“I’m on the train!”

Durham Cathedral (not quite the view from the train!)

Writing from the train again – so far this morning it’s quite quiet, but then this is not the early morning commuter service which I usually travel on. I’m feeling pretty indignant about trains nonetheless, since it has just been announced that fares will go up in January, and more than the rate of inflation. That will take a saver return between Berwick and London to over £100. And that’s only the beginning: fares on this line are set to rise 15% over inflation in the next seven years. No wonder people fly. A new runway is proposed for Edinburgh or Glasgow to cope with domestic flights, although train travel is vastly better for the environment. Yet upgrading the railway so that trains can travel at high speed for the whole of their journey is not a priority. As usual, we seem to be paying lip service to energy savings, in case the government loses votes by restricting people’s freedom to pollute.

Selfishly, of course, I don’t want people to travel by train. Well, I want numbers great enough to keep the level of service as it is, while not so many that trains are significantly busier. I have almost entirely given up travelling standard class. The seats are too uncomfortable, the carriages are so crowded that the proximity to your neighbour is almost unbearable. First Great Western, on which I travel regularly, has new rolling stock. More seats than ever have been crammed in, so that it’s like travelling by bus – there is no room to breathe, it seems, let alone wriggle. These days my travel habits are exacting: I book as far in advance as possible and always travel on the train booked, so that I can buy cheap first class tickets. Yet despite calculating everything to the last detail so that I can book the instant tickets are released, I can almost never get the cheapest option. But at least my dodgy hip is made no worse by a 3-hour plus journey, and I can get a significant amount of work done (or, in this case, play).

There, a train rant and I didn’t mention mobile phones once!

Buttered scones

I have recently been dipping into this book of essays about food. I best know the author of Snail Eggs and Samphire, Derek Cooper, as the presenter of The Food Programme on Radio Four, so I was pleased when a collection of his writing was published in 2000. I have been reading a little at a time, every few days or so.

This week's piece, "Defying Nature", is a plea for fresh food and a balanced diet. Cooper was writing about a retired GP in Perthshire, Dr Walter Yellowlees, who deplored the poor diet he had seen during his years as a local doctor: "tinned meat, tinned vegetables, very seldom any salads; masses of white bread, scones, biscuits, cakes, sweet drinks, packeted milk puddings, margarine instead of butter, and, in place of porridge, the ubiquitous packeted sweetened breakfast foods." I'd have to admit that sounds a pretty fair representation of the contents of our larder during my Perthshire childhood, though biscuits and cakes were in short supply. Yellowlees recalled that his elderly patients remembered a time when they had fresh local food, before farmhouses became holiday homes. There were, during my childhood, occasional visits to people who still lived as they had grown up, in rural farmhouses where food was freshly prepared (and the baking was legendary). One of my happiest holidays was to a cottage (admittedly even then a holiday let) next to a family of smallholders. I went morning and evening to watch the cow being milked, and my fascination with the process was only outdone by that of the farm cat, who knew she would soon be given a saucer of warm creamy milk, her reward for being a trusted mouser.

Cooper's writing throughout the book is a plea for good food, lovingly and carefully produced. We are benefiting these days from a resurgence of interest in real food and his book discusses everything from the revival of interest in cheese production to how museums present the history of our food, by way of herring fishing in the Hebrides and backgarden egg production (a subject after my own heart).

A radio programme this week suggested that in Britain we read huge numbers of books on cooking, while rarely venturing into the kitchen ourselves. Perhaps we would do better to read more books that, while they celebrate the best in food, also document the addition of water to meat and bacon, the move from eating butter to margarine, the loss of regional recipes, the depletion of our fishing stocks. If we were better informed about what we eat, more people might decide that they would rather prepare it for themselves. I have admitted on this blog that I don't cook - well, I don't, largely because I live with people who do it better than me, and enjoy it more. I'm more enthusiastic about growing food for someone else to prepare. My red Russian kale is a thing of great beauty. And the joy with which a gone-to-seed lettuce is received by the Bluebells is a delight.

Booking through Thursday - Connecting Words

Joanna and Brad are asking about “connecting words,” and they don’t mean conjunctions like “and” or “but.” No, what they’re looking for are unique, or treasured words that we’ve found out and about in our daily travels, words that might not be common usage, or often heard, but which struck a chord for some reason.

