooks and am jolly lucky not to have lost the whole batch. Naturally, I assume this lidlessness is my fault. I am also enraged, assuming that the fucking website has allowed me to order forty-five jars without generating an error message that alerts me to the fact that, while nobody would ever order jars without lids or lids without jars, the wretched things are sold separately, as if a restaurant suddenly started charging extra for plates, glasses and cutlery. I contact the company, apologise for my stupidity and ask them to rush me forty-five lids. They reply that no, the jars and lids are sold as a package: I have in fact done everything right. My lids have been omitted by their system, which understands lids and jars as two separate things (why, since the order does not?). They are very sorry and will have some lids sent out to me with all speed on Monday morning. I say, hilariously, ‘Jam tomorrow!’; am briefly cross that I can’t think of a joke about yesterday’s jam; muse fleeting on the chances that the same person is responsible for my delayed lids and the online marking system; and think nothing more of it.

Monday
Jam Jar Emporium: What kind of jars do you want?
Me: I don’t want jars. I have fucktons of jars. I want lids. GIVE ME LIDS!
Jam Jar Emporium: Great! Glad to hear you’ve got jars!
Me: The order number and the fact that I want some lids are in the subject line of the email.
Jam Jar Emporium: Super! [Is it?] What kind of lids do you want?
Me: I want lids that will fit my jars. I don’t care about the colour or pattern. [I was so cross that I almost quoted Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat]. Any lids will do.
Jam Jar Emporium: What colour do you want?
Me: I literally don’t care.
Jam Jar Emporium: Right, but what colour do you want?
Me: Fine. Blue, please.
Jam Jar Emporium: We’re sold out of blue.

Tuesday
Just after breakfast, I receive an email that says my lids have been packed up and are on their way to me via courier. A nice man on a motorbike arrives with a jiffy bag that makes the right noise when I shake it, with my name and ‘OMITTED!’ scrawled on the outside in hysterical biro. Recklessly, after dinner I email the Jam Jar Emporium idiot to say that my lids have arrived, and I prepare three pounds of fruit (Marrakesh lemons and some limes to bring it up to the required weight). The limes are teeny-tiny and full of pips, so this takes ages, but none of them have actually gone over, and it’s jolly satisfying to see it all bubbling away together. I’ve decided to make this batch with weak Earl Grey as the liquid, since Marrakesh lemons are what give Earl Grey its lovely smell, and for sugar I’m using set honey. As I add it to the pan, I have the brilliant idea of immediately cleaning, de-labelling and sterilising the honey jars and pouring the brand new marmalade back into them. Accordingly, I sterilise these eight jars, plus another eight jars from the box. I count out the brand new lids, which are a fetching red with spots. Much like a heroine in DH Lawrence, the marmalade reaches its crisis eventually, and I ladle it into the jars. This is the moment at which I discover that the new lids are too fucking small.

Wednesday
Me: These lids won’t do.
Jam Jar Emporium: Don’t you like the colour?
Me: The colour is, as we have established, a matter of indifference to me. They won’t do because they are too fucking small.
Jam Jar Emporium: Are you sure?[4]
Me: Please find attached a picture showing both lid and jar.
Jam Jar Emporium: Oh dear. I think we may have sent you the wrong size.
Me: REALLY ARE YOU SURE.
Jam Jar Emporium: What size jars did you order?
Me [again, the order number is in the subject line of the email, so surely you can just look it up, but whatever]: 12oz.
Jam Jar Emporium: What’s that in kg?
Me: 340g [I knew this from doing the conversion when buying the honey], but everything on your website is in imperial.[5]
Jam Jar Emporium: Nope. I’ve just searched for 340g jars and we don’t do those.
Me: You do do those. I have forty-five of them in my kitchen. You just call them 12oz jars, which is what they are. Again, however, I must remind you that it is the lids that I require. Do you do the lids for them?
Jam Jar Emporium: You’d assume so, wouldn’t you?
Me: YES. YES, I WOULD.

Thursday
Just after breakfast, I receive an email that says my lids have been packed up and are on their way to me via courier (again). This is less reassuring than it was last time, but the email comes from the boss of the fool I have been dealing with and so I remain hopeful. This ebbs away as the day drags on, partly because of Trump’s inauguration, and partly because I don’t think motorcycle couriers deliver jiffy-bags of jam jar lids after nightfall.[6]

Friday
It’s 5.30pm, and I am still lidless. This morning’s email from Incompetents R Us suggests I make the marmalade anyway and put clingfilm over the lids of my jars (because jars that have been filled with boiling sugar remain cool to the touch and the clingfilm definitely wouldn’t melt). I recall that, except for walking the dog (I don’t want to be borked to death), I have been unable to leave the house during the day all week for fear of missing one lid-bearing courier or another. The house, myself and the remaining three pounds of blood oranges are still in a state of tension, as, like Adrian Mole waiting for the giro, we continue to wait for the lids. If only I had some marking to do to pass the time.

 

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[1] Other options are available, of course, such as not handing in work at all. I was once confronted by an angry student who had been awarded a mark of zero for failing to hand in an essay (and ‘awarded’ is surely the right word here). The student felt that a suitable way to persuade me to change his mark of zero was to yell at the other staff in the room, and then assault me with a quick burst of Cicero-like rhetoric. Under the impression that I was a. interested and b. allowed to make those kinds of decisions (I was neither), he looked me straight in the boob, and said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ Since I had created and then managed the student database for a year, I knew exactly who he was: I knew his name, mediocre A-Levels and unit choices, and yet I am still assailed by the nagging feeling that this wasn’t what he meant. Happily, not only did the mark of zero stand (because of course it did, despite a telephone call from his father, who turned out to be a minor civil servant and only too happy to take our side when I explained how little work his son was doing), but the student failed a load of exams the following summer and thus removed himself from the university forever, like a tick falling off a cow. Thus perish all mine enemies, saith the Lord.

[2] Why on earth would we want universities, of all things, to be modern?

[3] This year’s crabapple and apple jelly, which I made on Christmas Eve, was a corker. As described in a previous post (see Eve’s Pudding), it is sunset in a jar.

[4] AM I SURE. As if the reply was going to be, ‘actually, I’m not very sure. It’s so hard to tell the different between Things That Are Big Enough and Things That Are Definitely Too Small To Be Useful, isn’t it?’ No woman of thirty-six has ever said this.

[5] This is because preserve recipes are fundamentally imperial. Marmalade: three pounds of citrus fruit + six pounds of sugar + six pints of liquid. Lemon curd: three lemons + 9oz sugar + 4.5 oz butter + three eggs.

[6] Although if they did, that’s a stand-alone early Buffy episode right there. The episode (and courier company?) would be called Nighthawk; Americans don’t watch ‘Allo ‘Allo, but one might include a sprinkling of hilarious references that only British viewers would understand e.g. Giles wearing a policeman’s uniform, rehearsing Pirates of Penzance, perhaps (‘Good moaning!’); an Italian exchange student shouting ‘The byowtiful lie-dee!’ at Cordelia; everyone stuffing cheese into their ears so they don’t have to hear Xander’s attempts at cafe chantant, and so on. The couriers would be dishy, leather-clad and apologetic, and then BAM! As per The Fly, fruit and sugar trigger these apparently nice young men to develop beaks and talons and all the vulnerable jam-making ladies would be horribly pecked to death and/or partially eaten and smeared with jam. Then Willow decides to make marmalade for some reason (a school project, say), orders some jam jars that are ‘accidentally’ sent without lids, terribly sorry miss, we’ll rush them to you by courier, and thus our story unfolds.

Tales from the canal-bank

It is a great loss to me (and, I venture to suggest, the world) that I don’t run a creative writing class. If I did, however, this week I would be asking my students to pick one of the following items, all of which I have observed at one time or another on, in or in the vicinity of a canal, and use it as the starting point for a short story.

We begin with items found floating in the water. Pearson’s Canal Companion suggests that canal flotsam is not entirely savoury, and he’s not wrong.[1] Here’s an arresting image from a passage on Langley Maltings (Titford Canal):

The water, too, seemed cleaner, as clear as a see-through blouse; though the contents of the canal bed thus revealed were not quite so desirable as the analogy suggests.[2]

Item one is a dead seagull, frozen in a position that, in conjunction with a set of humming overhead power lines, suggested it had been electrocuted (or, at the very least, greatly surprised) before flopping into the filthy water, wings forever stiffly raised mid-flap – but there could be so many other explanations, each ripe with Adventure and Plot. Item two is a whole, unpeeled and (apart from being in the canal) apparently sound onion, which reminded my husband of a lettuce (also whole, and also apparently fine) he once saw in the canal, forlornly bobbing along singing a song. This one almost makes sense, since lettuce is 100% useless (see Home Economics), but surely one knows that at the point of purchase? One doesn’t buy a lettuce in good faith and then, a few hours later, suddenly experience the stunning epiphany, crashing over one in a chilly wave of horror, that lettuce has nothing of value to contribute to the kitchen.[3] ‘Begone, lying vegetable!’ cried no-one ever, hurling the wretched thing out into the void:[4] one knows before one wastes one’s hard-earned cash that lettuce is Not Food in any meaningful way. A discarded onion, which could have formed the base of innumerable meals, makes no sense. Was it a missile in a heated domestic argument? Did it jump? Was it pushed? Endless possibilities unfold before us.

