the last book I read

The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. 

Subtitled Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, this is a book primarily concerned with *checks notes* sex, and the evolution of human nature. "Sex" is a slightly problematic term here for several reasons, not least because it refers to two separate but related things - the binary separation of the human species into male and female (I can sense you shifting nervously in your chair, but we'll come back to that later), but also the physical act of love, coitus, jiggy jiggy. etc. 

The whole business of combining two sets of chromosomal material - zipping each one in half, sticking them together again, ensuring all the bits line up - is quite an overhead, though, and that's before you get into the overhead of taking a lady out to dinner, maybe a movie, some dimmed lights, scented candles etc., to get her in the mood for little bit of chromosomal combining, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Compare this with just splitting yourself in half and ending up with two genetically identical clones (as some species have done perfectly happily for a gajillion years) - possibly slightly painful, but quick, efficient and no-one has to argue over who picks up the taxi fare or has to sleep in the wet patch. 

I'm being slightly flippant here, obviously, but the point is that it really is a major overhead in energy terms and would clearly be selected against by evolution were it not for the benefit that it must confer. But what is that benefit? Essentially the first half(ish) of the book addresses that question, and the second half(again, ish) explores some of the sometimes counter-intuitive ramifications of choosing to do things this way. Some of the first half of the book covers similar themes to those covered (in more detail) in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, specifically all the stuff about the gene being the principal unit of selection and reproduction, and therefore responsible for some behaviour that would otherwise seem inexplicable, like altruism in favour of close relatives (who carry a similar set of genetic material). In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I read somewhere between a third and a half of The Selfish Gene, probably 20+ years ago, but never finished it, not because it wasn't an interesting read but more than likely because some shiny and tempting volume of fiction hove into view and distracted me. 

The main benefit of sexual reproduction, it seems, in large and complex organisms in particular, is that the regular mixing of genetic material into new and unique patterns provides a means of flushing out undesirable genetic mutations, and also staying one step ahead of the massed ranks of crazed and homicidal micro-organisms (viruses, parasites, etc.) that are out to invade our bodies, kill us and then feast on our rancid liquefied remains. It's more difficult for them to get into your house, steal your stuff and shit on the carpet if you keep changing the locks.

Hoary old phrases like "survival of the fittest" encourage the assumption that it's the organisms with the "best" genetic material that get first dibs on reproducing and populating future generations, and there is a very basic sense in which this is true - those with really disastrous genetic mutations are highly likely to die before they can reproduce. But this disregards sexual selection, i.e. how organisms decide which organisms of the opposite sex to mate and reproduce with. To put it another way, how would they know who had the "best" genetic material without running extensive genetic tests as part of the courtship process? One answer is for the candidates (and it's almost always the males, it being the females doing the selecting for the obvious reason that they carry the young) to display some physical adornment that advertises the good health and vigour necessary to produce, say, absurdly long or decorative tail feathers, but also the strength to overcome the physical handicap imposed by such things and survive to robust adulthood. Indeed, the more absurd and cumbersome the decoration, the more impressive the individual's achievement in thriving despite it, and so a sort of escalating feedback loop is created. 

So in fact the organisms that do best at passing their genes on to the next generation are those who are the most successful at attracting mates, not necessarily those with the "best" genetic material, assuming that term even means anything.

That's all very well for peacocks, you'll be saying, but I don't have a massive multi-coloured fan sticking out of my arse to attract the ladies. What have I got going for me? Well, in addition to all the obvious stuff like being fairly tall, reasonably symmetrical features, relative youth, solvency, good prospects, there is a theory that part of the reason humans evolved these gargantuan brains is as a result of sexual selection. This is in conflict with the usual explanations around needing the big brains for things like tool use and most obviously language and its uses for constructing large-scale societies, situation comedies and complex hire purchase agreements. What if the large brain and its function as a generator of charm, wit and poetry was itself a sort of virtual peacock's tail? That would explain its being larger than even dealing with language would seem to require, a sort of runaway feedback mechanism limited only by the female body's capacity to give birth to large-headed babies without needing impractically large hips, and as a consequence impractically expensive trousers.

