The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: gardening and birdwatching

What with the weather being so nice, we’ve been devoting some of our time to our garden. Coronavirus or no, we were planning to plant a few things in our vegetable patch anyway – we always do! We were lucky with our timing, though, paying a visit to the garden centre to buy some vegetables for planting the weekend before the government advised against non-essential travel.

It’s been interesting to see how there has been a push (well, a few feature articles in the papers) about encouraging people their own food in these uncertain times – I suspect that if people have really gone for this in a big way (and it looks as though people have, echoing perhaps the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign during the War), it’s probably as much about doing something (a something that, it must be said, does appear to have some positive mental health benefits) as it is to make sure we’ve got something to eat if we have problems with the food supply chain later on.

We’ve planted carrots, cabbage and kale in the main bed, in addition to which there are some onion plants which have somehow survived the winter, some asparagus plants doing their thing at the back (who knows, with those?) and the ever-present rhubarb plant. 

Then we have some more kale in a couple of the bigger pots and lettuce in three other pots. 

The troughs have peas and mange-touts growing in them, although at present these have yet to see the light of day!

On a visit to Homebase just before Britain went into lockdown (the primary purpose of which was to get a new gas-bottle for the barbecue), I also picked up a little bag of seed potatoes which I held off planting in the compost-bags until last weekend. Not that it takes particularly long, but I thought I’d spread the work out. Last year, we did get some potatoes but they were mostly on the small side, probably because we planted too many in the bags so this year I deliberately planted less.

A problem we’ve had in the past is one that many gardeners face – slugs. We still had some slug pellets in the shed from last year and they were put down as soon as I’d planted our vegetables, but that was the extent of our supply. Therefore, I’ve fallen back on a more old-fashioned method which may or may not work – eggshells. Opinion as to whether or not these actually work in terms of deterring slugs is mixed on the Internet, but in the absence of anything else right now it’s got to be worth a shot, right?

Inside, we have some micro-greens on the windowsill which are growing at differing speeds; some of these clearly do better than others.

And what of the birds? I was enthused by the RSPB’s new Breakfast Birdwatch initiative (encouraging people to take some time to watch the birds when they’d usually be commuting and/or doing the school run) but a consequence of not having to go to work at the moment is that I have been sleeping in for much longer than I usually do – such is life on furlough-leave! But I’ve still been keeping an eye out for feathered visitors to the garden – as I type I can see out to the feeder on our front lawn – and over the last few days I have seen a wide range of birds either visiting us or flying overhead: pigeons of the wood and feral varieties, ring-necked parakeets, starlings, blackbirds, blue tits, great tits, goldfinches and the occasional wren. The nuts are popular with birds of all sizes, but I am particularly impressed by the agility of the parakeets!

The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: re-arranging books and reading them

Looking for something to do, and feeling that it was about time I off-loaded some surplus books (never a shortage of those in our house!), I went through my bookshelves last week and came up with a dozen or so that I read ages ago and have no plans to re-read again, especially given that I still have plenty of unread ones. So, such classics as The Day of the Jackal, Royal Flash and The Wench is Dead went to the communal bookshelf at East Finchley Tube station, for the delight of those essential workers who are still relying on public transport and those who pop into the station during their out-of-the-house daily exercise breaks to pick up a copy of Metro.

I then sorted out my remaining books, looking for the ones that I have acquired over the years but not got around to actually reading (everyone has this problem, right?). Now I have all of my unread books ready to go – this picture merely shows the fictional ones! 

Depending on how long this lockdown business lasts, I might finally get around to reading Lorna Doone and Bleak House – although I’ll probably go for The Shadow of Doctor Syn and at least one of the Agatha Christies before either of those...

I started on my unread books with a point of order – regarding the John Buchan book, The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn & Other Stories (which I had myself picked up from the communal bookshelf at the Tube station). This recent Penguin Classics Buchan anthology contains 18 of JB’s short stories, eight of which I already have thanks to my owning both volumes of The Best Short Stories of John Buchan so I felt that this one was a bit of a cheat. None of these volumes, by the way, contains the Buchan short story that made it into The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan; all I can deduce from that is the obvious observation that JB wrote a lot of well-regarded short stories! My plan here, I decided, was to read through the JB short stories that weren’t in the books that I already own (if that makes sense). I particularly enjoyed the titular one, a very Buchan-esque piece about a man who steps out of his house one morning ... and is neither seen nor heard of for the next five years.

