Lately

My (failed lately) plan is to write blog posts regularly, not because I flatter myself that the world is crying out to read them but because I like the way writing them clarifies things for me. Writing, for me, is the best way to think. Only after you've set down a few scrappy sentences do you see, reading back through them, how muddy your thinking is  - and how lazy. No, not "you", of course - me, is what I actually mean.

But then, working your (my) way through the strings of words, teasing out whatever real idea there may be within them, you discover what you actually saw and thought and believed, as you wandered the world or read a book or watched the telly or a play.

That takes time though and there are always other things to do instead - brain work is, for me, always to be avoided, if possible. I think this is mainly because it is so anti-social. Once I do start writing anything with any concentration, I find myself so absorbed that I don't want any kind of demand or interruption from anyone else. I think that must be what is meant by being "deep in thought". An artist I know says she has realised that she too procrastinates because she wants to avoid the invevitable withdrawal that comes with trying to solve tricky problems to do with how she wants a work to look.

Anyway, since I don't suppose I will necessarily ever get around to writing about them as fully as I'd wished to, here are:

a) some of the books I've especially liked lately

Something for the Pain and The Plains by Gerald Murnane

Murnane comes from roughly the same part of Australia that my mother comes from. He has never left Australia and apparently scarcely never left the state of Victoria. This in itself makes him attractive to me - having travelled, not always entirely willingly, since I was a very small child, I have a secret belief that those who never leave a small piece of territory know more and are wiser than those of us who have roamed widely. But perhaps I am merely comparing Hedgehog knowledge with Fox knowledge. 

Murnane's dreamlike novel The Plains concerns a region - "the true extent [of which] had never been agreed on" - that is somehow beyond Australia, but encircled by it, a region that our narrator believes only he can interpret. His mission is to be accepted by the masters of this region, the plainsmen - whose main preoccupation is "their lifelong task of shaping from uneventful days in a flat landscape the substance of myth" and  whose apparent arrogance "was no more than their reluctance to recognise any common ground between themselves and others ... the very opposite ... of the common urge among Australians of those days to emphasise whatever they seemed to share with other cultures". The book reminds me of Peter Carey's short story Report on the Shadow Industry - 

5.
My own feelings about the shadows are ambivalent, to say the least. For here I have manufactured one more: elusive, unsatisfactory, hinting at greater beauties and more profound mysteries that exist somewhere before the beginning and somewhere after the end.

I actually read Something for the Pain, Murnane's autobiography, before reading The Plains. Although nonfiction it is scarcely less dreamlike and it turns out that Murnane shares with the plainsmen a fascination with colour. Having begun to train as a priest, Murnane loses his Catholic belief and replaces it with a complex faith of his own making, centred around the coloured silks worn by jockeys.  The book is wonderfully odd. Murnane writes beautifully and, as far as one can tell, exceptionally unselfconsciously, untroubled apparently by thoughts of fame and fortune. Without striving for it, he turns out to be one of the most original writers alive.


My Cousin Rachel and The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier

I found My Cousin Rachel very exciting to begin with but then got bored, having not been supplied a solution to the mystery and feeling that there was not enough other substance in the novel. I preferred The Scapegoat, because the depiction of what it is like to live in peacetime side by side with people who did not behave entirely honourably, gave the narrative interest beyond the mere drive of plot. But both are well written novels with great descriptions of setting and a wonderfully imagined array of characters. du Maurier was a rare, great storyteller.

The Party by Elizabeth Day

I don't know why I got this. It is a small thriller with a sad situation at its heart. I didn't like it. The characters lacked depth. If you read it very quickly, it isn't terrible though, mainly depressing.

All Out War by Tim Shipman

This tells the story of the Brexit campaign and is very entertaining and interesting.


Jackdaw Cake: An Autobiography by Norman Lewis

While Lewis's life is most interesting when he is very young and therefore I enjoyed the early parts best because they are so particularly funny, the whole book is amusing and very good. He is an excellent writer.

