The Deep North

One of the minor problems of Layfe at the moment is the collision between two important factors: the Two Nice Girls’ vegetable collection, cheap, nourishing, local, fresh, etc., and on the other hand, the general boost to one’s spirits, morale and so forth induced by the Asian Home Gourmet and sundry suchlike packages from the (Straits Chinese) local oriental supermarket. Hence, looking back a blog or three, the Spud Problem. I await correction from Godmama, but to be honest, I can’t see a natural interface between curry laksa and parsnips. Carrots, yes. But I scored a bit of a triumph this evening: a splendid, inky-looking Indonesian black pepper sauce, which I had some of the other day with some pork stirfry strips, didn’t half perk up some beetroot when I used up the other half of the packet. It also looked rather good in a sinister sort of a way.

We had the most beautiful Day Out yesterday. Off to Cromarty with a friend: some warmth in the sun but along with that, a pellucid light like North Norway, water and sky clear as crystal, sky bright, bright, blue. The sort of winter day with a hint of spring which reminds you why there are compensations for not just moving to the tropics and staying there. We stopped at Aberlour to meet up with friend and get a picnic from the deli. Since Miss Dog had by then had an hour in the car, we thought she had better run up and down a bit. Let her off her lead on the walk along the Spey, whereupon, being a labrador, she went in. But she is, unlike Miss Best Friend or the previous Miss Dog, not a swimmer. She likes to paddle and get muddy. The Spey is fast (more than walking speed, I’d say 5-6 mph) and it was absolutely freezing cold — too fast to freeze, of course — and it goes straight down, without a shallows, to a depth of about two and a half feet. So with intention to paddle, she went headfirst into this fast, freezing cold river, and scrambled out again as fast as she could manage — the expression of disgust and outrage on her face was a sight to see. But after a refreshing zizz in the car, she cheered up again at Cromarty. The light, a delicate silvery gold, sky delphinium blue, the pretty little town, viewed from the vantage point of a long walk along the shore then up onto a ridge which overlooked it, harmonious, with its eclectic buildings, crowstep gables, wood siding, rosy sandstone, painted corrugated iron. We went of course to see the Queen of antique dealers, fended off the offer of a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, and accepted strong tea. She has been adding to a locally available range of mugs, expressing on the whole wholesome sentiments (’I'd rather be bagging a Mundro’) in decent Roman capitals, some lines expressive of her general philosophy: ‘Carpe, Diem’. ‘If not now, when?’ ‘Will show knickers for chocolate’. We had a terrific afternoon and Miss Dog was as good as gold. Then we went home through a strangely beautiful twilight, because it was full moon. We ended up at one point pulling in and turning the car lights out so as to appreciate the greenish-blue sky, the black silhouettes of the pines, and the great silver disc of the moon. So Kaspar David Friedrich it was eerie.

We went the other day to pay the plumber: his office is at his residence, built over what must have been designed as a double garage, which he uses as a storage area for all manner of plumbers’ supplies. The Professor, who had been there before, had mentioned the presence of two charming cats. He went upstairs to deal with the ladies in the office, and I stayed downstairs because we were in a hurry. Both cats, as it turned out, one ginger, one ginger and white, were in the plumbers’ stores: I became aware of two pretty ginger faces staring at me from vantage points among the cardboard boxes, so I said hello. This turned out to be a misjudgment. Both cats had evidently been told not to talk to strangers: they looked horrified, scrambled down, and streaked past me and out into their garden. I was aware of a slight oddity in the gait of the ginger and white one, which seemed to be moving more like a rabbit. It wasn’t till the pair of them paused to reconsider me from a safe distance that I realised that the ginger and white had three legs. She was compensating for this quite superbly. She sat quite normally, I’d already noted her turn of speed, and I saw her jump about a foot. Both cats had beautiful plumy tails, and the three legged one used hers extremely cleverly, flexing it sideways so that the weight helped to balance her and compensate for the missing leg. It struck me as something of a triumph over circumstances.

