Blackberry Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

for a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots

where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

we trekked and picked until the cans were full,

until the tinkling bottom had been covered

with green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

that all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013

As you lay in awe on the bedroom floor

I was very keen on the Smiths in my teens and bought every record. I plastered pictures of Morrissey, carefully cut from the NME, all over my bedroom door. I saw them live at the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1986, just before The Queen is Dead came out, and on the day of its release I went to Virgin in Princes Street, Edinburgh, to buy it. It had just been delivered and my copy came straight from the box – had it been unpacked they would have noticed it and claimed it for themselves because, as I realised when I examined it in Princes Street Gardens, heart bursting with excitement, my copy had been signed by Morrissey in gold pen. It’s hard to describe the elation I felt and this was my most treasured possession for a long time.

I left the UK for Hong Kong in January 2003 leaving behind the house I shared with J, which even then I instinctively knew I’d never enter again, although there was no set date on Hong Kong and I possibly thought we’d be back in the UK after two or three years. In the attic of that house in North London went all the books, clothes, records, personal papers and photographs for which there was no room in our two suitcases. From time to time I’d wake in the night and feel anxious about what was in the attic. What if the tenants raked through it? What if the house burnt down? 

But ultimately I clearly didn’t care enough about any of it to go back to retrieve it on any of my visits to the UK and so there it all lay for nearly 10 years until the house was sold last year. I asked the estate agent to arrange for the stuff in the attic to be cleared out and put in storage – something that was surprisingly difficult to do from so many miles away since they wanted me to be there in person to sign for the storage unit. The man with a van the estate agent found said there was “a lot of rubbish” in the attic so I blithely gave him carte blanche to throw out anything that met that description.  

What I should have done was specify what I did want to keep; because in a  small cold storage unit in West London, courtesy of the kind and wholly last-minute emergency assistance of my former father-in-law, I found a lot of books I will never read, some I will, and very little else. Amongst the things that I know I’ll miss: hundreds of photographs from the days before digital; an old jewellery box full of adolescent treasures; all of my teenage diaries (read ‘em and weep!); a first pressing of Tigermilk by Belle & Sebastian; and my signed copy of The Queen is Dead. And it’s nobody’s fault but my own.

Fuzzy fuzzy

Gentle, mellow, lovely boys from Dunbar.

In a station of the metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound

Above: incredible art/architecture at Solne Metro Station, Stockholm. Picture from The Cool Hunter; follow the link for more.

Barriers to entry

I've always been at best careless, at worst clumsy; since I got pregnant and had Max if anything it's become more pronounced, not least in public (which at least serves the purpose of allowing random drunken strangers to go on about their drunken business feeling satisfied they've helped another human being in need).

We've put a barrier up between the kitchen and the rest of the house, consisting of one side of Max's now-obsolete wooden play pen (gone are the days when he would stay in it). The kitchen is home to all the really interesting/dangerous stuff that he'd love to get his hands on: drawers full of knives, cupboards full of bleach, the bin, the oven, the dishwasher - a cornucopia of delights for small hands. Unfortunately for me, the barrier is just a little bit too high to step over with ease, and I've now had two spectacular falls, in both instances caused by (1) laziness and (2) wearing the lovely furry baffies (slippers) my sister gave me for Christmas some years ago. Cosy though they are, as slippers, they live up to their name and both times the same disaster unfolded in slo-mo before D's helpless sight: I stepped carelessly across the barrier to the kitchen, not troubling to lift my back leg high enough to clear the barrier, the back slipper slipped, and I hit the ground  full length and so rapidly I didn't even have time to outstretch a hand to break my fall.

To D this must have seemed like a combination of high slapstick and endlessly unspooling horror, particularly because both times I lay on the floor humiliated, winded and in some small amount of pain while Max, shocked by the crash and bang and the fact that Mummy was now horizontal on the floor moaning unpleasantly, screamed in fright and stood on the other side of the barrier anxiously.

The second time, my flailing foot caught one of the slats and knocked it clean out and the bowl of sardine surprise I was carrying (after Max had refused to eat most of it) fell on the floor first, in exactly the place my face then subsequently landed.

I now have a large purple bruise on my thigh, about the size of a cauliflower and not dissimilar in texture, and a thoroughly chastened attitude.

