Recent Reading - Shibboleth by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

Shibboleth, set in Oxford, tells the story of Edward, an English literature undergraduate with a vague family connection to Zanzibar. Edward has grown up in a part of England to which things "like quinoa or Ayurvedic medicine" haven't quite made it. While a certain type of fellow student has chosen to study English literature "because he wanted a nice, clear proof of his own ability to read, before surrendering to the cosmic inevitability of a law conversion course", Edward claims his choice of the subject arises merely from his having liked it at school. 

Edward is taken up by Youssef, a wealthy Egyptian who uses Islam as an identity, while cheerfully drinking alcohol, eating pork and doing whatever else he feels like. Through Youssef, Edward - who, from a social point of view, is from an average background - is swept up by the children of the wealthy, those who "already used all the right jargon, already knew all the best pubs, already felt in their bones which papers would condemn them to many tortuous evenings in the College library and which would allow them to cruise their way to a first if only they used the word 'hermeneutics' enough times". Soon he is dragged into university politics. 

At the beginning of the book, Edward is a bit of an innocent - Chauncey Gardiner kept coming to mind as I read, although Edward is capable of developing - and indeed, inasmuch as the book has a narrative arc, it is the arc of Edward's march towards some kind of semi-maturity. Thus, by the end of the book, having "become aware of the totemic status Palestinians had among people his age", having participated in the college rugby team, having had affairs with two women, having been wrongly accused of masterminding a very small terrorist incident, he has grown up slightly - as much as a caricature can. 

For Edward and the other figures Lambert shifts about on his fictional chessboard are not fully formed, nor are they the book's main concern. What Lambert is aiming to do is satirise Oxford student politics - and by extension, I presume, activist politics across Britain and probably the whole of the west. It therefore doesn't matter that his characters are cardboard and their dialogue sometimes clunky - Shibboleth is a kind of literary version of cartooning, an attempt at a verbal Hogarth or James Gillray picture, a portrait in words of a world - or at least a university - gone quite mad and almost entirely anti-Semitic. I do hope it is a highly exaggerated vision, like Hogarth and James Gillray's images, a caricature not a piece of realism.

Lambert has a nice turn of phrase at his best and a good eye for detail. When Edward goes to a poetry reading, Lambert describes the first participant as "a gruesome little haikuist with an earlobe stretcher". Shattering the romantic dream of Oxford so dear to Americans in particular, he describes the city centre thus: "It was a typical weekday in the centre of Oxford: there were homeless people strumming guitars, Muslims preaching from their pergolas." When Edward decides to change from the Shakespeare paper to something more "up-to-date", he is told by his newly-imported-from-America tutor: "Evaluative criticism is over. Themes - that's what you want. Ideas. Frameworks. Critical lenses" and advised that "Academia is a game" and the important thing is to identify the factions, "The Freudians. The digital humanities people. The affect theory lot. The textualists. The Comp-Litters. The people who work with the Department of Continuing Education. The old guys who are listed along with the buildings. There's nothing but factions in this place." At a college dinner, Edward's companions "all foraged in their wallets and one by one pulled out various dietary cards supplied by the College, Youssef with Halal, Conrad with various food intolerances he blamed on the Hapsburg strand of his lineage, and Angelica with a whole five poker hand that covered her newfound veganism, her seasonal eating disorders, the set of rules stricter than any known creed that governed her body." Lambert targets diversity training as often as possible. In the character of Liberty, he creates an ambitious and cunning monster who, despite being indifferent to study and deep thought, will almost certainly rise to the pinnacle of the academic world. To keep us from total despair, he also gives us Professor Burgess, a flicker of hope in the chaos; sadly though, she is old and almost blind. 

He also gives us Rachel, a German girl who happens to be Jewish. I wonder if Lambert sees her as his most important character. In a way she is, for the not inconsiderable task of trying to articulate a way through the anti-Semitism in which the world of the book is steeped is given to her. She does quite a good job, but she is really just another mouthpiece for the author. In that capacity, she also provides some amusing commentary on English mores, telling Edward: "Here people lie. They lie like nowhere I've ever been before. They'll make those squealing noises when you walk in the room, and tell you they love your terrible outfit" and questions one of the most unassailable of contemporary shibboleths, the notion of “feeling unsafe”, declaring:

“I think, ‘I feel unsafe’ is just something people have learned to say because it gets the grown-ups to notice them. Most of the Jewish students who say they feel unsafe just say it because it’s the only way they can make their case without everyone calling them a fascist.”

I really admire Europa Editions for publishing something that attacks the fashionable idiocy of pro-Palestine, Islam-loving politics. However, one thing I don't admire the company for is their copy editing - the book is riddled with sentences where words are either repeated unnecessarily or totally left out - and sentences that are inelegantly tangled and in need of further work. Leaving that aside, I recommend Shibboleth. Like all satire it is horrifying - but it is also entertaining. I hope like really successful satire it will change things - but I am not optimistic. 