I'm not sure I completely buy that theory, but it's an interesting idea. The difficulty with all this is avoiding the charge of concocting plausible-sounding just-so stories that fit the data without hard evidence that these supposed mechanisms actually exist. To pre-empt this charge Ridley does offer a blizzard of citations in the 30-page bibliography at the end, although I have no way of distinguishing between Professor George Eminent of the University of Science and A. Dimwit from the Academy of Dubious Claims, or at least not without doing a lot of legwork I'm not prepared to do.

It's interesting while reading a science-y book like this written by someone with an obvious regard for data and evidence and try to tease out their own biases - in Ridley's case the clearest one is a general dislike for anyone who leans (in his view) too far towards the nurture side of the nature/nurture argument, in particular the pioneers of social science such as Émile Durkheim, but also some more regular science-y people like BF Skinner and the behaviourists. I'm fairly sympathetic to Ridley's views here but it is interesting to note that in the 30-odd years since The Red Queen's publication in 1993 the "everything is culture" school of thought seems to have become more prevalent.

I couldn't say whether this is a view inherently linked to what you might (inaccurately) call the "everything is genetics" viewpoint, but the other thing you occasionally get a whiff of when Ridley strays into more general non-sciencey musings about society is a slightly unpalatable right-leaning free-market libertarianism. The relevance of this is to Ridley's ill-fated tenure as chairman of Northern Rock during its time as an early victim (in late 2007) of what's become known as the 2008 financial crisis. It's highly debatable how much Ridley's own role as non-executive chairman allowed him to dictate policy but it's certainly true that statements like this (from this 2007 George Monbiot article in the Guardian and therefore second-hand, so I have to trust that it's genuine) have a bum-clenchingly Ayn Rand-ish sound to them:

Bureaucracy, he argued, is "a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world ... governments do not run countries, they parasitise them".

The elephant in the room that I have failed to acknowledge thus far is that the unstated premise of the whole book - i.e. that biological sex exists, is a highly-robust genetic mechanism and results in two sub-categories of Homo sapiens which have identifiably different physical bodies and attributes, some of which extend to behaviour - is now controversial in some quarters. This is a problem not solved by substituting the word "gender" for the word "sex", although Ridley does this to solve the different problem of confusion between the two different meanings of the word "sex" as mentioned above.

There was a time not that long ago when doing this (i.e. conflating "sex" and "gender") would have got you scolded/abused/cancelled, the idea being that "gender" was more about your self-presentation and even self-identification, in some individuals (i.e. transgender people) differing from your biological sex. More recently there has been a move towards the scolding/abuse/cancellation stuff switching to being directed at those who insist that they're different things (and maybe even that "gender" is just a slightly woolly and artificial sub-category of the more general group of things which could be called "what you're like"), and towards the ideologically pure position being that they're the same thing. 

Expressing any sort of a dissenting opinion about this stuff is liable to have you dismissed as basically Hitler, or, worse, JK Rowling, but for what it's worth I can see, from a strictly ideological/political standpoint, why people might do this (i.e. insist that they're the same thing and both equally social constructs - "everything is culture" again, I guess), since acknowledging that biological sex exists opens the way for the establishment of female-only categories in, for example, sports, and female-only spaces elsewhere, e.g. rape crisis centres. I do think denial of clearly demonstrable reality is unhelpful and unlikely to be sustainable, though.

