heofon to hrofe

My Books Game

2009-09-26T20:04:00.000+00:00

Here is a list (in no particular order) of ten books I would recommend. Not necessarily the most important ten books of my life; more like the best ten of the ones I've read recently. Ten books that I would honestly recommend right now.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome

The Irresistible Revolution, by Shane Claiborne

Collected Poems 1908-1965, Siegfried Sassoon (Faber and Faber, 1961)

Stardust, by Neil Gaiman

Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

The Mabinogion (I'd recommend Sioned Davies' new translation)

If you've read any of them, let me know what you think.

I'd love to know what ten books other people would recommend. Post a comment if you have time - the first ten (or five!) books you'd recommend if somebody asked you what to read next.

Speedy Bread

2009-09-24T12:20:00.000+00:00

Here's how I make bread. I think I originally got the recipe from the side of a packet of Sainsbury's strong white bread flour. It's really quick and easy. I usually put half of the dough in a large loaf tin and divide the other half between two small ones. You can also make rolls or a bread mountain (handy if you only have a baking tray).

You will need...

750g strong white bread flour
25g butter
2 teaspoons salt
1 x 7g sachet of fast action dried yeast
450ml water
a bit of olive oil

First, put the flour in a large bowl. Rub the butter in (you can use margarine if you prefer), then stir in the salt and the yeast (salt necessary to make the yeast do its stuff).

Then mix the water in and pull it all together into a big lump of dough.

Knead the dough for at least ten minutes. You can knead it on a floured surface, but I actually find it makes nicer bread if you don't add any extra flour at all. It will stick to the surface a bit at first, but it just pulls off again. I find the bread is nicer if you make sure you knead it for a good long time too.

Divide the dough up into loaves or rolls or whatever you want. Cover each lump of dough in oil (I use olive oil) and put in the tin/on the tray. Cover with a tea towel and leave somewhere warm to rise. I usually leave it for about 50 minutes.

As the dough finishes rising, preheat the oven to gas mark 8, which is 230°C or 450°F.

Bake for about 15 minutes if rolls, a bit longer for loaves (20-30 minutes, depending on how done you like it). Supposedly it's ready if it sounds hollow when you knock it (although I heard that refuted somewhere or other).

Then just let it cool. I'm trying freezing some of the rolls from my latest batch, so I'll let you know how that goes. But really it's best served warm (with butter and honey... mmmm!)

African Snow

2007-05-03T10:02:00.000+00:00

Yesterday me and my mum went to Trafalgar Studios, London, to see African Snow - Riding Lights' first West End production, a play about Olaudah Equiano and John Newton, and the horrors of the slave trade. The play is mainly biographical, telling the story of Equiano's life interweaved with the outline of Newton's history. Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped with his sister from a high-status family in Africa, separated from her, and sold as a slave, after many years and much cruelty managed to work his way to freedom. Having been a slave in England he had learned to speak, read and write English, and he later wrote a book: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself.

Probably the thing that most struck me about the play was the way that Olaudah's name was stolen from him when he became a slave. He is re-named Gustavus Vassa by a British Naval captain who calls Olaudah Equiano a "nonsense name". Thoughout the play Olaudah reminds us of his real name, pronouncing it in a beautiful, musical way. His memory of his sister throughout the play is emphasised by the repetition of her cries of "Olaudah!" as she begged not to be separated from him. Olaudah's name, in African Snow, is symbolic of his freedom. As a slave he is known as Gustavus Vassa - he is dismayed at being baptised as Gustavus Vassa - but, as soon as he purchases his freedom, he joyfully reverts to his true name, Olaudah Equiano.

John Newton comes across as a very wretched character; and with good reason. He was master of slave ships in his time, even after his conversion to Christianity. I'm not sure at what point in his life he wrote the words to our well-known hymn Amazing Grace, but African Snow certainly portrays Newton as a man who was not able to find peace after all that he has done. "I was young," he pleads, and, "I didn't see."

