what a difference a word makes

The banana split boat hasn't sailed, has it? Some reader of mine, somewhere, must have missed the storm in a sundae dish over the anonymous poem found in the House of Commons - or somewhere - nobody has actually said where it was found, or how - was it lying upon the stair? Anyway, somehow everybody got to know of it, and very funny it is too:

"As I was going down the stair, I met a man who wasn't Blair.
He wasn't Blair again today. Oh how I wish he'd go away!"

And no one knows who wrote it! It's a complete mystery - a government scandal! A couple of ministers have completely denied that it's anything to do with them, but then, they would say that, wouldn't they.

Of course we're all jolly glad whenever anyone isn't Blair, and we hope it stays that way, but you have to admit that it's a fine thing for Parliamentarians to be taking to their pens like this. It may be only doggerel but revolutions have been started with less. And it pleases me, partly because the original upon which it is based ("As I was going up the stair/ I met a man who wasn't there./ He wasn't there again today...") was told me many many times by my dear Papa, le duc de Baroque, back when he was about ten times bigger than me.

However, the real genius of the piece comes in when my brand-new favourite-ever politician, Austin Mitchell MP (Great Grimsby - fancy a weekend away, anyone?) posted this delicious, and far superior, bagatelle on his blog: the cherry on top. Poetry truly lives in the corridors of power! Austin's whole site is well worth a read. Take these snippets from his "House Diary":

"These are the times that try men`s socialism. Polls disastrous. Morale low. New chums wondering if ritual suicide might be helpful. Blairites in the ascendant with crazed proposals to force the disabled back to work (assuming the Poles leave any jobs) or proclaiming the virtues of wealth, Mandy announcing that Gordon has forgiven him, and Tony sucking up more jobs in his flibbertigibbet progress to the throne of Charlemagne II.* ...Oldie of the Year lunch. Hockney harangues me for voting for the smoking ban, announcing that it will be the death of reflection."

Even his home page is fun. And did you see the picture above? He has something I want.**


* Flibbertigibbet is one of my all-time favourite words.
** & I don't mean a house - although, yes please... (edited in: on reflection I think I mean a nice big empty room, with a polished floor. You could have a vast abode and not have that! But mainly it's the Friendly's sign, of course.)

infamous indolence

To say it's been a slow weekend in Baroque Mansions would be to do a disservice to the Ice Age.

There have been sleeping, eating, and the cooking necessary to have the things to eat; there have been lolling, slumping and more eating; and there has been more sleeping, followed by some eating and lolling. Ms B never left the house at all between 4pm on Thursday and about 4pm on Saturday, except for a doomed, misguided attempt to go for a walk which left her (well - the car - not hers, of course, but even so not even a very competent attempt at a walk) pelted and battered by inch-wide raindrops and then a hailstorm worthy of Good Friday itself - oh, wait. It was Good Friday.

Saturday brings us, recovered from the pelting, to the thrilling heights of Morrisons, where I discovered that 6pm the day before Easter Sunday is not the time to find a nice leg of lamb.Thus my lamb in white wine, lemon and egg sauce became a delightfully plucky and inventive lamb-&-lemon meatballs in white wine, lemon and egg sauce. There were also rice, an entire Savoy cabbage, some very beautiful grilled courgettes, and a bread & butter pudding made with brioche rolls (2 extra free), cream and 100g of dark chocolate.

Later that day, when the kids and auntie had gone, I ate the last meatball, the leftover vegetables and the rest of the pudding standing up at the counter, and drank the rest of the cooking wine, a cheap Orvieto.

DVD: Infamous. Very interesting but I'm not really in the mood to write a movie critique... Toby Jones deliciously over-the-top as Truman Capote, I will say - but as for what's her name from Truly Madly Deeply playing Diana Vreeland? Just NO.

Yesterday woke up remembering that I had three egg whites left over, plus the rest of the double cream, and there was a girl in the house whom I knew it would be very easy to thrill with a sudden meringue... it's so hard nowadays with one's own offspring. Mlle B, who was "too full" to eat even a morsel of the bread-&-butter pudding (Duh! Like that stopped anyone else), simply doesn't like meringue. For this reason alone it is always great fun to make it when this particular friend is there, so we can offer Mlle B some and, when she refuses, shake our heads pityingly in unison.

Then several hours of saying I was going to write my stuff, and not, followed by almost being late to the cinema because I'd actually forgotten how to leave the house: it was a delightful, if suitably leisurely, French gangster film circa about 1960 give or take, called Le Doulos, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, a lot of menacing shadows and an all-but-forgotten family of performing overcoats. Then an asparagus risotto.

Work tomorrow. The meringue is finished, there's no meat in the house, I never had to resort to white sliced, the place is Armageddon of laundry, and as I write this - at 11.26 - I have not yet been outside today, either. In the few hours left to me I have all the writing I was going to do over the preceding five days to do, plus the laundry.

