Obsessed With Food? What, Me?

Tagine

Lately I've been writing a lot about food on this blog. I don't think I'm obsessed with it (though my wife may disagree!), but I do think it's an important and interesting subject. Much of the world can't get the food it wants and needs, but I find it miraculous that, given half a chance, people will still find a way to produce nutritious and tasty food from limited resources.

We in the indulgent West are spoilt for choice, of course. Yet it never fails to amaze me how we (I'm talking now of the UK) are prepared to put up with such a low gastronomic standard. Naturally, I'm generalising — but I think it's evident that good food here is a much more hit-and-miss affair than it is, say, in France, Spain or Italy. Although cuisine has improved in this country compared with 20 or 30 years ago, there's still a long way to go, and it's a fact that continental Europeans think that British food is a joke. And can you blame them?

Let's take pubs and restaurants. Pub food, despite a superficial, glossy makeover, is still irredeemably awful in the main. It's usually corporate chain fare: insipid steaks; inauthentic 'hand-cut' fries; sickly burgers; undressed, unimaginative salads; and a hundred and one other ready-prepared, microwaved nightmare items listed on laminated, greasy-fingered menus. No thanks.

Sadly, many of the old, traditional pubs are closing, which is a tragedy, as some of these did use to produce proper, homemade food: such as the White Hart in Northend, Bucks, set among the fabulous Chiltern hills and beech woods. I regularly visited this welcoming, old-fashioned, oak-beamed country inn once a fortnight when I worked as a mobile librarian. The landlord's wife used to produce a cracking steak and kidney pudding fresh out of the oven. (I've just tried to trace this pub on the internet and found it was turned into a private house long ago.) Next door to the pub lived the lonely and eccentric author Alan Hull Walton, translator of Baudelaire, who used to jump aboard the mobile library for a chat and to reserve some very weird books. He invited me into his house once, which stank of mildew and urine. But I digress...

Then you have the nationwide chain restaurants: your Nandos, your Bella Italias, your Wetherspoons, your Harvesters. The occasional one is very good (Wagamama), but most are dire (Frankie & Benny's).

You are left with the private, individually-run restaurants — some no-frills, others more up-market, fine-dining concerns — and even these vary enormously. Just read the late Michael Winner's columns in The Sunday Times to see how, even in some of London's supposedly top restaurants, the service, and the quality of the food, can't always be relied on. All you can rely on is the over-inflated price of the meal.

Of course, there are many exceptions. One exception not far from here is La Parisienne, a café-restaurant in Southwell, which specialises in French-Moroccan food. It's cramped; it's friendly; it serves brochettes and tagines and cassoulets and tartiflettes at very reasonable prices, and an incredibly drinkable house red. What more could one want? But my real point remains: eating out in Britain is an unreliable business at best, and pity the poor continental visitor who comes to these shores and takes pot luck. He or she will almost certainly be disappointed.

To set the seal on it, let's take fish and chips, our national staple. Yes, I've occasionally eaten takeaway fish and chips in places — Scotland and the East Anglian coast come to mind — where it's been a hugely memorable experience. But your average fish and chip shop in your average English town or village is just that — very average indeed, and I've stopped going to them.

Let's now compare with France, Spain, Italy. I'll give just one example. A couple of years ago I was walking the pilgrim route from Geneva to Le Puy, and slept one night in a dilapidated caravan on a camp site in Frangy, one of the less salubrious towns en route. By evening I was starving, but it was a Sunday, and there didn't seem to be many places open in the centre of town. The gap-toothed old crone of a campsite owner directed me to an industrial estate half a mile away. 'You can eat there,' she cackled. I followed a main road past rows and rows of prefab units and parked-up lorries. It didn't look very promising. Then, unexpectedly, right at the end of this edge-of-town development, a modest, unpretentious little restaurant came into view. And I ate and drank there like a king — some of the best food and wine I've ever had in my life — and was served with such exquisite friendliness, hospitality and expertise that the memory of it warms my heart still.    

Fish and chips

(All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Quinterview 21

As soon as we read the first stanza of Annette Volfing's poem Run, we knew we wanted to publish her in The Passionate Transitory: 'She had hoped for a hare. / Just one, something fast and mad / ripping the moon-damp fields, / a thumper like herself . . .' She sees the world with a delightfully fresh eye, and her poems capture moments with imagistic precision. We love her description of a garden 'creaking' under the snow in her poem Whiteout, and her image of muntjacs stepping out of a cloud in Run has visionary power. 