As for The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan, this is an anthology covering the British short story from the age of Swift and Defoe to the early twentieth century, with works by 36 authors. I’ve been dipping into it at leisure. Some names are familiar to me, others less so. Having enjoyed some of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories in the past, I made a bee-line for his one, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat’ (a lively read, and a story that I feel has great contemporary relevance in the age of fake news and concerns over the extent of the influence of the media; worth comparing, I feel, with Buchan’s ‘The Last Crusade’). I then chose an unknown (to me) author at random, and thus found myself enjoying ‘Holiday Group’, the tale of a vicar and his wife taking their young family on a holiday to the seaside by E.M. Delafield.

Then it was an immersion into the murky world of Tudor politics courtesy of Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s sequel to Wolf Hall. At just under 500 pages it’s a long read even though it covers a short time-frame, from September 1535 (the point at which Wolf Hall left off) to the execution of Anne Boleyn the following year. I do like the revisionist portrayal of Thomas Cromwell, particularly how he deals with the ever-fascinating and ever-dangerous Henry VIII; the part where the King is knocked unconscious during a joust and everyone fears that he has died – this at a time when it was considered treason to speculate on what would happen in the event of the King’s death – is a particular highlight. Then there’s Cromwell’s interaction with the courtiers who think that the low-born Master Secretary (the son, as is often mentioned, of a Putney blacksmith) is beneath them, just like they thought the same of Cromwell’s former mentor Cardinal Wolsey whose ghost haunts the life of his protégé. Oh, how they underestimate him! It’s no coincidence when, as Cromwell moves to bring down Anne Boleyn once it becomes clear to him that the King’s now got eyes for Jane Seymour, he makes sure to take down four noblemen who openly mocked Wolsey after his downfall. Heavy going? Yes, for there is much detail here. That it is very well-researched and very well-written I do not dispute, but although I enjoyed parts of Bring Up the Bodies I do feel that, when it comes to intrigue in the reign of Henry VIII, the Shardlake novels are probably more to my taste.

A lighter read, next. Well, physically lighter at any rate, for Rasselas (full title: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia) by Samuel Johnson comes in at 150 pages and about a fifth of that is the introduction (this being the early Eighties Penguin edition, original retail price £1:60). I am something of an admirer of Samuel Johnson, having volunteered at Dr Johnson’s House in the City (and even visited his birthplace in Lichfield) but I had never previously read this, his only novel which I bought – if memory serves – from the 50p shelf of a second-hand bookshop in Winchester. According to Boswell, Johnson wrote Rasselas in a week in order to pay the costs of his mother’s funeral, although unfortunately some scholars have cast doubt on whether this was actually the case. The story features characters from Ethiopia (formerly known as Abyssinia) which also piqued my interest (since I went there myself on my African odyssey); Johnson himself was not entirely unfamiliar with this country, one of his earlier works being the translation of a book by a Portuguese missionary who’d been there in the seventeenth century. 

The titular Rasselas is a young and idealistic prince, raised in a comfortable-yet-isolated community in the mountains known as the happy valley. He is, for want of a better word, bored with his pampered and carefree existence in the valley and desires to see the wider world and find what it is that makes people happy and contented. So, in the company of his sister Nekayah, her servant Pekuah and a well-travelled poet-philosopher called Imlac who acts as a mentor to the others, Rasselas escapes from the happy valley and travels to Cairo. They meet various people from all levels of society, among them a hermit (who, far from extolling the virtues of a life of solitude as might be expected, decides that he wants to go back to the city), a philosopher who disappoints Rasselas by failing to practice what he preaches (“be not too hasty, said Imlac, to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men”) and an astronomer who, although initially taken to be wise, is in fact mad (“perhaps”, opines Imlac, “no human mind is in its right state”). A visit to the Pyramids goes badly when Pekuah, who hadn’t wanted to join the others by going into the Great Pyramid, gets kidnapped – leading the others to reflect on guilt and loss before she is returned to them. Eventually, in the final chapter (entitled “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded”), they decide to return to Abissinia after realising the futility of their search; complete happiness is, they have found, elusive.

