shewhomust | Entries tagged with guardian

It's reciprocity, but not as we know it.

I do habitually read the obituary pages of The Guardian. I don't think this is morbid: you meet so many interesting people there, and although it is sad to learn that they have died, it is often a joy to learn that they have lived. Random example: Richard Gibson, the architect who persuaded Shetland that the traditional harling not only resulted in drab grey houses, it was also harming the beaches from which its raw materials were extracted, and so introduced brightly painted timber cladding instead (timber! in Shetland!).

But every now and then I stumble across someone who touches me more personally. ( Ruth Wyner )

( Tom Madden )

That's all I've got, really. Obituaries: sometimes they make you sad, sometimes they cheer you up, sometimes they lead you a merry dance through memories and things you have forgotten.

I quite often skip the human interest stories in the newspaper; I certainly wasn't hooked by the headline I thought I understood my late father. Then I was forced to spend lockdown in his home. But the picture at the top of the article made me look twice. It showed a child climbing over a fence, in a landscape of water and round green hills (in the online version it has been moved further down the page) and I thought: "Orkney?" It doesn't take much to make me think "Orkney?", but I wasn't far wrong: this was Shetland.

The article begins:

I wanted to reach out and feel the weight of the speckled eggs in my palm. Guillemot eggs: longer than a chicken’s and slightly pear-like in form, so that when they roll, they do so in a tight arc, rather than towards the cliff edge. There are plenty of cliffs to roll off in Shetland, a group of wind-scalped islands where the North Atlantic and the North Sea crash together, as well as other wild delights, like the precious mosses and orchids threading through the craggy peat bogs. Just over the hill, a low orange glow served as a reminder of a very different island treasure: Sullom Voe, one of the largest oil and gas terminals in Europe.

I stood by the trestle table staring at the strangely static greenish-blue eggs. A closer look revealed they were not what they seemed; in fact, they were not eggs at all. They were ceramic plates so cleverly designed that the slightly concave base appeared to curve outwards. It took a moment to re-adjust my focus.

Haven't I seen something like this before? The article continues to explain that this is the work of the author's late father, ceramicist Bill Brown; this name, too, seemed familiar. If I was right, I could check this journal, which I think of as my external memory -

- which turned out not to be so easy. I found photographs of what must surely be those eggs (though the description makes me think of something smaller, something you could hold in the palm of your hand...):

Another picture shows more of his work:

But I was beginning to think I had not after all posted about the gallery where I saw them, and that this post would be about the failure of my external memory (in a reversal of the usual situation, my organic memory seemed to be functioning better than my virtual one). All is well: I found it eventually hidden under a cut.

Two functioning memories: such riches!

The Guardian's Reader's Editor is back at work after the break, and the never-ending task of correcting errors has resumed. I liked this entry in yesterday's selection:

The great auk, a bird hunted to extinction, was penguin-like but not "a penguin" (Police seize 6,000 birds’ eggs …, 30 December, p12).

In a Guardian article, Simon Hattenstone looks back at the phenomenon of streaking, and meets some former streakers:

McGlade, now 60, was wearing black seamed stockings and suspenders with red and white ribbons (Middlesbrough's colours) around his privates when he climbed the barriers and jumped on to the pitch. "I had 'Save Redcar Baths' on my chest and 'Fiona I am sorry' on my back and I was carrying this yellow space hopper on the pitch."

Why am I not surprised that Fiona was unmoved, and that the demolition of Redcar baths went ahead? But Bass Brewery, whose promotional competition was the reason for the space hopper, gave him full marks for effort and a VIP trip to Disney World.

Yesterday's Guardian had a story about a series of photographs of the mantelpieces of creative people. As I type that, I think how sickening it sounds, but the initial photograph was rather jolly. So, even though I usually skip these house-design articles, I read on. It's a personal project, and is quite open about being inspired by the photographer's mother's mantelpiece in the first place, but even so, I was growing irritable about the extent to which these creative people were the friends and family of the photographer. However, now that you have been warned, I did quite enjoy these photographs. In particular, scroll right down almost to the end for Virginia Ironside's show of hands.

durham_rambler consulted the tide tables, and declared that this morning we should visit the castle: this gave us the longest possible overlap of castle open, causeway closed, and so the best chance of avoiding the crowds. When did Lindisfarne start to be so crowded? There have always been visitors, of course, but I was quite shocked by the crowds we had to negotiate yesterday, driving through the village. Anyway,

durham_rambler's strategy worked, and for much of our visit we had the castle to ourselves (and some very discreet staff).

