First memories of France

Memory is extraordinary – the least obvious thing can trigger something unexpected and long forgotten, with a clarity that seems to concertina time itself.

Thus it happened this morning.

It was a chilly, grey start to the day. At around 9pm, I was wondering what on Earth to have for breakfast.

Breakfast is my least easy meal of the day – particularly when I’m at home. I rarely actually feel hungry first thing and whereas by the time I get into the office if I’m working there, I’m ready to go up to the deli and find something, at home I have to force myself to eat before 10am – or it’ll be almost lunchtime and I still won’t have broken my fast.

So there I was, on this chilly, grey morning, wondering what caught my imagination. I felt in need of something warm – and something meaty. I don’t eat meat every day by a long chalk, but sometimes the body wants a particular foodstuff and you have to listen.

I’ve got plain pork sausages in, but they’re for tonight. Rooting around in various cupboards, the answer eventually presented itself. On a pre-Christmas shopping trip to Lille last December, I’d bought an outrageously cheap stack of small tins of terrine and paté. Fourteen for – if memory serves – around €24. So I fished around, making the effort to read the French labels, and pulled out a pork liver and Armagnac one, put some bread under the grill to toast, and then enjoyed a really rather indulgent and luxurious repast.

And so my mind turned to that Lille trip – and then to my very first visit to France, in early 1983 – probably almost exactly 26 years ago.

That was a grey and chilly day too.

I was at college in Leicester and a friend had decided to take a day trip to Dieppe. Since she lived in Milton Keynes, we drove there the night before, then set off for the port at Newhaven early the next day. This was in the times when you could take a couple of photo booth snaps with you and get a temporary passport at the point of departure. No planning required.

It was a four-hour ferry trip. I stood on deck, po-faced and ridiculously serious, staring back at the fading coast of Albion with something approaching melancholy, as though I were a scouting party for my little-Englander family; the first one to depart this green and sceptred isle and unlikely ever to return.

I even remember what I was wearing. After a nasty back injury had left me with a lot of back pain (it eventually saw me chucked off the course), I’d bought an old British Army battlejacket – the sort of heavy top with a thick belt at just the right level to support my aching lumber region. I had that on and sported a rather large grey cord cap with it.

If anything could ever illustrate my extreme gaucheness at being abroad for the first time, it was perhaps my amazement to find that Dieppe was, well … so French. For some reason or other, it didn’t seem to have occurred to me that there really would be picturebook narrow streets with their narrow houses and long, painted shutters at the windows.

And the cobbled square, where a large church – St Jacques, I think – towered, a vast Gothic edifice, dark and brooding, and unlike anything I’d ever seen outside of films and books. If it was chilly outside, icy fingers seemed to caress me as I entered the gloom, my mind playing images of the Maid of Orleans.

There were a few stalls outside the church. I remember the pungent smell of cheese, which seemed so much stronger then than it now, to my more experienced nose. And then the bakeries, with the aroma of fresh-basked bread wafting invitingly out into the street.

I found a little post office and bought a couple of postcards. The elderly woman at the counter (and the queue behind me) waited with remarkable patience while I managed to dredge up enough pidgin French to ask for stamps. My change included a note with a picture of the composer Berlioz on it – since a shared birthday has enhanced somewhat my liking for old Hector, I still have that note somewhere.

When I met my friend again, ready to depart for home – it was just a few hours stop over – she realised that she’d left her camera in a shop. For some reason or other, I was sent back to get it, something achieved almost exclusively with mime, since my smattering of the lingo didn’t go remotely that far. And besides, I was a drama student.

I don’t remember anything about the journey back, except that I watched a few minutes of a grotty X-rated old horror movie on the ferry.

But I’d done it. I’d been to furrin land. And had returned.

Memory, as I said, is extraordinary.

And I went home without the slightest inkling that, over 20 years later, I’d return and find all those things that had astonished me in Dieppe to be amongst the things that made me fall in love with France.

Paying for the sins of the father

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero

It might seem an unlikely subject for a communist and atheist to tackle, but Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago's Gospel According to Jesus Christ is an extraordinary novel of great power and beauty.

He takes the traditional gospel stories of Jesus, and with a remarkably few twists, ensures that the story that is so familiar takes on a whole new meaning and freshness.

