The Deep North

The Management apologises for an interruption in transmission. We got back from London all right (limping, in the Lady Novelist’s case: she had been suffering for her art in the Tower of London). Since then there haven’t quite been enough hours in any one day. She is locked in battle with the twelfth and final chapter of the current draft — hence the Tower of London — and will be more conversable once the last exciting episode has been committed to type. Yesterday produced one of the less attractive of local seasonal manifestations: driving home from the University, we observed with gloom that every other field was turning stark cadmium yellow. Yup, it’s oilseed rape time again. The stuff is the planet’s friend, we believe. Due to its rich, oily seeds, it is responsible for the massive boost to the lark population which delights us on a daily basis. However, it also features some of the nastiest pollens known to allergenic mankind. Our contact lenses promptly clouded up with protein, we sneezed, we fell into a state of general and unspecific malaise. Experience suggests that after a brief adjustment, we both get used to it, but the first impact of the year is always a bit of a moment. All that yellow aside, things are very beautiful up here. The trees have suddenly popped into leaf, the bright, clear lime greens you get in the first week or so of growth. The larks are thanking the Lord for oilseed rape. The ground elder is threatening to take over the world. And so on. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Once more, we are deserting the Deep North: the Lady Novelist is spending a week in London and discoursing on Mr Edward Burra, the Professor is dodging between London, Manchester and Oxford. We will probably be off line, so expect to hear from us again at the beginning of May. We are in a slight state of fiscal gloom at the moment, because the Refugee Gardener and his son-in-law are sorting out the extension. You do not want to know what was underneath the pebbledash which was coming off of its own accord. We did not want to know either, but we had very little option in the matter. The only fun bit was working out a colour for the limewash: a sort of dusty pinkish shade. Not a colour I would ever have chosen in cold blood, but the assertive nature of red sandstone leaves one with few, if any, options in the matter.

The Real World Consultant and the Arts Consultant suggested that, this being Saturday, we met them at a farm shop and had lunch together. Thus we ended up tootling off on a variety of Southward roads towards Deeside, an area which is not very familiar to us. What is most noticeable about it is a strong flavour of Highlandness: as one approaches the Dee it begins to feel as if one has been going due West rather than due South. There are fine mountains, snow-capped, on an almost Alpine scale, on the horizon, as opposed to the purple dragon’s-back of Bennachie, and in every respect the landscape seems larger. We had slightly hoped to take out Craigievar castle, but they are re-harling it at the moment: thus that most romantic of structures is entirely wrapped in polythene and looks like something by Christo. The farm shop was an agreeable institution, and lunch was slow, extensive and prolonged. Having been disappointed of Craigievar, we had a small antiquarian moment on the way back, which was to try and find the grave of a major eighteenth-century aesthete called Byres of Tonley. He had been somewhat in our minds since we visited the Ashmolean about a fortnight ago and found there, to our black delight, the eight-foot-high marble candelabra which he and his talented associate Signor Piranesi had , erm, ‘found’ at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli and ‘restored’. Best guess is that about four cubic inches of actual first-century work was involved, and they made up the rest as they went along, including the three two-foot-high cranes looking in different directions on the top. We were very chuffed to find that the objects in question had been successfully flogged to an English Milordo on the Grand Tour, since they had doubtless involved a great deal of work — the Milordo then gifted them to the Ashmolean with a self-praising inscription in Latin from which the story could be readily deduced. However, finding Mr Byres’s grave turned out to be easier said than done. He died quite well off, and at one stage, contemplated building himself a mausoleum, so we thought there would be something pretty dashed grand and neoclassical in the churchyard of Tough (which, by the way, is pronounced Tuke, not Tuff). But there wasn’t. There was a perfectly good obelisk covering his nephew and heir, confirming that we were in the right churchyard, a perfectly extraordinary edifice over a late-nineteenth-century Farquharson which involved three different colours of granite and looked like a municipal drinking fountain, and acres of quietly excellent lettering, but Mr Byres was nowhere to be found. A mystery. We got severely lost after that, and saw more of rural Aberdeenshire than we have ever seen before in one go. It is looking very fine at the moment. The larches are coming out.

