Books for the beach: the great annual dilemma

Loki with, err, her gospel

And so it begins: the great annual kerfuffle about What Books am I Taking on Holiday.

It brings with it the annual question of: ‘why don’t you get a Kindle?’ Well, I have a tablet, and I read news and features on it, but don’t particularly like reading anything longer.

I love the feel, the heft, the smell, the sense of a real book.

And however good the backlighting is on a device, glass does not take well to being buffeted by sand (oddly enough) and other elements, while computer technology does not, generally speaking, make good bedfellows with water.

I don’t an electronic device into the bath – so why would I risk dropping one into the sea or similar?

Books it is – and this ritual is one that, even in its apparent indecisiveness, I enjoy.

Of course, it adds weight to the baggage, but I’m not travelling by air.

The Other Half is being seriously serious this time around, with an intention of taking Piketty for the beach – only a doubting Thomas would not concede that Capital in the Twenty-First Century has already caused enough of a stir to render the first name of its author as superfluous.

And Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life, a massive new biography by Stephen Parker, is also sitting ready to find a corner in the case.

My own reading list is somewhat different – although the Brecht will be available if the mood takes me.

First up is The Colours of Catalonia: In the Footsteps of Twentieth-Century Artists by Virginie Raguenaud, which I bought in Collioure in the first place – and will now take back to provide artistic background for this trip.

It does, of course, include a section on Collioure and Matisse and the Fauves. And Raguenaud talks of Ceret and Elne, of Picasso and Survage.

Museums Without Walls, by Jonathan Meades, is also penciled in for provision of pithy pointers to looking at and reading the built environment around us.

And then I have Five Quarters of the Orange, Holy Fools and Coastliners – three novels, all set in France, by Joanne Harris, together with The Gospel of Loki, her reworking of Norse myth from earlier this year.

Harris is one of those writers I haven’t read as much of as I have meant to – but that’s largely out of fear. For ages, I dreaded any of her other titles being a let-down after the glories of Chocolat, which is a rare beast, in that it’s a book I’ve read rather more than once.

Back in 2005, I reviewed Gentlemen and Players for a magazine – and thoroughly enjoyed that too – but subsequent re-reads of Chocolat and a first reading of its sequel, The Lollipop Shoes, were as far as I dipped my foot into Harris’s oeuvre until dipping into Blackberry Wine a week or so ago.

I’d always intended to get a copy of The Gospel of Loki, but this has not been a big reading year, so hadn’t got around to it until The Other Half suggested it for the holiday list.

One Amazon reviewer suggested that Loki won’t appeal to anyone who liked Chocolat, but that seems a remarkably limiting idea with no logic.

I love Chocolat – and I love the Norse myths. I can’t be unique – well, not on that score, at least.

As Terry Pratchett’s dust jacket biog points out, he is “sometimes accused of literature”.

Harris is, first and foremost, a wonderful storyteller, with a great ability to weave modern fairytales – on occasion, very darkly – and to employ magic realism, but she’s also a writer of the sort of subtlety that the same can be said of her: indeed, she makes me think of Angela Carter.

Take Chocolat: it’s a wonderful story, but it’s also ‘about’ so much: about life, living, pleasure and guilt, and it leaves you with plenty of food for thought.

My mother didn’t like it, but then it was only some time after I’d given her a copy that it dawned on me that Harris’s approach to both the sensual pleasures of life and to religion might not entirely have appealed to her.

C’est la vie, as those damnable Frenchies might say.

Blackberry Wine is a great read, and as I turned the final page and brushed away a tear – yes, you really do care that much about the characters Harris creates – thus was born the feeling that Proust can wait.

When blackbirds fight back

'Err, I don't know how to get down.'

It’s all well and good watching vultures tear a distinctly deceased rabbit apart when there’s the safety of a nice, substantial wire fence between you and them, and being able to observe that the old cliché about nature being red in tooth and claw is true.

But such bloodiness is hardly limited to zoos. And here, in little old Hackney, there’s been a fair bit of it in recent days.

