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 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-air-uh 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!

waiter, there's some wiener in my schnitzel

One thing that struck me while reading Staying On was the whole business of the Smalleys living in a little annexe off a bigger hotel complex and mostly subsisting off the food provided by the hotel, sometimes ferried across to them on trays by hotel staff. This set off an odd echo in my mind of our time living in Bandung, specifically the brief period shortly after our arrival in late 1978 when we stayed in one of the chalets attached to what was colloquially known by everyone in the expatriate community as the Bumi Club (pronounced to rhyme with "roomy"; stop sniggering at the back there), but is apparently more properly called Bumi Sangkuriang. It's a distinctive building in some sort of Dutch colonial style (lots of swoopy roof gables) built in the 1950s, and still there in a slightly modified form today. I say "slightly modified form" on the basis of having compared a photo taken in the outdoor recreation area at the rear of the main buildings in 1978 to one from the TripAdvisor page linked above: as you can see some of the buildings in the background have been expanded somewhat and the sloping grassy banks removed. For reference you can compare the original roof-lines and observe that the bit right in the middle of the newer picture with the distinctive notch at the back is the one in the older picture, with new sections built on top of and in front of it.

I'm reasonably sure that's me in the background in the top picture, standing on the pool steps (my two sisters are in the foreground), probably with some trepidation since as I recall the pool designers had made the bold decision to have the steps lead straight into the deep end. My (possibly flawed) recollection also tells me that the rightmost section of building in the background housed the room where (having evidently exhausted the entertainment options available elsewhere) I watched The Hindenburg twice in an afternoon.

Anyway, the thing that actually twanged my memory synapses was the food thing; I can't remember exactly what the arrangements were at the Bumi Club, including whether we had any facilities for preparing our own, but I do vividly remember some of the stuff we used to get from the club's own kitchens and - presumably - have delivered over to us. Or maybe we went to some communal dining area to eat? I can't remember. Anyway, things that stick in the mind (and probably stuck to the ribs at the time) were the thick crepe-style pancakes that always seemed to be cold (did they start out hot? I have no idea) and smeared with some sort of Nutella-esque chocolate spread, and the two varieties of schnitzel, which were badged as Wiener schnitzel and paprika schnitzel but could have been pretty much anything. You might, for instance, ask yourself what sort of meat it was likely to have been. Pork? Unlikely in a largely Muslim country, I'd have thought. Veal? Maybe. Chicken? Dog? Human flesh? Who knows.

I note that some other less specific Bandung reminiscences were prompted by my reading of Eight Months On Ghazzah Street back in 2010. More can be found here, here, and here. 

spacelebrity doggylikey of the day

Just a quick one today - I have no idea what sequence of clicks sent me down the YouTube rabbit-hole that led to some detailed second-by-second analysis of the Columbia space shuttle re-entry and break-up, but I assume these are things that have been pushed a bit more than usual by the algorithm given the imminence (February 1st) of the 23rd anniversary of the disaster, and indeed the even nearer imminence of the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster (January 28th). Anyway, it struck me, and hear me out here, that the nose of the shuttle, from certain angles, is slightly reminiscent of Brian Griffin from Family Guy. 

the last book I read

Staying On by Paul Scott.

It's the early 1970s, pretty nearly a full quarter of a century after Indian independence and the end of colonial rule. Lots of British people involved in the old system of colonial rule have packed up and gone home, there being no need for them to stick around among a population less inclined to consent to being subjugated and abused. I mean, where's the fun in that? Honestly, if you can't even find a decent punkah wallah to keep you cool while you're sipping a pink gin then you may as well be in Swindon.

Some have stayed, though, and will have a variety of reasons for doing so - maybe they have business interests in India, maybe they've married into Indian society, maybe they just like it there. For some it's more about having been in India for so long that they wouldn't feel comfortable in British society any more, and maybe because the cost of living over there is higher, plus the cost of getting there in the first place, plus perhaps a bit of laziness about uprooting oneself from a reasonably comfortable life and sailing off into the unknown. 