Annette Volfing

Spaghetti Bolognese

Spaghetti Bolognese (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

One of the endlessly fascinating things about cookery is how difficult it can be to get even the simplest dishes right. Of course, we're often in such a rush, we haven't time to check the recipe, we think we know what we're doing. And I'm sure most of you brilliant cooks and chefs out there do know what you're doing. But, speaking for myself, I must admit that if I hurry and guess and estimate, the result can sometimes be mediocre, if not plain inedible.

What I'm really saying is this: respect for those of us who can cook standard dishes brilliantly, whether it's a Sunday roast dinner, a full English breakfast, a loaf of bread, a vegetable curry, a beef casserole, a cottage pie (got this one cracked— the best recipe in the world has got to be Delia Smith's cottage pie, which includes swede as well as carrot, a surprising half-teaspoonful of cinnamon, fresh thyme and parsley, and cheese-encrusted leeks on top) or a simple poached egg.

To reinforce my point: how often have you eaten any of these dishes, whether at the house of a friend or a family member, or even at a restaurant, and thought: this is legendary! Not often, I bet. (I don't want to sound mean here. Naturally, we're very forgiving of and generous to friends and family!) To rest my case: during my mammoth South West Coast Path walk, when I stayed in B & Bs most nights, only one breakfast in ten showed all three attributes of love, care and skill.

All of which is a roundabout way of introducing a thought which came to me this afternoon. Spaghetti bolognese! Yes, an ordinary, classic dish, beloved of adults and children alike. We've probably consumed many in our time. Yet how do you get it perfect? There are hundreds of recipes out there in cookery books — and many more to be found on the internet (and the internet can be a minefield for recipes). I must have cooked this dish a million times, yet it's often just adequate rather than sensational.

There are so many variable factors. I mean, do you add white wine or red wine — or no wine at all? Do you make it with a mirepoix of onion, carrot and celery, or some other combination? Fresh tomatoes or canned tomatoes? And if canned tomatoes, what sort? How do you avoid the sauce turning bitter? And how long do you cook the sauce for? (Recipes vary from 20 minutes to 3 hours!) Which pasta do you use (spaghetti, linguine, tagliatelle or some other kind)? And do you include either chicken livers or streaky bacon with the minced beef? And is the mince top-quality butcher's steak or fatty, supermarket mince of dubious origin? And what do you use for stock? Which herbs do you favour, and are they fresh or dried? And why does Italian food always taste much better in Italy than if you try to replicate it elsewhere? (The Italian ragù alla bolognese is rather different from UK and US versions.) And how do you eat the spaghetti — with a fork, or with a fork and spoon? And is there an elegant way to eat it, or doesn't it matter? You see, there are endless variables. You could spend your life debating the ins and outs. If you hadn't anything better to do.

My challenge to you is this. Let's discover the perfect spaghetti bolognese! If you have a wonderful tried-and-tested formula, do post it in my comment box. If you want to take part, and experiment with different cookery book or internet recipes, please report on the result. If you want to join me in trying out any suggested recipes from mutual blog friends, do this too. No rush — we can do this over a period of months!

(Apologies to vegetarian readers — but any contributions, suggestions and ideas about tomato-based sauces would be very welcome.)                  

Rokia Traoré

The sensational Rokia Traoré from Mali. (She appeared on Jools Holland's Later tonight.) If you like this, try a YouTube video of her full-length concert at La Cigale, Paris, in 2004.

Beef And Orange Casserole With Wine

A rather rustically arranged plate of beef and orange casserole.

There are certain food marriages made in heaven: chicken and thyme, pork and apple, lamb and mint sauce (don't tell the French, they'll think you're mad), venison and blackberry sauce, liver and onions, duck and orange. But have you tried beef and orange? I've had a couple of beef-with-orange dishes before, but not this simple casserole, which I made today, and found richly flavoursome. (Yes, we're still cooking winter casseroles here in Solitarywalkerville, and we're not ashamed to be regressive either: the weather still feels like winter, the central heating's on, and there are hailstorms outside.) You can't beat a casserole for a warm and comforting glow. Here's what I did:

I fried a sliced onion, a large diced carrot, a diced parsnip (turnip would also be good) and 2 diced celery stalks in a mixture of olive oil and butter for 5 minutes. Half way through I added 2 chopped garlic cloves. After removing the veg from the casserole, I added more oil and browned 500 gm cubed braising/stewing steak, which I then coated in seasoned flour. Returning the veg to the casserole, I mixed in about 300 ml of beef stock and 150 ml of red wine (enough to cover) plus a good dollop of tomato purée, a bay leaf, a few drops of Tabasco sauce, a few strips of orange zest, and the juice of an orange. I put on the lid and cooked it in the oven for 2 hours at a low temperature (150 deg C/gas mark 2). I took the lid off for the last half hour after stirring (keep an eye on it in case it needs a touch more liquid). Finally I sprinkled chopped parsley over the top and served with mashed potato (creamed with with butter and horseradish sauce) and fresh greens (dwarf beans and mangetout). There should be enough for 4 servings here.

