opusculus

Last week's bread had a mould episode, chiz, so I made a loaf of Dove's Farm Organic Seedhouse Bread Flour, crust sprung a bit while baking, I think due to age of yeast, but otherwise okay.

Friday night supper, penne with sauce of roasted red peppers in brine whizzed in blender + chopped Calabrian salami.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple, strong brown flour, maple syrup (also new batch of yeast): v nice.

Today's lunch: tempeh stirfried with sugar snap peas and a sauce of soy sauce, maple syrup, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, cornflour mixed in water, crushed garlic and minced ginger: am not sure the tempeh was supposed to crumble like that during cooking?? served with sticky rice with lime leaves and chicory quartered, healthygrilled in pumpkinseed oil and splashed with lemon and lime balsamic vinegar.

When I turned on my clock radio - which I do on Saturdays to ensure that the time is co-ordinating with the radio time-signal - Radio 3 was playing the finale to Brahms Violin Concerto.

Joy!

Well, this has been an up and downy year as ever, but I am beginning to poke my nose out of my hole. I am still Doing Stuff, even if various projects seem to have got bogged down (not just on my side ahem ahem).

Anyway, in accordance with tradition, I pass round virtual rich dark gingerbread (and also gluten-free, diabetic-friendly, etc, versions), sanitive madeira (eschewing Duke of Clarence jokes) and other beverages of choice, and lift a glass to dr rdrz.

So yestere'en there was a get-together for the Fellows of the institution I have had the honour to be award a Fellowship of, so I thought I ought to Make The Effort and turn up at least for a little bit.

So I trotted off, and in spite of some hitches with the Tube (several trains going to the wrong branch) got to the right stop, and lo, the Scientologists are still infesting Tottenham Court Road, what is this thing that this thing is?

So I crossed the road, going, surely the traffic flow used to be one-way? Confusing.

And went down a side-street, and came to this lovely and surprising thing, which I am sure wasn't there last time I was in these parts, early in 2020:

Alfred Place Gardens

and was charmed.

Then on to venue, where everything seems same as it ever was.

Hearing aids still not optimum in room full of overlapping conversations: but I did manage to have some fairly coherent conversations, including one with old academic acquaintance who was most gratifyingly complimentary about The Biography, all these years later.

So I think a win, even if I did suppose that this event would also include some admin stuff relating to Fellowship, which it didn't.

I do feel, Lee Child, that this categorisation is a bit simple:

But I think it’s nuts that people think genre is easier than reaching a very small and reliable audience. Some good, middle-class Julian Barnes or Martin Amis reader, they don’t expect to be 100% satisfied with a book. They put it down and start the next one. When you’re a bestseller, you’ve got to satisfy the person that reads one book a year on the beach. If you leave him disappointed, he may never read another book.

Okay, I read a lot and I very very seldom expect to be 100% satisfied with a book, but the ones that ring the bell are all over the place. I won't say I expect to be satisfied by a book but you know, Middlemarch exists, Tam Lin exists, The Fountain Overflows exists, etc etc, I can always hope.

And what do we mean by being satisfied by a book anyway? I was in Slow Motion Trainwreck Relationship with a person who had some very weird stuff going on about reading and what they would or would not read and somehow being afraid of investing time in reading a book that might not be Right. It was not about satisfaction precisely, it was about having some internal template a book had to match.

Actually I suppose this rather went with making the occasional askance expressions and noises at the kind of things that I was reading, because I may not be entirely indiscriminate in what I read but I do have to be reading something and I will give quite a lot of things A Go.

I also wonder how one fits into the above paradigm people who do read a lot but want the exact same thing with just slight changes, which is also a market that bestsellers aim at, surely?

Also, are there literally people who only read one book a year when they're on holiday (and probably on the plane rather than the beach)?

On another paw (how many have I got up to?) there is Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love who would never read anything (except for Country Life, presumably, if he found the chub-fuddler there) after the transcendant experience that was White Fang.

Last week's bread did some spectacular mould action, bah, so I made the light rye loaf from Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery, discovering as I weighed out the ingredients that I had rather less strong white flour than I thought and had to make up the requisite proportion with white spelt. Turned out v nice, though.

No Saturday breakfast rolls because of rushing off to conference.

Today's lunch: pork spare ribs, which I rubbed with a mix of maple sugar, hot and sweet smoked paprikas, black pepper, garlic salt, and salt, and left overnight, then wrapped in foil and cooked for 3 hours in a very low oven, then basted with what was more of a barbecue sauce than a glaze of a small tin of chopped tomatoes + apple vinegar + dashes of tabasco and worcester sauce, simmered together, and cooked at a slightly higher temperature for 45 or so minutes - v tasty if a little dry - possibly did not need quite so long at that final stage; served with tenderstem broccoli and okra simmered for 45+ minutes in coconut milk with ginger paste and fresh coriander (possibly a little overdone?); baked San Marzano tomatoes; and cornbread (plain white flour + baking powder, half and half with mixture of fine/coarse cornmeal).

Today was the day of the conference at which I had been invited, at rather short notice, to give a keynote.

Not only did I have to get up EARLY especially for a Saturday, I had a rotten night because the lower back decided to kick off and even when it had calmed down a bit it took ages to get back to sleep.

And then as I was doing my final preparations I discovered the battery in one of my hearing aids was flat, which was a bit irksome, because I had been expecting all week for it to do the warning bonging, like the other one did, and had to replace that.

So anyway, I got out, and found that the place I was aiming at was not quite so far distant from the Underground station as had been indicated, and also, even though I was late, so was the start.

Rather few actual in-person attendees - I'm not sure how many there were on the Zoom.

Crisis! there was supposed to be a delivery of sandwiches at lunchtime which Did Not Arrive so we all went out to forage (these later turned up some hours later, what is the point).

So, I think my paper went over okay, and there were some questions, even if some of them got rather off-topic onto more general questions about archives.

Some of the papers were moderately interesting, some of them were a bit hard to hear, and I picked up at least one useful reference (possibly) for one of my own projects.

Met one old academic acquaintance from way back, and a couple of interesting Younger Scholars.

Had already decided that I was not up for going on to meal in restaurant, so came home to flop.