Winter is coming ... to the beach

Every year, at around about this time, I take a number of books off shelves and stack them in a corner of the flat.

Then, over the following period, they are shuffled, increased one day and decreased the next, as I debate whether or not this is the right selection for holiday reading and whether there are enough books or too many.

Every year, I am told by people that I should get a Kindle. Every year, I explain that:

I do not actually like reading books on a tablet;

if I drop a book on a damp beach, the damage will never be greater than a single lost book;

I distrust The Cloud and continue to prefer to actually have my ‘stuff’ under my control and my control alone.

The first part of this usually occurs a month or so before a trip. This time around, it has been just a few days – which possibly suggests how welcome the trip itself is going to be.

And while there is therefore little adjustment time, the pile itself reveals a considerable jolt in my reading habits over the last eight months or so.

Back in ancient times – okay, the end of the 1970s and beginning of the following decade – I ‘discovered’ horror and fantasy fiction.

In the case of the former, it was largely Stephen King and, in the latter, Tolkien and, a few years later, Terry Pratchett.

I read Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant novels avidly, plus works by William Horwood.

But then, Sir Terry apart, I drifted away from fantasy because it all really rather seemed to be largely inferior Lord of the Rings. This is possibly the point at which to state that, for vaguely complicated reasons, in my mid-twenties I did a series of commissioned illustrations of places from Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit for a hotel owner in Torquay who just happened to be called Tolkien and was a nephew of JRR.

Unfortunately (or not – I don’t recall them being stunning, and they took me an age) I have no record of them. Hey ho.

Be mother to your own Funko Pop dragon

Late last year, it seemed the time to pick up LoTR once more. Reading the first part again, I found myself thinking that Frodo is still wet and irritating, but I also enjoyed the poetic stuff much more, including Tom Bombadil.

And I moved from that to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy – works I’d been promising myself I should read for some years.

Thus far, I’ve only read the first book, Titus Groan: I didn’t find it a quick read, but it is a stunning one, and it reawakened by interest in fantasy. Surely there had to be works out there that didn’t just slavishly echo Tolkien’s formula?

One of the first books I found was Neil Gaiman’s American Gods – a sure fire hit given my predilection for Norse mythology (I have also been reading more extensively than before this year).

Half a dozen of the Sandman graphic novels sit on my shelves and there is also Dark Omens, a copy of the novel he co-wrote with Sir Terry years ago, but I had not dipped into any of his own novels.

Sure enough, I loved American Gods. I love Gaiman’s version of Odin and all the other gods from around the world that he brings to life.

The Other Half read and enjoyed it too, so his Anansi Boys is going with us on holiday.

The discovery of the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks has opened up a wonderful variety of works, including Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, which is a slow burner, but draws you inexorably under its spell.

What is not a slow burner, however, is George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones – the first book in a series that seems to have spawned a little TV show.

Now I haven’t even watched a trailer for the TV version, but the first 800-page volume utterly gripped me.

This is masterful storytelling – not least given the number of threads that Martin develops at the same time and his ability to ensure that the reader never becomes confused or loses track of what’s going on and who is who.

... or your own direwolf

I still haven’t watched any of the TV version, but I am now aware of the look of it and the actors playing the main characters – and also some of the collectibles that are available. It is, as you may gather, my new favourite thing (just in time to be able to join in with all the comparisons between the stories and the state of British politics) .

The second book was the first thing into this year’s book pile – followed a short while later by the third – or to be strictly accurate, part one of the third instalment.

TH White’s The Once and Future King – his series of novels about King Arthur, including The Sword in the Stone – makes the pile: another that The Other Half is also likely to indulge in. I’ve spent years thinking that I should read some version of Arthurian legend and the time has come.

After a recommendation from a delightful Polish barista in a local coffee shop, I have just been reading – and thoroughly enjoying – The Last Wish, a collection of short stories featuring Geralt, the witcher of Rivia, by Andrzej Sapkowski.

Blood of Elves, the first full novel, is already waiting on the shelf, but that is for another time.

For a change of flavour, the holiday fantasy is joined by two Maigret novels and one collection of three modern Italian crime fiction novellas.

But I already know that, as we head south on Friday, it will be A Clash of Kings that will be the first tome to be opened. I can hardly wait.

There can never be too many books

And so it is that World Book Day is upon us again – and almost gone, at the time of writing.

In an era where, increasingly, digital seems to dominate, it’s wonderful to think about books.

Yes, yes: I know that books can be digital too, but, to me – and many millions more – there is nothing to beat the tactile joy of a real book. Indeed, for billions of people on this planet, the old-fashioned variety of bound paper is all that they can hope to have access to.

Do you remember the joy when, as a child, you managed to read a book on your own for the first time?

I cannot remember the title of the first book I managed like that, but I remember sitting in a small red and white straw child’s basket chair with it, and being so proud when I got to the last page.

Not that long after, I took enormous pleasure in Enid Blyton’s Well Really, Mr Twiddle, which had me hooting with hysterical laughter.

