The case of the Circular Cat

Snooker the cat gave us a scare on Saturday morning.  I was lying, deep in the dreamless, when my beloved husband appeared by the bed, not with the Saturday morning tea and toast (Marmite and marmalade – noooo, not all mixed up, separately of course!) but with the injunction to Get Up! The Cat’s Acting Strangely.

Poor old Snooker was indeed acting strangely.  She was walking round in a circle, for all the world as if someone had nailed her right-hand paw to the floor, with her neck all twisted.  Hum.  So it was off to the vets and an anxious wait.  Now partly the anxiety was caused by the idea of old fur-face having injured herself and – I must admit – partly from the idea of the Vet’s bill.  These animals can’t half cost, you know, and Snooker, who turned up as a stray, cost a few hundred quid in the first month or so.  Gulp.  So it was with some relief when the vet said there was nothing to worry about.  Really?  I asked, looking at our circular cat.   Yep, nothing much.  It’s a balance problem.  It happens in older animals.  Like a stroke?  Nothing so dramatic.  It’s a Latin name known to vets which means your cat’s gone wobbly and is going round in circles. Gosh. I’ll just give her this anti-inflammatory injection and you should see an improvement.  And he did (brave man) and it worked.  A day’s dozing, followed by being tempted to eat (tuna and chicken) and one cat, right as rain, able to walk in a straight line, emerged once more.

Now, apart from the brief moment of grief at the sight of the Gordon-Smith finances being dipped into by yet another ruddy animal, what’s the point of the story?  Nothing much, unless your cat gets a fit of the circles, you might find it reassuring.  It just happened, that’s all.  And that’s the difference between fiction and real life.

In real life, stuff comes along, starts, muddles, finishes and doesn’t really amount to much.  A story, although it can seem like real life, isn’t like this.  If a Poor Old Woman in the middle of the woods scams lunch off the Seventh Son, it’s not because she’s hungry and there’s not a MacDonalds for miles, it’s because she’s testing his fitness to rescue a Princess or recover a Great Jewel or a Magic Lamp or what-have-you.   If Hercule Poirot announces a case is the most baffling of his career, we know it’s a wind-up.  Hastings might not get it but Hercule will.  If Frodo’s asked to drop a magic ring into Mount Doom, somehow or other Frodo will do it.

The stuff on the way’s important too.  In A Fete Worse Than Death Jack comes across an old friend, Bingo Romer-Stuart.  I needed a way for Jack to get hold of records at the War Office and so I dreamed up Bingo, a Brigadier, who works at the War Office, threw him enough back-story (about two lines, I think) to make him a credible old friend, and there we were.  Bingo, in fact.  I could have added a page or so about Bingo – he was quite clear in my mind – but the reader would have signed off out of sheer boredom long before I’d finished.  Everything in the story has to add to the story.

Oh, and the cat’s fine too.

Food, Glorious Food

There’s been a lot of discussion about food this week on the DorothyL  American crime and detective story website.  Rather to my surprise, there’s a whole lot of Americans who feel warm and fluffy inside at the thought of Treacle Pud, Bisto gravy (yes, honestly!) Clotted Cream, Scones, Jam, Yorkshire Pudding, etc, etc.  And I haven’t even mentioned Toad In The Hole!  You might have noticed something about the above dishes;  they’re all very definitely comfort food, childhood favourites that bring warm feelings of love and care with them, in a way that lettuce just doesn’t.

Unless you’re a Flopsy Bunny, of course.



It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is ‘soporific’.  I have never felt sleepy after eating lettuces; but then, I am not a rabbit.

As well as being familiar and comforting, food can also be a great shortcut to finding out about another place. Considering all food is either Meat, Fish or Veg., it’s astonishing how different food is different various countries.  I like spinach and cheese, for example, but I’d never thought of putting them in a pie until I bought one on a Berlin railway station caff.  (Train stations in Germany are great – full of food!) Curried sausage, again in Berlin, was weirdly nice and my local railway station does black peas and liver, onions and mash to a turn.

