Just Perfect Mystery Thrills for November

I have always heard of Lady Audley's Secret but never engaged with it. I found this by chance in a second had bookshop (upstairs in the Victoria Market) in great condition. I am a hog for the old penguins (cream borders and black fronts) and dislike the new ones which have inferior design and anyway, aren't the penguins of my youth.

Anyway, this book has gripped me from the second I opened it. Rather than be a flimsy, sensationalist book as I had feared, it is well written, strong on plot but above all robust of character, particularly the excellently lazy and pacifistic Robert Audley who I could happily kill a weekend with. The plot seems pretty transparent at the moment but the journey is so very worth it. As proto-detective novel, a ripping yarn and a time capsule of the sensationalist 1860s it is a cracking read.

Alleged Fool's Heal-All

My lovely folks brought me a large carrier bag full of elderberries on Wednesday which was delightful as I have been itching to make an alledged cold-remedy called variously 'Elder Syrup', Elderberry Cordial and Elderberry Tincture (i think this includes alchohol).

I spent an hour taking the berries off the stems with a fork and then the next night boiled up the berries (kept overnight in the freezer) with enough water just to cover them. After mashing the berries I strained them through muslin and a sieve and added about 10 cloves and 300g sugar. The resultant reduction is a thick blackpurple luxuriant syrup which I have bottled with extra colds. I had a tot grogged in hot water this morning about 6 am, sipping it with a teaspoon whilst watching 'Mock the Week'. My fingers are still purple.

My Little Pot

As an angry and continually exasperated socialist the whole area of money is a prickly one for me. It's late March again, when Evan Davies' eyes get even further apart and Andrew Marr's arms seem to stretch even more Mr Tickle-like in panic and unholy enthusiasm about money-transfer and savings rates.

Obviously, in this day-and-age, if I don't look out for my family's future, no-one will ... crumbs that sounds Tory. It isn't meant to, but in a society where central government seem unwilling or unable to protect any individual (house buyer, house seller, shopkeeper, banker, public sector worker, private sector worker ...) the individual is forced to protect itself. This is a long way from the socialist utopia of work hard, pay your taxes and it'll all be all right. There is not a single utility or civil procedure that has not taken wrangling and barter from me this year - there are no safeguards any longer and it sems that the honest working public sector earner is being screwed at the bottom of the pile.

Anyway, I digress. My point is that I am engaged in a distasteful task - that of sifting through interset rates - variable and fixed - to move out modest penny-jar ISAs to get the best interest and income I can for the next year as the flipping state will take no interest in my welfare, never mind my growth. If my family is the flourish I must set my nose to the wheel. Terrible isn't it - we are all varnished into the Tory corner by a labour government who have allowed the private sector to declare open season on the working individual. Everything has its price in 2009 - everything has a catch, so out with the penny jar and out with the price comparison websites and off we go. Ugh.

Villette - the Best a Man Can Get?

I finished Middlemarch last week and turned straight to Kipling's odd and peculiar fairy-stories with a historical basis: Puck of Puck's Hill. I enjoyed it very much and it has left me hungry for more.

However, now I have moved onto this long-lost last novel by Charlotte Bronte. It's very enjoyable, especially the odd opening chapters which concen Polly, the doll-sized, grave and inscrutable child of the teacher Paul Emmanuel. It's intriguing and satisfying - not yet as deeply seductive as Jane Eyre, but I will keep you posted.

Walken's Jackanory

This cracked me up. If only school had been like this...

Vernal Stuff

The Naturalist

Haloing your new head is a never-so-blue sky
under which a cloud of gorse, (its invisible smoke
spring’s incense), causes you to reach,

rooted in the soil of my arms, to touch the beads
of its rosary of just-poached yolk
with your small, rock-pool fist and habitual gasp of why;

but I draw you back, telling an inward not yet,
and offer a single saffron bloom, clean as buttermilk
which you scent and wish to ingest
- unsure from scent alone if it is food or toy.

We skirt the brambles’ tousle and avoid
its unkempt combs. Not yet.
Instead you taste an ash-bud, brand new, its silk
a surprise: a softness you have already begun to forget.

White-Knuckle Ride

Coo Ur Gosh. I never thought such a monolith of world literature would be such a white-knuckle ride of sympathies and suspense. I am a week into Middlemarch in the old penguin edition and it is fantastic. I am up to about p.390. In a week! I would reccommend that people are not put off by its 800 odd pages. I am getting up at the crack of dawn to plough on with its wonderful web of intrigue, melancholy, tragedy and humour.

The Present Which Keeps on Giving

As a lifelong fan of the mighty, mighty Wedding Present I thought I'd offer evidence that Gedge is still writing the bittersweet gems, packed with guitar crunch. This is a great vid, snipped from their LP EL REY> Thank you David, long may you reign.

Suspicious Circumstances

Just finished (in the bath, as it happens) this account of the Victorian true-life murder of the three year old Saville Kent and its repocussions throughout the worlds of literature, politics and crime.

It is a pacey and an intelligent read but BEWARE! The index, the list of illustrations and the photographs contain spoilers. This rather confounded me but to repay us, Kater Summerscale's afterword is packed with tidbits and sensation that keeps you white-knuckled to the last page.

Not for the faint of heart this is a belting read, as much for the way it lifts the lid on the victorians we think we kn ow as anything else.

Little Drops of Go(u)ld

When I first met the woman who is now my wife, she took from her handbag a copy of the 1981 recording of Glenn Gould's reading of Bach's
Goldberg Variations. This turned out to be an exquisite series of piano (or rather, harpsichord, properly speaking) pieces based around a central chord progression. Glenn Gould, the canadian eccentric and piano virtuoso can be heard humming and muttering to himself as he plays. I knew that there was another version, recorded almost 30 years earlier and just this week I bought a copy. It is vastly different. Gould's recorded debut (the 1955 Goldberg Variations) is sprightly, quicksilver and full of life where the 1981 is dreamily sombre, romantic and deep with melancholy and febrile thought. It is hard to chose a favourite but one thing I am sure of, I cannot hear the opening aria without thinking of my lovely, lovely wife. What a blessing to have a piece of music so rich that you can have a relationship with it which lasts for years and years.