Anyway, back to the book - not much more to say except it was an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, and of course significant in the context of this blog in that it represents my first blog foray into the non-fiction genre. I'm pretty happy with the decision, overall, though I'm not going to continue with the practice of trailing in advance what genre my next book is from; you'll have to wait and see. 

miami twice

A couple of follow-ups (follows-up, if you must) to the Lost Man's River review: firstly I alluded to it having taken quite a long time to read - just to apply some exactitude there I have that number as 63 days. The last book to take longer than that was Auto Da Fe back in 2022; looking back further there was....oh, heck, let's do a table:

Book	Pages	Completion date	Days	Pg/Day
Lost Man's River	539	19th April 2026	63	8.56
Auto Da Fe	428	13th June 2022	66	6.48
The Pope's Rhinoceros	753	6th September 2021	61	12.34
A Man In Full	742	2nd August 2018	56	13.25
The Human Stain	361	23rd December 2017	60	6.02
The Conservationist	323	22nd July 2017	67	4.82
Zeno's Conscience	437	4th December 2016	78	5.60
Midnight's Children	463	16th September 2014	91	5.09
Infinite Jest	1079	10th February 2013	96	11.24
The Name Of The Rose	502	28th June 2012	53	9.47
Sunset Song	258	12th August 2008	66	3.91

That's applying 50 days as an arbitrary cut-off threshold. Infinite Jest remains the leader here, though to be fair it is also the longest book on this entire list. Sunset Song is the shortest book to clock up over 50 days to read and as a result nabs the award for slowest read at a glacial 3.91 pages per day. I can't remember what I would have been doing to distract me from reading in summer 2008 but it was pre-kids so it was probably some carefree frolicking and spending of ample disposable income or some nonsense of that sort.

Secondly, you'll recall that Killing Mister Watson included a couple of maps at various scales showing the area where the action takes place; Lost Man's River contains what at first glance appears to be the same set of maps, but closer examination reveals some differences, reflecting the decades-later setting of the second book (later map on the right below).

Obvious differences include the Tamiami Trail linking Tampa and Miami (you see what they did there) and indeed the inclusion of Miami itself, which is labelled Lemon City on the earlier map. As far as I can gather the settlement of Miami did exist pre-1910 (the date of the Watson killing); the settlement of Lemon City is now a neighbourhood of Miami known as Little Haiti. The settlements of Homestead and Naples are also on the later map only. You might also notice that the settlement of Punta Rassa at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River has acquired a second "s" between books; I'm unclear whether this was just a mistake on the earlier map or whether it reflects some real shift in spelling over the decades.

the last book I read

Lost Man's River by Peter Matthiessen.

We're back in Florida. Not this guy, but instead the south-easternmost state of the USA, dangling pendulously into the north-eastern reaches of the Gulf of Mexico like, well, a dangly pendulous thing. In particular we're back in the south-western corner of the state where the events of Killing Mister Watson took place, events that included, as you'll know if you were paying attention at the time or are capable of reading the book's title, the killing of Edgar "EJ" Watson by a ragged posse of his fellow dwellers in the loose gaggle of islands at the outflow where most of the water in the Everglades - which is really just a sixty-mile-wide, shallow, slow-moving river - meets the sea and where there is a complex and ever-changing landscape. 

But why did they shoot him? Well, part of the answer to that question is: go and read the first book. But many questions remain, and by the time the narrative here starts at least four decades have passed - it's never completely clear what date this all happens, but the best bet seems to be late 1940s or early 1950s. Many people have found their subsequent lives defined and haunted by the events of 1910 (i.e. the murder of EJ Watson), especially those who were there on the day and who may or may not have fired some of the shots that took Watson down, but also Watson's own children, of whom there were at least ten by at least five different women.

Our principal business here is with Lucius Watson, youngest child of Watson's second wife Jane, and around twenty-one when Watson was killed. He's been various things over the years, from a fisherman to a respected academic historian, and is now back in the area stirring up unwelcome memories. This is partly for research purposes for a book he's preparing about the Watson murder (in the hope of rehabilitating his father's murderous reputation), partly because it's come to his attention that the National Parks organisation that now oversees the Everglades is considering knocking down The Watson Place, his father's old house at Chatham Bend in the islands, and partly because his long-lost older brother Rob Watson has reappeared after many years, somewhat the worse for many years of drink and gnawing guilt about his association with some of his father's murkier deeds. 

