Booking through Thursday - Hero

You should have seen this one coming … Who is your favorite Male lead character? And why?

It's a good thing I've had all week to anticipate this question – heroines were so much easier! I suspect that I'm much less loyal to my heroes, a serial monogamist perhaps.

The first, and much the most enduring, is Winnie-the-Pooh. It's funny that a poor memory, a sweet tooth and an inclination to stoutness is so much more endearing in a Bear than a husband, but Pooh still makes me smile. My loyalty is strictly to the A.A. Milne and E.H. Shephard characters, though –later incarnations have never really appealed to me.

Now we get to the serious stuff. Hamlet is next, and the first of a list of Byronically mad-bad-and-dangerous-to-know types. He's followed by J.P. Donleavy's Balthasar B, he of the Beastly Beatitudes, and a young man of very loose morals. Next is Francis Crawford of Lymond, from Dorothy Dunnett's 6-novel series, The Lymond Chronicles. A sixteenth-century Scots noble, Lymond is very much in the Hamlet vein, exiled and hunted down by his family, living by his wits and sword, and rampaging across Europe and the Ottoman Empire to the detriment of friends and enemies alike. Lymond was to some extent followed in my affections by another of Dunnett's heroes, Niccolò, his great-grandfather, who has a similar capacity for both humour and destruction. Swashbuckling at its most entertaining. In this category I must also include Albert Campion, who just beats Lord Peter Wimsey for me, although I know many won't agree. You'll have noticed that I like my men to be funny, erudite and not entirely responsible. And they need to be better than average dancers (I'll exempt Pooh on grounds on girth). Loyalty demands that I include Titus Groan, although he's singularly lacking in a sense of humour, and it's a bit strange being in love with a man you've known as a baby!

Happily, a more mature taste brings me to Mr Knightley, my favourite of the Austen men, despite his infuriating tendency to be right. Nonetheless, he's the one I'm spending most of my time with these days, a serious, well-read man, and above all, restful, a quality under-rated in one's youth, but which I've come to appreciate.

Spring purples

I picked this glorious selection of leaves for dinner, and we had them just lightly steamed, with roast chicken and Rooster potatoes roasted in goose fat. The outer leaves went to the Bluebells, who greeted them with their usual enthusiasm. We were rewarded with five eggs, one of them the largest I think I have ever seen from a chicken - it will be a double-yolker for sure.

Booking through Thursday - Heroine

Who is your favourite female lead character? And why? (And yes, of course, you can name more than one . . . I always have trouble narrowing down these things to one name, why should I force you to?)

My intermittent attempts, during my teenage years, to launch my career as a novelist, were always first-person narratives, so I suppose it's not surprising that my thoughts immediately turned to three narrators. They have a good deal in common, including period. The first is Fanny Logan, quiet observer of the comings and goings of the Radlett family in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. From the perspective of middle-age, Fanny relates the story of her cousin Linda's "relentless pursuit" of love, and Polly Montdore's disillusionment with it. The second, who ought to be another cousin of Fanny's, since she has much in common with her, is Amy Savernake, in Joyce Windsor's A Mislaid Magic and After the Unicorn. I suppose Windsor's writing is too really sub-Mitford to be well-known, but I find Amy's "voice" appealing and her comments on her thoroughly eccentric family are not without asperity. Last of the three – perhaps you've guessed by now – is Cassandra Mortmain. As an aspiring writer, she actually sets down on paper her desire to "capture" her family (and the castle, of course), and she's been like a sister ever since I first discovered her in my teens.

Less self-effacing would be Georgette Heyer's eponymous heroine, Frederica. She's witty, efficient, unfazed by irritable cousins and manages the affairs of her orphaned brothers and sisters with humour and commonsense. Of course, I like most of the Heyer heroines: like Austen's, you can imagine settling down with them for afternoon tea and a giggle at the foibles of the world, and Cassandra, Fanny and Amy would fit right in. I'm sure we could budge up on the sofa, too, for Lizzie Bennet, and Flora Poste and...

Incidentally...

I saw this meme at Stuck in a Book (where you can find its pedigree) and liked it so much I was halfway through my answers before I'd actually decided to do it. I was sorry to find that Simon doesn't like the word "Onyx" since it's rather in the same field as my favourite. But then my father was a lapidary, which is also a good word, and I spent much of my childhood sorting gemstones. The relevance of the photo, which is an old one, is simply that it's two contented dogs.

What is your favourite word? Chalcedony.

What is your least favourite word? "Incidentally"...it always bodes ill when my husband starts a sentence with it.

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally? Ah, baroque church music.

What turns you off? Reality television. And breakfast television.

What is your favourite curse word? Hell's bells and buckets of blood. I'm old-fashioned.

What sound or noise do you love? The unique silence that happens when you wake up in the morning and it's snowed heavily overnight. The contented noises my dogs make.

What sound or noise do you hate? Loud noises, especially when made by a high wind. It makes me nervous.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? I could be an anchoress on a suitable country estate, perhaps, as long as the library van visited regularly. With a chicken or two for eggs and a vegetable garden I could be quite self-supporting. And a dog to guard the vegetables. Oh dear, perhaps I'm missing the point. Actually, I'd rather like to be a textile conservator.