We have seen, for two days running, an exceedingly fine libel. An elderly individual had been standing with a placard in the immediate environments of a gentleman’s residence, with a placard some three feet by two displaying the following legend: ‘P***n of G********m House is a corrupt liar devoid of any scruples’. As a form of protest this seems both polite (up to a point, admittedly) and grammatical. I suppress, naturally, the name, not merely because promoting a libel is illegal, but also because in this particular case I doubt very much if it is true; I know and like Mr P***n. and if he has a fault, lack of scrupulousness is unlikely to be it. But I still enjoy the spectacle of someone asserting the right merely to declare his point of view.

Miss Best Friend has had a bath this evening. She has compounded her recent litany of crimes by rolling in otter poo. According to the Gamekeeper, we are now regulars on the local otter circuit. Since both he and the Northern Gentleman have seen trout cruising about in the lake which are practically the size of whales, this is not unduly surprising. I am for otters. However, the spraints (I believe this to be the relevant technical term, on no better authority than T.H. White) which they leave have a peculiarly musky, penetrating quality, when imported into a domestic environment by a labrador. We are all for Nature but we would prefer, on the whole, that some of it stayed outside.

Miss Best Friend has been dining away again. Yummy carrion, it would seem, and too far gone even for canine digestive processes, since we have just discovered the results in the back drawing room. Well, we had been saying to each other that the recently acquired oriental rug from the Praisegod Carpet Co. (via Ebay; a mysterious outfit who have been flogging dodgy rugs for almost nothing for the last two months) looked a bit offensively new for the country. It doesn’t any more. Labradors as an aid to interior decoration, discuss. The funny thing about Miss BF is that her general demeanour is suggestive of a censorious Old Lancashire Catholic housekeeper, but the Good Old Thing, as she is sometimes called, can be a remarkably Bad Old Thing on occasion. She seems, so to say, to be an Old Housekeeper who periodically mounts a broomstick and disappears into the night with a flash of lisle stockings — without for a second conceding her possession of the high moral ground.

I was going to say a bit more about the Italian jaunt. Perhaps the single most magical thing we did was to visit the marble quarries above Carrara. Loredana had told us of a tunnel through the Monte Altissimo, dating perhaps from the fifteenth century, linking the quarry regions with Tuscany. Since it is simply bored through solid rock and is not a modern tunnel, it is not lit or anything, and she was saying she had been warned not to attempt it in winter since the ice forms vast stalactites as water filters slowly through the marble, and these can fall on you. Or you can drive into one, in the pitch dark. Dauntless driver that she is, Loredana agreed to take us up the Monte Altissimo, on a road that looked like a diagram of something’s insides. I hadn’t known that the marble for all that Renaissance and Baroque statuary came from quarries about 3,000 feet up. All of it was brought down by men- and mule-power, lashed to crude sledges, on what were little more than goat-tracks; if you think of the size of the block needed to create Michaelangelo’s David, to take a single example, the logistics of getting it to Florence would have been absolutely hideous. It was a strange, secret world up there. Snow lingered on the tops, and from any sort of a distance you couldn’t tell snow from marble. It was blindingly white under a very blue sky up there, and completely silent; from the highest point of the road, one could see the ground plunging away vertiginously, quarries looking like strange white futurist cities from above, because of the way the great blocks are cut out in neat rectangles. Villages in the laps of distant valleys, like little huddles of Lego bricks, and range after range of misty blue hills marching down towards the sea. The tunnel was just as terrifying as expected, but what was really strange was that it seemed to be a tunnel through time. On the Ligurian coast, it was spring, and the sun was warm. In Tuscany, a mere half a mile away through the Monte Altissimo, it was winter, and snow lay thick on the ground. That bit must have been still in deep shadow, but it was massively disconcerting as an effect.

A brief post to say that the Northern Professor will be tipping up on a Radio 3 arts programme called The Verb this coming week — I think it goes out at 9.45 on Friday evening but in any case I should think that if you go on to the Radio 3 site, for about a week after the broadcast, you can probably have a listen — it was certainly the case with Book of Ed last December. As always with radio he came away wishing that he had said things other than what he did say, but I suspect it went off perfectly well. I will also take this chance to apologise to anyone who has submitted a blognote and has not found that it appeared. Once the number of comments goes over about 200 I can’t actually get into the spam-file to check through them, because it siezes up. I usually do a clean-up every day or every other day. Having been in Italy or travelling for a fortnight, I found that the mass of revolting nonsense trapped in the spam filter was over 850 items, and I am waiting for a Blogmeister to come and sort it out. He will, unfortunately, pull the plug on the entire contents; I can hardly expect him to sift through looking for genuine observations. So, sorry, everyone.

