Never Again

Although I moaned here about the UK Telegraph a couple of days ago, I have to admit it is almost worth buying the paper for the occasional run of letters on trivial but faintly diverting subjects that appears there now and then.

The most recent concerns negative "bucket lists". That is, people are writing in to tell readers what they want to ensure they never do - or never do again - before they kick the bucket. I fear the kicking of buckets may be something that preoccupies we of the Telegraph demographic, but at least this new topic seems to have overtaken the topic that was dominating readers' minds rather unhealthily for a while.

That topic, if you can believe it, was lavatory brushes. Letter after letter appeared on the subject. It captured the imagination of a surprisingly large but sadly not particularly witty group of readers, (the only faintly noteworthy letter relating to lavatory brushes was one that claimed, supposedly on very good authority, that Princess Margaret once gave one of her ladies-in-waiting a lavatory brush for Christmas, explaining, "When I was last at your house I noticed you didn't have one, so now you do.")

Anyway, the first of the replacement series on negative "bucket lists" came, I think, from Richard Weeks in Felixstowe, Suffolk. He referred to an "upturned bucket list" and said that in this context he never wanted to eat pumpkin, go on a cruise, or wear a suit and tie again, (a few editions later he was ticked off severely for this last aspiration by CE Purdy from Gloucestershire who insisted that "a man's neck is invariably most unattractive" and explained that he plans never to be scruffy. Well, very good luck to him).

A woman from Surrey soon replied to Mr Weeks, telling him and the world that her husband hopes to get through life without going to Ikea, (he hasn't lived!), while a man called Thomas from Lancaster agreed about never going on a cruise again, but then slightly changed his mind, suggesting he might be tempted if the price of the ticket gave him the opportunity to throw two people per day overboard, starting with the people who were supposed to be his dinner companions.

The next day, a letter from Richard Skidmore in Cheshire recounted Woody Allen's response, when asked what he might do differently if he had his life to live all over again: "Not read Moby Dick", apparently. In the same edition, Charlotte Primrose told the world that she doesn't ever want to meet a celebrity, which I agree with in principle, except that there are some people who fall into the celebrity category but could possibly also just become one's friend, I imagine. Further down the letters column, in a smartarse ploy - but I recognise someone had to give in to the obvious temptation it presented - another contributor, this time from Wiltshire, announced that he intended never to write to a newspaper's letters page again, ha, ha, ha.

But the prize for absolutely strangest and most intriguing list of things someone never wanted to do again most definitely should be awarded to someone called Lesley, who lives in Lavenham, Suffolk. Lesley explained that she/he does not ever wish to repeat the experience of a) spending the night in a room over a bar in Spain and - magnificently weird and absurd in equal measure - b) sitting "in the dress circle in a heatwave with unfortunate people above me projectile vomiting".

My mind has rarely boggled so vigorously as when trying to imagine that extraordinary and, I imagine, very pungent scene.

Bad News

I suppose I expect no better from a Murdoch paper than to have celebrity tabloid rubbish about some actor (and isn't it a bit weird that this actor has spent several years entertaining people by playing an extremely wicked character but now that he may have done something wicked in real life his wicked character is to be axed?)  all over the front page:

Naively, I had hoped for better from The Telegraph:

even after the utter beat-up the other day about Cambridge caving in to demands to multiculturalise its English course (the university did nothing more than discuss the idea - when and if they make such a decision it truly will be a story, but for now it looked awfully like the editor of The Telegraph saw the opportunity to have a very pretty girl on the front page [mind you, I did wonder why the girl in question had had such very professional photographs of herself prepared, but maybe that is what everyone, except me, does these days?]):

and even after they chose to dominate their front page with the photograph of some woman who is the wife of a film star, or who is a celebrity human rights lawyer with film star husband attached, or both - but whose Halloween outfit is nothing at all to do with current affairs (and don't get me started on Halloween itself and the way it has sprung up as a thing in countries that never before celebrated tricking and treating and cut out pumpkins et cetera - all, I suspect, in order to merchandise stuff uniformly around the world, [but, as I said, don't get me started]):

The tabloid first name headline only makes it worse. Do they really believe their readers all know this face so well that they don't need to be provided with proper identification?

