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.

the laurels of unrest and other mundane matters

Ahhh... it's that moment in the week again. The moment when you have lugged the shopping (from Fresh & Wild and the Turkish shop, because once again you have managed to completely miss the supermarket - every supermarket - because you didn't leave the house till quarter to three, and then spent two hours drinking coffee with your friend) up the hill, and have opened your organic Bergerac and left the lettuce to get crushed by the Adriatic salami, and put the first load of laundry into the drier, and have checked your email and realised how late it really is, how late, and nearly Monday morning already and all that.

Picture it. Baroque Mansions is in semi-darkness, only one light on. Mlle B and her friend who is spending the night have not yet arrived. The whole place is quiet. Even Mozart is not on. The balcony door is open and the sky is dark, but the moon is round the other side, by the kitchen. What could have been stars ("The elderly and frail," according to Anthony Hecht, "Who've lasted through the night/ Cold brows and silent lips,/ For whom the rising light/ Entails their own eclipse") are in fact planes, loads of 'em, flying in all directions, unimaginably full of real people; and equally full of unseen characters are the three tower blocks over by Green Lanes, and all the little Victorian houses whose tiny orange lights form the horizon.

There are of course things still to do; you can't rest on your laurels just because it is Sunday evening. There's the laundry; and the new potatoes and overpriced organic chickenburgers (which Mlle B has just thoughtfully rung you from her father's house to say she is not hungry for, as she had her "lunch" at 5pm); and the bed slats to nail to the useless Ikea bed frame so they will stop falling down the whole time, with the nails so thoughtfully given you by your friend, the Cat Lady's, husband, because you also missed the hardware shop; and the washing up, plus all the other stuff you have to do, which is frankly rather a lot, and you are thinking your nails will have to go hang, though (you are hoping) not in the form of hangnails...

But - as the parenthetical quote above shows - you are a Person With an Idea. Oh yes. More than one, even! But one is an idea for your 2,000 words on Anthony Hecht, and it is a surprising and fun one, and one you can do, if only you can get hold of that one book you don't have... but it is still four days till payday. But there is a Borders gift card in the house, which could have some money on it. Only by going to the till at Borders can you ascertain this, and only at Foyles will they have the book.

However. There is Darian Leader, whose books I liked, to read on why we have completely lost the plot with our relationships and emotional lives; and there is James Wood on what makes a fictional character real (i.e., convincing, or surprising, or successful) (which could also apply to living people); and there is Sarah Crown's interview with Edwin Morgan, who at 87 didn't win the TS Eliot prize last week - even though his barely intelligible recorded reading was FAR more compelling than any of the live ones (though some of those were good). The result was far too depressing even to write about.

In fact, I think we'll leave Morgan with the last word, shall we? Substitute "January" for "February" and "Hackney" for "Hertfordshire" (and "American" for "Canadian" - but you get the idea. And "pedant" for "wolf," I suppose) and it could be the Baroque weekend exactly:

Lock the gates and man the fences! The lone Canadian timber-wolf has escaped into the thickets, the ditches, the distances! Blow the silver whistles!
The zoo-born sniffs the field mist,
The hedgerow leaves, liberty wind
of a cold February Friday.

Saturday trudging, loping, hungry, free but hunted,
dogs tracking, baying, losing scent, shouts dying,
fields dangerous, hills worse, night welcome, but the hunger
now! And Sunday many miles, risking farms, seen panting,
dodging the droning helicopter shadows,
flashing past gardens, wilder, padding along a highway,
twilight, sleepy birdsong, dark safety – till a car
catches the grey thing in its rushing headlights,
throws it to the verge, stunned, ruptured, living, lying,
fangs dimly scrabbling the roots of Hertfordshire.

stuff and the empty plate

It sounds nice, doesn't it. Empty... Dinner plate, dental plate, tectonic plate, platelet - all of these, and also the other one, the plate I can't seem to get anything off of this week. The one that should be one-way, you empty it and it stays empty, not this strange magic re-filling one where you can never just move on to the next thing. Oh GOD! Maybe it's the New Renaissance. It's Simon Barraclough's new anti-para-conspectivity. Nothing ever goes away.