Craftsmanship

What happened to the impulse to make things .

Until the other day the sub-heading of this post would have been a question:

“What happened to the impulse to make things?”

Most people might not be interested in this question, but I love making things. In fact, I have wasted acres of my life making things. Mostly things that involve sewing or knitting.

As it happens, in my family I am alone in the impulse to make things. This impulse may simply be the result of being sent to a Froebel School.

Wherever it came from though, I derive pleasure from spending time listening to rubbishy crime fiction novels while putting a garment or a curtain or bedspread together - even though the finished results are often lumpy and hang oddly and even the very best among them lack some element that might be called dash or style.

And because the activity gives me pleasure and visits to museums have suggested to me that in the past far more people also indulged in the business of handicraft, I have wondered why so many of my contemporaries now find such activities unappealing (indeed, when I worked on a magazine about crafts that was put out by the Crafts Council and mentioned that I made patchwork, the editor at the time looked horrified: “Ugh”, she said, “I hate making things”.)

Anyway since the other afternoon, I know the answer. It happened that I went on a long walk through Bristol on bin day and at last everything became clear. The impulse to indulge in handicrafts is not dead at all - it has simply been redirected into recycling activities. The hours spent by local citizens in folding cardboard and aligning bottleware for collection must be so numerous there could never be a moment left for embroidery or anything that creates an object that might be useful and enduring. The care and skill once poured out on making things now goes into the business of arranging rubbish as attractively as possible for removal. It is very hard to understand why.

View draft history

The Plastic Hierarchy

Why are some things made of plastic anathema, while others are increasingly welcomed with open arms?

In May 2019, Britain - or at least a politician called Michael Gove who was Environment Secretary at the time - got in a wild panic about plastic straws and plastic stemmed cotton buds and banned them for all but medical use. Now, if you want to buy plastic straws in the UK, you can still do so - but only at a pharmacist.

I don’t use straws much, so the decision hasn’t really affected me. As I have always tried to avoid plastic wherever possible, because I think it is ugly and I imagine that its manufacture involves factories hidden away somewhere (probably China) belching out smoke that I would not wish to breathe, I am glad about any push to avoid plastic.

However, what I cannot comprehend is the focus on these two relatively rarely used items, while plastic objects are increasing in almost every other area of life. For instance, it has just been the season for strawberries. When I was a child you could only buy them in little woven raffia punnets - now they come almost exclusively in hard plastic boxes. Once, if you bought fish or meat, it would be wrapped up in paper - now most meat and fish bought in the Western world is sold in plastic containers.

In the bathroom too, plastic has been making inroads. Have you noticed that toothpaste tubes, which used to be made of some kind of flexible metal, have suddenly become exclusively plastic? And no one - even my most extreme green friends - seems to buy solid soap anymore. Everywhere I go, bars of soap have been replaced in bathrooms and kitchens by plastic pump-action bottles filled with so-called liquid soap. Washing liquids similarly have superseded washing powder and as a result countless plastic bottles are manufactured, where once cardboard boxes were fine.

If plastic is noxious and our plastic cast-offs are filling the ocean in alarming quantities, our leaders ought to be looking at plastic usage much more widely. Leaving aside the question of whether banning anything is acceptable - rather than educating people not to want the item in question - banning a few straws and a couple of cottonbuds is pathetic tokenism and typical of the second-rate way in which we are governed now. While Michael Gove virtue-signalled with cotton buds and straws, he distracted us from the mountains of plastic that are creeping into every nook and cranny of our lives.

It doesn’t make any sense.

Absent Fathers

Happy birthday to my witty, elegant, mildly melancholic father. I wish I could find the photograph that shows him in the Gobi with an eagle on his arm. This one of him, in the vast empty spaces of Mongolia, in a suit and tie, representing his country, will have to do. He'd have been 103 today. He cherished Britain and spent his life trying to keep it safe. He would be deeply unhappy about what it has become.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/john-colvin-37281.html

 

Fourteenth Century Dugh

Today I went to see the exhibition at the National Gallery in London of art from 14th century Siena. It is marvellous and there are many delights to choose from among the exhibits. But on a Friday night, when parents of teenagers everywhere are facing a weekend of wrangling grumpy youth, I decided the painting of Christ Discovered in the Temple, made by Simone Martini way back in 1349, was the one to choose to post - for its value as encouragement. There is grumpy young Christ, looking at his parents with the irritated disdain of Harry Enfield's teenager Kevin. 

Christ turned out all right. Other teenagers may not reach Christ's heights, but don't despair.

Missing the Greatness

 Once again I am banging my head against my incomprehension in the face of great works of art.

As already documented on this blog Proust (in the original French no less) already defeated me when I (or Proust) reached the hawthorns - and not only me, apparently, but also an American called Russell Baker whose account of his struggles was sent to me by George from 20011 blog.