Many years later, I got pretty much the same sense of pride from reading an entire Asterix book in German. Books always offer potential for new moments of personal achievement.

At the beginning of my twenties, I suffered some sort of breakdown after being injured and then chucked out of polytechnic. For ages, I couldn’t read – even much-loved books could not hold my concentration beyond the first few pages.

What revived reading for me was Stephen King. I picked up Carrie in a local bookshop and couldn’t it down. Then The Stand and It, with many more to follow.

I ‘discovered’ Terry Pratchett before he was anywhere near national treasure status, standing in a small sci-fi and fantasy bookshop to meet him once when nobody else was even around.

The result is three very precious signed volumes of the earliest Discworld novels.

Books – among the very first things I’d unpack in my nomadic early adulthood: get those out and it would start to feel like home.

Books, which provide a wonderful pre-holiday ritual when considering what from my buckling shelves I wish to take.

Books, which bring with them knowledge and entertainment.

While the majority of the books that I have bought in recent years have been non-fiction, I still seek out good storytelling too.

Penguin are now releasing the entire Maigret collection, and with new translations that finally do Simenon’s noir novels justice. Those are on pre-order with me.

There are old friends that I have read many times already and will probably read many times more: Jan Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre (which I hated at school), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Stephen King’s The Shining (the movie was crap) and Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, all of which I find new things in every time I pick them up.

I have a few antiquarian (relish that word) books – some up to 200 years old. They are to be treasured and looked after: I feel only a temporary guardian.

And I also rather pride myself on having a collection of books about German history – no! Not that period! – that would, I suspect, count as pretty decent.

I still judge a bookshop on its history section: on whether it is just full of WWII and the Nazis or goes beyond that.

Of course, talking of the Nazis, it’s always worth remembering how they burnt books on Bebelplatz in Berlin in 1933 – right next to the Humboldt University. That symbolism should tell you something about the power of the written word. And today, of course, we have groups of religious fundamentalists who want to deny people – and women and girls in particular – the right to learn.

Whether in the deepest, darkest days or winter, curled up on the sofa with a good read and a hot chocolate or under a parasol on the beach in the height of summer, is there really anything that can compare to the pleasure that can be found in the pages of a good book?

So let’s celebrate books today – and those who create them and those who read them – but let’s never stop loving books for all the other days of the year.

And PS: make sure you love your local library too.

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.

Weather to warm up the pleasure muscle

A whisper of cloud in the blue and the sun warming the body, all the way to the bone. Bright pink blossom waving gently in the merest of breezes. It was a glorious weekend.

Not that the enjoyment in our neck of the woods was limited to me and The Other Half alone: the cats were thrilled to bits too. The kittens went scatty both mornings, as we sat outside with coffee, relishing the peacefulness.

Otto made several dashes up one fence into next door’s garden, which seems to be her Schleswig-Holstein. Loki too was full of wild-eyed mischief. Next time, I’m naming cats something like ‘Fluffy’. Boudicca, by and large, remained aloof.

I took the chance to sit out with them, finishing Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, which I’ve now read at least three times.

It’s a wonderful book – and one that reveals new things every time I pick it up.

This time, I was particularly aware of the idea of having to stop running from the past before you can move forward. Both Vianne and Reynaud are in this situation, as well as Josephine. The question – and it remains at the end – is whether any or all of them can do this.

As always, it makes me cry in a number of places – and yet this is a deeply life-affirming novel, and one that celebrates pleasure (including food) and life itself.

In ways that I had not seen before, it seemed much more personal than on previous readings, bringing to my own somewhat nomadic childhood and the impact that that (along with other things) influenced.

But lifting the theme of food from it, this was a chance to build on Thursday’s development of taste and looks.

Because I was running low on stock, Saturday was a day for roast chicken. The bird was stuffed and cooked as per the River Café East Two recipe I use (three hours on a low heat, then half an hour on high, with Vermouth added for the final stretch and butter massaged into the skin).

The weather was so utterly fabulous and summery that it was also the perfect time for a salad of courgette, sliced into thin ribbons and dressed with honey, lemon juice, olive oil, seasoning and tarragon leaves. It’s a lovely light and fragrant dish.

I also did Provençal tomatoes. These were big, beefy fruits, halved, de-seeded and dried out carefully, then sprinkled with a mixture of salt, pepper, nutmeg and sugar before being filled with a layer of finely chopped shallots and topped with masses of fresh, fragrant herbs and garlic, also finely chopped.

They go into a hot pan, skin side down, for two minutes, and then you throw in a slug of wine or stock or water. Turn the heat down, lid the pan and leave for 10 minutes.

Take a spoon and a palate knife and carefully turn them, keeping the shape and the filling in place as much as possible. Add a drop more liquid if required. Lid the pan again and cook for a further 10 minutes.

Now mine had rather collapsed on Saturday (hence the absence from the photo), but they’re still seriously tasty.

And as a garnish, I’d more aïoli and also some tapanade, which brought plenty more big flavours to the plate.

That was followed by a rhubarb syllabub, which freshened things up again.