Eurgh. So cross. But luckily, I have found a safe newspaper haven. It is the Irish Times:

That is the kind of front page I want - the main story is something important, an event that I have vaguely heard about but am thoroughly confused on the details of; I can read the front page piece and discover who this Manafort person is and what he is charged with and why, rather than simply having celebrity shoved at me (how I loathe the cult of celebrity). That is what you get a newspaper for - not to look at pictures of celebrities. Or have I got things all wrong?

Of course, some might say that I should read the Financial Times instead, as it lives in roughly the same stable as the Irish Times, but the Financial Times is essentially Pravda for the European Union and the Irish Times publishes short stories and has many, many amusing and lovely bits of writing, which is something I don't think anyone could accuse the Financial Times of any more, (there was a time when the weekend edition had some really charming columnists, but those days are gone - and if you tell me Tyler Brulé is funny I will say, 'Well, up to a point, but the point is not very distant from a starting point of unfunniness and any amusement he may very occasionally create is mild, [feeble even?] and very, very far from enough reason to buy an entire paper').

Let me give you a glimpse of the gentle whimsy that one can fairly reliably expect from the Irish Times. To do so I will quote from today's Irishman's Diary column, whose author on this occasion is Pól ÓMuirí (did I mention the additional pleasure to be found in wondering how many Irish Times  writers' names might be said out loud?) and whose subject is the arc of creeping sophistication as witnessed in Ireland via coffee drinking habits, (tea - or as Pól would have it, "tae" - is not sophisticated):

"... You do not drink tae. You drink coffee. You are sophisticated, modern, European, outward looking. You take a chance on the word that you think you can pronounce: "I'll have a large cup-o'chino."

You do not realise it but you have made a big hames-o-chino of the pronunciation. You do not get the right emphasis on the middle syllable It is all right. The barista serving you the cup-o-chino is from Drogheda and no more knows the correct pronunciation than you. You learn Coffee Italian. You drink coffee. You are sophisticated, modern, European, outward looking. You start having latte and mocha and espresso - but you keep pronouncing it as 'expresso' like 'express' because that is the bus you get home! No one notices your bad Coffee Italian.

However, now comes another hurdle. You have to learn Breakfast French to go with your Coffee Italian. You drink coffee. You are sophisticated, modern, European, outward looking and you must therefore eat croissants. You ask for cruxunts and crocunts and kussants. (Damn all those years you spent learning Irish. What a waste. There is no Irish word for croissant!)

No matter. You drink coffee. You are sophisticated, modern, European, outward looking. You keep getting cruxunts, crocunts and kussants with your expresso from that little barista-run shop at the corner. You learn fluent Breakfast French and even ask for pain au raisin now and again.

Still, you have to point at the pain au raisin because the barista is from Belfast and thinks you have a speech impediment.

They introduce bagels. You are a bit wary about bagels. Bagels do not sound French and, therefore, many not be sophisticated enough for you. But wait? They eat bagels in New York? New York is very glamorous and hip and trendy. You too will eat bagels ....

Then you notice one day that they are serving something called the Breakfast Bagel in that nice barista-run shop at the corner. You are a bit suspicious of this. A breakfast bagel? What the hell is that, man? It is a bagel - bagels are cool - filled with bacon, sausage and egg.

You are Irish; you like bacon, sausage and egg. However, you also drink coffee and you are sophisticated, modern, European, outward looking.

Can you really have the breakfast bagel filled with lovely bacon, sausage and egg and still be on trend? No one is looking. You buy the breakfast bagel with your semi-skimmed, lightly frothed, latte-mocha and eat it at your desk.

In truth, you say to yourself, a breakfast bagel is fusion cuisine; it is the bringing together of two traditions and making a new, fabulously tasty, one.

You are Irish. You like bacon, egg and sausage. You forgo the cruxonts and the pain au raisin for a while. You start eating the breakfast bagel until, one morning, there is a queue out the door of that little barista-run place you frequent. You are forced into the local shop where you never go. (They do not have nice coffee.)

They do, however, have breakfast rolls, huge monstrously lovely white rolls filled with half a pig and enough eggs to keep you going till Easter.

