Meanderings about recipes, books, craft and more
19 April 2010 14:09
A straight translation of “It’s a sair fecht” is – “It’s a sore fight.”
When people use this phrase they mean – “It’s a hard life.”
People usually say it when they are just a bit fed up with things, not seriously despondent or depressed.
As we are now coming to the end of the Easter holidays it’s a fair bet that my husband will be saying – it’s a sair fecht – sometime soon, at the thought of going back to teaching on Monday.
18 April 2010 18:42
A lot of people don’t like reading short stories but I’ve always been quite keen on them. I find that they are good for bed-time reading and they can be handy if you are travelling. It’s also a fine way of getting reluctant readers started off, a thick book can be really daunting to some people.
If a story sticks in your mind for a good 30 years then I think it’s fair to say that it must be a success. That is what has happened to me with Somerset Maugham’s short story The Verger which you can read here. It is a very short read indeed but I think it says a lot about tolerance and also the snootiness that some so called ‘educated’ people can be prone to.
Another one which has stuck in my mind is The Alibi Machine by Larry Niven (see a description here) which I read over thirty years ago on my husband’s recommendation.
More recently I enjoyed Annie Proulx’s Wyoming Stories.
At the moment I’m tackling John Updike’s The Early Stories 1953 – 1975. It’s a fairly thick tome, as you can imagine and I’m finding it a bit unwieldy for reading in bed. It’s also far too big to drag around when you are travelling. I might find it easier to read out in the garden if we get some half decent days weather-wise this summer.
16 April 2010 11:05
I really like the small town of Dunkeld, there isn’t an awful lot there but all the shops are individual and quirky and the place just has a lovely atmosphere.
There is a scenic old bridge which unfortunately is undergoing some work at the moment so half of it is covered with scaffolding, so no photograph at the moment. However if you cross the bridge from the town and take the Birnam Walk, which is just down the steps at the left hand side of the bridge, and turn to the right at the bottom of them, after about ten minutes you will reach the Birnam Oak.
As you can see, the tree is so old it has been given crutches. It is thought that this is the only remaining tree of the original ancient Birnam Wood which is mentioned in Macbeth.
The bottom three metres is hollow. You can see the gap.
Apparently a company of English players did act at the nearby city of Perth and it is thought that William Shakespeare may have been one of them. It seems plausible to me as something must have given him the idea of writing about Birnam Wood travelling to Dunsinane.
If anything, this sycamore tree looks even older but it is thought to be only about 300 years old. It is wonderfully gnarled, like something out of a scary fairy tale.
Dunkeld is also famous for its links with Beatrix Potter as her family had a holiday home nearby. She got a lot of her ideas from the area and also did some very good paintings of the local flora and fauna which can be seen at the Arts and Conference Centre in nearby Birnam.
12 April 2010 00:59
Germinal was first published in 1883 and at 536 pages I must admit that I thought I might have bitten off more than I could chew considering this was my first foray into French literature. However, the pages whizzed past and I must put in a good word for Roger Pearson who made such a smooth job of the translating. I especially liked the fact that he used the Scottish word ‘piece’ meaning sandwich.
I really enjoyed reading this book, although that does seem a strange thing to say because there certainly isn’t much joy around. Things just lurch from bad to horrendous.
The story begins with Etienne Lantier, an unemployed mechanic walking through the countryside on a freezing cold dark night, penniless and starving. When he reaches a mining complex he is interested in the lay-out of the place and hopes he might be able to find work there, which he does.
After his first shift he decides that the work is too hard and that he will move on, but when he realizes that the miners and their families are in dire straits, he decides to stay on, hoping that he will become a leader of the miners eventually.
Zola writes very realistically of the bitching and gossiping which goes on in a small close-knit community. You can’t help thinking that the French workers don’t seem to have benefited at all from the French Revolution. The contrast between the miners and the mine owners is vast. Zola seems to be a sort of French version of Charles Dickens, highlighting the appalling working conditions of the common man. However M. Hennebeau is lonely in a loveless marriage with an adulterous wife and can’t help envying the miners their ‘free-love’ lifestyle. The grass is always greener.
