Wokkel

So to keep yourself from going completely mental from jet lag after a 30 hour flight from Sydney to Amsterdam, I recommend getting a kitten. Not the teeny tiny ones that can't function like a proper cat yet and need constant care, but one that is a little bit older, say about 3.5 months. This is what we did, and it worked pretty well for us.
We've had our 2 older cats (Darwin and Vrutsel) for a while now, but felt that Vrutsel was getting pretty lonely during the long days that we are at work. Because Vrutsel herself is still pretty young, we thought getting a kitten might help her because she would have company during the day, and maybe even someone to play with. The parents of a friend of mine had a nest of kittens, and we picked a black-and-white (Frisian cow style) one. It turned out to be a tomcat; we would have preferred a female but once chosen there was no going back. We decided to call him Wokkel, after the Wokkel crisps (by Lay's, it appears that these are only sold in the Netherlands). His (half) brother with very similar pattering is called Tictac and his sister is called Sisi, so we decided to stick with the food theme. My friends older sister would look after our cat and her own while we were in Australia, and we picked him up the day after our return.
Wokkel turned out to have grown quite a lot, and looks more like he is 6 months old rather than 3.5. His ears are gigantic compared to the rest of his head, and his paws are also relatively big, so he will probably keep on growing until he is a kitty force to be reckoned with. It is a very friendly cat, who likes to cuddle and purr and be amongst people (and other cats). He is still very playful, but he is also quite cheeky and inquisitive, which has led him to some tight corners. Vrutsel is very scared of him, as she is of almost everything, and yowls and hisses when he comes near. Wokkel is less than impressed, but they are getting along better and better each day. Darwin on the other hand, has accepted him outright, and they will share a lap if everyone sits quietly. However, Darwin is already pretty old, and can have his grumpy moments (which leads to tail swishing, which leads to Wokkel jumping Darwin's tail, which leads to more grumpiness). But all in all, Wokkel appears to be very happy, the other cats are mostly also content, and we were happy to have the distraction on our jet lag mangled brains.
So now we are five, with Wokkel not quite fulfilling the companionship role we had in mind for him, but still having taken up his place in our household smoothly. If only he could stop pushing all his toys under the couch...

Back from Down Under

After 30 days (4 of which were spent in air planes and on airports), we're back from Australia! And it's amazingly cold and dark and dreary here! Why did we ever leave the relaxed, sunny warmth of Down Under?
But before I get too sad about being home again; the trip was great, I won't describe every move we made in detail, because I've got a travel journal that runs 23 pages and I don't want to spend this day typing that over, but in broad lines we did the following:

Sydney (opera house, Harbour bridge, Taronga zoo, random jetlaggy wandering in an unfamiliar city)
Blue Mountains (National Pass hiking trail)
Abercrombie caves
Canberra (Parliament House and the War memorial on Remembrance day, very impressive ceremony)

Glenrowan (Ned Kelly's last stand)
Melbourne (little penguins at St Kilda's pier!)
Tower Hill reserve
Great Ocean Road (Twelve Apostles and several other geological rarities)
Adelaide (random wandering)
Wilpena Pound (peak climb)
Coober Pedy (slept in an 'underground' hostel)
Kings Canyon (Kings Canyon Rim walk)
Uluru (aka Ayers Rock; sunset viewing, sunrise viewing, base walk)
Kata Tjuka (aka the Olgas; very hot walk)
Alice Springs
Ghan train to Katherine
Katherine Gorge
Kakadu National Park (Nourlangie and Ubirr rock art sites)
Darwin (more random wandering)
Cairns (trip to Cape Tribulation, snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef)

Which was all very nice, except for the Great Ocean Road which was mostly very cold and dreary. Also, I'm not really a city person, so we mostly spend our time there in the botanical gardens, which were very nice and well kept. But we did see the main stuff in each city, of course, because when are you ever going to be there again?
We saw lots and lots of wild animals, including kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, a dingo, little penguins, New Zealand fur seals, a possum, several emu and tons of other birds, all of which I have ticked off in the Australian bird book I bought. I have to add the numbers up, but it's got to be over 100 species, including both species of kookaburra, lots of water birds in Kakadu NP, and several parrots, some of which actually ate out of my hands. No cassowary, sadly. We also saw lots of reptiles, including lizards, dragons, and geckos, the best of which was the 1 meter long perentie that literally crossed our path in Kings Canyon.

Some observations on Australia and Australians:
- most people live in the cities but the countryside is the best place to be
- Australians are very polite and helpful, if you are the same
- Australians are all sports crazy, with people running and cycling up every steep incline in sight, even in 38 degrees C
- Australians are a lot more like the British than they would care to admit
- Aboriginal people have some of the best art and stories in the world
- most distances are put in time ('a 15 minute return walk') rather than distance, except for road signs
- people in Coober Pedy will call it 'humid' when there is 5% humidity
- people in Darwin will call it 'a fine day' when there is 85% humidity
- in the outback you can literally drive 50 km without seeing another car
- while camping the most annoying thing are the biting ants, and the grasshoppers falling into your food
- nothing has tried to sting us, bite us, or kill us, but we used some common sense
- there are clean, spacious public toilets everywhere, even if it's a town with only 600 people
- it is one of the most relaxed, warm and beautiful places I have ever been, and I can't wait to go back

We are sorting through the pictures now, and trying to get everything back into shape while still seriously jetlaggy and mostly very cold. The cats are unbelievably happy that we're back, and our parents probably too, although they didn't show it as much. We've still got 3 days to adapt and land, and then our travels will be truly over, until the next trip.

Blogging time-out

So it's been a very hectic couple of weeks here, with lots of not-so-regular stuff happening, from celebrating my 29th birthday to swimming with dolphins, and in the less positive scale of things the death of my grandmother and a major train disruption that left me stranded at 11 at night. All things I would normally dedicate a blog post to, but as it has been a bit of a weird time, this hasn't really happened. Apart from blogging, I've been missing out on some of my other hobbies (Postcrossing, piano) too, so it's not that I don't want to write, it's a time-thing.
Rather than fixing this in the near future, I will be hopping on a plane to Australia to spend 4 weeks 'down under', so don't expect a quick revival. I will of course put a report of my travels here, but this may take a while. Unless I find a proper wifi spot and decide to write something while there, which would be the ultimate comeback from my time-out. But barring that highly improbable situation, I will be back in December!

Choux try-out

The Great British Bake Off has finished again, leaving us with a huge gap to fill on Wednesday evening. But also, many baking ideas.
One thing I've been wanting to make for a very long time is choux pastry. In the earlier Bake Off seasons, this was presented as one of the most difficult things to make, apart from filo pastry. Now, in the later seasons, all the contestants can just whip up a choux no questions asked, although they do explain that it is a tricky thing to get right.
I've investigated the stuff, and discovered that it is in fact twice cooked dough; first you cook it when you combine butter and flour with boiling water, and then you cook it again in the oven. What I'd like to know is who ever thought of this first, and why anyone in their right mind would want to tip flour into boiling water and then beat in eggs without having them scramble. Because the resulting dough isn't really all that special, it's actually pretty tasteless, and has to be filled with some kind of cream to be appetising.

Anyway, the ingredients list is very short:

125 ml water
50 g butter
65 g flour
2 eggs (beaten)

Preheat the oven to 200 C.
Put the water and butter in a pan and heat on a gentle heat until the butter has melted. Then bring the water to a boil, take off the heat, and quickly dump in all the flour at once. Start stirring frantically until the mixture forms a ball-like dough and comes away from the sides.
(I never thought this was actually going to happen on the first try, and that I was going to waste a lot of water, butter and flour in the process, but lo and behold, it worked!)

Ball-like choux pastry sans eggs.