The beasties are generally very good and not much trouble. But they have their moments. Yesterday, Miss Dog elected to roll in something more than usually foul, came in smelling to high heaven and had to have a bath. She was slightly due a bath anyway, so that was all right. Today, just to add variety, Miss Kit got stuck up a tree. Infuriatingly, it was manifestly a very EASY tree, but she lost her head completely and just sat there screeching dismally. We have a new, scientific roofing ladder. Unfortunately it doesn’t come to bits and weighs about as much as a healthy twelve year old. We had a perfectly horrible time lugging it into the copse and disposing it for cat rescue. Hard hearted as I am, I would have left her up there to work out her own salvation, only the morning had been enlivened by the sudden manifestation of a totally free range Alsatian, whose we do not know, and I was rather keen to get her into the house in case the wretched beast turned out to be unreliable with cats. We got her down in the end. We also took Miss Dog to Delgaty, where the Professor had discovered a really beautiful woodland walk. The top field is mysteriously muddy and unpleasant at the moment, so if there’s time, he’s taken to running her over there in the car. It was the first time I’d been, and it is lovely.

Miss Dog is something of a food hound even by Labrador standards. She has nice manners and doesn’t beg. She has, however, evolved a rather personal take on not begging, which is, when I am eating something she considers toothsome, to put her head politely, and heavily, on my knee and salivate. The element of ’see me being good’ leaves the human end of the transaction with little if any defence. I affect to ignore her and become damper and damper. Fortunately, I am not dressy.

The new dog is of a helpful disposition. Likewise, interactive, enthusiastic, and keen to participate. In the house I have data relating to approximately 300 students. Two sets of exam scripts, nine sets of essay scripts (the result of the labours of 4 + 5 teaching assistants). Out of this I am attempting to put together all the data relating to firsts, fails, plus a decent sampling of the marginal. I am therefore surrounded by tottering piles of paper, and it is fairly imperative that I keep them in order. All the students are identified only by a number and I am slightly numbers-dyslexic — I find it all to easy to type 698 when I mean 689. Introduce into this a large, powerful, interactive, etc. etc. labrador. At the one end there is a blunt, powerful head. At the other there is a scything, powerful tail. Both liable to send my precious heaps flying across the floor. And I am trying not even to think about the number of more or less official documents which now have muddy paw prints on.

Our friend the Arts Correspondent turned up with a belated Christmas present which we were greatly taken with. One recent development here in the North has been coldpressed rapeseed oil as a sort of Northern olive-oil. I personally wouldn’t swop it for olive except in an emergency, but it’s quite nice, and certainly, for those greener than I am, locally sourced, etc. etc. etc. The rapeseed oil merchants have come up with a new wheeze which is simply brilliant. Inevitably they ended up with vast piles of still slightly oily seedhusks: now, they have invested in a little more technology, and they are compressing these into solid bricks and selling them as fuel. Their seedbricks burn like coal, are totally sustainable, put out twice the heat of wood, aren’t smoky or smelly (quite pleasant, actually) and LAST. The only problem is that, as I found when I looked at the website, the oil merchants have become a victim of their own success. They are now completely sold out and can’t do a thing till the next rapeseed season, which I suppose is some time around June. I begin to wonder if they may have to reverse engineer their business and produce oil as a byproduct of fuel brick rather than vice versa. But good luck to them, it was a tremendous idea, and the sort of thing there ought to be more of. It’s not as if there is any shortage of rapeseed up here — the dreary fields of staring cadmium yellow litter the landscape, and offend everyone who’s susceptible to pollen (they produce a particularly rebarbative pollen, unfortunately) on a twice yearly basis.

Among the adornments of Aberdeenshire are Two Nice Girls who have taken up growing vegetables in the Howe of Buchan — these ornaments to the sisterhood are a pair of American ladies of middle years and cheerful disposition. They deposit a weekly veg box, which costs ten quid and is, compared to T*sc*s, insanely good value. Most of it is nice, and some of it is lovely. We have not learned to adore kale but have found ways of making it edible, which I suppose is something. But, at this time of year… O God, the spuds. They are very nice spuds. But the Prof and I don’t eat that much starch. Every week these good ladies deposit more potatoes; we are a bread-eating household in the main, and what with the beneficent fairy wand of the Godmother Formerly Known as Tropical, are eating quite a bit of rice … I open the food cupboard and find myself thinking of Mickey Mouse as the Sorceror’s Apprentice. I’d swear they multiply in the dark.

