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Text of the page (random words):
no surprise that i woke up with a burning desire to mooch around a bookshop for a few restorative hours accordingly i took myself off to nottingham which has a much better branch of waterstones than leicester has and had a good old browse i wasn t after anything in particular but never the less felt an irresistible pull towards food and drink titles i didn t try and resist it for a moment warm bread and honey cake came out about 5 years ago and i know i ve picked it up a couple of times with no special interest but today it grabbed me which is part of the charm of a good bookshop it would have been cheaper online but then i ve never come across it whilst browsing amazon and at no time does coordinating with couriers appeal to me even less so when i have the desired object in my hand since i last looked at this particular book i ve acquired and used another of gaitri pagrach chandra s titles sugar spice which i liked more than enough to favourably predispose me to anything with her name on it she has had one of those lives which give roots in all sorts of distinctive cultures perhaps the most obvious sign of which us not the recipes so much as that the measurements are given in grams ounces and cups or sticks where butter is concerned and whilst that might not sound like a big thing american measurements look exotic to me it s a combination that speaks far more of international experience than any recipe could this also sounds like the perfect autumn book warm bread honey cake longer nights and unpredictable weather beg for such things it s also time for a confession this is the first season of the great british bake off i ve properly watched and i m not really a fan i like bits of it i m a fan of baking i m definitely a fan of mel and sue and i m very much in awe of some of those creations but they seem ever further away from anything i d want to bake at home the same could be said for a lot of the baking books i saw for sale yesterday i m think of surprise inside cakes and peek a boo cakes especially all of which were full of things that had a wow factor to look at but none of which made me want to eat them opening warm bread and honey cake at random i m confronted with spice cake stuffed with almond paste it s a good looking thing in a homely kind of way and the very thought of it is making my mouth water i can almost smell it and i can t wait to make it no wonder i fell in love with it on the spot it s a book full of things i want to try things which look useful things which might present a challenge if that s what i m in the mood for and things that speak of comfort along with long tradition there are things to read about rather than do and things to dream of it is in short a book which mixes practicality with a magical alchemy and one which i intend to spend a lot of time with posted by desperate reader at 12 27 pm 5 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday august 27 2014 return to night mary renault in 2005 virago re printed mary renault s the friendly young ladies which i read and loved on the back of that i went hunting for more mary found and discarded the historic novels on the grounds that it didn t sound just entirely my sort of thing i m reassessing that viewpoint now and bought a copy of the charioteer which i still haven t read perhaps because it s described as a monumental work in gay literature which somehow makes reading it sound like something one ought to do and which in turn isn t always very appealing a brand new copy of return to night on my doorstep however was a bit more inspiring so only slightly daunted by its 417 pages i got started and then basically read through it in 3 sittings and am now fully enthused by renault again i don t care how monumental she is when virago first looked to reprint the friendly young ladies back in the early 80 s and not long before renault died she was keen to alter the ending which she felt was too conventional and unconvincing one if the young ladies rides off into the sunset with a man in the end a compromise was reached in the form of an afterword sarah dunant suggests in her introduction to these reissues that the same criticism of an imposed happy ending could be levelled at return to night but i m inclined to disagree reading the friendly young ladies a decade ago the ending suggested that the heroine was still exploring herself in return to night it s a bit more complicated it s 1938 and dr hilary mansell is in her mid 30 s with a stalling career after a job she wants in london goes to her lover david she clears off into country practice where she s somewhat bored by the slower pace and more routine work when julian fleming is admitted with a head injury hilary s experience saves his life but she also manages to make an enemy of his mother later the pair meet again julian is extravagantly attractive intelligent charming 10 years younger than hilary and has an uncomfortable relationship with his mother despite herself she falls in love with him and he with her julian s sexuality is arguably ambiguous but i think this is a red herring beautiful young men who want to be actors and are uncomfortably close to their mothers do not have to be gay but it s a convenient suspicion for the reader to hold whilst they try and decipher the tension between mother and son and tension there is mrs fleming is one of those terrifyingly horrible mothers that crop up all over the place in books of this vintage do they still i don t read enough contemporary fiction to really know her relationship with julian is desperately manipulative she controls him by deliberately withdrawing her favour and affection there is never anything as vulgar or openly expressed as anger or frustration never any discussion just a pervasive sense of disapproval or disappointment which is utterly corrosive julian is undeniably damaged but then how many women don t want to fix a man at some point in there lives this book works now because one taboo that remains firmly in place is that of an older woman having a relationship with a younger man eleven years is enough for the reader to know that hilary is right to fear being made to look a fool to worry about the condemnation of her family and to dread local gossip none of these are calculated to help a relationship she s right too to wonder how much she can trust in the continuing love of a still very young and inexperienced man and how as a woman with a profession can she go on respecting a man who has none or as a woman who fought her own parents to get into that profession how does she find the patience to accept a man who hasn t yet worked out how to do the same and then julian wants marriage which make all of hilary s considerations so much more acute it would after all be so public in the end marriage or at least an engagement becomes necessary despite hilary s doubts or julian s reservations about his mothers reaction for hilary it s hardly a conventional happy ending she understands that she s as much replacement mother as lover and by the same measure julian is in part the child she s unlikely to have but war is on the horizon written in 1946 it s made clear that we know the war has happened even if it s set in 38 39 julian is going into the airforce and hilary is a surgeon as well as a gp survival is hardly assured so having found love even messy far from perfect love why not take a