Frydmania

Some writing stays with you – but sometimes for less typical reasons. Did you ever sit and write things out for the sake of writing things out? For whatever reason, the poem I copied out, over and over, was the first verse of The Lady of Shalott:

‘On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye
That clothe the wold and meet the sky
And through the field a road runs by
To many towered Camelot…’

Forgive me if it is possibly tower’d, or something of that kind. These days seem to bring precious little handwriting – except for shopping lists, to do lists and the like – so handwriting for its own sake feels rather remote.

Perhaps it’s an overly teenage girl thing. Perhaps it says more about the time when fountain pens were routine (albeit with interchangeable ink cartridges so if you suddenly felt like expressing yourself in green ink, you could).

It probably also says a certain amount about that time in your teens when you are ‘trying on’ different alternatives: different shapes to letters, different ways of doing your hair, different musical likes and dislikes, highly influenced by your peers.

I know that I consciously picked up certain handwriting habits from observing how friends, teachers, family wrote. I no longer really know what was originally mine – now the hand is all mine, for better or worse.

I don’t know quite why I picked this poem – though my family does tend towards remembering, and reusing, words, phrases, bits of poems.

I think both parents may have been required to learn longer poems by rote at school – but they still seem to remember them. My mum would quote a line or two of this poem, at least – and there was a Tennyson collection on a shelf that I could look at.

For some reason, I stuck to the first verse for my writing – perhaps the second too? The drama picks up later when she spots Sir Lancelot…the rest you should read for yourself.

One of my school friends was keen on Pre-Raphaelite pictures, and I have in my mind the image of the classic one of the Lady of Shalott as I write this. Arthurian legend, romance, plotlines that resemble Greek tragedies, it’s all still perfectly popular too.

You don’t have to be keen on particular styles of handwriting to want to do this.
It’s quite soothing, really. You could knit, you could sew, you could dry the dishes or methodically pick apart Lego blocks and put them Back In The Box. (Hmm. Is that soothing? Sometimes.)

But you could also write. And if you get the chance to linger with a poem, a verse, through the movement of pen on paper – it becomes part of you in the way that the best stories can do. And that is always a good thing.

It’s January, and my own kitchen is getting a bit of a blitz. A couple of the cupboards have see-through doors, and at times I rearrange the contents, looking for a pleasing combination. It is the power of food containers as icons.

In the Night Kitchen is one of my favourite books. By Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, it is not as well known, though I think it deserves to be.

There was a time when the book was banned from some public libraries in the United States – because the hero, Mickey, falls out of his pyjamas fairly early on in the story, and spends most of the rest of the time naked.

Luckily, he is not too draughty, partly through the adventures he finds in the Night Kitchen. But partly, our attention is taken well away from Mickey, and up to the skyline of the Night Kitchen, which, for me, is where the real magic is found.

Food containers are part of our every day lives. They are familiar, comforting, instantly recognisable, often. Their changes over history are even charted by some, like Robert Opie, whose collecting of packaged household objects in the UK resulted in a museum, now in London.

In Sendak’s book, they become skyscrapers, buildings that form the backdrop of the Night Kitchen. There are people in the kitchen too – and memorable verse, lest I seem to underplay the words side – but there is something about the kitchen writ large that fascinated me.

Other kitchen paraphenalia is also part of the skyline – a box grater, and I think a giant whisk is in there too. And, trying not to give away too much of the story, even the Milky Way in the sky contains real milk.

I was fascinated by what you could learn about the world of the Night Kitchen through the pictures, promises, and so on that were part of the kitchen skyline. Particularly as a British reader, the items in the illustrations were seen from the outside, for me, as dreamlike in themselves.

I still enjoy some of this sense of entering another world when I encounter food packaging from other places. My inner social anthropologist loves a good mosey around supermarkets abroad, learning much from what is placed next to what; what is seen as pure, natural, clean and so on can certainly vary between cultures.

I love the look of food itself, too – don’t get me wrong. Markets, stalls of fruit and veg in particular, are pictures in themselves. But when I see people reuse containers with packaging on – like the large olive oil cans from Mediterranean countries, reused as planters, for example – part of me sighs happily.

Yes, it’s reusing. It’s adding a little separate colour. But just as ingredients, special dishes, take on their own internal mythology too us, depending on where and with whom we encountered them – so too do the food containers themselves.

You’ll be pleased to know I don’t go around kissing the food containers in my kitchen. They’re not those sort of icons.

But there is something of the promise of them, of the anticipation of something good, that is fully part of the Night Kitchen. And for that, I remain extremely grateful.

It could have been one of many things. I guess that you could call the Hundred Acre Wood a well-formed universe: after all, it has maps, hums to hum when walking through, and so on. But The Hobbit understandably stood out when I was little.

Not one map but many. Not just hums, but developed songs; beings with other languages, other scripts. Humans, yes, but somewhat different to us – and not that sympathetic as characters.

Humans alongside many others, with their own customs, their own strengths and weaknesses and prejudices and pigheadedness. Some so different that they need two books, and extra side-quests, to learn respect for each other.

My dad read The Hobbit to me. It may have been a gentle intro to science fiction – if so, it worked. I read The Lord of the Rings for myself – his copies.

When I was looking to buy a copy of The Hobbit for someone, we hunted extra hard for one with the pencil sketch cover of Smaug on the front. There is a certain fascination of that subdued cover, set against the richness of the story.

