Pass the Pesto!

I was thinking earlier about the fact that I hadn't written on this blog for a while. The problem is, every time I've thought of something to write about, it was food-related. But today it occurred to me that my intended reason for starting this blog was so that the things I was thinking about 'would be written'. And I have been thinking about food a lot lately. More specifically, as Mr Scribetur and I are currently considering a move which might result in reasonably tight circumstances, I've been thinking about how best to make good meals, but without spending too much.

I fear I don't have much patience for the approach of articles such as this one, which imagine that cheap cooking as a student involves only beans, eggs, or mince. Of course, I'm setting up a straw man here; although when I went to university  I was certainly given a small paperback book of student meals that had, I think, an entire section devoted to cooking with baked beans, there has been a recent shift in attitudes to student/budget food, with one self-proclaimed student chef, Sam Stern, rising to mild celebrity through providing rather more practical recipes for aspiring chefs pressed for the space, time, and range of ingredients required by some of Gordon Ramsay's more complex recipes. (One of my all-time favourite meals is his game pie, which my Mum makes at New Year, but unfortunately game pie is only budget if you're willing to do a bit of poaching...) 

At the end of the day, I think the thing about cooking on a budget is that you have to decide what it is you can put up with, because having just one very cheap meal a week can help save up for something a bit more exciting later in the week. Over the past year or so, mine and Mr Scribetur's go-to for this has been pesto pasta: the type you can buy in a small jar that does two meals easily, with some cheap olives chopped up and cheese on top. We have even had 'pesto pasta weeks', where, if we wanted to save up for a luxury, we would have pesto pasta for every other meal. From the ridiculous to the sublime, we spent the money saved on a nice bottle of whisky. Those were a few drams well-earned!

Unfortunately, I have to admit that it's got to the point where I was a bit tired of the above culinary concoction. Pesto pasta seemed to me like one of those things that is perfectly edible, and fills you up, but it's fairly neutral on the food-enjoyment scale. It isn't bad; it just isn't the kind of thing you'd ever cook for a visitor. 

Then, this week, Mr S asked me to get some food from the supermarket (having a bike, I, alas often end up being the one going into town for the shopping, as it takes half as long as walking...!), including, for one recipe he was doing, basil leaves. It seemed a bit inefficient to make from scratch something that could be bought in a jar for £1.50, but, nevertheless, I collected together the other ingredients required for home-made pesto pasta - pine nuts, and a cheap equivalent to parmesan (in this case, Grana Padano). Olive oil we had at home. The final result was this:

Combined with 200g of linguine, some more pine nuts, and a sprinkling of cheese, the result was surprisingly impressive, if I do say so myself. Certainly it tasted absolutely nothing like Sainsbury's own-brand pesto, and was a meal that was genuinely enjoyable. Certainly a bit - though not a lot - more effort than opening a jar, and probably a pound or two more. But still a very cheap meal, and also one that I wouldn't mind eating quite regularly. Also - and maybe this is just me - blending things can be very therapeutic...

I used this recipe, although I think I ended up using about half of the amount of olive oil suggested. The recipe did enough for two well-sauced plates of pasta, with about half spare for another time. So, if you're tired of baked beans or store-bought pesto, but want to save money, I would definitely recommend a bit of home-made pesto!

*

*

*

P.S: The glass that the pesto is pictured in is something which gives me an inordinate amount of pleasure: it used to contain nutella. I love the fact that you can buy nutella in small jars that, once washed, make completely respectable tumblers. It's like you can eat chocolate spread and save money on glassware all at the same time...!

In sickness and in health...

There are, without a doubt, many wonderful aspects to living with one's significant other. You get to share so much - not just your leisure time (which I love - it means I can read books or surf the net to my heart's content, whilst also keeping my feet warm underneath Mr Scribetur), but also daily chores such as cooking, cleaning, doing the washing up, etc. Whilst in many cases this means that jobs are halved, as it were, there are also times when sharing can double things. Such as coming down with illnesses, for example.