I am now back from Italy, with a handful of tales some of which I will try and get around to telling. Apparently, Italy was as cold at Easter as we were over here, which made it all the more gratifying that spring sprang while we were there. The greengrocers frothed over with every known variety of chicory, including the delicious puntarelle, which I hadn’t seen since I was last in Rome, and a very curious sort of old-ivory one with small flecks and spots of oxblood red. There was also lots and lots of cheap sprue, and cor de bue tomatoes. Happiness, in short. We spent a bit of time in Florence, then wandered over to La Spezia, where a friend was renovating a house. La Spezia, which is on the Ligurian coast, is oddly like a cross between interwar Toulon and somewhere in Norway: there is, on the one hand, the turquoise sea, a town of heavy, dignified art-nouveau stucco buildings with streets lined with oranges and palms, but immediately at its back, there is a range of high purple hills, and behind them, the silver peaks of the Monte Apuane. We ended up having an intensely complicated few days sampling the wonders of Ligurian cooking and going on a variety of expeditions. One of these ended us up in the town of Fivizzano around lunchtime. It was an old town with entrance ports, and it looked very bare, and dusty, and shuttered. We parked, and walked through one of the arches, and almost at once, came upon a tall wrought iron gate in the wall, showing a derelict formal garden with a grotto with a broken basin, where water clearly had not flowed for decades. Just the Professor’s sort of thing, in other words. We spent some time sticking our noses through the bars before wandering on to discover a grandiloquent plaque on the wall announcing that the house to which the garden was attached was the birthplace of a poet whose name was carved in imperishable bronze (Horace); Fanteo Bononi, who in the society of the Arcadi, was known as Lucindo. A few steps further on, there was a large and very shut door, and a notice saying ‘Museo della Stampa’. A museum of printing. Further information elsewhere in the town suggested it might be open at three, and meanwhile, we were hungry. The town square contained a dusty, waterless Medici fountain ornamented with marble dolphins who had tied themselves in granny knots and looked as if they on the whole regretted it, an ice cream parlour, and a trattoria. To the trattoria we went. The padrona turned out to be a curious little woman of maybe thirty-five, dressed all in black, with bright red lipstick and a variety of gold adornments; gold sneakers, a gold comb in her hair, and so forth, in a thundering bad temper. She took our order, and eventually, food was forthcoming. By the end of the meal she was all smiles, having apparently got over whatever it was; we tipped quite lavishly, and since it was by then quarter past three, went on our way. But alas, the door of the palazzo remained obstinately closed. We trailed back to the square, and asked the ice cream shop. ‘Oooo’, they said. ‘We haven’t seen Professore Burroni around for a while. But it was definitely open in the holidays.’ Begging the question of which holidays; Christmas, or Easter? Back we traipsed once more, to find the door still firmly locked, and in a spirit of general enquiry, went along to the gate to see if any lights had come on in the building. There, on the other side of the bars, stood an enormous dog, wearing the canine equivalent of a dusty and out-at-elbows grey flannel suit. He had a wrinkled forehead and drooping jowls, and his expression was grieved and pained. He appeared to be nursing a secret sorrow. I had a sudden flash of inspiration. ‘That is Professor Burroni’, I said. ‘The padrona is a witch. He said something nasty about her gnocchi, so she turned him into a dog, and now he can’t turn back until full moon.’ The Professor pointed out that it was just as well he had tipped her, since it is well known in Mediterranean circles that if a witch has taken a present from you, the honour of witchdom demands that she refrain from aggressive gestures thereafter. Our friend then addressed the mastiff, asking him very politely if he might consider turning back into human form and opening the museum for us, eliciting nothing but a sigh and a roll of his large and liquid eye. There was nothing to be done. We went back to the car, while behind us, Professore Burroni began to howl. We did conclude, however, that the cross padrona had got in one small hex before the Professor neutralised her; Loredana discovered that above a certain altitude, she seemed to have become invisible to other drivers. But since we are all still alive, this might be taken as more an outbreak of witchy humour than a genuine curse.

We are on the last stage of the Old Aberdeen book. Meaning, we had bloody well better be, because at sparrowfart on Tuesday morning we are heading off on the first leg of going to Florence by train. That is, Aberdeen to London, London to Paris, Paris (overnight) to Florence and La Spezia. But it is not too worrying. Somehow or other, this slim volume seems to have been pretty well scrambled into existence in the course of the last month of frantic activity: it is basically wadding to separate photographs, but even wadding has to be properly done. However, I am thoroughly bored with it. The Northern Gentleman has the task of editing, which is great on two counts; I have no worries whatsoever about how it will be done, and I don’t have to do it myself.