What profession would you not like to do? Dentistry.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? "The library is that way...".

Lark Rise to Tea Bread

I've been – belatedly – catching up with Lark Rise to Candleford on BBC1. Having reached episode 3 I'm quite enjoying it, but I was a bit surprised to find that it started about 3/4 of the way through Flora Thomson's memoir, with young Laura's move to Candleford to work at the Post Office. Having seen how the stories for each episode have been created from incidents a few lines long in the book, I'm not surprised that there doesn't seem to be a credit for the author at the start (or am I missing it?), or that a second series of feel-good Sunday telly has apparently been commissioned. Oh well, it's all quite pretty, and there's little enough to watch otherwise.

I've been hunting for tea bread recipes on the internet. We don't each much in the way of cake or pudding in this house, though muffins sometimes happen when both sons are home. When they were small I baked almost daily, and tea bread was a staple for days when I was in a hurry, for instance, if it was a butter-making day, as that was time-consuming. My preference in baking has always been for the "hearty" kind – I can't do light-as-a feather sponges, and never really felt much urge to, but a good solid fruitcake packed with sultanas and raisins, an applecake all unctuous and sticky in the middle or a classic gingerbread were all turned out regularly and disappeared about 10 minutes' later. My tour de force, I reckoned, was a date loaf served with home-made ice-cream. Unfortunately, a vital ingredient of the loaf was Kellogg's bran buds – at some point during the 80s, these were changed, and never produced the right result again. I think they subsequently disappeared in the UK, though they seem to be available elsewhere. I still make good ice-cream, though, on the rare occasions there is any room in the freezer.

The most unusual tea bread recipe I've found uses lavender; I shall have to try making it when the lavender comes into flower, even though I shan't be able to eat it (lavender makes me wheeze). This is one of the kind which is simply a loaf-shaped cake which might be served with butter, as is The Dormouse's excellent banana and date loaf. The other kind is made by soaking the dried fruit in tea – I rather favour this type and plan to experiment with different kinds of tea, Russian caravan for starters, I think. The huge advantage of the breads-made-with-tea is their speed. Soak the fruit in advance (overnight if possible), chuck in some honey or muscovado sugar, flour (not forgetting the baking powder if you're not using self-raising!) and a beaten egg or two, turn it into a tin and shove it in the oven. Go and watch an episode of Lark Rise..., and it should be about ready by the end.

Booking through Thursday - Format

All other things (like price and storage space) being equal, given a choice in a perfect world, would you rather have paperbacks in your library? Or hardcovers? And why?

For most purposes I prefer paperbacks, they are usually lighter and more portable, which is important to me. I have huge affection for the old Penguin and Pelican covers, orange, green or blue and cream, and would be happy to have rows and rows on my bookshelf, even if some of them were battered. For preference I buy paperbacks, waiting, if I can bear, for new books to come out in that format, but there's plenty of evidence on my shelves of the occasions when I couldn't wait, or when a special bookclub edition was, inconveniently, produced in hardback. Or, in the case of old books, that is simply what I found.

The main exception is when I am buying an old, collectible, book – in that case I may well choose a hardback, especially if it's an affordable first edition, or is illustrated by a particular artist, or possibly just has a cover I like. With new books that might become collectibles, I don't have strong feelings – a well-produced soft cover is as acceptable to me as the alternative, though I do enjoy the occasional beautifully produced coffee table book. Another occasion on which I buy hardbacks is at readings, generally because that's what is on offer. Finally, I also buy old leatherbound books from time to time, when they serendipitously combine beauty and a subject which interests me.

Cruel and unnecessary...

This isn't the post I had planned for today but I had an email this week from a friend who is trying to rescue two donkeys from France. It's one of those all-too-familiar stories - the donkeys are due to be exported to Italy for meat – mortadella and salami, apparently. Now, I fully admit to being one of those people who is somewhat irrationally squeamish about eating some animals while (relatively) cheerfully eating others. Viewed in a purely objective light, it makes little difference whether it is cows or horses, sheep or dogs, but there are animals I will eat, and animals I won't.

What is certainly not irrational, however, is my strong objection to any creature suffering unnecessarily; despite legislation intended to control the live export of animals, each year in Europe up to 100,000 horses and donkeys, as well as thousands of other animals destined for the meat market, are transported in appalling conditions: suffering from thirst and dehydration, overcrowded and exhausted, in temperatures which swing from one extreme to the other. The Handle with Care campaign points out that:

We already have the technology to transport fresh chilled and frozen meat and the science to prove the welfare benefits of local, humane slaughter. For these reasons, long distance transport is not only cruel, it is unnecessary.

So I admire and support my friend's efforts to rescue these two animals and bring them to Scotland to share a home with her own donkeys, and have sent my small contribution. She is hoping to collect £800 for each donkey, and is in contact the Equine Section website, which lists animals and provides information and advice on how to rescue them. I hope to be able to tell you how she gets on. In the meantime, the International League for the Protection of Horses campaigns here for a ban on the export of live horses, while on the Handle with Care website you can sign a petition to stop the transport of all live animals for slaughter.