Words are important to me; my husband and I used to play a game where one chose an obscure word from dictionary and offered a choice of definitions; the other had to choose the right one. My younger son once offered, as definition for Tagalog (indigenous language in the Philippines): that bit at the start of a television programme where they tell you what happened last time and what’s coming in this episode (and the opposite, therefore, of epilogue). I still think of them that way.

It’s family legend that my great grandmother carried diffidence to extremes. She had several expressions to denote very small quantities, I believe, but at one meal she was asked if she would care for some more roast beef. “Just a tentacle, dear,” she replied. We still use it in appropriate circumstances.

My mother-in-law was given to Malapropisms. When she was taking driving lessons she announced that she had put her foot on the “exhilarator”. She was very cross to be laughed at.

Growing up in Scotland I became rather attached to a number of dialect words. While brushing its hair a fidgeting child might be admonished, “Stop shoogling about.” A colleague was complimented by a Canadian student on her “nice vest”, which would have offended her greatly had she not recalled that overseas a vest is not the garment worn closest to the skin, so he was not remarking overfamiliarly on the scrap of lace showing from her camisole – what in Scots she called a “sinnet”.

Here on the Northumberland coast in summer we can have beautiful weather. I love the way our garden basks in sunlight. Pity poor Berwick-on-Tweed, though. Just where the town boundary begins, a murky, yellowy-brown cloud can be observed. This is the famous local “haar”, a Norse word for mist, which must doom many afternoons on the wonderful golden beaches to damp and shivering misery.

Living at the edge of the world

Or so it seems! I am struggling to maintain my equilibrium against great odds - my broadband connection is practically non-existent at the moment. We have trouble with the connection if it's not quite the right kind of weather, if it's particularly dank, or especially windy and, despite years of battling with BT, the problem is apparently not amenable to improvement. A considerable quantity of phone wire and a wonky telegraph pole have been replaced, yet it continues to be as bad as ever. And this is why it feels like living at the edge of the world - there is no house beyond us. We are at the end of every supply line. The water frequently arrives at snail's pace, a weedy trickle of freezing or scalding water emerging from the shower head. Or not at all. We got broadband years after everyone else in the area. Power cuts are a regular occurrence.

Difficulties extend beyond the utilities, too. Post and other deliveries often take a day longer to reach us. Couriers frequently can't find us at all (although we are on the map!) and deliveries are preceded by phone calls from drivers who can never quite explain where they currently are, but it's definitely not here. Just to add insult to injury we have a ridiculous access which means that nothing heavy can be delivered closer than the farmyard and we have to exercise ingenuity - or more often, muscles - in getting things to the house. I had no idea kitchen worktops weighed so much. And it was jolly good fun when the skip lorry got stuck.

It's the broadband that drives me to distraction, though. Whenever I post anything, the file has to be backed up because I risk losing it altogether when uploading. There are whole days when I struggle even to pick up my email, which is awkward for someone who works largely from home. This morning it took over half an hour to order a Christmas present and pay for it - fortunately I was stuffing conference information into envelopes, so I could afford to sit and wait. They also gnash their teeth who only stand and wait, I thought, even Milton's patience would have been tried.

This page may have to be an image-free zone in the meantime - since I am hardly the area's most talented photographer, this will be no great loss, but I miss the odd touch of colour.

A Very Cellular Song

If I need a friend I just give a wriggle
Split right down the middle
And when I look there's two of me
Both as handsome as can be

It's not every woman who is lucky enough to get worms on her birthday. But now that the Bluebell Girls are settling in nicely (and even providing us with the occasional egg) my Other Half has decided that my nurturing skills are not being taxed adequately, and has bought me a wormery. With a little bag of wriggling things. Now, it has to be said that I am not the best person in the world at dealing with little wriggling things. Or small scuttling things. He also bought me a frog, to help desensitise me, he said, since a toad has taken up residence in the greenhouse, and I screech every time it jumps out at me.

In the Country by Kenneth Allsop

First published in 1972, this book is a collection of essays originally published by Kenneth Allsop in The Daily Mail. Well-known in the UK as a broadcaster, he died a year after the book was published, and is buried in the village he wrote about, Powerstock in Dorset. Throughout the book, for reasons, at the time, of privacy, he uses the names of Hardy’s Wessex (so Dorchester becomes Casterbridge, for instance), a conceit which sits very nicely for bookish readers, who may enjoy the sense of continuation it offers to the Wessex novels.