I am much looking forward to all these hours in trains. I have been pining to get back to drafting the new novel, which has been on hold since writing Ch. VIII in Cumbria a month ago, and I’ve always liked writing in hotel rooms. Writing on trains has the same basic appeal of being ’somewhere else’ — the East Coast line is a rattly old track so I will have to be careful; with all the joggling it is horribly easy for chunks of text to get deleted in error, but anyway, I am looking forward to cutting loose from current preoccupations. The weather in Florence, we gather, is just as horrible as the weather here which is unfortunate, but if it is really vile then I will simply lurk in the apartment and write. Our Hero will be in the environs of York for much of chapter IX so driving rain etc. will help me along. Should it prove otherwise then I’ll go out and have fun. I have a date with a literary festival on Sunday 6th, and will be back home, I suppose, on Tuesday 8th. It may or may not be possible to update between now and then, but here’s hoping.

The last thirty-six hours have been dominated by weather. The wind has been screaming round the house like something possessed. Miss Kit refused to leave the house, and I had personally to conduct her out for her ablutions yesterday morning — on really bad mornings she will consent to go if I go with her, and not otherwise. The electricity was flickering ominously all evening, but we cunningly provided ourselves with strategically placed candelabra and matches, thus ensuring that it did not actually go off. This morning, the laird of Towie, clearly in a sharing-the-love sort of mood, rang to say 1) that his boiler had burst, and 2) that he was therefore bringing a friend round for a cup of coffee, and 3) Idea of North, pah. Look out of the window. So we did. Deep and crisp and, alas, even. The sun is now shining and I don’t think it will lie. I hope not. Towie also told us that his guru at Findhorn was undergoing gender reassignment and he didn’t know what to call him/her, and if it wasn’t for his Twisby he didn’t know how he could carry on. We don’t believe him, of course. No Twisby has ever been known to be of the slightest use in a crisis.

It has been a somewhat strange day: we have a very grand, and very old, French poet coming to dinner, throwing me into a bit of a tizz as when I do Grand Dinner it is on the whole Italian Grand Dinner and not French Grand Dinner which is something else again. The car is in for its MOT. Someone needed a reference in a hurry. Someone else needed something poodlefaked in a hurry. We are trying to finish the Old Aberdeen book. Just as we were reflecting that there were far too many things to be worrying about all at once, a Missing Nun was added to the rich brew. The good sister in question has decided to spend Easter at Pluscarden Abbey. She is by way of being a friend of Peter’s, and is normally based in Rome, and when she said she had no idea how to get there, he suggested Hayseed Taxis, our extremely rural taxi service, and forgot all about it. Except that while he was trying to refurbish a pair of dodgy looking plate candlesticks, the yokel in question rang up to say he had lost her. Quite what he was meant to do about it, apart from pray, I was not entirely sure, but it added to the rich texture of things.

Since the last blog, life has pursued a sufficiently even tenor not to provoke much in the way of comment. Despite the recommendations of the Barbadian Latinist, we have not embarked on glue-traps, since old fashioned breakbacks combined with Miss Kit seem to be working wonders. We are trying to finish a book; any excitement generated thereby will be contained, eventually, within its covers, but don’t expect much. We have seen advance copies of the Northern Professor’s slim volume of verse, which is out next month, and very fine it looks too.
The other local news is that we have a new gardener, who, like the good slater (which is how we came across him) is a refugee from the northern territories of the Empress of Tea — this lady, most of whose life lies in the far east, has become an involuntary benefactrix to the entire area by throwing men who anyone in their right mind would have gone almost any distance to keep off her estate. She perhaps imagines that in the place of one highly skilled, selfrespecting tradesman who can think for himself, and expects to be paid accordingly, she can whistle up 60 coolies, or perhaps, that she should be able to. The estate in question is achieving a rather marked degree of picturesque neglect, and I personally can’t say I’m sorry. After four years of a dear old buffer who was a good hand with a mower and a chainsaw and had some species of yearning, private relationship with potatoes I never tried to understand. (Potatoes. Why does a certain type of Scots gardenere insist on them? Practically the cheapest thing in the shop at any time of year; what is this with growing potatoes? When the first year made it clear that we had unsuitable storage facilities and if you left them in the ground, they got eaten by slugs, and if you didn’t they went green and chitted …. race memory?). Anyway. Under the rule of the Refugee Gardener, I think there may be no more potatoes, and rather more of what we actually want. There’s a happy thought. By the way, I own a double, pale green tree peony of great antiquity with the charming name of ‘Green of Beans’: the plant seems, after about six years of cosseting, to be producing a flower. I will report at inordinate length if it does.