Lewis's childhood is spent partly in Enfield, where he comes home one day and "found that my father had become a Spiritualist medium" and partly in his grandfather's house in Wales, (during his entire childhood his grandfather never addresses a word to him), together with his aunts, Polly, who suffers very badly from epilepsy and regularly falls into the fire; Annie, who loves dressing up, to his embarrassment once he starts school, sometimes as Queen Mary, sometimes as a female cossack, sometimes as a Spanish dancer; and Li, who cries almost constantly - as well as an "old grey parrot [that] crawled over the furniture making .. farting noises, and a number of tall clocks [that] ticked the wrong time",  plus the game cocks his grandfather bred, the best of which was "fed on chopped up fillet steak, barley sugar, aniseed, ginger, rhubarb and yeast mixed with 'cock bread' made from oatmeal and eggs to which a little cinnamon was added".

In that house, Lewis tells us:

 "the choice of reading material [was] Victorian novels that were too old for me, or a manuscript copy of a work by one of my forebears who had kept an eye-witness account at the beginning of the last century of all the numerous public hangings of condemned men from the boughs of the great oaks still standing at Llangunnor, across the river."

Even an attempt at something as ordinary as a picnic unfolds in an unstraightforward way:

"We were menaced by an aggressive cow that had strayed down to the beach, and when we presented a dog with the remnants of our stale sandwiches, it went off and returned with the gift of the decayed corpse of a large seabird, and could not be driven away."

It is hardly surprising when Lewis remarks: "above all I was anxious not to be associated in any way with eccentric behaviour."

Despite this impulse, Lewis marries into a fairly eccentric Sicilian family - I particularly like his description of his father-in-law as being "dressed always as if attending at an important funeral"

With the arrival of war, Lewis joins the armed forces and is sent to:

"Winchester, where the training was by the NCOs of the Grenadier Guards; [it] was the shrine and museum of ceremonial marching, and the commanding officer in those days, ‘Mad John’ Rankin, prided himself on the fact that one form, invented by Frederick the Great, was practised nowhere else." According to Lewis, "the only instruction we received was in lecturing ‘other ranks’ on security. ‘It’s a good thing to get off on the right foot and put them at their ease,’ the officer said. ‘You’ll find it helps to address them as “you fuckers”.’

Soon he finds himself under the orders of Sergeant-Major Fitch. "This man", Lewis writes, "was strangely obsessed with coal, for which he had come to develop an affection while working in the cinema [looking after the boiler there], and he always begged us when we went out to patrol the docks to take a haversack in which we could smuggle out a few ‘cobs’ from the various deposits in the dock area. He kept his treasure stacked in glistening black pyramids and ziggurats in his back garden."

Intriguingly, Lewis mentions a colleague in the military who surely must have been part of Louis de Berniere's inspiration for aspects of Captain Corelli's Mandolin:

"He was a PhD and had been a lecturer in Hellenic Studies at Aberystwyth University, and with the outbreak of the communist revolt in Greece and the consequent rush to find Greek speakers, his name had been unearthed in the files. Hopper spoke only the classical version of the language, and knew little of the happenings in the country after its eclipse by Rome in the first century ad. Needless to say, by the time he reached Europe on his way to Athens, the emergency had been at an end for some two months."

I could go on but I'm supposed to be making this snappy. There is much more in the book and in Naples '44 which I read after it - a more famous piece of his oeuvre, but not as entertaining. To briefly sum up, I love Lewis's unsentimental sense of human absurdity, and although he never seems quite a wholehearted participant, more a bemused observer, he never conveys any sense of superiority. Jackdaw Cake does reveal that the setting he gave to one of my favourite books is really Guatemala, which he considered "the most beautiful country in the world".
     
The Standing Chandelier: A Novella by Lionel Shriver

I enjoyed this - I think Lionel Shriver is becoming a better and better writer of fiction and I loved The Mandibles a year or two ago. My favourite quote from The Standing Chandelier, about the main character is this one:

" it had taken her some years to understand that she’d had such trouble settling on a career because she didn’t want one."