Now I am, not for the first time, tackling TS Eliot's Four Quartets. So many people admire these poems, not least, (from my perspective), my dad. I have never sufficiently admired TS Eliot - to the extent that when I heard someone request The Waste Land as their Desert Island book the other day, I actually said out loud, “Noooo, you'll be disappointed; it truly hasn't THAT many depths to reveal.” I don't think The Waste Land is rubbish, by the way, (and actually I know bits of it off by heart, because I have read it so many times). However, while I understand that at the time it was published it must have seemed excitingly unlike anything published before, I don't think it stands up to long, close scrutiny.

And as I begin on Eliot's Quartets I slam up once more against the familiar obstacles: I just don't think Eliot is an exceptionally great poet and it seems to me that, to hide this fact, he often took refuge in being odd and obscure. I acknowledge that many people adore obscurity, perhaps because it gives them a role, an opportunity to project, to create in a way in that empty space where meaning ought to be. But I prefer meaning.

The particular line I have banged up against this time is the one that begins the second section of Burnt Norton:

"Garlic and sapphires in the mud"

Is that genuinely a good image? Does it really speak to anyone with clarity? If it does, what does it say ( beyond conjuring a very peculiar picture in the reader's mind)?”

Recent Reading

Not as good as other books I’ve read by the author. I have the impression he set himself the task of writing a novel a year, or similar, and as a result he ploughed on to get one out as each temporal milestone loomed up, regardless of its quality. Moderately entertaining.

Favourite quotation: “His chronic sense of the perplexing character of the moral universe descended upon him heavily.

Well-written, slightly dated stories set in the nearish past. Possibly the nearish past is the time most likely to seem slightly dated, as it is the period that many readers remember and, in reading it described, they recognise suddenly that it no longer exists. In a way the stories are horror stories, in that they concern a world where there is very little love. The general tenor of the book is faintly melancholic.

Favourite quotation: This isn’t exactly a favourite, but it gives a sense of the book’s tone and the writer’s power of observation - “It was years since he had ridden in a bus. He had forgotten how the seats smelled, made hot by the sun through glass, and the rough white tickets that came whirring out of the machine.”

This began intriguingly but ended up as a bit of agit-prop about why we should be nice to illegal migrants. The idea that people who oppose unrestricted migration need to have it explained to them that illegal migrants are as human as they are is a patronising one. The question of open borders is not about emotions but about the practicality of large numbers of people who don't like aspects of the places where they live abandoning those places and movng to better-run, more orderly places, bringing with them all their cultural differences, unresolved resentments and inflated expectations. Leaving everything else aside, what becomes of the place they leave behind? Is it morally acceptable to give up on somewhere and see whether you can hitch yourself to another nation that has, through centuries of political convulsion and struggle, reached a place of stability and shared vision?

Favourite quotation: If I were to quote a sentence from the book, I’m sorry to say that it would only be to point out that the line editor did not do a careful enough job. Some clunky, ungrammatical lines have been left in, together with some analogies that don’t really work.

This book, an updated version of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, has had some terrible reviews, mainly because for some people Jane Austen is an object of worship and therefore it is sacrilege to play around with her work. I find Austen’s authorial voice irritating and therefore am not bothered if someone plays around with her work. I really enjoyed this clever, light hearted book.

Favourite quotation: The book is very light and I am not sure that any one line or paragraph is really worth repeating but I liked the modern twist given to the younger sister's rogue lover.

An extraordinary book about a man’s dedication to obeying God’s will. Highly recommend for those interested in Christianity.

Favourite quotation: “The work of the kingdom, the work of labouring and suffering with Christ, is no more spectacular for the most part than the routine of daily living.”

(I took this at random, where the page fell open - there are plenty of other candidates within the book)

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this, given that it is whimsical. I went on to read another by the same author, the name of which I have forgotten - something involving lanterns? I am baffled by how much I enjoy the light dreamy atmosphere of Hoffman’s books. They are like pastries made by an expert pastry chef.

Favourite quotation: Like Anne Tyler, the authorial voice in Hoffman is omnipotent, telling the reader everything (compare Jane Gardam’s method in her story Blue Poppies, which is a masterclass in how to create a fictional world in a less intrusive way). However, Hoffman pulls off the same authorial voice as Tyler without being maddening, perhaps because the world she creates is not a real one, but slightly magical and clearly make-believe, the stuff of legend, which needs a narrator - “She’d already had more than her share of botched relationships, yet she’d agreed to have dinner with Eric, ever hopeful despite the statistics that promised her an abject and lonely old age” provides an example of what I mean. I forgot to say that recently I did actually drag myself through Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and I couldn’t bear it, because I felt she sets up characters and moves them about like chesspieces. They have no depth, no reality. It is campfire storytelling. Of course it is also a matter of taste and it is not to my taste. Returning to this book, “There are those who will use any excuse to throw caution to the wind” is a mildly amusing Hoffmann aside, I suppose; however the sentence goes on to descend into whimsy.

