epershand

What I read

Finished Pointed Roofs - gosh, how bizarre is that German girls' school? It seems more like somewhere that parents send their little darlings to until marriagable age, and actual education is not a priority.

Simon R Green, Which Witch (The Holy Terrors #3) (2025), enjoyable popcorn read.

Which could also be said for Simon Brett, Death in the Dressing Room (A Fethering Mystery, #22) (2025), phoning it in a bit perhaps.

I thought Janice Hallett, The Killer Question (2025), was doing the opposite of phoning it in and straining too hard. This might be the thing one sees when a writer has done Something Fresh and Exciting but there comes a point when that is hard to sustain and there is a feeling that they have scurried around a bit and it feels kinds of effortful.

Matt Houlbrook, Songs of Seven Dials: An Intimate History of 1920s and 1930s London (2025) (which is, I may point out, well after the epoch of Seven Dials in which I have shown interest....). It's very good, very readable, if I had been sent it for review I might have made a few quibbles - e.g. on the basis of the evidence he adduces about the changes going on in the area, even if the mixed race couple the Kittens hadn't brought a libel suit against entrenched wealthy interests, wouldn't their cafe have had to close eventually anyway? Also was reminded of those lecture by Gayle Rubin on the leather community in San Francisco and how very specific local contingent factors meant that certain phenomena could arise, also very much within a specific time. Also that cities (if they are places where things are still happening rather than historical relics) tend to see changes all the time and there is a fluidity around spaces.

On the go

Still on the go, Diary at the Centre of the Earth, which I am enjoying a lot.

Exasperatingly, because of the e-reader issue and because Some Men in London 1960-1967 alleged it was not properly authorised I had to reauthorise my reader via Adobe Digital Editions, as a result of which a large number of my books have been removed from the ereader, including that one, removing my place markers when I reimported it.

Up next

Should probably get on to Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies (A Dance to the Music of Time #12 (1975) for the final meeting of the book-group next month.

Firstly:

So, farewell then, PSC, whose advice to the sexually-bothered (rather than the lovelorn) has so oft provided fodder to oursinial musings. Guardian G2 today includes 23 of the best Sexual Healing columns

Not sure if they are The Greatest Hits rather than molto tipico of the kind of thing she addressed: in particular we note (as she stresses in the interview about the lessons learnt over 10 years of agony-aunting):

The female orgasm is still a mystery to some people
I’m still getting questions that show me people continue to think that the only “correct” type of female orgasm is one that’s purely vaginal and doesn’t involve the clitoris. For people to still think that, or to have that as the ideal, is extraordinary, but there it is. They just haven’t had the education to understand otherwise.

We also note the recurrent MenZ B Terribly Poor Stuff theme, what with the one who appears to regard his wife's bisexuality as a USP meaning *3SOMES* and two or three where one feels she did not interrogate sufficiently whether the male querent was actually gratifying his female partner before offering reassurance/solution e.g. 'My stunning wife makes no effort with our sex life' where we should like to know precisely what effort he is putting in, ahem.

However, there are also some of the wilder shores there.

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Secondly, and could we have a big AWWWW for this: David Attenborough seeks out London’s hidden wildlife:

Filming the wildlife of London requires an intrepid, agile presenter, willing to lie on damp grass after dark to encounter hedgehogs, scale heights to hold a peregrine falcon chick, and stake out a Tottenham allotment to get within touching distance of wary wild foxes.
Step forward Sir David Attenborough, who spent his 100th summer seeking out the hidden nature of his home city for an unusually personal and intimate BBC documentary.

Last week's bread held out adequately.

On Wednesday I made Angel Biscuit dough (this year I had active dried yeast) which was enough to provide for Christmas, Boxing Day and Saturday morning breakfast. Turned out rather well.

For Christmas dinner we had: starter of steamed asparagus with halved hardboiled quails' eggs and salmon caviar; followed by pheasant pot-roasted with bacon, brandy, and madeira and served with Ruby Gem potatoes roasted in goosefat, garlic-roasted tenderstem broccoli (as noted with previous recent tenderstem broccoli, wish to invoke Trades Description Act re actual tenderness of stem), and red cabbage (bought-in, as not only is it an Almighty Faff, making it from scratch would involve ending up with A Hell of A Lot of Red Cabbage). Then bought-in Christmas puds with brandy butter and clotted cream.

Boxing Day lunch: blinis with smoked salmon, smoked Loch trout, and the remaining salmon caviar, and creme fraiche with horseradish cream, and a salad of lamb's lettuce and grilled piccarello pepper strips, in a walnut oil and damson vinegar dressing. Followed by mince pies.

Yesterday lunch was the leftover blinis and smoked fish. For yesterday evening meal I made the remains of the pheasant into a pilaff, served with a green salad.

Today's lunch: chestnut mushrooms quartered in olive oil, white-braised green beans and cut up piccarello peppers, the Phul-Gobi (braised cauliflower) from Dharamjit Singh's Indian Cookery, and blinis made up from the last of the batter, a bit past its best.