Now add the egg mixture a little at a time, beating thoroughly between until all the egg is absorbed. At this point, I realised I might have used a bigger pan, because the mixture kept sloshing over the side due to my vigorous beating.
When all the egg is absorbed you have nice shiny mixture, which you can pipe in whatever shape you want onto a baking parchment. I made some eclair shapes and some choux bun shapes.
Then it goes in the oven for 10 minutes at 200 C, and after that you turn the heat down to 170 and bake for another 30 minutes or until they are golden brown all around. I've found wildly varying baking times for these, so this is what I did, but I've also read recipes where they tell you to turn the heat up instead of down after the first 10 minutes.

As soon as they are done, take them out of the oven and pierce them to let the steam out. I was too late doing this with some of them, which means the steam will turn back into water and soak your choux buns, making them sloppy and inedible.

Leave to cool completely, split open, and fill with your favourite cream (I used whipped cream). You can drizzle chocolate over the top if you haven't forgotten to buy dark chocolate (which I did, and I felt too lazy to go back to the store).

Eclairs filled with whipped cream (no chocolate).

Choux pastry in itself is pretty tasteless, as I already mentioned, but these were quite okay when filled with whipped cream. I am going to make them again pretty soon, letting them cook a bit longer and letting out the steam earlier, so they don't turn sloppy and we can actually eat all of them. But for a first attempt, it went a lot better than I'd ever expected!

KitchenAid love

Wow, I actually haven't written anything in the whole of September. How did that go by so fast?
Anyway, now that it's October, and autumn is about to start and my birthday is creeping up (which is less and less of a good thing as years go by) I am hoping there will be more time to actually write stuff here. Because it's not that stuff hasn't been happening. A lot of stuff has been happening, it just that I was simply experiencing the stuff, and not able to write about it. And I will now stop using the word 'stuff'.

One of the things that happened which I can write about because I can be relatively brief is that I bought a KitchenAid. An Artisan KitchenAid, to be exact, in a deep red colour. And if you don't know what a KitchenAid is, go look up pictures now.
I've been wanting to have a KitchenAid for as long as I knew they existed, but first there was the sharing-a-kitchen-with-loads-of-other-(thieving)-people issue, then there was the no-money problem, and then there was the our-kitchen-is-smaller-than-most-people's-walk-in-closet thing. The last hasn't technically been resolved, but when brand-new KitchenAids were being sold for 2/3rds of the normal price, I couldn't resist. So I bought one (with some mental support from my boyfriend) and then waited patiently for 3 weeks for it to arrive.
But oh, how pretty it is! How shiny and strong and robust. Also, how heavy (due to the smallness of the kitchen, I have to move the thing in place whenever I want to use it, and KitchenAids clearly don't expect to be put away in dusty cupboards). But it works like a charm. It came with a big (4.6 l) steel bowl and 3 types of mixers, and I'm already planning to buy loads of accessories once my bank account has recovered. I used it to make brownies for last weekend's family day, and all agreed that they were very tasty brownies indeed.
So apart from the storage issue, I am very happy that my KitchenAid dream finally came true. Now we'll just have to buy another kitchen to fit it in.

Apple cake

Our apples have been steadily growing bigger and redder, and after another few attempts we have conclusively decided that they are not fit for normal 'eat an apple' consumption, as they are far too sour and tough and somehow just plain yuck. But that doesn't mean we can't put them in other stuff! I've made two apple crumbles already, and yesterday I made an apple cake. This is a recipe my grandmother used to make when my mom was little, but it's not one of those teary-eyed family heirlooms because frankly, it's too simple to put into words.

Ingredients
200 g flour
200 g sugar
200 g butter (softened)
2 eggs
(baking powder)
apples
sultanas/raisins (soaked if you're using dried ones)
cinnamon

Pre-heat your oven to 180 C.
Simply mix together the flour, sugar and butter and add the eggs when the mixture becomes too tough to handle. I added some baking powder because my flour was pretty old, but you can leave that out. Mix thoroughly for about 3-5 minutes and then put into a rectangular baking tin (which you've lined with baking parchment etc).
Cut the apples into little slices and put these on top of the cake mixture, slightly overlapping (in Dutch we call this 'roof tile style'). I used three small apples and my baking tin was filled, but you really just have to try how many will fit. If you have some left over you can always sneak them in between some others.
Dry off your raisins and sprinkle these over. Also sprinkle over some extra sugar and cinnamon.
Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, until it's dry in the middle.

There is cake mixture underneath, hard to see at this point.

Now the idea is that the cake will spread around and over the apples, partly covering them, and leaving nice 'apple trails' on top. This usually works, but this time, probably because I used baking powder, the cake went a little crazy and gobbled up most of the apples:

Hello cake!

So usually it looks like the bit on the top left, but hey, who cares what it looks like anyway?
It tasted great, moist in the middle and nice and crunchy on the sides. I wanted to add some lemon zest in the mixture but it's a good thing I forgot as these apples are really too sour to be adding some more. But if you're using quite sweet apples, lemon zest may be a nice addition.

There are still lots of apples left on the tree, so I may be trying out some new apple recipes soon, maybe even a tarte tartin if I'm feeling very adventurous!

Piano revival

I've been meaning to start playing the piano again (I've had lessons for four years and played a while after that, but it stopped as soon as I went to university) for more than a year now, ever since we moved into this big(ger) house. Somehow, I never really got round to it, until a couple of months ago I heard someone play the Amelie song Comptine d'un Autre Ete in public, and I decided I really wanted to play that song. Which meant getting a piano, and learning to play again.
I went for a digital piano*, as you can plug in headphones and play all hours of the day without disturbing other people with your awful hammering. Also, it never goes out of tune, which is nice. After a short online investigation into the really beautiful but very expensive big brands, I eventually bought a Casio CDP-100, because apparently it's the cheapest piano that still has a reasonably okay sound and touch sensitivity. I bought one second-hand via the Internet, and it has been sitting in one of our upstairs rooms for a week now, because I didn't have my sheet music and after 10 years cannot play any song from scratch apart from 'Twinkle twinkle little star'  and that gets boring after a while.
But last Wednesday my parents came to visit and brought with them a towering stack of piano books; who knew I had so many? Easy songs and classical songs and jazzy songs and very recent pop music songs all combined into my history of piano lessons. I used to love all the country tunes and melodic musical wanderings before I turned to more recent and less classical stuff. Looking back, I think this was the sign that I wasn't really interested in the whole piano thing anymore, but right now I can't wait to get back into all those classic classical pieces.
So today was the first time I tried some of the old songs again. And it went surprisingly well! I could play each and every song of my first 'real' music book without problem, and even in the proper time. Now these are songs where you don't really have to move your hands about, and all the notes have the correct finger position above them, but still, it surprised me. Then I tried some more difficult things, a menuet by Mozart that I'd played at a recital, and that one went quite okay too, a bit slower and hesitant, but still pretty nice. With some of the moves, it was like my fingers still remembered the things they used to do, and just went along in a stream of memory movements.
After a while, my arms and especially my fingers became pretty tired (strangely enough the thumbs seem to go first, probably because you don't really move them when you're typing, which is the only similar movement they've been getting for 10 years), so I decided to call it a day. But still, a whole hour of reviving old songs and playing pretty decently, I'm positively surprised at how well I am actually still playing. And as they say, practise makes perfect, and I have a whole weekend of practising ahead of me!

* I've been getting some questions as to why I call it a 'digital piano' and not a 'keyboard':  because the two are completely different things. A digital piano is basically a piano that produces sound digitally, meaning you can stick in some headphones and not bother anyone with your music. But it does have 88 keys, which are pressure sensitive and weighed, so it takes the same effort and effect as playing a real piano. Keyboards have fewer keys, which usually aren't pressure sensitive and take very little effort to press down. It's a bit like the difference between a type writer and a computer key board. And as I plan to buy a real piano sometime in the future, I felt it was better to buy a proper (and more expensive) digital piano than they keyboard substitute.