I have been in the Deep South for a few days. Golly, it’s crowded. I ended up taking a train from Victoria to Chichester, and there seemed to be continuous built up area from London to Horsham. After that it struck me that things got a bit nicer, and there was a certain amount of old-fashioned Home Counties with undulating green meadows and stands of mature trees. Chichester itself, where I was giving a lecture on Ed, is a little city of considerable charm; an agreeable mixture of eighteenth century and older houses, moments of architectural fantasy (for instance, a pair of dodo like short-legged ostriches atop gate piers) and the spire of the cathedral visible from just about everywhere. Otherwise I spent a couple of days in the British Library where I was gulping down books without the knowledge touching the sides, as it were: it will all have to digest but exam season comes first. Anyway, I got back around eleven last night, and it was not till we got up that I became aware that the Professor and Barry had wrought an Improvement. The front upstairs landing is lit by one of those old fashioned Victorian skylights: a large slab of glass framed with slips of star-engraved glass, and squares of red glass in the corners. The back landing also boasts a skylight, a small and grotty iron affair, Crittal or thereabouts: I used to dislike it, then fell out of the habit of seeing it, as one does with the grottier aspects of one’s domestic environment. Or rather, boasted. As of the other day, there is a considerably larger skylight to match the one at the front, only with blue corners. It looks splendid, miles better.

I have been severely bitten by the Inland Revenue, the bastards. My accountant, with a glorious swish of his sword and his lance, and a glorious clank of his tin-plated pants, has sailed in to do battle. What is so annoying about the situation is: 1) I have NOT earned any money to speak of through my writing for about five years, in keeping with the general mayhem which has descended upon the the fiction market. 2) a sum of money bobbed up I should have had a decade ago. I was, naturally, very pleased to see it, especially since it came as a complete surprise, but the dewy-eyed naifs of the Inland Revenue promptly said — hey! if you earned this much in 2010-11 we may reasonably assume you’ll earn the same in 2011-12!!! As if. Therefore, they merrily concluded, you can pay half up front for moneys which, in fact, I have not the slightest reason to believe will, or even might, exist. This is what you pay accountants for. I hope that in the next day or so, he will be sitting the Inland Revenue down upon his knee and explaining to them that no, Santa Claus does not exist. Nor the Tooth Fairy. Nor, at present, my ability to earn five figure sums by making things up.

For more than a decade, I have been used to a desk diary — a quiet sort of object which came as a seasonal gift from my erstwhile agents’ (the current agents don’t do corporate gifts). I find it handy for work, and scribble in details of students, essays, minor complications, read something by Wednesday, etc. Thus I found myself in the position of wanting to buy a desk diary. I consulted Amazon and the first name which came up was C-ll-ns (who I remember as General Diary Suppliers of yore). I ordered a week to a page diary, and a few days later, it turned up. To my utter horror, it had unadvertised and ghoulish added value. For example, today. ‘Owls with an attitude problem don’t give two hoots’. Tomorrow, ‘Too much jogging is sole destroying’. I thought about going through the year while discovering an irritatingly lame pun added to each and every working day — crowned with thorns as these so often are — and thought, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO.’ (to quote a dear and valued friend). Either I will end up in Colney Hatch or my dentist will make a fortune. So I have ordered a NEW desk diary from a rival firm. But dearies. If you value your sanity, do not buy a C-ll-ns Desk Diary.

One aspect of the Miss Dog AWOL Drama I didn’t mention is that in the middle of us racing about yelling, a perfectly nice individual tipped up with a folio of photographs — he was flogging images of ‘your property from the air’, taken in 1967. Anyway, it was in fact this bloke who found Miss Dog, and having spotted her careering about far too near the road, was good enough to come back down our toilsome drive and say so. After which honour demanded that the Professor buy a photograph. Actually, it’s very interesting. In 1967, my big border at the back was a shrubbery. The lawn border didn’t exist; the rest of my garden was a swathe of gravel. We had an awful lot more mature trees than we do now, and what’s now the parterre is a sort of scrubland which perhaps had been Digging for Victory twenty years before. The shrubbery explains quite a lot about the poor, depleted ground. We can only think that the borders — which had been, after a fashion, stocked, but not for a long time — must date to the 1970s EEC Subsidies. Perhaps the paterfamilias, who was, by the seventies, living in a sort of flatlet in what is now the drawing room, was encouraged to take up gardening as a retirement hobby. Shame we lost the trees.