This is a Jesus who is tormented by guilt at having survived the massacre of the innocents; who suffers nightmares where his Earthly father, Joseph, comes to kill him. His relationships with his family – particularly after Joseph's heart-rending death – are far from easy. And his salvation, as a human being, comes through his love affair with Mary Magdalene.

But he is trapped by God's desire to win followers from the other gods. And when he demands to know what will happen as a result of his martyrdom, God (being omniscient) is able to recite a list of some of those who will be martyred after him, including his friends the disciples.

God acknowledges that there will be wars and the Crusades and the Inquisition – and much, much more misery as people try to keep themselves free from God's definition of sin.

But when the Devil offers to stop making mischief and become God's most dutiful and faithful follower, if only God will simply allow people to come to Him, thus avoiding the carnage and misery to come, God refuses.

He explains to His son that He cannot exist without the Devil – without sin, without guilt and without pain. And He certainly cannot build an even bigger empire of followers without these things.

Saramago's God is based soundly on the Bible and his point, ultimately, is that the god of Judeo-Christian tradition is cruel, selfish and power-crazy. Jesus does not die for our sins – he dies for the sins of the father, the sins of God.

Because God, if He is truly God, could do things differently – God does not have to make people suffer. But he chooses to do so, having created sin and guilt in the first place.

The author doesn't challenge the idea of the existence of a god: what he does is to examine the nature of the god of the dominant religious tradition in Western culture. And the result is not a nice or comforting or loving portrait.

Saramago's Jesus, however, is a compassionate and humane man, but flawed and troubled too.

Like Jesus and many others, Judus Iscariot is simply a pawn in God's hands. There are no choices – the choices have been made for them.

And if that is the case, then there are no choices for the Devil either – he is simply another of the pieces on God's chessboard, as he plays with the toys that He has created.

The novel has been controversial. Published in 1991, the Portuguese ministry of culture blocked its inclusion on a European literary prize list after it offended some Christians.

Seeing that as an act of censorship, Saramago packed his bags and went to live in Spain.

The prose is not easy to read. Saramago doesn't bother with much conventional punctuation – there are no speech marks, and speeches are run on, one after another, on the same line. So concentration is essential. But there is a beauty and a sense of the poetic to this novel. And that, combined with the story itself, makes it an unforgettable read: challenging, humane and very moving indeed.

Dressing down the sartorial naysayers

The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant (published by Virago)

Novelist Linda Grant doesn’t claim to be a stylist or even a fashion buff. What she enjoys, she explains, are good clothes. And shoes. And handbags.

So what she has set out to do in her new book is to explore why clothes are important – and why making an effort to think about how we dress is not wasted time.

This accessible – and in places very, very funny – book is not what you’d call a work of scholarly rigour, but Grant still manages to get across a number of messages with enjoyable ease.

She illustrates, with just a cursory look at the distant past, how humans have always cared about how they look – about how they present themselves, from the earliest adornments and tattoos. Which, as she points out, makes a nonsense of the view that fashion is only a product of capitalism and consumerism, and that shallow women are just manipulated into contemplating matters sartorial.

She also illustrates the inherent misogyny in the view that thinking or talking about clothes is an indicator of vapidity. Men base so many of their responses to women on how women look, and criticise them if they don’t look ‘good’, but also criticise the time they spend achieving that look.

As Grant points out, we have to wear clothes: a man begging on the street might have plenty of people pass by and ignore him. But if he’s naked, the police will turn up pretty quickly and take him away. Clothes, in our society, are not an option. It might sound howlingly obvious, but if that’s the case, why do some people consider it to be an indicator of a weak mind – or a capitalist plot – when people enjoy thinking about clothes, shopping and dressing?

Why, for instance, is shopping derided more than, say, watching football or playing dangerous sports or playing shoot-em-ups on a computer – or any other predominantly male form of pleasure?

Grant rails against clothing being limited to the strictly utilitarian, and peppers the book with anecdotes about her own mother – the daughter of immigrants – who understood the way clothing could be used to help fit in. And there is a series of interviews with Canadian style doyen Catherine Hill, an Auschwitz survivor whose teenage life was possibly saved by a moment of old-fashioned, female vanity.

The point that, in the 19th century, department stores were a new and liberating place for women, where they could go unchaperoned, is made too (see Zola's The Ladies' Paradise). And how new designs (by designers, thus stressing the importance of designers) for shoes and dresses also helped in the process of liberating women (from corsets etc).