Red velvet cake (a leaner approach)

I've been fascinated by red velvet cake ever since I had a slice at an American exchange student's party a couple of years ago. Both the strange redness and the extreme sweetness make it an interesting, and also a very American, cake. Only an American would make a cake that screams 'look at me! I',m red!' as loudly as this one, and only an American could suffer the intense sweetness of all that sugar without wincing. However, I had completely forgotten about red velvet cakes until the Great British Bake-off started again, and someone made a red velvet Swiss role.
So I looked up several recipes, most of which on American websites, and I was completely bowled over by the amount of calories you are supposed to put in. There was one recipe that required about a kilo of butter, a kilo of icing sugar, and 8 eggs. These are really not normal amounts for cake making (in my book, at least).
So I went for a more British approach, and picked Lorraine's three tiered recipe, selecting the middle tier (23 cm) as the cake to make. The ingredients were still vastly beyond any limit, so I halved them. For the buttercream I did something completely different, because I refuse to put 600 g of icing sugar in with 300 g of butter, that makes the whole thing just too sweet, especially with fondant icing added on top. So I changed the ratios there a bit. Also, I used a recipe that requires food colouring instead of boiled beets, as I've had enough trouble with beet stains in my life.

Ingredients:
175 g butter
175 g sugar
3 eggs
150 g flour
25 g cocoa powder
baking powder
25 ml food colouring (red, obviously)
500 g rollable fondant icing (white)

buttercream:
100 g butter (softened)
60 g icing sugar
100 g cream cheese

Preheat your oven to 180 C.
Grease the tin and line the bottom with baking paper.
Beat the sugar and butter together until fluffy. Beat in the eggs one by one, then add the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and a pinch of salt. Add the food colouring (I did this little by little, because the whole thing turns an outraging shade of red which then dies down as you mix the thing). Put in the cake tin and bake for about 40-50 minutes (I forgot to change the baking time to the lesser amount of ingredients, so I ended up with a slightly burned and very dry cake).
When it's done take out of the oven and leave to cool completely.

Red batter

For the buttercream, mix together the butter and icing sugar until fluffy. Add the cream cheese and mix again.

When your cake is completely cool, cut in halve and sandwich the halves together again using the butter cream. Cover the entire outside with the remaining butter cream (this will go better if your cake is not dry, with little red crumbs sticking everywhere). If you have any indentations, use the butter cream to fill them for a more even end result.

Buttercream-covered crumbs

Spread some icing sugar over your work surface and roll out the fondant icing until it is very thin and large enough to cover the whole cake. Transfer onto the cake (this is surprisingly easy) and press down gently so that the icing sticks to the butter cream. You can decorate the cake using anything you want, but I thought this was enough of an exercise for one day.

Slightly burned brown-redness

So, the end result was pretty dry and a bit over cooked, but still quite edible. You can taste the cocoa coming through, and the butter cream was not too sweet. The fondant icing makes for a nice look, but it doesn't really add anything to the taste. All in all, halving the ingredients still made for a pretty decent cake, I can't imagine how rich it would have been with the full amount of ingredients. Still, a very nice cake to have made, and I foresee some red velvet cupcakes in my future, as I still have quite a lot of food colouring left over. And this is one of those 'I'll never be able to do that myself!' cakes that I can now cross of my list.

10,000 pageviews (and counting!)

When I posted my Literary Splendour post, the page view count was at 9,990. When I looked this morning, it was at 10,030! A blogging milestone!
Youtube or Facebook probably get about 10,000 page views a second, so it's nothing big in Internet terms, but it feels like a (unconscious, to be honest) personal goal has been reached.
To give you some interesting details: most views are from the Netherlands, but there are quite a lot from the US and the UK, and lots of single views from countries around the world. Most traffic comes in via google (google.co.uk, google.co.nz and google.ie being the highest contributors, funnily enough), but some comes in via Postcrossing and some people have taken the trouble to memorise the URL and type that in directly.
The most popular post by far is still Painting with clingfilm, to which I've never actually given a follow-up post because I haven't actually been painting with clingfilm for about two years.
So there we are. 10,032 page views and counting. Onwards and upwards to the next 10,000.

Literary splendour

So I've read three incredible books lately (with some less incredible books in between, which are the ones you tend to forget about pretty quickly), and today it hit me that all these books were written by women (Eleanor Catton, Kate Atkinson, and Elizabeth Gilbert, to be exact). Three completely different women, from different parts of the world, but three women nonetheless. Which is pretty amazing, because a) there are still fewer women then men writing 'serious' novels and b) those novels don't seem to make it to the Netherlands all that often. To which I could add c) most of my favourite authors thus far have always been men.
So what is different here? Firstly, they're all pretty big books, 500+ pages, meaning that we really get into the story. The other book written by a woman I've read in the past weeks, The Love Affairs of Nathanial P, was about 200 pages, and that feels like typical chick lit size. When you get above 500 pages, we get into proper psychological depth and character building. Also, all novels had an elaborate setting, either in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, that needed a lot of exposition and explanation. Also, all of them have something that is 'different' about them in structure or outward appearance. The Luminaries has its astrological connection and decreasing chapter length. Life after Life similarly has some very short chapters, and combined with the repetition found through the reincarnation theme the structure is pretty extraordinary. The Signature of All Things has the most conventional structure - chronological and with chapters of about equal length - but contains botanical images and a distinct font that still set it apart.
But what really makes these novels so great are the characters. The Luminaries has more protagonists than you can count on two hands, but all of them have a proper history and depth. Also, most of the characters are male, but they are not caricatures of men as you find in so many novels written by women (Nathanial P being a case in point). In Life after Life the protagonist is a girl / young women whom the reader gets more acquainted with as her life progresses through its various cycles. Apart from gaining a deeper understanding of the early twentieth century and general European history, you get to know her and those around here better and better with every reincarnation. In The Signature of All Things the protagonist is also a woman, who leads a pretty tranquil and confined life, but still manages to fill page after page with her experiences and revelations. In short: all these characters take their lives in their own hands, make proper decisions, and then live with them. They are all strong, observant, and still full of conflict, making them very real people.
I don't know if any of this has anything to do with the fact that these novels were written by women. I've read the same type of character in novels by Yates or Ian McEwan, so I don't really think so. Also, these women are from three very distinct corners of the globe (Canada/New Zealand, the eastern US and the UK), writing in three very different literary traditions. So maybe it's a pure coincidence that these three wonderful novels came to me so close together. Or maybe it's a sign of the times, of many more psychologically developed character rich historical novels to come. Either way, I've had a very rewarding literary summer.

Garden update (3)

I could simply add photos to the previous post (when my computer was refusing to cooperate) but so much has been happening in the garden that I think it deserves a new post.

To begin with, have a look at these marvellous strawberries. A second crop is growing on the plants as we speak, but I'm afraid they won't nearly be as big and tasty as these ones were...

June strawberries

We removed some of the apples from the apple tree to lighten its load, and then I turned these apples (tiny, very very sour, but ripe enough (the seeds were brown, which is the main point, I was told)) into an apple crumble.

Miniature apples

Also, another pepper has been developing, and now we have two:

Peppers!

And one thing I forgot to mention last time are the beans (green beans, to be exact) which have staid very low but still produced some very nice beans. But those have already been eaten, I'm afraid. As have most of the leeks, before they sprouted flowers
We've also eaten the first of our potatoes, which has produced really a lot of offspring, some of which almost too big to fit my hand. We can eat 2-3 times from this first one, and we put 5 in the ground, so I'm thinking that leaving your potatoes to sprout roots and then put them in the ground because you don't know what else to do with them is working out pretty fine. Their 'alpha' potatoes, which normally grow on Malta, but with the warm and dry weather we've been having also seem to thrive here.

Our courgettes and pumpkins haven't started flowering yet, but they're producing lots of leafs that haven't been eaten by the slugs, so I'm hopeful they will do something yet.

And finally, this weekend, our trial aubergine also went to work, and produced this:

Baby aubergine

Yes, that is a baby aubergine. It's about the size of my thumb as we speak, but we're hoping to make it into a proper sized purple egg.
I never would have guessed that a garden this small, with so little attention given to it, would produce this much food! Just imagine what we will do when we get a proper plot on our hands. One can only dream...

