UPDATE ON RECENT PUBLICATION

 A poem has been accepted by Small Leaf Press for their mag, 'Jaden'.

 Food Of The Gods

Last year, I was diagnosed as being pre-diabetic so I have been making a real effort to cut down on sugary food, do more exercise and lose weight. And let’s face it, if I don’t want to resemble a bowling ball stuffed into a tea cosy at my wedding on December, I need to lose a lot of my excess baggage.

I have actually shed roughly two stone, which sounds quite impressive until you consider the facts. I began cutting back this time last year, which means the weight loss has been only half a pound a week on average. The reality is even worse than this – some weeks I’ve put weight on and had to spend several weeks getting back to where I was before I could sustain the downward trend. A bar chart of my progress during the year would look like the amount of schoolwork completed by the average British schoolchild, plotted weekly, during the Covid pandemic. 

I have a long way to go, and I should be travelling much faster!

But I am – generally speaking – moving in the right direction. A casual observer wouldn’t yet be able to tell I’ve lost weight simply by looking at me – partly because very few people have actually seen me since the first lockdown and most of my friends have probably forgotten what I look like anyway, but also because around half the fat I lost was laid down during the first lockdown, so I’m probably in reality only a stone lighter than when I was last on public display. I myself can tell I’ve lost weight – but only because my bras now make my bosom feel like two apples rolling around in the bottom of a large shopping bag, and my ageing face is beginning to resemble a deflated balloon. So subtle has my weight loss been that I have seriously wondered whether my scales are faulty, but the new set I bought say the same weight so I guess that proves my fat-reduction regime is working (though on those weeks when the scales tell me I’ve put weight on, I know it’s just because these new-fangled electronic weighing machines are notoriously inaccurate…).*

  

Every so often, the ascetic lifestyle gives me the willies and I have a mad urge to bake as if Nigella Lawson was now PM and had issued an edict that anyone who didn’t eat a minimum of two pieces of cake or equivalent every day would be forced to live with Gordon Ramsey for three months. So, during my current bakingfest, I've made a number of different cakes, most of which have, sadly, been donated to friends and family or consigned to the freezer as I don’t feel I can justify eating more than a mouthful of each. After posting pictures of some of my efforts on Facebook, I noticed that one particular friend seemed to dislike several of my flavour-choices – he wasn’t keen on the idea of blueberries in a cake, for instance, or of coconut and lime in combination. Then I noticed other non-FB comments by friends and relatives: apples in a scone were seen as ‘a bit weird’, a syrup made of blood oranges and pomegranate (Nigel Slater’s recipe) was frowningly deemed ‘unusual’, the news that there were lumps of marzipan in a sponge cake was greeted with a scrunched-up face suggesting I’d accidentally said ‘cow pats’ rather than almond paste. And I realised that there was a common denominator in operation: all these critics were born and raised in Yorkshire…

Don’t get me wrong –I love God’s Own County. I moved back here twenty years ago from a place I adored, giving up a job I loved, for goodness sake! But there is no doubt that Yorkshire-folk are discerning food-critics. And by ‘discerning food-critics’, I mean ‘fussy-eaters’ – or ‘picky buggers’, to use a more regional vernacular. I used to feel slightly aggrieved by the portrayal of the people of my home county in comedy sketches like Catherine Tate’s ‘Janice and Ray’  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQd5Ieprung], but I have to admit that Tate had a point. Every picky eater I know is from Yorkshire, culminating the picky-eater apotheosis that is my husband-to-be’s mum.