We read how Coco Chanel created the timeless little black dress as long ago as 1926, and how, in the aftermath of WWII, women swooned for Christian Dior’s beautiful New Look.

Grant is quite clear that fashion – in terms of the catwalks etc – is not ‘real’ clothing, but a form of art, and every bit as valid as a painting or a piece of music. However, she also believes that our innate desire to look aesthetically good – to be attractive – is “irrational”.

But that begs the question of whether art in general is irrational – indeed, whether it’s irrational to consider aesthetics in anything that could be strictly utilitarian (architecture, for instance). And unless you think it is, then it’s difficult to conclude that clothing should adhere to a different ethos.

Grant ends with the story of a single red, high-heeled, patent shoe that she spotted on the top of a display of shoes at Auschwitz, where they’d been stolen from owners who were mostly destined for the gas chamber.

She dares us to denigrate the unknown victim of the Holocaust who had worn or carried with her on that final journey, shoes that she loved.

And she leaves us with a challenge – to live and to make the most of it. Including in the enjoyment of what we wear.

This feels a little like Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion: as he was eventually provoked by fundamentalists into writing, so Grant has been poked with a stick by those (including women) who pour derision on others for taking care over what they wear.

And while it doesn’t have quite the force of Dawkins’s work, it’s an enjoyable, interesting and welcome rebuttal to a particular attitude and critique.

The joy of chocolate

There can be distinct advantages to being stuck in the house all day.

Here I am, still ‘guarding’ the flat, spending a second week working at home.

So the question arises: what does one do with one’s lunch hour?

Well, I had just the thing in mind. Some of Saturday’s sweet, vanilla-flavoured shortcrust pastry was still in the fridge, so it was the business of mere minutes to roll it out and line the tart tin while the oven was heating. Greaseproof paper and baking beans inside, and it was ready to go.

Next, halving the measures in yet another Gordon Ramsay recipe, take 200g of good quality chocolate (about 70% cocoa solids) and break it into a bowl. Heat 125ml of double cream with 75% water, until just reaching the boil, then pour onto the chocolate and whisk until it’s all blended.

The pastry case has had its basic cooking by now, so you take it out, remove the greaseproof paper and beans, and give it another five minutes on a slightly lower heat. Then give it another three minutes after brushing the pastry all over with a glaze of beaten egg yolk and water. Take out and set on one side.

Take a beaten whole egg and add it to the chocolate mix. Whisk in. Then very carefully pour the chocolate ganache through a fine sieve and into the tart case. Slide out an oven shelf and pop the baking tray and tin on to it. Top up the chocolate mixture.

Cook for 25 minutes, then turn off the oven and leave it for another half an hour. Remove and leave to cool. Then chill. Just before serving, dust with sifted icing sugar and cocoa powder.

Now that is the way to spend a lunch hour – and I assure you, it is absolutely divine!

A Sunday in the kitchen

It’s Sunday, it’s the morning and I’m on my own for the day so, as Mr Gershwin might ask: what to do, what to do what to do?

It seems amazing that, even though I’m conscious of it now, I still get twinges of guilt if I’m not ‘doing things’ all the time – even when I have a day off work.

Cooking fulfils the need to ‘do things’ – and gives me an increasing amount of pleasure, so I don’t have to give myself excuses for spending time in such a fashion.

So what to cook today?

I have decided to try my hand at a different sort of bread – a date and pecan loaf. To start with, this means dealing with a different type of flour – granary – and then adding the dried yeast differently too; not by mixing it first with liquid, but by putting straight into the flour and salt, and then adding warmed milk and water.

Even after adding all of the specified liquid (and I am an Überpedant when it comes to measuring ingredients during baking), it’s not coming together completely. Fortunately, I’ve seen enough cookery programmes and read enough books to know not to panic and to simply add a little more warmed water.

Knead for about 10 minutes (at which point I realise the error of not removing my baggy, comfortable old sweatshirt first), until it’s a pleasingly elastic dough, then pop into a lightly oiled bowl, cover with cling film and stick into the airing cupboard.

An hour, and a few essential but boring chores later, the dough is ready to be knocked back and have the fruit and nuts added.

Eh? It’s like trying to cram a quart into a pint pot. At least, for such a seemingly impossible task, I’ve removed my sweatshirt first, and am standing in the kitchen with arms bared and just a t-shirt between me and the dough. It’s an elemental struggle!