The display in the castle has been radically altered since our last visit. This is not surprising. We were last on the island three years ago, in the aftermath of Covid, and they seem to have been restricting visiting: my diary says "The castle is already fully booked for the week, but we have a slot to visit the priory tomorrow." So the last time we were in the castle must have been in 2018, in the aftermath of major building works, when the interior was mostly bare, but for an art installation. Now the furniture has returned, and as previously represents the period when the castle belonged to Edward Hudson. There is more emphasis on the process by which Edward Lutyens transformed the shell of a Tudor fortress into a holiday cottage like no other, but there is still room to show the results of that transformation. Information boards quote guests, particularly Lytton Strachey, who was not impressed: "Three miles of sand, partly underwater with posts to show the way - rather alarming to the nervous... then an abrupt rock with a building on it". He visited more than once, though, so it must have had some appeal:

In the upper gallery - which I remember as a music room, often full of the cello music played by Madame Suggia, a frequent guest of Hudson's - there is Embodies Cacophonies, a light and sound installation by artist composer Liz Gre. A video downstairs explains something of the background of the piece, which was intriguing: the thing itself less so. Trails of fairy lights heaped up and hanging from the ceiling; gauzy hangings; music triggered by the movement of visitors (perhaps this was one thing which would have worked better if we had not had it to ourselves)...

We left the castle and reached the Ship with five minutes to order our crab sandwiches before they stopped serving lunch. Then home through the rain, pausing only to buy some biscuits, to dry off and make coffee...

The Thames barges were unique vessels: between 80ft and 95ft long, 20ft wide, capable of setting a spectacular 3,000sqft of sail (bigger than a tennis court) and carrying up to 170 tons of cargo (the equivalent of four articulated lorries). Flat out on a beam reach, they could fly along at 12 knots (about the same speed as an America's Cup yacht of the era). Not only that, but they could be sailed, famously, by "one man, a boy and a dog" - though, as Jim said, it would have to be "a bloody good dog".

From the Guardian's obituary for Jim Lawrence, one of the last people to skipper a Thames saoling barge. In later life Jim became a sailmaker, and "[h]is sails featured in TV programmes such as The Onedin Line... and a long-running Beck's lager ad campaign." Which means that I have seen his work, because that last refers to the green sails of the Alexander von Humboldt. This connection makes me happy, though I have no photographic evidence for it.

An interesting article in Saturday's Guardian describes a trend to produce and sell specialty sugars in the same way as the various dofferent specialty salts on the market (the pink Himalayan crystrals, the carefully harvested sea salt...). If there were any hope that the single origin products so temptingly descibed might lead to sugar becoming something to use with discernment, as sparingly as other spices, instead if a cheap bulking agent, I'd be a lot more interested.

But the article is in the paper's Environment section, not Food or Health. It acknowledges a downside to sugar, but only one:

Sugar production has an ugly past. About 5 million slaves were brought to the Caribbean, most to toil on sugar plantations starting in the mid-1500s. The slave trade reached its height in the 1700s, and Barbados, known as Sugar Island, was its crown jewel. Abolitionists in Europe and the US waged boycotts of sugar, a slave-derived good that represented abhorrent working conditions.

For even a vestigial awareness of the damage sugar does in the present to our national diet, you have to go to the Feast supplement. Feel free to insert here the tradional rant about how Feast caters to every dietary exclusion but one, or just skip straight to the back pages, where Grace Dent has her finger on the pulse:

Apple Butter Cafe, which recently opened a second branch at the top of London's Regent Street, is very much a cafe of its time. Today's young may be eschewing the vices of yesteryear - booze, ciggies, drugs, etc - but their Achilles heel is sugar. Build a cafe that serves short stacks of chunky, fat pancakes smothered in banoffee syrup and topped with mini meringues, shards of tempered chocolate, quenelles of thick cream and microplaned lemon zest, and they will come. Post a video on TikTok of someone blowtorching said pancake stack, so the meringue browns and gives the whole hot mess a baked alaska vibe, however, and your customers will queue from 8am for the chance to make their own content next to the fake plastic trees "growing" inside the cafe.