The periphery of the carpark has been, for the last week or so, an avian maternity ward.

Never before have there been so many bird families nursing young and watching over them as they fledge – it’s almost like the flats themselves: more obvious results of human fecundity than ever before.

But for cats, the presence of all these birds is like having Christmas, Easter, summer holidays and birthdays all arrive at once.

Back around 2006, when Boudi was about two and a half, and Mack and Trickie were still alive, we were all out in the garden one day, under a rather pallid sky.

The garden in those days was less patio and more just mess, overgrown with various short-lived and halfhearted efforts at anything resembling the horticultural arts.

The older cats were slumbering when, all of a sudden, Boudi jumped up at the rose bush and just as rapidly, dived in the direction of the flat, with something clearly in her mouth.

The Other Half grabbed her by the scruff and made her drop a small bird, then hoiked her inside and shut the door on her juvenile objections.

As the bird made to totter into a bush, Trickie came out of her reverie and realised that prey was around.

She was duly tossed inside too, to be rapidly followed by Mack, who, at around 14, had been the last to spot what was going on, and had started to slink toward the feathered abductee with a glint in his eye.

The Other Half, being rather more used to this sort of thing, said it was probably on its last legs and I’d need to put it out of its misery.

Great.

I got a spade, but it had no desire for a quick end, and instead kept hopping away in a manner that suggested that it was far from in agreement with his diagnosis.

After a few minutes, I decided to leave it – not least since I was, by then, being divebombed by a very angry robin.

Once inside, with the cats all complaining, the same robin took up a position atop the rotary drier and continued to ‘bark’ out a warning for the next hours.

In the meantime, other adult robins swooped in to help coax the fledgling first onto a chair, then onto the little table and from there into the thick pyracantha right next to it.

And then, until nightfall, they flew back and forth taking it food.

In the morning, they’d all gone, so presumably, the fledgling had regained its strength back and learned how to fly instead of simply falling conveniently within jaw range of a cat.

It was an extraordinary example of a family working to save their little one.

And that was the last time that we had any sort of bird incident.

Before that, there’d just been one occasion when Mack and his sister Mabel had ‘found’ a small bird and brought it into the flat, causing the feather to fly rather more than metaphorically.

That had been my first encounter with such an event and I had been all rather desperate and girly about it.

A certain more realistic steeliness had set in by the time we rescued the robin fledgling.

And that was that on the bird front – until last weekend.

Then, while we all sitting in the Sunday afternoon sun, as though summer had landed all of a sudden, Loki bombed in through the open gate and straight into the flat.

I got inside to find her in the hall with a small bird on the floor in front of her.

Boudi had materialised from somewhere and was reaching out a careful paw to see if it still moved.

We shooed them away and carefully picked it up and took it back outside.

It was breathing heavily but with no obvious signs of external injury. So The Other Half placed it in bushes and we hauled the pride inside, to the predictable objections.

It was only then that I realised that the noise of birds, which has been quite loud of late anyway, had been particularly frantic at that stage.

We checked later and the bird was gone. So, we allowed ourselves to think, another happy ending.

Unfortunately, just 24 hours later, it was Otto’s turn to race into the garden and behind a large pot. We went to see what she was up to and she shot into the flat, to be scragged quickly by The Other Half, who made her drop her prize.

It’s impossible to know for certain that it was the same bird, but it did look so – a sparrow fledgling. And this time it was most certainly deceased.

There were drops of blood on the paving stones – hardly surprising, given that Otto’s canines are so long that I half suspect she’s actually a Dracula cat.

We disposed safely of the bird and kept them in for the rest of the day, while the noise outside continued.

Since then, though, the weather and my illness meant that, until this weekend, the girls haven’t been outside.

Not that all this is remotely as one-sided as you might imagine.

Mr and Mrs Blackbird were, only a year since, squawking away in juvenile joy from the lithe silver birches in the carpark, and are now quite clearly a family unit.

No baby has been spotted, but Mr B has been seen rooting worms from the potager – and hectoring any cat (or human) who comes ‘too close’. Like some of our more colourful ’ackney residents, he was giving it large to all and sundry.