There is pleasure in eating food and there is pleasure is cooking it. And this was a day when the very weather gave an enormous dose of pleasure too.

Salty tales to pique the appetite

Salt: A world history by Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlanksy’s Salt: a world history promises to do something that seems rather obvious on the surface – to illustrate the importance of salt in the history of the world.

After all, we can all acknowledge the importance of salt in a general sense, can't we? But if ever there was an illustration of history being news, then this is it.

There will be many for whom this book is still a revelation in terms of just how many uses – culinary and non-culinary – the world has found and developed for the whole range of salts that have been known of and used since the dawn of time.

Ham and salted fish and gunpowder are one thing (well, several things, actually), but I confess that it’s to my shame that I personally didn’t realise quite the role of salt in cheesemaking, for instance.

This extraordinary book covers as wide a geographic terrain as the author found possible, from China to Cheshire.

It touches on politics, on economics and on religion, as well as science, engineering – and, of course, food, with a host of salt-related recipes.

There are times when Kurlansky’s tale is a whirlwind that leaves the reader dizzied.

As when he writes: “In the Caribbean, the leading cargo carried to North America – more tonnage than even sugar, molasses, or rum – was salt. The leading return cargo from North America to the Caribbean was salt cod, used to feed slaves on sugar plantations.”

There’s something so circular, but so crazy, about this scenario, that it is difficult to get the mind around it.

And personally, I knew nothing about the role of salt in the struggle for Indian independence, with British imperial bans on the people of Orissa making or gathering their own salt – in order to create a market for Cheshire salt – helping cause famine and much hardship.

It's rather amusing – in a wry sort of way – to realise that current economic orthodoxy both rails against any form of the protectionism that enabled the British (and US) economy to build in the first place, and claims that for growth, developing world economies must open themselves totally to foreign investment. In other words, they must 'choose' to do (because they're told there's no alternative) what they previously had to be forced to do.

And then came the 240-mile march by Gandhi and some of his followers to Dandi to gather salt illegally – and integral part of the struggle for independence.

Nor did I know of the role of salt in the American Civil War, where one unexpected legacy from that period is Tabasco Sauce: another circle, with the seeds for the peppers having been originally taken from Mexico to grown in the US – and recently having been returned to be grown there for the same sauce, while salt continues to be mined at great depths on Avery Island.

Circles are no more evident than at the conclusion, when Kurlansky describes how most salt became uniform, and then most salt producers were bought out and absorbed into a few massive companies. And yet … some people persist in wanting variety; in searching for something more authentique, if you will. So small producers start making salt again in the old ways.

I could be pernickety and point out that Kurlansky is a tad inaccurate or misleading when he describes Port Vendres in the South of France as: “a contemporary hillside monument to industrial efficiency”. It was first discovered by the Greeks as a safe port in around 600BC, and while parts may be new and industrialised, and while Port Vendres is certainly no Collioure, it is not all modern and it is not without its charms.

But that feels a tad churlish, for in general, Kurlansky’s book is an entertaining, informative, fascinating read.

And all this from someone who makes no claims to be a professional, trained historian (so in the same boat as Stewart Lee Allen).

On the other hand, a preliminary browse through the second edition of Cuisine and Culture: a history of food and people, by Linda Civitello, who has an MA in history, was more than enough to annoy me out of starting to read it properly.

For instance, in the introduction, one discovered that there have been nine world wars. Yes, you really did read that correctly.

I thumbed rapidly to the appendix that apparently detailed this, together with all other important wars and battles since ancient times, starting with the fall of the Roman Empire in 476.

The War of the League of Augsburg is listed as one of her ‘world wars’. As are the Wars of Spanish and Austrian succession, the Seven Years War, the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars …

This, after some Googling, seems to be the ‘theory’ of a US historian called Thomas A Bailey, who produced the original version of a textbook for US schools, The American Pageant. I couldn't find any other historian, reputable or otherwise, supporting the same idea. I can't imagine many people are about to start describing the events of 1914-18 and 1939-45 as WWVIII and WWIX.

Returning to Civitello’s own tome, however, let’s set aside the typo (presumably) that omits the US from the “who fought” list of WWI (well, they did wait until rather late in the day to get involved), but then there’s the classic error that surely a real, live historian with an MA should know or check before making, of describing something as the “Civil War” in England (there were three English civil wars).

And then there’s the matter of referring to “England” as a combatant in many wars (including the two real world wars), as opposed to Great Britain.

But this appendix, set out as a chart on a gray background, in the fashion of the charts that pepper the rest of the book, is part of the problem: it’s enormously simplistic. To describe, for instance, the Thirty Years War as simply “religious”, 'fought by' Catholic v Protestant, is to almost sinfully misrepresent the extremely complex nature of that conflict.

So is this book intellectually rigorous and authoritative or not?

On page XIX of the introduction, she also repeats as fact the story of the Romans feeding “Christians to the lions for entertainment”. The Romans did persecute Christians, but there is no supporting evidence for the idea of mass throwing of Christians to lions in arenas. It is a myth. And 21st-century historians should not be citing it as a fact.