We have had a bit of an afternoon. Miss Dog had a hilarious morning, because Barnyards was doing something to the steading involving diggers and MUD, and also his very nice little Springer, Monty. She met Monty the other day and decided he was her new best friend. So she came lolloping in, highly pleased with herself, and absolutely covered in mud, glorious mud. This afternoon, having been on the whole rather cooperative up till now, she went missing. She’s been free thus far to go out and amuse herself, but she simply vanished. After a great deal of exercise, she was spotted over by where the owners of the sheep in the back field live, and persuaded back home. The Professor then brought her up the hill, where I had been conferring with Barnyards and Monty, and a stray farm collie, all of whom were supervising some further digging operations. The dogs, naturally, bundled off together, at which point, the behaviour of Monty and the Collie began to suggest a reason for all this: Miss Dog is coming on heat. As it happens, we had booked her in at the vet tomorrow for a check up and so on, so I think she may be getting a lovely PILL. Meanwhile, she’s grounded. We got back here, and within fifteen minutes, she let herself out of the front door which we had foolishly left ajar - fortunately she didn’t go far, but it does suggest that she is not quite herself. Her ablutions will take place on the lead this evening and tomorrow.

We were pottering off to our antique shop friends at Clola the other day, a route which takes us past a very fine class of oldfashioned village pond. There are generally ducks and things on it, but I was surprised to see the hunched, prehistoric-looking shape of a cormorant — not generally an inland bird. Unsurprisingly, everything else had vanished, though I noticed a couple of poor little coots scuttling away under cover of a hedge as fast as their legs could carry them. Very wisely, I suspect. Your cormorant is a ruthless feeder. I’ve just had an exciting moment with the garden birds. I scattered some seed on the ground, and got the usual flock of chaffinches. Then this rather attractive little brown job appeared, and realised I hadn’t a clue what it was. After some work with the RSPB website, I found it: a twite! I had no idea that there was any such bird. I was particularly pleased since it’s the name of a favourite fictional heroine. Also, they are quite rare, but we are very remote and rural, which helps to account for it.

The mouse saga is an ongoing aspect of life since it is actually a domestic war — what with gnawed pipes and all that. We have a sonic mouse-deterrent which may or may not be inhibiting them from coming in (this is what it is aimed at). But those already in, Miss Cat is dealing with with admirable firmness. When I was in London the week before Christmas, she brought the Professor four, and I found another on the duvet as a lovely present when I got back. The night before last, the small hours were enlivened by a sudden outbreak of scutter-scutter-scutter-CRASH suggestive of an encounter on the rather slippery wood-effect flooring in the bathroom which had been, shall I say, not crowned with victory. It has to be remembered that the household is passably hygienic. We have ceased to keep stuff bound for the compost heap in the cupboard under the sink, and there’s actually now very little for mice to eat, apart from exercising their teeth on PVA pipe. On the other hand, there is a saucer of cat food in the bedroom for the foolhardy. Last night, Miss Cat took an hour’s nap, and then vanished on what was evidently a stake-out. Hours later, a sharp. high, triumphant cry announced victory. This was followed by a variety of juicy, crunching noises. Ah, nature red in tooth and claw.

One of my everyday task is cleaning out the Spam filter which ensures that the comments aren’t overwhelmed by rubbish (and also, if it gets away from me, is the reason why some of your well turned comments disappear in an irritating fashion). Spam is bizarrely episodic. Inevitably, most of it is pornography, for years, the poker sites kept up a war against society which seems now to have ceased (perhaps all potential poker addicts have been deemed ensnared), a sizeable wad is more or less dodgy pharmaceuticals. One mystery of this winter — the Spam filter lets you see not only the message but the sender — is that for about the last fortnight, whatever the ostensible message, the MILFS, hentai and Viagra have been shunted aside completely by advertisements for Ugg boots, presumably fake. Today’s pass removed 27 Ugg boots messages, and there were no others of any kind. Now, does that mean that somewhere there is a sort of fake Ugg boot mountain, or has someone paid vast sums to the Spam-meisters?