And in the week’s most extraordinary moment, he chased off Reggie, who had only reggiecide on his feline mind, dive-bombing the big ginger cat until he fled through the carpark gates.

So this weekend, whenever they’ve been out, we’ve been extra attentive, listening for any sound of avian anger.

Mind, Loki is clearly working to convince me that nominative determinism really exists.

It’s only just over a week since she managed to get up onto the balcony of the flat above ours – my back was briefly turned so I can only speculate on how she did it.

Once up there, the sense of accomplishment was soon replaced by another feeling.

“Loki, come down!”

“I don’t know how to!”

“Well … how did you get up there in the first place?”

“I can’t remember! I’m stuck!”

She paced rather frantically from one side of the small balcony to the other, meeping in an increasingly paniced way, before suddenly deciding that she could simply jump straight down, landing perfectly lightly, and then making her way into the flat as though nothing untoward had happened.

Yesterday, I found her on top of the canopy that stands next to one of the rear communal entrances, trying to see if she could see any birds in a tree next to it.

But hopefully, a rather quieter weekend is the sign that the fledglings have all fledged or perished in the attempt.

Before I sign off, Boudi wishes me, in the interests of balance, to point out that, a year or so after the robin affair, she actually caught three mice in the flat, over the course of a week or so, and left each one dead, but still in one piece, on the doormat so that, when we got home, we would be sure to find them.

The feline hunting instinct isn’t always a negative thing to be tempered as much as possible.

A purple patch

The return to London and everyday life was softened – not inconsiderably – by the improving weather. Or perhaps more accurately, by what a week of improved weather had done to the garden.

Bright red tulips were in flower, along with gloriously rich purple ones, a purple chive-like flower whose name I cannot recall, purple cape daisies and a mass of cornflower blue anenomes.

It's a veritable purple patch.

The mint, which I had moved away from the most direct sunlight, is looking better than it ever has, and the sorrel has begun producing its first new leaves, bright, fresh green with a red vein, while the curly parsley is looking healthier than ever.

Within a few days, the first nasturtiums, which I’d sown just before I went away, were popping their heads above ground.

The vine had been planted, like much else, just a year ago in March (in a heatwave, for goodness sake), but had entered winter looking brittle and dried and dead.

However, last year provided learning exercises in the extraordinary power of plants to revive, and so it has now produced a reminder, with the vine now having some 14 buds, with the ones nearest the top starting to open as the sun makes regular appearances.

The pyracantha has produced delicate new leaves and the first signs of its tiny flowers, while the rose, so sternly pruned back once again, is almost unimaginably suddenly a mass of glossy green, and the oh-so-delicate pink petals of the first clematis buds are just beginning to open.

In the grow house, the two remaining pea plants from the earlier 'boiling' debacle have come on in leaps and bounds and have spent the last week being hardened off. A third one, which I sowed just before my trip, has sprouted, along with three runner beans. And three broad beans are on just visible in their pots.

The rest of the grow house story is a mixed one.

Runner beans.

I may well have to give up on growing tomatoes, strawberries and chillies from seed this year – the erratic weather has done my embryonic knowledge no favours.

But out at the potager, the turnips and the most recent sowing of carrots have finally germinated, while peas that had taken six weeks to even pop their heads above ground are now making steady progress, and two broad beans had emerged too.

And under a canopy of gorgeous pink blossom, the blackcurrant bush is in lush leaf and busy producing buds.

So the weekend demanded that I get outside and do some gardening.

First was weeding – I mention this again simply because it’s worth reiterating that you can do it without pain and without chemicals. One Dutch hoe, the potager and around 15 minutes. All done – no backache. Two weeks of sudden spring growth sorted.

But this subject means it's also worth mentioning what happened yesterday, when the EU acted to ban neonicotinoid pesticides.

A massive step forward, but also one with dangers, given that manufacturers will look to create alternatives – and users may restart using older products that are hardly less 'green'.

Another point worth noting is that the UK government voted against any such ban – its prime constituency remains big business, and big business is not happy at this.