And on p221, on another of these charts (which make the entire book seem less like something aimed at intelligent grown-ups and more like a school textbook) laying out the gender division of work on a Midwestern farm in the 19th century, she includes the somewhat unscientific phrase: “Make everything look nice”.

On p361, of a Fox Network programme called Glutton Bowl, she comments that it “presented chow hounds as athletes”. “Chow hounds”? Oh pur-lease. It’s the same sort of sloppy language and approach that has no place in a book that sets out to be serious and intellectually sound.

And that was after a glance inspired by reading the introduction and finding the nonsense of ‘nine world wars’.

I’d trust Kurlansky infinitely more, and it returns to the shelf fully read and as an important part of my growing culinary library.

The Civitello – unread, apart from the gems cited above – has only been allowed back on the shelf for when I need a sort of Daily Mail moment to make me shake me head in irritation and horror.

Getting over my reading listlessness

It’s been a funny old year thus far for books – having for once not even kept a list, I’m struggling to remember what, if anything, I read while winter was still with us.

That wouldn’t be a first – it seems a sort of unofficial habit of mine: to start off slowly in January and pick up as the months pass.

Venice gave me a kick on the book front: after re-reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice for the umpteenth time, it was on to Donna Leon’s police procedurals set amid the canals and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti.

So far, I’ve read Death at La Fenice, Death in a Strange Country, The Anonymous Venetian, A Venetian Reckoning and Acqua Alta.

They good fun; quite dark and a bit obsessed with the Mafia and corruption, but with a cast of main characters that are reasonably well drawn. They're hardly the apotheosis of the genre, but they're enjoyable for when I want something light, which doesn't tax "the little grey cells" too much.

And there are plenty more in the series, but given the speed at which I gobble them up, I’m keeping a couple for summer and the beach.

I have also managed a couple of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels – Monstrous Regiment and then Night Watch, both of which were as brilliant as one expects from Sir Tez, plus Gore Vidal’s Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings, which was odd, since it had nowhere near the amount of sex I was hoping for, but was superb anyway and had me ordering another collection of Vidal’s essays straight away.

And then, as seen in yesterday’s review, Blake Morrison’s The Last Weekend.

That interrupted a re-read of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep – and thank goodness I could return to that on Sunday evening.

Re-reads are intriguing. There aren’t many books I’ve read more than once – let alone more than that. I should take that as a lesson and I’d easily and quickly be able to cull my library. But Chandler, as with Mann, would be at no risk of eviction.

There have been other bits and pieces in the past few months – I can rarely read history in one go and have two tomes on the ‘reading-in-process’ pile at present.

But my mind is already turning to my reading list for Collioure at the end of August. We barely took enough last year and, since my new case (the old one had to be Sellotaped up on the way back from Venice) is bigger and lighter, it shouldn’t be a problem to ensure a nice variety this time.

On the more serious front, I’ve promised myself I’ll take Elizabeth David: A Biography by Lisa Chaney.

On something of a crime fiction kick, I’m tempted to try one of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano novels, which are set in Sicily, together with one of the Wallander novels by Henning Mankell, plus – as mentioned already – some more Donna Leon and inevitably, some Maigret.

I may pack the new collection of Vidal essays and possibly the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, plus some poetry: I’m about two thirds of the way through Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid, which has finally conveyed to me the glories of Greek mythology – not least in actually getting me familiar with a few of the stories. On these grounds, I’m contemplating some more Hughes.

Such a selection should keep me going. At least for a few days!

If this was a race, it would be a good start

It's been a beautiful start to the new year in London – bright blue skies and sunshine, and a crisp cold to invigorate.

I feel particularly relaxed – and that's helped by a celebratory dinner being well under way. I've got individual ramekins of potatoes boulangère in the oven – layers of thinly sliced potato and onion, seasoned with chopped flat leaf parsley, salt and pepper, with chicken stock poured to almost the rim, dotted with butter and covered with foil. The foil will come off in a short while and they'll get a further 30 minutes uncovered.

Shortly before that process is concluded, I'll pan fry rump steaks with crushed peppercorns pressed into the meat. Those will then be flambéd in brandy before cream is added to finish the sauce. I only set fire to a dish for the first time just over a year ago – terrified of fire since childhood, it was a big thing to do so. I wouldn't say I'm now casual about it – I still get the pan lid ready, shut the kitchen door and feel the adrenalin rise – but it's not out of my skill store now.

The steaks won't be cooked for long – two minutes a side. I won't buy cheap meat if I can help it – I'd rather have meat less often – and although I've increasingly become a real meat lover in recent years, I concomitantly see the meat, and how it was produced, with respect.

I want something really easy for the side, so that'll be tenderstem broccoli. Also in a short while, I'll open a bottle of Grenache to let it breathe. And there's just enough Banyuls to serve as an aperitif.

And for dessert, there's are crème brûlées chilling in the fridge, waiting just for a sprinkling of brown sugar and the caress of the blowtorch to caramelise it.

It's a perfect meal to start 2010.