The Outline Trilogy by Rachel Cusk

I had read no Rachel Cusk until I came across the Outline Trilogy, which I loved. Cusk fashions the three books almost entirely from the narratives of those she meets, which she reports more or less verbatim (although probably none of them existed at all and the entire thing is made up).  More recently I've been reading A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, in which a narrator tells the story, as he imagines it, of his friend's love affair. As I read that book the other day, I suddenly saw a parallel between it and Cusk's trilogy, and it came to me that what both writers are doing is demonstrating that each individual imagines that their versions of what they see people around them doing is reality but really it is only their own fictional version of what they imagine to be others' reality. None of us know anything except about our own selves (if even that?) but we imagine we do and make up our own stories about everyone else, stories we believe are real. Rachel Cusk affects to merely pass on the stories she is told. Salter claims to be telling his friend's story, but it is actually very much the story he imagines and may be nothing like what happened. Both of them are reverting back to openly being story tellers, rather than effacing the author from their fiction - they are making it clear that this is a story being told by the writer, rather than striving for the illusion that this little world they have conjured up on the page is real, existing outside of the storytelling framework.

But there may still be a realist's sleight of hand at work. Under the guise of relating true stories of what happened to her - or rather to her main character to whom she has given a name other than her own - is Cusk actually creating fiction that strives for the illusion of reality as much as that of the realists did? That is, if what she is relating is actually entirely made up, then hers is really just a new form of realism. Thus, we believe as we read the trilogy that Cusk is not writing fiction but reporting what really happened but, if none of it is true, if actually it is all not reportage but entirely imagined out of thin air, then she turns out to be the greatest producer of realist illusion of all.

In short, she may not have been told any of what she relates, and in that case, while apparently entirely drawn from life and not at all from imagination, these books are an enormous act of fiction, with as vast an array of entirely imaginary characters as any Tolstoy or Dickens novel. And anyway, as everything is filtered through the narrator, the characters, even if drawn from direct experience, do all become fictional because they are only her interpretation of themselves, just one reality among many - including their own, possibly very different one.  Certainly, under the guise of random reporting, Cusk manages to examine and rexamine a number of themes and ideas in these books, as well as playing with the whole idea of fiction.

I've also now read by her: Arlington Park, my least favourite thus far; The Country Life, which is very funny; In the Fold, which is also funny and insightful; The Temporary, which I wasn't enormously fond of; and The Bradshaw Variations, which for reasons I don't understand I can't remember anything about - possibly my e-reader has got it wrong in telling me that I've finished it.


Love & Fame by Susie Boyt

I found this book, I'm sorry to say, a little annoying, mainly because of the main character, but there are good bits in it. Here are a few, and I do recognise that they are some of them fairly domestic and middle-class, relating to folded linen and cups of tea, but then I am too:

"He genuinely loved his enemies, and not just to annoy them either, like normal people."

"It was lucky, she thought, that childhood occurred at the beginning of life. If it took place later on, no one would be able to stand it."

"Sometimes right at the very edge of what you could bear were the best things."

"A cup of tea can be almost voluptuous at times."

"It doesn’t make sense. People we love dying. It’s an appalling idea. What a flaw in the system."
         
"A silver tankard of prawns, their tails hooked over the lip of the cup like louche chorus girls."

"You do not see the world as it is, you do not even see it as you are, you see it as you were"

"They had passed a beautiful bright blue and white 1910 clapboard house with a wrap-around porch on an architectural tour. ‘What’s that house there?’ he asked the guide. It was actually the sort of building the bold new architecture was designed to replace – so that was him told – but the blue house kept popping into his mind. It was solid and it was perfect and through the windows you could make out large square rooms and old wooden floors"

"Linen is very soothing. When you see it all folded up at home in the cupboard"

"being too tired to peel a sticker from a granny smith so you just eat through it anyway"
           
"Perhaps you just can’t hide anything any more in the world"

"Why would someone who was going to end their life go out and buy a new computer?’ ‘Maybe setting it up was so frustrating it pushed him over the edge!’"

"‘Do you think some people feel humiliation more easily than others?’"

"Like airports,’ Eve said, ‘what they do to the time.'"

Hare Sitting Up by Michael Innes

This should really be a Battered Penguin but I don't have anything to say about it, except that it wasn't the best Appleby novel I've read but I like Appleby novels, even not very good ones.

This Great Calamity by Christine Kinealy

This book about the Irish famine is extremely well researched, makes you furious at the callous way the British government behaved, but is an exceptionally dull read.

Pure by Andrew Miller

I enjoyed this. Andrew Miller is a good writer, but there was something bloodless and thin about the novel - I never really understood why he had written it. There are beautifully imagined scenes but I didn't come away feeling I was different or wiser really. I do believe you need to read books at the right time and perhaps I didn't read this at the right time.