Fact meets fiction

As per the recommendation of one of my colleagues, to whom I mentioned my love of The Luminaries, I am now reading The Signature of All Things. This is by Elizabeth Gilbert, who also wrote Eat Pray Love, unleashing the stream of 'going to find myself in another country' literature that we're still being flooded by. The Signature of All Things, however, is surprisingly good. It is quite similar to The Luminaries in style (although without the astrological references) and setting, with some strong female characters and lots of historical details. Somehow, there is this whole new market for nineteenth century and early twentieth century stories, as also shown by the many new BBC tv series coming out. Which is good for me, because I like both the period and most of the stories.
Apart from this novel, I'm also reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, because someone gave me a book on the Higgs particle and this confused me so much that I realised I hadn't actually read Bryson's more general audience work, so I decided to read that one first. And it's great, of course; hilarious but informative, colourful but factual. I hope I will be able to talk in more detail to my chemistry and physics colleagues after finishing this work.
Now the interesting thing was that in one single day, I read about the same person in both works. This was Joseph Banks, an English naturalist living in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The father of the protagonist in The Signature works for this man for a while, before starting up his own plant enterprise. He is quite a minor character, interesting because he enables the protagonists father to get on in life, but no more than that.  Just a couple of hours after reading this, I read about the same Banks in Bryson's work. As it turned out, the man has really lived, he wasn't someone Elizabeth Gilbert made up.
Fact meeting fiction. I must have encountered this before, but no proper example springs to mind. Somehow, it made The Signature a more interesting book. Some of this has really happened! Funnily enough, I loved finding this out by myself, and would have appreciated it less if it had the 'based on a true story' recommendation stamped all over it, as is the rage with so many movies (and tv series) these days. Also, I would have liked the novel just as much if I hadn't accidentally found out that it's partly based on real people (which should have been obvious because Captain Cook is also mentioned, but that's such a famous name that she may have just put that in to lend the story some credibility, whereas Banks is so obscure that you wouldn't know from just reading about him). It just adds that little bit extra, a dimension that wasn't there before but that makes one wonder about the rest of the characters, and all the events.

I haven't actually looked whether the main character and/or her family are also based on real historical people. I want to finish reading the novel, and appreciate it in its own right, before I look into that. Somehow, it makes it feel like I'm cheating on the author when I check this, also because the 'based on true events' wasn't splattered all over the cover. Apparently, she also wants me to appreciate it without that recommendation. And also, it wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't based on real events, it would just give extra sparkle to an already wonderful novel.

Summer hibernation

High summer, the period when all schools are closed for the holidays and the 'bouwvak' (= builder's vacation) is in session, is called 'cucumbertime' in the Netherlands. We produce a lot of cucumbers, mostly around this time of the year (although actually year-round, since they're grown in greenhouses) and apparently this is the only actual interesting piece of news in summer. 'Cucumbertime' denotes the time that nothing really happens, parliament isn't in session, most people are away on holiday, and we can all fall into a pleasant slumber while the German tourists take over our coastline and the Asian tourists take over everything else.
This year, we went on holiday really early, in the beginning of June, so we get to experience the whole cucumber event for the full length. And it is really true. Nothing really happens. People are contently slow, waking up late, going to bed early, doing nothing much in between. Except when you have to go to work of course, which I still have to do most days, but even there it is really quiet, a maximum of 20 emails a day, lots of time to catch up with colleagues or get down to annoying-and-lengthy-but-still-important tasks you couldn't find time for in the rest of the year. But you go home a bit earlier, do less when you actually are home, go to bed early and sleep badly because of the heat. And then repeat, until some time mid-August when the whole country suddenly snaps awake again (already, my work agenda has been filling up from the 20th of August down right until the beginning of October).

But this year, it's different. This year, a plane was shot down, and the whole country has been in a state of bewilderment and shock for about a week now. The most trivial facts suddenly become massively important, with the major news outlet sending out push messages whenever our king or prime minister utters a few words in public. Also, news reporters are reporting more about their own personal experiences on their respective sites, than that they're doing much actual reporting. And everybody has to know everything about everything that happened and everybody who was affected and it's like there is nothing else happening in the world but bodies being found and moved and put into trains and trains moving to other cities and bodies being put into air planes and air planes flying to the Netherlands and bodies being put into cars and cars going some place where they will finally identify said bodies. That, and the Tour the France, of course.

Somehow, it all feels like cucumbertime squared. It's just so many tiny details that in ordinary life are important to no one but are now suddenly massive news. It's not about the politics behind this, or the war, or about the humanity, it's all about the little details. The vox pop, the human side of things. Interviewing anyone and everyone remotely connected to aviation, the military, the deceased, etcetera. It's like we're still not realising that this year, there will be no pleasant summer slumber, this year, something really happened, something massively important, and that we should pay attention. To the big things, the times in motion, not the small details. It's like they're still wanting to speak to the lady who just learnt to double park her caravan, while that same caravan has just been shot down by tent salespeople. Or some other weird analogy.

In any case, it feels pretty surreal, and maybe the best thing to do is to return to our summer hibernation and return when the world has somehow been patched together again. And we will be able to process this as normal news, in the normal way. Which is not to disregard anyone's feelings in this thing, it's just an observation on the way news travels and is digested in these long, slow summer months.

Garden update (2)

So last time around it took a while for a 'garden update'  to appear, but this time I'm going to keep all of you posted. Because a lot has been happening in our garden, much of it good, some of it less good.

One of the not-so-happy things is the fact that a looot of slugs have chosen to call our garden home. And they have an appetite. Strangely enough, they're also eating the leafs on the potato, which I thought would make them sick but somehow only seems to make them bigger slugs. Otherwise, they love eating fresh strawberries, especially during the night when they're just doing their final ripening before we take them off. And also young courgette and pumpkin plants, with their tiny leafs just coming out, are wonderful food.
The good thing is that we did have strawberries, and several other edible things actually growing. The only thing that failed massively were the carrots, of which exactly 3 showed some fizzy leaf, which then disappeared after a while (whether the slugs were involved, we don't know, it may be that they're just unhappy growing on our clay soil). But we've had a loooot of strawberries, which in true strawberry fashion were ripe during Wimbledon, so it's been a week since we had the last ones. Otherwise, we've had some broccoli, and the leeks are really starting to become proper leeks. We've eaten some already and are going to have to eat the rest of them soon before they start flowering and become inedible.


Our apple tree also did surprisingly well, its little branches laden with apples. Every rain storm or gust of wind I'm afraid the weight of the apples will break the branches, but so far it's holding up pretty good. Then there are the aforementioned potatoes, and we've gotten a new batch of courgette and pumpkin plants for a do-over. We're also having a pepper plant (one small pepper already growing away) and an aubergine plant, which doesn't really seem to be doing a lot. And both of our berry plants are still completely without leafs, but we do have a lot of butterflies around from the caterpillars that ate all those leafs, so I guess it's been good for something.
In the non-veg area our thyme plant has been eaten twice, we just put in the second reserve in the hope that this one will survive. Most of our other plants are doing really well, especially the butterfly-bush, which is attracting a lot of bees, butterflies, and other nectar-loving insects. Sadly, it's also attracting our little neighbour girl, who likes to pull off the flowers because they smell so nice. But all in all the garden is doing a lot better than I expected, given the lack of sun, abundance of rain, and lack of attention from us. We'll see if the potatoes, peppers, apples, courgettes, pumpkins and aubergines turn out to be any good later in the year. For now, it's most used to enjoy the wonderful weather we've been having.

PS: I was going to add some photos, but my computer is being especially difficult tonight, so pics still to come.