A comment I saw on a forum yesterday observed that, at some point, scientists may be able to create all our food without pollination. But I wonder: why would you want to? Why would that ever be a good thing?

Anyway, I remain a chemical-free gardener – and trust me, I'm not the most energetic. So if I can do it ...

You get the gist, I hope.

The next most urgent task was to sow out the oldest two pea plants from the grow house into the potager and add further copper rings to protect them.

I’d already erected the basic wigwam for the peas and put a bottom row of string around it. By yesterday, the largest of the transplanted peas had wound its first tendrils around the string.

The thing with the copper, as I understand it at present, is that you have to ensure they’re firmly in the ground – I’ve pressed soil against them both on the inside and out – so that nothing can get underneath, and that no plant flops over or debris provides a bridge across it.

Boudi thinks about chasing Basil.

But like so many things, if you check regularly, it’s a matter of moments. And in the battle against slugs and snails, it’s the best basic tactic – so I’m told.

Much remains to be done – and some new planning is in order as I work out what to do with the dead and dying bulbs, and what I actually want to plant on the patio for this summer.

The lemon tree needs some bedding plants around it quickly, to give some protection to the bare soil that loses moisture so rapidly.

It’s recovering now from the long months under a fleece, but given it’s position right against a wall, it probably didn’t get enough moisture during that time – something that I hadn’t fully appreciated and that needs to be remembered for next winter.

Beyond the garden – and the carpark – trees seem to springing suddenly to life; green is everywhere, and people are flooding out of their workplaces during the day to sit outside. The relief is obvious and widespread.

The cats are all pleased too – Boudi is managing almost daily patio rolls on the warmed concrete every time that I let them out.

She's also enjoying being able to see of Basil and Reggie – the carpark's two 'visitor' moggies – and, in general, behaving not remotely like a cat who is on the cusp of 'senior' status.

Otto and Loki are also revelling in being able to re-explore the spots they discovered last year.

So here’s hoping that we get enough of both a (late) spring and a summer to build us all back up after such a dismal start to the year. We all really need it – cats and plants included.

Christmas is for cats

Loki (top) and Otto, with shiny paper and a few balls.

‘Christmas is really for the children,’ or so many people claim.

In which case, do cats count too?

It’s certainly been an eventful festive season for our little pride, starting when Loki got herself lost.

She’d successfully chased the considerably larger Reggie out of the carpark behind our flat, and was rather obviously feeling chuffed with herself.

But by the time I’d returned from the shops, The Other Half was back inside, the door was still open, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Cue much calling and rattling of food tins. No sign.

After about half an hour of hunting – and increasing panic – The Other Half went upstairs on a communal staircase and opened a window to peer out from above.

Next door to our small block is an old pub that’s been converted into flats. He thought he spotted her on the metal stairs leading to the upper floors.

He sped out one way and I went the other, food tin and fork in hand.

There she was, underneath the metal stairs, hiding in a corner, bravado gone, now just thoroughly frightened.

Eventually he coaxed her out and through the gate, picking her up and pushing her back into the carpark, where she ran past me as I beat a tattoo on the tin and called her.

Past me, indeed, into the garden, straight into the flat and absolutely straight to the food bowl, where she started to gobble food.

“She’s going to bring that all back up,” I mused to The Other Half a few minutes later, as she continued to empty the bowl. But remarkably, she didn’t. Presumably, being frightened and lost gets the appetite going.

She’d also managed to get mud all over her paws and belly, so we toweled as much off as possible. I was wondering if we’d have to experience the joys of bathing a cat, but fortunately she completed the job excellently all by herself.

And then it was a case of flopping next to The Other Half on the sofa and not moving for the rest of the day. And the day after that.

But Christmas Day brought with it reasons to be active again.

The cats have had a few balls to play with for some time – light, ping pong balls are perfect. But they lose them rapidly beneath the furniture and then demand we get them out again.

Solution? A Christmas present of a bag of 150 orange ping pong balls.