It's Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun

James Lasdun is a good writer with a fairly nasty imagination. These are well crafted rather old-fashioned short stories. Entertaining and skilful

The Joys of Travel by Thomas Swick

A nice set of essays about travel. Swick is a good solid travel writer.

The Reading Party by Fenella Gentleman

What was the point of publishing this book? It was baggy and shapeless and rather sentimental. It just slowly meandered to no end in particular. Annoying.

Resolution  by AN Wilson

Brilliant, absolutely loved it, everyone should read it.

Loving by Henry Green

I didn't get the Henry Green bug and found this very very hard going. Proud to have finished it but not sure why I should be. Again perhaps I encountered it at the wrong time?

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien

Although the ending is wet and the trip to the Hague somehow silly, I really liked this book. O'Brien is a strangely enchanting writer.

Wilful Disregard by Lena Anderson

Unsparing account of a dreadful case of female obsession, leading to said female to lose all dignity. Very sad.

I also read The Divided Mind, Healing Back Pain - the mind-body Connection, The Mindbody Prescription by John Sarno and loved them all and totally believed his theory about suppressed anger expressing itself through other means, regardless of whether or not it has been clinically trialled or not. Sarno comes across as a kind, good, thoughtful physician, but I quite understands that others will disagree.

I am also making my way through the Grand Hotel Budapest  which is a book about the making of the film of the same name. I am really fond of that film and I love reading about it.

Meanwhile, through all this time, the Brexit madness as churned on, which is partly why I've been reading - to ignore that other ghastly shrieking muddle. Last night I tried to watch AF Neil's interviews with Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson and was baffled and alienated afterwards to find that they were considered to be brilliant interviews. The issue of fox hunting was somehow raised recently by Hunt apparently - although I bet, like the "do or die" quote supposedly uttered by Johnson, it was actually thrown up by a journalist and the politician simply had to respond, thus cementing themselves in ways they never intended - anyway the only hunting allowed in Britain at the moment seems to be the hue and cry of the media. Instead of asking questions of interest and waiting for answers, they hector and bully, they lay traps for gotchas and they are just ruder than anyone should be - and this is considered great journalism. For example, how can this question from Neil to Johnson be useful, in the sense of providing the public with any intuition about what policies might be pursued if Johnson becomes Prime Minister:

"Someone who's worked for you, who knows you well, says you're all flaws and no character. The British people will face huge and unprecedented risk with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, won't they"

That isn't a question - essentially Neil is hurling an anonymous insult at his interviewee and expecting what? That Johnson says, "You're right. I'm awful". Or could it be that he just wants the squeals of joy he hopes to elicit from his admiring journalistic colleagues - "Ooo look at Andy, being butch and showing no respect, that's how we do it these days, spit on the lot of them, while never being prepared ourselves to take on these hellish jobs".

And to Hunt, Neil sneered that his business wasn't as big as those founded by people like Steve Jobs, because, once again, why should you show any respect for anyone who wants to be a member of parliament, even if you, the interviewer, have never set up a company or created new jobs for anyone - or indeed ever tried to do anything constructive, preferring to go into what is no longer a studio but an arena and attempt to tear and rip away any tattered vestiges of respect the public might hope to retain toward their elected representatives. Imagine if journalists subjected themselves to these kinds of experiences. But the media like to remain firmly in the pack, hunting, not hunted, politicians and anyone at all who tries to do anything positive their natural prey. It's actually both sickening and hugely corrosive for democracy and decent government - you have to be prepared to be hounded if you decide to go into any form of public life - not merely questioned, but spoken to with unbridled viciousness, as if you deserve it just for daring to try. It's called bullyng and political interviewers have become the entitled, arrogant bullies of our age. I really hate it.

Battered Penguins - The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes

Having bought four large bookshelves and had one wall of an entire room lined with more shelves and having filled all of these, it was agreed that we would buy no more books. Which was why I was surprised, on a rainy day in a coastal town in England, that my husband suggested we shelter in a secondhand bookshop. It turned out that he had spotted an old map in a window that he liked the look of. I meanwhile picked up The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes, and began to read:

'Only the steady creaking of a flight of swans disturbed the silence, labouring low overhead with outstretched necks towards the sea.