American holiday literature

So we just went on a 2 week holiday to Italy, and during this holiday, I read 3 American novels. I won't call them 'the great American novel', because none of them were, but it had been an long time since I'd read so much American literature in one go.
First I had to finish The Luminaries, which is such a wonderful book that it deserves its own blog post. Also, it's written by a New Zealander (New Zealandess?).
After finishing The Luminaries and knitting my head together again as it was blown to pieces on the sheer brilliance of the novel, I started with Big Brother by Lionel Shriver. Which is different, veeeery different. Also, I'm not sure if it really constitutes as 'literature', but that's just technicalities. It reminded me a lot of We Need to Talk about Kevin, which I was forced to read for a class and still have slight nightmarish thoughts about every once in a while; sad, deflated, somewhat depressed woman describing events to the reader (in the case of Kevin in letters, in the case of Big Brother it never really becomes clear how she is conveying her message to us). The book is about a woman whose brother comes to live with her for a while, and it turns out he's become incredibly fat. Which disrupts her whole life, and her family's life. But really it's about expectations in life, about becoming 'someone', and the American Dream falling apart. The sad thing is that this message is repeated time and again, by the main character, her husband, and everyone else, so that you get incredibly sick of it. The ending was also really really horrible, one of the worst deus ex machinas I've read in a long time, which made me so disappointed with the whole thing that I quickly went on to the next.
Which was The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates. Which definitely is literature. I loved Revolutionary Road, so I bought The Easter Parade on a whim, and also took it with me on a whim. I knew nothing about this novel before I started reading, but it turned out to be pretty close to Big Brother, in that it's also about siblings, and it's also about life not turning out the way you planned, and about the American Dream falling apart. Only it was written 50 years earlier, before people got properly obese, so there's none of that. Otherwise, it's great. Typical Yates, with his descriptions of people and atmospheres and feelings. It's hard to describe, I think everyone should just read Revolutionary Road (it has better character development) and experience it for themselves.
Finally, I read Rabbit, Run, which is the first of John Updike's brilliant Rabbit-series. It describes life in the fifties for the average American guy, which is to say; another American Dream bursting asunder. Harry (Rabbit) leaves his pregnant wife to go on the great American road trip, which reads like the start of a great young-guy adventure story, but as Updike says himself in the afterword 'things fall apart when a young man leaves his young family behind', which is exactly what happens in the novel. And the main character is just so self-absorbed, so stupid (at first you believe what he says and you also think his wife is a dull witted bore, but you quickly find out that he's a narrator you shouldn't be trusting) that you have to love reading about him. And about America in the fifties, with it's nice little details (his mother refuses to buy a washing machine because washing by hand does the job just as well). It was written in 1959, just like all the following Rabbit novels were also written in the last year of the decade the represent, which makes it a probably pretty accurate account of the times.
Now apart from the American Dream falling apart, which seems to be a theme in many American novels, there is one other connecting element to these novels: New Holland. The narrator of Big Brother lives there, Emily Grimes stays there for a year with one of her lovers, and Rabbit drives through it on his great American road trip. Most readers probably wouldn't have noticed, but as someone from the 'actual' Holland, these things tend to stick (I realise that there must be thousands of 'New Hollands' in the US, and I can only be sure of the first one, which is properly set in Ohio, but still, it's a nice detail). Apart from the first novel, which was good in writing and characters but bad in plot, it was a nice trio of American literature. I've ordered the rest of the Rabbit novels, so I'm sure to get back to the US in due time, but for now I'm busy reading the rest of Roald Dahl's short stories, which are a whole different thing all together. Particularly because there is no American Dream; life has failed for most of his protagonists before it even started.

Original films

I've been watching a lot of films lately, because we got this 'unlimited' cinema card for a generous discount, and that has made me visit the cinema more often than I would usually do (and also watch films in the cinema that I generally wouldn't have paid any money for). One of the things that struck me, both in the story lines of the films themselves and in the trailers, is that there are hardly any original stories left. In film, that is.
The films trending in the Netherlands over the past few months have been: The Book Thief (based on a novel), Divergent (same), The Hundred-Year-Old Man who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (again), X-men: Days of Future Past (comic), Captain America: Winter Soldier (ditto), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (again), Maleficent (arguably a somewhat original story, but based on Disney's own version of the fairy tale and the fairy tale itself), and the umpteenth Godzilla film. I've also watched The Railway Man (based on true events) and seen trailers for Grace of Monaco, The Fault in our Stars, 22 Jump Street, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and countless other sequels (Transformers, Star Wars, the Hobbit, The Hunger Games, etc).
Why is this? Is it impossible to think of a new, fresh storyline, with new, fresh characters? Also, all the books-made-into-films are based on not-very-literary examples of novels, or generally even popular young adult stuff (not counting The Hobbit, of course). Non-literary, but selling like hot cakes. Must a story prove its worth before a movie can be made out of it? And what's with all the super hero movies? Don't get me wrong, I love watching those, but it's really really hard to come up with any original storyline there (although it was nice to see that someone finally put the Gwen Stacey thing in a Spider-Man film). It's not that I don't like another X-men film, or that I won't go to see them, but I'm lamenting the fact that somehow originality seems to have gone out the window, and only safe, already-proven stories are getting produced.

As I see it, there are two proper exceptions to this rule, one of which I've already seen, and one which is yet to come out: Edge of Tomorrow and The Philosophers (also known as After the Dark). Edge of Tomorrow, even though it is yet another 'super hero will save the day' film, has a great plot, and great characters, and great acting. It is truly original, borrowing some elements from some other films, but never copying outright, and giving them original twists. I haven't seen The Philosophers yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
So I'm hoping that lots of people go to see these films, and will rate them positively, and that film makers (and mostly those giving film makers the money to make films) will realise that there is an audience out there waiting for original stories, not copies of real life, novels, comics, or other films. As I see it, films are an escape into another world, and if that other world is already known, the escape is less powerful. It can be a friendly immersion into familiar waters, but sometimes you just want to be pulled out of your comfort zone into a whole other world. Which is what Edge of Tomorrow will do for you. Go watch it, and spread the word.

Tiramisu

It's been a while, but it's made such a lasting impression that I still remember it crystal clearly: the day I made tiramisu for 12 people.
We'd rented a holiday home with our sailing group (we usually sleep in the boats but this year wanted to go a bit more, well, grown-up) and after the weekend most of us went home again, but a small group stayed in the home to enjoy the rest of the week. On Wednesday, we had a last-evening-dinner, which featured Pizzarette (baking your own miniature pizzas in a miniature oven with miniature ingredients). The evening before, I offered to make dessert for everyone, probably tiramisu. The response was so excited that I simply had to follow up.

To make tiramisu for 12 people you need:
375 ml whipped cream (unwhipped)
125 g white sugar
6 eggs (you only need the yolks - I froze the egg whites to make meringue at some later date)
750 g mascarpone
8 tbls liqueur (I used Amaretto)
250 ml espresso coffee (cooled)
375 g ladyfingers
cocoa powder

Mix the whipped cream with one tablespoon of the sugar until it is almost firm (this is a difficult decision to make, I stopped just before the 'firm peaks'  stage, but as all the rest of the preparation takes so much time your cream will become less firm again anyway) and set aside. Split the eggs, and in a separate bowl mix the yolks together with the rest of the sugar until it is pale and fluffy (at least 5 minutes). Add the mascarpone bit by bit, mixing well in between so the mixture stays light. Spoon in the whipped cream until you have an even mixture.
Stir the coffee with the liqueur, and dip one side of a ladyfinger into the mixture (it's easiest to use a shallow, rectangular bowl; also, I dipped in the non-sugared side of the biscuits). Then put the ladyfinger in the serving bowl, with the wet side up. Repeat for half the ladyfingers. Pour half of the mascarpone mixture over the ladyfingers. Repeat with the rest of the ladyfingers and mascarpone mixture.
The mixture will be quite wet and liquid at this point, and I thought that it would never set. But after a night in the fridge (prepare at least 4 hours before serving) it was nice and firm! Dust liberally with cocoa powder shortly before serving.

Tiramisus ready to be devoured.

I had to use two bowls, as I didn't have one big enough. Officially it's supposed to be round, but given the shape of the ladyfingers I preferred the rectangular bowl.