Evolution Of The English Breakfast

it seems quite crazy that —

after the Big Bang
the scatterballing of the planets
billions of years
of fire and ice and precious
little hospitality
the piling up of continents
pooling of oceans
the deep-sea hydrothermal vents
farting the first bubbles of life
the first fish gulping air
the first bird flaunting feathers
the slow plod of Galapagos
tortoises, the subtle finches
the first ape playing hopscotch —

we come to this banal
morning, epitome of eons
sum of the centuries:

a lipsticked coffee cup
a tear-stained paper towel
two shattered plates
smeared with the carnage
of scrambled eggs, the cooked flesh
of streaky bacon, a pudding
of dried blood, burnt holes
in blackened toast, and fruit
juice dripping on the floor
a kicked-in door
a ‘fuck you’ voicemail message

for God’s sake
let’s move on, evolve
if only to please Darwin

Self-Promotion

Teesta Rangeet

This month I was delighted to be asked to submit some of my poems for inclusion in Teesta Rangeet, the new poetry journal based in Sikkim, a small, north-east Indian state located in the Himalayan mountains. You can find them here in issue 4. I was also pleased to find my work referenced in that issue's excellent editorial. My poems have only rarely appeared in poetry magazines before as I can never be bothered to send them. Also I think I would get dispirited if I received a run of rejections.

As many of you know, I've been writing poetry on and off since I was young, and I thought it would be fun and a good learning experience to design and publish a book of my poems. This I did recently using Amazon's CreateSpace software. The collection, Raining Quinces, was the result. I was reasonably happy with the finished product, considering it was a first attempt, though the odd typo did slip through.

All of which brings me to thoughts about marketing and self-promotion. And I must admit I find it easier to promote the work of others rather than my own. When I launched my own online poetry magazine, The Passionate Transitory, in August 2012, I found it quite natural to solicit contributions, to approach existing writers, to enthuse about their poems, to promote their work through two Facebook pages, my blog, The Solitary Walker, and other media. (A professional background in publishing sales probably helped in this.)

However, now I have my own book to promote, I'm finding it a much more difficult task. I'm doing it, but I have to force myself. You need to have a lot of self-belief and a thick skin, for, of course, not everyone will be as positive about your book as you and your friends are. And most people are going to be plain indifferent, as we all are to the vast majority of books which are published. There are just so many, and the number increases year on year. And poetry books, well, who reads them anyway? Poetry has always been a minority interest, and always will be.

Nevertheless, I've forced myself, and I've now got a feature coming up in the local village magazine, and my book's on sale at the local post office. The local library is promoting it, and has asked me if I'd be willing to do a reading (oh my God, I've never done anything like that before!) I now need to approach the town newspaper. I've designed a poster and worded a press release. Poetry Cornwall has promised a review.

But I don't find it easy to promote myself like this, and I secretly hope this promotion of my book, this self-promotion, will come across in a gentle and modest rather than an egotistical and self-congratulatory way. It's the way I am (though I do realise there's sometimes a thin dividing line between modesty and false modesty).

It's the same when I regard the work of others. I'm always drawn to the less obvious, more retiring flowers rather than the gaudy and brash self-advertisers. It's the same too with blogs: the blogs I read and enjoy, the blogs on my sidebar, are blogs which, yes, of course, incorporate the personality, often the strong personality, of their creators, but are essentially about other things — the self is there as part and parcel of the whole world, not as a preening, solipsistic ego.

Similarly, I've always felt uncomfortable in interviews, though you'd probably never guess it from the outside. It's all that praising yourself and your achievements, all that bigging yourself up that I don't like. I mean, godammit, can't everyone see I'm a nice, useful, desirable employee/person/human being without my having to pretend I am? :-)

Kind Of Spring

When we moved into our hundred-year-old house fourteen years ago, we knew the garden would eventually need some serious reconstruction. It had been neglected by the previous owners for decades. Everything was the matter with it. Trees and bushes grew in the wrong places and were too crowded together. The pond was matted with dense vegetation and strangled with interlocking roots and pine cones. Ground elder, cleavers and other vigorous and pervasive weeds had taken over the borders and the shrubberies. The lawn was a ragged carpet of moss and dandelions. We struggled over the years to keep on top of things. With both of us working, this was a difficult task.