Which we emptied onto the wooden floor all at once, to enormous feline confusion. Confusion, however, that was followed by gleeful play.

Boudicca isn’t entirely convinced, but The Kittens – who arrived at Christmas three years ago, so aren’t really kittens any more – love them.

It’s a sort of combination of dribbling skills and pinball. Although Otto has added a format to the game that’s entirely of her own making.

Having worked out that she can carry a ball around, she picks one up (using her front paws to lift it to her mouth) and then carries it to the mat inside the door to the garden.

Then she puts it down and waits until it either rolls away, before she charges after it, or until she decides to bat it away, and then charge after it.

But then, after a while of pinging it around, it will be brought back to the mat to start again. In the last week or so, the mat has changed to a piece of shiny wrapping paper, which is near the mat.

Wrapping paper is obviously another seasonal pleasure, to be dived on (this year’s new wooden floor means you can pretty much surf on it), torn at – and made into little tents to hide in.

Not that this is Otto’s only version of a formalised game.

Having realised, last Christmas, that she particularly loves ribbon, I bought a spool so we can cut lengths off for play.

And the ribbons ended up on the bed, which has a blanket box at the end of it.

The game, as it has evolved, means that when I’m sitting in bed with a book, Otto will sit on the blanket box and wait.

I’m supposed to take the longest piece of red ribbon and flick it towards her and then draw it slowly up the bed.

Sometimes she pounces quickly – sometimes she waits. And waits.

But she always returns to the blanket box to start the next round.

Cats have habits – they’ll patrol exactly the same area in exactly the same way, for instance – but neither The Other Half nor I have ever seen anything quite like this. It’s fascinating.

Mind, she will also sit and watch television (or a computer) for longer than any cat I’ve known either.

Boudi continues to be the household’s big clumsy girl. Presumably because she was so young when we got her (six and a half weeks) and because she moved into a household with two elderly cats, her social skills are not what they might be.

She gets her verbal signals all confused, growling and hissing when she’s actually playing. It still bemuses The Kittens, although they generally seem to regard her behaviour in a sort of ‘oh, it’s just Boudi’ way. They’d probably shrug if they could.

Mind, that’s when they’re not teasing her – karma, Boudi, given how you baited Trickie when you were a tiny thing?

Trickie, our Battersea rescue cat, who had spent most of her life with an elderly man who clearly liked a very hot home; who thought that she wasn’t a cat, but a small, elderly and rather genteel lady in a fur coat.

Trickie, who was nearly about to set records for the longest stay at the home; who beat her ‘cabin’ door when she saw us coming, drooled over the top of it at us, and faked the cat test, which is supposed to reveal whether a cat can get along with other cats.

Trickie, who was so grateful to be rescued from Stalag Luft Battersea, and who was then twice attacked in our garden by some hulking stranger cat, who was chased off by Boudi, paws a-whir as she hurtled after it, claws glistening in the morning light.

All of them leave you with stories and memories.

Not that our anthropological observations this last couple of weeks have been limited to the cats.

When we finally managed to get out for a walk yesterday, we discovered that squirrels make nests. Okay, I knew that they nested in hollow bits of trees, but had never realised that they actually make nests in the branches too.

We were in the park and there were squirrels everywhere – including the fattest one either of us have ever seen; sitting beneath a tree and munching its way through a whole pile of nuts, beady eye keeping a watch on anyone who got too close.

But not far away, there were squirrels running up and down the naked trees, carrying leaves to a big nest.

Since there was another rather large squirrel watching, we surmised that there’s a spot of Sciuridae pregnancy in the air.

And with a scattering of pink blossom on a tree further on, and crocuses already well on the way in our own little garden, it would seem that the seasons are well and truly in chaos.

No wonder it hasn’t felt much like Christmas anywhere but completely hidden away from the outside world.

Apocalypse not

So, what did you do with your last day alive? What do you mean, you didn’t believe that the world would end today?

Whatever was going to happen or not, one thing was certain: today was my first day of the holiday at home, so time was going to be spent in the kitchen.

I'm working on a rather special dessert for Christmas Day and, fortunately, it can be done in stages.