The Apparitional Gamekeeper is offroad, having knackered the clutch of his absurd 4×4 boy-mobile. While he waited for another clutch to turn up in the post, he was looking for work, and suggested that he demolish the carport created by Kev the Evil Geordie. It was something we had had in mind, so we said all right and now are rather glad that we did. The design of the carport was bold and rather nice like a Victorian conservatory. What we did not realise at the time, some four years ago, was that Kev did not have sufficient building knowledge to angle the gully between the carport and the house so that it would spill water off. Water, instead, built up and went into the wallhead of the utility room. As a result, there is now a clear, visible inch between the pebbledash render of the walls and the walls themselves. They are absolutely hovering on the brink of falling to bits of their own accord. One misplaced cough might do it. What was revealed about Geordie craftsmanship in the course of the demolition was mind-boggling. We put a new, angled roof over the existing flat roof, and left the flat roof as a second line of defence. Having had water sheeting over it for four years, this is now wet-rot central. The only cheerful thought really is that at least the port has now gone, and the damage it has done is probably reparable. If I have any wisdom to offer, it is don’t employ cowboy builders, not ever. There are some who would say don’t employ Geordies, but that is probably unfair, though as of this evening it seems not unreasonable.

For the third time, we have mice in the flour cupboard, which is sited catercorner above the cooker. This is quite maddening: they squeeze through a ventilation brick from outside, come up the inside of the wall, and gnaw holes in the ducting for the cooker’s ventilation fan. They are therefore entirely outwith our control unless we can work out a way of mouseproofing the ducting, which is easier said than done. The little bastards haven’t got anywhere much, I am happy to say. Since the last round of invasion, I have kept my bags of flour in seethrough plastic boxes. The real problem is Miss Kit’s understandable feeling that she ought to do something about them. This led, only the other day, to her leaping onto the counter and from thence up into the adjacent mug cupboard (where she landed with one of her forelegs in a rather nice creamware mug. Crash, tinkle.) I regret the creamware mug, but my real source of anxiety is that she might jump onto the glasstopped electric stove at a point when it is cooling down, but not yet cold. I keep a trusty water-pistol handy and shoot her whenever she advances along the worktop, a statement of position which she is on the whole inclined to respect, but it’s a bit much to expect that her general association of jets of water with going near the stove will be sufficient disincentive if she can actually hear a mouse scuttering about in the cupboard above it. The whole thing has the air of an accident waiting to happen, and I think the next thing might be wire-mesh around the ducting. But mice can get through the tiniest spaces. I wouldn’t bet on more than delaying them for a bit.

We found ourselves the lucky recipients of one of those mysterious outbreaks of Corporate Culture that the extremely wealthy somehow consider necessary. Various individuals connnected with the wonderful world of oil decided to have an elegant evening of hits from grand opera at a local castle, and proceeded to invite a pretty motley selection of the local great and good, including representatives of the University. Hence us. It was in its way an evening of dark comedy. To begin with, someone had not thought through with any clarity how many people the reception rooms of a smallish Scottish castle can contain comfortably. With a Victorian Scottish Baronial Pile, you can have the band of the Coldstream Guards unnoticed in a mere corner of the drawing room playing light music, but with a real castle, matters are somewhat different. As harrassed waiting staff struggled through something a bit like a rush-hour Tube train inhabited by the unusually well dressed, with plates of canapés held shoulder high, I began to develop a private sweep on which expansive lady would end up with cheese n’ pineapple shot down her cleavage. The ‘Culture’ bit also involved an element of stately miscalculation. Which is to say that even two opera singers make so much actual noise that in a sixty-foot drawing room, they can actually cross the pain threshold. As the female of the pair climbed above the stave, you could see people cringing as if blasted by the North wind. For my own part, something strange seemed to be happening to my fillings during the high bits and the ringing in my ears lasted for a good hour after it had all stopped. ‘There’s a voice that could saw wood’, commented one of my reprehensible colleagues. We ran away as soon as we could, having enjoyed it. In a sort of a way. Not perhaps the way we were meant to, but never mind.