Things come to a head when the mine owners inflict what amounts to a pay cut on the workers, who already couldn’t make ends meet and the workers go on strike with Etienne as their leader.
I think Zola got the confrontational scenes with the army just right, showing how quickly desperate people lose control in a mob. The despised shop owner comes to a very nasty end at the hands of the women who are a rough bunch due to their circumstances. His depiction of the Chaval-Catherine relationship is so well observed and frankly depressing as the abused Catherine sticks to her abuser for fear of finding something worse without him and ending up a prostitute. Plus ca change – as they say.
At the end of the book Etienne is thinking of a future when the workers will organise themselves into unions and win the day.
I’m sure I would never have got around to reading Zola without the Classics Circuit, so a big thank-you again and I’ll definitely be reading more of his.
I’m going off at a complete tangent here.
Etienne couldn’t be expected to imagine having to contend with the likes of Margaret Thatcher, who in the 1980s decided to close down all the mines in Britain, and reader, she did it.
I had such a feeling of deja vu whilst reading Germinal because we live in what was a coal mining district and the conditions were terrible even in the 1980s. The mine which was about half a mile from us went under the North Sea and the workers had to crawl for about an hour before getting to the coal face. It was too cramped to stand up and of course they weren’t paid until they reached the coal face. Then they used pneumatic drills (jack hammers) so the noise was horrible. But still they fought for their jobs, they didn’t have to face the army as in Germinal. It was the police on horses. Soldiers wouldn’t have been as bad. We all contributed money to the strike fund but Maggie got her way in the end.
10 April 2010 21:45
I thought it would be interesting to read an Enid Blyton book again after watching the BBC biopic about her which was screened fairly recently. So I decided to read this one as part of the Flashback Challenge.
In the Fifth at Malory Towers was first published in 1950 but I read the whole Malory Towers series in the summer of 1969 when I was 10 years old. I remember that I was completely engrossed in the whole thing, I absolutely loved it, it was my alternative life.
In the Fifth is all about the girls in the fifth form being given more responsibility as they grow older, and being expected to work hard on their own. The beginning is the usual catching up with friends and the introduction of a new girl. Each girl’s personality is spelled out for us, there seems to be one of every sort of person.
They are given the task of producing an entertainment for the whole school and their families at Christmas. After some thought, they decide to put on a pantomime. Darrell writes a version of Cinderella, which as you would expect goes down a storm. There isn’t very much of ‘cool and steady’ Sally in this one, who I seem to remember was my favourite character.
Blyton obviously saw herself as the Darrell character and she is always the heroine of the day. There is no doubting the fact that Blyton was a pretty nasty person herself in reality, completely delusional. Well there’s a lot of it about.
Anyway, people tend to be a bit sniffy about Blyton nowadays, but I don’t really think it is fair. After all they are meant for young children and I certainly loved Malory Towers and The Famous Five when I was even younger.
I think that her writing was probably a bit dated even in 1969 but that probably just added to the charm for me. I went straight from Blyton to Agatha Christie then to other vintage crime writers and on to the classics from about 11 or 12 years old and I haven’t stopped since. Anything that gets people reading can’t be bad.
I had always been a member of the local library. But when my parents took me to Morecambe in Lancashire for a fortnights holiday in 1969, and it seemed to rain for the whole two weeks, Malory Towers was a lifesaver to me.
I bought the full set of six at the Morecambe branch of Woolworths, which of course, is sadly no longer with us. Having visited Morecambe last year for a day, (it didn’t rain) we decided to take this photograph of the old Woolies store for posterity.
8 April 2010 16:00
We had a day out in St Andrews yesterday, making the most of a fleeting visit by that big orange thing in the sky.
I decided to take a photograph of the beginning (and end) of the Old Course. It really tickles me that there is a public pathway cutting straight across the fairway and people wander across it all the time. I suppose it must be a right of way otherwise it would have been got rid of long ago.
This place is a Mecca for golfers but it always embarasses me as I think it must be a horrible disappointment for them as the course itself is far from being a thing of beauty. It is really boring looking. I suppose if you are into golf then it is the history of the whole thing that gets to you. There is a museum of golf on the road behind the course.