PS: Does anyone want a signed, limited edition of The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis, fine, no d/w? Numbered 176 of 1,000. It's very large... offers accepted.

truly madly

Anthony Minghella will be, I suspect, as troubling in death as he has been for me in life: I always wanted to like him. He had such an engaging face, such a cheerful smile, and his films always looked so beautiful. The opening shot of The English Patient, over the dunes that look like skin and the curves of a body, has stayed with me all this time, whatever I thought of the rest of the movie (and don't get me started; it would be disrespectful in the extreme at a time like this; Ondaatje's novel is a great book). "Minghella" - it's fun to say, very pleasant in the mouth. And "Anthony Minghella" is a fine, tactile name; his parents must be proud of it (it is clear that they are proud as punch of their boy, poor things). The news of his death at age 54 has shocked us here in Baroque Mansions. I lost a friend aged not much less than that and you wouldn't wish it on anyone.

The ice cream industry on the Isle of Wight will also now be a sadder thing than it was, too; that has got to be a sad thing. (I've always seen Minghella's ice cream van origins as somehow intrinsic to the sugariness of his vision: the English Patient's starkly doomed trek across the desert - to say nothing of the tart-with-a-heart-of-gold's cappuccino run in Breaking and Entering - has always seemed to me to have a custard base, although it may seem base to mention it now. I think in fairness and kindness we can say that is just what the man was like, and lots of other people liked it too.)

Whatever you thought of Minghella's films, it is impossible to deny that the British film industry has lost an industrious champion. When Minghella was appointed Chairman of the BFI in 2003, he told the BBC, "We're not getting enough movies made here, our studios aren't busy enough, we don't have enough studios."

One can only agree with this. It would be nice to think that someone will be inspired to respond to this sad occasion by pouring money into new ventures, maybe by new writers, producers, cinematographers, directors, representing a broad sweep of contemporary outlooks, or even - against the grain of our modern society - inner visions. I know a couple of marvellous unproduced scripts, and I have a couple of very heavyweight biographies I'd love to use as props. Bergman's autobiography, maybe.

Some reports are saying Minghella has had a heart attack and others are giving no cause of death. I for one, lying in bed for the second day running with some kind of weird gyppy tummy, think we should all watch our smoke and fat intakes (hoping that will sort of cover the salt bit). Please, all you Type A men out there. Take it easy.

Now, some sober reflection.

food, glorious food - who is to blame?

Why have we been reduced to talking about food as if it isn't food? It's all "products" and "fatty foods" and "reduced-salt intake" and so on, and it frankly sounds about as appetising as - as -well, as somebody said to me this morning: "these nutritionists talk about food as if it were excrement."

The BBC website (article: "Not that naughty but still nice") makes it all sound even more fun. Get this:

"Taking fat or sugar out of food is not necessarily as straightforward as it sounds.

The product may simply not sit together properly - it is hard for instance to make ice cream bind without sugar, or pastry and chocolate without certain quantities of fat...

Take too much fat out of cheese and it won't do the things that consumers like it to do, such as bubble, melt and go brown.

Worst of all, it may end up not tasting like cheese, and researchers are agreed that if these products are to work, and genuinely reduce the nation's waistlines, they must be virtually indistinguishable from that which they are supposed to emulate."

Got that? The key word is clearly emulate.

Do we understand? It's no longer even real food we're talking about!

But never fear: "One particularly promising avenue is the mushroom."

"Hurrah!" I hear you cry. "I love mushrooms!" But don't get excited. Apparently, "It produces hydrophobins, air cells which protect the fungus from water, but which appear to have the same material properties as oil. And yet they have no calories."

That's all right then! We'll all hold out for that. And while I can only applaud (as a person whose moderate enjoyment of food has often led me into dress sizes I'd prefer not to talk about) the verdict of the food researchers who this morning announced that "individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity" - the rationale being that cheap fatty carbohydrates are cheaper, and that we all (sic) drive cars and no one walks anywhere any more - I do still think there is probably a little that individuals could do. I'm complaining about the way we talk about food, but we could all do with just thinking about it a little.

Now, let Ms Baroque remind you. She ate no fat at all (beyond what is found in a chicken breast) for four months, on medical instructions. This was a Bad Thing, and left her vitamin-deficient as well as run-down.

But anyway, here's what worked. Use the merest drib of olive oil in your pan. Slice, don't chop, the onions (it's just nicer), and cook them in it. When it dries out too much, pour in some white wine. (You know me; I even used rosé sometimes. It was fine.) When you're ready, add your garlic, a bay leaf or two, your meat - chicken breast, white fish, or even - now I'm back on normal food - a pork chop or whatever, and, once it has browned, add more wine. Cook till done.

This method uses about a teaspoon of oil. The key is not then to put lashings of butter on your rice, or eat half a camembert with it. Don't encourage your kids to eat crisps, and look for cakes - such as the Dutch ginger cakes you can get - that are naturally, and meant to be, low in fat.

Also: fat-free or low-fat yogurt; fruit; Marmite without butter on your toast. Frozen yogurts or sorbets instead of cheap ice cream. Baked sweet potatoes, that are actually nicer without butter.

Also: get a range of your food groups in. I love the food groups: cereals and starches, meats & proteins, fruit & vegetables, milk & dairy, and fats, oils and sweets.

Alcohol is not a food group. I have to say, I do wonder if my almost-complete abstention did me some good during those four months. Of course, that was largelydown to never going anywhere. Things are different now...