We have had an extremely jolly time in the Eden valley, despite slightly more weather than seemed strictly necessary at the time. There was a very fine howling gale which left us trying to remember precisely which point on the Beaufort Scale (which we both dimly remember from school geography) is represented by ‘flying twigs and minor damage to buildings’. At such moments, one pines for Google, but perhaps I will remember to look it up. We did not indulge in much in the way of excursions, since I was really more interested in a bit of peace and quiet for writing than anything else, but we did go to Melmerby, famed for its village bakery which is about as whole-earth, organic, locally sourced, sustainably fuelled, etc. etc. as any concern in the country (and, incidentally, apart from all the fuss, quite a good bakery). We had a cup of tea and a bun, since it was that sort of time of day, and overheard two separate snippets of conversation which between them seemed to say quite a lot about organic-bakery-frequenters of the twenty-first century.
One stout lady in Pringle and Wetherall, to another, similar: ‘It turned out there was poison in the water at Violet Cottage. Don’t ask. It’s a man thing.’
One Rohan and cableknit sweater to another, similar: ‘It was going just fine till those bloody ethnomusicologists moved in.’
On the way back from Melmberby, I had a moment of perhaps foolish optimism, and persuaded a highly dubious Northern Professor that it would be possible, and even a good idea, to buy four enormous terra-cotta orange pots with swags and garlands and put them on the back seat of a Vauxhall Corsa (perhaps the smallest car you can obtain that isn’t actually powered by pedals), on the grounds that they were amazingly cheap. With the aid of two strong and willing youngsters, this was successfully achieved to the surprise of all, including me, not that I was admitting it at the time, you understand. The rationale behind the pots is that just before I left, I bought four citrus trees, six or seven feet high, via Ebay (two lemons, two oranges). Dr Biswell assures us they duly arrived, and so they require to be homed when we get back. Anyway, it will be nice to have a reason to remember the Eden valley, every time our northern fastness is wreathed in orange-blossom.
Our most exotic excursion was to Ninekirk, advertised by Simon Jenkins as ‘the hardest church in the country to find’. Who could resist such a challenge? There is a shy and retiring layby off the A66, and from it there springs a footpath heading off who knows where across open country. Five (unlabelled) gates, four fields and quite a lot of riverbank later, there it was, stuggy and uncompromising, and startlingly well concealed. It was built by Lady Anne Clifford in the 1660s, a witness to the good Countess’s fathomless conservatism: there had been some kind of church dedicated to St Ninian on the site (quite possibly, considering the very early-christian nature of the site, on a bend of the river Eden, a church of Ninian’s), argal, a decent new church should be built, regardless of the fact that its congregation probably consisted almost entirely of otters even in the seventeenth century. It must really be one of the most useless buildings in the Anglican communion, in the sense that is is not now, nor has it ever been, useful. except in the strict sense that a building erected to the greater glory of God is useful by definition. But as a result, since otters are little given to handicraft, nobody has mucked about with it. It has fine box pews and a tablet with the Ten Commandments, it is utterly and completely unimproved, and contains no flowers, Child Art, Christian Aid posters, or plastic chairs.
We also went to Newcastle, which is currently in restauro. It was a bit like visiting Rome the year before the papal Jubilee, when every church in the city was surrounded by scaffolding. The big museum was shut, as was much else, though at least the Laing Gallery was open. We came in on the little local train from Hexham, past one of those enormous out of town shopping centre. In its vicinity, and for a mile or so to either side, the scrubby little trees that spring up on the waste-ground alongside a railway were all festooned with blowing grey rags of plastic from thousands of abandoned bags, which made it look even more depressing than it would have done anyway. I had some time to spare because the Professor was looking at a manuscript, so went to the antiquities museum in the University, which contains a number of surprisingly wonderful things. There is a fair collection of Roman stuff of one sort or another, including a fine square limestone altar to the Nymphs, standing about four feet high. There is an inscription on the front face, in the usual way, but strangely, and rather movingly, the face to the left has, in low relief, a cooking knife and a wooden spoon, the face to the right, a jug and a frying pan. The modelling is accurate but slightly simplified, rather in the style of Eric Gill, and what is supposed to be going on here, I cannot begin to guess. Another superlative piece of stone carving which has fetched up here is the top of a Northumbrian cross-shaft, circa 800, reduced to a cube about two foot on each side, but as good, or better, than any of the more famous ones. I had never seen it before.
Newcastle is worth the detour, if anything takes you that way. What is little is left of the eighteenth-century city, after the road- and shopping-centre builders of the Seventies had quite finished with it (I seem to recall that Newcastle received the special attention of T. Dan Smith, of evil reputation), is still quite wonderful, especially seen under a bloodcurdling sky with bright and dark cloud. So are the bridges over the Tyne, always a great moment of the East Coast railway line for those of us who have travelled up and down it all our lives. One day is enough, sadly, unless going credit-card happy in Fenwick’s is your idea of heaven, but it must have been a great city once.