The book follows the calendar year, from darkest January to Christmas, finishing on a joyous note, and each month is broken up into shorter essays on a variety of subjects. We learn a good deal about Allsop’s ancient restored mill home, the trout in the millrace, the ungrateful doves who only drop in to eat all the corn, and the changing landscape around it. Changing both with the advance of the year, but also with proximity to the 21st century. Yet while Allsop was an ardent conservationist, and a campaigner until his death, his concern is worn lightly in these pages, which convince without haranguing. His love of birds is ever present, as is his passion for the countryside, and no tiny detail is beneath his notice.

This book is about the pleasure and the occasional affectionately-tolerated inconveniences of country life (he suggests that within 25 years it would be possible to rebuild Wessex entirely of corrugated iron), the daily communion with the furred and feathered inhabitants of his home. His joy is shared with the reader through the immediacy of his writing, his detailed description:

The bees aren’t yet fully operational. The sun had prodded an arousing finger down the shrew’s tunnel or through the eiderdown of moss where each had dozed through the frosts [. . .] Above the powdery red cliff which the thrust of the current has gouged into a crescent (and where there is an old kingfisher’s nesting hole – unused, now, for even down here kingfishers are scarce) the bees burnished the air with golden pencillings [. . .] How frail is the thread which sustains them: the few comatose queens nurturing the seed of their kind within their bodies for the long blank months of danger.

Allsop’s troubled life and his uneasy relationship with another of our great nature writers, Henry Williamson – an equally troubled man - are absent from these short pieces, although I think Williamson’s influence shows through the nature writing. And in that sense, this is a slight work, purely an elegy to life in the country, rather than a portrait of its author. But I think I am rather comforted to know that, despite great pain and unhappiness, he found a love of the countryside to be sustaining and a bringer of at least occasional joy. I recommend it as a pleasurable read and an interesting piece of recent country history.

A minor personal sadness is that with this recent re-reading, my 34-year-old paperback copy has fallen apart, and will not be accompanying me on my next trip to the West Country.

Booking through Thursday - Preservatives

Today’s question comes from Conspiracy-Girl: I’m still relatively new to this meme so I’m not sure if this has been asked yet, but I’m curious how many of us write notes in our books. Are you a Footprint Leaver or a Preservationist?

Oh good heavens, stand back while I rant! I am constantly beset by people who write in library books. Look, clever-clogs, I don't care if you know that the author has said "infer" when they mean "imply" or that members of X regiment didn't wear that particular cap button in WWII - keep it to yourself! And while we're on the subject, don't make little notes inside the back cover so that you'll know you've read this book. Get a notebook! As for ringing page numbers, or turning down corners - what are bookmarks for? If you don't have one of those gold-embossed leather things, an envelope will do, or a postcard (not a bank statement, please). And don't crack the spine on that paperback! oh look, pages 294-97 have fallen out.

Now, I have to admit that as a child I used to colour in the illustrations in my favourite books. My aunt used to do the same thing, and her books were works of art, but mine were always a mess because I ran out of patience before I finished. I still have my messy copy of The Little White Horse, and wouldn't part with it. And I did eventually find that I had to make notes in text books, because I simply couldn't keep track if all my notes were in a separate place. But they are my textbooks and, if I ever decided to part with them, which is extremely unlikely, I will go through with a rubber and clean them up. I once bought a secondhand textbook online and, when it arrived, it had been annotated throughout - admittedly in pencil, but I wouldn't have bought that copy if I'd known. They weren't even good notes. I had to erase all of them before I could read it comfortably.

You'll have gathered from all this that I am a preservationist of the most avid variety. When one of my grandfathers retired he took up bookbinding, restoring Victorian floras and music scores to objects of beauty once more. At which point I may have to concede that 19th-century textual annotation may be interesting.

By the way, let me assure you that I'm generally a quiet and assuming sort of person - should I happen to pass you, in the library, dog-earing a page or writing your shopping list in the margin of page 42, I may only say, "Please don't do that," in the mildest of tones. Alternatively, I may just tiptoe away, pretending I haven't noticed.

Handel's Messiah, bound by my grandfather.