It would be a mistake to assume that Rasselas is a travel story, though. It’s an examination of the human condition, with particular reference to the pursuit of happiness and the age-old question of whether (so to speak) the grass really is greener on the other side. Somewhat cynical about optimism while also reflecting on mankind’s seemingly infinite capacity for hope, it’s definitely worth reading, and I feel that it’s a book that can be returned to again and again. And there are, of course, some great Johnsonian pearls of wisdom to be had here, among them:

“A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected” (ch. XII – yes, he used Roman numerals for the chapters!)

“Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting is scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile” (ch. XXIX)

“Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired … do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world” (ch. XXXV)

The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: Dundee cake

With Britain in lockdown (although quite frankly Allison and I were already working from home before the Prime Minister ordered the country into lockdown on Monday evening), our thoughts have turned to what we can do while we’re having to stay at home.

Quite a lot, as it happens. The kitchen in particular has been subject to a cleaning regime the likes of which it hasn’t seen since we moved in, and we’re growing plenty of things in the garden and even on a window-sill (more on these in later posts).

But first, some baking.

I’ve not made any bread for a while, although given the amount of flour we already had it’s only a matter of time.

Cakes, though? That’s another matter. In times of national crisis, there’s nothing like a nice cake to lift the mood, right?

We went through the cupboards to see what we had before deciding what sort of cake to make. Checking the cupboards can reveal some interesting things, especially if you’ve not done it for a while. We, it turns out, had a fairly random assortment of dried fruits (currants, raisins, etc) – items that had been bought on a one-off basis and sometimes left over from Allison’s cooking club.

Based on this, a fruitcake of sorts looked do-able so I consulted the oracle (a very well-used paperback version of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course) and came up with Dundee cake. This is an old family favourite (my grandma used to make it) and it’s called Dundee cake because it reputedly originated courtesy of Keiller’s, the Dundee-based marmalade producer which mass-produced the cake in the nineteenth century. As with most Delia Smith recipes, it’s online. 

The quantities of the various dried fruits in the recipe did not of course match what we had in the cupboard (we didn’t have any glace cherries, for example), but I reckoned that if we added up the total weight of all the dried fruits and then put in what we had up to that weight, it should be OK. On the recipe, currants, sultanas, glace cherries and mixed dried peel weigh in at 450g (more or less a pound in imperial), and we were able to get enough currants, sultanas, dried mixed fruit and raisins to get to that level (using up everything but the raisins, as it happens). 

We also didn’t have a small orange and a small lemon to zest, but we did have some large lemons in the fridge so I just zested that. Also, we didn’t quite have enough blanched almonds left to meet Delia’s requirement, but that’s just for decorating the top of the cake anyway (the trick is to put them on lightly and not press them down). So I went with a simple cross rather than arranging them in concentric circles. Although with the outer circle, it’s really a Celtic cross!

When making cakes I do get apprehensive about cooking times as the last thing I want is for it not to be done properly on the inside (the opposite of those foolish contestants on Masterchef who seem to think that they’re going to be the ones who can do the perfect chocolate fondant, which clearly started out as underdone chocolate cake). 

Only once the Dundee cake had cooled could I cut it open to check...

Thank goodness it was done in the middle! The result goes very well with a cup of tea in the afternoon.