I am neither a very good nurse nor a very patient ill person. When I come down with something, I have to be persuaded - usually by Mr S - that it really isn't a good idea to go cycling out into the cold just to get a book, so I can spend the day in and working. And then I grumble about my inability to do said work, even though I'm clearly not capable of much more than drinking Ribena and watching bad television (and maybe writing slightly incoherent blog posts...). When my husband gets ill, usually a few days after I've recovered from whatever bug I had and then passed on to him, I do my best to show him more sympathy than I did myself, but that's not exactly saying much. I like to 'do' things to fix a problem, and at the end of the day looking after someone who is ill - especially if you live in the same small flat together! - only involves so much active running-around-after-helpful-medicines, and a lot of sitting beside them listening to them sneeze and cough. Which in turn makes me feel guilty, both for giving him the illness and for not being able to do more, which in turn makes me visibly crotchety, which finally winds up with my feeling guilty again. So falling ill, as a member of a couple sharing a small living space, means knowing that there's a fairly high chance that you'll pass it on, and that you'll recover only to have to look after the other.

Of course, I'm not always the 'first' to catch something, which stings in a different way. It's a bit like seeing a television preview of a programme that looks really bad, but you know you're going to have to sit through it anyway. And then when symptoms do start appearing, your other half magnanimously says, with his no-longer-sore-throaty-voice, "ah, yes, and next comes the bit where the main character does x..." Or, well, you get the picture. And sometimes, because human bodies are weird that way, you get 'bonus' symptoms your partner didn't get, kind of like a blooper reel on a DVD. 

This is all more in the way of a reflection than a complaint - if I were living alone, I'd still get ill every now and then, and I wouldn't have anyone to tell me to sit down and relax, for goodness sake (you masochist), or to make me cups of Lemsip whilst I'm curled up on the sofa. And as for the looking after my partner when he's ill, though I might have the bedside manner of Dr House (or, if you want a more geeky allusion, of the holographic doctor on Star Trek: Voyager), I do it out of love. After all, though there is nothing worse than watching the person you love suffer, however mildly, there is nothing better than caring for them - in sickness and in health. I just wonder if that part of the marriage vow should come with a disclaimer* pointing out that at times there might be twice as much sickness, and half as much health as there ever was before.

*Speaking of disclaimers: Astute readers might have guessed that I am currently somewhat cold-ish. Please forgive any errors of grammar, and mentally adjust the slightly Eeyore-ish tone of the above accordingly! 

The Other Side of Fear

Written a few days ago -- but I still feel relieved!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Relief. It is a strange feeling. It is not one I have ever had the chance to evaluate at length, but I have been feeling, and thinking about, that particular emotion very much today. Today I received some news that I have been waiting for, but fearing would not come, since the end of June last year. To all the dear friends and family who have provided comfort since that time, this is my announcement that the best - as you told me it would! - rather than the worst has at last happened. In the first minutes after getting that news, I felt sheer joy - the kind of joy that leaves you shaking, and crying, and feeling as if you could take on anything in the world. But since then this joy has settled into something quieter, but no less marvellous. Relief.

Relief, I realise now, is the other side of fear. It is what you feel when reality has been turned on its head for a time, but then rights itself. And the longer reality has been the wrong way up, the more reconciled you had got to the prospect that you might not wake up from the nightmare - the purer, the deeper, and the more, well, odd the feeling of relief is. It's like having a huge bruise, that hurts when you touch it, but then suddenly one day, though you can still see the bruise turning from purple to green, it doesn't hurt no mutter how hard you press at it. Throughout today, I have kept pressing away at the bruise I had got so used to, but there is no pain there any more. Just relief, and the promise, at last, of a future in a world the right way up.

It is hard to become unaccustomed to fear. Relieved as I am, I cannot help but think - surely this is temporary? Maybe there has been a mistake, and I'm just looking through a maze of mirrors, which make the world look the right way round, but in reality it is still topsy-turvy? But no. The relief, which is just beginning to work on healing the wounds of fear, says otherwise. It is real. The only thing to fear now is fear itself.

Relief, the release from fear, is not a steady emotion. It is like a calm ocean. It has no crashing waves, but it swells every now and then, filling your heart and splashing its salty liquid into your eyes.

Quite simply, I am relieved. And, humble, overlooked, and undramatic though that emotion may be, it is one of the best things I have felt since the end of June last year.

The Strangeness of the Past

For my MPhil in Early Modern History I am writing a thesis on the subject of early modern reactions to mountains and (if and when it happened) mountain-climbing. Right now, that means trawling through Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth, first published in English in 1684. This text has been used by scholars over the past sixty years or so as an exemplar of the allegedly universal early modern 'distaste' for mountains, but it is far more than that, if it reveals such at all. It is nothing less than one man's attempt to explain the physical realities of the earth by sketching its history, from Creation, to the Flood, and beyond.

Sometimes, when I have been working on a particular historical figure for a long period of time, I get to wondering what it would be like to meet them. I would definitely like to go for a drink with Sandy Irvine, for example, the 22 year-old Oxonian who died on Everest in 1924. His letters are witty, slightly cheeky, excited in tone and often badly spelt. I imagine he would be the kind of person who would tell wicked stories all evening, and who might flirt a little with girls, but always politely. Elizabeth Elstob, an early seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxonist whose letters I edited a year or so ago, would I think probably be quite trying company, at least in her later years, although through no fault of her own. In her letters one gets the sense of a woman for whom life held a great deal of melancholy, and a succession of unfulfilled promises. I think she would fill an encounter with a sympathetic ear with slightly mournful reminisces of days gone by.

Thomas Burnet, on the other hand, would be an infuriating person to spend an evening with. I envisage him as the kind of older man you might end up drawn into after-dinner conversation with, who has the smile of one who believes he has all the answers. And the problem is, he does.

I am only halfway through the first book (of, heavens help me, four), but thus far I cannot help but feel impressed by Burnet's theory. In a nutshell, it is this: the Bible, he points out, tells us that when the Flood (or, as he terms it, the Deluge) occurred, waters rose to above the tops of the mountains. As far as Burnet is concerned, this just can't be possible: there isn't enough water in the oceans or in the clouds to cover the tops of the mountains. So his answer is that the mountains could not have existed until after the Deluge - that, indeed, they were the result of it.

This simple totting up of cubits of water on Burnet's part has some interesting ramifications. He argues, next, that the ante-deluvian (pre-Flood) Earth was in the shape of a 'mundane Egg', with the fiery centre as the yolk, a watery 'Abysse' as the white, and a layer of Earth as the shell. So how, the reader asks, did all that water get out? I can answer that, says the all-knowing, infuriating Burnet: the Sun's heat gradually caused vapours to be released from the waters of the Abyss, and eventually these vapours broke out of the shell - causing the surface of the earth to crack, flooding it with water, and causing mountains to form.

The thing that really gets me about this is that, taken entirely on its own terms, it... well, it fits. My know-it-all after dinner companion has laid out a jigsaw which seems impossible and then manages to fit it together perfectly. If I didn't know the things I do know, thanks to having been born in the 21st-century rather than the 17th, I might almost be tempted to think he was right.

This, I think, is the real challenge with exploring the thinking of the past. By modern standards, Burnet's Sacred Theory is mad, silly, even. But for all that I sometimes find myself wanting to reach through my computer screen and strangle the man for being so unflappably, even smugly, convinced of his own correctness, I also cannot forget that I have a fairly considerable advantage over him. At one point, he talks about what the Earth would look like from the Moon. To me, in 2013, this seems a commonplace - images of the Earth from space abound (often on Facebook, with inspirational quotes beneath...), after all - but for Burnet, in 1784? That was a huge leap of imagination. His entire theory is an immense feat of imagination. From two sources - his observations of the world in its 'current' form, and Scripture - he then went on a journey of the mind to seek out the deep history of the earth. 

The ideas of the past may seem strange sometimes, and they may even be wrong by modern standards, but we must not forget that once, they seemed to some to be feasible, or even genius.

Lost in the Stacks

Over the past four years, I have had the immense good fortune to be given the opportunity to use two of the best libraries in the UK - the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the University Library in Cambridge. What makes them the best? They are both copyright libraries, meaning that they have a right to a free copy of every item (magazine, book, newspaper) published in the UK. Therefore, they are both huge - the 'UL' has an estimated stock of 8 million books, [1] whilst the Bodleian Library holds around 9 million. [2] This does not include the books held by the Bodleian Libraries as a whole (an umbrella term recently coined to the irritation of many – ‘change’ is a not a thing which the venerable institution of the University of Oxford does very well – to reflect the fact that the books held by the university itself are now spread across a number of physical sites). I won’t emphasise too much the 1 million difference between the two, because I know all too well that I have been, well, a bit spoilt when it has come to adapting to Cambridge. The fact that I was suddenly at a slightly different ancient university, with different coloured bricks adorning differently shaped dreaming spires... well, you get the picture. Constantly comparing the two places is certainly ridiculous, but it is hard not to do so when it comes to the library, the place that is the heart and centre of my life of study right now.

My initial, Oxonian objection to the University Library was, I will admit, a very shallow one. It was architectural. The Bodleian, with its towers and crenelations, put me in mind of a castle, a fortified stronghold within which a great wealth of knowledge was kept safe. The UL – I’m sorry – makes me think of nothing so much as a giant penis. (I heard a story that the architect was determined that the tower be taller than the spires of King’s College Chapel, previously the tallest building in Cambridge. If that isn’t a case of phallic pride I don’t know what is!) It isn’t that the UL is not an impressive building. Its odd mix of Byzantine-cum-Communist-cum-Classical Chinese (sitting inside small courtyards in the middle of the building, the flowing roofs reminded me forcibly of the Forbidden City in Beijing) is quite frankly pretty awesome. Its tower (at the top of which, it is said, copyright-deposit pornography is said to reside) can be seen from miles around, so the architect certainly achieved his wish. But, gosh darnit, it simply doesn’t possess the, to me, infinitely more pleasing neo-Classical perfection of the Old Bodleian, or the sinuous curves of the Radcliffe Camera.

However, the most important part of a library is, of course, what is inside it, and it is inside that the true difference between the Bodleian and the University Library is to be found. The UL, you see, has ‘open bookstacks’. Historically, at the Bodleian, if one required a book that was not on ‘open shelf’ in the main library, it had to be ‘called up’ from an underground location of varying distance from the library itself – the Bodleian currently boasts storage as far afield as Swindon and Cheshire. This physical separation between readers and books has recently been eased, a little, by the opening of the Gladstone Link, previously a closed bookstack. But the Gladstone Link is shiny, and new, and designed for comfortable working, and doesn’t really have all that many books in it. The UL, on the other hand, has four main bookstacks, each 6 floors high, crammed with books. And they are completely open to readers.

The thing that I can’t help but love about the UL bookstacks is that they completely fulfil, for me, my mental image of what a library should be like. There are maybe one or two miniscule desks per floor, but apart from that, the stacks are just full of books – ceiling to floor shelving, with walkways between shelves that can only accommodate two people if they press themselves flat against the volumes before them. Some of the bookstacks are overflowing, with books on tables or on floors. They are also mazes. The doors out of the stacks are sometimes hidden in odd places, so that I feel an urge to run a piece of string behind me, just so I can find my way back to the stairwell. Only yesterday, after a whole term getting used to the UL, I found myself wandering, with rising panic, through rows and rows of shelves, trying to find my way out.