Anyway, come on, guys! It may have all turned to food science - but it's not rocket science.

peach pie

Everywhere you go in the USA, there's pie. Fruit pies. Lemon chiffon pie, chocolate cream pie, coconut cream pie, things with meringue and without meringue. Boston cream pie. Soon there'll be pumpkin pie too. And everywhere, fruit. Blueberry pie. Apple pie. Peach pie. Strawberry rhubarb pie. Cherry pie.

I love this! In America you have to try, not to eat pie. Half the people I know prefer pie to cake. It's lighter, more flavourful, more differentiated; it feels better for you (especially fruit pie; the peach pie above has no fat except for the pastry, which I rolled thin, and about half as much sugar as a cake without icing): more like real food. Fruit pies also celebrate, in a very real way, the harvest, the fact that things come into season and are there in plenty. They're much more about the earth and the seasons and how we're all part of that. Plus you can have ice cream with it and nobody thinks that's at all excessive.

Not that I don't love a good cake! Dear me, no. Anyway, the aforementioned Boston cream pie, a lifelong love of mine, is a perfect celebration of cake, the way it comes into season any time you want - and eggs. Yes, it celebrates those. And chocolate icing. As a child, if ever presented with options that incuded a Boston cream pie, eg like at the Ponderosa Steak House, I invariably chose that. Why mess around with second-best? A Boston cream pie is essentially a sponge cake, layered, and in the middle is custard - technically, a thick crème patissière - with chocolate icing, not thick frosting mind, maybe more a glaze, on top. Much better than a chocolate cream pie, which must be the most boring dish on the planet. It's the best.

Meanwhile, here's my peach pie, making use of the last usable peaches of the year, fresh from the oven. I always, by the way, make a lattice crust. So much nicer in every way. I'm just sorry you can't hear it sizzling and see it bubbling, with the steam rising, and smell its peachiness wafting through the flat.

Also the best.

It'll be gone by nightfall.

(The rest of the meal: a mushroom ragoût with red wine and marsala, polenta, a roast free range chicken, and with the pie a choice of whipped cream or ice cream, and some seasonal fresh figs. I'm limiting Ms R S-D's wine consumption this afternoon to some reasonable amount, and to proper wine. The kids can stay up as long as they like.)

"these foolish things..."

At last! My long, no-longer-apocryphal article, "The Tawdry Halo of the Idle Martyr: MacNeice's Autumn Journal," is finally published! Feedback, if I might be so bold as to quote, includes remarks that it is "really, really good" and that I've "selected FABULOUS quotes"! (Thanks, guys; the fivers are in the post.)

You can find it on the Contemporary Poetry Review website.

I begin:

"In 1963, after Louis MacNeice’s premature death of pneumonia, Philip Larkin wrote that “his poetry was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the news-boys were shouting . . . he displayed a sophisticated sentimentality about falling leaves and lipsticked cigarette stubs: he could have written the words of ‘These Foolish Things.’” "

I was very happy when I discovered this quote from Larkin, because that quality is the thing I most love about MacNeice - and I don't see it as trivial, either. Ever since I read it, the song has become one of the foolish things that remind me of MacNeice (sorry: I really like Bryan Ferry's version...).

Now, my piece is just one part of a whole MacNeice issue celebrating the dear man's centenary; go and check it out. (Once again, I had wanted to write something aobut him on his actual hundredth birthday, but that was September 12th and I was busy going to the US Post Office, the airport, and home. Bit distracted. MacNeice would have understood.)

Ms Baroque is still in America

The weather has turned: back-to-school has deepened into autumn. Yesterday's rain was torrential enough to make you wonder how the pilgrims survived - it lashed down so hard on skylights and cars and wet roads that you imagine a small wooden structure would be flattened. If the humidity of the past few weeks has been a thought, the rain was its corollary action, and realisation. Now there's a delightful crispness - my favourite season. It'll be hot in a few hours. Even the wind sounds different: the leaves are dried out, and turning - many are already red - so they give the wind a sort of rattly sound. (Sounds: the crickets are quieter now, only a few hardy ones left. There is a cardinal flying around - I saw him - perching on the railings and branches, cheeping his harsh little cheep. The cars sound louder and more whishy than last week.)

But last night, driving home from Shady Glen - the ice cream and cheeseburger place that sounds like a cemetery in a John Cheever book - everything was still damp and wet, and creepy North American mists wrapped themselves around the tops of the trees, the streetlights, the little houses set back along Route 6 - even the air. Every air particle was wrapped in a creepy mist particle and visibility, other than of ghosts, was low.

There's so much contrast here! A week ago in the sun there was so much contrast present in every minute that light and full shadow were the only two settings. You could barely see. And people talk slowly up here. They don't want fast remarks that go off at a tangent and blur the contrast between what's being said and what cannot be arrived at. They rehearse the facts, are very clear and careful, declarative. Then I went to New York City! Hundreds of different modes of being, telling, dressing, suddenly suggest themselves & I become a different person. I even look different there. People all want to talk to you, they want to hear your answer and they want to tell a story. They can't resist asking questions.