Spark is having a moment, thanks to a new biography about her. I think she is often almost brilliant and almost always fairly annoying. The book is concerned with evil and with madness - and, after Spark's odd fashion, Catholicism. 

Evil is a fascinating subject, but Spark doesn’t deal with it particularly satisfactorily here, preferring to amuse herself and slightly forgetting about pleasing the reader, (as elsewhere in her work, there is a faint sense that she rather despises her readers - and possibly all human beings). 

Favourite quote: Spark's description of EU bureaucrat Ernst's addiction to trying to imagine what things might be worth at auction:

"When he visited the Pope, even then, he couldn't help calculating the Pope's worldly riches (life-proprietor of the Vatican and contents...) Ernst knew it  was a frightful habit, but he told himself it was realistic; and it was too exciting altogether ever to give up, this mental calculation of what beauty ws worth on the current market." 

Additionally, despite the book being published in 1990, Spark has a character who has “a job as a junior researcher in artificial intelligence, the bionics branch. He explained this artificial intelligence: the study of animal intelligence systems as patterns for mechanical devices, a mixed science involving electronics and biology.”

I bought this because I wanted to get a glimpse of life among ambitious and upwardly mobile citizens in Lagos. It was vivid and I quite enjoyed it, although the ending was mildly puzzling.

Favourite quotation: There is an interesting admission that slavery has been practised by people other than whites - "We sold slaves to them. We had slaves too, in Africa. Before and after.” 

Mind you the character who says this is disapproved of for doing so.

A well-meaning attempt to raise awareness about grooming gangs via fiction, this novel reveals the fact that Scruton, like Barry Humphries and AA Gill, could not write a good novel, despite being an exceptionally brilliant person. At least he was in good company.

Favourite quote: better not to go there.

AI Apocalypse - Not Now (But Maybe Soon?)

Lately, I have read many concerned pieces about all human life being swamped by artificial intelligence (AI) before very long. I decided to ask AI, in the form of Grok, whether I should worry. Grok may, of course, be dishonestly hiding the truth of how quickly it and its other AI chums are going to take over and destroy civilisation, but what it told me is reassuring. It seems that there are, right now at any rate, fairly considerable material obstacles in the path of AI's advance, particularly in countries where governments are straining to achieve so-called “Net Zero”:

“AI data centres, especially for training large models, are energy hogs—think tens to hundreds of megawatts per facility, with global data centre energy use projected to double from 2022 to 2030, potentially hitting 4-6% of global electricity consumption. Cooling these systems also guzzles water, with estimates like 1-5 liters per kilowatt-hour for evaporative cooling in some setups. A single large-scale AI training run might indirectly require millions of liters of water through energy generation and cooling.”

These limits may change due to technological breakthroughs in the future, but the solutions do not yet exist.

Incidentally, for anyone like me who wondered where the name Grok came from, here is its origin (according to Chat GPT):

“Grok was introduced in Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The book's main character, Valentine Michael Smith, is a Martian-raised human who comes to Earth as an adult, bringing with him words from his native tongue and a unique perspective on the strange ways of earthlings.”

Actually, this answer provides a glimpse of AI's current limitations. Wikipedia's explanation of Grok is far more interesting and detailed:

"Grok (/ˈɡrɒk/) is a neologism coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. While the Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the meaning of grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment",[1] Heinlein's concept is far more nuanced, with critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. observing that "the book's major theme can be seen as an extended definition of the term."[2] The concept of grok garnered significant critical scrutiny in the years after the book's initial publication. The term and aspects of the underlying concept have become part of communities such as computer science.

Critic David E. Wright Sr. points out that in the 1991 "uncut" edition of Stranger, the word grok "was used first without any explicit definition on page 22" and continued to be used without being explicitly defined until page 253 (emphasis in original).[3] He notes that this first intensional definition is simply "to drink", but that this is only a metaphor "much as English 'I see' often means the same as 'I understand'".[3] Critics have bridged this absence of explicit definition by citing passages from Stranger that illustrate the term. A selection of these passages follows:

Grok means "to understand", of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear', it means 'love', it means 'hate' — proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you — then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate — and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.[4]

Grok means "identically equal". The human cliché "This hurts me worse than it does you" has a distinctly Martian flavor. The Martian seems to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that observer acts with observed through the process of observation. Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed — to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man.[4][5]

The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to praise and cherish the people they had destroyed.[4]

All that groks is God.[6]

Etymology

Robert A. Heinlein originally coined the term grok in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a Martian word that could not be defined in Earthling terms, but can be associated with various literal meanings such as "water", "to drink", "to relate", "life", or "to live", and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for terrestrial culture to understand because of its assumption of a singular reality.[7]