A flock of filthy philanderers begging for burnt bacon bits

Our third floating item is a sex toy, last seen gently drifting towards Dudley like the world’s nastiest message in a bottle.[5] From a distance, it appeared to be common or garden white goods, such as I regularly see from the towpath on my morning walk, which also happens to be along a canal. On closer inspection, it appeared that an enraged sex fiend had chopped a plastic woman into sections and then discarded what one would have thought was the most useful part, which resolutely refused to sink. This should not surprise anyone who has thrown things into a canal: Giant Bear and I have learnt from experience that the more embarrassing the item, the less likely it is to sink. In our case, two strings of high sausages haunted us for an entire evening. We couldn’t fling them into the undergrowth on the bank in case a dog ate them and was horribly poisoned; in our food bin they would have made the boat stink; and putting them back in the fridge seemed equally mad. We had just moored in an absolutely beautiful spot, as close as we could get to one of the moorings from our honeymoon. As we opened the canal-side hatch, a kingfisher zipped into view, settled on a branch just long enough for both of us to cry, ‘A kingfisher!’ and then was gone again. In other words, it was a moment both idyllic and restful, spoilt by having to work out what on earth to have for dinner now that there were no viable sausages. Finally, we were tired from a long day of locks (me) and boat-driving (Giant Bear), and simply didn’t have the patience to wander up and down the towpath in search of another bin. There seemed no satisfactory solution (“and the canal is full of shit anyway”, we reasoned, recalling several of the items already mentioned), so into the canal with you, where, oh fantastic, you are producing enough noxious gases to float about accusingly for several hours. Fish appear and take a few exploratory nibbles; moorhens peck at you, but you’re far too gross even for things that live in a canal cheek-by-jowl with electrocuted seagulls and discarded sexual aids. Other boats charge past (rather than on tick-over, as they should be), but, how wonderful, you bob up in the wake, battered and intestinal, but undaunted, reminiscent of an unfeasibly lavish greyish-pinkish bowel movement and definitely no closer to sinking. You catch on an overhanging bramble for a few excitingly yucky minutes, but then drift brazenly back into the centre of the canal for all to see. Overnight, mercifully, you vanish, but we are both convinced that you are not gone, but lurking, in the reeds or under the boat, like some mottled sausage-y sea-serpent.

Item four is a rat I have seen many times on the canal at home, who has learnt that a local gentleman in his twilight years likes to sit in a certain spot and feed the pigeons. Pigeons are messy eaters and leave more than enough for a ratty breakfast. This particular rat has been known to wear a little Lucozade bottle-top on his head (I assume it was sticky the first time he encountered it), and thus is known as Lucozade Hat Rat. I venture that this is a rat with a rich and varied existence, with the whole canal to explore (graffiti under bridges! Discarded toasters! That guy who is always in a tremendous hurry and smells of hash!) and his rakish head-gear to distinguish him from what must be literally thousands of other rats in the local area. An updated Tales from the Riverbank featuring Lucozade Hat Rat is just as likely to become a quirky bestseller as any of the things that actually do become quirky bestsellers.

Item five is non-floating, but no less poignant for it: a tableau of a depressed-looking ginger horse with a sore foot (back right), languishing alone in a benettled field. In the foreground, a partially-sucked mint humbug sits on a fencepost, quietly melting in the August sunshine. Was it offered to the horse, mumbled and then rejected? Was it left by a kind passer-by for him to take at his convenience? Perhaps the horse sees and smells the sweet, but his sore foot prevents him limping over to the fencepost to claim it and he is horribly tantalised by its tempting brown-and-fawn stripes. Perhaps he is faking a sore foot in the hope of blackmailing kind passers-by into leaving him mints, which he hoovers up quietly at night, surefooted and sneaky in the darkness. Perhaps the horse hates mints; perhaps he hates passers-by, too. Here, one might pause to give some thought to the protagonist of one’s canal-based tale. There is always the option of taking a cue from Tarka the Otter, Watership Down et al. and basing a story around (say) a family of ducklings, a deceitful horse or indeed a seagull tragically cut off in his prime. There was, for example, that time I rescued a mouse in imminent danger of drowning in the boiling floodwaters of a nearby lock. Surely he returned to his nest that evening and regaled Mrs Mouse with a tall tale of raging waters, foul smells, mysterious engine noises and then –lo!– a stick-based miracle? Or one might choose to write a terrifying horror story, starring one of the many dogs that haunt the canal, a surprising number of which can’t cope with locks, boats, other dogs or Being Outside. Think of the terrors these animals have to endure. The Unattainable Sausages! The Place That Was Dark And Barking Made No Difference! Everything Is Floaty And Weird! ARF! ARF! This year we met a couple with a large boxer, which the chap cheerfully informed me was ruining their holiday. ‘If we go into a lock and leave her on board, she howls, shakes and pees on the floor,’ he said in an almost incomprehensible Birmingham accent, shaking her lead belligerently; she ignored this, continuing to focus all her energies on Barking At The Canal. ‘If we take her off the boat, she tangles her lead around my legs while I’m doing the lock. She’s welcome to drown anytime she likes.’

Students with some knowledge of canals might choose to show off their mastery of canal-related terminology (windlass, cill, pound, winding hole etc.), and model their prose style upon that of Pearson’s Canal Companion, which is certainly idiosyncratic. Consider, for example, Pearson’s description of Holt Fleet on the River Severn (‘A rash of caravan parks and shanty-like chalets mar otherwise unspoilt riverside meadows for everyone but their proud owners’);[6] or the following comment on the Birmingham Canal Navigation:

So what do you think of it so far? […] Are you under its spell, or are you under psychoanalysis, still hyperventilating from its fulminating blend of inspirational industrial heritage and sheer downright ugliness?[7]

One could do worse that to cast a canal gnome as the hero of our tale. The Canal and River Trust volunteers as they are more properly known are easily identified via their blue polo shirts and bright orange life-jackets; they are almost always wiry middle-aged men with Midlands accents (‘Orroight?’), knowledgeable, charming and name-badged. One exchanges the same pieces of information with all canal gnomes: yes, it is a pretty boat; yes, it is a nice-sounding engine; yes, my husband is driving it jolly well; yes, the water is low/high today; yes, the ‘missus’ has certainly drawn the short straw, walking miles in the lovely countryside along the towpath and pausing only to open and close locks, rather than standing still for hours in a cloud of diesel smoke and taking responsibility for anything bad that might happen to the boat; and what a beautiful/awful day it is. Canal gnomes help with locks whether one likes it or not, and admire Giant Bear’s driving, but more importantly for our purposes here, I bet they’ve seen it all: dead sheep the size of mattresses; enormously fat boaters bending the lock beams with their monstrous buttocks; broken paddles, lost windlasses, abandoned dogs; tipsy lone boaters leaving their vessels to fend for themselves while they man the lock; fisticuffs between anglers, boaters, walkers and kayakers all scrapping over the same stretch of duck-infested water; narrowboats grounded, overturned, sunk and on fire.[8]

Finally, there is the genre of our putative short story to consider. I suggest that canals are under-used locations in murder mysteries. Susan Hill uses a riverbank in her Lafferton detective novels; Colin Dexter makes excellent use of canals in The Wench is Dead; and my own humble murder mystery is set a few feet from a tow-path (and speaks of more than one suspicious death that may or may not have taken place in that general area). However, no mystery writer I’m aware of, has as yet made full use of the possibilities offered by a canal tunnel. Canal tunnels are dark, noisy, completely unlit except by the lights of passing boats, and sometimes have narrow walkways along one side, which cry out as places to dump a body (possibly of a person; possibly a large female boxer with a lead wrapped around her neck). The murderer would, naturally, be found out several days later, however. Experience has shown that when he or she least expected it and was peacefully feeding bacon to a passing paddling of perverts, the bloated corpse would loom out of the brown water, bump (softly, sausage-like) against his or her boat and then refuse to sink.

 

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[1] The humble duck turns out to be a depraved sexual predator upon further investigation. Mallards have explosive corkscrew penises, covered with spikes and almost as long again as their bodies. Their preferred method of sexual advance is to quack madly, ambush a female duck and grab her by the neck before deploying their terrifying weapon.

[2] J.M. Pearson, Pearson’s Canal Companion: Black Country Canals, Stourport Ring, Birmingham Canal Navigations (Central Waterways Supplies, Rugby, sixth edition 2003), p. 23.

[3] I don’t even put it in a BLT anymore; avocado, cucumber or more bacon are far better options.

[4] This is actually a jolly satisfying part of being on a narrowboat. Washing up is so much more fun when crumbs etc. can be simply tipped out of the window for waterfowl to squabble over. Thus does one make instructive discoveries, such as that ducks don’t like mushrooms.

[5] Pearson writes that ‘there is about the Dudley Canals an independence of style and spirit’, but I don’t think discarded plastic pelvises were what he had in mind. Pearson’s Canal Companion, p. 63.

[6] Pearson’s Canal Companion, Stourport, p. 36.

[7] Pearson’s Canal Companion, Stourport, p. 17.

[8] One of the boats a lock or so ahead of us got stuck on the cill (the lip at either end of the lock that the gates seal against) and partially grounded while they waited for the rising water to lift them away from it. We worked this out eventually, but there is no standardised system of hand gestures between boaters, and so one bellows emptily above the noise of boat engines and the rushing of mighty waters. I’ve often wondered why the canal gnomes haven’t yet given their minds to devising a system of approved hand gestures to convey a range of common messages to other boats, such as ‘Help help I’m aground’, ‘Do you have an up-to-date copy of Pearson’s Canal Companion?’ and ‘My name is Inigo Montoya. You stole our lock. Prepare to die!’