Cut to a year ago when at long last we were able to start hacking back the wilderness. A Corsican pine which was squeezing everything else out of the garden had to be felled. (It's sad to cut down a tree, but this variety is common in the countryside round here, and they are hardly garden trees anyway.) The leaking pond at its foot was relined and re-edged. The lawn was extended and returfed. The weeds were attacked. A new patio was laid. And much else. 

We didn't do a lot in the garden over winter, and have been reluctant to do much so far during this year's so-called spring. It's just been so cold and windy. And of course there's still a huge amount to do: potatoes to plant, beds to dig and compost, perennials to establish. There's always something to do in a garden.

It's no news to anyone that spring has come much later than normal this year. In fact it barely seems to have arrived here in the English Midlands. According to photographic and other records it's about a month behind. Plants need several days of continuous warmth as a signal for them to bud and flower with abandon. But the days have been cold with north-easterly winds, late snowfalls and little sun.

I heard a cuckoo a week ago, but the willow warblers and chiffchaffs have yet to land. The blackthorn's snow-white blossom has been on show for a week, and dandelions are popping up, but I saw the first daisies only this afternoon. There's a great crop of grape hyacinths, but the cherry tree seemed to flower then fade in a jiffy. Some of our daffodils and tulips are out, but others not...

Today I managed to cut the grass, and to plant three rhododendrons and a pieris, but was glad to scurry back indoors to coffee and the computer. (Incidentally, I was pleased to see quite a few bees flying over the lawn, which I identified as mining bees, and found some of their burrowed nests in the cropped turf.)

I'm now looking through the study window at yards of empty earth waiting to be colonised, jazzed up, beautified. No doubt it will happen in nature's own good time. Meanwhile, there are always pots of gaudy primulas to lift the spirits...              

I've read that when spring finally does arrive in all its glory, it will be short but intensely vibrant and stunningly colourful. We can but hope...

Telfour Tremble RIP

The Australian headland of Tweed Heads. Could this be the final resting place of Telfour Tremble?

On 23 February 2013, had you googled 'Telfour Tremble', you would have drawn a complete blank. On 24 February 2013, in my blog post The Strange Case Of Telfour Tremble, I rescued this little-known French poet from the depths of obscurity and unleashed him onto an unsuspecting cyber-world. Today, if you google his name, you'll find literally hundreds of citations. So I consider my work done, and can thankfully now put the great man to rest. I'm sure it won't be long before the references duplicate, and triplicate, and quadruplicate, and Tremble will take on an independent life of his own, stumbling from cyber-bar to cyber-brothel, and dropping concrete poems like so many bricks behind him. Essays will be written, theses, literary analyses, critical works. Researchers and dissertation writers will come knocking on my door for titbits of information. Biographers will solicit my opinion about the long term value of his poems and beg me for translated fragments of his verse. But I'm well prepared for this onslaught; indeed, I may even write a biography myself, with the help of his grandson, Théodore Marie Tremble, with whom I'm now in regular contact. However, for the moment, it's farewell TT, and may God rest your poetic soul...

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Concrete Poetry

Concrete poetry or shape poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as the meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has evolved to have a distinct meaning of its own, but which shares the distinction of being poetry in which the visual elements are as important as the text. WIKIPEDIA

My poem Dodo was an attempt at a concrete poem:

dodo

dodododo

dodododododo

dododododododododo

don't oh don't please don't

make me

extinct

It's shaped both like a tree (the dodo is extinct; are rain forests heading the same way?) and an arrow (arrows are ambiguous: they can point towards a solution, but they can also be weapons, instruments of extinction). Whether this comes across clearly enough to the reader, I'm not sure.

The little-known French poet Telfour Tremble also experimented with the genre, and I've translated two of his concrete poems, which I reproduce below:

I

before disappearing i wanted to tell you this

before disappearing i wanted to tell you

before disappearing i wanted to tell

before disappearing i wanted to

before disappearing i wanted

before disappearing i

before disappearing

before

II

a — r — t — i — s — l — o — n — g

and life is short

I wonder if anyone else has examples of favourite concrete poems? (Don't worry if not — I know they're difficult to set out in a Blogger comment box!)

Telfour Tremble: A Postscript

You may recall my 1st April post about the obscure French Symbolist poet, Telfour Tremble, in which I recounted my meeting with his grandson, Théodore Marie Tremble. Théodore had revealed to me his grandfather's penchant for cross-dressing — a propensity more common amongst the English than the French at the time — and his single-handed invention of 'concrete poetry' a full sixty years before the genre was generally assumed to have appeared. I thought this was the end of the affair, the rather unsatisfactory and unconsummated end to the literary, slightly obsessive, necessarily platonic love affair I'd been having for several months with this secretive and endlessly fascinating dead French poet.