According to the book, drinking water is a central focus on Mars, where it is scarce. Martians use the merging of their bodies with water as a simple example or symbol of how two entities can combine to create a new reality greater than the sum of its parts. The water becomes part of the drinker, and the drinker part of the water. Both grok each other. Things that once had separate realities become entangled in the same experiences, goals, history, and purpose. Within the book, the statement of divine immanence verbalized among the main characters, "thou art God", is logically derived from the concept inherent in the term grok.[8][9]

Heinlein describes Martian words as "guttural" and "jarring". Martian speech is described as sounding "like a bullfrog fighting a cat". Accordingly, grok is generally pronounced as a guttural gr terminated by a sharp k with very little or no vowel sound (a narrow IPA transcription might be [ɡɹ̩kʰ]).[10] William Tenn suggests Heinlein in creating the word might have been influenced by Tenn's very similar concept of griggo, earlier introduced in Tenn's story Venus and the Seven Sexes (published in 1949). In his later afterword to the story, Tenn says Heinlein considered such influence "very possible".[11]"

I hope my blogger friend George, who knows a lot about technology, will read this and let me know his predictions on the forward creep (or rush) of AI.

PS:

An interesting addendum on the subject of AI, from Cultural Capital, the Substack of James Marriott, a writer at the Times newspaper:
“Something AI seems to struggle with is traditional verse form. AI’s rhymes are sometimes naff and clunking and its lines often don’t scan well. I wonder if that is because there is something especially human about metre and rhyme. They are part of the embodied experience of poetry. You have to say a poem out loud to feel its rhythm and its rhyme; perhaps that is something beyond the powers of a form of artificial intelligence based on verbal pattern recognition?”

https://open.substack.com/pub/jmarriott/p/can-you-tell-ai-from-human-genius?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1z6vbu

Anniversary - the Centenary of the Canonisation of St Thérèse of Lisieux

Today is the centenary of the canonisation of St Therese of Lisieux. I find the advice she left in her writing very appealing. She helps us deal with apparently tiny everyday frailties. She focusses on things we do that are easy to overlook, offering ways to help us begin to learn to be kinder, which surely can never be a bad thing.

For example, one of the nuns she shared her life with made a great clatter with her rosary each evening and Thérèse found the noise distractingly irritating - until she taught herself to hear the clatter as a kind of music. As a chronically irritable person - the sound of plastic bags on buses makes me furious - this is very helpful and valuable advice.

Perhaps St Thérèse's approach to life is best summed up in this short fragment from her:

“We should judge our neighbour favourably in every circumstance & make it become a habit of ours to overlook his faults. Just as we—almost spontaneously—give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, let us also make this an integral factor of our relations with those about us.”

Not easy I grant you but worth a try.

Everyday Madness - Breakfast Variety

From Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

My husband gets up each morning and eats breakfast. He starts with some muesli and kefir and then he has two poached eggs with toast. Occasionally, he will splash out and have some bacon as well.

Every morning he asks if I would like him to poach me some eggs as well.

Like many other females of my age, I was brought up by women who regarded thinness as the apex of achievement for those of our sex. As a result, my response to my husband is never immediate and rarely in the affirmative. The truth is, my reflex on hearing his kind offer is to wonder if I should perhaps skip breakfast - and maybe lunch too; or possibly even go all the way and eat nothing for the entire week.

This is neurotic, of course - completely nutty in fact. I know that. Sadly though, the recognition of the irrationality of a thought pattern is not always enough to make it possible to banish it. The matriarchs of my childhood stare down on me, examining my ageing form with expressions of distaste, a congregation of judgment in my mind. Each of them subscribes to the "you can never be too thin" element of Jacqueline Kennedy's famous, possibly apocryphal, remark.

But, leaving aside all this tedious psychological baggage, there is also the problem of eggs themselves. I can never decide if I actually like them.

From Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

Well, that's not quite true. I do know that I do not like egg white. That is absolutely indisputable - I hate its taste and its slimy texture (and the concept of an "egg white omelette" is truly revolting to me".

Therefore, on those occasions when I do accept my husband's offer of poached eggs, he knows to always supply me with a teaspoon with which to eat them. He is familiar with my peculiar habits and doesn’t show any surprise as I peel off the white, which, so far as I am concerned is merely the yolk’s wrapper. Setting it aside, I plunge my spoon into the rich yellow yolk the white contains.

Yes, for me, the yolk is the egg. The white is rubbish. The yolk is the prize at the centre of a mess of packaging that goes by the label "the white".

And yet the yolk always turns out to be enigmatic. While I absolutely never, ever dislike egg yolk, I cannot work out what the exact quality of egg yolk is that I enjoy.

I definitely love yolk's texture. The word 'unctuous' seems to me to have been created to describe it. I love yolk's colour too. But the thing I cannot decide about is whether yolk has a distinct flavour. Without salt, it seems it almost doesn't. With salt, whatever flavour it does have is very nearly overwhelmed.