It was a warm, wet, windless afternoon with a soft feathery feeling in the air: rain, yet so fine it could scarcely fall but rather floated. It clung to everything it touched; the rushes in the deep choked ditches of the sea-marsh were bowed down with it, the small black cattle looked cobwebbed with it, their horns jewelled with it. Curiously stumpy too these cattle looked, the whole herd sunk nearly to the knees in a soft patch.

This sea-marsh stretched for miles. Seaward, a greyish merging into sky had altogether rubbed out the line of dunes which bounded it that way: inland, another and darker blurred greyness was all you could see of the solid Welsh hills. But nearby loomed a solitary gate, where the path crossed a footbridge and humped over the big dyke; and here in a sodden tangle of brambles the scent of a fox hung, too heavy today to rise or dissipate.

The gate clicked sharply and shed its cascade as two men passed through. Both were heavily loaded in oilskins. The elder and more tattered one carried two shotguns, negligently, and a brace of golden plover were tied to the bit of old rope he wore knotted round his middle: glimpses of a sharp-featured weather-beaten face showed from within his bonneted souwester but mouth and even chin were hidden in a long weeping moustache. The younger man was springy and tall and well built and carried over his shoulder the body of a dead child. Her thin muddy legs dangled against his chest, her head and arms hung down his back; and at his heels walked a black dog - disciplined, saturated and eager.'

What an opening. Beautifully written, with such a surprise at its conclusion. I broke the no-new-books rules and bought The Fox in the Attic. I probably would have even without that opening, as an earlier book that I read by Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica, fascinatingly original and strange.

Sadly, I ended up being disappointed by The Fox in the Attic. It seemed to me to be a number of unfinished novels, with several lectures thrown in for good measure. Because it wasn't just one of these things - or, in the case of the lectures, because they were there at all - it ended up being unsatisfactory, at least for me. But I still acknowledge that Hughes is a brilliant, interesting and original writer.

The main character of The Fox in the Attic is the man who is carrying the dead child in that opening scene. His name is Augustine and, following the opening scene, we are introduced to him in his own home - a house he has inherited only because his cousin is dead, lost at Ypres. By means of this inheritance explanation, one of the book's subjects - its main subject, really  - the condition of Europe after the first world war, is inserted.

Augustine has grown up in wartime and "No one had warned him he might after all find himself with his life to live out: with sixty years still to spend, perhaps, instead of the bare six months he thought was all he had in his pocket. Peace was a condition unknown to him and scarcely imaginable. The whole real-seeming world in which he had grown to manhood had melted round him".

When I say, "following the opening scene", by the way, I don't mean "directly following the opening scene". Instead, what happens immediately after that opening is that Hughes whisks us to a banquet in Augustine's local town, where we are treated to one of the book's best passages - a really vivid stream of consciousness passage delivered from inside the increasingly inebriated mind of the local coroner, Dr Brinley. Given how well we get to know Dr Brinley during the course of this, it is surprising that after this section we never see him in the book again.

But this glimpsing of characters as if from the window of a speeding train is something we have to get used to. We go on to meet Augustine's niece Polly at some length; his sister Mary; some of the characters who work in her household; and, extremely briefly, her husband, Gilbert a "Man of Principle" (in the same way that countries that have Democratic in their titles are almost certainly anything but, we are led to believe that Gilbert is, in fact, far from principled). He is also a Liberal (I think) politician, (Toryism versus Liberalism is another minor theme).  While at Mary's, we could easily be lulled into thinking that we are about to enjoy a story about a big country household and the interconnections between upstairs and downstairs, the relationships and arguments and possible love affairs that take place in that small community. No such luck.

Instead, we are whisked away with Augustine to Germany. There we are introduced to one-legged Otto, a veteran from the losing side in WWI. We are treated to his memories of coming back from the conflict, but then we switch to the author explaining for pages about the first world war and what their defeat at the end of it had done to the German psyche - page upon page of this sort of stuff (this is among the best bits):

"In 1914, then, there was something of an emotional void in England: and into it war-patriotism poured like Noah's Flood. For the invasion of Belgium seemed once again to present an issue in the almost-forgotten terms of right and wrong - always incomparably the most powerful motive of human conduct that history has to show. Thus the day Belgium was invaded every caged Ego in England could at last burst its false Cartesian bonds and go mafficking off into its long-abandoned penumbral regions towards boundaries new-drawn."