I get as much in as I feel is possible, then kneed again for another couple of minutes before it’s rolled it into a ball, plopped it on a baking tray, covered in a clean tea towel and returned to the warm shelf above the boiler.

It might not be very Francophile, but Oasis makes a great driving accompaniment for such endeavour.

Amazingy, it’s almost 3pm when the second proofing is complete. Time flies when you’re having fun. A quick brush with water, a generous dusting with more of the granary flour, and it can go into the pre-heated oven.

Now, for the first time in what seems to have been a frenetic weekend, I’m going to go and sit down and have a read.

Some time later, the bread is cooked. But for all the magnificent aroma, you can’t eat it yet. Oh no, you have to wait to let it cool at least a bit. It’s a form of torture. And in today’s specific case, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as mad for a slice of ‘mere’ bread.

Thus comes the ‘Oh My God’ moment. Still warm, so the butter starts to melt invitingly. So sweet from the dates. Gorgeous. That’s three slices gone already.

More reading. And then: good grief! Where has the time gone?

It’s almost 6pm, but still light, since this is the first day of British Summer Time. It catches you out.

So to dinner. I’m continuing yesterday’s Gordon Ramsay mood, but this time with a dish from A Passion for Flavour: roasted salmon with a sweet and sour red pepper sauce.

To start with, that means softening very finely chopped red pepper and shallot in butter, together with some herbs. Now, partly because this dish is only for one person and not the four that the recipe is designed for, I’m adapting a bit. That and not having all the recommended ingredients.

I haven’t got any Noilly Prat, which chefs seem to love. Vermouth is the next best thing and there’s always some in the cupboard for risotto.

One of the herbs that I don’t have is tarragon, but since I have a French tarragon white wine vinegar, that can easily substitute for the plain white wine vinegar in the book. And one pepper (a red one) will to do instead of two red and two yellow. And today – what a crime! – it’ll be veg stock out of a bottle and not a proper, homemade vegetable nage. So there, Gordon! But thanks for the recipe anyway.

Ramsay has been on telly a couple of times in the last week, with new episodes of the US version of Kitchen Nightmares.

One can’t help but wonder why, if restaurant owners contact the production company to ask them to send in the gobby Glaswegian genius because help is required, so many of them are then so reluctant to take the advice that is dished out?

The pepper sauce has had the vermouth, the tarragon white wine vinegar and the stock added, been simmered for 20 minutes and then had the herbs removed.

Rice is now on and the oven heating for the salmon. For a Ramsay concoction, this seems really easy. All the sauce needs to finish it is a little more butter whisked in. The fish gets 10 minutes in the oven – nothing more required except to sit down and eat, with a glass of red wine and some Dean Martin on the deck.

Perhaps this is one of the most indulgent things that you can ever do – cook really good food just for yourself?

And on that note – cheers!

The curse of the tangy tart

It was June 2003 when I made my first effort to cook a tarte au citron, a night that I doubt I'll ever forget – but for all the wrong reasons, and none of which had anything to do with my cooking.

Just after the tart had gone in the oven, I discovered that one of our cats was seriously ill. It was a Saturday and we'd never had Mabel and her brother registered with a vet. I hit the phone while The Other Half tried to comfort her. Once we found her, half under the bed and unable to move, she started crying. Mack, her brother, stayed out of the way, behind a chair in the living room.

It took hours to find a vet that was open that night – and then a taxi that would take us and a cat. By the time the cab arrived, she'd died.

Needless to say, the tart was ruined – even if we'd felt remotely like eating anything. And I haven't attempted to make any such thing again – until today.

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision really, inspired by my standard Saturday morning browse through some cookery books. In this case, an orange and lemon tart from Gordon Ramsay's A Chef for all Seasons. I appreciate that Ramsey isn't everyone's cup of the proverbial, but I've learnt a lot from his books. They are, I suggest, about real, classic, French-based cooking, which can teach you a huge amount about the basics – why reductions work, for instance.

And so early this afternoon, I started on the pastry. It was hardly what I'd describe as an easy task, beating sugar and butter together for the start of the sweet shortcrust pastry. You can develop muscles doing this sort of thing. A vanilla pod was then split and the seeds scraped into the mix, followed by egg and flour.