And us? What don't we see, today? I had been thinking that African Snow might pose a more direct challenge to its audience: there is still slavery in the world today - what are you going to do about it? The play does not. But in the back pages of the programme we do find a challenge. "Tonight's play takes us back more than 200 years, when there were four million slaves in the world. Now there are over twenty million." We could all be John Newtons ourselves, without even realising it.

Want to do something about it? Various websites (listed in the programme!) provide various ideas (e.g. lobbying MPs, spreading awareness, signing an international declaration/petition). Try visiting www.stopthetraffik.org, www.antislavery.org or www.setallfree.net. The Church Mission Society website also has information about modern day slavery and ideas of what you could do to help with the campaign against it.

Toy Trains

2007-04-30T20:29:00.000+00:00

We had some children round to play today. Ostensibly their parents were visiting our parents, but we know really that the two little boys had come to play with our Brio. It's been in the loft for years. With the youngest of us now aged fifteen, I think we're deemed to have outgrown it, but it's simply not true. Both our small visitors had lost interest and wandered off to find the Hairy Maclary books long before Ed and Thom had finished trying to make the track fit around the entire sitting room.

OK, and me too. There's something slightly addictive about Brio :)

Insomnitractors?

2007-04-19T04:57:00.000+00:00

Why am I awake at 5am? I guess the real reason is simply that I'm not very good at sleeping. After one or two nights of good sleep, my mind seems to rebel. 'Oh no,' it says, 'not falling for that old trick again. Sleep? There must be thousands of more interesting things to do!'

And so here I am, having spent the night reading Marina Lewycka's novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and typing up notes to do with Northern Cross. I quite enjoyed the novel, in a light reading sort of way: it was diverting. The front cover describes it as "extremely funny" and "mad and hilarious". I have to say that I didn't really spot either of these attributes (although for part of the book I did get an odd feeling that I was missing something - that jokes were being made at somebody's expense, only I was not quite sure whose, and that I was missing the point by taking things too much at face value. Whether this had more to do with the increasingly tired state of my brain than the author's intentions, I cannot be sure).

On the subject of books... Waterstone's once again lured me in with their three-for-two offer. This time I had a good excuse, in the form of a book token I needed to spend (it had started falling apart). Almost every book I could see looked like it had some form of special offer sticker on it today. In the end I opted for a biography of Jane Austen which I've been wanting to read for a while, and a couple of novels I'd seen reviewed in my brother's old copy of Books Quarterly. All of which ought to give me something to keep my brain happy the next time it decides to go insomniac.

Nettle Soup

2007-04-17T15:09:00.000+00:00

Yesterday morning Richard Mabey's book Food for Free arrived in the post from play.com. Paca and myself had been intrigued ever since spotting the book in the National Trust gift shop on Holy Island. It is a most interesting little volume, giving details of various different edible plants which can be gathered from commons, hedgerows and gardens, and some ideas of how to use said plants once collected. Seeing as nettles are fairly prolific in my back garden, and usually easy to identify, and had a very proper-looking recipe attached to them, we decided to begin our first foray into self-sufficiency by making everybody some nettle soup for tea.

Note that I said nettles are usually easy to identify. Perhaps this is often because you've brushed a little too close to the plant, and ended up getting stung. Well, the moment we needed to identify them (who knows what untold dangers could be caused by serving bramble soup, or unidentified garden herb soup, by mistake?) we were both seized by irrational doubt, such that we forbore to pick any until we'd got two or three stings each, just to be sure...

You can hold a nettle plant without getting stung, as long as you only grasp the centre part of the leaf between two fingers - the stingy white hairs are only on the stems and around the edges of the leaves. However, actually picking a sufficient quantity for soup might have been a bit painful without taking some precautionary measures. I wore gloves and used scissors; Paca picked carefully, with the aid of a tea-towel. It didn't take long to gather the requisite 'four handfuls of nettle-tops', and we headed back into the kitchen.