Getting to the bottom of things

Regular readers will recall that your gentle narrator suffers (the word is chosen with care) from bowel disease (see Busting a gut, Bite me, Home Economics, GAH! Michael Gove! and The loud symbols). I have been laxative about contributing to the blog over the last seven months, after being buried under an avalanche of work from which one arm now feebly waves, soon (I hope) to be followed by the rest of me. These two things may not seem related to each other, but my colitis is caused by work-related stress, which is also called work addiction (see I was flying from the threat of an office life and Exemplum Docet). Thus, I live in a little feedback loop, working at whatever pace I feel I can stand and then accepting whatever reward or punishment my insides see fit to respond with. I am eternally grateful to have the skills to work from home most of the time; a husband who finds my swollen stomach and disreputable underwear (of which more later) quirky and charming; and a toilet right next to my study. Giant Bear has even furnished the upstairs toilet with a comfortable wooden seat, a tasteful selection of bra catalogues and a thing called a Primal Stool that cost £20 but is worth its weight in gold (this is a similar thing: do scroll down to see the unicorn-poo advert). John Keay comments on the internal disorder of George Everest (yes, the mountain is named after him. Also, his name is pronounced ‘Eve-rest’, disturbingly), and notes that his ‘[r]ebellious bowels leant an urgency to the working day’. Yes. Yes, I expect they did.[1]

Bowel disease is misunderstood, difficult to talk about, jolly painful and surprisingly common; and work addiction is just everywhere and awful. While I wait for mountain rescue, therefore, here are some jolly facts about bowel disease and work-related stress.

1. Bowel disease is the great leveller.

People with small children seem to talk about poo all the time: how often their babies poo; how copious, stinky, firm/loose and frequently produced their babies’ poo is; and how their babies sometimes manage to defecate so heartily that they get poo right the way up their backs in a single movement. I don’t have babies, but having colitis allows me to join in nonetheless.

‘Yup,’ I say, finishing my tea. ‘I’ve done that.’
‘When you were a baby?’ My childbearing friend is momentarily distracted by the menu, or possibly the child. ‘Or do you mean last time you went to China?’
‘Nope’.

2. Working too much makes you a shitty worker.

My understanding of the strike that junior doctors undertook recently (the first such strike in my lifetime) is that they were protesting against two things in particular, captured (as is so often the case these days) in a hashtag: #notfairnotsafe. This captures two ideas, as follows: one, working longer hours as proposed (for a higher wage, but a lower overall hourly rate) implies that the ridiculous hours and shifts that they already work are not sufficient. Two, working longer hours will exhaust them and make them bad doctors. I don’t understand why there is any discussion to be had about this. We all agree that tired motorists are dangerous. Are exhausted doctors dangerous? YES. OF COURSE THEY ARE: TO THEMSELVES AND OTHERS. I have lost count of the number of mistakes I have made, documents I have deleted and spreadsheets I have cocked up because I was simply too tired to be competent. With the obvious exception of smug health-cunt Jeremy Hunt (Jim Naughtie has established precedent, so this is fine), nobody is stupid enough to think a tired doctor is a competent doctor, but nobody, in any line of work, should be working so many hours that they are too tired to do their job properly. I used to work four days per week; then, to cover for a colleague, I did two months of five days per week. I would have done better to stay at four days per week, because I was so tired that a. I caught a bug and had to miss two days’ work; and b. forgot to save my database and lost another two days’ work. Net gain: nothing.

   3. Number of times I have soiled myself since being diagnosed: four.

Once *just* after a Departmental meeting; once while sitting quietly in a chair, reading a book and minding my own business; once in China after some questionable fish; and this afternoon. When I went to Dublin for a week a few years ago, I packed twenty-one pairs of knickers by the simple method of counting seven pairs of knickers into the suitcase (‘Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday-Sunday’) three times without realising I had done so. Do normal people even *own* twenty-one pairs of knickers? They do not.

4. Being addicted to work means not being allowed to go cold turkey.

Some addictive substances (drugs, alcohol) are things that we have no physical need of, by which I mean that removing these things from our lives, while extremely difficult, is not damaging, but rather may have considerable health benefits. We may feel the need (physical, physiological, psychological, emotional) for another cigarette (I have written about this elsewhere; see A three-pipe problem), drink, high, win or whatever, but we can live perfectly well without these things, just as we can live without smoking, drinking, drugs, gambling, sex or pornography. The most difficult addictions to deal with, I suggest, are those where cutting the destructive substance or behaviour out of one’s life altogether is not possible. If one is addicted to food or work, for example, one has to find some way of changing that relationship to make it healthy and sustainable: one cannot simply stop eating or working. I don’t think there are many therapists who, confronted with (say) a smoker would suggest that he or she learn to manage his or her relationship with tobacco: the end goal would always and unquestioningly be to give up, totally and forever.

5. Number of times I have thought, ‘that’s it. I’m going to die on the toilet. Like Elvis, except he had a cheeseburger to keep him company’: three.

Halfway through reading this post, my husband showed me a picture of the thing below (it’s a cheeseburger-shaped anti-stress ball) and said, ‘shall we get one, and keep it in the upstairs toilet?’

‘Not suitable for children under the age of three’

 

6. Bowel disease makes you feel really, really old

Were I so inclined, I could produce a series of Venn diagrams showing the commonality between my life and that of a woman forty years older than me; let’s call her Daphne. Yesterday’s diagram would show that Jess walked (rapidly, happily) to the train station to catch the same train as Daphne, while Daphne’s great age forced her to make the journey on the bus; Jess has brought a copy of Silent Spring and some knitting to keep her occupied during the journey, while Daphne prefers the Telegraph and crochet; Jess has decided not to bring any food, while Daphne has a packet of mints[2] and so on. Apart from the train itself, the only area of overlap is that both Jess and Daphne will spend a significant part of their day worrying that they are going to disgrace themselves because *there is no toilet at the station*. That’s very annoying, think both Jess and Daphne upon arrival, with enough time to buy their tickets, but not such a long wait that they get cold and cross. The train will be here in a minute, and once we get going I can use the facilities on the train. Imagine the disgust of both our protagonists (Jess says a curse word; Daphne does not, but her lips get very thin) when it turns out that *there is no toilet on the train either*.

My usual train trip is around 50 minutes, and fortunately there *are* facilities at the other end. But, really: good grief. There is a person at the station (sometimes two!) to sell tickets to the Great Unwashed *and* a model railway shop. There must, therefore, be at least one toilet. Giant Bear tells me that there *is* a toilet, but that in order to use it, Daphne and I would have to queue up and then yell through the ticket window that we’d like to borrow the key, please. There is also nowhere for the staff on the train to relieve themselves; at least the ticket inspector can walk from carriage to carriage to distract himself (and maybe do a little poo in the corridor where nobody will notice), but no such luck for the driver. John Pudney said the following about toilets at train stations seventy years ago, much of which still holds today:

For the ordinary run of early railroad passengers, there were no arrangements whatever; and patience was the only necessity. At early morning stops, men were wont to salute the sunrise, as decorously as they might, at the ends of platforms, while women stood in earnest conversation here and there, their long skirts providing cover even though the platform itself offered little by way of camouflage.[3]

7. Being addicted to work is socially acceptable. 

While I think it could be argued that we have a society with a dysfunctional attitude to many addictive substances and behaviours (food, alcohol and sex spring to mind), the attitude to work goes beyond that into stark raving mad. We all talk about our ‘busy’ lives: it is entirely normal for women in particular to babble on about ‘juggling’ all the things we have to do, on top of earning a living, which somehow takes up far more time and energy than it should. I am no longer surprised to receive (and send) emails at 6am or 11pm; nobody expresses surprise when it becomes clear that I work weekends; and while I was at the university, I once went into the office on Boxing Day and *I wasn’t the only person in the Department*.

8. Bowel disease has ruined the following words forever: movement, regular, irrigation, stool. On the plus side, Andrew Motion is now a funny name.

9. Bowel disease makes you feel that nobody will ever want to have sex with you again.

There is swelling (sometimes soft; sometimes tight and hard like a tyre). There is diarrhoea (bright yellow, mostly liquid and excitingly explosive). There is dehydration (headaches, itchy eyes), horrible stomach cramps, massive hair loss, brittle nails, tiredness that mere sleep cannot touch, and endless medical humiliations (pooing into little trays; enemas; strangers inserting Things into one’s special area in the name of Science). There are ruined clothes, from which the physical stains can be removed, but which I can never bring myself to wear again.[4] Finally, there is the terror that every tremor and gurgle in the abdominal region may be about to burst forth into the Bog of Eternal Stench, punctuating yet another day with what can only be described as arse-sneezes: hot, gritty crap that pebble-dashes the inside of the toilet in a splatter pattern strikingly reminiscent of the vomit one sees on the pavements outside student residences, except that this is yellow, streaked with blood and mucus, smells like the devil’s farmyard and CAME OUT OF MY ARSE.