You get it with tea - they do not have nice coffee - go back to your desk, eat like you were at a feast with Fionn Mac Cumhaill himself [the other thing about the Irish Times is the excitement of references you cannot even begin to understand, the sense of standing outside a culture, pressing your nose to the window and trying to make out what the hell is going on inside] and wake up in a cave, saying: 'Ah f@@k it! I am not sophisticated after all. I am Irish.'"

By the way, did you notice how nicely punctuated and edited that extract is? I think the Irish Times might even employ literate sub-editors, a miracle these days - and another very good reason to support the paper. I do not believe they would ever, ever be guilty of this, which is from the perhaps aptly named Pratt Tribune:

No Yolk

I have never been much of an egg eater, because I hate the consistency and flavour of boiled or poached egg white - ditto fried egg white, unless cooked by my granny who managed to turn it into some kind of crispy deep fried delicacy that looked like oily lace. Sadly, she has not been around for over 30 years, so that is no longer a culinary option - try as I might, I've never been able to reproduce the effect she achieved, despite setting off every smoke alarm within a 10-mile radius in the attempt.

Having renounced the granny emulation experiments, I have lately turned to trying to eliminate egg white from the egg eating equation entirely.  To this end, I have discovered that, if I use a teaspoon, I can eat the yolk of a fried egg or a poached egg or a soft boiled egg and, contrary to my longheld conviction, (and fear), no one is going to put me in the slammer if I don't eat the white as well - indeed, if I first pour off the white before frying or poaching an egg, I'm not even wasting it, as I can save it up and make meringues with it, (I am quite happy to eat egg white in that form.)

The one problem that has arisen following this discovery is that, since I have liberated myself from the dread of egg-white-avoiders' prison, I have become addicted to eating two egg yolks each morning for breakfast.

Yes, my name is Zoë Colvin, and I'm addicted to yolk.

I find this new situation puzzling; I can't quite understand why it has come upon me at this not exactly early stage in my life. I've given it some thought though and one thing that I've decided may contribute to my addiction is precisely the fact that egg yolk's attraction is mysterious. That is, when you try to define clearly to yourself what egg yolk tastes of, to pinpoint what precisely are the elements of its flavour, it is almost impossible to do so. Which makes you keep on coming back to try it one more time.

Yolk is creamy, I suppose, except that its consistency is thicker than actual cream, and it isn't as sweet. It is unctuous, except that it isn't actually oily. It responds well to salt - in fact, the taste almost vanishes without it. It is velvety, except, when you think about it, it isn't, as velvet is furry and yolk is utterly smooth. Sometimes I think if I had a whole jug of yolk I could get to the bottom of it, but I think I'd be sick, because yolk is, more than anything, rich - and perhaps that is its real attraction.

But there is yellowness too. That is important. Although I can't help wondering whether, if someone gave you a spoonful of yolk but blindfolded you and didn't tell you what it was that you were being given, you would be able to guess - or is seeing that brightness part of the way its taste is perceived? I think I heard something on the radio recently about someone colouring food unusually and people then no longer being able to recognise what they were eating, and I suspect if we were presented with a yolk that wasn't yellow it wouldn't taste nice at all.

Now I think about it though is my difficulty in defining how a yolk tastes actually just a tiny part of a wider problem - is taste itself always virtually impossible to explain? And is that a deficiency of the English language only - or is it something that all languages share?

And yes, I acknowledge, of course, that this post should really be called "No white, all yolk", but a pun is always irresistible. Isn't it?

Before I Forget

I've remembered what the new usage is that makes me shudder more than the now fortunately almost vanished cliché "pig in lipstick".

The new verbal tic that I have a neurotic allergy to is the insertion of the word "ahem" into sentences where it doesn't need to be (does the word "ahem"ever need to be written down actually? Should it ever be given a place in prose on the page?)