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Louis MacNeice, 1907 – 1963 

It's a shame about Ray

For any fan of Scottish music in the last few years of the twentieth century, a job at the recording studio in my village would have been a dream. Who wouldn't have wanted to be sitting in reception as Edwyn Collins walked by on the way to record "In a Nutshell"? It could just as well have been The Krankies on their way to "lay down" their immortal (and unofficial, by which I mean there is no trace of it in the official archives and no other mention of it anywhere on the internet) 1982 Scotland World Cup song ("We're goin' tae Spain/Oan an aery-plane"), but the indie glamour was still all there.

Because it's a tiny village I don't think the the owner realised that there were any hiring choices, and he took on a village boy - let's call him Raymond - who was less than enthused by his new career and behaved with slovenly disregard for his employer. Efforts to get him to be politer, and to do, er, his job, were meant with mutinous silence. Eventually he was given notice and told he was not working out in the role. After a silence, he responded slowly: "Aye. It cuts both ways, ken."

Words to live by

“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out."
Roger Ebert 1942 - 2013

The moment you know

Even though not every song on the new album really works. Even though the "idea" for the cover could have been envisioned - and then rejected - by a 10 year old and should have stayed on the drawing board. Because it was a surprise. Because I've always loved David Bowie's music, in every phase of my life. Because his German accent is rubbish. Because he makes the banal sound profound. Because this is quite beautiful and perfectly sad.

A little green

Some beautiful green things, from my collection on Svpply:

[Dress, La Garconne; Chair, Crate and Barrel; Ring, Dannijo from My Wardrobe; Sandals, Gucci; 60 cm Kilo TT from Velospace]

My word is my bond

We are just about to move house, and once again I'm thinking about that most peculiar of Australian customs, the bond. I've rented for the last 11 years since leaving the UK, and before that I'd rented in Edinburgh,  Glasgow and London, but never before had I encountered the terror of the bond - a deposit which you get back only once the real estate agent is completely satisfied that the house is exactly as you found it when you moved in. In practice this means several things:

1. It doesn't matter what the house was like when you moved in. Especially if you have no documentary evidence of what it looked like. In Sydney, for example, we moved in after the owner had moved out - no bond, therefore no obligation to clean, so the place was filthy. When you move out, it has to be as if no one has ever lived there and it's been scoured from top to bottom twice daily. Even if you've actually taken this approach, however,
2. It doesn't matter how much you do - to the estate agent this is a revenue stream. D's brother got bond deducted for leaving two coathangers in the wardrobe. When we left Sydney we got bond deducted for leaving cleaning products under the sink. In short, they'll find a reason. But the real kicker is that:
3. They don't actually deduct from your bond, because this would affect your ability to rent a new place and might mean that you are annoyed enough to contest it and/or report the agent. They tell you to pay them direct and then they won't deduct from your bond. And,
4. The amounts involved are at a certain level too - low enough to mean most tenants won't complain, but not so low as to be negligible - let's say $240 out of a $2,000 bond.

In other words it's a scam, carried out under the radar and perpetrated against vulnerable tenants from someone in a position of great power with control over your money. When I first moved to Australia D insisted we photograph everything in the new flat and check against the extremely detailed inventory. I thought this was a bit over the top, with all the laissez faire experiences under my belt. How wrong I was.

Goats and monkeys

In the 1990s my sister (who must surely by now be tiring of me appropriating her/our stories) was invited to travel on an all expenses paid trip around the motorways of Britain as "assistant" to a family friend who was writing a book about off-the-motorway beauty spots. (A great idea, I think - instead of stopping at some moribund service station for grey coffee, chips and sad burgers, why not, guided by the book, travel up some anonymous slip road and find a small pub by a river with a weeping willow under which you consume delicious roast pork sandwiches? But I guess the internet will do this for you now.)

The "assistant" tag is as dodgy as it looks; he was after her body, but was, I'm afraid,  a deeply unprepossessing man - we'll call him A - known to us as "A the Goat" because you didn't even need to half-close your eyes to see him as a billy (perhaps even the stinking one my Dad once owned, a creature who was dubbed by my brother "the Cultural Wizard" on account  of his little wispy beard and crazy-wise yellow eyes, who had to be locked in a shed down the road far from human habitation because he smelt so bad). Claire was having none of it, and at one point stormed from the car with A tailing pleadingly after her.