I was staying at the corner of LaGuardia Place and Bleecker Street, a conjunction of street names almost calculated to bring a lump to the baroque throat. And look! Lunch in the White Horse Tavern, laughing with my friend about the cheesiness of it, beneath an enormous painting of Dylan Thomas (my friend points to the table next to us: "I think that might be where he did it"); dinner at John's Pizza in Bleecker St, my other friend and I talking non-stop about everything for three and a half hours and walkign back to his subway stop in the balmy evening; dinner the next night at a pleasant little place also on Bleecker Street with another friend, talking about Harriet the Spy! Fun! The best cheeseburger of my life, too, I think. In short, very restorative, but sad to be saying - as one always does - "see you soon," and then hastily adding: "Sooner next time, I hope!" - in the full knowledge that I always say that and it is always two years.

In between engagements I went up to Union Square twice (first time missed Barnes & Noble by five minutes; but I did get my Junot Diaz book in the end. I was annoyed in a what-can-you-do way to discover later that the Strand also had signed copies, at a $7 discount. However, the Strand did come through for me. Unlike the weather, which was so muggy and hot and moist and hideous that my feet swelled up, giving me an unprecedented number of blisters, and I now don't know if I even have any shoes I can wear to go home in!

I walked at least a hundred blocks in two days. Up Broadway and down 7th Ave. Up Avenue of the Americas and down Broadway and over Houston Street and around and around the West Village. There's a Barnes & Noble at something like 12th St & 6th Ave. I came back to CT with three bags of books - and a brand-new pair of ugly black-&-pink North Face flip flops, which I'm leaving at my mother's house. I never got further north than Union Square (not very far north - 17th Street). I never got on a bus, let alone the subway. I missed out on midtown and the towers of Gotham. And practically the most fun I had was on the bus coming home, which drove straight up 10th Ave, through midtown and the Upper West Side until it becomes Amsterdam Avenue, and continued up it through Morningside Heights and Harlem, all the way to 155th St, where it turned and crossed the bridge and continued north along the edge of the Bronx. Every one of these neighbourhoods is poignantly evocative, saturated with its own flavour and feel. There are a hundred Manhattans and I want them all.

Oh, speaking of poignant, I had to stop myself from crying when I got out of the cab at Port authority, stood there gazing up 8th Avenue into the receding distances of uptown, breathing in the smells, soaking up the feeling of the familiar canyons of buildings - which for my first 19 years was my only template for a city - and reluctantly, through an act of will, took myself in the doors (automatically and happily cursing the people who crossed my path with my heavy bags) and went down the escalator. Crying. "Oh, come on Kate." I said to myself. You'll be back. And sooner this time."

Straight from the bus depot to the Hebrew Home, where the rain lashed garden and gazebo and picnic spot; the lobby was packed full of convalescents, elderly people and their visitors. It gets very noisy, because everybody is talking very loud, and slow, and making jokes. Le duc de Baroque and I had to sit in the corridor, he in his flashy new wheelchair, I damp and tired. He insisted on staying with me till my sister arrived, no matter how his head nodded (he has a head rest now); he said to my offers of taking him upstairs for a nap, "It'll only make it harder to wake up when we get there;" when I talked of putting his sweater on, because there was chilly air from the door, he said, "no, no, I'll get them to do it once I'm already on the plane." So we waited, & I had hot chocolate in a styrofoam cup from Thelma in the coffee shop. It's Rosh Hoshanah now, so the coffee shop is closed for three days; Thelma's going down to Florida till next week.

While I was in there I ran into the rabbi, and he was once again very interested to hear the details of my flight. It turns out he is an ex-flying instructor! He still loves it and goes and does flight-simulator sessions, setting himself particular precision tasks like tight take-offs to perform. He says, "Lots of people love flying for the thrills. I don't like thrills, I don't like the roller coaster; I like precision! It's the precision of flying that I love."

Then sis, and Mama Baroque, and Shady Glen, and packing materials, and packing. Right now Mama B is taking Truman to his puppy play centre for the day so we can all do our things. He has gone running off with one of his favourite stuffed toys clutched in his mouth like a bunny. (We did see a bunny on the hillside yesterday, too.)

Now it's chilly and the leaves are turning. The deck furniture is inside the house. Today, the book-shipping saga. My nephew will arrive and drive me to the airport shuttle, and I'll go to the airport (how, with these bags, I literally have no idea, there are too many of them and all heavy and I only have two arms, & I know that at some stage before I get home I will experience despair and maybe cry on a concourse) and onto the plane, and home, where Mlle B is taking the morning off school tomorrow so she can be there when I arrive.

Mama B has her presentation tonight, and tomorrow sets off for North Carolina for the winter, and the house here will be shut up.

elegant Wallace Stevens: thoughts from a master, part two

Wallace Stevens lived in Hartford. He composed poetry in his head as he walked to his job in the Hartford Insurance company every day up Asylum Avenue, the same route my school bus used to take me on. He was the vice president of the company by the time he retired, and had fiercely kept his two lives separate. I love the story about how, when somebody at the publishers was desperately trying to get hold of him for some reason and resorted in the end to the company phone number, Stevens hissed into the phone: "What are you doing calling me on this number? I told you never to call me here!"

I also love the one about him taking the train down to Philadelphia for a business meeting, back in the day when civilised people took trains, and refusing all offers of a car to pick him up at the station. He said he'd walk. And walk he did, from the station to the meeting,m and showed up with a bag of doughnuts for everybody. ("Let be be finale of seem; the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.")

