Michael explores.
Because it’s there
Please feel free to sympathise
I recently failed to get selected for a post in Ireland. Yes, I know my job here is perfect but, supposing that we wanted to move back to Dublin, wouldn’t it be nice if I could get paid?
My family in Ireland, in the manner of families, delved into the details with more enthusiasm than I might have wished successfully bringing out the peeved adolescent in me: “How many candidates were there?” “Dunno, can you leave me alone please?”
I rang home the other day and got my brother. I heard him calling my mother “It’s John McKenna on the phone”.
“Who’s John McKenna?” I asked when she picked up. “Nobody,” she said hastily “just your brother being foolish”. In the background I heard him say “No, no tell her he’s that golfer who never makes the cut”.
And to think that the poor Princess has two younger brothers.
Black Swan Green – A book review and why not, I ask you?
The publishing exec has kindly donated the above tome to the Waffle book collection. Having been away from home for three nights and four days, I have demolished it speedily. I found it slow going at first but it grew on me. It is a depressing reflection that the coming of age novel is now written by people the exact same age as me. I’m not sure how many more 80s stories I can take.
Mr. Mitchell, unwilling to waste some of the characters previously encountered in other works brings back Belgian Eva from “Cloud Atlasâ€. It is always nice to see a Flemish native cast as exotic and exciting. Those of us who live among them regard them differently, I think; more stoic, industious and dependable. And furthermore,if she were a real posh Fleming then French would be her native tongue even though she lived in deepest darkest Flanders, which she did. I know precisely where this fictional character lived because years ago, the publishing exec made us take a detour there on our way home from Bruges. Never say these editors don’t support their authors. I see there is a reference to number9dream as well. Is he going to be like that William Boyd and keep introducing the same characters in all his books? Not a bad thing, but I just wanted to show off, I haven’t been reading the London Review of Books for years for nothing, you know.
The book reminded me a bit of “The Rotters’ Clubâ€, particularly the relationship between the siblings although my memory is that Lois and Ben enjoyed a somewhat happier rapport before Lois’s catastrophe (see the way I’m not ruining it for you, in case you haven’t read it) and horrible cousin Hugo reminds me of vile Paul. I bet Hugo will end up a New Labour MP as well.
It was also somewhat Mary George of Allnorthoverish in its descriptions but, if you ask me that Lavinia Greenlaw is a bit too poetic, so I’m not entirely sure that this is a compliment. There’s only so many poetic descriptions I want in my prose, thank you.
It wasn’t as good as “Cat’s Eye†or as horrific but it was an entertaining read. Not quite as entertaining as “Starter for Ten” also a pub exec present and now a major motion picture but, I thought, a much more thoughtful and evocative book. For me, far better than “Cloud Atlas†despite all the latter’s much vaunted cleverness. I really warmed to the main character and I loved his deeply unlikely triumph at the end of the book. While “Cloud Atlas†was very innovative in structure and all the more annoying for it; this is comfortably familiar perhaps even, ooh dare I say it, oh go on, a little derivative, but in a good way. What’s not to like? Recommended.
Oh, and apparently yesterday was world book day so they’ve brought out abbreviated versions of the classics to encourage more reading. “War and Peace” now weighs in at a slimline 900 pages instead of 1,500. Who precisely is the target audience for this? I suspect that a reluctant reader won’t embrace 900 pages more enthusiastically than 1,500 and, for heaven’s sake, if you’ve covered 900 pages, surely another 600 aren’t going to hurt. Mind you, they said they’ve made it shorter by cutting out a lot of the war and, if my memory is any way accurate, I can’t feel that that would hurt the narrative much.
Reality Television
Whispering male voice with peculiarly patronising tone: Mr. Waffle is home alone until Thursday while his wife is off for a work trip (or an illicit break of the working mother as it is better known). He has faithfully promised her that he will not be cross with the children while she is away even if they cry all the time and conspire to make him late for work.
Whispering male voice continues: Mr. Waffle returns from work and is left alone with his three small children. [Camera pans around scenes of chaos; the boys cry and the Princess is bold]. We see Mr. Waffle remaining calm and firmly putting her in the “coin colereâ€. The annoying whisperer observes: The boys continue to cry; will Mr. Waffle remain true to his promise or will he snap? Daniel gets sick. Michael crawls away while Mr. Waffle mops up. The Princess wees in the confines of the “coin colere†because, as she explains, she couldn’t go to the toilet because she was in the “coin colereâ€. Michael calls merrily from the bathroom “I’ve climbed on to the cistern and I’m trying to get my head into the toilet bowl from hereâ€.