I'd just got it wrapped in cling film and into the fridge to rest when the curse of the tangy tart hit again. The Other Half's computer decided to have a hissy fit and cease working. Apple were helpful, but he couldn't get an appointment at the Apple Store to see if it's fixable until Tuesday.

I had an Oscar Wilde moment: 'To lose one computer may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two computers in just over a week looks like carelessness.'

Given that I have been sans computer since the St Patrick's Day burglary, The Other Half's set up was essential. Indeed, it had allowed me to work from home over the last week, thus ensuring that the fort was always guarded. With no working computer, we'd both have to go into the office next week – and the new security measures aren't due for another seven days.

Or I could take a couple of days off work altogether – and, since I'm freelance, lose money.

Or I could bolt into the West End and replace my own computer straight away.

It wasn't much of a choice. So, I have a Mac again – and a sexy beast it is too.

But back to the tart. Fortunately, although the pastry had been rested for rather longer than planned, it still rolled out easily enough. It wasn't perfect, as I realised after the blind baking. I hadn't kneaded it enough to get all the air out of it, so there were a few little bubbles in the base. But it wasn't too drastic.

The filling saw orange and lemon juice reduced considerably, then cooled. In the meantime, grated zest from a lemon and an orange was added to caster sugar, egg yolks and cream, and poured into the pastry case.

It was baked at a low temperature for around 45 minutes, then left in the switched-off oven for another hour to set, before being dusted with sifted icing sugar and caramelised with a blowtorch – not once, but twice. While it was baking, I made a stock syrup and a confit of orange and lemon to serve with it.

After all that, it was delicious.

And hopefully, that's the end of the curse of the tangy tart.

A spot of poetic justice

Families are funny. They try so very hard to inculcate you with all their own beliefs – and prejudices. It’s downright Jesuitical: ‘Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man’, which itself is based on a quotation by one Francis Xavier, a Spanish missionary.

As Oscar Hammerstein II so eloquently put it in South Pacific:

“You've got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate everybody your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.”

My parents had plenty of prejudices to impart. Well, particularly my father, whose personal repertoire included pretty much any group that he could think of from outside England (plus a few inside), with suitably deprecating (if unimaginative) terms for all of them. Never let it be said that he allowed his vocation as a clergyman to interfere with those prejudices. Rather, as he explained to me once about matters political, one had to take into account ‘real life’. His faith could never be allowed to permeate all areas of his existence – just those that he decided were convenient.

He also, of course, has spent years protesting that he didn’t really mean the things he said – that when actually meeting people from foreign climes (or homosexuals), he had no difficulties. That, however, has long felt like rather tawdry pleading.

But he reserved a special hatred for Germans. He’d stood on a hill near the Cornish backwater in which he grew up and watched the fires of the Blitz over his beloved Plymouth. He carried the detestation for many, many years afterwards.

When he retired in 2000, his parishioners gave him and my mother a 10-day holiday to southern Germany, with tickets for the millennium staging of the passion play at Oberammergau thrown in for good measure. He went into panic – partly at the thought of flying, but primarily because it was in Germany. Yes, I had to hear the old stuff about the war all over again and how he didn’t really want to go.

I suppose that, once you believe in the ‘sins of the fathers’, you can go on blaming people for something that they personally had no involvement in – whilst conveniently having a burst of forgetfulness over the ‘sins’ of one’s own ‘fathers’. That is how it seems to work.

In the event, they enjoyed themselves. And even, in succeeding years, returned to that general area of the world.

But his detestation had a peculiar impact on me.

Some of my first clear memories of football are of him screaming abusively at the television as England faced West (as it was then) Germany in the 1966 World Cup final (one of my first memories), and then again in the 1970 tournament. It reduced me, a young child, to tears – not least, I assume, of fear. My mother would tell him off, but to little avail.

He still rants and raves, but his powers have waned to nothing, and any aura of authority that once he had has evaporated. I watch him now and see that he is small and that he knows that his time has passed; that I have grown beyond his control and that I harbour – how shall I put this delicately – ambiguous feelings toward him.

But, perhaps strangely, his bellicosity did nothing to dissuade me from developing a personal passion for football.

And over the years, whilst I wouldn’t dare say anything, I’d watch such matches, in his presence, and silently hope that the Krauts, the Bosch, the Hun would win. I had learned to take pleasure in his bilious disappointment. Schadenfreude. How delightfully German.