I wasn't really expecting much from this, but this tiramisu is seriously good. If you add the mascarpone in very small amounts and whip it long enough it all becomes very smooth and airy. It's about 100000 calories per portion, but it doesn't feel like you're eating something incredibly heavy.
We were with 10 people in total, as it turned out, but both bowls went home empty and scraped clean. And just Sunday we were barbecuing in the park with some people from the sailing group, and they were asking after the tiramisu again. So if you want a dessert to impress, give it a try!

Feathered housemates

So, after a year of waiting, the moment is finally there: we have a little birds' nest in our nest box! The fact that I still get manically excited about these things shows how much of a biologist I still am (Dutchies: you may want to watch the documentary 'MeesTV' that was broadcast a short while ago to understand this). I have spent a summer ploughing through forests and fields to check up on literally hundreds of nest boxes and their inhabitants, so you would think I'd be done with them by now, but nope, it's still great.
We'd put the nest box up on our eastern wall, which is the one facing the garden, as high up as possible. This had two reasons: safer from the cats, but also longer sun time. We put it up quite early last spring, in the hope of catching some late breeders, but nothing happened, apart from some stray twigs being put into the box.

Then this spring, some great tits took an interest in the box (incidentally, a friend of mine who is now teaching proficiency classes in English put a question about a 'great tit' on her examination, which led to the test supervisor having to grab the microphone and inform the sniggering first years (and anybody else in the exam hall at the time) that "a 'great tit' is a kind of bird". Seriously, who doesn't know that?). We held our breath, but the birds disappeared again. The house sparrows have been in a frenzy of breeding for a couple of weeks now, so I'd lost all hope, but then last week I came into the garden from the bike shed, and two great tits left the nest box. Very exciting! But also a bit disturbing: if they were leaving when I entered the garden, how would they ever start to breed in there?
Then it started to rain, and it kept on raining for at least a week. So I was sure nothing was happening, as they couldn't have possibly already started a nest, and now they wouldn't be starting one because of the rain. But then today I came into the garden and heard the unmistakable sound of little birds begging for food. So I stood still for a good minute, and as expected: one of the parent birds went into the nest box carrying food, and came out with a little white parcel of poo. Which makes our box officially inhabited! Woo!

The box has a little window up the side through which you can look inside, but as it is about 4 meters of the ground I think I'm going to pass on that one. I think there must be 4 or 5 chicks in there at the moment, reckoning from the sound, but more may still hatch.
The only downside is that the box is quite close to our (always open) bedroom window, so we may get some sleep disturbance from the begging noises. But I'm guessing they've been out of their eggs for a couple of days now, and just aren't as loud as we thought they would be. And otherwise, they'll be gone in two weeks, so I will enjoy their presence for as long as it lasts!

Shortbread Investigation

So a colleague mentioned that her daughter had made millionaire's shortbread over the weekend, and that reminded me of this thing I've been wondering about (not consciously, but you know) for a while now. How to make the best shortbread? I have 3 cook/baking books all proclaiming that their method is best, and those are only the 3 I'm aware of, so I probably have more.

Shortbread recipe galore!

But to keep things a bit in control I decided to go for these three trusted bakers: Mary Berry, Paul Hollywood, and Lorraine (Baking made Easy). Checking them more closely, it turned out that Paul's recipe and Lorraine's recipe were actually identical in ingredient ratio and mode of preparation, only different in amounts (Paul uses 225 g flour where Lorraine uses 130: I don't know who was there first, but I'm anticipating a fierce shortbread copyright battle in the months to come!). So I could cross one of those off the list, and decided just to make 'The very best shortbread' by Mary Berry and 'Dreamlike shortbread' by Lorraine.

A prickly duel.

Mary's recipe:

225 g flour
100 g semolina
225 g butter
100 g caster sugar
sugar for dusting

 This one is of the 'rub the ingredients together with your fingers' variety, which I really really don't like, but had to try here anyway. You put all the ingredients in a bowl, rub them between your fingers until they become sticky, knead it into a ball and put in the prepared tin (30x23 cm, according to Mary). Prick all over with a fork, then put in the fridge to chill. Preheat your oven to 160, and bake for 35-40 minutes until pale golden brown. Sprinkle the sugar over the top, leave to cool in the tin, then take out and cool further before cutting into fingers.

Mary Berry's shortbread.

Lorraine's recipe:

130 g butter
60 g caster sugar
130 g plain flour
60 g rice flour
pinch of salt

Now I didn't have any rice flour, and to keep things even I used the semolina in Lorraine's recipe as well.
Here, you first mix together the butter and sugar until they are 'pale and fluffy'. Then mix in the rest of the ingredients and mix with your fingers until it becomes a dough. Put into the tin (20x20 cm), prick all over with a fork, chill in the fridge. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees, bake for 30-35 minutes, sprinkle some sugar on top, leave to cool, take out and cut into pieces.

Lorraine's shortbread.

So they are both pretty similar, apart from the first bit: do you 'rub together' or do you use the mixer? Also: can you taste the difference?

Strangely enough, you can. Even though the ingredients are similar, and in similar amounts, they do taste different. Lorraine's version is a bit more condensed, less flaky. But it is a bit more caramely, a bit more sticky sweet. Mary Berry's version is lighter, which is strange because it is almost twice as high, and took far longer to bake properly.
Opinions differed as to which tasted the best: personally I liked Lorraine's version, but some co-workers (I took these to work with me, naturally, you don't want to have 300 g of butter biscuits sitting around the house) preferred Mary Berry's, and one colleague disliked them both immensely.

So which one would I recommend? Mary's version gives you far less dishes and hassle, and gives a lighter texture, so I would probably use that one if you're going to do something else with the shortbread, such as pour chocolate on top, or make millionaire's shortbread. But if it's just shortbread you're after, I'd stick with Lorraine, because it's easier to make and to me, tasted just a little bit better.

Garden update

I called this post 'garden update' to give an update on an earlier post I wrote about our garden plans - but it turns out I'd never actually written said post. So I guess it's just a first garden post for this year, following up from the first-ever post about our new garden from April last year. Ahum...


This year we moved around some plants that weren't doing too well in the spot they were in, such as the grape, which was pining away in a dark and wet spot. Then we dug out some plants that had gotten a bit out of control (mint, anyone?). But that is not all. Of course we also have the strawberries, aforementioned grapes, and the artichoke still left over from last year. But now we get to the good part: we also put lots of new vegetables in.
We have created a dedicated vegetable patch, which now sports broccoli, leeks, onions, carrots and potatoes.

Dedicated vegetable patch area

You can't actually see the carrots, onions or potatoes in that picture, but the top ends are poking out a tiny bit. The potatoes were actually less planned than the other things: we had some that were left in the cupboard to long and started sprouting roots, so we decided to put them in the ground and see what happened. What is happening right now is that they're putting little purpley bits through the soil, so I think they are doing good. We're growing the carrots and onions from seed, which is a first, so we'll see how that goes. Obviously, we bought the leeks and broccoli as small plants, otherwise they'd never gotten this big this quickly.

But there's more (and I honestly have no idea where we're going to put these when they start growing properly): we also have several little greenhouses filled with even more veg.

Baby vegetables-to-be

From left to right you can see rocket, radishes, and peas. They have all been sown from seed, and kept nicely snug and warm in their greenhouses. The peas are a little bit less enthusiastic, but they are coming. Somehow, somewhere, these will be put into the ground once the weather gets a bit warmer and they get a bit bigger. We planted out some rocket last year, which came up but then disappeared under a massive courgette that was groping its way through the garden. We had radishes in the garden at our other house but the snails ate them all, and tried peas before but they never really did anything. So, this is sort of our 'second chance' box.

I'm very curious to see what will grow and what will wither in our new garden, and I fully intend to keep you (more) up to date!