As a child I was never taken down his road without my mother saying, as we went past, "there's Wallace Stevens' house." And there it is. No plaque, nothing like that here. Only the arguably-most-important American poet of the 20th century lived there.

It's worth pointing out, too, in the midst of all the fray, that his first book, Harmonium - one of the two or three most infuential books in American poetry - was published when he was 44.

Here are some more thoughts from the wonderful man:

The poem is a nature created by the poet.

The thing seen becomes the thing unseen. The opposite is, or seems to be impossible.

The world is the only thing fit to think about.

All history is modern history.

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself. This is so not only logicalyl but categorically.

The tongue is an eye.

The time will come when poems like Paradise will seem like very triste contraptions.

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

The word must be the thing it represents; otherwise, it is a symbol. It is a question of identity.

When the mind is like a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else.

There must be something of the peasant in every poet.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

Life is the elimination of what is dead.

The fundamental difficulty in any art is the problem of the normal.

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.

The acquisitions of poetry are fortuitous; trouvailles. (Hence, its disorder.)

Exhibitionism attaches and is not inherent.

The eye sees less than the tongue says. The tongue says less than the mind thinks.

The poet must not adapt his experience to that of the philosopher.

Thoughts tend to collect in pools.

Life is not free from its forms.

the little circles our lives go round in

Picture me last week. I'm pacing the home baking aisle of Morrisons (née Safeways), and there are no meringue nests in sight.* The flan bases, pre-cooked pie shells, trifle sponges and other summer pudding bits are also missing. I have searched the store three times. Are they perhaps on special somewhere, in a huge display that I couldn't see for tripping over it, because it's now strawberry season?

Odd: because this entire neighbourhood is pulsing with Sunday lunches, garden parties and spoilt kids, though of course it's possible they no longer want to eat anything that isn't sold in the Farmer's Market. (n.b., Fresh & Wild doesn't sell meringues either.)

I ask a rather hulking young man in a grey tunic. He looks earnestly up and down the shelves for a moment and then turns to me, abashed: "Um... can you tell me what type of product it is?"

I explain that it is an entire family of products - though he doesn't understand "bases for summer puddings," either - that is missing. I try to describe what the packaging looks like. I tell him meringues are made of sugar and egg whites.

Ho looks so vague I know he has no earthly notion what I am talking about, but he goes to "check the warehouse" and comes back with the sad news that they are not there. But they will be in on Monday.

Cut to Tuesday this week. I have spent two days off sick. I'm only in Morrisons because I have nothing left to eat and have no choice. I feel, as the saying goes, like shit; I'm craving some sugar to get me home, but even in the sweet aisle it's all chocolate, which of course has fat in it. I return to the meringue-and-flan-case section, but it's no better than last week.

This is strange: my friend the Cat Lady has only just been on the phone complaining that she bought some meringues over the weekend and her kids have eaten them (if the cats had eaten them she'd think they were adorable little darlings), and I know she goes to Morrisons. Everybody does. I did ask her if shed thought of telling the kids they were only for her, or else buying twice as many, but she hadn't.

So there I am. I'm not prepared to spend yet another half an hour trailing through the entire shop looking for a summer puddings display that I know, deep down, I won't find. I don't dare ask another young person because I know he will have been brought up by some slut who never made nice things for her kids - or maybe by a superwoman who never uses shopbought pudding bases - either way, there will be no point. I seek out the manager. I stand by the information desk for fifteen minutes waiting for him, and when he arrives he is wearing a pink shirt which is reassuringly different from the grey tunics of the people who don't know the products.

He's called Steve. He looks as if he lives in Essex, and has bright blue eyes. I tell Steve my story.

"Ah," he says, cheerfully. "There's a funny thing there, it's complicated." I like him! It's complicated!

"I knew it was!" I say eagerly. "Because it's not just the meringues, it's the flan bases and the pre-cooked pie - "

"and the trifle sponges," Steve says.

"Yes," I say. "And it's strawberry season!"

Steve tells me that a while ago they had a directive from the main company telling them to de-merchandise that stuff from the home baking section -

"De-merchandise it?" I say.

"Yes, and to re-merchandise it from another section."

I look at him expectantly. "...which is...?"

"Well, the other section doesn't exist," he says. "So consequently, unfortunately, nobody's placed the order..."

Of course the other section doesn't exist. How could it?

"But it's strawberry season!" I tell him. "I even thought it might all be in a big summer pudding display somewhere."

I can't tell from Steve's face whether he has thought of this angle before; it is convincing though, isn't it! He tells me there may just still be some out back; he'll go check. I cultivate a taste for slightly old meringues as I stand there waiting, but when he arrives his hands are empty. He leads me through the shop, though, to show me the exact stand where the meringues (etc) are going to be on display when they do arrive. He says, "It's too late today, but I tell you what I'll do, I'll do the order myself, tomorrow morning." He's riffling through a clipboard. "That's Tuesday. They should arrive sometime on Wednesday, so we'll have them on display by Thursday, that's day after tomorrow. See this? We'll use this whole stand, I get what you're saying, see these packets of custard powder here?"