I’ve mentioned Agnes before. She’s a fabulous person, but her pickiness with food is the stuff of legend. She dislikes most food-groups, including all those things that, for most people, enhance boring food, such as ketchups, chutneys, pickles and sauces. She doesn’t eat fruit due to the mysterious circumstance of having once worked in a fruit shop, darkly hinting at an experience of behind the scenes apple-and-banana-abuse. She won’t eat lamb or pork because her father ‘used to have a small-holding’ [?], and she considers many other meats, including turkey and goose, to be simply too exotic. Particular cuts or types of meat fall into the same category, such as mutton, veal, spare-ribs, belly-pork, and some combinations of food mystify and repel her, such as gammon and pineapple. ‘Fish’, for Agnes, means cod in batter or maybe – at a stretch – a parsley sauce, though she’s not too keen on parsley or sauce really; ‘veg’ means potatoes (but not anything ‘fancy’ like dauphinoise or saute), carrots, sprouts, broccoli, peas and cabbage (but only a limited variety of cabbage – kale is rather exotic and cavalo nero is ‘foreign stuff’). Pasta, for Agnes, is something you find in milk puddings (which she doesn’t like); she has never, in 86 years of life, tasted rice except in rice pudding (which she doesn’t like), or cooked, blue, goats’ or soft cheese, or any sort of egg except a hen’s egg, or any kind of spice except maybe cinnamon and nutmeg in a Christmas pudding (which she doesn’t like). She doesn’t like chocolate or jam or honey or peanut butter or jelly or mousses or any sort of ice-cream except Walls’s vanilla soft scoop or beans or nuts or crisps or toffee or coffee or pancakes or doughnuts or stuffing or roast parsnips. She would, I know for a fact, be horrified if she was presented with anything like rabbit or venison or pheasant, or any kind of seafood, or swordfish or tuna or mackerel or sardines, or anything foraged like samphire or wild strawberries or boiled sweets or any other kind of sweets. She won’t even contemplate trying any sort of ‘foreign’ cuisine like Chinese or Thai or Indian, including such common staples as pizza or spaghetti. She doesn’t like most biscuits, or any cake which has ‘fancy’ stuff on it such as icing. 

We discovered a few months ago that, amazingly, she quite likes white chocolate when it is put on top of what we call buns but the southerners among you would call cup-cakes. But not if you add a Smartie or a Malteser for decoration. I learnt this the hard way.  

But Agnes, miraculously, likes my lemon drizzle cake (admittedly, she’d like it even better without the lemon drizzle). This is like getting a thumbs-up for your hand-thrown coffee mug from Josiah Wedgwood. Given the extremity of her Yorkshire tastebuds, I take it as a true mark of baking success.

I’d love to witness a meeting between Agnes and Greg Wallace, preferably at La Gavroche…

 

*I have to say here that I am not an advocate of diets as such. I have never tried any specific ‘diet fad’. I also believe that dieting actually makes you put on weight in the long-term, as this is what has always happened to me in the past. I have always tried to cut down moderately and eat healthily, while gently increasing my exercise level, but I have always found myself fatter than ever a few years later on, as essentially I think that for most people it is impossible to sustain a truly healthy diet all the time. I’d love to be slim and healthy, but it was only the health risks associated with potential diabetes that have made me embrace yet another attempt at a healthy lifestyle. And I am also aware that food-intake and body image issues are serious problems for many people, not only those with named conditions such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia, so I am not intending this column to be flippant about such things, which I know are often life-destroying.

 

BOOK REVIEW: A Writer's Opinion

 

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

Natalie Haynes is well-known to Radio 4 listeners as the bubbly presenter of Natalie Haynes Stands Up For The Classics, not to mention a critic on programmes like Front Row and Saturday Review. Having studied Classics at Cambridge and being part of the famous Footlights, it is unsurprising that she was once a stand-up comic and that she now spends much of her professional life promoting the Classics, often humorously. Popular at both comedy and book festivals, Haynes is personable and has a degree of charisma. She has written non-fiction books and essays;  A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Woman’s Prize For Fiction in 2020, is Haynes’ third novel, after Amber Fury and Children of Jocasta.

  

I have to be honest and admit that someone bought me this novel. While I do have an interest in classical mythology, I feel that my curiosity has been well satisfied by Stephen Fry’s popular retellings of the most famous myths. The recent plethora of novels based on classical mythology, often from a feminist perspective, has also taken the edge off my interest, not because they are bad books (many are excellent) but simply because I’m growing bored with the gods.