These are the times when the unconditional love (and relaxed attitude to nudity) of an understanding and patient partner is better than all the peppermint oil and herbal tea in the world. Here is a little story I call ‘Disappointment’: the other day, Giant Bear came home from work, and without explanation, silently removed his shoes, tie, waistcoat, braces, shirt, trousers, socks and, with a certain sense of inevitability, his pants. Why, good evening, darling, I thought, ceasing to stir the dinner for a moment, and trying to remember if my own underwear was a. the kind that can be flung aside in a sexy fashion; b. not that kind, but at least stain-free and vaguely respectable; or c. in such a state that I’d have to bundle it up in my jeans and then attempt to kick both carefully into a dark corner. Just as I was about to spoil the moment by talking, my husband had a jolly good look at his pants, turned them round and put them back on again. ‘Had them on back to front all day’, he observed, and went upstairs to get dressed.

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[1] John Keay, The Great Arc (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p.146.

[2] To alleviate what George Sherston calls a ‘railway-tasting mouth’. Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1928), p.299.

[3] John Pudney, The Smallest Room (London: Michael Joseph, 1954), p.75.

[4] Just as I am no longer able to eat English mustard because gaaaaaah.

What a lovely pear

I wonder how long it will be before class is determined not by income, one’s father’s occupation, school or socio-economic group, but by simply placing a load of foodstuffs on a table and seeing which ones a given person can name; which ones they can use correctly in a meal; and which ones they eat regularly themselves.[1] My mother maintained that she once heard a large lady get out of a taxi in Henley-on-Thames and accost a passer-by by braying at him, ‘my good man, is there any butter in this ghastly little town?’ In my mind’s eye, the lady in question is tall, bold about the nostrils, and voiced by Penelope Keith. While we were living in Henley-on-Thames ourselves, my mother picked up the habit of referring to builders and other assorted tradespeople as ‘little men’. I found this most confusing (as indeed any child familiar with the work of B.B. would). The men in question were rarely little, and yet I instinctively reach for both this awful term and my Penelope Keith voice whenever I have to deal with ‘little men’ myself.

Recently, we had some repairs made to the roof of the railway room, by a local builder named Tom. He came to survey the damage before starting work, which meant actually coming into the house. This seemed to discombobulate him, and he insisted on taking his shoes off and carrying them apologetically as we went in and out of various rooms to give him a decent look at the relevant piece of roof. We are not a ‘shoes off’ household, as anyone could tell from a cursory glance at the carpets, but he seemed more comfortable this way. Tom turned up a few weeks later, startling me by being on time and on the day we had agreed, accompanied by what I will refer to as a sous-builder. They set to work, fortified with horrible tea (I bought it specially, of which more later), and were finished by lunchtime. This meant that they came into the kitchen (each clutching their shoes forlornly) at exactly the same moment as Giant Bear came home for lunch. Lunch that day was avocado on toast because OF COURSE IT WAS.

The previous day, while purchasing the aforementioned horrible tea, I was suddenly overcome by a wave of reverse snobbery. Why, I reasoned, should I assume that builders must want builders’ tea (i.e. as strong as possible, with milk and two sugars)? We did already have some black tea in the house, but I somehow felt that neither lapsang suchong nor Earl Grey would get the job done. And yet it seemed so silly to buy more tea, when we already have an entire cupboard dedicated to it: black, red, green, white, pink, orange and various shades of herbal in both bag and loose-leaf varieties, as well as two filters, a tea-ball and three kinds of hot chocolate. For guests so bewildered that they can only stammer ‘Whatever you’re having?’ we have the Mystery Jar, in which any lone or unidentifiable teabags are housed, and subsequently fed to the indecisive (see Indecisive Cake). We are also in possession of no fewer than six teapots of varying sizes, and, bearing in mind that the house usually contains two people at most, twenty-six mugs. In the end, I bought a box of builders’ tea[2] anyway, but stashed it out of sight so as to conceal the fact that I had bought it specially. Halfway home, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps they might prefer coffee, but by then it had started to rain and I had to take my chances. A few hours into the roof-repairing, we reached the moment of truth.[3]

‘Can I make either of you a cup of tea, Tom?’ I asked casually (or so it would seem).

‘Yes, please,’ he rumbled. ‘Milk and two’. I had an apple tisane[4] and we were all faintly embarrassed. A couple of weeks later, we attempted to purchase an avocado in Sainsbury’s and discovered that the man on the till had never seen one before and didn’t know what it was. Giant Bear said helpfully, ‘it’s a kind of pear’. This did not improve the situation.

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[1] I recently came across a restaurant review online, consisting of a single star and the following plaintive sentence: ‘They made my risotto with long-grain rice. Need I say more?’

[2] When we lived together, S used to refer to this as Normal Boring Tea (also called Ordinary Tea, like Ordinary Time); my friend H calls it Normalitea.

[3] This phrase actually comes from bullfighting, and refers to the moment when the matador makes the final stroke, attempting to sever the spinal cord by plunging his sword between the shoulder-blades of the bull. In doing so, his whole body is exposed to the horns, and if he does not hit his mark, he will be horribly gored. Truth indeed.

[4] My beverage of choice when watching a Poirot.

Notes from Nanjing

The following notes (relating to my time in Nanjing in 2009) were found in an old notebook, unearthed this week while I tidied my office.

Day 1, in the airport (Frankfurt)
The smoothest landing coming into Frankfurt that I have ever experienced (I almost slept through it). Going through security I had to remove the 99p bottle of water I had bought in Bristol and drink it before I was allowed into another dingy booth. The German security people thought this frightfully funny and laughed like very efficient drains. I couldn’t see the joke, but perhaps it had been an unusually boring day (or perhaps the national stereotype is inaccurate, and the Germans are a nation of childlike, humorous people). Security in Britain resulted in my incredibly dangerous sun-cream and deadly deodorant being confiscated. The man was unmoved by my argument that sun-cream is too thick to be considered a liquid as such; he was also unable to explain how placing the deodorant in a plastic bag rendered it harmless. As soon as they let me through, of course, I was free to stock up on other, more sinister fluids at the duty-free Superdrug.

I rode the travelator, but this turned out to be a lot less fun on my own. Now I am reading A Dance to the Music of Time (which, so far, I don’t much like), sitting on a comfy chair by a weird bakery (pastry the size of your head, madam? How about if we encrust it with unidentifiable purple crap?), from whence ‘Tainted Love’ is blasting out. The bakery also serves beer (because this is Germany and there is a probably a law about it) and a Chinese man, who might even be on my onward flight, is wearing a purple cardigan that almost matches the pastries, visibly more relaxed than when he arrived and with three empty steins in front of him. Opposite me, a woman is reading the most German newspaper in the world: an edition of Das Bild, with the headline ‘HITLER IN BERLIN SCHATZ STOLLEN’ and a picture of a naked women crouching over a Bratwurst in the middle of a field. The TV cycles ads for HDTV on mobile telephones, urging us to watch CNN on a screen the size of a golf-ball. Don’t they see how they undermine their own sales pitch by telling us this via a screen nine feet long?

Day Six, Nanjing
Signs I Have Seen: ‘Dagoba’ as a misspelling of ‘pagoda’ (‘we can’t possibly repel a Buddha of that magnitude!’) and a sign in the hotel clamping down on guerrilla sewing cells (‘No Smocking’).

Day Ten, Nanjing Holocaust Museum
P [Chinese colleague] suggested that we [myself, colleague James, and John, the husband of our American colleague] might visit a museum together on our day off, which we thought sounded like a fun and educational way to spend the day. The taxi pulled up outside an enormous building with a statue of a weeping woman on the pavement beside it. This should have told us that ‘fun’ and ‘educational’ were the wrong words entirely.

The signs in the holocaust museum, commemorating the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, are confused about how many people were killed – it might be 30,000 (all the students in Bristol), or it might be ten times as many (the entire population of Bristol). Either number is plausible in a city of so many millions of souls.

First there are piles of dusty bones in fish-tanks (almost all adult femurs. They do not look real). Then we move into a darkened room with illuminated glass boxes around the walls. The signs, as I say, are curiously uninformative. There is no mention of the thousands of (actual) rapes perpetrated by Japanese during the (metaphorical) rape of the city itself and I wonder if this is because they simply don’t ‘count’ in the face of so many murders. P seems largely unmoved, and I think James and John are more surprised at being taken on a fun day out at a holocaust museum than anything else. I am comparing this room with Pit 1 in Xi’an. The terracotta warriors marching away in perfect silence are creepy after a while; one keeps expecting them to step forward (all of them, all at once). They don’t, of course.

