I've been putting seeds into pots with compost and watching them grow.
Blonde maraicheri lettuce just coming up.
The same lettuce a week or so later.
Red Orache. I've never tried it. I look forward to tasting it in a few months time.
Crocus
snakeshead fritillary
An apple seedling. Mr Kite and I just planted 82 fruit trees down at Mountain Cottage in corfe mullen, Dorset. It's mostly apples, but cherries, plums, pears, quince and medlars too. They're all a lot bigger than this seedling.
The LAG funding group I'm a part of has just put a 'temporary freeze' on funding all new projects. The government are abolishing RDAs and centralising everything with DEFRA.
I couldn't get online yesterday, so this post is a belated.
Recipe for Spiced Pancake avec Bean (Mr Kite's invention)
For the pancake:
110g plain flour
pinch salt
2 eggs
200ml milk mixed with 75ml water
2tspn garam masala
2tspn tumeric
1 tspn ground coriander
sieve flour and salt into a mixing bowl. Break the eggs into the mix, or blend. Add milk and water gradually. When all the milk and water is added, slide a spatula around the edge of the bowl to incorporate any stray flour. Add the spices and whisk until smooth.
(Note: These pancakes seem to take slightly longer to cook than conventional pancakes. The spices seem to slow the cooking down. Allow about 5 mins per pancake, but ultimately you decide when they're done.)
for the Avec Bean:
(pancakes to be cooked during the Avec Bean cooking time, or if multi-tasking is impossible for you, after. Ensure the bean mix is kept warm while the pancakes cook.)
1 red onion- chopped
2 cloves garlic- chopped
1 red pepper- chopped
2 courgettes- chopped
mushrooms- chopped
ginger- sliced. Smallish quantity.
chilli powder- 1tspn or less
tinned tomatoes
tinned mix beans
150g mozzarella
coriander leaf
basil
Fry onions for 5mins
add pepper and garlic and fry for further 5mins
add courgettes and ginger. Fry for 5mins
add mushrooms. Fry 3mins
add the herbs and spices and tomatoes and fry for 5mins
add beans and fry for a further 5mins.
Add the mozzarella 30 seconds before serving.
This recipe can be adapted and changed for variety.
I just finished reading Thomas Holt’s A Song for Nero. I picked it up because it’s a historical fiction told in a modern style with a few deliberate anachronisms and a contemporary flavour. My own novel I’m working on is a light-hearted anachronistic historical fiction. I’m trying hard to find published novels following that sort of principle.
Song for Nero was easy to read with a good concept. The light-hearted style made it a much more enjoyable read from other historical fiction. The characters were strong and well described. The whole ambience of the story put me into that time in history without alienating me.
The book was excessively long considering nothing much actually happens. It was over the top to the extent that though I guess a lot of stuff did happen, it seemed to be negated by the OTT barrage of stuff that I couldn’t relate to. All the mishaps that occur bled into one another creating a spiral of repetition. Despite such a formulaic repetition, the characters never learn from their previous experiences. Though Galen does seem to develop towards the end, I felt character development was thin on the ground. I had no reason to root for the characters because it was never made clear what the characters actually wanted, other than to be in a different situation.
Having said all that, I did enjoy reading it. I just felt it came so close to being an amazing perfect book, but it never quite connected, never quite filled its potential.
Has anyone out there read a good historical fiction in a similar vein to A Song for Nero? I’m talking modern language, no excessive description into intricate historical fact, a lot of deliberate anachronism, tongue in cheek and chilled out? I’m talking Maid Marian and Her Merry Men but in adult novel form. If anyone can suggest something similar (that isn’t the book I am writing) then point me that way.
I have just read The Drowned World by J G Ballard. What particularly struck me about the book was within the postscript. Ballard comments on the fragility of society/ status quo. Ballard discusses how living through a war allowed him to see society as a construction. This idea is central to The Drowned World. Kerans refers to the structured society that Colonal Riggs represents as being unreal, a construction. Kerans, Beatrice and Bodkin are sharing the same dream, their consciousness collectively aligning with an ancient archetype, regressing mentally as their new world regresses to Triassic conditions.