This latter category of people definitely includes Tusker and Lucy Smalley, eking out a just-about-comfortable existence, mainly facilitated by Tusker's military pension, living in the lodge attached to a fairly dilapidated old hotel in the small-ish town of Pankot. The hotel is run by the comically rapacious (money, food, sex, you name it) Mrs. Bhoolabhoy and her somewhat downtrodden husband; Mr. Bhoolabhoy maintains cordial relations with the Smalleys and occasionally enjoys a few drinks with Tusker, but Mrs. Bhoolabhoy regards them generally as an inconvenience and a potential problem should she wish to sell the hotel, something she has considered doing as profits have diminished since the building of a newer, swankier hotel just down the road.

Obviously during the Raj the social structure was nice and clear: the British are in charge and the natives do their bidding or expect a damn good thrashing. But 25 years later it's considerably less clear - some residual deference remains, and some residual expectation of deference remains in people like the Smalleys, both in their early seventies and fairly set in their ways. But for younger Indians in particular there's less of a sense that they should do as they're told by a bunch of elderly foreigners: after all, why should they?

The Smalleys' financial position is in a state of constant precariousness, not helped by Tusker's past unwise business dealings, some gambling problems and ongoing fondness for a drink or two. As befits people born in the early years of the twentieth century it's been Tusker who has held the financial reins with Lucy - objectively the more sensible and responsible of the pair - having precious little to do with it, and in a position of knowing very little about the details, including what her position would be if Tusker were to die, something that's been on her mind since he had a mild heart attack a while back. 

The Smalleys (mainly Lucy) maintain some correspondence with Britain, mainly people they knew from India who've now returned, or in some cases their children, and via this route Lucy learns that a vague acquaintance of an acquaintance, Mr. Turner, is visiting India and wants to pop in to say hello. This prompts a frenzy of excitement about what stuff they can get him to bring from home - with some it'd be Marmite, for Lucy it's a particular brand of blue rinse hair dye - and how they're going to make him welcome when he arrives, resources for lavish banqueting and the like being a bit thin. 

Meanwhile Mrs. Bhoolabhoy has seen the writing on the wall regarding the future of the hotel and has decided to sell up. This means that someone is going to have to write a letter to the Smalleys telling them that their tenure of their little lodge at preferential rates is at an end, and they'll have to find somewhere else to live, and that someone is Mr. Bhoolabhoy. And it turns out that it is the receipt and reading of this letter which is the thing that finally finishes Tusker off, his body being found later that day after suffering a massive heart attack, his hand still clutching the letter.

Paul Scott is of course most famous for the Raj Quartet, which is in turn best known for its 1984 TV adaptation, The Jewel In The Crown. Staying On is a sort of footnote to this series of much chunkier books, and the Smalleys feature as minor characters in the later novels in that series. I didn't know this when I bought my second-hand copy a few years ago and I can tell you that you have no particular need to plough through the quartet to appreciate this, unless you want to, of course, in which case have at it. Staying On, despite being written later, was actually adapted for TV first, in 1980, and the whole thing appears to be available on YouTube. It stars Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, more famous from Brief Encounter, as the Smalleys.

None of the great sweep of history that I imagine (possibly wrongly) features in the Raj Quartet here, just two fairly unexceptional people eking out the last few years of their lives (the last few days, in Tusker's case). No suggestion that Tusker was a particularly good soldier, despite eventually rising to the rank of colonel, nor a particularly effective businessman, nor even a particularly attentive husband, though he clearly does love Lucy in his own gruff and inarticulate way. There's an odd mix of comedy and pathos here with the two sometimes clashing with each other a bit, but you do feel a pang of sympathy for the Smalleys, desperately hanging on to the only life they've ever known while the country reinvents itself under their feet. I do agree with this Guardian review that Mrs. Bhoolabhoy is something of a grotesque caricature, but overall I enjoyed it; the 1977 Booker panel evidently felt the same way. Scott was unable to attend the presentation as he was already ill with the cancer that was to kill him a year later; he was also apparently a chronic alcoholic which probably didn't do much for his general health.