When this section ends at last, we meet Lothar, who of course we grow interested by, especially as he seems to represent the rising generation of young Germans yearning to prove themselves. But once again we are not destined to get to know him properly. As we were with the servants in England, we are treated to only a glimpse of Lothar and then another fleeting sighting, when he appears again for a moment, as part of plot twist that seems to have no point

But look, now a castle in Germany is being wonderfully evoked, with all its occupants included, (as I read this section, I kept thinking of the castle in which the family featured in the BBC's excellent radio series RatLine lived). And now we switch to Munich and the Ludendorff uprising, which is wonderfully vividly told - Hughes is a magnificent writer, if poor at structuring a novel, at least in this case. And following that little history lesson, we lurch back to the castle, in time to witness a girl become suddenly blind.

We stay at the castle for quite some time, accompanying Augustine, who falls in love with the blind girl. Meanwhile, a German intent on killing Augustine kills himself instead.  We go back to England and a character called Nellie, who is having a rough time, partly due to the misplaced kindness of Augustine's sister. We return to Augustine, who finishes his trip as mystified by this foreign culture he has been exposed to as he was to begin with, (such supposedly mind-broadening exchanges are often futile - a cousin of mine, sent to France, climbed the aeroplane steps muttering, "Why do I have to go to bloody abroad" and then, according to his host family, spent his entire time lying under his bed, listening to cricket on his transistor radio).

Augustine is not quite so unwilling to engage as my cousin was but in the end we find him giving in to bafflement. "These Germans", he thinks to himself, " ... all this passion for politics ... all these millions of sinister similar man-grown evergreen trees". He decides that Germany never seemed quite real to him. I presume the author intends the reader to draw the conclusion that it was this kind of failure of comprehension that led to the next war.

Perhaps, if you wanted to, you might argue that a careering sleigh ride that is described at the heart of the book is emblematic of the instability of the historic period in which the book is set and that the novel's lurching plot mirrors both the sleigh ride and the lurches of the period where, at least in Germany, everyone was:

"somehow, some way, riding the Great Inflation. Thus, in their manner they reminded one rather of skaters caught far out too late in a thaw, who know their only but desperate hope lies in speed. The ice is steaming in the sun and there can be no turning back. They hear anguished cries behind them but they lower their heads with muffled ears, they flail with their arms and thrust ever more desperately with their legs in their efforts to skate ever faster still on the slushy, cracking, sinking ice"

You could argue that, but it doesn't necessarily assuage the frustration of the reader of The Fox in the Attic. Maybe I should press on and read the second volume in what I think may in the end have been an unfinished trilogy. It might be worth it for Hughes's gift of description. On the other hand, if there are more lengthy passages of the "Primitive man is conscious that the true boundary of his self is no tight little stockade round one lonely perceiving 'I' detached wholly from its setting ... Selfhood is not wholly curtailed within the 'I' ... That primitive truth about selfhood we battle against at our peril ...the depleted voltages must cry out for a re-charge and dichotomies new..." I find myself profoundly uninclined. And after all I do now have a no-new-books rule - yes, on this occasion I think I will choose to observe it and therefore to say no Volume 2.

Nourished, Soothed and Refreshed

Once upon a time, you would need to eat a meal, talk to someone you trusted and maybe have a swim in a cold and dangerous sea, to achieve these states of mind and body. Now you can just go into the bathroom:

The Public

In The Strange Death of Liberal England, Dangerfield observes that:

"'The public', of course, is a brittle expression which, the moment one examines it, offers to break into numberless fragments

I am grateful to him for making this point as, ever since I read it, I have been alert to the use of "the public" and find myself distrusting any document that contains it, as it is an indication that the writer lacks clarity in his or her thinking. 

Therefore, while lots of people I know have been impressed by this piece, for my part, having encountered "the public" being invoked in the very first paragraph, to quote Count Jenő Teleki, (one of Patrick Leigh Fermor's hosts in Between the Woods and the Water), "I ha'e ma doubts" 

Meals in Books - Flemton Banquet in The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes

I read Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes recently. I hope I will get around to writing about it soon. To use a food analogy, since this is a post about food in the book, it was a curate's egg.