In the centre of the room is a partially excavated mass grave. Not a reconstruction, but an actual mass grave. The skeletons lie where they fell in 1937. There is a skull with no jaw. There are numerous children. There are couples huddled into each other’s arms. There are several with nails driven through their joints, bright orange with rust. The earth is grey and the bones are brown, and the whole thing is lit up with festive fairy-lights. The colour of each light indicates the gender and estimated age of each victim. There is no explanation offered anywhere of what the Japanese hoped to achieve or why the Chinese did not fight back, and that lack of narrative makes the museum feel pointless and not like a museum at all. Nobody is trying to educate me. No attempt has been made to understand any of these awful deaths and I don’t feel equal to the task. I turn to P to check that he is OK; the whole thing is utterly bewildering and I think I might cry out of sheer frustration. P is fine and takes my question as more P-centric than I intended. He was not there, he says, and there is a reason that he was not there. So, he is OK. I was not there either, and I’m now even less sure why it bothers me so much (and him so little). All of the bones look like children to me and the illuminated panels give more gory details of impaling, bayonets and possible drowning, as the site of the grave appears to have been a shallow pond. This is based on the discovery of snail shells, some of which are on display, rather than the testimony of survivors. Were there any survivors? The Japanese escaped with their lives, I assume? Or, perhaps, some of the Chinese were allowed to live, or some escaped, or were too ashamed to say that they surrendered their weapons on request, but did nothing to reclaim them when they saw what was going to happen. This is what P tells me, when I ask how a force of a few thousand soldiers from a small country can invade a much larger country, march through the middle of the land (Nanjing is not a coastal city) and murder thousands of people in broad daylight. Did the Japanese have superior weaponry, I ask? No, says P. They are better mentally. What does that mean? When the Japanese tell them to put down their guns, they do it, he says. And when the killing started, I asked? P shrugs and I have learnt nothing today.

Day Twelve, Nanjing
Today a student told me that he wanted to broaden his ‘horizontals’ by investing in the ‘stocking market’. I said, ‘I hope your plan holds up’ and nobody laughed. I miss home.

Indecisive Cake

I grew up in rural north Cornwall, on the outskirts of a tiny village, with no pub, shop or post office, but a medieval church, a village green, and an abundance of cows, foxes and old people. From time to time, we would make an expedition to what passed for civilisation, so as to purchase shoes, duck food and other necessities. Our destination of choice was, occasionally, Launceston (pronounced ‘Laaaaance-un’), where I could get my hair cut in a place called Tangles for £4.50, my mother could buy some curtain fabric she didn’t need, and my father could take us all to the Mad Hatter’s café on Church Street for coffee when being in a conurbation of more than twenty houses got too overwhelming.

I mention this because the Mad Hatter’s café (and the cake menu in particular) has passed into family folklore. The café itself is still there, complete with a hundred-strong teapot collection and Alice in Wonderland décor, but it has changed hands and sadly no longer retains its original menu. In the early ’nineties, this included a bewildering list of homemade cakes, all displayed temptingly under glass. If a customer found himself unable (me) or unwilling (Father) to choose just one kind of cake, he could order Indecisive Cake, which consisted of a trinity of slightly smaller pieces of cake (unless they were ‘getting towards the end’ of a cake, in which you got extra), chosen at random by the proprietor. I don’t think we ever ordered anything else.

On the subject of indecision, I read The Mandelbaum Gate recently, which quotes the Book of Revelation in a way that seems relevant. The same passage featured in a service my beloved choir sang in over the summer, at Lincoln Cathedral. In The Mandelbaum Gate, Revelation is quoted as follows:

“Do you know,” said this passionate spinster in a cold and terrifying voice, “a passage in the Book of the Apocalypse that applies to your point of view?”

“I’m afraid the Apocalypse is beyond me,” Freddy said. “I’ve never had the faintest clue what it is all about. I can cope with the Gospels, at least some parts, but –”

“It goes like this,” she said, enunciating her words slowly, almost like a chant: “I know of thy doings and find thee neither cold nor hot; cold or hot, I would thou wert one or the other. Being what thou art, lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, thou wilt make me vomit thee out of my mouth.”

Freddy did not reply. People should definitely not quote the Scriptures at one. It was quite absurd.[1]

It seems to me that religion, religious ceremonies and religious texts, while obviously holding value in and of themselves in terms of structured, collective connection with the Almighty, the consolations and comforts of routine, beautiful words, expressive music and the company of friends, also have a practical purpose that is often overlooked: that of providing direction and assistance with the problems of one’s daily life. Freddy’s assertion that ‘people should definitely not quote the Scriptures at one’ is, to me, absurd. What is scripture for, other than to be spoken to other people? This passage from Revelation, for example, has wide application. For one thing, it describes beautifully (and succinctly) the problem of indecision, writ both large and small, and the impatience experienced by the more decisive observer. Had we been able to call it to mind, it would have been a wonderful thing to quote to each other in the Mad Hatter’s café. “Father!” I might have said, “I know of my doings and find myself neither lemon drizzle nor coffee-and-walnut; I would I wert one or the other.” “Fear not, my child,” he might have replied, flourishing the menu. ‘For lo! The Lord has provided the wonder that is Indecisive Cake!”

We moved to Cornwall[2] just as the village church was entering what Anglicans charmingly refers to as an interregnum i.e. a compulsory pause between vicars.[3] This meant that the parish passed into a sort of Indecisive Cake period of its own: instead of one vicar conducting all the services, we had several celebrants of various flavours, chosen at random by a higher power.[4] They were mostly aged, well-meaning retired vicars who could be relied upon to read the notices clearly and stay calm in the face of the organist (Father again) playing the tune for ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ as we all opened our books to sing ‘Love Divine’ or similar. Two stand out in my memory at either end of the quality spectrum, rather like the angel/devil figures so often used in cartoons to illustrate moral conflict. On the angel shoulder was the late lamented Peter Coster; on the other, a man who we always referred to as the Hobgoblin.[5] Peter Coster was a lay reader of great gentleness and charm. He gave thoughtful, well-constructed sermons about whatever topic had taken his attention that week, and kept to a length and subject appropriate to a tiny congregation of elderly villagers. On the devil shoulder, the Hobgoblin was somewhat stronger meat. I think the period I’m talking about here pre-dated Eddie Izzard’s ‘cake or death’ routine, but either way the Hobgoblin did not conform to the notion that you can’t have strong points of view in the Church of England.

I don’t think I ever knew his real name, and in any case the Hobgoblin suited him much better.[6] Top hat notwithstanding, he looked remarkably like the Hobgoblin from Finn Family Moomintroll, with a vigorous beard and dark, menacing eyebrows. The original Swedish title of Finn Family Moomintroll is Trollkarlens Hatt.[7] Trollkarlen (even less recognisable in the Finnish, Taikuri) means ‘Magician’ and the Swedish title (literally ‘The Magician’s Hat’) refers to the Hobgoblin’s search for his magical, transformative top hat. Our Hobgoblin (who may or may not have flown through the air on a panther and may or may not have mislaid the King’s Ruby) had spent some considerable time in the Holy Land, and treated us to wild, distinctly-made-up-sounding declarations, declaimed in Foreign with outstretched arms and blazing eyes.[8] Presumably some of these were blessings and Biblical quotations, but how were we to know? He could just as easily have been translating the parish magazine on the spot. One might modify Freddy’s sentiment accordingly: ‘people should definitely not quote the Scriptures at one in a language one does not understand’.

It is reasonable to expect a congregation of Cornish pensioners to find the Hobgoblin somewhat off-putting, with his outbursts of Hebrew/Aramaic/Yiddish/whatever and mad sermons (some violently anti-Semitic, some only mildly so). I remember one in particular based around the Book of Revelation (possibly even chapter 3, as quoted above), which was almost entirely unintelligible as, channelling Amos Starkadder, he bellowed at us that we (fourteen-year-old me, my parents, and a handful of septuagenarians) were sinners of the first order and should turn aside from the path of fornication before we were gobbled up by the Beast.[9] We took our tongue-lashing in what I assumed was a bewildered silence, but as Father quietly fed a voluntary through the mangle of the tiny, ancient organ to indicate that the Hobgoblin could, if he so wished, sweep magnificently down the aisle and into the vestry, trailing his spotless vestments in a white, cleansing wave behind him, it became apparent that perhaps he knew his flock rather better than I did. He emerged from the vestry, divested (de-vested?) of his vestments, to shake hands with us as we obediently returned our minute hymn-books to the bookcase, and was greeted by Rex, one of the oldest and most Cornish people I have ever known, with a deep bass voice and a handshake of such age-defying vigour that exchanging the peace with him was fraught with danger (‘Peace be with WHAT THE HELL?’). Grasping his hand (the Hobgoblin didn’t flinch as his knuckles were ground into finger paté) and looking him straight in the eye, Rex rumbled, “Nice sermon, vicar.”

I don’t know how to apply the Indecisive Cake metaphor to this situation. Should one assume that, were Rex ordering vicar-cake, he would be content to dine on Mad Ranty Sponge every Sunday? Or is it more likely that, just as a broken clock is right twice a day, the random vicar-selector was bound to match up with the theological preferences of one of the shuffled inhabitants of the village sooner or later? I’m talking here about style rather than content – I don’t think for a moment that our tiny hamlet was a hotbed of Jew-hating fornicators (although there may have been one or two), but rather that perhaps the Hobgoblin’s fire-and-brimstone style is an example of what the passage from Revelation is driving at: being cold or hot, rather than lukewarm. I take this to mean, in some sense, having the courage of one’s convictions to either be what one is, or to choose what one will be, however distasteful this might appear to others. The Hobgoblin, regardless of what he actually said, did at least fit one set of ideas about what religion ought to be: passionate, taken seriously, and declaimed without shame or self-consciousness. I said earlier that I didn’t feel his Sodom and Gomorrah sermons had much overlap with the needs of his parishioners, but perhaps that isn’t right. Perhaps from time to time, one feels the need for someone who knows whether they are cold or hot. I would thou wert one or the other.

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[1] Muriel Spark, The Mandelbaum Gate (London: The Reprint Society, 1965), page 16. Biblical Quotation from the King James translation, Book of Revelation, chapter 3. As I noted in a previous post (see Why Don’t You Do Right?), one should always give one’s sources.