Hardly surprisingly, most of the natives of the area who have any knowledge about the events of 1910 are a bit cagey about coughing it up, particularly to the son of the murder victim who might have his own motives for getting a clear picture of who was at the dock and the order of who shot whom and when. And the order is obviously important here, since the early shots will have been the ones that did the damage; anyone who shot later would have basically been pumping lead into a corpse - somewhat less culpable, morally speaking. Moreover, Lucius' evident desire to include a visit to The Watson Place in his trip makes certain individuals nervous, the house now being used for other slightly shady purposes that those individuals don't want him, still less the Park authorities or the police, knowing about.

Lucius is a cautious and circumspect type, but the same cannot be said of his brother Rob, and after some unwise shooting his mouth off and some actual shooting of firearms (thankfully not resulting in any casualties) he is kidnapped by some of the locals now making use of The Watson Place for nefarious purposes, including, slightly awkwardly, the father of Lucius' research assistant and very occasional lover Sally Brown. 

Lucius, Sally, local man Andy House (whose father may or may not have been one of EJ Watson's executioners) and Sally's intermittently estranged husband Whidden Harden take a boat out into the Ten Thousand Islands archipelago to visit The Watson Place and try to rescue Rob. Lucius has come into possession of a letter from Rob which appears to be a confession of his involvement, at his father's instigation, in the murders of Wally and Bet Tucker in 1901, and an explanation for the restless and tormented life he has led since, and appears also to have been written as a final confession in the expectation of his own imminent death.

Lucius and his party head for the Watson Place, where there is a showdown with some of the smugglers who have been using it and the place eventually burns down with Rob inside, partly at his own instigation. Returning to the mainland, Lucius learns that his old friend Henry Short, one of the few black men in the area in the early twentieth century, is in hospital and not expected to survive. Their brief deathbed conversation seems to resolve the vexed question of who shot first (it would have been Watson had his damp shotgun not misfired, and then Henry shot him) and answer most of Lucius' questions. His plan of restoring his father's reputation having been scuppered by Rob's letter and its depiction of cold-blooded murder, Lucius abandons his project. 

This is the second book in the Watson trilogy - the third, Bone By Bone, offers the events of the first book from Watson's own perspective in a Rashomon/Alexandria Quartet/Gilead style. The trilogy was later reworked into a single book, Shadow Country, which won the National Book Award in 2008 (Lost Man's River was originally published in 1997). Much of the eventual trimming that was required to whittle the original trilogy down to single-book length apparently came from Lost Man's River, and it's easy to see why - there's a lot of talking here with various extended family members, including reminiscences of who was cousin to whom and the like (much of which prompts keeping a finger in the family tree section at the front of the book just to keep track of who's who) that doesn't have any direct bearing on the murder of EJ Watson and, while interesting in its own right, doesn't really drive the narrative along with any urgency. 

There is a sense, though, in which that's not really what the book (and the trilogy as a whole) is about; instead it's about the place in which the story happens, its remoteness and desolation and the sense of everything being temporary at best and subject to being rearranged or obliterated by one good cathartic hurricane. Although Matthiessen primarily thought of himself as a novelist, he published many books about travel and nature and those concerns evidently bled through into his fiction writing. 

So while it has much to commend it it's probably not as good as the first book, and it's quite slow and therefore probably not for everyone. It's a blunt tool as it ignores outside influences that may have affected my reading opportunities, but the fact that it's taken me two months almost to the day to read it tells its own story. 

aber bit of this

All right, let's do a quick whisky post. Wife and one child are away and I've got a quiet evening at home so what better way to cap it off than by using writing a blog post as an excuse for a whopping slug of distilled spirit.

This particular distilled spirit is from the Aber Falls distillery, right here in God's own country, Wales, albeit about as far from my home city of Newport as you can get without being in an entirely different country, or perhaps the sea. The distillery is in Abergwyngregyn and takes its name from a waterfall a couple of miles to the north, in the foothills of the Carneddau range on the edge of Eryri/Snowdonia. I personally have no strong feelings, incidentally, about whether you say Eryri or Snowdonia, just as I have no strong feelings about whether you say Brecon Beacons or Bannau Brycheiniog, and I guarantee no-one else does either despite the many column inches of manufactroversy that have been expended on the matter. 