Just as food is a shortcut to another country, food in books can tell you a lot about character and place.  When Death in Terry Prachett’s Discworld tells us he could murder a curry – sorry, that should be, “I COULD MURDER A CURRY,” – we know that Death may come to everyone but he isn’t out to get you.  When Mrs Lacey in Agatha Christie’s The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding starts detailing the menu, we know that’s she essentially a nice, kindly woman with a large guest list.  OK, we could probably get to know that anyway, but it’s an economical way of getting the information across:

“…the oyster soup and the turkey – two turkey, one boiled and one roast – and the plum pudding with the ring and the bachelor’s button…. All the old desserts, the Elvas plums and Carlsbad fruits and almonds and raisins and crystallised fruit and ginger.” As we’ve previously seen Hercule get to grips with the calories, we’re not surprised when he says, “You arouse my gastronomic juices, Madame!”  Later, in the same story, when he goes to interview the cook, yes he’s detecting, but his heartfelt praise of Mrs Ross’s cooking touches on lyrical.  “Above all puddings,” continued Poirot, well launched now on a kind of rhapsody, “is the Christmas plum pudding such as we have eaten today.”

One of my favourite books of all time, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, uses food a lot, from Edmund’s acceptance of The White Witch’s Turkish Delight (incidentally, Lord Peter Wimsey traps a villain with Turkish Delight in Strong Poison) to the fish supper the Pevensey children share with the beavers in Narnia (…There’s nothing to beat good freshwater fish if you eat it when it has been alive half an hour ago and has come out of the pan half a minute ago.  And when they had finished the fish, Mrs Beaver brought unexpectedly out of the oven a great and gloriously sticky marmalade roll…”) to the sadness evoked by picture Lewis paints of the happy tea-party with Fox and Squirrel and the other animals destroyed by the White Witch.

A hugely enjoyable bit (and a deeply Roman bit) of Jane Finnis’s excellent A Bitter Chill is her description of the Saturnalia feast enjoyed in Ancient Brit Land.  “…Roast piglets, which they arranged around the sow, and platters decorated like birds’ nest containing chickens, ducks, geese and doves….  There were rich custards…and fruits to go with them, peaches and cherries in wine.  Hazelnuts and walnuts, already shelled, were brought round on silver trays, and I counted nine kinds of cheese, offered with fresh warm bread.”

It’s good, isn’t it?  I was right there, reading that description. When Matthew, in Anne of Green Gables buys Anne some little chocolate sweeties, we’re as touched as Anne and – as we’re talking about Canadian authors – I can’t think of Louis Penny’s Three Pines without my mouth automatically watering, so loving and lavish is the description of the food.  It’s no wonder houses don’t come up for sale very often in Three Pines; you’d have to move me out with a crowbar, the food’s so good.

A good few subscribers to DorothyL were interested in a recipe I mentioned for Steamed Syrup Pudding done in the microwave.  Here it is.  Happy eating – and reading!

Steamed Sponge Pud (microwave)

You need a 1 ½ pint or  900 ml pudding bowl that can go in the microwave.  Plastic is great.

Some cling film (food wrap?)  That clingy plastic film for food, anyway, OR a microwave plate cover.

4 ounces/100grams of self-raising flour

2 ounces/50 grams of suet.*

2 ounces/50 grams of sugar, dark soft brown for preference

1 teaspoon of baking powder (about 2 pinches)

3 fluid ounces/75 ml milk

1 beaten egg

1 teaspoonful (about the lid of the bottle full) of vanilla essence

*The recipe calls for suet.  I don’t know if you have suet, but if not, melt butter or margarine and use that.  The point is to get the fat distributed throughout the pud.

Lightly grease the pud bowl

Put about 3 tablespoons of syrup in the base. Give it a nice good dollop. Golden syrup or Maple syrup (is Corn syrup sweet and golden?  If so, then I bet that would work fine too.)  Then give it 30 seconds or so in the microwave to make it more liquid.

Mix all the ingredients together and put them in the bowl

Cover with film or the plate cover

Cook at ¾ power (Power Level 6 or so) for 4 minutes, then at full power for 1 minute.

As microwaves vary, just have a look and see if it looks cooked but it doesn’t take long.

Take out of the oven, leave to stand for about two minutes, then turn upside down onto a plate and remove the pud basin.  All the yummy syrup comes down the side of the pud.