[2] When I say we moved to Cornwall, we actually did. We sold our house in Henley-on-Thames and moved to Cornwall. I mention this because people sometimes assume that the house in Cornwall was a second home, and that therefore we were contributing in some way to the gradual evisceration of the countryside and the communities that live therein. We weren’t: we actually lived there, all the year round. This assumption used to annoy my father so much that sometimes he would bellow at tourists, “get out of the way! I’m a LOCAL!”

[3] I don’t know why the church uses this word. Since it refers to a sort of lull, between the acts rather than between kings (and one rarely meets a kingly vicar), ‘intermission’ might be a better term.

[4] The Rural Dean, according to Father, although I think it’s clear he was merely the Lord’s instrument (as are we all).

[5] Discussion with Father revealed that he always assumed Peter spelled his surname ‘Coster’ as in costermonger, and I always assumed ‘Costa’. I have used ‘Coster’ here as a. Father is more likely to have seen it written down and b. this makes the whole name closer to Paternoster, which pleases me greatly.

[6] Father comments as follows: ‘None of us knew the Hobgoblin’s name except the senior churchwarden, who didn’t share as if we might be contaminated.’ Father does not indicate whether we would contaminate the Hobgoblin or he would contaminate us.

[7] Tove Jansson, while Finnish, wrote her books in Swedish.

[8] The first time he did this, I whispered to my mother (both of us cowering in the pews, unable to look away), “is he speaking in tongues?”

[9] From my maternal grandmother’s diary, Sunday, Jan 24th 1929: ‘Screaming minister at church’. Nothing new under the sun.

Home Economics

This post is prompted by an article by this guy, and a much more sensible post explaining why it is nonsense. I’m not going to recapitulate Aethelread the Unread’s perfectly cogent argument, since you can read it for yourself. However, here are some thoughts I had on the subject of eating and how to do it economically.

i. Planning meals in advance. I have to do this because of my bowel condition (see Busting a gut), and because I’m a pedant. I limit my consumption of sticky stuff (bread, pastry and cheese), and processed meat (bacon, salami and sausages) because they are difficult to digest and (in the case of processed meat) increase my already elevated risk of developing bowel cancer. This is also a strategy for keeping costs down, because otherwise one is trapped into the ridiculous position of buying, say, a lettuce[1] in order to use only a few leaves, while the rest of the damn thing slowly turns into a slimy morass in the ironically-named crisper.[2] Unless one becomes a painfully precise food-burglar, one has paid for the whole damned lettuce, and therefore should plan to eat the whole damned lettuce.

ii. Shopping as little and as quickly as possible. I hate shopping in supermarkets from the depths of my being. I begrudge every single minute I spend doing this. I hate supermarkets almost as much as I hate airports. One should not only factor in the cost to one’s purse and time, but to one’s soul.

iii. Transport. I don’t have a car. Doing lots of ‘little’ shops is time-consuming (people who are financially poor are also time-poor), esp. when you have to walk everywhere, and we’ve already established that I’m planning my meals in advance and hate shopping. So therefore doing one big shop makes a lot of sense. But hang on. I don’t have a car. Can I do a big weekly shop on foot? No chance: it’s too far to walk with heavy bags. Can I do a weekly big shop on the bus? Not easily, no, because of what I’m going to call the ‘shopping via the bus’ problem’.

iv. The shopping via the bus problem. Here is what taking the bus to the supermarket would entail: walk to bus stop; wait; take bus, which doesn’t go direct; get off; walk to supermarket; do shopping; walk back to bus stop carrying bags; wait some more; get back on bus; take circuitous route home; and then, finally, drag shopping through the streets, secure in the knowledge that i. by now, it is the middle of the night and ii. you get to do it all again in a week. I would probably be able to manage the walk from the bus stop to my house while carrying many heavy bags, because the bus stop is right outside my house, and I’m thirty-three years old and in relatively good health, but someone with a small child would have no free hand with which to grasp said child; someone in ill-health, or who was elderly (or weak from hunger) certainly couldn’t manage either the walk or the burden, or might find themselves tempted to buy things on the basis of whether they can carry, say, a bag of potatoes *and* a carton of fruit juice, rather than on what they can afford and/or want to eat.

v. Comparison shopping. This is the biggest waste of time. Have you seen the smug Asda women crowded round their laptop tapping every single price in to see if they have saved themselves four pence by buying a packet of scourers at Asda? Fuck off, smug Asda women. Who has the time for this nonsense? As we have already established, for someone who doesn’t have a car, the fact that the supermarket in the next town is slightly cheaper is information that they can’t do *anything* with, unless they are prepared to do their shopping via an even more inconvenient bus (see iv).

vi. Comparison shopping again. Comparison shopping does not always produce the results you think it might. I once did two identical shops at Waitrose (my closest supermarket at the time i.e. I could walk to it) and Tesco (which was the second-closest, and required a ten-mile round trip to the next town). I bought the same brands in both supermarkets, and whenever I would buy Waitrose’s own brand stuff, I bought Tesco’s own brand. The Tesco shop was £1.50 cheaper. Once I factored in the petrol and my time, it was considerably more economical to shop at Waitrose. I had a car at the time, so the ten-mile drive to Tesco was door-to-door and relatively quick. If I had taken the bus, however, it would have taken over ninety minutes (i.e. an entire evening) *and* cost more than the £1.50 I supposed to be saving.

Here’s where I’m going with this: I don’t think people should aspire to eat cheaply. Food is the only thing you buy that becomes part of you. I have learnt the hard way that it is incredibly important what you put into your body. Don’t fill it with cheap shit: this will not save you money or time in the long run, but will instead make you ill, fat and/or malnourished, and miserable. Think how wonderful food is, and how much pleasure it gives us – way out of all proportion to the purely biological function of sustaining us for a few hours. It matters whether you enjoyed your breakfast today.[3] It matters whether you are looking forward to your dinner.[4] It also matters where food comes from, what’s in it, who grew it/made it/harvested it, and how, and where. Instead of aspiring to eat cheaply, therefore, I think people should aspire to eat economically.

Cheap food is variable in quality and morality (it’s cheap for a reason e.g. it’s made of shoes). It may not have cost you very much, but it cost somebody somewhere. Moreover, eating economically is much more about what you cook and how little you waste than it is about what you bought in the first place. A chicken, for example, is an incredibly economical thing to buy, even if you buy a super-duper organic Happy Chicken, for, I don’t know, £15. You get a roast lunch out of it; then you get a pasta sauce out of the giblets; then you get a curry or enchiladas or sandwiches out of the leftover meat (probably with enough leftovers to have this again the next day, too); and then you get two pints of chicken stock out of the bones, which you can use to make a risotto or soup (contrast that with a pair of chicken breasts, which will make one rather uninteresting meal). I can make a chicken feed two people five times. If it can do that, it damn well ought to cost £15.

If I were ever to write a cookery book, it would be called Leftovers Are Fucking Brilliant and it would consist entirely of recipes called things like ‘Three Things You Can Make Using The Leftovers Of The Thing On The Previous Page. You Know, The Thing With The Beans’. The aim would be to throw absolutely nothing away and each chapter would be about how not to waste stuff (e.g. ‘Things You Can Do With Leftover Yoghurt #95: eat the Goddamn yoghurt’) and how to compost or grow more food out of what little you couldn’t eat.[5] The focus would be on planning to cook sensible, economical things and then buying stuff accordingly; not going to the supermarket, buying whatever was cheap and then throwing half of it away because a packet of hundreds-and-thousands, a tin of kidney beans, a questionable turnip, some elderly plums and a bottle of washing up liquid doesn’t actually constitute a meal, and anyway you had no idea what to do with the questionable turnips that were left over, and, oh dear, you bought eight of them because it was cheaper per turnip to buy eight even though you only wanted one and now where you could have had one questionable turnip that could have been disguised in some soup you have seven that definitely can’t be used for anything and will have gone funny by the end of the day.

Eating economically, for me, consists of doing the following things:

1. Not throwing anything away. Vegetables that look sad and old? Soup. Unidentified lentils? Soak them just in case and put them in soup or curry. One slice of bacon left? Omelette. Two small hard pieces of bread? Toast, but also, why did you buy such a big loaf, moron?[6] Glut of tomatoes? You could make pasta sauce or chutney, but really, the point is that if you are throwing stuff away because it went funny before you got round to eating it, the problem isn’t just what you’re cooking: it’s the quantities that you are buying.[7]
2. Growing stuff that’s really expensive. Chillies are really expensive, but easy to grow and taste much better fresh. Ditto herbs of almost all varieties.
3. Making stuff from scratch. Some things are not worth the effort (consensus reached between myself and my friend KM: pasta, croissants, gnocchi and brioche are Not Worth It). Ice-cream, however, is dead easy, esp. if you have an ice-cream maker to do the annoying churny bit for you; as is custard; as are scotch eggs, pancakes, porridge[8], and pretty much everything else I like cooking.
4. Planning food based on what I have already that needs eating. This week’s menu, for example, is based around the fact that I have three eggs (eggs and temporary housemate KW’s leftover ham tomorrow night, with toast and fried potatoes); leftover chicken noodle soup (dinner tonight); some bread (toast for breakfast tomorrow); two pathetic turnips (more soup); and some asparagus, which I don’t like (I’ll be feeding this to KW and Giant Bear for dinner on Friday, which means I don’t have to eat any of it but it still doesn’t go to waste).
5. Using the hob rather than the oven. The oven is more expensive than the hob, so if I use the oven it has at least two things in it. I also cook things that can be hob- or oven-based on the hob (e.g. my amazing white chocolate rice pudding [9]).
6. Making meals out of other meals. Leftovers are fucking brilliant.