A drank himself to death at a tragically young age, and my mum went to his funeral last year. She passed on the post-funeral celebration, which was scheduled to take place down the pub. A fitting location, you might think, given how much he loved booze, but I think it a little bit of a queasy choice to be celebrating the life of someone who killed themselves with alcohol by raising a glass of it.

Although my sister and I mocked him (and we had some prior history with him, having spent a very strange Christmas in a holiday cottage in Wales with him and his girlfriend at the end of the 1980s, and Claire endured who knows what on her motorway odyssey), I'll always have a special fondness for A because, in a travel piece he wrote for the Scotsman, he managed to get this past the subs: "The Kyle of Localsh and the Kyle of Minogue".

It is always the unreadable that occurs

I remember coming home from primary school at lunchtime and hearing the news on Radio 4 as my dad made lunch — "Dominy Carrot" (Dominic Harrod) and the World at One. I knew it was important even then, at the age of 7 or 8: my dad would be shaking his head, worried about portents, concerned about developments (oil, the Middle East: plus ça change). This was serious. At school we had to report back, every second day, about "real" news: the other days were about what had happened to us personally (fell over, scraped knee, climbed tree, built a little dam of sticks to block the stream, ate wild garlic on the way to school, got a puncture on the bicycle, climbed on a hay bale). I listened intently to the radio to glean "real" news, but I remember only writing about murders, even then being fascinated by them: the Black Panther, self-titled (oh the hubris) who murdered the heiress Lesley Whittle by hanging her in a bunker after his demands weren't met (what a sad and pathetic and, ultimately, 1970s story that is!); and a bit closer to home,  the World's End pub murders (still officially unsolved, but controversially so).

I've been what you could call a "news junkie" ever since — albeit I object to that term, since on the facts, I wouldn't steal from my mother, or inject myself with anthrax in order to get my fix. The Australian press is shockingly poor, partisan without admitting it, partial and lazy; I still read whatever I can get my hands on. I still read The Guardian (the best newspaper in the world - am I wrong?) every day, a habit that's almost lifelong (my brother Robin, when he was 13 and I was 15, brought a copy home and we were all hooked). Even though it sometimes seems absurd and pointless, I check every day to see what's happening in the world and become enraged anew at some injustice.

It's fascinating to look at Max and wonder how he will get his news — if he is even interested in it — and what he will find to sigh over.

Here's mud cake in your eye

White chocolate mud cake with chilli chocolate ganache (D's birthday cake). Aside from the sweet potato brownies below, I can count on the tines of a fork the number of times I've baked a cake in the last 10 years, so I was inordinately pleased with how this one came out. It's soft as can be when freshly baked but by day two it has developed a fudgy consistency and the ganache is no longer quite as pleasingly shiny. It still tastes pretty wonderful, though.

The recipes all suggest using white chocolate for the ganache, but I thought this might lead to sickliness overkill, so I experimented with chilli chocolate instead, in a mostly successful attempt to provide an interesting counterpoint to what's inside.

White chocolate mud cake

300g white chocolate (I used Whittaker's white chocolate)
200g butter
250ml (1 cup) milk
165g (3/4 cup) caster sugar
2 teaspoons (10ml) vanilla extract
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
100g (2/3 cup) self-raising flour
150g (1 cup) plain flour

•  Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius.

• Grease a 20cm square cake pan and line the base and sides of the pan with baking paper.

• Place chocolate, butter, milk and sugar in a large saucepan over low heat, stirring frequently. Remove from heat when chocolate and butter have melted, and stir mixture until completely smooth. Allow mixture to cool at room temperature for 15 minutes.

• Add vanilla and eggs to chocolate mixture and stir until well combined. © exclusivelyfood.com.au

• Stir flours together in a large bowl. Add one cup of chocolate mixture to the flour and stir until a smooth paste forms.

• Add remaining chocolate mixture and stir until mixture is smooth.

• Bake for about 1 hour 10 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes. When the cake is ready, a fine-bladed knife inserted into the centre of the cake should come out without any batter attached.