One Hundred Years of Solitude

After finishing Netherland, I decided it was time for another one of those classic novels I still have to read (on a sidenote: I think that in 50 years time Netherland itself will be considered one of those 'must read' classic novels, but that may be my prejudice as a New York-loving Dutch person). Since Gabriel García Márquez has just passed away, and One Hundred Years of Solitude has been living in my bookcase for a couple of years now, ever since my boyfriend got the novel for his birthday from a Mexican exchange student, I decided to go for that one. My boyfriend isn't going to read it even if he somehow finds himself in 100 years of solitude, and a lot of good things have been said about it.

This wasn't my first Márquez novel, because for Spanish class in secondary school I'd read No One Writes to the Colonel. In Spanish. This was, to put it mildly, a challenge. Week after week we'd wrestle through the paragraphs, each having to read and then explain a page in turn. You got to prepare at home, so I always had lots of translated words scribbled in the margins, but still I couldn't make any sense of it. And I wasn't the only one, after finally making it to the final word in the novel, mierda, our teacher triumphantly slammed his copy of the book shut, threw it on his desk, and said; "Si! Mierda!" We stared back at him, expecting some kind of explanation. When he just stood there waiting for an equally enthusiastic response from our side, one of the students ventured: "Mierda? Shit? What does that even mean?" He took a big dramatic Spanish sigh and said: "If you don't understand why that is a great ending, you don't understand literature." Which I thought a bit rich, even then.

Anyway, I would not let that experience put me off of reading
One Hundred Years of Solitude, only this time, I would be reading in English. The front, consisting of a naked lady staring vacantly in the viewers eyes, somewhat baffled me, especially in connection with the blurb, which informed me that the novel was about a little village, and especially about seven generations of a family who had lived in that little village for one hundred years already.
I'm now more than a quarter of the way through, and I don't know much more about the naked lady, or about the seven generations. What I do know is that this book is brilliant. 
I love magical realism, which is why I love Neil Gaiman's work, but this is a whole different thing altogether. You just have to let your suspension of disbelief stretch into impossible lengths, and just go with whatever is happening, even though all your instincts are telling you that a minute ago everything was just as it is in the real world. Also, the style is great, with some characters drawn out over the pages, while others are put down in a few brushstrokes, but then they all turn out to be completely different then you'd originally thought. Big, important events (death, war) can be condensed into a single line, which you will then miss and have to reread to get, whereas small, uneventful things can be drawn out across the pages, with some paragraphs stretching multiple pages.
It took me a while to get into, to get the dense, layered writing style, the somewhat-recognisable-but-still-strangely-different setting and the many references and figurative elements, but now that I'm into it, I want it to last as long as possible. This isn't a novel to read quickly or glancingly, but also, I don't want it to end.
So once again, the label 'classic' has proven to be correct. I feel like I am repeating myself with every classic novel I read, but again, this will be one of those novels that will stay with me for years to come.

Craziness is all around

The Saturday edition of the newspaper always comes with a themed magazine, and this week the theme is 'we're all crazy', about how nobody is really 'normal', when you look closely. This includes an article about crazy writers, or more generally crazy artists. Traumatising childhoods, bipolar disorder, autism, depression, narcissism, addictions, the list is almost endless. The list of famous artists suffering from these diseases is even longer, stretching from Mozart and Dickens via Woolf and Hemingway to Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga.
Those suffering from depression, the article goes, are good at keeping faith through difficult times, because that's what they're doing a lot. Churchill and his black dog are the stock example. Those who are narcissistic are best found on stage, where they will entertain people. Cue Lady Gaga. And then there are those who use all their negative experiences and/or depressed and/or manic periods to create great art. Because they see the world differently, because they can put themselves to one side and live inside the story, or just because they don't really give a damn what anybody else thinks about them.
Long story short: mental diseases or problems are great if you want to be an artist. It's also great for the rest of us, because a) these people are turning their attention to art and not self-destruction (although in the case of Kurt Cobain or Van Gogh that may not be strictly speaking true) and b) we get brilliant new art to boot.

But does this mean you have to be a little bit crazy to be a good artist? Can't normal people write/paint/compose nice things?
Jane Austen didn't have any particular mental illness, as far as we know, and she wrote pretty good novels. Same goes for Shakespeare's plays, or Rembrandt's paintings, or Bach's music. I know many popular musicians who may be a bit more expressive than the rest of us, but that doesn't make them raving narcissists. Then another part of the paper included an interview with Eleanor Catton, the youngest ever winner of the Man Booker Prize (The Luminaries, which has been living in my bookcase for far too long without being read) and she came across as pretty normal, maybe a bit tired, but nothing too funny. Of course, the article about the 'crazy artists' doesn't mention these people at all.

So what is this thing about mental illnesses combined with artistic genius? Clearly, it's not as if the former is a strict prerequisite for the latter. Even more, there are many mentally ill people who never produce any art worth speaking of in their lifetimes. So is it just the connection that makes us wonder? 'Hey, I thought they were crazy, but look at what they can do!' Or is there really something special to their works, something that we can't quite grasp, but that makes us wonder? Or maybe even makes us slightly jealous, that someone can see the world and create these things while we will never be able to?

But then again, as the rest of the magazine goes, none of us are completely 'normal', we all carry our own special kind of strangeness or madness inside. Maybe some show it more than others, and find it easier to express themselves to channels that others don't generally use.
Anyway, I don't really see the big deal here. And taking stock of my favourite authors and painters, most of them don't show that many cracks and shadows, so maybe I myself am too 'normal' to appreciate the true genius of the others. Maybe that's why I wonder at the article, because I don't really see the connection all that strongly. Or maybe it's because I still dream of becoming a writer some day, and I don't want to be put off by the idea that there has to be something 'wrong' with you to be able to succeed...

House of Cards

There was an article in the newspaper on Saturday trying to explain why all of a sudden people like to watch series that revolve mostly around 'bad guys'. It somehow went from the black-and-white villain world of Lord of the Rings, via the Cold War, to the current 'everyone's a shade of grey' thinking. Which to me still doesn't explain why people like to watch stuff like the Red Wedding scene; there is nothing grey or 'in the middle' about that one. Bad guys are generally still bad guys, the good guys are the good guys. Combined with an article I read today about how Captain America is the only moral beacon left in an otherwise corrupted and confused world, I had to conclude that we still tend to over-analyse things. If people want to watch series like Dexter or Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, let them. There are also loads of people still watching Friends reruns or sobbing about the HIMYM finale, so it's not really like the world has changed that much. (The one thing they did get right was that paid networks like HBO or Netflix do not have to cater to the taste of lots of people because they don't rely on advertisers, so they can experiment more and therefore make more daring series. But that doesn't really say anything about the 'spirit of the times' except that it's still all about money.)

Anyway, one of the series mentioned was House of Cards, which we have been watching for quite a while (no, we don't have Netflix, yes, downloading was legal until 2 days ago, yes, we downloaded all of it before it became illegal). I've visited Washington, even took a tour of the Capitol, which makes me go 'been there!' every other minute, which is always nice (it also made me notice the horrible inconsistency in the opening scenes of Captain America: Winter Soldier, but that's a whole other thing). Other than that, there isn't much I can relate to. I'm not that much into politics, or lobbying, or fund raising, or journalism, and even less into playing games and manipulating people. Still, it's a great series to watch. And the article I mentioned got me thinking: why do I like to watch this?
Firstly, of course, because everybody is watching it. I've been getting Postcrossing cards for months with people saying "I watched House of Cards today - it's great!" from Canada, India, Latvia, and everywhere in between. Most of my colleagues are also watching, with whispered information and reactions passed on during the breaks (whispered not because we're ashamed, but because some people will shout "No spoilers!" if you talk too loud). It's a group thing, because everybody is talking about it.
But it's more than that. Also... the acting is great. I am really starting to loathe Kevin Spacey, which means he must be doing something right. But the plot is great too: I'm curious as to what crazy thing he's going to do next - he must be satisfied with what he's got at some point, right? But no, he's off again, aiming higher, going further, manipulating more.
And then there is that nagging feeling of 'Could this be real?', generally immediately followed by 'No, it can't be real! Right?'. Is this the hidden world of politics? Is this how things really work? Is this what politicians really think of 'the common man'?
Funnily enough, they don't really do cliffhangers. The end of season one was as un-cliffhangeresque as you'll ever see. Nothing was really happening, no 'who killed JR' moment, just people jogging in the park. Most episodes also wrap up nicely; the main problem or problems have been resolved, most people have gotten one step closer to their goals, some people have been diverted or confused a bit more, and everybody is happy. But still, you want to see the next one. You want to know what happens next. Amazing, when you think about the lack of suspense at the end of an episode.