However, there is a postscript. My attempts to track down a copy of his rare, final work, Une Saison en Purgatoire, had proved exhausting — and fruitless. A few days ago I was ready to call closure on the whole business, as it was taking up far too much of my spare time. Each night I'd been retiring to bed in a state of nervous debilitation, only to rise again early the next morning and begin the vain search anew. Then, just yesterday, a package arrived by courier, which I duly signed for and opened.

My heart skipped a beat when I realised that it contained a letter from Tremble's grandson, Théodore, together with a sheaf of ragged and yellowing manuscripts, diary extracts, jottings and other documents, all written in the spidery handwriting of the great poet himself. I spent the whole day reading through these precious papers — which was no easy task, since much of the script was barely decipherable. In the end, however, I managed to piece together the gist of the contents, which I'll briefly summarise as follows. (I owe this much to you, my dear and faithful readers, as I know so many of you have followed me with such patience thus far, and are awaiting with bated breath some kind of proper conclusion to this preposterous tale.)

The Cutty Sark

It seems that Tremble had eventually tired of London. His devoted mother and sister had gone back to France, and at first he missed them terribly. In an attempt to escape his loneliness, he resumed an even more dissolute lifestyle of drinking and drug taking, lurching from bar to brothel to basement den of ill repute. After being involved in a drunken brawl one evening — in which he lost several teeth, the lobe of one ear, a petticoat and a corset — he packed his meagre possessions and joined the crew of the The Cutty Sark, a famous Merchant Navy ship which was due to leave St. Katharine's Dock the very next day. He was soon installed on board as chief cook and bottle washer.

The surviving fragments of his diaries show that he spent at least a year, possibly longer, on this vessel, which plied the trade routes between Britain and the Far East. The Suez Canal had opened in 1869, so merchant ships could now reach the Indian Ocean and the all-important Strait of Malacca (the sea gateway to China and Australia) without having to sail down the entire west coast of Africa. The Cutty Sark, one of the last British tea clippers, would have carried wine, spirits and beer to China, and returned home with wool from Australia and tea from India.

The Sultan's Palace, Zanzibar

There's evidence of several love affairs while Tremble was on the high seas. One in particular stands out: a romantic and passionate liaison with an English sailor who went by the name of Jack 'Pretty Boy' Wiggins. There is, unfortunately, no direct poetic evidence of their affair, but three verses of a poem written by Tremble do exist from the period, which I've translated and reproduced below:

Let go the copper trencher of the sun.
Let go the silver saucer of the moon.
Let go the vast indifference of stars.
If you don't let go now, you will do soon.

Let go the mountain's icy flutes and spires.
Let go the valley's quiet, gentle charms:
Its village hall, its church, its country inn —
They never welcomed you with open arms.

Let go the sailors and their salty ways,
Warm nights under the stars and tropic days.
Sailing to Goa, Java, Zanzibar,
Exotic climes became my Shangri-La.

I interpret this as meaning that Tremble had achieved some sort of peace at last; the mood of melancholy resignation is very marked. You feel that if he had died there on that clipper — somewhere between Suez and the Maluku Islands — he would have died happy. And die there he very probably did. For there is no real proof that he lies in an unmarked grave in a Parisian suburban cemetery — as has always been hitherto thought. The likelihood is that he succumbed to scurvy or dysentery while on board ship and was given a sea burial. Or perhaps his skeleton lies, untroubled and content, on some Australian headland or on one of the Indonesian Spice Islands. Who knows?

Indonesian spices

Finally, I came across further examples of Tremble's revolutionary 'concrete poetry' within my unexpected haul of his lost papers and documents, and hope to write more on this soon...

Quinterview 20

The Passionate Transitory's twentieth quinterview is with the poet Tess Kincaid.

I'm not sure who first used "thought bomb" to describe poetry, but I like it. Poetry is a necessary and beautiful literary conduit for channeling thoughts and ideas, condensing them, and exploding them in the minds of readers. Tess Kincaid

Tess Kincaid

Quinterview 19

The Passionate Transitory's nineteenth quinterview is with Duncan Gillies MacLaurin, master of the sonnet. For Duncan, poems and songs are inextricably related, and he enjoys reading and singing his own work in front of an audience. These rhymed and rhythmical poem-songs show great structural skill, and are clever, knowing, lyrical and funny.