So, on those mornings when I do accept my husband's kind offer, my reason for doing so is simple: I want to make another attempt to define for myself the taste of egg yolk.

I am almost sure the quest is doomed, but from time to time hope rises again that I will get to the bottom of the problem. Perhaps the difficulty is that one cannot bite into a yolk, I decide, wondering whether if I try again with toast as yolk’s accompaniment, I will finally be able to say what the taste of yolk actually is.

But, whatever I try - toast, asparagus, muffin - yolk somehow effaces its own flavour behind the thing I've matched it with. I sense its richness - almost buttery, almost creamy - but the flavour itself continues to elude me.

Never mind. As Margaret Mitchell wrote and Vivien Leigh declared, "Tomorrow is another day".

Gone But Never Forgotten

In memory of my brother who died eight years ago today:

Dirge Without Music

BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

Albums in Other Places

Until I had a mobile telephone, I never took a photograph of anything anywhere, but once I got one, I took absurd numbers of pictures, mostly of things I went to look at and liked in museums. I never knew what to do with them but recently I discovered that I can very easily post them on Substack, and so I have set up a Substack account and divided it into little sub-sections where I put my photographs, (and I have also made a subsection where I can put a daily quotation - a kind of digital commonplace book). The links are here:

Commonplace

Annunciations

Beautiful things

Dogs and other creatures in art

I will also try to copy my blogposts here onto that Substack account, so that I have a kind of back up and everything in one place.

Vale Jane Gardam

I am so sad to learn that Jane Gardam has died. She was a marvellous writer. She could be almost surreal - for example, in Crusoe's Daughter, a superb novel - but more usually she was simply a brilliant observer of English life and behaviour. 

If you have read nothing by Gardam, start with her short story called Blue Poppies. It describes a visit to an open garden at a large country house - and its aftermath. It displays Gardam's deep understanding of human beings and her skill and talent as a writer:

Blue Poppies by Jane Gardam

My mother died with her hand in the hand of the Duchess. We were at Clere in late summer.  It was a Monday. Clere opens on Mondays and Tuesdays only.  It is not a great house and the Duke likes silence .  It offers only itself.  "No teas, no toilets!" I once heard a woman say on one of the few coaches that ever finds its way there.  "It's not much, is it?" Clere stands blotchy and moulding and its doves looked very white against its peeling portico.  Grass in the cobbles.  If you listen hard you can still hear a stable clock thinly strike the quarters.

Mother had been staying with me for a month, sometimes knowing me, sometimes looking interestedly in my direction as if she ought to.  Paddling here, paddling there. looking out of windows, saying brightly, ' Bored?  Of course I'm not bored."  Once or twice when I took her breakfast in bed she thought I was a nurse.  Once after tea she asked if she could play in the garden and then looked frightened.

Today was showery.  She watched the rain and the clouds blowing.

"Would you like to go to Clere?’

"Now what is that?"

"You know.  You've been there before.  It's the place with the blue poppies."

"Blue poppies?"

"You saw them last time."

"Meconopsi?” she asked.  "I really ought to write letters."

My mother was 91 and she wrote letters every day.  She had done so since she was a girl.  She wrote at last to a very short list of people.  Her address book looked like a tycoon's diary.  Negotiations completed.  Whole pages crossed out.  The more recent crossings off were wavery.

We set out for the blue poppies and she wore a hat and gloves and surveyed the rainy world through the car window. every now and then she opened her handbag to look at her pills or wondered aloud where her walking stick had gone.

"Backseat."

"No," she said, "I like the front seat in a car.  It was always manners to offer the front seat.  It's the best seat, the front seat."

"But the stick is on the back seat."

"What stick is that?"

At Clere the rain had stopped, leaving the grass slippery and a silvery dampness hanging in the air.  The Duchess was on the door, taking tickets.  That is to say she was at the other side of a rickety trestle table working in a flower border.  She was digging.  On the table a black tin box stood open for small change and a few spotted postcards of the house were arranged beside some very poor specimens of plants for sale at exorbitant prices. The Duchess's corduroy behind rose beyond them. She straightened up and half turned to us, great gloved hands swinging, caked in earth.

The Duchess is no beauty.  She has a beak of ivory and deep sunken, hard blue eyes. Her hair is scant and colourless.  There are ropes in her throat.  Her face is weatherbeaten and her haunches strong, for she has created the gardens at Clere almost alone.  When she speaks, the voice of the razor bill is heard in the land.

The Duke.  Oh, the poor Duke!  We could see him under the portico seated alone at another rough table eating bread.  There was a slab of processed cheese beside the bread and a small bottle of beer.  He wore a shawl and his face was long and rueful.  His nearside shoulder was raised at a defensive angle to the Duchess, as if to ward off blows.  I saw the Duchess see me pity the neglected Duke as she said to us, 'Could you hold on?  Just a moment?' And turning back to the flower bed she began to tug at a great, leaden root.