Near the beginning of the book, there is a village banquet though, which sounds okay; certainly there is no lack of food, even though some of it - most particularly those jugs of custard - doesn't sound entirely enticing:

"Already ducks, chickens, geese, turkeys, legs and shoulders of mutton, loins of pork, sirloins of beef, sucking-pigs - there was far more provender than the Wreckers ever could have cooked alone, and according to custom it had been farmed out among all the private ovens in the place.

Now, with all these and with huge home-cured hams boiled in cider as well, with pans of sausages, apple-pies, shudderng jellies in purple and yellow, castellated blancmanges, bedroom jugs of congealed Bird's custard, buckets of boiled potatoes, basins of cabbage - every matron of Flemton was gathered in the Wreckers big kitchen and full of jollity"

Annunciations - National Gallery, London

Perhaps because I am female and have on occasion been surprised to discover that I am to have a baby, I love paintings of the annunciation to the Virgin of Christ's coming arrival and always look for them in any gallery I go to. Recently in London at the National Gallery I spotted two that were new to me:

 This is by the Master of Liesborn, the gallery's caption tells us, active in the second half of the 15th century. It was probably painted somewhere between 1470 and 1480. The caption continues thus: "In a comfortably furnished room, the Archangel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she will bear God's son, Jesus Christ. The scene is framed by an arch on which perch the statues of Old Testament prophets. This is one of several scenes of the life of Christ from the Liesborn Altarpiece. (Oil on oak)

For me, the Virgin's expression is a bit uncomplicated in this depiction. However, I love the minute details - the cushions, each with its own design, the patterned flooring, the carved wood of the bench, the stained glass of the window, and the glimpses of the calm world beyond the windows.

This one is by Poussin, painted in 1657. The gallery's wall caption tells us: "The Archangel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that, through the medium of the Holy Spirit, she will bear the son of God. The Holy Spirit, represented as a dove, hovers over Mary as she joyfully accepts the message (Luke i: 26-38) According to the inscription, the work was painted during the pontificate of Pope Alexander VII".

I am resistant to this painting. I dislike the angel. I am intrigued by Mary - although at first I thought she had been portrayed as simply accepting the news gratefully, looking closer I see that it is possible to see awe and some shock in her expression. Her drapery is beautifully painted, as is her hand and her touchingly bare feet. All the same, it will not become one of my favourites. Poussin always leaves me with little impression of his humanity, although no one could argue that he didn't know what he was doing with paint.

Learning Foreign Languages

I wrote a post some time ago about how much I like to learn languages, while never expecting to master any of them - how, in fact, that is part of the pleasure. Like learning a craft, when you try to learn another language, you are embarking on a task - or taking up a hobby - in which your skill cannot ever be entirely perfected. Even in one’s native language, there are unexplored areas, and this is doubly so with a language you set out to learn after acquiring your own. You therefore have a rich source of mental activity ahead of you for as long as you live.

Another pleasurable aspect of language learning, particularly in a time of uncertainty and relativism, is the immutability of much of the material you study. You meet a word you have never seen before and you search a dictionary for its meaning. You find it, and that’s it. You don’t have to argue about whether the word might actually mean something quite different, whether the source of your information is a fake news outlet (although I do admit there is a whole other post to be written about politics and dictionaries - we have a whole shelf of Croatian-English dictionaries, given to us as presents by Croatian diplomats since the break up of Yugoslavia; each volume is  rich with newly discovered vocabulary that differentiates the Croatian language definitively from the Serbian one) or feel any doubts at all about the information before you. This word in this language conveys what you mean in your language when you use that word. Learn this word and you can express that concept, no ifs or ands or buts.

But what I like better than all this about language learning is finding out about tiny, puzzling variations in perspective that are embedded in each nation’s language. Thus, for example, while we English speakers (apart from some Scots), think, when telling the time, about the past - referring back to the hour that has just been when we say “ten past one” or “five thirty”, those who speak Hungarian tell the time with their eyes firmly on the future. Their one fifteen is actually a quarter of the way to two o’clock; their half past five, becomes half the way to six.

Of course, having said I like the fixed certainties involved in  learning another language, I’m now contradicting myself, since what I love about this aspect of the activity is its mysterious quality. How are one’s attitudes affected by such tiny variations in the way we think about time and other elements of existence? Are we all seeing the same world, regardless of the language that we speak?