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[1] I never buy lettuce. I hate lettuce. It tastes of nothing and takes up space in a sandwich where there could be more of the stuff that goes in the sandwich that you actually wanted. Plus, it’s not good in soup and is therefore Not Food. It’s only a good example if you imagine someone other than me buying and eating it.

[2] I’m looking at you, Milligan. You bought the whole damn lettuce, didn’t you? Then eat the whole damn lettuce, you cretin, and include the cost of the whole damn lettuce in your patronising calculations. Buying four tons of lentils might be the cheapest way to buy lentils per lentil, but you still need to have enough money to make the initial outlay. And a kitchen large enough to store your lifetime supply of lentils. And some idea of how to soak and cook lentils. And some way of preserving the lentils so that they don’t go funny before you’ve eaten them. And some other stuff to eat with the lentils so that a. you don’t get malnutrition and b. the lentils taste of something. And you have to really, really like lentils, and hope that everyone in your house really, really likes lentils, because you just bought a metric fuckton of lentils, and people who are *actually* worried about the amount of money they spend on food don’t just buy four hundred eggs and exclaim over how cheap this was and why don’t people on benefits do this more. They buy what they can afford, and they eat all of it.

[3] I did. I had toast, with homemade greengage and blackberry jam. It was delicious.

[4] I am. I’m having homemade chicken, courgette and noodle soup. I made it yesterday, so I don’t even have to chop stuff up. Om nom nom.

[5] Things You Can Do With Leftover Yoghurt #96: half a tub of yoghurt you aren’t quite sure about and a handful of dubious carrots can be made into yummy soda bread by simply adding lemon juice, thyme, bicarbonate of soda and flour. Plus it doesn’t require any kneading or proving. It’s essentially bread without the making bread bit.

[6] The point is don’t buy more than you need, even if buying more than you need costs less than buying exactly how much you want. If you wanted two pairs of socks and two pairs of socks cost £4, but six pairs of socks cost £8, you should buy two pairs at £4. If you buy six pairs for £8, what you’ve done is to buy two pairs of socks for £4, and then another four pairs that you didn’t need for another £4 that you didn’t need to spend (plus, the £8 socks are probably cheaper per sock because they’re made from dental floss). If you think £4 is a fair price for two pairs of socks, just pay it, take the socks home, wear them and feel good about it. Even if six pairs cost £3, buying three times the amount you need only makes financial sense if you can think of something to do with the four extra pairs of socks that you now unaccountably own and *knew* you didn’t need before you even left the house. This is why the natural resources of the world are exhausted: uncontrolled consumption of stuff you don’t need, didn’t want and yet felt you had to buy for reasons you can’t explain.

[7] It breaks my heart to throw food away, even when it has gone well and truly funny. The high sausages described in Tales from the canalbank made me unhappy on many levels.

[8] Scottish food = awesome.

[9] You may want my white chocolate rice pudding recipe, but it’s better for everyone, and your waistline in particular, if you don’t have it.

Busting a gut

My local high street shops are about a twenty-minute walk from my house. There is a fancy butcher (by which I mean that it is expensive and also sells halloumi), an organic hairdresser, a Post Office, a church converted into a centre for amateur dramatics, a sooty hole halfway up a building where the Chinese nail studio used to be (I’m not making that up. It exploded in the middle of the night a few months ago), an independent optician, a Turkish supermarket, the best bakery in the city, and any number of assorted coffee shops. I was in one of these when a woman in an ugly jumper and shoes that I can only assume she had made herself flopped into a chair at the next table. I wouldn’t normally listen in on the conversation at someone else’s table (having a far more interesting conversation of my own, or possibly reading something racy), but as I was turning my attention back to the question of whether or not Hates Commas was standing me up, another woman in a similarly offensive jumper arrived and embraced the first woman in a jangle of homemade earrings and after some highly unnecessary shrieking they ordered coffee and some kind of lentil-based snack and sat down and I went back to my book (The Jacaranda Tree by the greatly underrated H.E. Bates). In fact, I was about to remove the two women from my mind altogether (easier said than done when one takes the fit-inducing knitwear into account), when the first woman leaned confidentially across the tiny table.

‘Oh, but haven’t you heard, Jobiska [or Rushlight, or Sunset, or whatever]? Yoga is what I do instead of drugs!’ she exclaimed. Having suppressed the urge to slap her espresso out of her hand for her own good, it occurred to me that, while this is a profoundly stupid statement, in my case it approaches the truth.

I have had stress-related bowel disease since 2007 and originally was put onto two different drugs, to be taken together: an anti-inflammatory and a pain-killer. The anti-inflammatory pills were white, small and innocuous; the pain-killers were giant fuchsia-coloured horse tranquilizers, and if (as instructed) I took the two together they used to make me cry, for no reason and with no warning: I freaked out many a student, innocently visiting the office in the hope of handing in an essay. Having returned to the specialist and informed him that I was no longer going to take said pills as they didn’t seem to be having any other discernible effect, he replied ‘I see. I think I’ll double your dose’. This was the point at which I ceased to take any pills at all, on the grounds that, firstly, my specialist was a madman with a grasp of the English language in general, and the statement ‘the drugs don’t work’ in particular, that was shaky at best (did the 1990s pass him by completely?); and, secondly, he failed to understand basic maths (nothing multiplied by two is still nothing). I was also offered an operation to remove the troublesome section of bowel. The operation essentially involved pulling out the entire bowel, cutting out the nasty bit, and then stuffing my innards back where they belong. It had a 40% success rate and would leave me with an enormous scar. The specialist helpfully suggested they put this on the right, where it would look like an appendectomy scar ‘only bigger’ (the fact that I already have an appendectomy scar having also passed him by); it would therefore also make any future Caesarean tricky, and I would need a mere six weeks off work to recover, assuming that nothing went wrong, which it might well, given that what we are describing here is essentially a controlled disembowelling. Since I was ill in the first place because of work-related stress, I suggested that he could simply sign me off work for a few weeks and have much the same effect without the need for major surgery, but I must have said this in my mind rather than out loud because he swept on, speculating cheerfully on how likely it was that the surgery might go wrong (massive internal infection, perforated bowel and internal bleeding were among the jolly possibilities) long after I had said ‘I don’t think I’ll be doing that’. We concluded our interview with me asking whether there were any further lifestyle changes I should make. Bowel disease, I already knew from my excellent GP, carried all sorts of risk factors in later life, like liver disease, leg ulcers, colorectal cancer, and the delightfully named toxic megacolon (essentially, the colon swells up and then bursts, causing all sorts of nasty things and, if not treated, death, presumably from a combination of shock, blood loss, internal infection, embarrassment and rage). His response was that ‘not much research’ had been done in this area and he was unable to advise me. He then weighed me (for the second time in an hour), commented that I weighed the same as last time (who knew?) and suggested I take up watercolours.

I now manage the condition by other methods, all of which I am sure my many-bangléd friends in the coffee shop would approve of whole-heartedly. I have cut down on meat (my favourite thing), bread and pastries; I have no nicotine, no alcohol, no drugs and almost no caffeine. Instead, I dose myself with aloe vera juice (which tastes like sperm), fruit, cod liver oil, evening primrose oil, water and herbal tea (which don’t).[1] God help me, I even tried to switch to soya milk (very good for the bowel. Got a question about what’s good for your bowel and what’s not? I am the bowel-related magic eight ball), but honestly, soya milk is so disgusting that just typing the words ‘soya milk’ is making my mouth turn down at the corners in case I have to throw up. And then of course, in addition to all of this, there is yoga, once (or if I am feeling really keen, twice) a day, on a homemade mat.

I do hatha yoga (i.e. not the jumping around kind; not the chanting kind; and not the very high temperature kind). There are a few poses that I can manage with a modicum of dignity, as follows: Chair Pose (in a brilliant non-sequitur, my wonderful 1970s yoga book suggests I imagine I am a wizard); Eagle Pose (bend into unlikely shape while balanced on one leg); the Dancer (ditto, but this time with one foot above your head); Warrior Pose (‘imagine you are poking an assailant in the eye’); Tree Pose (back to balancing on one leg while doing things with the other); the Cobra (at least you get to lie down for this one); Happy Baby Pose (surprisingly literal); Reclining Hero Pose (look, that’s just what’s it called. I don’t make the rules); and Camel Pose (not at all like a camel). A pathetic little list. Bat Pose, which I believe is also known as putting-your-head-on-the-floor-while-clutching-your-ankles pose, is particularly tricky. A few months ago, a major Bat Pose fail ended in me flicking a terracotta pot, an African violet and about two pounds of soil onto the floor with my buttocks. I’m still not entirely sure how I did this; I was probably concentrating on releasing my kneecaps or similar at the time. I mention this because it demonstrates my favourite thing about yoga: even if you do it really, really badly, it still works. It stimulates the internal organs, relieves stress, aids concentration, strengthens the back, tones muscles you never knew you had, and clears the mind. It is also the only thing I have found that can beat jet-lag, as the stunned people cleaning the building opposite my hotel in Nanjing could testify.