I love Steve. I like his style. I'm also grateful to him for the whole story about de-merchandising, which is frankly better than Morrisons meringues. So I'm tired but happy. I thank him excessively for his trouble (and his pink shirt) and then I say, "Listen, Steve, while I've got you here - there's another thing I've always wanted to talk to somebody about, it's like a little dream of mine, if I ever got the manager's ear - you know, Ben and Jerry's do this amazing chocolate fudge brownie frozen yogurt, it tastes exactly like the ice cream but it has only 2.3g of fat per 100g!"

Steve's eyes light up. "Really?"

"Yes," I say to him. "It's frozen yogurt, But it tastes just like the ice cream!"

"Ohhh," he says happily. "I'll look into that..."

I say to him, "I can tell you right now that if you stock it half of my friends will buy it."**


* Regular readers will already be aware of how large meringues can loom in to a foodie person, with a sweet tooth, on a no-fat diet.

** I mean me and the Cat Lady, of course; we will buy enough for half of Stoke Newington.

galled again

The reason I've been around so much the last couple of days is that my bladder of gall has decided to kick up and gall me as much as possible in the limited time remaining to it. Aside from a black coffee and half a mango consumed in a friend's studio five minutes walk from Baroque Mansions on Saturday, the only thing I did all weekend was that poetry reading on Sunday afternoon. And jolly exciting that was, too! For two or three brief hours I forgot to be galled.* And I was home by eight.

Anyway, that's probably not connected. But I spent yesterday mostly in bed, with pretty constant twinges and flashes of pain, and steady achings in my upper right quadrant (as they call it; I like that it sounds like part of the world). It's not as if there's anything setting it off. I could not, somehow, face either of my two local grocery emporia - and, to be honest, could not face the frozen prawns that lurk, limp and wet, in my freezer - so my nourishment yesterday consisted of the following: 0%-fat yogurt with fruit; 0%-fat yogurt with maple syrup; plain bread with nothing on it; a Weight Watchers ice cream product with 2.1g of fat; a truly disgusting Ainsley Harriott dried packet soup with about 1g of fat in it;** and some leftover tomato sauce with tinned tuna in it, and rice. Total calories about 1,300. Total fat about 1/10th of my total daily recommended allowance (or, more accurately, yours).

Basically, if I am getting nothing to eat, neither is my gall bladder. So what gives! I slept, I padded around the house with twinges in my side, I opened the fridge, swore, and shut it again. My innards should have been sleeping like lambs.

So here's the deal. I went to the doctor this morning. The doctor has given me a prescription for painkillers and a note signing me off work till after the operation.

So here's the deal. I have an editing deadline; a tricky re-editing job to do, which could be outsourced I suppose, except that I'm the one who edited it the first time so I understand the document; two lots of design job to oversee; and a handover to organise for when I'm "really" off sick in July.

I could do the editing at home, but it will be harder to do the admin at home - and anyway, the HR department won't like "signed off sick, but editing at home" - it goes against all their principles. They probably won't even let me: I could edit this thing anyway, naughtily, and just email it to the chief exec, I suppose.

I've also cancelled an engagement for tonight, that I was really looking forward to. Just a quiet drink with some of my best friends , my old gang - me drinking juice, them eating dinner, probably, me getting a cab home. But now, me sitting home, them eating dinner.

Your correspondent could just cry. In fact she nearly did, yesterday. Oh, and today. It is doing her head in.


* Not to the extent of actually eating the food, I hasten to add. I had two glasses of a pleasant dry rosé, sitting in a pub garden, which seems moderate to me, if not to my you-know-what.

** If I was a professional cook I would SO not allow my name to be put on anything like that. It does taste vaguely of dried peppers but it is not really like food.

the lasers are green

... and life is still okay. A short post here, with the text view enlarged to about a million, in case anyone is wondering how my rude consultant was yesterday. I'll tell you: he's lovely, now that baby's born! I think it's the first: he beamed when I asked, said he's got "a big boy" and he's called Tom, and told me: "It's wonderful." Tom Jeckyll - nice name.

I've had 20 laser burns (sorry to the squeamish) in each iris, and it was not as bad as expected. Every laser was less painful than the one laser I had in my right eye in, I think, 1993 - though some were, admittedly, awful. Apparently if they're too hot they make a bubble of gas that then pops in your eye, or something like that; it feels as if it's popping in your brain. But that was only about five of them. The consultant was very informative and pleasant, told me exactly what was going on, let me stop and rest when it popped, and kept saying things like, "okay, only six more to go".

I was the youngest person, as always, by at least 20 years. The others were all having the same laser treatment I had in my twenties - & I'm off the map. (One old guy, when I got led off for the lasers, said onimously to the group at large: "they're taking her in a different direction..." and indeed, I was in the basement.)

Crazy day, crazy experience.

Right now the usual contingent of four 13-year-old girls are babbling happily in every corner of Baroque Mansions. There's a big corn-fed chicken in the oven, ice cream in the freezer & a pound of carrots in a roasting pan.

I have some final edits (I might enlist one of the girls, sadly undereducated as they are, see previous posts, to help me) on an interview with the Scottish poet Rob Mackenzie; due, of course, sort of now, but everyone knows my eyes are like sieves.

First, however, I will continue listening to Sam Waterston reading the wonderful and unsung (really: it is amazing) Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder. News that stays news! More on that when I can type for more than five minutes without sending my eyes into a tizz.

