Life Less Literary

I had a great night out last Thursday - Claire organised a Hard Reality reunion (hmmf! Sadly there’s nowhere for me to hyperlink that name to any more, I don’t know who the hell is running the boatbuilding website at hardreality.com) at the Cod, our old stamping ground. There weren’t as many of the old crew there as I’d have liked, but it was great seeing Keld again, and seeing how people have carried forward a little of the Hard Reality energy in the three-and-a-half years since Mark and I abandoned ship.

Everyone is now scattered around various web agencies in London, but Tim said something very lovely - I forget his exact words but it was along the lines of “everyone who’s any good in the web industry in London seems to have come from Hard Reality”. I don’t know how much truth there is in this somewhat drunken statement, but it gave me a wonderful warm glow and made me feel that, hey, perhaps my judgement isn’t that bad after all and my totally chaotic idea of a “job interview” actually used to serve some purpose.

Tim went on to buy two bottles of Laurent Perrier just as last orders rang, in memory of the time I splashed out £550 on 13 bottles of pink champagne one lunchtime. It was lovely to see a great tradition being carried on (albeit in a slightly more sensible and grown up way. Slightly).

All of this made me realise what a great bunch of people we’d nurtured during our time in South Kensington, and how much I miss it. It also gave me a lot of self-confidence, realising that I’d done the right thing, and made me want to do it (or something similar) all over again. It played on my mind a little the next day, and then at bed-time I lay awake working out how I could make it a reality: find an assistant in Sheffield; go all out to get some new business in rather than (as at present) being scared of getting too much new business in case I feel overwhelmed; be bold, be brave; when we can justify taking more people on, open an office in Sheffield; nurture and grow talent; have a bloody great laugh.

Yeah, I’m really fired up about this. Second time around, I might even be able to hang on to some of the money we make, instead of spending it all on pink champagne. (Obviously I will still be spending some of it on pink champagne).

Yay! A parcel arrived in the post this morning: a copy of iCon - Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business by Jeffrey S Young and William L Simon which Brand Republic have asked me to review. The cover says “advance uncorrected proofs - not for sale” which makes me think I ought to be quick with this one: I’d thought it was already out, but Amazon UK put the release date as 31st May; it would be nice to get a book review in ahead of the publication date, for a change.

It will be a very interesting read, especially to see whether it was worth all the fuss that Apple made, withdrawing other books from publisher Wiley from their Apple Store shelves. The title is, of course, a rather wonderful piece of word-play, although the publishers seem to insist it was un-intentional. If so, then they really ought to take a bit more care over their book titles, because the “second act” part seems to refer to F Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line “there are no second acts in American lives” which as I learnt the other day is usually, incorrectly, taken to mean “you don’t get to make a comeback”, but what Fitzgerald really meant is that the American Ideal is no gap between desire and achievement (Act I establishes motivation; Act II is about overcoming obstacles; Act III is about achieving gratification. No Act II = no obstacles: desire leads directly to gratification with nothing inbetween the two). (Thanks for that, Al). Still, I suppose Jobs has faced a fairly monumental struggle, so the “greatest second act in the history of business”, although hyperbole, might not be entirely wide of the mark.

Another book I mentioned I’d read recently was Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson. I picked it up in Bochum - it was the only book in the small “English” section in the bookshop which looked in the slightest bit interesting.

It was actually very funny, not out-of-this-world special but a good read. Its main character, Gerald, “effete Englishman, culinary adventurer, and ghostwriter to the stars” is an absolute up-his-own-arse tosser. But one of the wonders of the book is that by the end you really come to love him, despite his remaining throughout an up-his-own-arse tosser. His neighbour, Marta, the “ghastly Slavic slut” (she’s actually a marginally famous Voynovian composer, staying in Italy to write the score for a new Pacini film) keeps popping around with bottles of Fernet Branca; Gerald beomes convinced that she’s an alcoholic with a taste for the sickly stuff (Marta, meanwhile, forms the same opinion about him). Actually, Marta has just been donated a crate of the stuff and is desperate to get rid of it somehow. By the end of the book, though, they’re both hooked, but meanwhile Gerald keeps working Fernet Branca into his somewhat avant-garde recipes. Here’s an example of such a recipe (although lacking one of Gerald’s favourite staples, smoked cat), other favourites include “garlic & Fernet Branca ice-cream”, “otter with lobster sauce” and “alien pie”.