• Loosely cover cake with greaseproof paper or a clean tea towel and allow it to cool to room temperature in pan.

• The cooled cake can be iced with the white chocolate ganache immediately (see directions below), or stored and then iced on the day of serving.

• Store cake in an airtight container in the refrigerator and bring to room temperature before serving. 

Chilli chocolate ganache

200g Lindt chilli chocolate
88g double cream

• Melt chocolate in a small saucepan over very low heat, stirring frequently. When chocolate has completely melted, remove from heat and quickly stir in cream. Use immediately.   

Stop on red

Lest anyone think that the experience of having a baby has caused all thoughts of the shallow to fly clean out of my head, may I present to you a long overdue visit to style dreamland, in the shape of the following:

Bag, Alexander McQueen; Dress, Michael Kors; Shoes, Christian Louboutin, all at Net-a-Porter

Claire de lune

My sister Claire and I went to see the Éric Rohmer film Les nuits de la pleine lune ("Full Moon in Paris") in Edinburgh in 1984, when it came out. I was very impressed by the quirky glamour of Pascale Ogier, the star, and her skinny chic, left bank, all-in-black style. Pascale was 10 years older than me and was immediately elevated to the category of impossible beauties whose apparenty effortless life I'd have loved to emulate (see also Béatrice Dalle). Not long after the film was released, Pascale died at the age of 25 of a heart attack caused by a drug overdose. I heard about it at the time, but so successfully did I translate this into a more romantic cause of death (a brain hemorrhage, of course) that only when I was looking for information about her this year did I rediscover the grubby truth.

I'm not sure why she came to mind but when Claire recently visited us in Melbourne we discussed this film again. Sadly, I remember very little about the plot or anyone else in it. The main thing that springs to mind when I think of the film, and of poor Pascale, is that it has gifted me with the steadfast conviction that the French can't dance. In my defence, I present the following:

Snow Day for Lhasa

By Patrick Watson and Esmerine, for Lhasa de Sela who died in January 2010. Beautiful, and another contender for saddest song ever written.

Words fail

Because I was spending a fair portion of each day sitting in a chair feeding Max, we hit upon the idea of buying an iPad to enable me to read the news, answer emails, and play games; I'd been a bit sneery about the idea of iPads and couldn't see the point of them, but now I am a total convert. When Max grows up he will be completely au fait with the idea of touchscreen operation - it will probably be old hat by the time he's 5 - but it's still a wonderful novelty to me: close your fingers, or sweep the screen, and everything is available to you. Although I dislike the glacial speed of typing on a touchscreen keyboard, and there are some other slightly irksome features of the interface, it's about as good as a small portable device could be, and I find myself irritably swiping in vain now at the screen of my Kindle, which at the time of purchase, barely 12 months ago, had seemed like such a miracle.

Apple's refusal to enable Flash on its mobile devices has, indirectly, led to a strange brush with the bottom half of the internet. I can't play (Flash-powered) Facebook Scrabble on the iPad, and have had to fall back on its predecessor, once called Scrabulous back in those early Facebook days, and now forced to call itself Lexulous and make some significant changes to the gameplay, including the provision of eight letters, not seven, which at once makes the game easier and necessitates a bigger board. Just as you can with Scrabble, you can play with random, more-or-less-anonymous strangers and if you wish, leave comments for them. In hundreds of games of Scrabble, my messages from them were never much more controversial than the occasional "Good luck" or "Good evening from Auckland". 20 or so games in to Lexulous, I've encountered perplexing, albeit very different, remarks from two opponents. The first one began with a torrent of personal abuse aimed at me. At me personally, because he'd seen my picture, and thought it might be... funny? or provocative? to heap abuse on me. Maybe he was deploying  abuse to make me quit and thus to take the win; maybe he was just very angry for some reason. The abuse was racist, so he wasn't the sharpest tile on the board. I wondered whether to respond, decided against it, got more abuse, maintained a dignified silence, and got my revenge by winning the game.