On a more local area of concern, we haven’t as yet suffered from the hurricanoes. The wind was screaming overhead in the small hours, but westron winds go over the house, generally, and we are okay in our little valley. Not that we’ve tried going anywhere. The wonderful thing is that at this time of year, you don’t have to.

We have been having a jolly time — the Godparents Formerly Known as Tropical, Dr Biswell & Mr Wil all turned up on Friday, and so did a couple of old friends from Cambridge, a jolly and exceedingly clever individual who looks like Mr Toad, and his beautiful art-dealer wife. I may have saved a marriage. The Cambridge contingent had not been in the house for very long when that instrument of darkness, the Financial Times end of year crossword made a dog-eared appearance from Mr Toad’s pocket, and I observed steam coming out of Mrs Toad’s ears. ‘Oh, GOD! Not that thing again!’ she snarled. There seemed no hope for it but to set to and finish the crossword before there was actual violence. With the aid of the OED and Google, the deed was eventually done, and harmony was restored. Miss Kit and Miss Dog are getting along quite amicably, so one way and another, peace descended. A certain amount of additional jollity was provided by a book I’d bought which turned up in the post — as I continue to pursue the question of baroque in the twenties and thirties, I found myself thinking about FOOD, and this led me to a cookbook, published in 1931, illustrating smart dining. Its authoress was clearly a poisoner; but that doesn’t matter. Smart people drank a great deal and smoked a great deal, and evidently the only bit you needed to worry about was the hors d’oeuvres; anchovies and olives and horrid little bits of fried bread with stuff in mayonnaise on it. As for the actual dinner, one read, and shuddered. Aspic of course was madly fashionable, as was ice cream, so both figured largely. Rice was evidently considered smart (surprisingly little bread was consumed, and potatoes, doubtless, were thought common). There were, I think, no references to any spices at all other than ‘curry powder’. Meanwhile, the husband, a surrealist painter, suggested decorations. ‘An African figure surrounded by cacti and aloes’. ‘Two dead branches, one painted red and the other white to resemble coral, in an accumulator jar’. ‘Any large Staffordshire cottage surrounded by big white roses’. The social anthropology of it was fascinating. Having a cold dinner, for instance, so that you could serve yourselves in order that the servants should not be upset by smart (i.e., daring) conversation. A certain additional satisfaction came from the fact that it was the cheapest copy on ABE, and the bookseller had failed to observe that it was signed and dedicated by the author and her husband (who illustrated it) on the half title. Ho, ho. Otherwise, we are having a nice quiet time, apart from a flock of goldfinches who are pushing each other off my niger-seed feeder, eating me out of house and home.

One big surprise on Boxing Day was that a patch of snowdrops had come out! I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in the Old Year. I spotted them as we whisked past in the car, and went out this morning to admire them. Yes, there they were, and so was a single white crocus standing up like a little candle. Naturally, the new Miss Dog decided to accompany me on this expedition. I was a lot more surprised to realise that Miss Kit was trotting after us, not least, because a venture down the drive implied that she was completely exposed and a long way from any cover or refuge. Inevitably, Miss Dog spotted her and went cantering back to — I don’t know. Investigate, anyway, or perhaps to initiate communication of some kind. Miss Kit’s response astonished me. Rather than turning sideways on and humping up the back (or indeed, fleeing for her life), she stood up on her hind legs, with her front paws dangling in front of her chest, looking surprisingly like an orange Meerkat. This brought her face pretty much to dog level, and from that advantage, she uttered a single sharp cry, like a breaking violin string. The dog seemed to interpret this without difficulty, wheeled away, and trotted off to investigate a rosebush. I must say, I thought it was terribly brave of her. It is true that she has just about taken the measure of the beastie, but, mutatis mutandis, if something twelve feet high was bearing down on me like that, I’m not certain I would stand my ground.