We are going on our travels for the best part of a fortnight, and I don’t know if we are going to have any chance of blogging en route. The cooker has been mended by the cooker whisperer, and Dr Biswell is in charge. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

PS: an indication of Dr Biswell’s tendency to make things better should not be overlooked: it has blown a gale for most of today and I commented that the sound of the corrugated tin roof of Barnyards’ cowshed, which has worked loose at one corner, drives me absolutely spare. Let it not be forgotten that Dr B thereupon went out with a hammer and some five inch nails, and it is not going to be banging in the breeze any time soon.

Warning

by Jenny Joseph
“The nations favourite post war poem”

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only eat bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old and start to wear purple.

All very fine and large, but consider the following report from 16 February of this year:

Police are hunting a woman in her 60s who held up a post office in Manchester. The woman, believed to be aged between 65 and 70, entered the shop on Palatine Road in Northenden, on Thursday morning. She was armed with a knife and threatened the cashier demanding money. Staff activated the alarm and the woman fled empty-handed. She is described as white, about 5ft 2in tall, with dark hair and a purple coat.

Dear Ms Joseph, are you indemnified against this sort of thing?

The long day drew towards its close somewhat tiresomely. The Northern Gentleman re-eventuated, which was not tiresome at all. But he and we were mutually debriefing, while I put together two lasagnas, one a re-invention of last night’s stew served to the laird of Towie, the other vegetarian-friendly spinach and ricotta, when there was a sudden and definitive ‘PHUT’ from the region of the stove and it went dead. Investigation of its dear little fuses and so forth must wait till daylight. I am not certain that death has ensued, since at least the ‘phut’ moment was not like the alarming occasion when one of its predecessors (we use glass topped electric stoves) got water in its works, fizzed, spluttered, and glowed like four circles of Hell simultaneously before I had the nerve to reach past the bloody thing to turn it off at the wall … Anyway. Whatever its long-term viability, there, in the short term, was me, the Professor, the Northern Gentleman, two lasagnas, and something of an impasse. I shoved the lasagnas in the Rayburn, which basically heats water and provides at best, long slow cooking and a simmering hob, and then we bent our collective intelligence to how one turns up a Rayburn. Not quickly, is the short answer. After an hour, the lasagne were certainly edible, if pallid, and the mere dainty and ladylike application of an industrial blowtorch provided something more or less like a browned and bubbling surface. However, I have a nasty feeling we may be living on stew of one sort or another for quite a while — though the Professor has just come in to say that the Rayburn has finally acknowledged its call to the colours, and has suddenly become very hot. But can I make bread in the damn thing? If not, our way of life is seriously challenged. It is challenged anyway, because bread aside, I seldom use an oven. I cook meat, even something the size of a leg of lamb, under the grill, I stir-fry, and one way and another, I seldom do the things Rayburns are best at. We all love rice pudding, but virtue is still prevalent, and we aren’t eating that kind of thing; and so much low fat cooking depends on the grill. Oh, well. Maybe we will get the bloody thing back on track in a day or two. It would be so nice, if so. If not, we may be looking at a future of dal, pea-soup, baked potatoes, polenta, chile, stifado … not the kind of cooking I do for preference but it will be OK.