You'll recall, of course, our visit to the Penderyn distillery in the foothills of the Brecon Beacons (or Bannau Brycheiniog; again, take your pick) back in 2010 following my purchase and consumption of a bottle the previous year. The Penderyn distillery was founded in 2000; the Aber Falls distillery is quite a bit newer with production starting in 2018. 

Anyway, I acquired this bottle as part of a gratifying haul of whisky at Christmas and my birthday - I've got the extended family pretty well trained now and it's almost exclusively books and whisky, the occasional rogue pair of socks aside.

It's not dissimilar to the Penderyn, actually; pale, evidently quite young, slightly more sweet and mellow and biscuity and slightly less pungently magic marker-y. It's been a while since I've drunk any Penderyn but I think if my memory of that is accurate then I like this one better. For all my tedious enthusiasm for all things Welsh, though, if you were to ask me whether this competes with some of the Scotch whiskies in a similar price bracket like, say, the entry-level Highland Park or Johnnie Walker Black Label, I would have to say: no, not really. 

genre bending

There's something that's been bothering me for a while, and I think it's probably time to give it an airing here. There's no point tiptoeing round the subject, so I'm just going to come straight out and make a statement here: I identify as transgenre.

Well, that's fine, you'll be saying, and we're obviously all keen to be as supportive as we can to you on your life journey, but can you be clear what you mean? Well, OK. I read quite a lot of fiction, as documented on this blog, and I like to think my novel-reading habits span quite a bit of a range in terms of subject matter, from Proper Literary Classics to science fiction, fantasy, utter filth both ancient and modern, historical fiction, murder mysteries both home-grown and foreign, big books, small books and all points in between. But all fiction, right? Now I'm not (clearly) one of those people who will feign some sort of incomprehension at wanting to read something someone just made up, nor do I make the claim that you can't learn useful things about the real world from reading fiction, as that would be nonsense - and I mean actual concrete stuff like history, not the more nebulous stuff like insight into the human condition and interpersonal relationships, which I take as read, if you'll pardon the pun. 

But nonetheless it is all squarely within the fiction genre, although occasionally straining against the fuzzy boundaries, and I wouldn't want you to think that that's all I read, nor that I am closeted in my little novel-reading garret oblivious to the goings-on out in the real world. My concern - and a bit of self-knowledge is key here, as it is in all parts of life - is that my slightly nerdish interest in the statistical minutiae of my reading habits might induce me to reduce the frequency of reading stuff that I don't document here, out of a (perhaps subconscious) desire not to skew the stats.

So I have come to the momentous decision to live as my true self in all its glorious messy rainbow diversity and include some non-fiction books in the list of stuff that gets documented here. I am absolutely not going to make any sort of commitment to quantity or frequency, and it will very likely be a lowish percentage of the overall numbers, but what I want is the freedom to widen the list of available choices for my next book and basically just do what the hell I want when I want; again, a reasonable aspiration for life as long as what you want isn't hollowing out people's heads and putting them in your fridge. 

Just for the record, this absolutely isn't a choice I've made because I'm running out of fiction choices in my unread pile; that remains, and always will given my book-acquisition habits, a healthy size giving me more than enough choice. I am very uncomfortable with the fashionable concept of tsundoku, because as used by a lot of people the term seems to imply the practice of buying lots of books and never reading them, rather than having a healthy and varied to-be-read collection that you haven't read yet offering a mouth-watering diversity of choice. Personally I find the selection of the next book to read from the available list to be one of the most delicious aspects of the whole process, something I might not find if I instituted a strict regime of only having, say, a maximum of five unread books on the shelves at any time. It's highly variable, but my current practice of having somewhere between 50 and 70 unread books at any one time means I never feel restricted or constrained by the range of choice on offer. 