And since these are the people who write my daily paper, their blind spot is apparent in its pages.

I have a bee in my bonnet about so-called "cosy" crime fiction, so I was intrigued by the promise of an article on the subject in yesterday's Guardian. Inevitably, when I came to read the piece, it was about something completely different.

My rant goes something like this: when I started to read crime fiction, long ago, you could also refer to it as "detective fiction." There were variations, but mostly there were a group of people, someone would be murdered, and someone else would assume the task of examining the relationships between the survivors to find out which of them had both reason and ability to commit the crime. There were books in which the emphasis was on action, fear, suspense rather than motivation, but these were something slightly other (possibly thrillers). In the intervening period, the balance has changed, and now if you say "crime fiction," the reader will anticipate something noirish and violent. There may be a mystery to be solved, but equally all may be in the open, and the only question is who will survive and who will triumph. Classic, golden age type, stories in which the crime is a lens through which the characters and their world can be studied - these are regarded as "cosy" (which is to say, not very highly regarded at all). Once, at a crime fiction event, I asked a speaker, an expert on Scandi-noir, whether there was such a thing as Scandi-cosy? He said no, but he had to think quite hard about it: the question hadn't occurred to him before. The criticism, I think, is that "detective fiction" in this sense is cosy because by solving the crime, the detective restores order; such fiction is comforting, whereas noir crime is virtuous because it afflicts the comfortable. I think rather that tales of violence among gangsters, hard times on the margins, allow middle class readers (yes, like me) to feel that these are things that happen to other people; cosy crime brings murder and suspicion among people like us...

Anyway, the Guardian article considered cosy crime to be inherently light hearted, humorous. That's my Achilles heel right there, of course. "For my money," says author Oskar Jensen, "today’s greatest exponent of playful detective fiction is Alex Pavesi, whose Eight Detectives is a gloriously original, intricate and often very funny series of practical jokes played on the reader."

boybear lent me a copy of Eight Detectives: I thought it clever, if cold-hearted and at times slightly macabre. It did not occur to me to consider it as humorous...

That aside, if crime is noir and cosy is funny, how am I to describe such classic crime as - well, I've just finished Ann Cleeves' (very early) Murder in Paradise. Perhaps I should go back to calling it "detective fiction."

Bonus link, from the same page: Tom Gauld's Christmas tree.

This week's Tom Gauld cartoon is a classic.

It's a while since I've read one of the Guardian's Long Read features; long enough that when I came across this piece about the trope of the disabled villain, I was initially baffled. Was it some sort of paid supplement? But no, it is an interesting and thoughtful essay about a literary cliché which has a long history and is maybe not entirely a thing of the past. From James Bond to JRR Tolkien via Shakespeare, author Jan Grue considers some literary examples, and eventually, of course, he reaches Roald Dahl:

It is no accident that the biggest recent debates over sensitivity reading have been initiated by two companies that strive to maximise the value of the intellectual property of dead authors. Their real sensitivity is to the market...

I might have posted about the row over the new editions of Roald Dahl, and I never got round to it: Grue has not written the post that was taking shape in my hed, but he struck a chord all the same. And the piece as a whole is better than what I would have written, so it's all good.

From the Guardian's Country Diary:: Maes Howe at mid-winter.
Also from the Guardian:: the traditional smell of Christmas (can you contribute to the Encyclopaedia of Smells?
Explore the portfolio of the Frères d'art:: I've barely dipped into it, and am already a little breathless (Look at this fisherman with a cormorant! or This one's called 'Disconnection'!...)
With thanks to the Flickr contact who made the introduction.

Still working through Saturday's Guardian, where I have just reached an encouraging article about spoonbills: they are, it seems, re-establishing themselves on the salt marshes of Norfolk. This is good news. But I should not have misread the statement, "This year, they boasted a record 77 young from 43 pairs of spoonbills." That's BOASTED, not ROASTED.

There is some excuse, though. Reading on, I learned of an unexpected source of historic population data: "We actually have an idea of where they used to be around the country from looking at estate banquet details from the Middle Ages."

I find this doubly delightful.

I made a recipe!