Recent reads - Jack the Ripper (again), Britain in the early Seventies and a Biblical travelogue (of sorts)

I’ll start this post, about three factual works that I have recently read, by saying that I really should stop reading books about Jack the Ripper. It’s not exactly a healthy subject to obsess about. After the latest Ripper book, I think I’m done on that subject for now. It was Jack the Ripper: The 21^st Century Investigation by Trevor Marriott, an ex-copper who was bigged up by the blurb as a ‘top Murder Squad detective’ who ‘reveals the Ripper’s true identity at last’; that last bit is used, with slight variations, for the blurb on almost all books about the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 so I didn’t exactly have high hopes. There followed a re-hash of the murders (I really am not sure if there’s much new that can be said here, but every Ripper murder book must of course cover this very well-trod ground – although to his credit, Marriott does at least suggest that there were victims beyond the ‘canonical’ five) before an admittedly entertaining set of chapters about the more prominent suspects (Montague Druitt, James Maybrick, the Duke of Clarence, etc, etc) in which the cases against each of them were taken apart. Marriott was somewhat put out that he wasn’t able to use his police contacts to have a go on HOLMES, the modern crime-recording database – he must’ve hated the recent BBC documentary, Jack the Ripper: The Case Reopened, in which Emilia Fox was allowed to do just that. Marriott’s eventual hypothesis was that the murderer might have been a sailor on one of the many ships in London’s docks which were not far from Whitechapel – not original, but it’s interesting how he’s able to research this (there’s not as much evidence as he’d hoped) and I like how he brought in the international angle – there were reports in the years immediately after 1888 of similar crimes in Germany and Nicaragua, although how much of that may or may not have been true is debatable (as with any Ripper study, Marriott is as quick to disregard any evidence that doesn’t support his theory as he is solid in his defence of the evidence that does). The ‘Ripper’ in this study turned out to be a German sailor who murdered his landlady in New York in 1894 and who, after being found guilty, met his end in the electric chair two years later. Apparently his lawyer thought he might have been Jack the Ripper. I’m not really convinced – we’ve had theories about Ripper suspects ending up getting done for different murders before. This, ultimately, was not the best of Ripper reads (Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed, which also tried to use modern investigatory techniques and came up with a very different but equally unprovable suspect, has the merit of being much better written), while I take my leave of Ripper speculation with a thought that maybe, given recent events involving Russia, the old one about the Ripper being a Russian agent acting to discredit the British police might be due a re-airing.

Moving to more recent history, I’ve encountered Dominic Sandbrook before. He’s the revisionist historian who wrote four books detailing British history – not just the politics, but a bit of everything including society, economics, popular culture, etc – between the Suez Crisis and the election of Mrs Thatcher. I read them out of order, of course, starting with the last one (Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979). I liked that one so much that I went back to the beginning and enjoyed the first one (Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles), then immersed myself in the second (White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties). And so to the third – State of Emergency: The Way We Were, 1970-1974. The early Seventies in Britain were strange times indeed and Sandbrook, true to form, immerses the reader in this period which saw strikes, moral panics over the country’s youth (a recurring theme in Sandbrook’s books, the only thing apparently new about the skinheads being that they dressed different from the Teddy boys from just over a decade beforehand), all hell breaking loose in Northern Ireland, more strikes, a Home Secretary seemingly permanently drunk (stagger forward, Reggie Maudling), several decent sitcoms and massive cultural change while there was a PM who had a grand piano installed in Downing Street (Ted Heath, of whose various faults the worst seems by this account to have been a run of appallingly bad luck). Everything, right down to children’s TV shows (and the accompanying concern that kids were watching too much TV), football hooliganism and popular fiction (in particular Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man which, although published in ’75, is used as a prism here to explore radical chic) gets a look-in here; even life in the suburbs, much maligned at the time, gets a more positive going-over. As with Sandbrook’s other works, things draw to a grand climax in which events and themes previously mentioned draw together as a government teeters on the brink; here, it’s the Heath government declaring a state of emergency for the fourth time (yes, really) as Britain, in economic trouble even before the oil crisis of ’73, lurches into the Three-Day Week in which electricity was limited to conserve energy supplies (and, guess what, people panic-bought toilet paper). Worth a read, even if you haven’t read any other books in the series!