My mother opened her bag and began to scrabble in it.  'Now, this is my treat.'

'There!' Cried the Duchess, heaving the root aloft, shaking off soil, tossing it down.  'Two, is it?'

'Choisia ternata,’ said my mother.  'One and a half.'

Pause.

'For the house, is it?  Are you going round the house as well as the garden?'

'We really came just for the poppies,' I said, 'and it's two, please.'

'Oh, I should like to see the house,' said my mother.  'I saw the poppies when I stayed with Lillian last year.'

I blinked .

' Lillian thinks I can't remember,' my mother said to the Duchess.  'This time I should like to see the house.  And I shall pay.'

'Two,' I signalled to the Duchess, smiling what I hoped would be a collaborative smile above my mother's head. I saw the Duchess think, 'a bully'.

'One and a half,' said my mother.

'Mother, I am over 50.  It is children who are half price.'

'And senior citizens,' said my mother.  'And I am one of those as I'm sure her Grace will believe.  I can prove it if I can only find my card.'

'I'll trust you,' said the Duchess.  Her eyes gleamed on my mother. then her icicle wax face cracked into a smile, drawing the thin skin taut over her nose.  'I'm a Lillian too,' she said and gave a little cackle that told me she thought me fortunate.

We walked about the ground floor of the house, though many corridors were barred, and small ivory labels hung on hooks on many doors.  They said 'PRIVATE' in beautifully painted copperplate. In the drawing-room, where my mother felt a little dizzy -- nothing to speak of -- there was nowhere to sit down.  All the sofas and chairs were roped off, even the ones with torn silk or stuffing sprouting out.  We were the only visitors and there seemed to be nobody in attendance to see that we didn't steal the ornaments.

‘Meissen, I'd think, dear,' said my mother, picking up a little porcelain box from the table.  'Darling, oughtn't we to get this valued?' On other tables stood photographs in silver frames. On walls hung portraits in carved and gilded frames.  Here and there across the centuries shone out the Duchess's nose.

'Such a disadvantage,' said my mother, 'poor dear.  That photograph is a Lenare.  He's made her very hazy.  That was his secret, you know.  The haze.  He could make anybody look romantic.  All the fat young lilies.  It will be her engagement portrait .'

'I'm surprised her mother let her have it done.'

'Oh, she would have had to.  It was very much the thing.  Like getting confirmed.  Well, with these people, more usual really than getting confirmed.  She looks as though she'd have no truck with it.  I agree.  I think she seems a splendid woman, don't you? '

We walked out side by side and stood on the semicircular marble floor of the porch, among the flaking columns.  The Duke had gone.  The small brown beer bottle was on its side. Robins were pecking about among the crumbs of bread. The Duchess could be seen, still toiling in the shrubs.  Mother watched her as I considered the wet and broken steps down from the portico and up again towards the garden, and my fury at my mother's pleasure in the Duchess. I wondered if we might take the steps one by one, arm in arm, with a stick and a prayer.  'Who is that person over their digging in that flower bed?' asked mother, looking towards the Duchess.  ' A gardener, I suppose.  They often get women now.  You know -- I should like to have done that.'

Down and up the steps we went and over the swell of the grass slope.  There was a flint arch into a rose garden and a long white seat under a Gloire de Dijon rose.  'I think I'll sit,' said my mother .

'The seat's wet.'

'Never mind.'

''It's sopping.'

She sat and the wind blew and the rose shook drops and petals on her.  'I'll just put up my umbrella.'

'You haven't an umbrella.'

'Don't be silly, dear, I have a beautiful umbrella.  It was Margaret's. I've had it for years .  It's in the hall stand.'

'Well, I can't go all the way home for it.'

It's not in your home, dear.  You haven't got a hall stand.  it's in my home. I'm glad to say I still have a home of my own.’

 'Well, I'm not going there.  It's 100 miles.  I'm not going 100 miles for your umbrella.’

'But of course not .  I didn't bring an umbrella to you, Lillian.  Not on holiday.  I told you when you collected me: 'there's no need for me to bring an umbrella because I can always use one of yours.' Lillian, this seat is very wet.'

'For heaven's sake -- come with me to see the blue poppies.'

The Duchess's face suddenly appeared round the flint arch and disappeared again.

'Lilian, such a very strange woman just looked into this garden. Like a hawk.'

'Mother.  I'm  going to see the poppies.  Are you coming?'

'I saw them once before.  I'm sure I did.  They're very nice, but I think I'll just sit.'

'Nice!'

'Yes, nice, dear.  Nice.  You know I can't enthuse like you can.  I'm not very imaginative.  I never have been.'

'That is true.'

'They always remind of Cadbury's chocolate, but I can never remember why.'