At first reading, you are propelled by the story. I remember being caught up in the plot, and the separate set pieces of the journey: meeting the trolls, the journey through the forest of spiders. And above all, Bilbo, trapped in the dark, desperately riddling with Gollum, and coming across the ring.

Later, you realise the extra layers within the wider universe: the environmentalism; the struggle between leaving behind one of your own – or what if they want to remain? The emotions become writ larger: fear, greed, pride, desperation, daring.

It is no wonder that ‘universe epics’ are so popular, in different settings. There is both the potential for many things to happen, and the growing internal logic: what choices a character may or may not make, because of what we know about the universe.

I’ve visited a fair few of universes over time. The desert world of Dune. The Harry Potter series, with everyday reality existing alongside Harry’s magical locations. Equally, Katie Morag’s island of Struay (again with map, and similarities with certain real islands we hold dear).

TV world is equally enamoured with its universes: whether Downton or Coronation Street, The West Wing or Dr Who, and many more.

For myself, I’m still looking towards writing shorter pieces – so blog writing is good training really. But secretly, I harbour a hope that a universe will some day unfold itself to me, and I will discover it too as I write.

Back to thinking about food again. No surprise. Many a fine reviewer has commented on Nigel Slater’s autobiography, Toast – and rightly so. What I want to think about is how it added permission to evoking nostalgia about food – and in brilliant prose.

Not an easy thing to write about, food. I thought I could, and then I started wrestling with it again last month, when doing my ingredient a day posts. Turns out that foods we love now, because we loved them way back when, can actually be hard to write about.

It’s fine to set the scene, fine to talk about how you felt when you tried them, how you seek them out since. But conveying the tastes, the eating experience, as it was at the time?

Sure, we have lots of phrases to talk about restaurant food, or quality of food in markets. But many of our strongest likes and dislikes form way before we have those expressions to hand. So dipping back into the past, conveying Just How It Felt…and then helping others to experience the same…well, hats off, I say.

Part of what I liked about it was that I knew some of the locations he wrote about. I could put myself in his shoes a little more, knowing the landscape, the local culture, and how people might respond to certain foods.

But what most of us like is that Toast is not about highbrow food – for all of Nigel Slater’s food accolades since. His evocation of different types of sweets, different tastes from packet products, familiar set meals, is of its time.

There are some of those tastes which we wouldn’t choose to revisit – there are others where it tasted just fine, whether or not it’s seen as a ‘proper’ ingredient now or not.

That’s also why Nigella Lawson comes up with reworkings of things like salad cream. Why Heston Blumenthal sets out to make giant fruit pastilles. I don’t feel the need to go out and buy a cookbook that is all about recipes with marmite, or HP sauce, but in moderation, it works.

I’m guessing it’s particularly relevant in the UK, because of the food revolution that took us from salad cream to mayonnaise; from instant to filter to macchiato, thanks darling. So many more ingredients available to us, better quality produce, access to specialist products – it changes the whole landscape, at home as well as in restaurants.

But I did like prawn cocktail when I was little. And I still do. I threw caution to the wind recently and bought barbecue beef Hula Hoops – because they used to be my favourites. I don’t care too much that the pink sponge in Battenburgs is particularly pink – it’s meant to look like that.

I know. I was there. Food is one of the most potent time travelling devices there is. Or why would the food critic in Ratatouille be brought up short by eating the dish of his childhood?

Proust was grateful for his madeleines. I’ll pass on Angel Delight, for the record. But thanks, Mr Slater, for encouraging us in sticking to the magnificent food obsessions of our childhoods.

Blog hopping? Come on in. Here’s one of my favourite children’s reads. When you’ve finished, nip over here for some more posts on books, children’s and others.

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I’ve blogged about this book before, a long time back, but I’m coming back to it again. For all of the fun of exploring new books, finding new ideas and new characters, there is something wonderful about regularly reinhabiting books.

The most regular form of this is whatever children’s book is most cherished at the time. I have had time to hone my ‘boglabols’ when reading Burglar Bill, because we read it so much. And no doubt part of our own delight (mine anyway) in rediscovering the books of our past is that opportunity to reinhabit pictures as well as well-worn words.

Back to A Formal Feeling. It’s by Zibby Oneal, an American author who writes brilliantly for teens. Not the kind of teen writing that comes out now (good and/or necessary as that is), but the type that is more about uncertainty, exploration of self, in a quieter tone.

The main reason for rereading the book is its evocation of the run up to Christmas, and just beyond. It covers the full run of preparations, the actual day, the days before New Year, and back into regular routine.

I used to read it from 1 December, for several years in a row, a chapter a day. It was a way of thinking about Christmas, of savouring a story, and details that were not my Christmas, yet somehow became mine through the rereading.

I’m mentioning it because it brings to mind other books that people reread. One of the things I remember from watching some of those makings of videos for Lord of the Rings is Christopher Lee’s comment about rereading the Lord of the Rings trilogy every year. No wonder he was pleased when he was asked to appear in it too.

There are certain books that appeal to us, that we want to relive. We know the ending this time, but we want to see the characters unfold – to see their reactions to situations, both in ‘real time’ (as the story stands at that point), and in the light of our knowledge of what happens next.

My mother in law has talked about this in rereading for the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy. The characters are so well written, they change as the planet is transformed through terraforming. They live so much longer than we can on earth, and so there are different forms of change in them as they take up new tasks, age, and so on.

So whatever lists of books you may have taken on to read this year – or not – go read something you’ve loved. Rediscover how good it is.

There’s a reason for going back to favourites – because they continue to please. And books, among all the other things they are about, are certainly about pleasure.