I often grumble about the Guardian's 'Feast' section. Yes, I know, the entire readership grumbles about the number of ingredients in Yotam Ottolenghi's recipes, but my grumble is different, it is that it pays constant attention to those following a gluten-free, or meat-free, or exclusively plant-based, or even just low-fat diet. It even has regular recommendations for alcohol-free wines and cocktails. But it never acknowledges that some of us -- rather a lot of us - have problems with sugar. Every week there are recipes for high-sugar desserts and cakes, and some of them are very tempting.

Ahem.

So I made Benjamina Ebuehi’s recipe for blackberry and sage crumble bars.

durham_rambler has been picking a lot of blackberries, and this seemed worth a try before the season ended. I managed to get some fresh sage while we were at the farm shop: they don't sell herbs, but they do grow them, to flavour the sausages, and parted with a generous sprig when asked.

The verdict, short version: I would make it again, but I'd try some changes.

( The verdict, longer version: )

Also at the farm shop, I found a small quantity of damsons, which I stewed with the last of the plums; but I could have tried them in this fruit bake.

Photographed by Natalya Saprunova (via - ah, I found it via the Guardian's 'My best shot' feature, but I see they had previously run a selection of these photos as a photo essay).

Warning: the portfolio includes a severed reindeer head. But also colourful costumes, fine embroidery and a strong contender for Best National Flag. An endangered language is mentioned but not explored.

In the Guardian, Charlotte Higgins takes the new Stonehenge exhibition at the BM as an excuse to visit Orkney. Well, you would, wouldn't you?

Tired of Wordle? Then try Wirdle, the Shetland dialect version.

In the 'interiors' feature of yesterday's Guardian, Lucy Mangan shows off her new library, and very splendid it is, too.

I was a bit surprised how long I had to squint at the pictures before I spotted a book I recognised - it was Marilynne Robinson's Gilead; then I found Shirley Conran's Lace 2...) But where are all the children's books?

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/770191.html

Todd Antony's photographs of Bolivian women wrestlers - indigenous Aymara Indians who wrestle wearing traditional dress (via The Guardian's 'My Best Shot' feature, which also gives some details of how the picture was taken).

His portfolio of women climbers is also very fine.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/763319.html

The Guardian reports that Juan Clemente Rodríguez Estévez has spent 11 years studying 68 pictures of food.

Not just any pictures of food, but a set of sixteenth century carvings which decorate an arched passageway in the cathesral of Seville. He has published a book on the subject, 'The Universal Banquet: Art and Food in Renaissance Seville', and at this point in the article I grumbled, not for the first time, Guardian, you run a bookshop, why not make it easy for me to buy books featured in the paper? On this occasion there may be a reason: the only book on the subject of which the internet is aware is El universal convite: Arte y alimentación en la Sevilla del Renacimiento. Which is tantalising, because - I won't copy out the linked article, but do read it - he has clearly found all sorts of interesting stuff about the dishes on display. And while I'm almost tempted to go for it, in the hope of more pictures, my Spanish isn't really up to it.

There is one more article on the subject, which clearly draws on the same basic information, and appears to be having problems with its images -

- in fact, and I don't know if there are issues of copyright involved, there is an overall scarcity of pictures for what is potentially a very visual story. Such examples as we have, though, follow a very modern pattern: an item of food displayed on a circular plate within a square frame, this isn't your traditional still life, this is an Instagram aesthetic.

Which seems particularly appropriate, because of course Saint Isidore of Seville is the patron saint of the internet. He lived a thousand years before this banquet was carved, but here's a random link turned up by my search for more pictures, to a copy of his Etymologies (courtest of the British Library).

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/761882.html

A quick crossword clue (17 July, page 54, 7 down) should not have described penguins and turtles as mammals; they are birds and reptiles, respectively.

Guardian, 19.07.2021

Indeed.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/760974.html

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News from Nowhere

Entries tagged with guardian

Normal for Norfolk

Among the obituary columns

Two functioning memories

Not a penguin

England, my England

Interior design

Lost worlds

Sweets for my sweet

Laughing at crime

How to organise your home library

A long read

Wise men bearing links

I have measured out my life in ...

Local harvest

The Saami of the Kola Peninsula

News from the Northern Isles

Bookshelf envy

cholitas luchadoras

Pictures of food

Great corrections of our time