Actually, this Christmas will, as previously, be a four-course meal. But to be honest, I think that doing the big festive dinner this way is easier that doing a big roast bird with all the trimmings.

Doing a traditional roast beef dinner, for instance, sends me crazy – not because any single element is difficult, but because timing everything, all at the same time, is.

And the more I learn, the more I realise that if I plan carefully for a meal like the one I have planned, lots can be done beforehand, leaving me with comparatively little serious cooking to do on the day itself.

So today saw a second attempt at one of the main components of dessert – there are more to come – which has already involved trying new techniques such as making Italian meringue.

Oh, how wonderful an invention is the thermometer!

The final shopping lists have now been written and the post office visited to collect a cake board and sugar decorations for tomorrow’s major project. Prep will continue until Monday evening.

But we still had to eat today and, with a bag of beef mince needing to be used, I decided to baptise my new tagine.

After all, it was only given to me a fortnight ago, so it would be churlish not to use it before all life came to an end.

So, approximately 400g of mince was mixed with four cloves of crushed garlic and some leftover roasted spices that I had from a week or so ago, before being rolled into neat meatballs.

Then, it was back westward, with a mirepoix of finely diced red onion, carrot and celery.

When all the prep was complete, and while the oven was warming to 160˚C (fan), a large sauté pan with a drizzle of olive oil was heating on the hob.

The meatballs were browned first and, after being removed to a plate, were followed into the shimmering oil by the vegetables.

After softening, they were joined by half of my last chilli from this year's harvest, a pinch of sugar, a nip of salt and a generous squeeze of tomato purée.

A dessertspoon of plain flour followed, before a healthy glug of red wine deglazed the pan – and maintained the sense of west meeting east. A little defrosted chicken stock went in too, plus several grinds of black pepper, before it was all decanted into the tagine, the meatballs added, the lid popped on and the whole carefully placed in the oven.

Discovery: it's not easy to lift a tagine lid while wearing big rubber oven gloves.

However, after 40 minutes, it came out and was tested for seasoning. Result – a little more salt added, plus, in a burst of inspiration, a dessertspoon of a honey fig jam I'd picked up on this morning in La Bouche.

And back into the oven for a further 40 minutes, before some basmati rice was set simmering, perfuming the kitchen delightfully.

That wasn’t bad for a last meal.

The mood must have been catching, since Loki chose today to go further than any of our cats has ever gone.

After deciding – all short hair raised in a stripe, from the top of her head to her tail, like a feline Mohican – to chase the considerably larger Reggie from the carpark, she had thought it wise to venture beyond the carpark gates.

It was a while before we realised – on my return from errands – that she was nowhere to be seen. And still longer before The Other Half detected her, hiding in fear under the metal stairs at the converted pub next door.

Once home, she ate as though she’d been starved for days, before we got hold of her and wiped off the worst of the mud she’d been up to her belly in somewhere.

Then she spent the next hour cleaning herself immaculately, before suddenly deciding that she was actually rather traumatised and wasn’t going to shift from beside The Other Half for the foreseeable future.

What an adventure!

But before we laugh easily at those who apparently actually believed that the Mayans had correctly predicted the end of the world as we know it – and knew where France was and where Bugarach in France was – something does occur to me.

Perhaps we might wish to remember, not least at this time of year, that many people still genuinely believe that a god came down from heaven and impregnated a woman – without even a hint of any coitus non-interruptus – and that the offspring was also that same god himself.

And then he later was executed for political crimes – although since his dad (who is also himself) knows everything, sees everything and is all-powerful, this means that his father planned his own/own son’s death.

But it was okay, because the father/son then rose from the dead and returned to heaven, along with their mate, the holy spirit.

And for some, if you eat a bit of bread and drink a sip of wine in the right setting, it will quite literally be a bit of his/their actual body and his/their actual blood – a wow of a cannibalistic idea.

Y’know, I think I was right to spend the last day – hic! – doing something constructive like cooking.

And anyway: Santa is coming and I have to make him a mince pie.