Fish Cake

No - we are not talking about exquisite fish and potato patties rolled in breadcrumbs and fried, that classic of English cuisine. This is a good deal more exotic, a Gerald Samper creation designed, as any work of art must be, to remind us that the world is an unexpected place full of unfamiliar challenges. I perfected it while compiling a small volume provisionally entitled The Boys’ Reformatory Cookbook whose witty asides proved too much for the fifteen hidebound UK publishers I tried to interest before I lost faith in the project. (The typescript joined many others in my bottom drawer that together constitute the graveyard of my literary hopes. These include the libretto for a delightful and lubricious operetta, Vietato ai Minori, that I now despair of ever seeing set to music, ditto my ballet Jizzelle.)

Ingredients
377 gm self-raising flour
151 gm semolina
62 gm cornmeal
149 gm granulated sugar
83 gm unsalted butter
1 tinned mackerel (about 74 gm)
Grated peel of 1 lemon
99 gm freshly ground almonds
26 gm sultanas
Pinch of black pepper
2 tablespoons plain yoghurt (optional)

Stir the flour, semolina, cornmeal, sugar, eggs and almonds together. The mixture will be severely crumbly. Now use your fingers and work in the butter and the fish. Don’t despair: after five minutes or so it will confound you by taking on the correct fatty consistency. Add the sultanas, pepper and grated lemon. Still on the stodgy side? The optional yoghurt will cure that. Go on working until the dough is uniform, with no individual flecks of mackerel. Your fingers may ache but you can console yourself with the thought that your nails will be all the cleaner (also one of the hidden benefits of making one’s own bread). Set the mixture aside to rest for an hour. Meanwhile pre-heat the oven to 190°C - what used to be Regulo 5 in the dear dead days of the Radiation Cookbook - and oil a baking tin. When the hour is up transfer the dough to the tin and bake for forty minutes, or forty-four minutes if you become distracted by a drunken slut in a neighbouring cottage.

To taste GS’s Fish Cake at its best it should be left to stand for twenty-four hours. This enhances both texture and flavour, though don’t ask me how. On the grounds that lilies are much improved by gilding, this cake benefits from an austere icing: 226 gm icing sugar mixed with 2 tablespoons Fernet Branca. This will top off your masterpiece with a toothsome cap of an interesting ginger shade.

For incurable R&D types, a word of warning. You would be amazed by how few varieties of fish are really suitable for this recipe. I have found by far the best to be ‘Pinocchio’ brand tinned sgombri al naturale, readily available in most Italian supermarkets. Raked salmon runs them a close second. In the past I have also tried eel, baked halibut and kippers. This last was not a success and I gave it to the birds. There was something a little too fantastic about fish bones in an iced cake, though it may be just that I’m getting old. Once upon a time my bird table in the Home Counties was an oasis of cuisine expérimentale in a desert of dull fare. Birds must surely be bored by an unrelieved diet of worms, bacon rind and burnt toast. My slow path to culinary mastery was marked by offerings that became the height of avian fashion - the dernier cri, one might say, which occasionally they proved to be. One of the victims, a green woodpecker, was in turn converted into a tasty mouthful by glazing and truffling.

Mmm, tasty

I just dug out some of the photos from the Woodcraft Folk trip to India in 1989/90 (was it really over 15 years ago?!?) where Gill and I met for the first time.

My favourite photo of the time was this one of a really cute orphan girl. I remember entering it in a photography competition afterwards, convinced that it would win. Makes me blush to think I would ever have thought it potential winning material (the judges returned it, saying that the balloon was too white), I think I got confused between the cuteness of the girl and the quality of the photo.