This week-and-a-half was always going to be fuller than full, with two book reviews and some other things, to say nothing of the Stoke Newington School GCSE Options Evening. (And having now had that one, let me tell you: figuring out those options was like doing a bloody GCSE.) But it was going to be manageable. (Someone said to me the other night, when I was complaining about it: "Oh come on Katy! I've seen you with a pile of books this high, that you had to review in a week, and you were sitting there drinking wine!") I'm wondering if last week's flu, impacted wisdom tooth and gum infection, and subsequent antibiotics, as well as some other minor medical items I won't bore you with here, have taken their tiny little tolls. I'm scattered. I'm stressed. I'm awake at 6 in the morning.

An editor has sent me a list of 19, count 'em, queries about a review!! 19! Some are little but some are big. One means trying to substantiate my reference to a book I don't own and thus can't look anything up in. As an editor myself I can only admire him, I'd have done the same, and as to the polite comment that he even thought I might not be over my virus yet, one can only hope that's what it is. But the book, laid out to the publisher's margin and font specifications, turned out massively over-extent in proof. Everything I touch at work ricochets back to me, unfinished or not quite right yet. I'm now scared to send anything off! Yesterday I even managed to delete an entire email I had just written & had to write the whole thing again. So everything that was supposed to be off my plate last week, both at home and at work, is still here, needing tweaks and checks and redoing, but now it's Friday and I have this week's things to do! And next week I really have to do something else, and that one's hard. Then there's the admin, all backed up both at home and at work because I've been too busy messing everything else up to touch it.

I have to return my new mobile phone, I ordered it over the internet and it is a complete disaster. And sort out Mlle B's account. But that's 20 minutes on the phone and a trip to the post office, which takes out reviewing and/or work time. And I haven't had a chance to go to the Abbey National and find out how I got so overdrawn overnight, but it seems I have. It's just a little too far away. And I haven't had much in the way of lunch breaks, what with the rain, and the extra work, and having to leave early for the parents' evening... No, no. Even after a week of anti-para-conbiotics I still have a toothache. Maybe I'm grinding my teeth in the night, during those rare moments when I'm actually asleep. (Also, I keep missing the last pill of the day, because I fall asleep in the evening without meaning to - it's like Apollo's cloak falling over the sky in Fantasia - and then I wake up later and stagger to bed and forget to take it. I'm just so tired.)

And the bed slats keep falling down, bloody Ikea bed, I've tried wedging them in place but they just fall down again. Jesus! Nobody can live like that. Maybe nail them into place along the outside edge. And I have to go buy a train ticket to Norfolk, Because that's where I'm going in two weeks' time and I'm paranoid about train fares - they start out cheap and, like mobile calls, suddenly rocket - but if I queue, I'll be late for work or miss the post office or not have time to get any groceries, or let another editor down or something, and I can't do it on the internet because I'm overdrawn and anyway then you just have to queue anyway to pick up the ticket.... I shouldn't even have been writing this. No, this can't all be me. It has to be something in the stars. Maybe the stellar plates have slipped.

these things never happen in Liberty's

Some of my favourite-ever moments have been in supermarkets, and some of my very favourite Baroque in Hackney moments, too. The time I fell over in Somerfields, for example, lives on as a glorious high point (shame I wasn't writing a blog the time I slipped and cracked my skull in the Isle of Dogs Asda! I was sat there for ages with a lady holding a bag of peas to my head, asking if I was all right, and all I could say was, "um... I don't know...").

Well, not much happening lately on those kinds of fronts here in Baroque Mansions. Thank God, you might say. However, friend-of-a-friend, novelist and amusing blogger Charles Lambert brings front-line news from a Somerfields somewhere worryingly near to you.

He writes:

"My mother’s local supermarket, Somerfield, has rearranged its tills, dividing them not according to how many items you might need to pay for, but the container, trolley or basket, you’ve chosen to collect them in. The trolley tills are where you’d expect tills to be; the basket tills have been siphoned off behind a barrier laden with the sort of goods some supermarket designer must have deemed the most probable impulse buys for basket carriers. I didn’t know this until today. I was emptying my basket on the belt when the woman told me her till was for trolleys only.