And then there’s Apostle: Travels to the Tombs of the Twelve by an American travel writer called Tom Bissell. The clue’s in the title – Bissell has taken it upon himself to visit the tombs (or sites of the tombs) of Jesus’s disciples. As travelogues go it’s an interesting challenge and Bissell – who kicks off by saying that he comes to this as a lapsed Catholic – has really done his homework in the arcane subject of who the twelve Apostles were (the four Gospels are not exactly in universal agreement here), what happened to them and where they ended up. Obviously in some cases their remains ultimately found their way to more than one place and some of this is highly disputed, but Bissell picks one site for each one and goes there to see what he can find out (the sites in question may raise some eyebrows – the site of an obscure monastery in Kyrgyzstan as opposed to Salerno Cathedral for St Matthew, for example, though what with several of the disciples being buried in Rome I guess he chose a site outside Italy for a bit of variation). On the way, he displays some impressively in-depth theological learning, sometimes perhaps too in-depth while in places he does tend to lose patience with the people he meets (his travels occurred over the course of several years, and at one point he notes that it was four years until he met ‘a person visiting a Christian church who knew something about Christianity’). He’s at his best in the first chapter, to be honest – visiting Jerusalem in an attempt to find the place where Judas Iscariot hanged himself – and by the end it seems like he’s running out of steam, devoting a mere four-and-a-bit pages to his pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela. A promising premise and plenty of insights, overall it’s more solidly good than anything else.

Endeavour - the seventh series, one episode in

(WARNING: Here be spoilers – perhaps it’s best you don’t read this until you’ve watched ‘Oracle’, the first episode of the seventh series of Endeavour which was broadcast on Sunday…)

I was greatly looking forward to the new (seventh) series of Endeavour, the Inspector Morse prequel which follows the early years of Colin Dexter’s great detective. Various interviews with people involved have stated that we are reaching the end of Endeavour’s run, although as an eighth series has already been commissioned by ITV it seems to be a case of not just yet. The original show ran for a total of 33 episodes, as did its sequel Lewis; the current series of Endeavour has just three episodes which will brings the prequel’s total up to 30, so I think we can safely assume that there will be a further three episodes next year and then that will be, as they say, that. Shame, but nothing lasts forever.

Fan of Morse that I am, I’ve always been pleased when younger versions of characters from the original series turned up in Endeavour (spotting them has been almost as much fun as spotting the many references to films and other British TV shows that have cropped in Endeavour from time to time). With not much left of Endeavour’s run, I wonder about a few seemingly prominent characters from Morse’s early life that have yet to appear. What of McNutt, mentioned as Morse’s mentor but in Endeavour seemingly reduced to a passing mention in favour of Fred Thursday, so wonderfully played by Roger Allam? What of Roland Marshall from the cricket episode? Or that curiously-named Machiavellian academic Clixby Bream? Most of all, what of Hugo de Vries, the con-man who was out to get Morse in one of the best episodes of the lot? 

(On a more superficial note, I was hoping that at some point we’d see Morse driving a Lancia as that was mentioned as his car of choice in the earlier novels before he got the trademark Jag, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that that probably won’t happen!)

In the world of Endeavour, it’s now 1970 and the new series kicked off with Morse seeing in the new decade in style, off to Venice for a night at the opera and getting lucky with the sultry brunette in the next box; compare that to Fred and Win Thursday who dined on chicken-in-a-basket at the WMC back in Oxford. Venice! Quite how a sergeant in a provincial police force who’s just bought a house can afford such a high-end break is a mystery in itself although to be fair, the house is very much a fixer-upper.

Elsewhere, the new year bought another murder, that of a barmaid by a canal – Oxford, not Venice – while another barmaid was acting a bit strangely.

In the first episode, the parallels between Venice and Oxford were played up for all they were worth, what with the waterways of La Serenissima contrasting with the Oxford Canal and a lingering shot of the Hertford Bridge, that bridge in Oxford that’s known as the Bridge of Sighs even though the Venetian bridge it actually resembles is the Rialto. Given this and the fact that the unmurdered barmaid was displaying seemingly psychic abilities in an early Seventies setting, Don’t Look Now obviously came to mind. Perhaps ‘Canal’ would have been a better title than ‘Oracle’?

