BREAKFAST WITH PROFESSOR GLOOM

Breakfast with Professor Gloom is a silent affair – on his part. I remark from time to time on the weather, a local outbreak of Plague, a meteorite hurtling towards us, but the only sure way to elicit a response is to say ‘Cheese’. From the instant softening of his expression, the unfurrowing of his corrugated brow, I know that ‘cheese’ has much the same effect on him as ‘madeleine’ had on Proust. God knows why, but there you are.

There’s a lot of food in literature – well, there is in the books I like. From Enid Blyton picnics (potted meat and ginger beer!) to Wodehouse breakfasts of kedgeree and kippers, and the glorious, gluttonous feasts of hobbits and dwarves. Breakfast on Pluto, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Babette’s Feast, Tea at Gunter’s…it’s the titles that attract me first. But if you want to read about food, you must read M.F.K. Fisher. I am the happy owner of a copy of The Art of Eating, a book so stuffed with stories, recipes, quotations and wonderful writing that it is an everlasting meal in itself. Her titles alone will tell you at once that you are in for a treat: ‘Consider the Oyster’, ‘The Gastronomical Me’ and my all-time favourite, ‘How to Cook a Wolf’.

This last was published in 1942, in a period of wartime shortage when you might have been glad of the odd slice of wolf, and is prefaced with a quote from C.P.S. Gilman which should be written above every writer's desk:

There’s a whining at the threshold,

There’s a scratching at the floor.

To work! To work! In Heaven’s name!

The wolf is at the door.

Fisher travelled the world, married several times, and had an inexhaustible appetite for life, love and food. This is from her Alphabet For Gourmets:

‘As for dining-in-love, I think of a lunch at the Lafayette in New York, in the front café with the glass pushed back and the May air flowing almost visibly over the marble tabletops….a bottle of Louis Martini’s Folle Blanche and moules-more-or-less-marinieres…then a walk in new black-heeled shoes with white stitching on them beside a man I had just met and a week later was to marry, in spite of my obdurate resolve never to marry again…’ Now tell me you do not want to read her.

I finished writing a novel this week - and felt that rare euphoria that comes with the moment when you realise that it's finally done. Unfortunately Professor Gloom wasn't here to celebrate: he had departed with the air of a man setting out on a doomed but vital mission to a far-flung, dangerous land (the Bridge Club) but I poured myself a large gin and tonic and Clementina kindly consented to sit on my lap for a full five minutes before she bit me, and wandered off to some appointment of her own in the garden. So I had another gin and tonic.

Now back to work. Finishing a novel only means you have to go back to the beginning: to revise, to prune, to enrich, to rewrite, and maybe in a month or two to send off those first letters and sample chapters, like so many messages in bottles...

To work! To work! The wolf at my particular door is Time.

In Praise of Jan Carson

Jan Carson is a very good writer (the stories in Children’s Children are quirky, funny, macabre and poignant) but what I want to congratulate her on are her wonderfully pithy travel updates on Facebook: ‘Hamburg…it’s very German.’ ‘Now we’re in Sweden.’ No unnecessary information there. I just wish she had time to train the nation’s tour guides, and in particular those of the National Trust.

I have a complicated relationship with the National Trust but Prof Gloom has just rejoined us, so I’m getting my money’s worth. And what I want is to wander around houses and gardens in PEACE. I don’t mind someone saying ‘That way to library’ or being there to answer a query I might have about a painting. What I don’t want is to be button-holed the moment I walk in and subjected to lengthy descriptions of every last Chippendale cabinet or Victorian moustache-curler, along with titbits of personal information. ‘What isn’t generally known is that Lady Ethel was a keen jam-maker'. Give me strength.

(I recall a glorious moment at Mount Stewart some years ago when we were asked to ‘Just stand very quietly to one side, please – Lady Mary is passing by.’ I very nearly tugged my forelock.)

With books, of course, it’s different: you expect a bit of information, but it needs to be lightly done. There are books where the historical detail is so painstaking and laboured that you feel as though you are slowly drowning in porridge, and there are books that draw you into the past so subtly that you find yourself enchanted, caught in the shifting shadows of history before you even know it. Some of the best of these were written for children – on the male side there’s T H White, Michael Morpurgo, Alan Garner, but a lot of my favourites are women: Rosemary Sutcliffe, L M Boston, Philippa Pearce. ‘Catherine Called Birdy’ by Karen Cushman. And Penelope Lively’s wonderful, hilarious ‘Ghost of Thomas Kempe’, where a seventeenth century apothecary causes trouble in the present.

As a teenager I devoured historical novels, everything from Georgette Heyer to Rosemary Hawley Jarman - the distant past was a refuge from the present. Later, I became interested in our different perspectives on the more immediate past, in the tricks that memory plays. I read Jennifer Johnston, Pat Barker, Nadine Gordimer, Rose Tremain; Penelope Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Blue Flower, the wonderful novels of JG Farrell, and more recently, Tan Twan Eng’s haunting, unforgettable ‘Garden of Evening Mists', and Kate Atkinson's Time After Time.

The book I'm working on at the moment deals with events in my own lifetime, here, and in the South Africa that I grew up in – at the time a country with seemingly even less hope of change than Northern Ireland. And time plays havoc with all our recollections: I keep having to go back, check facts and dates. It’s like darning holes in my memory. Jan Carson knows about holes in the memory -she also knows about dealing kindly. And that is what the past should be there for: to sift through, to question, and to learn from; to laugh and sometimes to cry over – and please god to make us kinder to each other. But not to venerate, or endlessly relive. Leave that to the National Trust, and to books.