- Why? I said.

- Because baskets are over there.

- But why?

- Because I can only take for trolleys.

- But I’ve got enough stuff here to fill a trolley.

- But you haven’t got a trolley. I can’t do baskets. I can only do trolleys."

What can have happened next? Click here to find out.

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.

I'm a vessel of pure experience

A discussion elsewhere has reminded me of the pleasure to be had in simply observing everyone around you. The context was writing - as in, the hours one has beguiled in crowded buses or waiting rooms, simply writing down what one sees.

This was something I learned to do early on, no doubt heavily - and I mean heavily - influenced by Harriet the Spy (which I still maintain is one of the great books EVER), who used to go around a self-designated' spy route' every day after school peering in the windows and skylights (and lift shafts) of strangers, and recording their lives.

It's also, of course, a common or garden writing exercise.

It's also fun.

The catalyst was a poem called "In the Atrium," by the New York poet Kathleen Ossip, which begins, "Ha! I'm a vessel of pure experience..." Here is a bit of it:

...and another group of women, bussed downstate
for a bargain matinee, want never to rise
from hunter green leatherette club chairs and I note
that I was brought up to dress like them - plaid shirts,
stickpins, ski jackets, oxfords - but that was before
I became a vessel of pure experience
and I note the fringed jazz-age torchères and the flower
arrangements afflicted with gigantism and verisimilitude,
Nile green and fuchsia silk dendrobiums
wilting even before their uppermost petals
relax into fullness, and one of the upstate women -
the youngest one, with the cockscomb bangs and the niecelike
impassive aspect - undramatically lets a mouthful
of tea dribble back into the white stoneware mug
and the maitre d' shuffles over and switches on
the electronic player piano which begins to ring
'Matchmaker, Matchmaker' and the man and woman behind me
drawl and balk in a lazy dialogue
about the meeting they've just left and territory
review and we should meet Ted tomorrow, okay?...

This is well-timed, because just last night when I finally got to the checkout at Morrisons, I suddenly because aware that the young woman at the next aisle was hissing into her phone while she put the food on the conveyor belt. "You're a fucking bastard!" she said. I looked over to see if it was a joke. It wasn't. "Something else I couldn't hear and then - it's because you're sitting in the fucking CAR while I'm in here buying all YOUR CRAP! Fuck you." She shut the phone and kept unloading her trolley, more and more vociferously, till she was slamming things down, looking really upset. Suddenly she just lost it and started crying, big crying, only in public, and she was unloading her trolley - it was a big shop. He really was a bastard. (The question of why she didn't just storm out, leave all the food lying on the checkout and go home on the bus, is another issue. It's complicated. You know how it never even occurs to you - and she had a pound in the trolley.)

She suddenly looked at me. I hope she saw solidarity. When I turned around once to see how big the queue was - the guy in front was very slow - I saw an infinitesimal but unmistakable flicker on the face of the girl behind me. We were all in it together. Poor thing.

And this morning there was a huge black guy with a pencil moustache and a pinstripe suit sitting right next to me, snoring. The guy opposite, in a yellow sports top, kept looking - strangely, at me, though I wasn't the one snoring. He was reading a book open to a page of drawings illustrating how to deflect a violent assault.

princess and pea, bashed my knee, free bottle of Corbieres, you can't get me!

It's been quiet here in Baroque Villas the past few days: we've had a bit of melodrama, which sort of kept me away from the desk, & which could even have been witnessed by my fellow N16 blogger Quink as he made the rounds of his local supermarket, the inestimable (no, really, I couldn't) Somerfields on Stamford Hill.

It was approximately 12.45 pm on Saturday when I slipped - oh yes I did - on about a third of a squished pea pod as I crossed the Somerfields produce section on my way to the bread aisle, to tell my daughter I'd remembered we already had some tomatoes.

That may not sound like much of a story.