The first step of the recipe is to "Strip the nettles from the thicker stalks, and wash". That seemed pretty tricky to us, without resorting to rubber gloves, so we contented ourselves with swishing them around in a colander for a bit, and carefully pulling out some of the stems. Once added, with chopped potato, to the fried onion in the pan, the nettles began to wilt, very like one would expect spinach to do. Indeed, as we added the vegetable stock, the nettles continued to behave like spinach. They reduced a great deal, and began to come apart just about enough for one bowl of soup not to end up with all the nettles in it. However, to give the soup a smoother texture we decided to liquidise it a little bit anyway, which turned out to be a good decision.

For seasoning we used nutmeg (recommended by the recipe), as well as pepper and a little ginger and cinnamon (not mentioned in the recipe, but good anyway). The potato made the soup nice and thick, and along with the flavours of stock, onion and seasoning the nettles were rather delicious. Other members of the family were somewhat dubious of our new delicacy before tasting it, but I think in general it was found acceptable - certainly there wasn't any left over! Nettles are apparently very nutritious, containing lots of iron and protein. To me they do taste a bit like spinach - I think better than spinach. And quite apart from that, I'm sure knowing some of the ingredients to be gathered from your own garden will always make a meal taste better.

Pilgrimage

2007-04-12T17:03:00.000+00:00

Northern Cross is a great way to celebrate Easter. We walk for all of Holy Week (i.e. the week before Easter), carrying an eight-foot cross, and arriving at Lindisfarne on Good Friday. Easter weekend is then spent on Holy Island. Anyone's welcome to come, and there are various different legs - one aimed at families, one more contemplative, and some more strenuous routes - with lighter or heavier crosses to carry and different amounts to walk per day as appropriate. It's great: you meet interesting people, walk through some really good countryside, experience very warm hospitality, and hopefully come closer to God by celebrating Easter in a meaningful way. Even if you don't want to walk every year, I'd recommend trying it once! Visit the website for more information, or have a look at my photos.

"As if by magic, the shopkeeper appeared"

2007-03-28T17:30:00.000+00:00

My mum has been invited to an Elizabethan Banquet on Saturday for a friend's 50th. After pondering for a costume, somebody suggested Haslemere Wardrobe, which turned out to be a very proper costume shop, with racks and racks of clothes from medieval to 1980s, and an assortment of hats, badgers and papier mache crocodiles hanging from the ceiling.

When I was little, I used to watch a television programme called Mr Benn. Each episode, the eponymous protagonist would walk along Festive Road to the fancy dress shop. Each episode, with a ding!, the shopkeeper would appear, and suggest a new costume to him. But when Mr Benn had donned the costume and left the changing room, the door would open not on the shop but on the world that went with that day's costume. In the one I remember most clearly, Mr Benn dressed up as a Red Indian. He made smoke signals and saw totem poles, and at one point he was chased by Cowboys. But cunning Mr Benn swam down a river, then walked backwards through the sand to some nearby trees, and climbed up to make his escape. When the Cowboys came along later they saw his footprints and assumed that he had walked from the trees to the river, rather than from the river to the trees.

Clever Mr Benn.

On flying a kite alone

2007-03-22T11:38:00.000+00:00

It was lovely and windy yesterday. I hadn't flown my Christmas kite for ages, so, waking up and seeing the trees moving, and without any precipitation, I decided it would be a good day. I wasn't sure how easy it would be to launch it on my own (always previously having had a happy helper to hold it up for me), but the instructions informed me that I could lay the kite on the floor, extend the lines, and gently pull on both of them to coax the kite up into the sky. It's the kind of kite that doesn't have any sticks to stiffen it, but is made up of pockets which fill with air, allowing the kite to fly.