Aaaaaanyhoo, there it is; my current book is still a regular old novel but once that's finished (and documented here, obvs) the one single commitment I will make is that the book after that will be a work of non-fiction. This is just to test-drive the process, and if I find the whole experience brings me out in hives or is otherwise unsatisfactory in some way then I'll knock it on the head. 

all right, Tiger, me old c***

Another example of the slightly counter-productive effect of prissily asterisk-ing out relatively innocuous words from news articles - here's a piece in the wake of Tiger Woods' latest car-related mishap. This one features an interview with David Duval, former world number 1 and apparently one of Woods' closer friends on tour during their brief period of serious rivalry between about 1997 and 2002. It's all fairly bland stuff, to be honest, carefully skirting round any speculation about Woods' intake of prescription (and indeed non-prescription) drugs or any future legal action, but does include this snippet:

Join me, if you will, as we mentally step through at least two words that could be in the asterisked place in the sentence, both of then considerably ruder than the "crap" that Duval presumably uttered, and respectively referring to items of female and male genital furniture. 

Duval, incidentally, now plies his golfing trade rattling around mid-leaderboard on the lucrative PGA Champions Tour, where he's making a perfectly decent living thank you very much - $86,000 from five events so far this year despite his best finish being a tie for 14th at the Hoag Classic a couple of weeks ago. Nice work if you can get it. 

me my shelf and I

I tweeted a photo of my bookshelves the other day, after doing the painstaking up-shuffling of everything to incorporate the various books I'd got for Christmas and my birthday. It occurred to me afterwards that I'd put a similar picture into a blog post a while back (that turned out to be here) and that maybe I should do another one. Part of the motivation for this is just to illustrate the slightly expanded shelfage area following our house move in mid-2022, but also for me to do an updated heat map of where the currently unread books are, as always just for my own amusement.

It is genuinely true, despite sounding slightly mental, that one of the big selling points (to me, anyway) of the house we now live in was the front reception room featuring a long straight side wall uninterrupted by windows or doors or fireplaces or other inconveniences. There was a radiator, but one of the first things we did after moving in was have that moved to a different wall. The motive here, of course, was to accommodate the long IKEA shelving unit holding all the books; I was very excited at having done some measurements and thereby determined that this wall was longer than the one in the old house by a sufficient amount to accommodate a whole extra horizontal span of shelving, with the giddying prospect of extra book-storage space. The other main advantage of this new library area was that it wasn't in our bedroom; not the best place for an area that you might want to make accessible to others. 

So anyway, compare the new shelving arrangement with the old one by looking at the pictures below (old one first). One probably obvious point to make is that while the extra fifth shelf span in each horizontal row moves the numbers around a bit, those numbers will also refer to an intersecting but non-identical set of books, since I've read quite a large number in the four years since the old photo was constructed and also acquired quite a lot of new books.

Things to note:

• one of the things the new layout has done is bring the Stephen King section occupying D3-E3 directly under the Dick Francis section in D2-E2; this accounts for the very low numbers in that section.
• two 6s and a 7 in the old picture, nothing higher than a 5 in the new one. We've flattened the curve!
• to generate even more extra room I reduced the vertical spacing of the shelves slightly when reconstructing them; as a result while the shelves still accommodate the old A- and B-format paperbacks they no longer accommodate the occasional "trade-format" outliers like House Of Leaves and The Road Home. Books of this size (and you can see there's only a handful of them) occupy the far-right end of the very top shelf above E1. It's a bit unsatisfactory but I decided it was worth it for the extra space it made available. 
• having constructed this new image I'm now loath to ever read anything from column A given the pleasing ascending sequence occupying it; in fact I might buy a couple of new books in the T-Z range just to bump up the counts by one in the two lowest sections.
• if I were to ignore that and just try and whittle the numbers down by attacking the highest-numbered sections first I would be spending a lot of time in the bottom-left corner, as that seems to be a heavy area for unread books; maybe because it's furthest from the door?

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.