I have made a few resolutions – but none of them involve food. Mostly, I use resolutions each year as private reminders of certain things that I need to be a little more disciplined about. So every year, for instance, I promise to read more. It's not so much a question of reading "more", though, but of making that pledge to myself to keep up my reading.

And talking of reading, I finished Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice the other day, for the ...

Well, I can't remember how many times I've read it. The first time was at school, where it was one of our set texts for 'O' level. I loved it then and have loved it ever since. And yet, like all really great books, there's something fresh that strikes you each time you pick it up again.

In this case, it was really noticing the inadequacies of Mr Bennet – effectively an absent father – and not just his wife.

But it also amazes me how many people seem to believe that Austen only wrote 19th century rom-coms – she hasn't, in that sense, been well served by dramatisations, which don't tend to show up the satire as clearly as the romantic elements of the plots. But the satire here is very clear on the page, and Austen's targets ranged from the obvious human flaws suggested by the title to class snobbery and on to the obsession of some females with fashion and men.

But she was also a sharp observer on questions such as the situation of women (of her own class). Here, for instance, Elizabeth's close friend Charlotte Lucas marries Mr Collins for no other reason than security. Elizabeth is shocked, but it's quite clear that Austen herself understood that such pragmatism was the only hope for many of her sex.

The humour is not soft: it has a bite that is delicious to this day.

On conclusion, I ordered Emma, which I've never read, and Persausion, which I haven't read since it was a text during my 'A' level studies.

And continuing the Victorian buzz, I've started Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers.

I have trouble with Dickens. I remember seeing a number of the books dramatised on TV – Sunday afternoon serials to be watched while eating tea in front of the telly: a rare treat. The plots are wonderful – but when you pick up the books, there's all the 'padding': all that exposition of social matters that Dickens penned. Okay, so it's not just padding – although it certainly helped, given that his stories were initially serialised in print – but an integral part of his work. But they seem to get in the way and I end up putting the book aside, frustrated.

Pickwick Papers, I decided, might be a little different. And thus far, I'm finding it really very funny.

After that, I think that Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (effectively a 19th century novel, even though first published in 1901) is due a re-read, while I need to finally conquer Anthony Trollope's The Warden and Barchester Towers, which have been sitting on the shelf for years. And I've got a copy of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford too; I've only read her Mary Barton previously.

Whatever happens in the coming 364 days, I feel as though I've got the start of the new year sorted in culinary and literary terms!

A model kind of woman

Yesterday's Craft Day, even if I was unable to actively participate, has left the office with a wide variety of, errr, additional decorations.

It's not that I'm anti craft. Indeed, I've always had quite a crafty bent myself.

Later in the afternoon, a little delivery arrived for me at the office. It consisted of three model kits – two resin and one metal. They're all for figures – two Prussian soldiers from 1870 and Brunhilda, the character from Germanic legend, most well known to those outside Germany from Wagner's epic Ring Cycle.

Assorted colleagues looked at the delivered boxes with wary or bemused expressions – particularly at the soldiers. Apparently, I'm "bonkers". Yet these were the same colleagues who, hours earlier, had been constructing a Christmas tree from an old, rigid board map that was now no longer needed, and knitting tiny scarves for decorative card birds that were to hang on the tree.

And I'm bonkers?

I used to knit at one time. The Other Half even has a traditional black and yellow scarf I knitted him for his role as a fan of the mighty Castleford Tigers.

I have been known to do a bit of needlepoint too. There's a rather complex one of a cat that's framed and hanging in the bedroom.

And I have put together and painted models since childhood, when my parents allowed me to have the old Airfix historical figures, but not the longed-for Spitfire.

The Spock at the top of this post was painted a few years ago and still stands, very happily, on the DVD shelves.

The Prussian soldiers are simply extensions – and quite logical ones, given that modeling background – of my abiding fascination in Prussian history (which started at school – a girls' school, note).

It seems extraordinary that there should be such a gender-based attitude toward something as simple as craft-based hobbies – that as a female, other females were bemused by my interest areas. Not by my interest in a form of craft, but by the direction in which that takes me.

I happen to work in an environment that is highly politicised – and with the majority of the staff being female: in other words, I know, work and socialise with a lot of politicised females. How odd that, while knitting seems to be almost a new form of feminist statement, a woman who prefers to do other kinds of craft as a hobby is – well, not derided, but treated with confusion. It's almost like a new version of my parents saying: 'No, you can't build a Spitfire'.

This, though, does seem to conform to something of a pattern.

Even last night, when there was a bit of Stargate Atlantis on telly in the background, I recognised an ever-so-topical reference to the Hadron Collider, described only by its initials. Isn't that an indication of geekette status if ever there was one?

And while I wasn't paying great attention to the aforementioned programme, I am not averse to sci-fi, either on screen or the page. Indeed, I have a confession: at one time I even maintained a website about one of the characters in Babylon 5, which I adored. And I once attended a B5 convention – in a hotel next to Heathrow airport: although in the interests of making male (and possibly female) readers of this blog jealous, I have to point out that Claudia Christian gave me a full on kiss at that event.