This lovely served with cream, custard (if available!) or vanilla ice-cream.

It’s dead easy to do a chocolate version of this by putting cocoa (chocolate powder) to the mixture and replacing the syrup with melted chocolate.  A fruit version is nice, too, with pineapple or whatever added to the syrup

I’ve been off air, so to speak, for the last few weeks.  There hasn’t been a crisis – well, only the usual sort of stuff – or any dramas or even any mild alarms but the internet decided to curl up and die.  Not so long ago we decided to swap service providers to Sky and, while we were about it, get Sky TV for my Rugby-mad husband and daughter.  (I have five daughters but only one follows in her father’s footsteps.)  (They sit at the far end of Edgley Park stadium, Stockport, on a Friday night watching Sale Sharks;  say hi if you see them or wave at the TV.) The actual event that swayed it was The Ashes.  Now, yes, I know, Ashes are cricket but it took daughter about half a nano second to work out that watching the cricket meant we could also watch the rugby.  And she does.  Gosh, she so does.

It took the rest of the off-spring about a whole nano-second to work out that satellite TV meant not just sport but America’s Next Top Model and a zillion other goodies such as new Simpsons, endless Futurama and a whole raft of shows where someone goes and decorates somebody else’s house.  (I don’t know who these people are who zap in, decorate, zap out again and never seem to stop for a cup of tea.  I wish I did.  The bathroom could do with a once-over and a new kitchen would be nice.)

Anyway, while we were about it, we swapped the broadband to Sky and, as always when asked to change its ways, the computer sat in a corner and sulked.  When asked (very politely) to recognize the new provider, it reacted with all the subtle charm of a six-year old boy asked to kiss Great Aunt Sarah With A Hairy Chin and say Thank You for the lovely socks.  It took two new routers and some serious enticement from the local Rent-A-Geek computer shop before it reluctantly scuffed its feet and came out to play once more.

S’weird how cut off you feel without the internet, isn’t it?

Talking about being cut off, I’m totally deaf in one ear.  I’ve had a perfectly foul cold and one ear has signed off completely.  I suppose, as human beings can get used to anything, more or less, that I’d get used to it if I was permanently one ear cemented shut, but I’m hoping that the doctor will be able to give me something to shift it.  Mind you, the member of the G-S household who probably feels more cut-off than most is the newest member, the kitten Minou.  She’s been taken for The Op and has to wear a plastic bucket arrangement so she won’t chew the stitches.  Here’s a picture of her looking puzzled.



And, if you can stand some serious cuteness, here’s another picture of her curled up with Lucky, the (three-legged) dog, who will stand a lot of  kitten as long as he’s allowed to sprawl in front of the fire.

Zen and the Thirty-Nine Steps

As I mentioned in the last blog, I was at St. Hilda’s mystery conference where – amongst other goodies – Natasha  Cooper talked about John Buchan.  She made the interesting comment that Buchan’s work always contains a quest for identity and, like all good critical comments, that was really illuminating.  I love JB and whole passages in his books came to life again as I mentally reviewed them in the light of what Natasha said.

Take The 39 Steps for instance.  This book suffers, like other very well-known books, from people sure they’ve read the book whereas they’ve actually seen the Hitchcock film.    There’s no problem with the Hitchcock film against which all other film adaptations are measured (Buchan himself enjoyed it very much) but it isn’t the book.

Now, the quest for identity in The 39 Steps can result in hilarity.  Richard Hannay has an uncanny ability in the matter of disguises. Disguise, of course, was de rigueur for any detective or thriller hero of the time, more or less by public demand.  Sherlock Holmes never felt happier than fooling Dr Watson whilst disguised as a tramp, a Lascar seaman, an out-of-work groom or whatever, and where Sherlock trod, fictional heroes for the next thirty or forty years or so more or less either reacted to or from this Canonical pattern, and Hannay faithfully followed suite.

He meets his match, of course, in the sinister chief of the Black Stone gang, who’s even better at disguise than Hannay.  (The chief of the Black Stone, Graf von Schwabing, was such a useful villian, by the way, that Hannay has to defeat him all over again in Mr Standfast and this time, unlike a Fu Manchu, for instance, the elusive Big Black Spider of German Intelligence stayed dead.)