So I'll have to conclude that it's great writing, great acting, and a slightly voyeuristic 'behind the scenes' feel that make me hooked. And that will be my stint of over-analysis for the day, time to watch another episode!

Netherland

During my English studies, there were several courses aimed at 'contemporary literature'. In my view, 'contemporary literature' was often translated to 'literature written by people not born in the UK, US, or Australia' or 'post-9/11 literature' (or combinations of the two, such as The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which I'll suggest to anyone who will listen). Somehow, post-9/11 novels attract other post-9/11 novels, which means my book collection has a relatively large amount of them. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, has been among them for a while, and after finishing Bridget I wanted to get on with something that was actually literature, and contained more emotions than 'will he ever tweet me back?'-angst.

Before we go any further, I would like to say that the category 'post-9/11 novels' does not contain any novel ever written after the 11th of September 2001. It indicates novels that were written in response to the 9/11 attacks, or that have been influenced by them. Some are very clearly in this category, such as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, some less obviously so, including Ian McEwan's Saturday. Some take place in New York City and deal with the obvious aftermaths of the events, some are set in the countries that the US invaded after the attacks (I've read We are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek, which is set in Afghanistan and Iraq) and some take place in a fictional future also influenced by the events. What they all, or most of them, have in common is an atmosphere filled with heaviness ("Something oppressive... like thunder" as Fiver tells us in Watership Down). People going through the motions, without actually thinking about it, mostly just to stay alive. Or on the other hand, people desperately trying to get out of the oppressed feelings, only to find themselves thrown back time and again. It's not that I particularly like reading about people who find themselves in such situations, but I am very impressed by the way writers can put these emotions through in their works, and they make me see why Literature is Literature, and what it can do.

So, back to Netherland, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while now. I had been advised to read it by many fellow students, some of whom had to read the novel for a class, so it has to be particularly good if they recommend it after having been forced to read it themselves. I had no idea what or who this novel was going to be about before picking it up, only that it was on the post-9/11 category. I didn't know, for example, that the main character is a Dutchman. And that there would be several Dutch words and sentences interwoven in the text, without translation or context, which I'm guessing makes them pretty hard to understand for non-Dutch people. Also, it gives an extra layer to the title, which is nice.
As if a Dutch protagonist isn't enough, the novel is also about cricket. There are few things I consider less American than cricket, but there you are. I don't know anything about cricket, either (which made a certain chapter in The Go-Between very difficult to read), but the author does a good job of not making that an issue. Otherwise, it's about New York City, and relationships between people, and how those relationships were stressed to the point of breaking in the aftermaths of the events.

Now I've been to NYC, I've seen the gaping hole and visited the church that the rescue workers slept in while they were searching the wreckage and read the memorials and I still don't feel like I've come even a little bit closer to understanding what happened and why it made such an impact. (I can see the national and global impact, but I'm talking about the man on the street, the 'normal' New Yorkers who didn't lose any loved ones but had to go on living in a scarred city, in a world that would never really be the same again.) But this novel can show me, if even only a little bit. It makes you understand the events, and try to accept them, or at least give them a place. I haven't finished the novel yet, so I don't know which way it's going to go, but I can already see it will make a lasting impression on my understanding of life, the universe and everything, which is what you need, once in a while.

Bridget's Third

You know I've read and love Bridget Jones's Diary, because I wrote about it before. You probably also know that a third novel came out quite some time ago, and that it was completely burned down by reviewers. I found this quite disappointing, as I had been looking forward to the new book ever since it was announced a long while ago. But I decided not to read it, to keep the idea of Bridget and Mark living happily ever after in my mind.
Then I read an interview with Helen Fielding, who was not at all concerned about all the bad reviews, saying that it's the readers who decide, in the end. And the book has been selling really well, which must partly be long-time readers wanting to know what happened next, and partly word-of-mouth advertising. But she did persuade me a bit, and also, she made me curious. What would Bridget be like at 50? And also: could it really be as bad as the reviewers made it out to be?
So last Saturday, I was standing in a bookshop with a friend, when she casually asked me whether I had already read it. When I said no but I did want to, she pushed it into my hands, and I bought it.

Now this is one of those books you can't have laying around for ages, moving it around to get to another book and thinking 'ow, yeah, I should read that one day' (as with Crime & Punishment, or Oliver Twist, to name a few examples). This is one of those books you dive into immediately. Which means that after 3 days, I'm about half-way through now.
I won't be giving too many spoilers, apart from what you've probably already read online, but if you really really don't want to know anything about this book, stop reading here.

At first, it was great. More Bridget! More craziness! More counting of alcohol units and weird self-help books. The writing style and wittiness were all there, just as if there hadn't been a 15 year gap.
After the first few elating paragraphs, I started to see what the reviewers meant. It wasn't the same Bridget. She had gotten older, and sadder, and at the same time stayed the same. This doesn't really work. Bridget was always kind of goofy, but you could see that she was quite smart and had Common Knowledge. Somehow, this has disappeared. No more literary remarks between the lines, no more small comments on events taking place 'in the outside world'. Also, she has managed to raise two kids to school-going age, but can't figure out how Twitter works? She can dress them, feed them, get them to school, get them back home, feed them again, bathe them, put them to bed, and not clear up the kitchen? Not very realistic.
And then there's the 'no Mark' thing. I can see how Helen Fielding wanted to get Mark out of the way so Bridget can have another love interest, but then really put him out of the way. Not have him lingering about with Bridget crying over him all the time, and the kids asking about him all the time (seriously, the younger was 4 months old when he died, how much will she be asking after daddy?). Also, it's been what, 5 years? It's like Helen Fielding couldn't really forgive herself for killing off Mark (a lot of fans would agree with her there) and therefore kept him in a bit.
And then there's the whining. It's all so horrible, being over fifty, being fat, having kids, having to do a job, being on Twitter, having a guy not call you back, on and on and on... In the earlier books, Bridget would be slightly unorganised and sometimes sad, but she wouldn't really whine about it. She would keep a bright face and move on, or try to move on, and if there was any obsessing over men, it was positive.
Finally, the whole structure of the book. It isn't called Bridget Jones's Diary anymore, for a good reason, because it isn't really a diary. It starts in the 'now', and then goes back through Bridget's older diary from the year before, with her adding fore-shadowing or 'back-shadowing' comments in between. This is Bridget Jones commenting on Bridget Jones. And it doesn't work, it takes away from the self-absorbed Bridget and turns her into a very self-conscious Bridget, trying to censor her past self.

That doesn't sound too good, does it?

But then I got thinking: the earlier 2 Bridget novels were written in the 90s, a time of optimism, of forward-going, of new-found freedoms. This novel is very much a post-financial crisis novel: everything is darker, people whine more, people are more self-absorbed and less focused on the world around them. Also, less interest in culture and literature, as expressed through Bridget's inability to write the screenplay for her Hedda Gabler adaptation (the only truly feminist/literary bit in the whole novel so far). Somehow, positive, bubbly, outgoing Bridget finds herself in darker times. And she has had to adapt, big time.
Which made me see the novel in another light, and as I came to this insight already half-way through the novel, I may have to read it again pretty quickly to see if my theory holds any ground.
But for now, I will have to get through it first. And even with the above stuck firmly in the back of my mind, the whining is still pretty tough to get through. I hope she falls in love again pretty soon...