Previous Booker Prize winners on this list are: G. (1972), The Siege Of Krishnapur (1973), The Conservationist (1974), Midnight's Children (1981), Hotel Du Lac (1984), The Remains Of The Day (1989), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), The God Of Small Things (1997), The Sea (2005), The Gathering (2007), Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up The Bodies (2012). The Siege Of Krishnapur, Midnight's Children and The God Of Small Things also feature in the list of books set primarily in India, a list that I would have expected to also include a few others off this blog, but the only one I can think of is A New Dominion; novels that tangentially feature India would include The Marriage Plot and Around The World In Eighty Days. 

rolled turkey has got me on the run

I'm pretty sure that the last thing the world needs in January, or really at any time, is some more tips on cooking Christmas dinner, but I had a go at messing a bit with the standard formula for Christmas 2025 and I was pretty pleased with the way it turned out, so I'm going to share it here. As always this is as much for my own amusement and future reference as anything else; the links I'm going to include will give a far more comprehensive description of the method than I'm going to bother with.

Anyway, the principle is this: a standard turkey of whatever size is an awkward and unwieldy thing to cook all in one piece in a standard oven and pretty much always ends up being overcooked, not least because different parts of the bird are different thicknesses and cook at different rates. So while tradition says you must have a giant single golden steaming monolith of meat to present to your jolly apple-cheeked multi-generational crowd at Christmas lunch, a more pragmatic alternative viewpoint says: fuck tradition, I would prefer to eat something that's actually pleasant to consume, quicker to cook, and leaves some oven space free for the host of other stuff that I need to put in it.

So the principle behind the deconstruction is: the legs are awkward because the drumsticks in particular are thin and tend to overcook, in addition they're very bony and sinewy and a lot of people can't be arsed with that. Also the giant cavity and the creature's back aren't really doing any good except taking up valuable oven space and slowing the cooking down. So what we do is: take the legs and wings off, debone them and roll them up into giant sausages (you'll need some string, ideally culinary/butcher's string (rather than, say, gardening twine or cable ties) - I kept it pretty simple but you can add some stuffing or other filling as you do this). The deboning is a fiddly job, particularly in the drumstick area as those partially ossified ankle tendons are a pain to detach, but it's worth the effort. Then detach the crown from all the unwanted remaining bones and skin and connective tissue and get rid of them, or make stock or something with them if you must. That leaves you with a crown roast and two chunky leg/wing sausages.

I also wet-brined the crown for about 24 hours before cooking it. This is another advantage of the deconstruction: a trimmed crown plus brining liquid will fit in a large-ish bowl which will go in the fridge; a whole turkey will require a large bucket or a bathtub and obviously won't go in the fridge, though the shed or somewhere similarly cool will probably do for 24 hours, unless you're living in Australia and it's the middle of summer.

The other thing you should invest in is a meat thermometer. I have a simple analogue one, nothing fancy, and it is invaluable for this sort of thing. What you will find is an hour and a half is ample to cook all the meat - mine was gratifyingly succulent and delicious but even then could probably have come out of the oven ten minutes or so earlier. Opinions and guidance vary wildly regarding what's the optimum temperature at which to hoick the turkey out of the oven and let it rest, but I reckon 65-70 Celsius is about right, probably the low end of that range, if you dare, for maximum juiciness. 

The other thing about turkey is that whatever you do on Christmas Day unless you've calculated the amounts absolutely perfectly you're going to have some leftovers, and those can be a dishearteningly dry and joyless experience, with the resulting sandwiches needing a surprisingly large amount of wine to wash them down. In this particular case, though, I'm happy to report that the leftovers were themselves delightful and a positively pleasant prospect for consumption on Boxing Day and afterwards. Eventually we got bored and just chopped the remainder up and put it in a pie; that was pretty good too.