Now, so far, so jolly.  However, the beginning of The 39 Steps does hint at something a little deeper.  Hannay, in that hot summer on the eve of War, has recently arrived from South Africa, a mining engineer of Scottish descent who has made his money.  Like many another Buchan hero, he’s achieved success and, having got it, doesn’t know what to do with himself.  He doesn’t, in fact, know quite who he is.  Fortunately for Hannay, the unfortunate Scudder, to whom he’s given houseroom, ends up pinned to the floor of the flat with a long dagger and Hannay, immediately suspected by the police, disguises himself as a milkman and – for no very clear reason – runs off to Scotland.

Hannay spends the rest of the book in a bewildering series of disguises and – follow me closely – it’s only when he’s pretending to be someone else that he feels he’s recovered the truth of who he really is.  Not only that, but Hannay, being Hannay, and not Sherlock Holmes, feels he has to explain his facility with disguise. He does it by citing his old fried, Peter Pindaar, the Boer hunter, who has told Hannay that if he wants to disguise himself properly – this obviously being a prime need in South Africa – he has to do more than put on another man’s clothes, he has to be the other man; he has to take on his thoughts, his feelings and his identity.  It’s significant, isn’t it?

I’ve talked about The 39 Steps because it’s Buchan’s best-known book.  Immensely readable, it hurtles along and is the book that has ensured the rest of the Buchan thrillers are continuously in print.  However, in the rest of Buchan, the same themes crop up over and over again;  success is greatly prized – and Buchan was a Border Scot with a proper appreciation of success – but it always leaves a “what now?” feeling. Buchan’s books usually start with a feeling of ennui.  Then the hero has to lose himself; a process is that always physically demanding, usually calling for him to live on the edge of whatever society he’s in and almost always involves disguise.

I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to see this as having it’s roots in Buchan’s abiding uncertainty about his world.  A poor boy, he had taken virtually every prize the world had to offer. He was a famous author, yes, but also figured prominently in politics. An enthusiastic hunter, fisherman, walker and mountaineer, he was forced by wretched ill-health to spend long periods as an invalid.  He ended up as the greatly-loved Governor-General of Canada and even achieved, with a blissfully happy marriage, a successful home-life. (So does Hannay; one feels Hannay’s home-life is a reflection of Buchan’s but with fewer megalomaniacs plotting to take over the world.)  Was it enough?  Perhaps not.

It’s very touching that in Sick Heart River, his most introspective book and the one he completed a few days before his own death, Edward Leithen, the dying hero, is seen to be more, far more, than the English gentleman and Decent Chap that his companions thought him. At long last, he finds peace. It reads like an epitaph for his author.

St Hilda's, August 2009

It was the Mystery and Crime conference at St Hilda’s, Oxford last weekend (21^st-23^rd August) and, as last year people seemed to be queuing round the block to say, “Are you coming to St Hilda’s?” Yours Truly put in an appearance.

Gosh, I can see why people like it.  St Hilda’s is a lovely venue.  It’s a Victorian college, founded in 1893, and the main building has a real grace and charm.  The setting is perfect, with the river running close to the main door with lawns and trees.  The accommodation is fine, if a bit student-y (it is a college, after all) and the Garden Building, where I was, has a complicated sort of trellis arrangement on the outside.

As a picture paints a thousand words, so to speak, here’s what it looks like from the outside:



Goodness knows what all the woodwork is for, but I can tell you, it’s great for hanging out the white jeans and white tee-shirt that I managed to slosh red wine down.  I don’t know what it is about me, wine and anything coloured white but, as sure as night follows day, the three things will come together and then it’s Ho for the tube of travel wash and some impromptu laundry.

The highlight of Friday night was, without a doubt, the after-dinner speech by Priscilla Masters on the subject of Luck and her early life.  Priscilla’s parents, who sound an incredibly generous and open-hearted couple, adopted Priscilla and six other children (I think it was six;  I was laughing too hard to take notes) the children coming from all four corners of the globe.