In the 1970s, I took music as one of my study options at school. That in turn introduced me to Beethoven – and Haydn and Schubert and Bach and … Well, you get the gist. The music that I loved was German.

Then there was history. It was a compulsory subject, but I found it, for the most part, pretty dull. Corn Laws aren’t really very sexy. A solitary area of our two-year ‘O’ level course interested me, actually claimed my imagination: Bismarck and German unification. Goodness knows why, but it did.

Fast forward over 20 years. I was working at the Guardian, subbing an article from the paper’s German correspondent about Prussia, Potsdam and the Lange Kerls, Friedrich Wilhelm I’s 17th-century regiment of extraordinarily tall soldiers. A different period perhaps, but it reminded me of that interest in 19th-century Prussia. I went out the next day and bought a history book.

A few more such volumes have been added since. Indeed, it’s now become one of my tests of how good a bookshop is to check the history shelves and see if German history covers anything other than the years 1933-1945. Most shops fail, not least because the British (primarily the English, I think it's fair to say) remain obsessed with that period – probably because it’s the last real time we were really important on the global stage, and for once we actually managed to be unambiguously on the side of the angels.

My history reading has expanded, all the way back to the Thirty Years War and into the early 20th century, but it remains an ongoing and developing passion. Explaining it to others, The Other Half has referred to me more than once as “a romantic Prussian”.

Then I discovered foreign-language films – and shortly thereafter, silent film. I’ve got quite a nice little collection of Weimar cinema now.

And literature, of course.

Shortly before that Guardian experience, I’d been working for a company where I’d met a German colleague. Old prejudices go far deeper than we sometimes realise. I remember being astonished to discover that he had a sense of humour. Deep down, and never challenged by actually meeting any Germans until then, I had retained an unquestioning faith in the idea of the humourless Teuton.

He became my closest friend and, upon being asked, offered up various suggestions for reading. Indeed, he introduced me to Thomas Mann – although without realising quite the impact that that would have on me.

We were travelling across London one day to go shopping at a specialist Spanish deli near Notting Hill Gate, sitting atop an old Routemaster bus, when I happened to mention that I’d got a colleague called Brunhilde (amazingly, I’ve met a number of Germans since I first met him). He asked if I knew anything about the name. I didn’t. So he told me the story of Brunhilde and Siegfried and Kriemhild.

I was in my late thirties, yet nobody – absolutely nobody – had ever sat down and related a story to me like that. When he reached the climax, as Kriemhild orders the burning of the hall with all the Burgundians in it, I was utterly shattered. It was the moment at which I finally understood that the UK's soppy excuse for romanticism is not what romanticism really means.

There’s a word in the Concise Oxford Dictionary for the sum of all this (as you might fairly expect): ‘Germanophile’.

It reached an apotheosis when, a couple of years ago, I started digging around for information about my family background. Neither of my parents knows much or cares enough, it seems, to set down a family tree of even the most casual sort.

My Cornish father (with Devonian blood) is a Celt (his red hair darkened before I was born), whose only interest in his ancestors is pride in the knowledge that one was hung as a smuggler. How very Cornish.

On the other side, her mother's mother’s maiden name was ‘Ingham’. With no other information to go on and a complete lack of parental interest, I started trying to find out the origin of this unusual name.

Some time after, I discovered that it meant ‘Ing’s hold’, which didn’t leave me feeling much better informed.

It took an age (I wasn’t very good at this sort of research) to discover that ‘hold’ was ‘home’, and then that ‘Ing’ was one of a number of old Germanic names for the goddess Freya. (It’s also an old English dialect word for a water meadow, but ‘water meadow’s home’ doesn’t really make a lot of sense)

Now I’m guessing here, but it suggests to me that one strand of the family comes down from the Saxon period. It’s probably only a few drops by now, diluted many times over, but I can probably claim a bit of Germanic blood.

What I cannot do is convey to you quite the level of my amusement at this discovery. Schadenfreude, anyone?

Tickled pink, I told my parents. Oh, the horror with which this information was greeted. It was like some form of divine retribution.

Like so many other inconvenient things in our family (my authorship of a collection of erotic short stories is another perfect example), it was quickly and quietly brushed under the proverbial carpet. But I know. And I know that they know. And that they know that I know that they know.

Your parents, as Philip Larkin so eloquently put it, may “fuck you up”. But it’s nothing by comparison with the revenge that you can, so sweetly and in oh so many ways, exact in later life.