Then there was this photo from a village which I think was near Buldana. Looking at this still brings a tear to my eye (if you look at the photo, you will see that my mouth is smiling but the rest of me is fighting off tears). I have never been to quite such a depressing place. All of the people living there had previously been nomads, but the government had a policy of making them settle in one place. This destroyed the soul of these, to use a cliché, once-proud people: all of the men went off elsewhere to find jobs or join the army, and so the village was only inhabited by children (who made up 2/3rds of the population), women, the sick and the elderly. There was a feeling of hopelessness, of death, of having given up on life. Even though in many ways it was a nicer place than the shanty towns we visited in Bombay (which the Indian government is now bulldozing, no doubt creating another generation of people with no hope), it was far more dismal to visit: at least in the shanty towns everyone seemed positive and full of hope.

I’m currently reading The Reader (Der Vorleser) by Bernhard Schlink. Not got very far yet, but I’m finding it remarkably lucid, readable and thought-provoking, a much easier read than most other translations from German (a language which seems to lend itself to leaden-footed prose when rendered in English). The chapter I just read also hit a lot of currently relevant buttons for me. First there was a reference to Stendahl’s Scarlet & Black (the copy which I donated to Bookcrossing resurfaced on a bus in Pontifract this morning) “I identified more with Julien Sorel’s relationship with Madame de Renal than the one with Mathilde de la Mole”. Secondly the narrator, Michael, finds himself increasingly taken with reading aloud to Hanna, something which has been on my mind a lot recently as I mentioned last week. Thirdly, as part of his journey into reading aloud Michael tells Hanna about “Hemingway’s story about the old man and his battle with the fish and the sea”, a central theme to Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake which I was listening to on an audiobook only last night. And finally, although I haven’t got that far in yet, the whole book deals with the issue of culpability for the Nazi Holocaust, something which is timely because of the recent 60th anniversary of VE day, but which has also been on my mind for other reasons lately (and which other media keep pushing around in my head - World War Two is another major theme in Timequake, and I recently went to see the excellent film Downfall [der Untergang]).

Reading has, I’m glad to say, taken a bigger and bigger part of my life recently, although the more I read, the more I want to read (and I find myself increasingly wanting to return to books that I, or rather a different “I”, read many years ago, in particular Josef Skvorecky’s books The Cowards and The Engineer of Human Souls [both also "World War Two books" to a greater or lesser degree]).

So, before I forget, some other books I have read recently:

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: wonderful, beautiful. I’m a sucker for a soppy love story, and what a love story this is. But what I like about it most of all is that, having read quite a few stories in my life about time travel, all of them focusing on the technological and philosophical ramifications, it is so refreshing to read a book about the emotional effects of time travel, both for the traveller and for those who get to see him come and go, and can never quite predict when he’ll do either. This book had me crying; a good thing, in my opinion.

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre: Also utterly wonderful, and completely deserving of its Booker Prize win.

Oh bugger, time to get the girls from school. More books soon, hopefully, Riddley Walker, Cooking with Fernet Branca, and anything else I can unearth in the archaeological mess surrounding my bed.

This is cool! I imagined it would be really hard, but actually I got almost all of my attempts right, mostly within the first 3-4 seconds, and I ended up with a score of 306.

If you were a kid, what would your Christmas letter to Christopher Walken say?

Yesterday I was to do my first bit of film acting, in Given Identity. I had a great time, but my acting didn’t come to much. In fact, it didn’t even come. I was given a new part when I turned up, with about two hours to learn the lines (admittedly I only spent about one of these hours actually learning them, then I got chatting to some of the other extras). When my time came to say them… well, I was afflicted by a crippling inability to say these lines which I hadn’t properly commited to memory and which anyway didn’t have a lot of resonance for me (funny, because only the day before I had been reading about “You can type this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it.”)