Duncan Gillies MacLaurin

Roast Vegetables With Couscous

I'm tending to eat less meat and more fish or vegetable-based dishes these days. I'm also a big fan of Mediterranean food. This dish, which I made yesterday, combines both these preferences. Quite honestly, it's one of the most flavoursome vegetarian meals you could ever hope to eat. Absolutely delicious! Here's the recipe.

Roast a tray of Mediterranean-type vegetables in the oven for 20-30 minutes at a very high temperature (230-240 degrees C). Beforehand coat the vegetables with plenty of extra virgin olive oil, and mix in a generous amount of crushed garlic, freshly-torn basil leaves and seasoning.

A good combination of vegetables might be: aubergine, courgette, red and yellow pepper, cherry tomato, onion. I used the vegetables I already had, so there was no aubergine or yellow pepper, but I used green pepper instead. For onions I used both red onions and shallots. (Incidentally, it's a good idea to squeeze out some of the bitter liquid from the aubergines and courgettes first. To do this, dice them, salt them, then place in a colander for half an hour with a weighted plate on top.)

While the vegetables are roasting (ah, the aroma!) pour 500 ml of boiling vegetable stock over 275 gm of couscous, season, stir and leave to one side. The liquid will soon be absorbed and the couscous will soften. Then prepare a salad dressing by whisking together 5 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, 1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper, 1 tablespoon of ground cumin, 2 tablespoons of tomato purée, and the juice of 2 limes (I used lemon).

Ok, now build the salad! (I love to make this in one of those wooden salad bowls and serve with a wooden fork and spoon.) Put the couscous at the bottom, fluffed up with a fork. Then spoon in a layer of roasted vegetables, to which you've added some pitted and chopped black olives and a tablespoon of capers. On top of the veg sprinkle cubes of firm goat's cheese. Finally top with mixed salad leaves and drizzle part of the dressing over them (serve the rest of the dressing in a jug on the side). Eat warm or cold. You really don't miss at all a fish or meat component to this dish. It's a meal in itself, and perfectly satisfying on its own.   

Remains Of Elmet

Broad track on the open moor.

Encouraged by one or two others (thanks George and Ruth!) I've decided to try to put together a collection of short travel essays on my experience of walking the Camino. I intend using some of my former blog posts as a starting point, then reshaping and extending them. I'll also be adding completely new pieces. Leafing through some of my old writings today, I came across this account of a walk I did in Yorkshire's Calder Valley. I hadn't seen it for ages, so I thought I'd give it another airing.  

Remains Of Elmet

The Calder Valley in the South Pennines forms part of the old Celtic kingdom of Elmet. It's the birthplace of Ted Hughes, and the place to which he returned constantly throughout his life. Read anything from his collection, Remains Of Elmet, and you are immediately transported to this land of sodden moorlands and ancient trackways, bubbling curlews and blackened gritstone; a harsh, brooding landscape littered with deserted cotton mills and abandoned hill farms.

Heptonstall hunkers down on the high buttress above Hebden Bridge. It was here I began my walk one cold and misty February morning. But not before exploring Heptonstall itself — an authentic example of a hand-weaving village from the pre-industrial era. Much like a mini-Haworth, in fact, but without the tourists and the commercial tat. Terraced rows of houses, faced with blackened stone blocks, slope down to a churchyard wrapped in peaceful, Gothic gloom and paved with gravestones laid end-to-end like a mosaic. There are two churches almost side-by-side: the Victorian New Parish Church of St Thomas the Apostle, and the atmospheric ruin of the earlier Church of St Thomas à Becket — built around 1260, destroyed by storm in 1847 and condemned by the itinerant preacher, John Wesley, as 'the ugliest church I know'. However, even in its derelict state, it's still a lot prettier than the octagonal Methodist Chapel (designed by Wesley in 1764) which lies marooned in the architectural warp and weft of numerous gritstone weavers' cottages. Before leaving, I sought out the grave (second row in the new churchyard) of the neurasthenic poetic genius, Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. The headstone, inscribed by her husband, Ted Hughes, reads:

  Even Amidst Fierce Flames The Golden Lotus Can Be Planted.

Sylvia Plath's grave.