In fact, my loving husband, tells me it wasn’t as bad as I might have imagined when I left first thing on Monday morning but he said that Wednesday was a particularly low point. In the morning, he dropped her highness to school with the boys in the buggy. Then he walked home and loaded them into the car and took them to the creche and climbed up to the third floor with the boys crawling ahead. At lunchtime he picked her highness up from school and deposited her at the glam potter’s house and went back to work. In the evening he collected her and then the boys. A fatal error. He should have collected the boys first. The boys were cranky, the Princess was cranky. He had to get shoes on all of them and carry/chivvy them down three flights of stairs and get them into the car. Hideous. But now I’m back from no internet land and I will mind my loving family and post all the material I wrote while I was away.
Finally, I see that I belong to the most discriminated against group in the British workplace. And who will be paying the pensions, eh?
The oddness of Belgium
On the way to school the other morning, the Princess and I saw four fire engines screaming their way to a warehouse near us.  They disgorged about 20 firemen who were suited up with masks and packs on their backs.  They leapt from the fire engines and sprinted into the warehouse. This urgency was somewhat undermined by each of the firemen in turn pausing at the threshold of the building to shake hands with the site foreman before running on to the smoke filled interior. Do you know that in their workplaces, Belgians kiss their colleagues at the start of the day? Fancy moving to Belgium, land of old fashioned courtesy in work places. Unless the work place is a department store in which case, the staff are paid extra to ignore you.
Recent culinary disasters or this is all very dull stuff but why should I suffer alone?
A while ago, I had some cold cauliflower which I decided to use up by turning into cauliflower cheese. I was undaunted by two significant facts which in retrospect should have daunted me: Mr. Waffle and the Princess do not like cauliflower cheese and I had never made it before. I turned to Mr. Conran for help (one of the many cookery books Mr. Waffle brought to our marriage). The quantities were for a head of cauliflower and it all seemed surprisingly complex. This is where I made my first mistake. I decided I couldn’t be dividing everything by four so I cooked the rest of the cauliflower. Then, Mr. Conran’s recipe had tricky bits in it like “make a mornay sauce†but add extra butter. So with a greasy thumb, I flicked between the cauliflower cheese and the mornay sauce recipe. And then it transpired that the mornay sauce recipe was a variant of another recipe on a different page; you know the kind of thing “as x sauce but with ingredient a instead of b and five times more câ€. So I created a lifetime’s supply of cheese sauce using recipes from three different pages of the book. It tasted quite nice too but that didn’t encourage the Princess or Mr. Waffle to indulge and a head of cauliflower cheese lies waiting in small packets in the freezer to be fed to my sons over the rest of their lives until they leave home when they will be taking the remainder with them to university.
Regular readers will, I am sure, recall that I bought wild boar in the supermarket months ago. Last week, I decided to cook it. I used Mr. Waffle’s “La cuisine pour tous†which is a terse French cookbook originally published in 1932. It assumes a lot of knowledge on the part of the reader. None of your sissy modern day explanations for Ms. Mathiot although she does give excellent instructions on how to manage the hired help and how to lay a family dinner table. The recipe for the marinade gave quantities for some of the ingredients in dl. I was not sure how much a dl was and neither was Mr. Waffle and none of our cookbooks gave instructions on this point and we were too lazy to turn on the computer (foolish, foolish people). We decided how much a dl was (by looking into our hearts and comparing the results) and using the handy calpol measuring spoon we carefully spooned in what we believed to be the correct quantity of vinegar. The beast was marinaded and on Friday night served up to my misfortunate family. Actually, the boar itself wasn’t too bad. A bit gamey but not tough. Regrettably the sauce didn’t taste of cloves or peppers or sherry or red wine (3/4 of a litre) or anything really, other than vinegar. I am reassessing our guess on dl quantities. Mr. Waffle and I gamely (ha, ha) ate some but the Princess, very sensibly, refused to have any truck with it. However, later in the evening on our way to the cinema, Mr. Waffle turned to me and said “I’m not quite sure how to put this but, do you think we could stop for a toasted sandwich?â€. Who was I to quibble. And to round off the evening, the film was quite, quite dreadful. May I recommend that you avoid Code 46? Having seen Samantha Morton in this, Minority Report and Morvern Callar, I have decided that I have suffered enough and I am going to foreswear any film in which she features in future. Happy Feet, anyone?
And finally, in other news, the royal grandparents are in situ for the week, minding the Princess for mid-term. They are not yet exhausted from their labours but we aim to send them back to Dublin shrivelled husks. Mind you, the Princess refused to go out with them this morning because she wanted to stay home admiring herself in her Snow White carnival outfit. They took Michael out instead (Daniel was napping) and he nearly expired from happiness at having two grown-ups all to himself. She did let them take her out this afternoon though. I am sorry, obviously, that I didn’t mention to her grandparents that she has got into the habit of putting on as many underpants as she can at a time. Not as sorry though as her grandmother who had to take her to the toilet in the local cafe and help her out of 14 pairs of underpants.