I don’t play golf as I am strictly in the ‘Why ruin a good walk?’ camp, but local golfers of my acquaintance are equally unimpressed and have assured me that the best courses are around Gleneagles in Perthshire.
If you happen to live in Fife though you have plenty to choose from. Even teeny weeny villages have their own golf course.
5 April 2010 11:04
I’ve been having a bit of a Forsyte-fest since I was given the original BBC set from 1967 for Mothering Sunday. I’ve watched all 26 episodes and although it seemed a bit dated at first, it wasn’t long before I forgot that it was in black and white and I got engrossed in the whole thing.
As I mentioned before, some of the love scenes in the earlier episodes are an absolute scream, but they did become more natural looking as time went on. Maybe the actors had started to do a bit more than acting with each other by that time.
I still think that the casting was better than the recent ITV version. Nyree Dawn Porter was so much better as Irene than Gina McKee was, although Nyree didn’t get the distinctive walk of Irene either. You would think it would be an easy thing for an actress to master – a sexy bum waggling walk, which Galsworthy described her as having.
For the most part, the ageing make-up was well done too. Although for some reason the character of June’s face looked dirtier as she got older.
Susan Hampshire will always be Fleur to me, I think she was just perfect for the part and her husband was played by the actor Nicholas Pennell, who I think did a good job. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen him in anything else, but apparently he was in The Saint, which I never watched. At some point he moved to Canada and acted in a Shakespearian company there. Maybe the parts just didn’t come up for him in Britain. Sadly he died when he was only 56.
So all in all, I thoroughly enjoyed my present. It was an absolute bargain, bought from The Guardian website for £19.99.
The Forsyte Saga was hugely popular when it was first broadcast in Britain. Pubs closed early (in England – Scottish pubs were shut on Sundays way back then; only hotels could sell drink and then only to “bona fide travellers”) and churches rescheduled their evening services.
It was subsequently released in Australia and America where it was just as popular and it became the first serial sold by the BBC to the Soviet Union. More than 160 million viewers around the world watched the serial.
1 April 2010 11:00
This was another random choice from my local library and was first published in 1920. I had never heard of the author before but I was attracted by the blurb on the back. The book is set in Glasgow at first, then the action moves to Italy and then to London before finally ending up in Auchtermuchty (yes, there is such a place) in Fife.
The story starts off in Glasgow in the early 1900s and I found that part enjoyable, mainly because everything was happening in my much beloved old stomping ground of Glasgow Uni, Kelvingrove, the botanic gardens and the Rennie Mackintosh designed Glasgow School of Art.
But I didn’t really like any of the characters in this book, especially not the main one, Joanna Bannerman. She was brought up in a strictly Calvinist household (who isn’t in Scotland?) But she still manages to get married to an Italian (Mario) whom she hardly knows and moves to Italy, where he holds her a virtual prisoner because he doesn’t want any men to look at her.
Mario had previously deliberately smashed some antique wine glasses because they had been bought at a time when Joanna had a relationship with another man. My Top Tip to Joanna is that this was the time to RUN because he is a NUTTER.
This is an autobiographical novel and in a piece of wishful thinking Mario is killed off in a cycling accident. In reality Catherine Carswell’s English husband ended up in an asylum, having gone mad, and she had to have her marriage annulled, no simple task.
Back to the book – after becoming a widow Joanna returns to Glasgow and eventually becomes the lover of a married artist, Louis Pender. Did I mention how much I disliked Joanna and what a bad judge of men she was?
When Louis ends up spending more time in London where his wife and family are, Joanne moves there too. Things eventually fizzle out after a disastrous trip to Edinburgh (know the feeling) and Joanna decides to revisit her family’s old holiday home in Fife. She bumps into some old friends, one of whom has been holding a torch for Joanna for years and she suddenly realises that she loves him.
It was at this point that the words- Pass the bucket – flashed through my mind.
This may be really unfair as I am not a big fan of romances. I love Jane Austen but that is because of the wit and sarcasm. I can cope with romance if there is a lot of authentic history too.
But a book ending up with romance in a field in Auchtermuchty, Fife, can only be a disappointment to me.
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