In another recent development, however, I became the one woman in our office (at present) to take delivery of an iPhone. It's logical: I work with Macs at home and in the office. I can synch it with all sorts of things. But yet again, I seem to be part of a 'male' club.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not particularly worried. But it's interesting that feminism – even in people who are very politically educated – would not seem to have really made a great deal of difference to ideas of traditional female pastimes and interests.

Of course, it's complicated further because I don't fall into just one obvious stereotypical category – 'tom boy', for instance. The same woman who loves Prussian history and paints model soldiers also likes handbags and chocolate, and as much as I'm currently reading a vast history of the Thirty Year's War, I've also got my well-worn copy of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice on the go as deliciously enjoyable light reading. I might love football – but I also enjoy Sex in the City. I might have collections of sci-fi trading cards – but I also collect cat ornaments.

So is an interest in history per se what's considered unusual for a female of the species? Or just certain kinds of history? Is it modeling per se that is considered odd for a bird – or just certain subjects for modeling?

And am I really so unusual – "bonkers", even?

It seems, as Spock might say, to be thoroughly "illogical".

I should know to trust Rick

Rick Stein, that is. One of my favourite celebrity chefs.

On Thursday, I hit a point; a point of feeble concentration at work. Or rather, a point where I had to work very, very hard indeed to maintain concentration.

That day, two colleagues had set off for Argeles-sur-mer, just north of Collioure, where I'll be in ... oh, just a day under three weeks! They had set off from St Pancras, on the Eurostar, just a five minute walk from the office I was sitting in, struggling to concentrate. I could have looked out of the window of my office and seen their train pull out, an hour after I'd got to work.

Anyway, in a mood of heightened longing-for-the-Mediterranean, I had found myself planning a weekend menu of varied dishes from the region. Things started on Friday evening with ratatouille – southern French vegetable stew of tomatoes, aubergine, courgettes, peppers, onion and basil, garnished with a mixture of crushed garlic and chopped flat-leaf parsley. And served, of course, with good bread.

Well, that was a decent start. Tasty and most certainly healthy.

With Vicki my fishmonger away for a wedding on Saturday, I had a choice. I could either have a meaty weekend or I could try the new fish shop at the top end of the market.

Now, I'd already, the week before, had a look in that shop. Since Vicki didn't have any cod, I'd wondered if they had, since I wanted to salt it for bacalao. We didn't get off to a good start. First, supposedly specialist fishmonger doesn't know what bacalao is. And then, receiving something akin to a lecture about sustainable fishing and cod.

Yes. I know about the issues with sustainable cod fishing. Vicki and I have discussed it at length. It's why I know that there are no problems with certain stocks of cod. And, unlike a lot of my fellow Brits, I can think beyond cod.

But most of all, I don't take kindly to such patronising lectures. So at least there will be no temptation to betray Vicki by going into their shop again. And even then, they shouldn't have said shop, since Spirit, a trader on street for years, was very wrongly ousted from his shop (where he sold fish) by our very dodgy local council in their very dodgy dealings with a local property developer.

Meat it was, therefore.

So on Saturday, we had roast chicken, done my favourite way, as in River Café Easy Two.

Heat the oven to 80˚C. Take your bird. Remove any inards and stuff with a good handful of rosemary, a handful of sage and some chopped garlic. (I chucked in a half lemon that was sitting in the fridge looking forlorn)

Pop it into roasting dish that it fits quite tightly. Pour 200ml of water into the dish. Pop in the oven and cook for an hour.

Remove. Turn the bird the other way up. Pop back in the oven and cook for another hour. Turn again and cook for a third hour. Remove from the oven. Turn the heat up to 200˚C. Take some butter and massage it all over the skin of the bird (great, messy fun). Season well. And then pour 100ml of Vermouth (Pernod would work too) into the dish. Put it back in the oven and give it half an hour.

Bingo! Superb chicken. And after you've had your dinner, superb chicken needs using properly. So after stripping the remaining meat, I took the carcass, plus an onion, additional herbs, three sticks of celery, a carrot, some peppercorns and a very large amount of water, cooked it all for around two hours and then strained it through muslin to give myself around three litres of stock for the freezer.

But what of Sunday's efforts?

Well, a couple of years ago, I was asked to review a cookery book – Rick Stein's Mediterranean Escapes. In an incredibly brief period between getting my paws on the tome itself and filing my copy, I had time to test out one recipe – a dish with sausages and lemon. Perfectly tasty. I wrote my concise 200 words, put the book on the shelf and pretty much forgot about it.

Fast forward to last week. Mulling over what to do for midweek meals, I picked it up and started reading rather more seriously. And realised that there were many more options than I had previously realised.

One that sprung to my attention was kleftiko, a Greek lamb dish.

Apparently, it was known as 'thieves' roast' and allegedly used to be made by the criminal classes in the Greek countryside. They would nick a lamb, put it in a hole in the ground with hot embers, seal it with earth so that no smoke could give it away, and then go about their nefarious business during the day, returning in the evening to their slow-cooked meat.