It didn’t help that the first few chapters didn’t really grab me. I found the pace rather slow and the writing a little too over-stuffed. However, I persisted, as I felt I owed it to the friend who had bought the book for me to try to read as much as I could, and I found, as I progressed, that the stories themselves began to grip me. I know these stories already, from school, from books and TV series and films, but Haynes’s novel actually helped me to get all the relationships straight in my head. Ah, Priam’s wife was Hecabe, and Paris, Hector and Polydorus were their sons? Oh, right, the Oenone of Tennyson’s poem was actually Paris’s abandoned wife? And now I understand, Patroclus was Achilles’ best mate (and possible lover) whose death made the arrogant ‘hero’ lose his rag and drag Hector’s body round the walls of Troy? Oh, and Iphigenia was Agamemnon’s tragic daughter?

I’m not sure whether it was simply familiarity with Haynes’s style or whether her writing actually improved, but I began to genuinely enjoy the novel from around Chapter Five. It is structured as a patchwork quilt of female stories which together tell the story of the Trojan War. These stories are not presented chronologically, and sometimes it takes a while for their significance to become clear. The novel jumps from character to character, though there is an ongoing chorus of Trojan Women who appear every so often, and some chapters continue a story begun elsewhere.  Occasional sections are narrated by goddesses or similar supernatural entities, and the existence of the pantheon of deities is treated as an accepted fact by the various women whose stories we hear. This complex structure actually works very well; like a jigsaw puzzle, each story fits into the others and deepens our understanding of the whole. There were stories that were new to me (such as the one about Penthesilea, the Amazon warrior queen; or Chryseis, the teenage daughter of a Trojan priest), and familiar stories that had new life breathed into them. There is no doubt that the feminine perspective makes these classic stories much more accessible and interesting to a female readership, but hopefully Haynes has revealed a new angle for male readers too.

I would suggest that you will get the most from this novel if you already have at least a sketchy knowledge of the epic story of the siege of Troy, though this isn’t absolutely necessary. You will be able to follow the story without any prior knowledge of the characters, but it is more engaging if you have heard some of the names and some of the events. If you know the epic very well, you might be bored at having it retold yet again.

Don’t be put off if you find the beginning slow. This is a novel that operates like a collection of short stories and you could certainly skip chapters here and there, or even read them in a different order, without serious loss of comprehension. Haynes’s style is a little unchanging, and there were times when I wanted the narrative to move along at a brisker pace, but I always felt secure as I read, happy to believe that Haynes has an excellent knowledge of these interweaving tales and the imagination and empathy to inhabit the women’s minds in a plausible fashion.

Other novels on similar themes: Circe by Madeline Miller, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, A Second Chance (Book 3 in The Chronicles of St Mary’s) by Jodi Taylor [highly recommended series if you fancy a comic, occasionally silly, occasionally poignant, occasionally scary romp through history with a bunch of time-travelling historians).

You can find out more about Natalie Haynes at: https://www.facebook.com/nataliehaynesstandupclassicist/

RATING: A Thousand Ships ****

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way

         

Update on recent publication

One of my poems was accepted by the wonderfully-named magazine 'Failbetter'.

 

WRITING PROMPT: insect-eye view

 Remember that old eighties' film 'Honey, I shrunk the kids!' or the even older 'The Incredible Shrinking Man'? Well, here's your chance to get down to the nitty-gritty.

Imagine you are only a few centimetres tall. Possibly you have been shrinking slowly over a period of days (or years), or maybe you suddenly become tiny. Or perhaps you are a creature who is naturally very small, such as a sparrow, mouse, lizard or snake - or even smaller, such as an insect, spider, worm, slug, bee, ant, etc.  Or you might decide to be a tiny mythological creature like a fairy, goblin, gnome, elf,. pixie, sprite, leprechaun, dwarf, smurf or whatever. You might even go really minute, like a bacteria, virus or amoeba.

What would the world look like from your viewpoint? How would you interpret what you see?

If the creature you chose had humanlike intelligence, you might construct a narrative around their experiences, showing the reader their thoughts and perceptions. Or maybe you could write a poem displaying the world as seen from the viewpoint of a butterfly or a grass snake? You might wish to anthropomorphise the Covid-virus or personify a blade of grass.