I only had a few sentences to learn. The first one, which I rehearsed a few times, was:

Dig it you hip cats and cool chicks. Betty Bitch and the Thunder Fucks, Go Go Girls, Cats Creepers, the Second Skins, The Pussy Licks we don’t want to hang out with a square.

Well, for starters I hadn’t learned it well enough, and although it was all there in my head somewhere, I had to pause between each band-name to remember the next one, which didn’t work very well. But more importantly, I was supposed to reel these words off in some sort of sleazy way (I imagined Lux Interior, from the Cramps, “this one’s for all you Gucci bag carriers out there, it’s called you’ve got gooooooooood taste!”). I just couldn’t find that sleaze within me, I think because I was too up-tight and inhibited. Apparently every single time I said “Pussy Licks” it was perfect, but the rest just sounded crap. Also, they wanted an American accent (I hate doing accents, it seems foolish and almost always pointless). And to top it all, I had to say the line just after jumping on stage and grabbing a microphone, so I had to work out how loud I was going to say these words, how far from the microphone, to try and avoid distortion and popping. Urk, all too much to think about and I freaked out and did very, very badly. In the end, they didn’t film me doing the part, I just acted as an extra, which in itself was very fun (lots of dancing to the Cathouse Creepers). And, my nerves having failed me so abysmally, I started drinking. And drinking. And drinking. Lots of beer & brandy to loosen up. They certainly worked, a little too well I think. But by then, it was too late.

We staggered out of the Abbeydale Cinema at around 10pm. I tried walking home (a long walk, probably 3 miles or so). But after two half-hour wanders down mysterious back streets, each of which eventually dumped me back about 100 metres further down Abbeydale Road, I decided it was not to be and caught a cab instead. I collapsed into bed, my hair still full of “product” and my face still plastered with make-up, very very drunk.

Yesterday when I came out of Betty Tiger’s yesterday I looked like Lux Interior. This morning, I look like Robert Smith (see below), my face bloated with alcohol. And I feel a right state. And I wish I could act.

I’ve finally started reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This is a book which has been creeping into my consciousness for some time. I’m not quite sure how it all started, but the phrase “Heart of Darkness” has become such a part of the English language that I suspect there was always a germ hidden somewhere in my mind’s dark matter. It’s only since about two years ago that I realised it was the name of a novel.

Since then, references have cropped up with increasing frequency, as these things tend to once a speck of knowledge takes hold. I first had the notion that the original Heart of Darkness was in Indo-China. I think it may have been Guy’s references to the Heart of Darkness bar in Pnom Penh, coupled with seeing Apocalypse Now for the first time (better late than never). I finally worked out that the Congo was even darker than the Mekong, a discovery which coincided with my growing interest in this part of Africa (partly sparked by references in a short story which I wrote, partly by the documentary Darwin’s Nightmare which I am dying to see). Subsequently, I discovered a third, South American heart of darkness, watching Werner Herzog’s films Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God. And then, reading The Heart of Darkness, to see Conrad describing the Thames as, in its day, another mysterious, treacherous, threatening river, the ancient Romans ever unsure as to what those pesky Brits are going to pull on them… TOO MUCH!

Anyway, all of this thinking about rivers and wildernesses… it keeps feeding a need to explore, deep inside me, a Conrad/Hemingway/Chatwin/Herzog urge. I want to be somewhere other.

The book itself… I’m not finding easy, it’s one of those books where my eyes keep deflecting off the page, I have to maintain maximum concentration to mine the richness of the prose. But every time I manage to do so, I am rewarded by beautiful gems (ivory?). I often think that I’d like to make notes of memorable quotes in the books I read, build up a nice little database like Niina’s, but apart from the fact that I never have anything to hand to take notes with, I don’t think I have an eye for soundbites (and usually when I read other peoples’ favourite quotes, I find myself longing for a bit more context). Anyway, this is a thought that struck me as I was reading last night, and there on a single page I spotted two prime suspects:

You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.

and

No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone …