getting my oats

I assume literally everybody had a go at making some sort of bread during the COVID-19 lockdown, right? There was a whole subculture (no pun intended) that sprang up around sourdough bread, including the best ways to ensure the capture of the airborne yeast that makes sourdough starter work. Other, if you will, avenues (what, your hairy avenue, etc.) are available for yeast acquisition, for instance if you are lucky enough to be the owner of a vagina you can harvest yeast from there, especially if you happen to be suffering from a conveniently-timed yeast infection. Intriguingly, it does appear to also be possible for the process to run in reverse, i.e. for you to catch a vaginal yeast infection from bread-making, although that does raise some interesting questions about how the yeast transference occurred. 

As an aside, if you want an even more extreme method of making bread rise, try making some gangrene bread.

Anyway, as much as I like eating sourdough bread I am far too lazy to get into the minutiae of starter fermentation and all that malarkey. We did nevertheless have a couple of goes at making bread during lockdown, firstly some fairly standard white bread (i.e. the sort that you make with the yeast that comes in a packet) which was fine, although we were a bit cavalier with the proving process so it was a bit denser than it might have been. 

The bread-making process isn't that onerous, honestly, but the yeast thing plus the multiple provings, putting a towel over it, leaving it in the airing cupboard, etc., is a bit time-consuming, so I was interested to hear that you can make bread with beer. The relevant paragraph from that linked page is this one:

There are two kinds of beer bread, both of which are incredibly simple. In fact, my favourite way is so simple a child could do it (disclaimer: don’t let a child do it). All you need to do is mix a 330ml bottle of beer, 375g of self-raising flour and 3 teaspoons of sugar in a bowl with a spoon. Pour it into a bread tin, top with a drizzle of melted butter and bake at 180°C/360°F for about 50 minutes, or until golden and crisp on top.

The results don't look massively different from the regular bread, and taste pretty similar too. I can't remember what sort of beer I used for the one in the picture, but you can imagine getting very different results from a lager or a light dry IPA, and a malty winter ale, or Guinness. 

The upside here is that it's incredibly easy to make and doesn't require any proving; just mix, in the tin, in the oven, done. The downside, of course, is that you'll have to sacrifice a bottle or can of beer to the process that you could otherwise have enjoyed in the proper traditional God-fearing way, i.e. by drinking it.

Anyway, it was perfectly nice, though I haven't repeated the experiment, partly for the reasons above, and partly because post-lockdown we now have nice convenient access to bread shops and the like. But I am always intrigued by a recipe that seems to bypass the sorcery and voodoo incantations associated with making regular bread, and I was therefore intrigued by a recipe that flashed past my eyes in a YouTube short (or possibly a Facebook reel) the other day. It's basically this one but I'll reproduce it here as it's very simple:

• 300g porridge oats
• 500g Greek-style natural yogurt
• mixed seeds
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1-2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• a pinch of salt

Seed-wise my current preference is a generous couple of spoonfuls of chia seeds in the mix, and then a generous sprinkling of pumpkin and sunflower seeds on top. Some recipes with near-identical ingredient lists appear to produce pale bread with a darker crust; mine is quite dark throughout. 

Essentially it's a variant of soda bread with the yogurt substituted for the more usual buttermilk and the flour/oats combo adjusted so that it's 100% oats. Anyway, the important thing is that the method is simple: chuck everything in a bowl, mix well, scrape it into a loaf tin and bake at around 180°C (gas mark 4) for about 45-50 minutes.

It's very tasty and lends itself to sweet or savoury applications: I've had it with goat's cheese and houmous on it, but also toasted with some honey on and both were equally nice. You'll recall that we have done bread-making using yogurt here before, but that was flatbread which is generally easier. 

the last book I read

Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban.

William G. (not this guy, just to be clear) is a quiet unassuming type of guy; lives alone in a flat in a shared house, works in a bookshop, keeps himself to himself. We learn that he was previously married, or at least in a relationship that lasted long enough to produce two daughters, who we gather he doesn't get to see any more for reasons that are never elaborated on.

Neaera H. (I would go with something like knee-airer pronunciation-wise) is an author of children's books, most notably the ones featuring cute anthropomorphic character Gillian Vole, and is nervously contemplating a move to writing books for an adult audience. 

Both of these two solitary people randomly end up at London Zoo at separate times, and moreover both end up gazing at a tank of sea turtles, contemplating the clarity and precision of their lifecycle in the wild (swim thousands of miles round the world's oceans, return to a specific beach to lay and bury eggs, philosophically accept that most of the hatchlings will get eaten before they ever reach the sea), comparing that with the aimlessness and stagnation of their own lives and considering the crazy idea of stealing the turtles, taking them to the sea and freeing them.

William and Neaera eventually meet and realise that they've been having the same thoughts about the turtles, and gradually hatch a plan, with the help of George Fairbairn, the surprisingly amenable guy at the zoo who takes care of the turtles. And so they build some makeshift turtle crates, hire a van, spirit away the turtles - no small feat as the adults weigh more than an adult human and you can't just walk them out of the zoo on a lead - drive to Polperro and release them into the sea there. 

And so, the turtles liberated and the two protagonists' quest fulfilled, the book ends, right? Well, no, actually - it turns out that while the turtular quest was both exciting and satisfying, and gruelling and frustrating, it hasn't been an instant fix for all the deep-seated problems in the two main characters' lives. That said, maybe some of the turtles' relentless and instinctive sense of purpose has rubbed off after all - Neaera finds herself having a relationship with George the turtle guy, and William has a brief fling (which doesn't last) with his fellow bookshop employee Harriet and then finds himself resolving some domestic disputes with house-mate Sandor with some uncharacteristic physical violence. Bizarrely, this seems to thaw William and Sandor's previously wary relationship and they start to become friends, and just as well, as they soon have to help deal with another in-house domestic situation - their quiet house-mate Miss Neap has hanged herself. 

This is the seventh Russell Hoban book to appear on this list, the others occupying a period of roughly six years between Kleinzeit in August 2010 and Pilgermann in December 2016. Those six books cover a pretty wide range of subject matter but all have in common a sort of ineffable strangeness, and Turtle Diary (one of Hoban's earlier works of adult fiction, published in 1975) is no different, despite the relative prosaicness of the subject matter and lack of supernatural elements. Is it actually about two people rescuing turtles? Well, sort of, but not exclusively: it's also about middle age, coming to terms with who you are and being comfortable with that, even if that means consciously limiting how much interaction with other people you do (with Miss Neap's suicide presumably intended to illustrate the consequences of never quite coming to terms with all that stuff). The turtles, as well as being actual turtles, act as a sort of metaphor for freedom and adventure and purpose. Neaera's career arc going from author of anthropomorphic animal tales for kids to adult fiction is of course a mirror of Hoban's own. 

My favourite Hobans are probably the early-1980s pair of Riddley Walker and Pilgermann, both set outside the contemporary London setting of most of his other novels (Turtle Diary included) in both space and time. But they're all good, very readable, fairly short and recognisably the product of a singular style and vision. The seven Hoban novels that feature here equals the number of books by William Boyd on the list, joint second only to Iain (M) Banks with eleven. 

Turtle Diary was made into a film in 1985 starring Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley (the whole thing seems to be available here). That makes it (as far as I know) the second book on this list whose film adaptation stars Ben Kingsley, the other being House Of Sand And Fog. It's also (again, as far as I know) the second book on this list whose film adaptation was written by Harold Pinter, the other being The French Lieutenant's Woman. The cover art of my Penguin Modern Classics edition is by Eduardo Paolozzi, who also got a mention here. 

problems with the the printing

Following on from my complaints (reasonable I think) about printing and/or binding errors in previous books on this list - Bluesman, Lolita and The Lay Of The Land, and related complaints about the frequency of typos in The Falls and Eternity, here's a little oddity in A Question Of Upbringing, prominent and worthy of note mainly because it's literally in the first line of the first chapter of the book. Have a look:

If you're struggling to see it, here's a similar screenshot from this video, of a version of the book that doesn't have the error:

If you still can't see it (there are two successive a's in the first sentence), that will be for the same reason that people sometimes struggle to see the deliberate error here:

I would assume that's the reason why it slipped through the proof-reading process for my 1980s Flamingo paperback. 

The linked video above, which I will confess to not having sat through the full hour of, also touches on a subject that, for instance, Powell's Wikipedia page is a bit silent on, but seems like an obvious question that one would want to ask: did he know before writing A Question Of Upbringing that he was embarking on a 12-novel cycle, or even a multi-novel cycle, or did it evolve as he went along? It's surprisingly difficult to find any related information, but this page has an explanatory paragraph:

Powell started writing the first novel, A Question of Upbringing, in 1948. At that stage it was intended, according to Spurling, to become the first part of “at least a trilogy”. By 1956, when Powell was writing the fourth novel, “what was originally planned as three volumes or a little over had grown to eight or nine.” In early 1962, when Powell was beginning the seventh novel, “he finally made up his mind to allocate three books to the Second World War, and complete the entire sequence in twelve volumes.” Apart from mentions of two scrap-books of scribbles and ideas, these scattered references are the only information Spurling imparts of how Dance was conceived and planned. This is a huge disappointment.

The references to "Spurling" there are to Hilary Spurling who wrote a biography of Powell in 2017, to generally more complimentary reviews than the implicit one in the quoted paragraph above. Note that the Guardian review I linked to there is written by Claire Messud, who also features on this blog. 

the last book I read

A Question Of Upbringing by Anthony Powell.

Ah, schooldays. It doesn't take much for one's mind to be cast back there: the endless Latin verbs, trying to find one's best tails for evening prep, fagging for Blenkinsop major and getting a good thrashing if his crumpets weren't toasted to perfection, trying to grind various future Prime Ministers into a wall in the name of recreation, all the usual stuff.

Hmmm, well actually perhaps not everyone's schooldays were exactly like this, but those of our narrator here (who we eventually discover is called Nick Jenkins) definitely were. Cast back by a wafer-thin framing device (a page and a half or so at the start of chapter one) into a reverie of his schooldays, at an unnamed school which we're clearly meant to infer is Eton, he recalls friendships with his old chums and room-mates Stringham and Templer, various hilarious scrapes involving their po-faced housemaster Le Bas - including the arguably less hilarious prank of making an anonymous phone call which resulted in Le Bas' arrest - and some out-of-school socialising during the holidays including meeting Stringham and Templer's respective families and navigating complex hierarchies of relative wealth and social class, as well as some more primal stuff involving the first stirrings of feelings, you know, Down There. Nick decides, for instance, that he is in love with Templer's sister Jean based on no more then a couple of mumbly teenage conversations.

Nick also encounters another schoolmate, Widmerpool, during a holiday in France. Previously something of a figure of fun and target for derision, Nick starts to see Widmerpool in a new light after he brokers a truce between two of the other residents of the house they are staying in, a Swede and a Norwegian who have been refusing to speak to each other after a disagreement over a game of tennis, a girl, or possibly both.

And so, schooldays over, it is time to put away childish things and proceed to university, seemingly without having to do anything as tiresomely proletarian as pass exams or undergo any form of entrance selection process. Again, the university is coyly unnamed but is clearly Oxford. Nick is re-acquainted with Stringham, and also encounters Sillery, one of the dons, who seems to have a limited interest in his students' academic progress but instead focuses on establishing political connections, easing his various protégés into influential positions in politics and business. These protégés include Stringham, who, with some behind-the scenes string-pulling (no pun intended) from Sillery, lands a plum (if somewhat ill-defined) job with a prominent industrialist. Templer, who has skipped going to university, pops in to visit with a couple of his London friends, and Nick's sense that his school friendships are gradually unravelling is reinforced when Templer drives a tightly-packed car (Templer, his mates, Nick, Stringham and a couple of random girls they've picked up) off the road and into a ditch, thankfully without seriously injuring anyone. 

Nick, recognising that a fresh start is required, heads off into London to meet his Uncle Giles, the slightly murky black sheep of the family. Will Uncle Giles be able to help him redirect his life?

Well, the answer to that specific question is a shrug and a "dunno", because the book ends at this point. That will be no surprise to anyone vaguely-acquainted with 20th-century literature and Powell's work in particular, as A Question Of Upbringing is the first book of the twelve-volume sequence A Dance To The Music Of Time. In other words if you want to find out what happens next, check out book two (which is called A Buyer's Market). I'm not conclusively ruling out ever doing this, but if you view A Question Of Upbringing as a stand-alone novel in its own right you'd have to say that not a lot of note actually happens. And fair enough, it's not that sort of novel, and if you want explosions, freaky sex and zombie Hitler that stuff is all available elsewhere. It's dryly witty, and there are some sly observations about wealth and class here, and just a sense that our narrator is slightly less rich and posh than some of his schoolmates, although these are just inferences since we never get to meet any of his family. For all that, there is also the sense that Nick is somewhat blind to his own privilege, drifting from Eton to Oxford, and probably subsequently into a nice job somewhere, nice and comfortably without having to sweat too much or wonder where his next meal is coming from. Whether he is deliberately written that way or whether these blind spots are just inadvertent reflections of Powell's own blind spots (he too went to Eton and Oxford) I couldn't say, at least without reading another eleven novels to find out. Beyond this it would be hard to say we actually know anything much about Nick at the end of the book, something noted by John Crace in his Digested Reads column. 

A bit like The Alexandria Quartet, the A Dance To The Music Of Time sequence, whose publication dates range from 1951 (this book) to 1975, has faded a bit in critical regard over the years, though it was still well-regarded enough in 1997 for a four-part (i.e. three whole novels crammed into each episode) TV adaptation to be made. While the general theme here of oblivious posh people going about their daily lives, borne safely aloft on a cushion of unexamined privilege, raises my lefty hackles a bit, it is very readable and pretty short at a whisker over 200 pages. I'd always thought of it as a sort of upper-class English condensed (or perhaps summarised) version of Proust, and maybe it is, although I am ill-qualified to comment, since although I own a copy of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (in an English translation, obviously) I have never read any of it. Maybe this year? Well, maybe. Having now, after just over 19 years of this blog, cracked part one of A Dance To The Music Of Time, will I now plough on and finish all twelve? Check back in 228 years to find out!