I really believe that sick people need the help of medical professionals to get well again, and yet here I am, self-medicating with poses I can’t do and supplements I don’t like. I’m doing so because one approach has worked and the other hasn’t. It must be infuriating for doctors to undergo years of training and examination, only to be informed firmly by well-educated people that they would prefer to drink raspberry leaf tea and rub valerian into their pressure points. Obviously some of those people are idiots and would do better to read some science and listen to the considered advice of their doctor. However, there are also people like me, who really believe in modern medicine until they become unwell and are then let down by the ‘pills and piss off’ culture (if the drugs had worked, I’d still be taking them). This leaves me with no alternative but to embrace each facet of new age nonsense with as much grace as I can manage. Next up: inappropriate piercings.

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[1] One notable difference is that, with aloe vera juice, one always swallows. As Lawrence Durrell observes in a quite different context, ‘[w]e simply wouldn’t demean ourselves by this niggardly shuffling and spitting out. We swallowed. I think you would have done the same in our place.’ Lawrence Durrell, ‘Stiff Upper Lip’, from Stiff Upper Lip (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), p .14.

Eve’s Pudding

Consider the names of things. For example, the names that people choose for their children. When my brother and sister-in-law were expecting their oldest son, the family was asked to put forward helpful suggestions for names. This was not a success: my father responded that he had cast his vote when my brother and I were named and had no further comment to make, and I suggested that, since the baby would be of mixed Indian and British heritage, they could name the baby Sujoy, thereby creating a real-life boy named Sue.[1] Or consider the names of small English towns. These are the basis of an excellent car game for long journeys through rural areas, called Let’s Live There! The aim is to find the most intriguing name of a real place by perusing either road-signs or maps (although you don’t need to actually go there. That would spoil it). You win points by pronouncing the name of your chosen town or village correctly (according to the consensus of those in the vehicle); speculating in an interesting fashion as to what the town or village might be like; fanciful descriptions of the origins of the name; and, finally, making the case for everyone in the car to move there. I grew up in Cornwall (see Indecisive Cake), which has so many eccentrically-named villages that the game can go on for several hours. These include Woolfardisworthy, Goonhilly, Gweek, Herod’s Foot, Broadwoodwidger and (my favourites) Splat and Hatt. This made it a more difficult game to play than you might think, because of course we all knew what these places were really like.[2]

The names of recipes are particularly intriguing. So many recipe names are not so much names as lists of the ingredients used and procedures followed, as if people were to name their children by simply adding their own names together (‘Mostly Gerald, with a glaze of Felicity around the eyes’ or similar), but the exceptions are so much more interesting. For example, Upside-Down Cake. This name is predicated on the idea that at some point a committee of unparalleled dullness was formed, and everybody agreed which part of the cake was going to be designated the top, and which part the bottom, and that if you chose to serve the cake with the bottom part uppermost, that was just a little bit kinky and ought to be pointed out to the unwary. British puddings in particular are riddled with this sort of thing. There is no consensus, for example, on the origins of the names of the Queen of Puddings, Apple Charlotte or Spotted Dick. According to the internet, this last is also called Spotted Dog[3] if you make it with plums (I’m not making this up). The creators of older recipes seem quite refreshingly unashamed about the link between food and sex. Philippa Pullar’s seminal work Consuming Passions originally had a picture on the front cover of a loaf of bread baked in the shape of a tremendous penis.[4] The cover of my copy features nothing naughtier than some slightly tipsy ladies in a dubious shade of pink, but I expect the more explicit 1977 originals are worth a bit. That rather lovely frankness seems to have coarsened with the passing of time. Without even trying, I found several examples of sex-related food on the internet, none of which I wanted to try. This included F-cup tea, which supposedly contains herbal extracts that will increase the size of one’s bosoms (or possibly shrink the bosoms of those of us already larger than an F-cup ) and a website dedicated to recipes that include breast milk[5].

My favourite oddly-named pudding at the moment is Eve’s Pudding. It’s as simple as it is delicious, consisting of a layer of cooking apples underneath a sort of biscuit-sponge lemony topping. I found a few recipes online, but I haven’t linked to any of them as none are as good as the one in my elderly Good Housekeeping cookbook, which advises you to substitute some of the flour for ground almonds and scatter flaked almonds on top. I also recommend deliberately taking it out of the oven early so that the cake part is still gooey in the middle. We have eaten two Eve’s Puddings in the last few days and will no doubt be eating many more this winter in an attempt to cope with the massive glut of apples produced by our tree. Last summer we had a fairly modest crop, most of which we left on the ground for the hedgehog in the hope of dissuading him from digging in the herb garden[6] and when he went into hibernation, we left what remained for the fieldfares as it was such a hard winter. The tree is enormous, probably fifty years old, and it dominates the garden. It has never been pruned and most of the fruit is therefore produced well out of reach and has to be harvested as windfalls, or using my patented lawn-rake-strapped-to-a-stick method, which doesn’t work. The falling apples vary in size and weight, but so far I have observed a severely concussed cat (this was brilliant as it is a boot-faced goblin that leaves horrible crusty cat-turds in the vegetable patch); a traumatized squirrel (the deadly fruit whistled past and thumped into the grass between its paws with no warning whatsoever); and two broken panes of glass in the greenhouse. This last happened in the middle of the day while I was at home on my own, and it scared my doublet and hose off. I found the apple rolling innocently around on the concrete floor, barely dented. If I tried to kill a squirrel or brain a cat armed only with apples, I doubt very much that I could do so, and yet the tree, immobile, blind and in no way sentient, has had a jolly good go at both.

Gardeners’ Question Time attempted to give the impression that my apple tree was not special: apparently it has been an unusually productive year for all fruit trees. However, in the case of our tree, I submit that the real cause was our Applefest party, which we threw in chilly early spring. Garden Naturalist (you can read his plant-based blog if you promise not to think less of me because I am frightened of insects larger than any insect has a right to be) did some research into Somerset wassailing traditions. These included tying toast to the tree, singing ‘Ye Gentle Men of England’ in an inaccurate but harmonious fashion, reciting incantations to the tree exhorting it to be fruitful, and lifting the smallest person present into the tree to splash cider on it and light firecrackers. This was all a resoundingly silly success (as the Guardian says, a decent wassail ‘sounds silly, but then most things that are best for the human spirit do’). We only narrowly avoided setting the tree on fire and I can forever treasure the memory of my beloved church choir casting Tallis and Bruckner aside in favour of a pagan ceremony that was probably written by a drunk. Now, however, the forty pounds of produce in my larder tell a cautionary tale to the would-be wassailer. I am eating apples for breakfast[7]; I am spending a small fortune on kilner jars; I have preserved more fruit than we can possibly hope to eat; and still there are more apples roosting in the branches.

According to some of the quince-related trivia I read while trying to work out what on earth quince jelly was and whether it was worth the hours of stirring, chopping and straining through muslin for a meagre five pounds of jelly (it was), I discovered that, even though you can’t make marmalade with quinces, nonetheless the word ‘marmalade’ is derived from the Portuguese word for quince, which is marmelo (supposedly the word marmelada, meaning quince jam, was misappropriated), and that although words very similar to our word ‘marmalade’ and probably derived from the same root are used all over continental Europe to refer to jams and preserves generally, because Britons use the word to mean specifically and exclusively those preserves made with citrus fruits, the EU insisted on spreading this usage across a bunch of other countries, to general spluttering. Best of all, I found out that some people believe that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was not an apple at all, but a quince.[8] In other words, either we have been making Eve’s Pudding all wrong, or it has no right to call itself Eve’s Pudding.

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[1] I know there would probably have been consequences for the poor little chap (now named Ben and probably living in youthful ignorance of Johnny Cash and all his works), not all of them good. I had in mind those fairy stories where the magical godmothers gather around the cot and list all the nauseating characteristics that they hope the baby will grow up to have. My metaphorical gift, better than all the enchanted swords and friendly woodland folk in the world, would have been a trump card for my nephew to play in any argument with his father (Father: What time do you call this?; Child: Mah name is SUE! How do you DO? NOW YOU GONNA DAH!).

[2] Hatt, for example, is a charming little place where my mother liked to go out for dinner. It is also just down the road from Botusfleming.

[3] I can’t say that either name makes me eager to put the thing in my mouth, which you would have thought was the only criterion.

[4] It was subsequently withdrawn . See also House of Holes and the coining of the brand new super-word ‘wonderloaves’.

[5] Apparently ‘breastmilk can readily be substituted for anything that calls for milk’. I would have preferred ‘substituted in anything’ (my italics), but we’ll let it go since I’m not being paid. I would also like to think they might make an exception for something requiring large quantities of milk: rice pudding takes long enough to make already.

[6] It didn’t work: nothing can dissuade him from digging up my plants. I have tried hand-feeding him cold sausages, but he simply pauses, eats the sausage and goes back to his digging. Hedgehog fail.

[7] Stewed with a little bit of brown sugar and then sprinkled with granola.

[8] Not convincing: raw quince is horrible. The serpent could have tempted pretty much anyone with the sunset in a jar that is quince jelly, but Eden is unlikely to have provided the necessary materials i.e. a jam pan, a wooden spoon, lots of sugar, a piano stool and a bolt of muslin.