Here is an example of what I mean, (including a pretty funny anecdote about Princess Margaret, to sugar the pill):

Oh blast, what am I thinking about? That is not it - but I won't remove it, because it is a good story. This is the piece I meant to insert there:

Admittedly, it is from an article written by James Delingpole, about whom I'm not mad, despite his being very conservative, as I imagine I am, (although in that regard I have been disturbed lately by the dawning realisation that I could never bring myself to even vaguely imagine voting for Jacob Rees-Mogg - but I tell myself that that has nothing to do with political alignment and results entirely from the fact that, to my eye at least, Mogg, like Delingpole, is unedifying; there is something about each man's delicacy and pallor, plus the impression of slight clamminess that each exudes, [but particularly the MP], that will always leave me hesitant about agreeing with any view they express or suggestion they make; and I do acknowledge that that is very unfair and the kind of thing we females ought to be against, with our decades of objectification, blub blub - and no, don't worry, I'm not ever now or in the future going anywhere near the topic of Harvey whateverisnameis - but in my defence all I can do is quote the former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who memorably, if unwisely, said "Life's not fair" [or perhaps that was my mother and Fraser's assertion was "Life wasn't meant to be easy", now I come to think of it - but, as we say in the Antipodes, "same diff", plus my mother is infinitely wiser than any Australian politician I can think of so probably more worth listening to.])

Oh, ugh - looking at the Delingpole extract more closely now, I see that it contains not only "ahem" but the pointless interpolation of "Hello" as well, which I reckon is very nearly on a par with "ahem". We are not on the telephone for pity's sake, we are not communicating aurally - the writer cannot just shout at the reader to try to get their attention. Absolutely vulgar and lacking in grace or skill.

Do let me know if you also hate "ahem" - or "hello" (or any other new phrase I have not yet decided to torment myself by loathing). A large part of the pleasure of blogging is discovering you are not entirely alone. Or so I'm told. (Sobs quietly into handkerchief).

Death in the Heart

Having just finished Elizabeth Bowen's Death of the Heart, my eye was caught by the phrase "death in the heart", referring to something quite different, in PJ Kavanagh's 1975 essay Fear of an Odd Sort:

" ...time ... is the most fearful of all things. Children are time made flesh. To love a child is to love a cloud; a child changes, slips through our fingers, disappears, probably physically but anyway into the adult. It is a love with no end in view save separation. It has to be unselfish enough to encourage that separation, it has no consummation, is nothing except what it is and every day is a fresh blow on the wedge.

Iris Origo says the Japanese have a word for the fear of an odd sort such knowledge causes, something like "a death in the heart". And it is a death, a loss, an education in time and in an impossible unselfishness. We fail, of course, but we think about it and it is worth our thought. "

Discovering a Loss

Two poets have died in recent days. Richard Wilbur was in his nineties, so his death was not entirely surprising, although I'm not suggesting it wasn't sad for all that. The second though was young - and,  as so often happens, it was only because of his death that I became aware of him. Gerard Fanning was his name and, only now that there are no more where that came from, I discover how good he was.

Here is a poem that appeared in The London Review of Books in 2000:

The Stone House: Dromod Harbour’

Gerard Fanning

Boat piers are much alike.
Stepping ashore at The Stone House,
Doused in the inky stream of Acres Lake

We walk a tarmacadam line
Where curvature comes together
As strands of carmine

Climb through migrant sprays
Of laburnum and maple.
In a wait that slowly accumulates

Until too long, hours refract,
And like a tiptoeing through a glass lean-to
We examine the stills of this romance –

The trays of alpines dusted over,
The hunter’s shot leaving no report,
The tennis court going under –

Trying to fathom that flinty allure
As somehow the wail
Of the long-haul Dublin train

Recalls a man who was falling,
Crying out somewhere
For his coffee-stained hill,

Folding his wings as if all he desired
Was a polished strip
Amongst petrified pines,

Where the stain of silence
Would be heaven sent,
And boat piers would greet the innocent.

I have always half-believed that those who die within a few weeks or months of each other spend a bit of time together, in some indescribable place where their spirits are readied for the mysteries of their next existence. I hope that Wilbur and Fanning are able to enjoy interesting chats while they sit in that celestial waiting room.

Belgian Memories I

I lived in Belgium for three years but left recently. I am planning to write about all the things I will miss/am missing about Belgium. As yet they aren't springing to mind, apart from the wonderful art nouveau architecture, but of course Budapest also is pretty good on the architecture front.

In the meantime, I have to say that one thing I am really not missing about Belgium is the regular experience in any cafe, restaurant or public place of having to go through the men's urinals to get to the women's loos. I don't know how anyone else feels, but for me the excitement of seeing Belgian men pee wore off very quickly.