Friday round-up, I mean Roundhouse: just keep thinking about the Dresden Dolls

Work. No, that's an order.

Ms Baroque has been editing as hard as she can for ten hours a day, and the tide of documents is rising. There's no food in the house; lunch is thus costing £6 a day, to say nothing of the crucial morning coffee, to say less of the disgusting sushi-&-cheeseburger-fest in Victoria Station the other night after a (yay!) drink after work with the new pals.

On the plus side I did get the TV working again. By the time I came in and got something to eat (bowl of spinach and broad beans, with some bacon which wasn't off; a roll, taken from the freezer and put into the toaster oven; quite a large amount of Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream) it was well past 9, and I was just, starkly, unable to:

• answer emails,
  
• type out the poem I'm working on, which exists only in one incomplete hard copy and has been untouched for days
• do anything else involving a screen
  
• speak to anyone
• make the bed that needs making for me to sleep in.

I was, on the other hand, able to:

• cut my finger badly on a brand-new and very sharp kitchen knife, trying to make carrot sticks out of a carrot from Morrisons that has absolutely no flavour left in it anyway
• ring Telewest and, as I say, get the picture back on the TV - it was something to do with the SCART leads...
• watch three episodes of EastEnders
• take Jon Stallworthy's biography of Louis MacNeice off the shelf - being in possession of a brand-new commission to write about it for a special MacNeice edition of the Contemporary Poetry Review - and look at it vaguely for about three minutes whilst thinking of all the other research I need to do
• sleep on the couch for the third night in a row

The yoga teacher says my kidney energy is very depleted. Tell me about it. He asked if I'd been feeling tired lately. Ha! I said: "Exhausted": I honestly thought I might cry.* He was giving me an acupressure back massage at the time, (see, life not all bad) and when he said, "Yeah, I can tell," I suddenly felt I might cry (this also happens in the yoga class, when you lie on the floor and they're saying, "just let the earth hold you - you don't have to do anything").

(The other thing that did the same thing to me this week was when a New Work Pal, asking all those questions, says, "and do you have a new partner?" I go, "No-oo...." and she says: "OH! Why not?? I thought you would, you're so sweet!" Well, tell me about it. I know it's not me that's not sweet.)

The other day I stumbled across this bizarre and amusing thing: Baroque in Hackney automatically-translated into French (or something very like French), which it alarms me that someone might read. My favourite part was the rendering of my friend Jen Pepper's name to "Poivre de Jen". I will try and type out the insanely long URL soon, to make a link. Mean time:

"Deux jours dans être arrières au travail, donc, et se sentir comme je « n'ai fait rien » - la signification ce qu'exactement, je ne sais pas, sauf que moi ont des piles de factures et de papiers et doivent aller voient la banque au sujet de quelque chose mais ont été trop fatigués pour courir autour en mon heure de déjeuner, et n'ont pas toujours une bonne liste de magasins pour envoyer des poésies au loin à, qui a besoin faire mal - pendant deux jours dedans, comme parole, j'ai presque édité un document entier ; J'ai eu quelques grandes grosses idées dynamiques et ai commencé à les vendre autour de l'organisation ; J'ai écrit un bon début sur un amusement (oui !) la nouvelle poésie, que je pense sortirai tout à fait ambitieux mais tombe mon stylo ; J'ai finalement trouvé ma citation de Primo Levi (j'ai dû acheter le livre, encore, et étrangement il n'était pas facile de trouver) et le mettre dans l'article, que je peux finalement envoyer outre de la finale édite au rédacteur ; J'ai lu ce grand article, concernant une force de police au Mexique tournant la marée sur le crime en enseignant leurs dirigeants à lire ; et celui-ci, qui me confirme dans ma haine de Starbucks ; J'ai été dans l'encore un autre de ces arguments au sujet des ventes de poésie contre « quels lecteurs veulent » etc. ; J'ai lu un certain Auden (ce lecteur veut Auden) ; J'ai lu une pile des poésies qu'un ami m'a envoyé ; J'ai texted Dieu de roche de 15 ans en France (aucune réponse ; il est de retour samedi nuit), et suivi les autres à la maison de leur père ; et j'ai été pour après-travaille la boisson (mon premier verre de vin en 10 jours !) dans la barre d'hôtel de chardon à la station de Victoria, qui est un endroit de fab à se réunir pour des boissons, réellement. Vous obtenez ce grand sentiment démodé d'hôtel, qui est toujours un tonique ; Je pourrais avoir été Mlle Marple, s'asseyant là. La fois prochaine je prendrai le tricotage..."

In other news, six phone calls in, I know the name of my eye consultant's secretary (Bernadette) and may be closer to getting a) a new prescription for the Poison Eye Drops, in case of emergency, and b) an appointment for the laser thing I missed when I had flu (which seems delightful, in comparison, in retrospect). They are making ominous noises about me having to go back in to the clinic again first, which I wish they wouldn't. They seem to have no idea how much it upsets me every time and just sets me back all over again.

* note from future: gall stones.

HOWEVER! In a major coup and thanks to my charming and kind friend Sarah, I had better go get dressed, and make it good: because this is where I'm going tonight.