And that lovely bit of colour was thanks to m'friend George – not Mr Stein.

Anyway. I've never had it and indeed, have had a low idea of Greek food since a poor meal in a Greek restaurant in Amsterdam in 2000, where the salad was washed out and devoid of taste.

And I've never cooked a dish like that – slow-cooking a big piece of meat in such a way. But I grasped the nettle and was encouraged by the interest displayed by The Other Half, who mused that, in the days before I had emerged on his scene, he used to quite regularly eat it in a Greek restaurant around Clerkenwell. He was also able to advise that the meat needs to be really falling away from the bone.

Okay. So I bought a should of lamb and got the butcher to quarter it for me (the easiest way to portion it for two people). A couple of online recipes talked of putting greaseproof paper at the bottom of the dish to stop the ingredients sticking, but Rick didn't mention this, so after some consideration, I stuck with Mr Stein.

Heat the oven to around 190˚C. Peel and dice some maincrop potatoes. Take a whole bulb of garlic and pull off the papery cover. Then cut the whole bulb in half. Pop the meat, potatoes and garlic in a big casserole.

Add the juice of two lemons, two teaspoons of salt and lots of ground black pepper, a tablespoon of dried oregano and two tablespoons of fresh oregano (or marjoram), six bay leaves and then 100ml of water. Cover the ingredients with kitchen foil, pop on the lid and then put it in the oven. After two hours, check it hasn't dried out and needs more water. Then give it at least another hour.

In the event, I needed to give it around 45 minutes more before the meat, as The Other Half had described, was really starting to fall away from the bone. But there had been no worry about potato sticking to the pan – the water sees to that. It really is a great flavour – and reheated, it'll do at least one (and probably two) more meals.

I should know to trust Rick.

Longing for the sun

Eleven minutes past three in the afternoon. It's a Saturday and I still haven't reached the point of sitting down and just ... well, just stopping.

I've shopped, then had a little lunch, then prepared a marinade for tomorrow's dinner, then done the spuds for tonight's meal.

And it's gone three. And I'm looking for things to 'do' instead of simply down with a book.

Indeed, here I am now, writing this.

Is it a general thing or does my puritanical background make it harder? I think it's at least partly cultural. In France, they don't live to work, but work to live. Brits, in general, seem to do absolutely the opposite.

It's the first day of August and I feel knackered. Long-term, deep-down knackered. I felt like this exactly a year ago, so at least the symptoms are not unknown. The beach did the trick – a first ever beach holiday, where I was astonished to realise that I really could just stop for 10 whole days. Stop. And sit. And think – or not. And rest.

Twenty seven days to go until that time arrives again.

It doesn't help that the weather this summer has been poor. Well, downright unseasonal, in terms of English seasons. We had a decent June, but then there's been so much wind since, and torrential rain. Not proper, old-fashioned English summer days with showers, but tropical downpours, with dark grey clouds obscuring the tops of buildings.

So, I'm starting to compile my summer holiday book list. I took eight books last year, convinced that, on the basis of the pace that I was reading at the time, I'd race through them. But I read just three. I'm still going to take a few this time around, but nothing too heavy. No Nabakov this year. And I'm foregoing the previously intended Proust.

There'll be some Maigret – I've been using ebay to bolster my collection – Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence and Hot Sun, Cool Shadow: Savouring the Food, History and Mystery of the Languedoc, which seems to be a sort of Languedoc version of the Mayles by Angela Murrills and Peter Matthews, plus Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking and, quite possibly, Emma Brockes's What Would Barbra Do? How Musicals Changed My Life, which looks a camp, bitchy hoot and has just been ordered.

My other main preparation is intended to be spending most of the month sans booze, with cuts to my caffeine consumption too. Try and get myself part of the way to relaxation and general well being before I set foot in the Languedoc. Oh, and I'm trying to push ahead with a podcast language course – but I'm really struggling with it, because German has finally taken root in my head and I keep wanting to say things in German rather than French.

So we get the podcast tutor asking something like: "And what is 'I am' in French?" To which my instant reaction is "Ich bin". I suppose Mrs John, my German teacher at school, who must have despaired of her linguistically challenged pupil (I managed 4% in my final exam), would be impressed. My French teacher would probably be astonished that I'm even trying.

Crap at foreign languages and incapable of relaxing. How English can you get?

There is going to be slightly more to the holiday than just sitting on a beach. Snorkeling, which I discovered last year. And I've promised myself that I'm going to actually try one of the big kayaks that you can rent at the beach. They don't look too difficult. And, if he's not stopped for the season, we'll take a couple of trips on the sailing boat that goes out from the little harbour.

I had some of my photographs turned into calendars last year for friends and clients. This month's picture is Collioure. I can hardly wait.

Now. I really am going to make an effort to go and sit down. With a book.

Update: here we are at 5.17pm. I did sit down. And read a page. Then I decided that tonight's tuna steaks would benefit from a marinade. Not that it's difficult. Not that it's a bad idea. But it's as though I'm an over-wound watch spring that can't actually stop.