And yet, there is something wonderful about that. The Bodleian is tidy, and organised, and in the main reading rooms you can calmly and quietly endeavour to live the life of the mind. The UL, on the other hand, is confusing, and more than a bit messy in places (how, you ask yourself, can a run of books begin on a shelf halfway down the stack, and then conclude beneath a table at the other end of the room?), and you can only set up calmly to read after launching what can sometimes feel like a mountaineering expedition up to South Front Floor 6 to get the books you need. But in its overwhelming-ness there is something wonderful. The whole building almost seems to creak with the weight of the millions of books hidden in its different corners, and, pacing through the shelves of the stacks, you cannot avoid realising how many people have written so many things on so many different subjects – and, indeed, how small the thesis you are working on will seem among such a collection if it ever makes its way onto its shelves. But, in this case, I do not find being but one grain of sand amongst a vast beach disheartening. Rather, I think it makes me feel rather less lonely, even when I do find myself alone at the top of North Front, lost amongst the bookstacks.

---

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_University_Library

[2] http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/75804/Central-Bodleian-Guide-2011.pdf

To write, perchance to dream

When I was a teenager, I wrote a column for two local newsletters entitled variously "Kidz Column" (I know. I thought I was being terribly 'cool') and, less cringe-inducingly, "Youth View". The ruling principle I took when deciding what to write each month was simply to write about whatever was on my mind at the time. I wrote reviews of films, mused about the vagaries of school life, and even once - though my mother thought it quite unsuitable for a children's column! - discussed politics. Writing for the columns earned me no small amount of fame amongst the more dedicated readers of the newsletter (by which I mean, the elderly ladies of the village always asked me what I was going to write about next when they saw me   walking towards the school bus stop of a morning), and allowed me to indulge on a monthly basis my desire to play with words and, it has to be admitted, be generally opinionated about life, the universe, and everything.

The thing is, though I, like many children, went through a brief phase of wanting to be an astronaut, this ambition was early on replaced with the conviction that I would - that I had to - grow up to be a writer. As far as I was concerned, Lois Lane was the role-model to follow, and JK Rowling, whose Harry Potter stories exploded into my eight-year-old imagination with the force of a thunder storm, was my ultimate hero. (I was eight in 1999, when the Harry Potter books were less of an all-consuming franchise and more of a huge secret shared between excited children; I remember, aged maybe thirteen, sharing my best friend's pride in 'having discovered them before they got famous'). By fourteen, I had written a novel (which I marketed - oh dear! - as 'Gothic fantasy'), which I then sent to various publishers who all, at glacial speeds, rejected it, and finally flogged copies of it printed at home to friends, family, and teachers to raise money for a trip to China. The drawer beneath my bed was filled with notebooks, all in turn filled with writing (at that point, I had a fad for glittery ink of all shades, so when I open them now, my hands turn slightly sparkly). When I chose my first handbag, I made sure it was large enough to take a reading book, a pen, and a pad of paper.

To the melodramatic, teenage me who probably both amused and bemused the inhabitants of Mendlesham and Stowupland parishes in equal measure, it seemed that writing was less a hobby and more of a compulsion. I felt certain that if I could not do it, I would die, or at the very least, my imagination would wither and my heart would be left empty. My view now is a bit more balanced. Writing is certainly something that makes me feel deeply happy and fulfilled. As a historian, it satisfies me to write things down, to leave a record. Writing is also something that I want to be good at, and for that I need to practise. I have more than enough practice at academic prose to keep me going - and will, I hope, have many years more ahead of me to hone that art! - and I still keep a notepad for fiction, albeit perhaps not 'Gothic fantasy', beside my bed. But the space which those newsletter columns filled has been, up until now, noticeably uninhabited. Of late, I have found myself thinking about things (not necessarily important things - the colour of the Cambridge sky, or the exquisite torture of cross-country bus trips) and drafting paragraphs about them in my head. Hence this blog. Whatever I find myself dwelling on, that I think might be of interest to whoever might stumble across this blog - it will be written.