That was pretty vile, but manageable; the second was just plain creepy, although in hindsight our exchange was also quite funny:

Creep: Did you see my invite?
Me: No, Lexulous can be a bit funny like that, messages don't get through.
Creep: I asked for players who wanted to have a naughty side bet on the outcome of the game.
Me: [Silence as I try to work out how to get out of this gracefully]
Creep: So, are you up for it?
Me: No thanks.
Creep: [Quits game in fit of pique and takes the loss]

England's dreaming

In 1977 I was chosen to be a flower girl for the annual village gala. This was always considered an honour (though I was probably quite randomly selected from the small pool of 8 year old girls in the village) but in the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, it was supposedly particularly special, although the day itself was the same as any other gala day in a small Scottish village: wearing pretty dresses (green with white hearts) made by our mothers, two of us followed the impossibly beautiful, sophisticated 12 year old Gala Queen solemnly, with a trademark halting step, as we travelled the tiny distance from the village's west to the east, first on the back of a lorry waving at handfuls of people on pavements, before ascending to a makeshift stage for the "coronation" ceremony.

There were "teas" and a disappointing gala bag with a stale pie; there was a welly throwing competition, and livestock on display; I don't remember much else except the crisp feel of new dress against my neck, and sitting ceremoniously in place for a long time, and clutching my commemorative giant 25p Jubilee coin, which lived for years thereafter in a tiny flowery purse on the basis that it might one day be worth something. An increasingly decrepit Jubilee mug sat on our cup shelf for years, guiltily preferred by me to my mum's hand-thrown cups on the basis that it was shop- bought.

I was only dimly aware of the Queen and the meaning of royalty; it was only later, during the eighties, that I developed a proper sense of outrage at the inequity of inherited position and the parasites who take advantage of it. But 1977 was a year in which there was at least a semblance of objection to the status quo; in Scotland, celebrations would always have been more muted, but for right-minded adolescents the Queen was a target figure, someone to be mocked and ridiculed, and possibly the most memorable punk record of all, God Save The Queen, was released as a reaction to the farrago of the Silver Jubilee. "You ain't no human being", "there is no future in England's dreaming"; these words may have been written by the much older Malcolm McLaren but snarled by Johnny Rotten, he seems to speak for a disaffected generation.

I have to declare a lack of interest; as an eight year old, if I had any awareness of punk, it seemed frightening and discordant. But it's hard not to long for the nihilistic clarity of a hyper-sarcastic "we mean it, ma'am" in the face of the outpouring of sycophancy that has been evident, even from afar, on the occasion of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

My kind of town

Max is eating well, so I'm often to be found sitting in the same chair and I'm getting through lots of books - thank goodness for excellent Australian libraries. More by accident than by design, I read three books set in New York one after another.

The first, Pariah by Bob Fingerman, met my deep-seated need to read about the forthcoming zombie apocalypse so much more effectively than the current, colossally disappointing AMC series The Walking Dead ever could (although to be fair, I'm still persisting with the latter, two seasons in, in the vain hope it will lift its game from being a soap opera with the occasional zombie). In Pariah, people actually ask the questions that will need asking in the event of the dead rising: how did this happen? How will we survive? What will happen to the zombies over time? What's the best place to hole up? What's the point? A motley group of previous strangers are starving to death in a barricaded New York tenement, tantalisingly close to the doors of a supermarket, a small, unbridgeable distance away and guarded by flesh-eating zombies in apparently good health. Then someone wanders by in the street whom the zombies don't want to eat ...

The second book is more ambitious and in some ways more satisfying, being rooted in all-too-readily imaginable reality: The Submission by Amy Waldman reconstructs the process of choosing the 9/11 memorial for the site of the Twin Towers but imagines a scenario where the winning design, chosen anonymously from thousands of submissions, was created by a Muslim architect. Before the selection has been announced to the public, the selection committee is torn apart by the resulting conflict. The book was written before the controversy about the proposed Muslim cultural centre at Ground Zero, but eerily foreshadows it. The characters are complex, and beautifully drawn with their frustratingly dogmatic thoughts and opinions, never quite behaving the way they should, and never quite making the matter an easy one.

The last book, which I finished this morning, is a superior detective novel set in Lower Manhattan, Lush Life by Richard Price. It's partly a collection of observations from New York life and acute character sketches, and partly a traditional police procedural written with a keen sense of empathy. It's about wasted dreams and wasted lives, as in some way the other two books also are; apart from that they have nothing else in common except the city where they're set.