I was talking to my mother on the phone last night, with the study door open so that Miss Kit and Miss Best Friend could wander in and out, as they do. I have found on the whole it is easier to sit there freezing than to get up and open the door once every other minute, especially when I am on the phone. A certain amount of bustle and scuttering seemed to be going on behind me, and I became aware after a while that Miss Kit had come in with a mouse. It is extremely hard to rescue a mouse in a large room full of things it can get under or behind, and I seldom try. So I tuned the battle out, and continued talking about carpets or some such. My attention was drawn to the mouse problem once more, about ten minutes later, when the creature made a spirited attempt at rescuing itself by running up my leg. The limb in question being smooth and bare, it was a bit like Miss Kit trying to run up a tree, and the effect was much the same, it got to calf level on momentum alone, fell off, and lost itself in the tangle of electrical cable under the desk. Mice do not worry me much. It is not a sensation I would recommend, but I was not greatly put out. However, the combination of mother on the phone and mouse up the leg reminded me of an incident relating to the mother in question, which is a splendid illustration of the way stories, as well as mice, have legs; viz., The Tale of Jackson’s Mouse. About sixty years ago, my mother, then a university student in Edinburgh, turned up for a tutorial with a fairly crusty individual called Professor Jackson. There was a mouse walloping about the room, making a surprising amount of noise, as they do. Jackson’s vast knowledge of Celtic philology and suchlike matters did not go hand in hand with much in the way of practical competence, and he was born in the reign of Queen Victoria — accordingly, he drew attention, rather helplessly, to the mouse, and asked my mother if she would like to climb on a chair, this being the reaction he was conditioned to expect from young ladies. My ma, of course, was not a Victorian miss but a modern young woman of her time, and said she was perfectly happy to stay where she was. Tutorial, and mouse, then proceeded on their way, until she saw Jackson suddenly freeze. ‘I believe’, he said with some constraint, ‘it has gone up my leg. I may have to ask you to leave the room.’ He would, I imagine, have been wearing woollen socks and tweed trousers; a doddle for an enterprising rodent. Well, it all sorted out somehow or other, from a humanpoint of view at least; he stood up and stamped a bit, the mouse fell out of his trouser-leg, and that was the end of the matter. But of course, my mother told the story, as one would — it is relevant to add that the entertainment value of Professor Jackson was in general, slight. She was much amused to find, ages later, someone telling her The Tale of Jackson’s Mouse, which had gone into student folklore; a version which involved a milk and water miss, a professor apparently gripped by some priapic frenzy and suddenly clawing his trousers off, Miss running screaming down the corridor, etcetera. A much better story, in short, and a reminder of the powerful tendency of fact to morph into fiction at the slightest excuse.

It was a grand day for a day out; a day of cloudless blue skies, and almost warm. And there was much to celebrate. For instance, I am reliably informed by the Canadian Professor, that today is the anniversary of the Battle of the Herrings (1429) and the independence of Chile (1818). Matthew the Jolly Publisher was saying rather dispiritingly last night or so that the trouble with Our Times is that fine weather in February just makes one worry about global warming. But there used to be fine weather in February once in a while before everyone started obsessing about the climate, and we were so glad to see it that we were not greatly disposed to wring our hands. The bank at the edge of the lawn is shimmering with the fragile purple goblets of the crocuses, the snowdrops are everywhere, the first of the London primroses has adjusted its horizons and put forth a tentative bud, and Miss Kit has temporarily shelved working on her recumbency problems and gone off to climb trees in the wood. By midday, the sky was the most extraordinary and brilliant blue, the sort of colour which usually happens with the aid of Ektachrome or these days, Photoshop, but for once, achieved by the unaided hand of nature, so we went up the Don to Kildrummy — a monument of Scottish Baronial, ugly but comfortable, and with a fabulous garden, made on either side of a precipitous gorge, and displaying a terrific variety of mature trees of all descriptions. They do a good lunch. While it is not the best food for miles around, it has the tremendous recommendation of unambitiousness. There is always game consommé or melon or soup of the day, they know how to make a tomato based sauce and a cream based sauce, and have no pretension towards ‘a jus infused with white truffle and vanilla’ and suchlike dubious notions. One goes with a great deal more confidence to a place which can do a few things properly than to somewhere with a menu the size of a telephone directory and a chef with an eye to fashion and a taste for experiment. Especially in the depths of the country, since anyone who is really any good at that sort of cooking would almost inevitably leg it for London, or at least, Edinburgh. It is also to be counted among Kildrummy’s significant virtues that stuff arrives pretty well the moment you have finished the previous course, on hot plates, the dining room is quiet, and the waiting staff are very genial. Given the celestial beauty of the setting and the drive, it all adds up to a very satisfactory deal. It made an excellent break from researching Old Aberdeen, not that that isn’t proving interesting from time to time. Still, what is the point of living in some of the most beautiful countryside in Scotland if you don’t go and look at it once in a while?