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tin measure out 200g of self raising flour 1 2 a teaspoon of salt and provide yourself with the finely grated zest and juice of an orange and lemon stir into the cooled tea and fruit mix then finally add 1 lightly beaten egg and the nuts mix until just combined then cook for 50 55 mins or until a skewer comes out clean posted by desperate reader at 7 29 pm 9 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest thursday june 26 2014 byssus jen hadfield back in my student days so basically pre amazon i worked in one of those discount bookshops which specialised in publishers over runs and slightly damaged books with the exception of the works which was never really the same kind of thing those shops don t seem to exist anymore which is a shame the shop i worked in had what i now realise was a really impressive poetry section hundreds of slim volumes that inevitably got in a hopeless mess so one day i decided i was going to sort them out it took hours but eventually everything was alphabetised and perfect perfect that is until the next day putting new stock away we realised that somebody had come in and reorganised the whole lot according to some system that clearly had a logic but one that baffled us i was not pleased years down the line i have some sympathy for that mystery book fiddler it seems more likely that what they did came from a passion for poetry rather than a desire to annoy booksellers it could have been both which is somehow encouraging at school i dutifully studied the romantics well suited to my 17 year old self and at university i read quite a lot of victorian poetry for background to the victorian art i was studying i have a slight acquaintance with some 20th century poets and in theory i m aware of how big a part of popular culture poets and their work have been but it s somehow hard to realise that it s something that people make a living out of that it s their actual profession this is coming from an avid radio 4 listener i m attracted to poetry for the same reason i love short stories and novellas there s something positively intoxicating about an idea or an image distilled down into a handful of lines and a good poem a good short poem is the ultimate expression of that i was attracted to jen hadfield s work when i heard she lived in shetland and that byssus deals first and foremost with what it takes to find and forge a home there was a radio 4 programme about her a couple of months ago which i thought was particularly good on dialect i ve been carrying byssus around with me for weeks now reading and rereading bits in both concentrated bursts and odd moments which has made it a companion read for the last 3 peirene books i ve read all of them have demanded real effort from me as a reader there have been corresponding rewards but with byssus it has at least been possible to read things over and over again and find new things every time honestly i feel like i want someone to teach me this book i want to be in a classroom arguing over what it might mean and what it does mean to each person there as it is just me and the book i find myself delighting over particular images and quietly in awe of how certain poems have been put together the use of dialect words there is a glossary at the back anchors the collection to a specific place and they re just frequent enough to occasionally trip the reader up but not so much as to seriously get in the way in my case it meant enjoying the sound and feel of an unfamiliar of half forgotten word and then going back to properly test it and consider it s place in the poem the arrangement of the words on the page does the same thing forcing me to spend proper time on piecing out how they fit together in the end the only insight i feel i have to share is that reading this and i m still reading it has been essentially rewarding exciting even but i m stuck when it comes to writing about reading it if i ever sort them out more thought may follow byssus by the way turns out to be the fibrous stuff that mussels use to anchor themselves to their surroundings posted by desperate reader at 11 55 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels jen hadfield shetland saturday june 21 2014 the blue room hanne orstavik translated by deborah dawkin thanks to leicester book festival we got to hear meike ziervogel talk about peirene press and her own writing on thursday night she was absolutely inspiring and i came away with a lot to consider both in terms of how i think about translated fiction and my own family history basically it was a great night and if you get the chance to hear this woman speak don t pass it up i read the press release for the blue room which argues that it comes from the same place in the female psyche as fifty shades of grey so decided some homework was in order i ve not read fifty shades beyond a few pages which made me feel like i d really rather not but i know it was born out of fan fiction so i went looking for fan fiction it s a weird world out there but at least it s free you can find short stuff and you can cover a fairly wide range if fantasies quite quickly nothing i found was well written which is interesting in terms of the whole self publishing market but that s a debate for another time i m guessing a lot of what i read was written by girls in their late teens or early twenties and a desire to be submissive certainly seems to be popular hanne orstavik s book is a world away from what i found online though for a start it s extremely well written and crucially it isn t playing out a fantasy the bare bones of the plot are this johanne a student in her early twenties wakes up on the day she s planned to leave for america with her boyfriend to find herself trapped in her room we spend the day in johanne s mind whilst she reflects on the events which have lead up to this day johanne lives with her mother in a tiny oslo flat she has a room the blue room if the title but her mother sleeps behind a curtain in the sitting room their domestic life seems to have no boundaries as evidenced by several conversations whilst one or other of them uses the toilet that lack of physical boundaries carries through into every aspect of their relationship or so it would seem from johanne s narration strictly speaking she s not a reliable narrator but as we spend the duration of the novel in her head she s not precisely unreliable either if she s telling lies she s telling them to herself initially the suspicion has to be that this mother daughter relationship is abusive the devoutly christian johanne is given to breaking into disturbingly graphic fantasies of rape and violence which the reader feels have to come from somewhere we re also left to wonder what has happened to her father and brother the brother is apparently studying in america but there is no mention of what happened to the father at all towards the end of the book though early certainties fall apart johanne says she s chosen to stay with her mother to save money she has a future all mapped out university followed by practice as a psychiatrist in an office to be built on her grandmothers land in space she still intends to share with her mother it s easy to assume that the mother won t let go of the daughter but how much does the daughter want independence and for that matter does her mother unambiguously want her there johanne s carefully laid plans