Pondering this quotation from the great, allegorical Chinese folk novel, Monkey, written in the sixteenth century by Wu Ch'Eng-en, and delighting in the wonderful strangeness of its setting among the scores of conventional Christian epitaphs, I turned my back on the village and scampered down a steep, rocky bridleway (the Calderdale Way) to a stone packhorse bridge spanning Hebden Water. On the eastern bank an entertaining riverside path followed a frothy, rust-coloured and dipper-haunted stream, which was enlivened by weirs now and then, and pacified by mill ponds. The next landmark was Gibson Mill. This was a cotton mill — built by Abraham Gibson in 1800 — which employed mainly women and children. Despite the installation of a steam engine, boiler and chimney in the 1860s, manufacturing ceased in the 1890s due to unreliable water flow and competition from much larger mills in the Calder Valley. After the mill, a short woodland stretch rose to Hardcastle Crags, a beauty spot popular with Victorian excursionists.

Gibson Mill near Hardcastle Crags.

Emerging from the trees, a remote lane wound over a culvert where a beck tumbled down into Rowshaw Clough. Just before Walshaw Farm the call of birds suddenly filled the silence. Finches twittered and swooped, and a party of fieldfares flew off chacking madly, their grey rumps prominent. From the moorland above a solitary grouse croaked loudly. Close by the farm I made a right-angled turn up a muddy walled track and headed through tussocky intake fields towards higher ground. I contoured round Shackleton Knoll alongside an enclosing stone wall until a gate led on to the moor itself. This was the high point of the walk in every sense. The sun was now out, illuminating high mooorland and intake pastures, and burning off the tendrils of mist which still lingered in the valley of Crimsworth Dean beyond. I rested a while on this soggy bump between the two valleys, and enjoyed the sun, the view, the silvery gleam of Gorple Lower Reservoir to the west. There are many places higher, many places more remote, many places more obviously spiritual; but for me, today, this was a contemplative viewpoint of space and freedom.

And so I went down again into the Vale, as go down we must, and met the first walkers of the day, who were struggling up the hill I now descended. The route back led through Crimsworth Dean and past a stand of tall Scots Pine trees, which clung to the steep slopes above the beck. I remembered how Lord Savile had given this woodland to the National Trust in 1951; and how, a few years later, he and the local people had scuppered plans to flood this valley and turn it into a reservoir. Eventually, after taking a minor road by Spring Wood, then following a lovely riverine path strewn with moss-covered stumps and stones, I reached another packhorse bridge and, finally, the delightfully scruffy backstreets of Hebden Bridge. These were lined with factories and new developments — and also with tiny, terraced houses, dark inside, but on the outside hung with wind chimes and festooned with plant pots placed on old, rescued, treadle-driven spinning machines. This textile town has a claustrophobic, gritty charm: rough, unmodernised pubs, sixties-style signage, no McDonalds — thankfully — in sight. But the relentless economic decline over the years has been oddly reversed by a kind of latter-day New Age flowering. The shops are chock-full of candles, tarot decks and occult books; and artistically printed cards in newsagents' windows advertise courses in reiki, shiatsu and meditation.

Reluctantly tearing myself away from this hippie settlement, with its stone setts and its Little Theatre, its shabby Rochdale Canal (where Ted Hughes used to net loach as a boy) and its grey wagtails bobbing on the now non-poisonous River Calder, I returned by bus up the steep hill to Heptonstall in the mid-afternoon sun, and looked down through the bus window at Hebden Bridge in the valley below. I saw rows and rows of terraced houses striating the hillside, home-factories (three, four, five-storied and many-windowed for maximum light) in which women used to turn wool into the yarn and cloth that was conveyed originally by packhorse, then later by canal boat, to the merchants in the piece halls of Halifax. At least I could see the place — a hundred years ago it would have been hidden by a vast, toxic pall of smoke generated by the cotton mills of the Industrial Revolution.

Five hours had passed and I was sitting once more on a wooden bench in Heptonstall's old churchyard and listening to the chattering jackdaws, thinking about literary and industrial heritage, and of what Ted Hughes had written about this very spot:

A great bird landed here.

Its song drew men out of rock,
Living men out of bog and heather.

Its song put a light in the valleys

And harness on the long moors.

Its song brought a crystal from space
And set it in men's heads.

Then the bird died.

Its giant bones
Blackened and became a mystery.

The crystal in men's heads
Blackened and fell to pieces.

The valleys went out.
The moorland broke loose.

Heptonstall Old Church from Remains Of Elmet by Ted Hughes.

Heptonstall Old Church.

(All images sourced from Wikimedia Commons)

The Lindisfarne Gospels

The Lindisfarne Gospels, one of our greatest cultural artefacts, goes on show in Durham, one of our finest cities, on 1st July this year. (As a student I did much of my essay research in Palace Green Library!)

http://www.lindisfarnegospels.com/lindisfarne-gospels-durham-exhibition

(Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Fougasse

Bacon and onion fougasse straight out of the oven... rather inelegant, and slightly undercooked in the middle (should have sliced bigger holes in it)... never mind... it's still delicious, and homemade, and that's the important thing..! 