At first I had no idea what I'd slipped on because it was so flipping small it was practically invisible. And another customer kicked it under a stand in disgust when she saw what it had done to me (a shop assistant later had to retrieve it for evidence). Then I couldn't stand up, but had to remain doubled over, balanced on one foot, clutching my left kneecap, while some particularly sheeplike shoppers stared at me as if I were an intriguingly artificial-looking statue of a woman in pain. Then, after I had snapped in my best voice, "and I suppose no one will even find a member of staff so I can get some help???" several large young supermarket assistants gathered round me and stood there for four or five minutes, clucking sympathetically as they looked on with their sweet brown caring eyes.

Eventually I managed to straighten my spine. Someone said, vaguely, but with a dawning sense of purpose, "shall we go find Steve? He's had first aid training..." My knee was swelling this whole time like a little fast-growing puffball mushroom in the midst of a fairy circle. (Don't eat the food, you'll never get back to your own world.) Then someone said they'd get me a chair, which I sat in, right there by the salad section, with my left foot propped up on my daughter's (perched on the edge of the fridge, poor thing) healthy young knee.

Then a boy in a pink tie comes with a clipboard and I have to answer questions. "Where were you when you fell?" "Do you want us to call you an ambulance?" ("I have to ask you that," he said, embarrassed: "it says here, was medical care offered.") He goes, "maybe someone could get some frozen peas for your knee? Someone go get some frozen peas!" Why not, I say - it was their sodding evil pod that did this to me. He adds, "I'm just going to go and input this into the pc upstairs. They'll send you a report" (goodie!), and is gone. A girl arrives, looks at my knee, remarks the redness, feels around it with some spectacular home-french-polished nails, and takes charge of the boys. They get me another chair for my foot.

Then someone said the manager had decided I could have my shopping for free - incidentally, the smallest grocery shop in the history of my life - less than £15-worth. Why couldn't this have happened on a normal day, when I go in for two things and come out £45 lighter? Eh? So of course I suddenly remembered the milk. And I also realised I wasn't going to be spending the whole afternoon blissfully grilling courgettes, so I took some mangetout, 2 for £2 - which don't need coooking. Practical, see. And there had been a promise of some gum.

Well, it's getting boring, isn't it. Then the big one - his name is Jeremy - says, "I wish we could give you a nice big bunch of roses or something but we don't even have any!" (Remember it's Somerfields.) I can see he's thinking about his own mother. He's a nice boy. In the end he and his colleagues offer me a bottle of wine, and when I say, "Thanks, I will - I can at least drink myself into a stupor while I'm lying on the couch. But it has to be really dry", they look at me mournfully. "I - I don't really know much about wine," says Jeremy. So I hobble over to the wine section, where I peruse the France shelf. Nothing there costs more than six pounds. And I can barely stand up. However, there is one unusual-looking bottle, a Corbieres for I think £4.99 - a snip among the Jacobs Creek - with the look of something good about it. Mine. Pink tie boy wraps it for me, & I hobble back to the exit where Jeremy is waiting to give me a lift home.

We pass the newspaper stand. "I could really do with a Guardian..." I say, "as I'm going to be laid up all afternoon." Daisy's head is in her hands and she's groaning in chagrin. "Well it's all right for you!" snaps Mamma. "You're going to the park!"

We get in Jeremy's car. Of course this is all rather embarrassing, but the sad truth is that Ms Baroque a) does not even own a car and b) cannot in fact walk. So I gush to Jeremy, "This is so nice of you!"

"I feel responsible," he says, "It's my section."

"And you know what?" I hear myself saying to him, "I did actually notice now spotless it was. All except the bit I slipped on."

(The disclaimer runs like this: and I didn't open the bottle of wine till last night, and it is indeed very pleasant. Mont Tauch Corbieres, 2005. On the couch on Saturday afternoon I watched a DVD of "The Constant Gardener," but that is another story. I spent so long with the peas on my knee that it was still frozen as solid as one of Lord Franklin's men an hour after I took them off. It worked: the knee is mending a treat. I never did meet Steve.)