chance on any happiness that s going there are clearly parallels between renault s relationship with another woman and hilary and julian s situation discreet affairs might be tolerated but an open relationship would be a scandal that 70 years later same sex marriages should still be a contentious issue is a disgrace in which case the happy ending is that this book bought renault a huge wedge of cash from mgm which allowed her and her partner to move to south africa where they lived together until mary died more than 30 years later there are things about the book which aren t perfect it s a bit too freudian in places underground caves especially make for quite heavy handed symbolism but it s a hell of a page turner and she nails so much about loving that it shouldn t be missed posted by desperate reader at 9 31 am 6 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday august 23 2014 august folly angela thirkell i first read august folly almost exactly 3 years ago i guess it s the august in the title that makes it seem like the right time to do it looking back i didn t seem to have much to say other than to have finally been able to pick up on the trollope references but as ever or so it seems to be turning out thirkell repays re reading the trollope references still amuse me there is a dramatic incident with a bull which is the making of the fortunes of both young richard tebben here and young johnny eames in the small house at allington and i still think this is a good stand alone book despite it s barsetshire setting in fact it s a pretty good place to start with thirkell for a couple of reasons the thing with thirkell and this is in part why this is a good book to start with is that she can be a terrible snob there are moments here when that snobbishness comes out moments i thought i d made a note of but it turns out hadn t so i hope i m remembering correctly the point being that if you can t warm to thirkell here than she s probably not for you a much better reason to start here is that it s a charming funny book exactly the sort of thing to lift a person out of the kind of flat mood to be found after their flat has been flooded or at least significantly leaked into twice in the space of a week that s my flat people and i m not happy about it august folly has two families at it s heart the tebben s and the dean s the tebben s are a scholarly couple with not much money and a brace of grown up children who are rather a worry at the start of the book how are they to be started out in life richard tebben has just come down from oxford with a third class degree and margaret has returned from being an aupair in grenoble both are slightly embarrassed by their parents especially their mother who s inclined to wear shabby clothes and fuss a lot and both are uneasily aware that they need to find jobs without being particularly qualified for anything or well enough connected to get a helping hand the senior tebbens are genuinely the sort of parents who might be a trial to their offspring and at the same time a couple who the reader really feels for mr tebben is a civil servant who lived for academic argument about the norse saga s mrs tebben who took a first in economics supplements the family income by writing textbooks on the subject it s the money she s earned that has built a house just a little to small in the country where her dear family least want to be thirkell s characters can be a little two dimensional but not the tebben s which made me wonder if they were based on real people the dean s are a family of nine children ranging in age from mid twenties down to about five only six of the children feature mrs dean despite her many children and being almost 50 is a woman still beautiful enough to be a suitable object of infatuation for a young man richard tebben her husband is a vague kind of a figure and the childre fill their various places in the plot most satisfactorily but they don t come alive in quite the same way that the tebben s do but then the dean s have money pots of money their lives are charmed and easy in comparison to others and that s the point of them as it goes the love story between margaret tebben and laurence dean is more convincing than some i ve found in thirkell and margaret s situation calls for genuine sympathy but the real point of reading thirkell for me is her humour this is a book that can raise a smile in the face of considerable domestic disasters on this readers part through a well described pair of ears in the moonlight there s something utterly charming and extremely english about it all i thoroughly recommend it posted by desperate reader at 11 00 pm 7 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tuesday august 19 2014 sweets made simple miss hope over the last few years i ve amassed a small collection if books about confectionary some of them are specifically chocolate based but quite a few of them cover more general sweets of all of them my favourites the ones i keep using and the ones where i ve learnt actual skills from are the trio of hope and greenwood books i have because of this i was mildly excited to see they have a tv series bbc2 friday nights now 2 episodes in hope and greenwood started as the sort of shop you find in london or brighton and not in leicester retro vibe and thoroughly thought out design in every detail all that style charms me and makes me mildly suspicious in equal measure but the acid test is the quality of the product hope and greenwood are more than satisfactory on that score eventually the books came along i ve posted about them all in the past with the same mix of fun design and thoroughly reliable as well as delicious recipes the instructions are clear specific and generally need to be followed to the letter boiling sugar is not the thing to mess around with and chocolate is temperamental in short these are good books and making your own sweets is first if all very satisfying and secondly means you know exactly what you re eating nothing brings sugar and fat content to life like measuring it out and this way there are no hidden or mysterious ingredients the bbc2 series is great there s a charm about miss hope and mr greenwood that i m finding genuinely irresistible no suspicion this time the dynamic between them really works on camera and the recipes are fabulous there is a book to accompany the series sweets made simple which looks to be a conglomeration of the first 2 life is sweet and miss hope s chocolate box as such it is a bargain in w h smiths this weekend it was even more of a bargain at half price their vanilla fudge recipe is the best i ve ever found the book would be worth it for that alone but this week i ve been trying the pecan maple fudge it took me 3 attempts to get it right first time i used to dark a sugar which was okay but the flavour profile was all wrong the maple was over powered second time i inadvertently took the pan off one hot ring only to put it down on another so the fudge burnt entirely my fault but the third time was the charm the book calls for a chocolate covering which was more than i wanted so i didn t bother with it but the fudge itself is perfect ostensibly destined for my boss who has been very accommodating about me waiting around for plumbers and electricians after my bathroom was flooded twice in a week by an upstairs neighbour who i cannot currently feel charitable towards great flavour and nice crumbly texture i would include the recip...