And now I must stop typing before I get blood on this keyboard.

low culture, low expectations

Several days in which Ms Baroqe has done nothing. She has cosseted what remains of her eyes (much better today); tried to read the Forward-Prize-winning Swithering, by Robin Robertson, but was defeated by a combination of Celtic twilight and trying to read it (in that light!) with one eye shut, which doesn't bode very well either for Paradise Lost; she has bought and cooked the minimum necessary foodstuffs, except for a Ben & Jerry's Oh My! Apple Pie! ice cream (yes), and has cleaned the kitchen. The mushroom, chicken & lemon risotto was a perfect autumn Saturday dish. She did a hell of a lot of laundry. She went for a lovely walk in Clissold Park, with the intention of finding the tree the fifteen-year-old rock god's crowd hang out under, and giving him a bollocking in public - but they weren't there, so it was just a nice walk in the park. The conkers are coming out, and if it hadn't been so painful she would have brought home a decorative bowlful of them in their prickly pale green pods.

Excitingly, she caught up with EastEnders after a long lull - but still has no idea what's happened to Sonia and Martin, the odious pair, to say nothing of that noxious storyline where Ian Beale was pretending young flibbertigibbet What's-her-face was his 'wife' for the purpose of impressing those weird charity swingers (why has Jane taken him back?? Oh - because she's a soap character).

See, we do manage bits of low culture in this house. I'm trying to ban reality TV for being too boring, inane and the augury of the death of civilisation, but I'm all for the soaps. You just can't ask too much of them.

And I'll have to get someone to come and read me Paradise Lost, but even if one did that, these days the little minx would be trying to watch America's Next Top Model at the same time (talk about HELL).

science - now that's poetry!

Quarry workers in Mexico seem to have discovered the New World's first known poetry in a pile of road-building rubble. The writing is on, not the wall, but a stone which is nearly 3,000 years old: a relic of the Olmec civilisation, the oldest known in the Americas, long before the Mayan. There's been lots of interest in the press - I've seen this cited in a few places - after the information was published in Science magazine last week, though the stone was found in 1999. Of course, all through the seven years since it was found the quarry has been in use, so as an archaeological site it's now about useless.

The slab of stone is 5 inches thick and weighs 26 pounds (the same as my middle baby when he was 8 months old; but he was off the scales), which is prompting archaeologists to refer to it as 'portable' - I say if this is portable then it's more like the first known TV.

Interestingly, though, and more to our purposes here in the beautified halls of - well - (one hesitates to say 'Hackney', though the fact that beauty can exist even here is surely the whole raison-d'être of beauty?) - the archaeologists have perceived patterns that looks like paired lines, with paired repetitions. In other words, they feel that the oldest known writing on the whole American continents could quite probably be something like rhymed couplets.

I don't know about you, but I'm pleased about that.

Also, if you look at the signs in the key above, you will see that it was a nice, happy poem, about going out for ice cream after eating corn on the cob... I think it may even have a pineapple in it.

A few years ago there was a fantastically interesting series about the Ancient Egyptians which the kids and I were all riveted by, in which the presenter showed these small - c4in - stone tablets used by builders as notepads. They were full of shopping lists and to-do lists, and little snippets of gossip, like, "I saw him yesterday with so-&-so's wife" (and if more than one wife: what a to-do!). That was just as gratifying as the poetry find. Human beings are just endlessly endearing creatures.

I couldn't find the article online, which is why I haven't linked to it. I was pleased, though, to see in another headline that "The Galápagos Islands Kiss Their Goat Problem Goodbye".

if you can't stand the heat

Ms Baroque has been thinking about cooking. Not actually doing it, mind - in this heat!? I can barely eat anything, let alone cook. That is sad, given how much I love grilling aubergines and courgettes, but as we know, if you can't do it you might as well think about it.

Someone said to me yesterday, with no preamble whatever: "So, Delia or Nigella?" Just like that. And in a flash I said: "Delia."

Isn't your copy of Delia's Complete Cookery Course totally worn out? Don't we love her chicken paprika? However enthusiastic Nigella may be, and of course she does have those biscotti I love so much, Delia, well she is so calmly about just making the dinner. Making it without fuss, but with a decent lashing of cream, you know. No licking of fingers, no showing off for the kids. Just this is how you do this, and then you do this, and put it together like this, et voilá!

I should say I love Nigella, expecially her epoch-making first book, How to Eat. She has fresh ways with classic recipes, which is of course better if you knew the classic versions in the first place; but I did, so that's okay. She has great cakes. And she has a wonderful version of lemon surprise pudding. (The surprise, of course, is that it's chocolate.)

When you get right down to it, mystique aside, cooking is making something. I've always loved making things, & in cooking there is chemistry. Things transform when mixed with other things and subjected to processes and heat. (So do I: I'm melting.) At about the age of 12 I discovered I could have pancakes whenever I wanted, and that it was more fun then messing with my chemistry set that didn't make anything happen - & I've never really looked back since. It's great, after a long day at work, to come home and do something tactile and constructive with earthy things like vegetables - or ice cream ingredients. There's a restorative element to it. If Nigella is all about having great food, and serving it to your friends, Delia is about enjoying the quiet happiness of making and doing.

And I've discovered another thing. She's a rock chick. Delia, yes, our very own Delia, baked the cake on the front of Let It Bleed.