The point I would most like to hold on to is that society is a construction, easily broken. I heard somewhere that civilised society is only three meals away from anarchy. Nothing in our day to day lives is actually real and it is all subject to extreme change. Resilience is the ability to roll with changes, embrace them and shift to the pattern of change.
The book I am currently reading is What I Was by Meg Rosoff. Rosoff is easier to read than Ballard, being a children’s writer. Her stories are simple and comfortable where Ballard’s are complex and sophisticated. There is something that is linking these two stories together and entwining myself within the folds. Finn is a boy who lives in a shack on a tidal island. He is wild, (partially) disconnected from society’s rules and constructed existence. Finn’s life is based in the facts and reality of living, of catching enough crabs to eat and sell, of collecting wood for his fire, on the act of being alive.
In Rosoff’s first book, How I Live Now, we meet four siblings with a similar unreality (disconnection from society’s rules).
I can relate to Finn and Edmond and Issac et al because I too wish to live in such a manner. I don’t mean total disconnection, because that would be rejecting things as they are now. I mean a partial disconnection, a state in which I exist as part of society but not expressly reliant on it.
I strive for this simple existence that acknowledges the fragile unreality of society. I want to be resilient, able to accept changes, to accept a total change of regime if it came to it. But I have been brought up in this society and have been conditioned by it. I often feel a sense of vertigo, as it were. I feel like What the hell am I doing? I have hardly any money, no security, no future path cleared ahead of me. I should acquire these things!
But these things are all so fragile. There is no resilience in them.
This brings me on to Sci Fi as a genre. The Drowned World is a science fiction novel. It is very different from the sci fi I have been reading recently, in that it accepts the fragility and temporal reality of our world and society. Often science fiction assumes our society will continue indefinitely far into the future and beyond the confines of this world. I disagree with this. We are not resilient enough. Our planet is subject to huge changes and the situation in The Drowned World is a lot more plausible than many sci fi situations. We are not all powerful. We are just successful animals enjoying a peak.
All animals have a limited capacity. We do not expect a dog to be able to compose a poem or discuss the intricacies of quantum physics. Why then do we expect the human species to have an unlimited capacity? Ages ago there was something on Radio 4 that discussed the limits of human comprehension. Martin Rees suggests robots will be the key to overcoming our biological limitations (though does not go into how the robots will be manufactured or fuelled if fossil fuels were to run out).
The lecture is extremely interesting, especially in relation to writing science fiction. It is neither disparaging of speculative science nor is it fanciful.
To listen to the lecture please follow this link. It’s well worth it, especially for sci fi geeks.
Lastly, the above ideas can be linked to the short story by Kurt Vonnegut entitled Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog, the premise of which greatly amuses me and which I would like to take on as fact.
I read Farewell my Lovely the other day. Raymond Chandler’s style is smooth and on the ball. Despite these books having been written in the 40s, they read with a slick freshness rarely found in even the most contemporary of books.
Sure, there are times when I have no idea what the hell is going on, but that’s all cool. It all makes sense in the end. There are some beautiful one liners in there. Chandler’s metaphors sing.
Philip Marlowe is everything I’d want from a PI character. He’s a real man, he’s no pansy. Marlowe’s tough, he knows how to use a gun and he can hold his liquor. When it comes to girls, he’s a smooth player. But he’s not invincible. He admits it when he’s shitting himself because whatever crazy situation he’s in is scary as hell. What I like most about Marlowe is that he doesn’t take himself seriously at all. It’s what pisses all the cops off. He takes on these cases with a nonchalant kind of Who Cares attitude, jokes his way through it and winds up solving the entire thing before the cops even get nearly half way there.
So on Radio 4 there’s a Raymond Chandler season. It’s about to start. I’d better wrap this post up so I can listen. Why don’t you take a look at it too? If you’ve never read any Chandler I’d say go for it.