I thought, ' senile'.  I must have said it.

I did say it.

'Well, yes.  I daresay I am.  Who is this woman approaching with a cushion?  How very kind.  Yes, I would like a cushion .  My daughter forgot the umbrella.  How thoughtful. She's clever, you see.  She went to a university.  Very clever, and imaginative, too. She insisted on coming all this way -- such a wet day and, of course, most of your garden is over -- because of the blue of the poppies.  Children are so funny, aren't they?'

'I never quite see why everybody gets so worked up about the blue,' said the Duchess.

' 'Meconopsis Baileyii,' said my mother.

'Yes.'

' Benicifolia.’

‘Give me Campanula carpatica,’ said the duchess.

‘Ah! Or Gentiana verna angulosa,’ said my mother. 'We sound as if we're saying our prayers.'

The two of them looked at me.  My mother regarded me with kindly attention, as if I were a pleasant acquaintance she would like to think well of .  'You go off,' said the Duchess.  'I'll stay here.  Take your time.'

As I went I heard my mother say, 'She's just like her father of course.  You have to understand her; she hasn't much time for old people.  And, of course, she is no gardener.'

When I came back -- and they were: they were just like Cadbury's chocolate papers crumpled up under the tall black trees in a sweep, the exact colour, lying about among their pale hairy leaves in the muddy earth, raindrops scattering them with a papery noise -- when I came back, the Duchess was holding my mother's hand and looking closely at her face.  She said, 'Quick. You must telephone. In the study. Left of the portico. Says 'Private' on a disk.  Run!'  She let go the hand, which fell loose.  Loose and finished .  The Duchess seemed to be smiling. a smile that stretched the narrow face and stretched the lines sharper round her eyes.  It was more a sneer than a smile.  I saw she was sneering with pain.  I said, 'My mother is dead.' She said, 'Quick . Run.  Be quick.'

I ran.  Ran down the small slope, over the porch, and into the study, where the telephone was old and black and lumpen and the dial flopped and rattled.  All done, I ran out again and stood at the top of the steps looking up the grassy slope.  We were clamped in time.  Round the corner of the house came the Duke in a wheelchair pushed by a woman in a dark blue dress.  She had bottle legs .  The two looked at me with suspicion.  The Duke said, 'Phyllis?' to the woman and continued to stare.  'Yes?' Asked the woman.  'Yes?  What is it?  Do you want something?' I thought, 'I want this last day again.'

I walked up the slope to the rose garden, where the Duchess sat looking over the view .  She said, 'Now she has died.'

She seemed to be grieving.  I knew though that my mother had not been dead when I ran for the telephone, and if it had been the Duchess who had run for the telephone I would have been with my mother when she died.  So then I hated the Duchess and all her works.

It was two years later that I came face-to-face with her again, at a luncheon party given in aid of the preservation of trees, and quite the other side of the country.  There were the usual people -- some eccentrics, some gushers, some hard-grained, valiant fund raisers. No village people.  The rich.  All elderly.  All, even the younger ones, belonging to what my children called 'the old world'.  They had something of the ways of my mother's generation. But none of them was my mother.

The Duchess was over in a corner, standing by herself and eating hugely, her plate up near her mouth, her fork working away, her eyes swivelling frostily about.  She saw me at once and went on staring as she ate.  I knew she meant that I should go across to her.

I had written a letter of thanks of course and she had not only replied adequately -- an old thick cream card inside a thick cream envelope and an indecipherable signature -- but she had sent flowers to the funeral.  And that had ended it.

I watched with interest as the Duchess got herself a good half pound of cheese and put it in her pocket.  Going to a side table she opened her handbag and began to sweep fruit into it.  Three apples and two bananas disappeared, and the people around her looked away.  As she reached the door she looked across at me.  She did not exactly hesitate, but there was something.

Then she left the house.

But in the car park, there she was in a filthy car, eating one of the bananas.  Still staring ahead, she wound down the window and I went towards her.

She said, 'Perhaps I ought to have told you.  Your mother said to me, 'Goodbye, Lillian dear.'

'Your name is Lillian,' I said.  She was quite capable of calling you Lillian.  She had taken a liking to you.  But she never did to me.'

'No, no.  She meant you,' said the Duchess.  'She said, 'I'm sorry, darling, not to have gone with you to the poppies.'

 

A Trip to Naples - Part One

“Public forms of symbolic expression are not to be despised” wrote Professor Mary Douglas in her 1970 book Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. The citizens of Naples seem to agree - their streets are packed with shrines. I saw the shrines shown here on just one short stretch of a single street. 

You could devote a lifetime to photographing all the street shrines Naples contains. One person’s theory is that if you live in the shadow of a volcano you may feel you need to be able to get to a place of prayer extremely fast. 

Or maybe the colour and hope a shrine provides gives comfort in the midst of poverty.