Arriving at the green, I ascertained the wind direction, removed the kite from its handy pouch, and laid it out in order to attach the wires. I had to place my jacket on top of the kite to prevent it from blowing away whilst I unwound the lines to full length. Which left me, a few minutes later, standing at the far side of the field, lines extended and attached to wrist loops - and my fleece on top of the kite, preventing it from taking off. So I ran forwards, keeping my arms as far apart as I could to stop the two lines from tangling. Removed jacket from kite. Ran back to other side of field to extend kite lines again - by which time the wind had caught one side of the kite and blown it over. I tried pulling on the lines, at first gently, and then with a little more vigour. But alas! From this new, upside-down position there was no coaxing the kite into the air. Once again I ran forwards with arms wide apart, righted the kite, and ran back across the field... this time I felt the wind tugging at the kite before I'd even got halfway. And sure enough, by the time I had the lines fully extended, the kite had once again blown upside down, and halfway across the field...

Repeat. Repeat again. And by this time, as you can imagine, I was beginning to feel what might be generously described as mild irritation at the situation. Suffice to say that before too long I was literally jumping up and down in annoyance.

At one point I did manage to bring the kite up into the sky. Whereupon, the wind immediately dropping, the kite did a graceful loop and crashed straight back down to earth.

Splash!

2007-03-07T21:02:00.000+00:00

I tried to go for a walk beside the river today. To a certain extent I was successful; I was certainly successful in ascertaining that my new boots are well and truly waterproof. Not that I doubted them, but it's nice to have solid proof in the form of dry socks after a day when at times it wasn't quite clear what was river and what was path.

My journey began with the sight of three picnic benches, paddling gaily in the midst of an impromptu lake into which my chosen path descended. Later in the day I found myself walking along what had once been the grass verge dividing the river from the track beside it. Now submerged, all that was visible were some hardy tufts sticking up above the water level. I was able to balance on the verge most of the way along. The stickiest moment came when even this verge had sunk away, the entire track having become a puddle indistinguishable from the river, deep enough even on the path side for a branch to be floating in it. On the other side of the track was a miniscule line of grass, narrower than my feet, and considerably overhung by somebody's garden hedge. Being too stubborn to turn back (anyway I had come too far... and it would have been miserable to have to go along the A road instead...) I splashed across to the hedge and dug my hands in deep, leaning out backwards over the water. I held tight to the thickest branches I could find and shuffled my way along, hoping intently that whoever lived behind the hedge would not come outside to find me clinging there...

A Winter Book

2007-03-02T09:10:00.000+00:00

I finished reading A Winter Book yesterday, and enjoyed it very much. I've never read anything by Tove Jansson before - not even her famous Moomin books, although I think I did see a few Moomin episodes on the television when I was little - but I'll definitely be investigating The Summer Book, which is her previous work for adults.

A Winter Book is a collection of short stories, many of them about the sea, or about living by the sea. The book is in three sections. The first two contain stories written from the point of view of a child, and I loved reading these - the way Jansson interprets the world in them often seems to fit with how I feel. Although each story is a complete piece in itself, the tales of childhood do fit together, each helping to add context for the others, gradually building up a picture of a child's life.

The stories in the third section are about a much later stage in life, and I have to confess that I enjoyed them less. They were still interesting, but I think I found the child's perspective of the world easier to identify with. The book as a whole contains stories of the sea, of small islands, of sailing and rowing boats, and rafts, and icebergs, and art. I'd definitely recommend it.

Dreaming...

2007-02-28T22:06:00.000+00:00

What was supposed to be a couple of days off after my course is rapidly turning into a week... there seems to be so much else to do that I haven't even had time to update my CV, let alone start applying for jobs. I have seen a few possible ones - one of them is in Scarborough. I'd love to go to Scarborough, but it's not residential and I'm not sure the hours I'd be working in the job would make it financially viable to rent a room.

I hate the way that everything depends on money. I know that it's so much part of our society that it's fairly impossible to get away from it. But it seems somehow ridiculous that so many people spend hours typing away in offices that they don't really want to be in, simply in order to get some numbers added to their name, so that they can swap the numbers for shiny things like new houses/cars/shoes/digital cameras.