There have been several important milestones with Miss Dog. She has been out to lunch and covered herself with glory (also mud). There was a mild contretemps when we arrived, and I rushed straight into the garden with her, viz., Rabbits. There is quite a colony of pet bun-buns, who had been rounded up into their chickenwire cage, but what nobody had quite thought of is that Miss D went straight for them: the panic-stricken creatures raced to the other side of their enclosure, and so she ran round the other side, and they did it again!!! Highly hilarious from her point of view, less so from the rabbits’. She was, clearly, not trying to catch them; she was in fact bouncing as dogs do to announce the start of a game, but it took several goes of round and round the pen before we could grab her collar. Rabbits were then evicted to the safety of the garage, and she was given the freedom of the garden. Having run off a bit of energy, she was, in fact, very good during lunch. Mostly resting on a temporary bed in the corner, but periodically getting up to walk round the table and put her head on the thigh of everyone present, in turn. She wasn’t begging, just wanting an acknowedging hand. After lunch my host and I took her to the park: always a moment of considerable anxiety with an unfamiliar dog. Fortunately, she is a paddler not a swimmer, so she didn’t attempt the racing waters of the Don, though (trust a dog) she found herself a lovely still backwater and coated herself in sticky black mud. But it turns out 1) that she WILL come when called, and 2) that she is very good with other dogs. A fellow Labrador was greeted in friendly fashion. A Springer nearly turned himself inside out trying to get her to play chase, and she wasn’t having any. A pair of collies were, after a brief race round a flowerbed, ignored. So we’ve covered a lot of ground in a day, and she was good about pretty much all of it except that she gets wildly excited about Going Somewhere, refuses to lie down, and after a certain amount of time has passed, whines in an irritating fashion, all of which is neither here nor there. But it’s a great relief to know that she’s steady with other dogs, and, given the speed she can move at, that she has some notion of the meaning of ‘Come here’.

There is a significant twig under the hall table, and fur all over the floor. We have a dog again. Miss Kit is getting used to it. Miss Dog was as good as gold last night sleeping in the kitchen, but when the Professor went down to give her her breakfast and let her out, she galloped happily upstairs after him. Miss Kit proceeded to shoot under the duvet and growl, which suggests that she is not, in her heart of hearts, feeling all that menaced. Moreover, they touched noses three times in the course of yesterday evening, and the black blobby one remains unscratched. It was just as well I came home when I did, though, since the Professor hadn’t been able to deal with them both simultaneously, and, dog having arrived at about twenty past eight yesterday morning, poor Miss Kit hadn’t relieved herself all day. I thought this might be the case, and took her straight into the garden, where she shot up the path to her favourite patch, and squatted down with a ‘Ye Gods!’ sort of expression, after a single cursory scrape of the ground. We are trying to make the bedroom and my study Cat Rooms, where Miss Dog only goes by permission. Miss Dog is fine. Like so many poor little doggies, she appears to be deaf, but perhaps it will wear off. She was rioting most cheerfully in the garden when I came down, chasing an indignant pheasant who clearly wasn’t used to that sort of thing, and with superpheasantine foolishness, attempted to outrun her rather than taking off. They careered all the way across the lawn, with the pheasant running like a champion before it finally took wing with an indignant screech: Miss D naturally thought this was hilarious. The only problem I foresee at the moment is that Miss D has so much more freedom and attention than she’s used to we are going to have to be quite careful to make it clear to her that 1) there are SOME rules, and 2) there are times when you go to your little bed and pipe down. We will have to take her out to lunch on Boxing Day. I am not entirely looking forward to this.

I gather we have a dog! I myself am in London at the moment, having nipped down to see my mother, who wasn’t well. I’ll be going back home this evening, and meet her for the first time. The Professor says she is very pretty, currently sad and nervous, therefore whiny and ingratiating (this was a rescue) but clearly good tempered if a little traumatised. Miss Kit is in the bedroom spitting fireworks and saying ‘no one consulted ME’, which is, alas, true. But she has fundamentally positive feelings about black labradors, so when she gets over the ‘pestilent interloper’ stage all should be well. I will, obviously, make a huge fuss of her when we get back. Nothing really horrible has happened to the new Miss Dog, just a lot which was sad and bewildering, and of course labradors DO love one day to be just the same as the next, which it wasn’t and hasn’t been for a good while. I hope she’ll be happy, and I don’t see why she shouldn’t be. I have bought her a ball; fluorescent pink with white stripes. Bet she manages to lose it on its first outing, all the same.