Fiction to get your teeth into

Interview With a Vampire by Anne Rice

Earlier this year, I switched on the TV to find that one channel was just about to screen Interview With a Vampire. Five minutes in, I wrenched myself away and switched off. The book was sitting on the shelf, ready for the moment when I felt in the mood for that specific literary experience – and I wanted the book to come first.

It eventually ‘came first’ this month – and provided an intriguing read.

The story is told in the first person by Louis, the oldest son of a rich, eighteenth-century French émigré family in New Orleans that owns an indigo plantation. Mourning the death of his younger brother, Louis simply wants to die – until the vampire Lestat, having already nearly drained him of blood, takes him into a very different life.

And there begins a journey, only part of which is revealed in this first volume of Anne Rice’s vampire series. We know, for instance, that the book is actually set in the present – at least, a time when cars and tape recorders exist, since the basic premise for telling the story is that of a young man conducting an interview with Louis.

Vampire fiction is hardly a new phenomenon and is rooted in the vampire hysteria of the early 18th century, which reached extraordinary heights with the official exhumations of suspected vampires Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole in Serbia.

Poems and stories followed – some of them including a sexual aspect to the idea of vampirism and some of them concentrating on an idea of Christianity v paganism. Then, in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula took the genre to new heights.

Stoker’s work centres on Victorian fears of female sexuality – particularly in Britain, where syphilis was rampant, including amongst the middle class. ‘Respectable’ middle-class women didn’t ‘like’ sex. It was something to be done only to produce heirs. Thus men found themselves lacking any regular conjugal pleasure. Prostitution offered an outlet, but with syphilis widespread, the dangers were obvious. The solution, it seemed, was to find virgins. And the search for virginal prostitutes achieved something unintended but arguably inevitable – a lowering of the age of the prostitutes. In the late 19th century, London was the child prostitution capital of the world.

In Dracula, Stoker portrayed unrestrained female sexuality and sensuality as the threat. Women’s sexual natures would, if allowed free rein, leave them vulnerable to the fatal foreign disease that would make them mad and very, very dangerous. That Stoker portrayed the ‘disease’ as foreign was not surprising – many countries referred to sexual diseases as being linked to a rival nation. Of course it also allowed for a racist element. But the issue of the dangers of unrestrained female sexuality is paramount in the text. And that, inevitably, has a religious component going back to the myth of Adam and Eve, the serpent and The Fall.

The vampire novel remained around in the coming years – Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend in 1954 was an example of a decently written take on the genre, penned with the Cold War at its background. But writers and readers next really got their fangs back into vampire fiction in the 1970s, when Rice produced Interview With a Vampire and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro began her Saint-Germain series.

During the near 80 years between Dracula and Interview With a Vampire, even though there hadn’t been a vast amount of quality vampire literature, a lot had changed.

Vampires had ceased to be simple, straightforward personifications of evil. Matheson, for instance, throws conventional morality on its head by asking the awkward question of just why his central protagonist deserves to triumph over the vampires – indeed, to survive.

And Rice’s first entry into the genre is stuffed with a philosophical struggle that is centred on ideas of good and evil.

Louis’s curse is that having once become a vampire, he cannot accept his own nature. His inherent being demands food. That food can just about be animals such as rats, but for a good and properly sustaining diet (if you will) he needs to feed from humans.

But he considers that – and therefore himself – to be evil.

And Louis is searching for answers on a wider scale – trying to work out how the God that he has grown up to believe in could make such a creature as himself.

In other words, much of the book takes on the sense of a debate between a conventional Christian view of morality and a more Nietzschean perspective.

Rice herself was born in a Catholic family and, after several years as an atheist, returned to Catholicism in 1998, saying that she would now dedicate her writing to glorifying her religion. So it seems possible that the moral questions at the core of Interview With a Vampire had been questions at the heart of the author’s own life for some time.

What is clear about the novel is the idea of alternative – or transgressive – sexuality amongst the vampires. While they don’t actually have sex, there is a strong sense of homoeroticism and paedophilia – the latter, which reveals itself through various vampires’ obsessive desire to possess/kill a child, is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the novel. And some of the scenes where children are involved are described in a particularly sensual/sexual way, heightening any discomfort that the reader might feel.

If such labels can be applied, then it seems that both Louis and Lestat are bisexual: there are lesbian overtones to the relationship between the female vampires Claudia and Madeline later in the novel (and paedophilic ones, since Claudia is – physically at least – a child).

Where Stoker’s vampire was fairly one-dimensional and simply ‘evil’, there is far more complexity here. Although it’s difficult to see what conclusion – if any – Rice reaches. And the apparent linking of homosexuality/bisexuality and pederasty is itself disturbing. Since none of what happens to the vampires would appear to make them ‘happy’, it could be read that Rice is implying that all ‘alternative’ sexualities are ‘wrong’, and that paedophilia is on a par with homosexuality and bisexuality.

But Interview With a Vampire is an interesting and well-written novel – and certainly a valuable contribution to a fascinating and developing genre.