Down But Not Out In Norn Iron

The man at the Braeside Nursery taught me a new word this week. (I love Mr Braeside: ‘£4.50, £2.99, £8.00’ – adding it up on a bit of paper – ‘That’s £15.49. £16.00 to you.’ Then he gives you a fiver change from £20) Anyway, the word he taught me was ‘kipe’. Now it’s entirely possible he makes a new one up every time he sees me coming, but here’s what he said: ‘You want to plant that against a wall or the wind will kipe it over.’

I’ve been adding new Norn Iron terms to my vocabulary ever since I got here, and I’m very pleased with ‘kipe’. Or possibly ‘kype’. At my advanced age I already trip, stumble, totter, fall flat on my face, now I can ring the changes with a bit of kiping.

The wind of change has kiped us all over this week, as a hideous groan from Professor Gloom in the room next door has just reminded me: he must be listening to the news. The news in Northern Ireland has often been more bad than good, but here’s the thing about the people in this particular corner of the planet: however many largely self-inflicted injuries they suffer, how ever often they knock each other over, they always scramble back up again, make a few concessions, and stagger on. So, despite the fact that we’ve been kiped over by Brexit, my money is on us getting back up and fighting on.

Humour helps. In times of trial some people turn to inspirational writing; I read Wodehouse (the English may be rubbish at referenda and football but they’re brilliant at humour) Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, and Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons – the book I most frequently take on planes so that in the event of a disaster, I’ll go down laughing. I could name a hundred other novels, a lot of them Irish, but these are my stand-bys.

So cheer up, my friends. It may have happened, but it’s never the end. To quote the late, great Canadian novelist, Robertson Davies (from ‘A Cunning Man’ but read ‘What’s Bred in the Bone’ if you haven’t tried him before) -

 ‘This is the great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous.’

I don’t know exactly why I find that comforting, but I do.

Tale of Woe

I haven’t needed literary inspiration this week: I’ve been sitting at my desk, working so hard that what I’ve needed most is a bit of respite. So I decided to take the evening off and go to the movies. And what I chose to see was Tale of Tales – a ‘gorgeous, grotesque triptych’ of fairy tales. ‘Fabulous, visually glorious, beautiful, inventive’ – at Cannes the critics loved it. And I like fairy tales myself, especially dark ones. (Angela Carter swoops by on a broomstick.) I like beauty, invention, imagination, and I like Salma Hayek.

Unfortunately, Tale of Tales is also very, very, very slow.  Salma Hayek (who has two basic expressions in this film: disappointed, and marginally less disappointed) plays a Queen who wants a child. Her husband, wearing a Pythonesque diving suit, and on the advice of a person who has clearly just escaped from some high-security institution, hunts down a sea monster in order to cut out its heart which is then cooked by a virgin, after which both virgin and Queen are simultaneously impregnated and almost instantly give birth to Albino twins. The Queen’s accent is uncompromisingly Spanish, the King’s is indeterminate (he dies, by the way – possibly a merciful release from a bad movie) but the albino twins are unquestionably American, and their fondness for each other causes the Queen even more disappointment. It might all get a lot better as it goes on, but after 20 minutes I’d lost the will to live, so I left.

If you tell me that I missed the point, that it really was a glorious, unique cinematic triumph, then I’m glad you enjoyed it. But I’m glad I went home and read Kate Atkinson’s book of short stories (Not the End of the World) instead. Her tales are better. 

The Writer's Friend

Every writer has ways of dealing with Writer’s Block – brisk walks, movies, anti-depressants, gin... I’ve had a dose of it recently and decided to try something different, so I invoked the ghost of Sybille Bedford.

(There is a patron saint of writers and journalists: St Francis de Sales – and that surname is French, it doesn’t mean he’s going to push your books – but religion isn’t for me. I prefer literary inspiration.)

Sybille, I said, I’ve chosen you because you’re one of my favourite writers, the sort of elegant autobiographical novelist I love. You were a great traveller too, and you wrote with such style and wit. And like me, you were a slow bloomer. Anyway, I felt you were a kindred spirit the moment I read ‘A Legacy’ and I’ve been your faithful admirer all these years, so help me out, send me a Sign!

The funny thing was that I felt a definite shift in the atmosphere straight away, although that could have been Professor Gloom shutting the front door several times to make sure he’d done it. (He is trying to reinstate his position as Head of Domestic Security after failing to lock the front door on two successive nights. And this not long after he had the entire staff of the Waterfront Hall searching for his house keys, which were safely in the door of our house all the time - on the outside.) Anyway, I was sure Sybille was going to come through, but to help things along I put a copy of ‘A Compass Error’ on my bedside table. And what do you know, in the middle of the night I heard a voice!

‘This is the BBC World Service” it said.

Well, it could have been Clementina the cat putting her paw on the radio remote, but it could have been a Sign.

The following night I was woken again, this time by loud noises and flashing lights.

Leaping out of bed I discovered that the TV in the second bedroom had been turned on. Again, it could have been Clementina, who I suspect is able to operate most of the machinery in this house, but when I tell you that the programme showing was Murder, She Wrote, you will understand that I think it was a message from Sybille. Maybe she was trying to tell me to branch into crime.

Or there could be somebody I don’t know about living in the attic…