The great thing about St Hilda’s is that it doesn’t loose sight of the fact it’s an academic institution.  The speakers present proper papers and I knew I was going to enjoy it when the very first one was Jill Paton Walsh on Lord Peter Wimsey’s first case, the Attenbury emeralds, followed by Kate Charles on Margery Allingham.  Theology, morals, psychology and motivation all got thoroughly analysed and it set the tone for the weekend.  It’s great to have serious stuff like this but treated with enough humour – and there was lots of humour – to lighten the discussion.   It was a bit like the best conversation in the pub who’ve ever had and set the standard of the papers to follow.

Privately, Jane Finnis and myself descended to personalities over a bottle of wine.  I essayed the theory that Rudyard Kipling’s short stories were complicated (Mrs Bathhurst to you, Jane!) Jane took the opposite view  and the ensuing literary discussion (complete with quotes, poetry and yet more wine) was one of the best bits of  the weekend.

The only thing wrong with St Hilda’s isn’t a televisions and I didn’t have a radio.  Dear Lord. This, with England’s fate hanging in the balance at the Oval (Cricket, yes, we’re talking about cricket) was a severe deprivation.  Calls home filled some of the void and so did Len Tyler’s frequent trips to his car radio.  (“We should be at the Oval, Dolores;  Flintoff’s hitting them all over the ground.”)

It was Len (L.C.)Tyler who pondered one of the conundrums of the weekend; when is a Man a Woman?

Now, those of you who know Len, author of the excellent The Herring Seller’s Apprentice, will know that he isn’t given to such deeply philosophical sounding speculations.  Not shortly after breakfast, anyway. I mean, it sounds like something almost German in its complexity.  What it actually was about was the annual meeting of Mystery Women, the group set up by Lizzie Hayes.  I asked if he was attending and hastened to reassure him that mere sex was no barrier.  After all, Martin Edwards and Andrew Taylor are members and Andrew’s got the tee-shirt to prove it!  Len duly attended and after that came the punting.

Okay, hands up, I was pants.  Priscilla Masters, who was watching my attempts from the front of the boat (she was sort of lured into it) eventually took matters into her own hands, suggested I shipped the punt-pole and paddled us up the river.  And back.

And, as I’d been silly enough to get in a punt wearing white jeans, it was back to the laundry again….

All at the seaside

We had the annual family holiday last week.  It wasn’t so much bucket and spade as pack-a-macs and umbrellas and keeping a stiff upper lip. Honestly, I think the Met Office’s prediction of a “Barbecue Summer” is going to be up there with Michael Fish’s famous comment before the hurricane of 1987.  (“There’s a lady who phoned up to say she heard there was a hurricane on the way.  Ho, ho, ho…”)

To those reading this in sunnier climes than Dear Old Blighty, you ought to know there was a time – it seems a long time ago now – when Britain had summers.  This hasn’t happened for a while and this year has been no exception.

The Gordon-Smith troop gave Cornwall the once-over this year.  It actually did stop raining long enough to register but there is a reason why the countryside is so beautifully lush and green.  Plenty of people have written about Cornwall;  here’s one of the reasons why.



Gorgeous, isn’t it?  It’s Mullion Cove, near the Lizard.  We stayed in Carbis Bay, near St Ives of cat fame.  (“As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives.  Every wife had seven sacks and in each sack were seven cats…” etc)  The reason why there were so many cats in St Ives is that the upstairs rooms in this predominantly fishing village were used to store nets and sails and mice loved nibbling away through the ropes.  It was biological warfare up there.  So much so, there was – ages ago – an official cat nurturer who rejoiced in the sobriquet of “Pissy Willy”.  This was your basic, Victorian-style neutering where a couple of bricks and a tom-cat with a pained expression featured.    Apparently Willy also manufactured ice-cream; and was never known to wash his hands.  I mean, it makes you think twice about the nut sundae, doesn’t it!

My holiday reading was Louise Penny. I had the pleasure of meeting Louise and her husband, Michael, a couple of years ago, and we got on like a house on fire.  Gosh, she’s a good writer.  She brings such a sense of place to her stories that I’m sure I could find my way round the fictional village of Three Pines.  Gamache, her detective, is such a nice bloke to spend time with as well, that you feel, by the end of the book, that you’ve made a friend.