experience a convulsion when she meets ivar and starts a sexual relationship with him or at least i assume she does and that this isn t more fantasy almost immediately he suggests they go to america together for 6 weeks the day she s locked into her room is only two weeks into the relationship and later it seems that johanne hadn t told ivar that she intended to meet him on the way to the airport it s a slippery book johanne isn t the easiest character to warm to and in the end you have to question her view point her mother is portrayed as steadily more sinister her clothing becomes more provocative and we re encouraged to think she s having an affair with a married man but maybe this too is one of johanne s fantasies arguably it s quite responsible of a mother to try and prevent her daughter leaving the country mid term with a man she s only known for two weeks but it s equally likely that johanne had no intention of leaving that what she s actually doing is manipulating her mother into keeping her close at heart popular rape and submission fantasies are a repudiation of responsibility a desire to have your cake and eat it when e m hull wrote the sheik in 1919 rape meant her heroine could have exotic sex outside of marriage without being judged for it i m inclined to wonder if the continued popularity of rape fantasies or fantasies about submissive sexual roles give tacit permission not to enjoy sex either way there seems to be a reluctance to take responsibility either for pleasure or the lack of it when all you re doing is what you re told orstavik takes that to another level johanne s submission forces someone else to make her decisions for her in this case it s her mother whose prepared to do that in a cycle that traps them both this is quite a dark book but it s undoubtedly one of my favourite peirene titles it genuinely does hold up a mirror to a part of the female psyche it s not always pleasant to explore honestly i m not sure i agree with meike when she says it analyses the struggle if women to seperate from their mothers though i read it more as the struggle some daughters make not to be separated posted by desperate reader at 10 59 pm 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday june 18 2014 a year at otter farm mark diacono the best thing about amazon the thing i d really miss and the one thing which has probably done everyone in the book trade a favour or at least no harm is the advance notice of upcoming books i spend a fair amount of time looking for new titles especially from favourite food writers and then quietly looking forward to publication with an ever growing sense of anticipation that was most certainly the case with a year at otter farm i ve been a fan of diacono s writing ever since the river cottage veg handbook came out in 2009 i can t praise that series enough and also really liked a taste of the unexpected in 2010 which covered more of the unusual things that diacono grows at otter farm and what to do with them once you have them part of the anticipation attached to a year at otter farm was to see what would be new about it or at least how it would expand on the excellent books diacono has already written the rest of the anticipation was all about the simple pleasure of looking forward to a book by an author whose writing i enjoy i haven t been disappointed in either score first things first it s a lovely book to look at the pictures are glorious they don t cover every recipe but they do show livestock and plants in a way that really sells the pleasures of small holding i m particularly taken with some winsome looking sheep not at all how my dad s looked his always had a fairly disdainful come on then if you think your hard enough thing going on quite often from half way down some ridiculous cliff from where they required rescue and there s a particularly beady eyed cockerel who s a thing of beauty as well apart from looking good having pictures of the live animal is a useful reminder that meat does in fact start out as a living animal and if you re going to eat it you should want it to have had a decent life first not that the core market for this book will need that reminder the substance of the book is part memoir part manifesto part growing guide and part cookbook all arranged by season something i really like about the styling here is that the recipe pages have coloured borders so they re easy to flip to details like that always make me happy i ve looked at the recipes bookmarked a few for use particularly later in the year and am really pleased to find quite a few cocktails and alcoholic infusions included having responsible fun with drinks is basically how i make my living and something i m always happy to read about over all though it s the manifesto memoir part of the book that s really sucked me in and that i ve spent most time with i don t have a garden of my own anymore though i do have the use of one at weekends not being in it much has limited my planting ambitions and seriously limited my ability to make use of what s been grown but it s better than nothing meanwhile i have a daydream where i win the lottery or similar and buy one of those huge victorian walled gardens ideally one with a gardeners house built into one wall and plant it full of amazing things a book like this absolutely feeds that fantasy not least by adding hitherto undreamed of possibilities into the mix most intriguing to me is the concept of a forest garden quickly followed by the perennial garden the forest garden apparently mimics woodland mainly using perennials which starts at a subterranean level carrying on up through ground cover shrubs and trees all linked together by climbers and planted to maximise mutual benefit it sounds like a beautifully low input system the perennial garden basically takes that concept and downsizes it to allotment or garden size losing the tree canopy i m not in a position to nurture a veg patch but i could and to some extent do have a garden which concentrates on things which are useful as well as beautiful smallholding isn t easy but the possibility of having some small part of the dream well that s attractive what i really love about this book is how unbelievably easy it is to lose hours at a time in it it s a page turner which isn t necessarily what you expect from a cookbook but then it s so much more than that i find it thoroughly exciting that people are out there doing new and interesting things on the small holding crofting farming front that it isn t all big business supplying supermarkets at terrifyingly low margins we take cheap industrially produced food for granted but i don t believe it s sustainable or particularly desirable there s to much waste and not enough understanding of how food arrives on the plate not enough variety and not enough consideration for the wider environment to many air miles and to much plastic packaging can you tell this is a bit of a hobby horse for me any book that makes people think about that a little bit more which i feel this one does and which provides inspiration and instruction for growing and cooking has to be a good thing that it s also entertaining and engaging is a massive bonus posted by desperate reader at 10 38 pm 6 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday june 14 2014 traditional food in yorkshire peter brears this has not been a great week work wise due to some oversights far above the shop floor my...