To be honest, I’m not quite sure where the show was going with the psychic angle – both barmaids, it turned out, were test subjects in a serious university research project into extra-sensory perception, although that aside here was a typically back-biting academic set-up (are there any other sorts in the world of Morse? Perhaps surprisingly, this one was not associated with Lonsdale College). This being 1970, there was a heady dose of outright sexism; the men (headed by a professor who wouldn’t let his wife sign the cheques) were resentful of the fact that their department’s token woman, Dr Benford, got the Open University-style TV job they’d all auditioned for. Alas, she did not make it to the end of the episode.

In one of the more predictable murder cases that have come Morse’s way, the sexist prof turned out to be the murderer of poor Dr Benford, although the motive was unrequited love rather than professional jealousy and the fact that she knew something about the canal murder (actually, she knew someone – the apparently psychic barmaid – who reckoned she knew something). The canal murder which had kicked off the episode remained to all intents and purposes unsolved by the end – the psychic storyline was left hanging along with talk of a flasher operating along the canal (how very Seventies) and hints from the redoubtable Dorothea Frazil about cruelty to cats (hope the Castle Gate CID chaps catch that perpetrator). Then, just before the closing credits, a person unknown did for the flasher; clearly, we have a story arc…

More interesting was the character development. Fred Thursday, more cynical and much greyer than before under the trilby, is clearly feeling the strain – with Morse away in Venice, his investigation into the barmaid’s murder was decidedly slipshod (fingering the boyfriend as the murderer in the face of a seemingly decent alibi). Then he went and bought a couple of canaries (a bit random, that) and snapped at Win for no good reason (speaking of Thursday’s domestic arrangements, things have clearly changed as Win no longer makes his sandwiches, and when Fred had a go he made a mess of it; a good bit of realism, that, for many is the occasion when I’ve not done a good job of that task when the butter’s been too cold). Perhaps the events of the previous series, when he went a bit Gene Hunt by taking a bribe and beating up a suspect, have long-term consequences here (although, of course, he did give the money back). Anton Lesser got to do some pathos as Chief Superintendent Bright, nursing his dying wife (diagnosed with lung cancer in the previous series – what with all that smoking, I guess someone had to get that, just like Betty did in Mad Men) and worrying about his lack of faith in contrast the faith healers who’ve come round to pray with her.

Jim Strange, Morse’s future boss, has meanwhile reverted to type; having spent much of the previous series uncharacteristically pursuing the unofficial investigation into the murder of DC Fancy, he’s now back in careerist mode, berating Morse for taking crime scene photos home with him (his further criticism of Morse for highlighting Thursday’s rather slipshod investigation methods with regards to the initial canal towpath murder may have be a bit wide of the mark, but that’s in keeping with Strange as a bureaucratic yes-man).

And Morse? First of all, thank God he’s ditched the ’tache; that just didn’t sit well, last series. Aside from decorating his new house and doing typically Morse things like solving the crossword and rubbing colleagues up the wrong way while being three steps ahead of everyone else when it comes to figuring out who’s been doing the murders, he started the episode with blood on his shirt. Whose blood? At the end of the episode, we viewers are none the wiser but no doubt there are a few ideas as to what this all means. Perhaps not unrelated to this, Morse seemingly has a new friend. After getting pick-pocketed at an open-air concert (dangerous places, those Oxford colleges) he met Ludo, who introduced himself as an old pal from their university days before wining and dining the detective.

The kicker at the end, which is clearly something that’s going to run for this short series at least, was the revelation that Ludo’s wife is Violetta, Morse’s Venetian love interest, but my mind was on something else. Racing away and jumping to a couple of conclusions, possibly in the style of Morse himself (albeit without the help of a couple of pints). The blood on the shirt – does that concern this love-triangle? And this Ludo feller  – a highly cultured man with an ingratiating style and a taste for fine wine. Could he, I wonder, be Hugo de Vries?

I may be wrong, of course (even Morse got it wrong, sometimes – that’s one of the great things about him as a fictional detective, the fact that he was allowed to do so). But, one episode in, I don’t think I am…