Dreaming My Animal Selves

The Passionate Transitory reviews Dreaming My Animal Selves, the new poetry collection from Hélène Cardona. (Published by Salmon Poetry.)

The Continuing Saga Of Telfour Tremble

Telfour Tremble

You may remember my excitement recently when I discovered a rare volume of the poems of obscure French Symbolist poet, Telfour Tremble. And perhaps you are wondering if there is not even more to this unbelievable story. Well, you would be right: there is more, much more. But I won't leave you in suspense, or even in suspenders. Let me take you back to 1st March, a week after my post on the shadowy M. Tremble stirred the imaginary waves of this great cyber-ocean of ours.

I was relaxing at home that evening — as you do, with a cup of wine at your elbow, a copy of War And Peace on your knee and a Downton Abbey replay on the telly — when my mobile's familiar ringtone of John Adams's Shaker Loops gently tickled my tympanic membrane. I gave a start — for, indeed, I'd been half asleep — and pressed the green button. A voice at the other end announced, in an accent reminiscent of Inspector Clouseau's in the Pink Panther films, 'Good evening, Monsieur Robert. My name is Théodore Marie Tremble, grandson of Telfour Tremble, the great if obscure nineteenth-century French poet!'

Imagine my state of shocked surprise, quickly followed by a rush of rapturous and euphoric delight! To cut a long story short, we arranged to meet up in the bar of the Ibis hotel in London's Euston Road the very next weekend. And to cut an even longer story short, Théodore furnished me with many hitherto-unknown facts about his grandfather's short but colourful life, facts which had never surfaced before in the annals of French literary history.

It seems that a few years before his untimely death on 1st April 1900, Tremble had decided on a whim to cross the Channel and visit England for a few months, following in the footsteps of his legendary compatriot and fellow Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud, who'd been to London (Camden Town to be exact) with Paul Verlaine in 1872, and had later returned there, dragging his doting mother and sister with him ('drag' being the operative word, as you shall see in a moment). But here the similarity between Rimbaud and Tremble ends. Rimbaud had been ill-tempered certainly, and on a short fuse, and prone to drinking bouts and violent arguments — but, as far as we know, he'd always been dressed, albeit cheaply, albeit shabbily, as a man. It now emerges, my dear and curious readers, that Tremble arrived on these shores garbed in women's clothes. Yes, the secret is out: our poet's most clandestine desire, undocumented till now, was to be a transvestite, like some Grayson Perry of the French Romantic era.

Chalk Farm Underground Station

Of course, the urge for cross-dressing is hardly avant-garde; indeed, it stretches far back into the dim and distant reaches of human history. The uncontrollable desire for women to wear the pants and for men to wear the dresses is no longer earth-shattering news. But what is sensational is that no one seems to have exposed Tremble at the time, and that he seems to have carried off with great panache this boldly successful deception, this unexpected reversal of habillement, for the whole period of his five-month sojourn in a stinking, rat-infested basement flat in London's Chalk Farm, just a stone's throw from Chalk Farm Underground Station.

The other amazing fact about Tremble revealed to me by his grandson was that during this unconventional and free-spirited period he started to write poetry which was revolutionary in both style and subject — poems more like the 'concrete poetry' originated sixty years later by Augusto and Haroldo de Campos in Brazil. Théodore gave me copies of these poems, written in a shaky, alcoholic hand, and they are now amongst my most treasured literary possessions. In an inspired moment the other day I took the liberty of translating one of these extraordinary poetic curiosities, and I present it to you below:

Sometimes I feel like the Queen of Sheba

and sometimes like Julius Caesar

and am confused whether to rule the celestial blue

like the Sun God Apollo or to conspire

with Phoebe Artemis and Selene

in the Moon's eternal soft mysterious embrace

There is talk, too, of another volume of verse Tremble published just before he died, a book so rare that only one or two copies are known to exist; but who owns them is shrouded in mystery. Some say Danny La Rue used to possess a copy, but where it went after Danny's own death in 2009 is anyone's guess. A further rumour circulating amongst the glitterati is that Boy George may have one, but so far he's denied it. There's no doubt that these books would fetch an enormous price at auction. Apparently the title is Une Saison en Purgatoire and Tremble uses the nom de plume of Marie Antoinette Bellerose. How I set about tracking down one of these books, books which have become the Holy Grail of French literature, is, however, a story for another day . . .

In Memoriam Telfour Tremble (born 1st April 1869, died 1st April 1900)