I think I'd like to go and live on some kind of community farm, with hens and vegetable plots, where everybody worked outside and went for walks to see the beauty of creation, and in the evenings we would swap languages and tell each other stories, and we'd always welcome strangers, and the whole way of life would be a quiet worship to God. We could have a library with books and CDs and computers, and take turns to do the laundry and the washing up and lead prayers. And anyone who didn't have anywhere to go could come and join us.

This is just my dream. I think there might be places a bit like it. But would I really enjoy all that cooking and laundry and digging and hard work as much as my imaginings make me think?

With the grace of God, I hope so.

Making a pinhole

2007-02-27T22:54:00.000+00:00

Paca and I spent yesterday creating a pinhole to attach to the front of an SLR camera (in the morning) and taking lots of shots with it (in the afternoon). He would have been at work, but he'd pulled a muscle in his back at the weekend, and it was still hurting too much to sit down for very long. But filing a piece of tin can to the correct shape, superglueing it to an old lens mount and sealing it with putty seemed to be ok (with plenty of standing-up breaks, that is).

Of course, I'm now desperate to get the film developed. I've got no idea whether any of the shots will come out. We tried four or five different exposures each time, just to experiment, to try and work out the best way to use our new lens. (We both keep wanting to call it a 'pinhole lens', but of course technically it isn't, because the whole point of a pinhole camera is that you can take photographs without using a lens... but it's hard to know what else to call it!)

I still favour film photography over digital. Digital definitely has its advantages - like my being able to publish this lovely photograph of the pinhole attachment without developing anything - but film somehow feels more real. Maybe it's also because I understand the process a little better. It's amazing, almost magical, to think of the light reacting with the film inside the camera, creating an image, which can then be projected onto paper which again reacts with the light... wow! I'd like it even better if I had my own darkroom. I'd love to develop and print my own pictures. But so far neither space nor finance has allowed me to try!

Carrying a Cross

2007-02-25T10:05:00.000+00:00

Today's the day of the Northern Cross meeting. Me and Paca (who's currently asleep on the sofa) have to go to Amersham to discuss route plans, overnight stops, numbers of walkers, and all sorts of other things I'm sure I'll find out about when I get there.

Northern Cross happens every year over the week running up to easter. Groups of pilgrims set out from various locations in Northumberland and Scotland, each with their own cross to carry (most are eight feet high). We all walk towards Lindisfarne, arriving there on the morning of Good Friday. Then everybody spends Easter weekend there on Holy Island, before heading off home on Easter Sunday. If you're even remotely interested, have a look at the website and think about coming along - it's well worth it!

Part of the fun is the stories that are involved. The area we walk through, and particularly Lindisfarne itself, is closely linked up with those ancient Northumbrian saints coming over from Iona and ultimately Ireland, who were in part responsible for the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. I'd like to look up some of the stories before I go this year, so that tales of Columba, Cuthbert, Aidan, Hild and the like can be told on the way.

Books!

2007-02-23T17:53:00.000+00:00

Today was the final day of my intensive, four-week TESOL course. We've all been so busy over the past month that it comes as something of a shock - certainly a very strange feeling - not to have any work that we've got to do. OK, so my bedroom could do with tidying (there are offcuts of brightly coloured card and discarded, half-finished lesson plans all over the floor!), but the certain knowledge that I don't have at least two assignments due in on Monday is - well - like suddenly finding that you're not in a tunnel any more but have emerged into sunlit fields.

In celebration, I paid a visit to Waterstone's on my way home, having realised that I actually hadn't read any fiction whatsoever over the last four weeks. Waterstone's almost always seem to have a 'three for two' offer on. I was easily drawn in by their marketing ploy, choosing one book that I definitely wanted to read, one that I sort of wanted to read, and a third which I'd never heard of before and only bought because I was looking for another one that might be interesting, seeing as it was 'free'...

I think I'm going to begin with Book One (the one I'd seen and definitely wanted to read): A Winter Book, by Tove Jansson.