St Ives is, of course, known for Art.  There’s lots of hobby painters -  it’s so picturesque that it makes you long for a paint-brush - but real artists live/lived there too.  The most famous is the sculptor, Barbara Hepworth.  She had a studio in St Ives with a garden attached.  The garden is fascinating.  It’s fairly small but full of these amazing sculptures that are positioned against the plants and the settings she chose.  I can’t honestly say I’m a huge fan of abstract art, but I fell in love with that garden.  It’s interesting, too, that her sculptures are so easy to copy –  many a town centre is disfigured by its pointless obligatory lump of Hepworth-style Art – but the real thing has got life and magic all of its own.

Across from Barbara Hepworth’s house is the old Palais de Dance. It’s been unused as a dance-hall for years and now, empty and silent, it’s used as a store-room for Hepworth’s sculptures.  Some of the figures in the garden look like Easter Island figures and it’s odd to think of those stone giants waiting on the dancefloor.  There’s a story in there somewhere;  stone music to breath them into life.  Maybe – in the story – they are dancing but their life runs on such a different scale than ours that we can’t see them move.  Rather like the kids in the morning!

The keen observer (as all the readers of this piece naturally are) will notice that I’ve written anything for the last couple of weeks.  This isn’t idleness (well, not entirely, anyway) but computer gliches.  It’s still not entirely sorted out, but it’s getting there – I hope.  I spent last week off-line altogether and it’s weird how cut-off it makes you feel. Considering that only a few years ago, computers were the stuff of science-fiction, it’s astonishing how necessary they’ve become.  I sometimes feel we’re all going to end up like one of those races they used to have in Star Trek, who are just pure brains and no bodies.  Mind you, I think the Youth of the future will probably have enormous thumbs, because of all the texting they do.

Talking of Youth – mine – we travelled down to Egham, Surrey, to watch Helen’s graduation.  Here’s a picture of all the graduates throwing their hats in the air after the celebration.  It was a wonderful day, set in the architecturally wacky late-Victorian dream of Thomas Holloway’s Royal Holloway.  Royal Holloway is now part of London University but when Thos. built it – it opened in 1886 – it was a women’s only college inspired by his wife, Jane, who reckoned it was a good use of quarter of a million or so.  There’s a statue of Thomas presenting the college to Jane in the middle of the quad and he looks fairly smug about it – and with good reason, too.  There’s few buildings which bear the imprint of their designer quite so blatantly.  It looks like a French château run mad.  It’s impressive but always makes me want to laugh, too – so result!  The graduation started with sparkling wine and Haribos (you know, those squashy sweets) outside the History Department, and then, after this laid-back introduction, we moved into the very formal surroundings of the Chapel.  The Chapel, as you might expect from such a sturdy individualist as Thos, is decorated without a trace of English restraint, but in an exuberant Italian-with-attitude style, glowing with colour and with lots of women saints on the walls.  Here’s a bit of the roof.  Trumpeters sounded, the graduates walked in, received their degrees and the whole thing went like clockwork.  Then it was off outside, into the gigantic Quads, for more sparkling wine and nibbles (if you could get to them; graduating gives the Young a fairly hearty appetite.)   It was a wonderful day; it all ran to plan and even the sun shone. 

The other event worthy of note is that the cat establishment of the Gordon-Smith household is now back up to full strength.  Tospy, The Ancient Of Days, handed in her chips a while ago at the grand old age of 19.  Post of Most Senior Animal was then taken by Snooker (aka “Grumpy”) who is impartially bad-tempered with dog, cat and human alike.  She just can’t see why any other animal is needed and knows just who to blame for disturbing the even tenor of her days. She reminds me of Maurice in Suzette Hill’s “Bones” stories.  Her life didn’t get any better when we arrived home with a new kitten.  Peter had naming rights and – because he’s a bit of a Francophile – chose “Minou”.  Apparently every French children’s story has a cat called Minou.  Perhaps we should try and find her a blue-and-white stripy collar with an onion motif.  Here she is, helping The Graduate at work.  I'm off to Sunny Cornwall (fingers crossed) next week so I'll talk more when I get back.