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.