Eighteen With A Custard Cream

It was my daughter Lucy’s eighteenth birthday this week.  I’m sure this will seem familiar to many mums, but when the dickens did little Lucy get to be 18?  I’m sure she wasn’t anything like that age last time I looked.  However, there it was.  And Lucy (with some justification) thought that steps should be taken to celebrate.  The trouble was that two of her friends were also 18 last week and the prime time slot of Saturday night had been taken, as was Friday, so that pushed us back to Thursday.

It went like a dream.  There’s something to be said for being the first in the line of the party-givers, because everyone is fresh and ready for it, whereas come Saturday night, a certain amount of party-droop has set in.

There’s more to giving a party than meets the eye.  You have to hire a room, hire a DJ and – of course – decorate the place.  We covered the tables with blue paper with gold stars, which looked nice, had blue and gold helium balloons and lots of decorations saying 18!!!  That, plus the disco lights, made it look great.  And, of course, there was the cake.  For as long as anyone can remember, Lucy’s favourite biscuit has been custard creams.  She can consume vast amounts of them (without putting on any extra pounds as far as I can make out) so, when it came to a theme for her cake, there was only one real candidate.

Enter the Custard Cream…



It was about two feet by eighteen (how appropriate!) inches and was a real hit.  It’s not really a big biscuit.  All the decoration was laboriously shaped out of icing and put on by yours truly.  It took hours. Was it worth it?  Of course it was.

And then there were the pizzas.  It’s a waste of time doing a “proper” buffet for a teenagers’ party.  Everyone’s dancing and far too busy to eat, but pizzas sounded like a good idea. So I ordered pizzas from the local take-away.  Now let me see… About 60 teenagers equals about 30 pizzas plus 20 pizza-sized garlic breads.  That’s about right, isn’t it?  Er, no.  Have you any idea how much room 50 pizza boxes takes up? As yet more pizza boxes arrived, I felt like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia doing the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  You know, when he casts the spell and all the brushes and buckets come to life and he can’t turn it off.  Pizzas! shouted everyone enthusiastically and proceeded to ignore them in order to get on with dancing.  At the end of the evening, I stood by the door, giving them out like party bags.  Apparently there were a lot of teenagers eating pizza next day in college.  One of these days they’ll work out how to eat at the party but that’s when sober middle age strikes.  Hopefully that’s a long way off.  I’m still getting over the fact she’s eighteen.

Seeing the Pope

Jenny and Lucy went to see the Pope, which isn’t something you do every week.  I had to get them to the school gates for two in the morning (again, not something that I do often) for them to get down to Twickenham on the coach in time for the Big Assembly, as the mass-meeting with school-children and various educators was called.  It all went tickety-boo, apparently, and they’ve got various bags and books and little flags as mementoes.

We’ve all seen the Pope before, in what you might call his natural habitat of St Peter’s Square.  It was Easter Sunday morning, a couple of years ago and we’d gone on a coach trip to Italy.  (Leger Coaches; highly recommended.)  Spring in Italy! I said, selling the idea like mad to my nearest and dearest.  Goodness knows what I thought it’d be like – sort of springlike, I suppose – and waxed as lyrical as a tourist brochure.  Manchester to Rome? queried the partner of my joys and sorrows.  Isn’t that a bit of a long journey?  We’ll love it, I assured him.  Won’t it be interesting to actually drive through Europe.

Well, we were both right.  Blimey, Rome’s so far away, I don’t know how the Ancient Romans, who seem to pop up everywhere, every made it, let alone stroll round Britain as if they owned the place.  And they didn’t have coaches. Mind you, the weather in Ancient Mamucium must have made them feel at home.  I’ve never encountered so much rain in all my born days as we did in Italy in the spring.  It was like being underwater.  Molto agitato said the weatherman on the Italian TV.  (We nicknamed him Colonel Weather because, oddly to our eyes, he was dressed up in full air force uniform with a moustache Hercule Poirot would have a hissy fit over.)  Anyway, it molto agitatioed and then some.

Now, the thing about coach trips is that you chum up with the other passengers and one girl, Charlotte, we got on with like a house on fire.  Charlotte was Jewish and quickly cottoned on to the fact we were Catholics.  At this point, the fairly glamorous thirty-year old Charlotte turned into my mother.   “You must,” she said, organizing the Gordon-Smiths, “see the pope. You can’t come to Rome and not see the Pope.  You must,” she said firmly, “be longing to see the Pope.”  Well, I wasn’t conscious of longing exactly, but there we were on Easter Sunday morning in the huge crowds outside St Peter’s Square and there, in the very far distance, was the Pope.

Charlotte was thrilled.  As the rain beat down, all the Gordon-Smiths got wetter and wetter and our thoughts turned fondly in the direction of a café.  Coffee. Tea. Food.  Not raining.  So, much to Charlotte’s horror, we upped sticks and beetled off.  She scurried after us, a drenched but determined Jewish mentor, reminding us of our religious duties.  “At the very least,” she said, sounding more like my mother than ever,“you must go to Mass.”  So, we Charlotte behind, encouraging us on, she ushered us into a church and, duty done, we found a café. There, on a television screen, was coverage of the ceremony still proceeding a few hundred yards away, under a haze of water, with depressed blokes in wet hats with wet feathers in them were gathered round a wet Pope.  “I told you,” said Charlotte, pointing to the TV screen in triumph, “that you had to see the Pope.”  Cup of delicious Italian coffee in hand, I thought it was a pretty good compromise.

Home-made Chutney

Autumn, I’m afraid, is a coming in, as a medieval poet might say.  Or, as Keats phrased it, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close-bosomed friend of the maturing sun.”  I admit you’d have to look pretty damn hard to see any sun in Manchester recently – the mist element has been stressed rather a lot, also the pelting rain – but it did dry up long enough last weekend to let me pick the apples.

We’ve got two smallish apple trees, a Worcester Pearmain and a Granny Smiths and both trees have produced a bumper crop.

So what on earth do you do with zillions of apples?  Eat them, yes, I’d got as far as that myself, but there’s a limit to how many apples even a family our size can munch through.  So I turned to chutney.

Wow.  It’s gorgeous.  There’s something about home-made chutney that knocks any other sort of pickle into a cocked hat.  What you should do, according to the recipe, is leave the chutney in a cool dark cupboard for two to three months (and if that’s not handy for Christmas, I don’t know what is.)  The trouble is, it tastes so fantastic, we’ve been through two jars already, and, as it’s just crying out for a knock-your-socks-off cheddar to go with it, it’s not doing my diet any good.

Here’s the recipe if you want to give it a go.

1 pound of onions

4 pounds of apples

8 ounces of dried fruit

1 ounce of ginger

1 ounce of paprika

1 ounce of mixed spice

1 ounce of salt

1 and a half pounds of granulated sugar

A pint and a half of malt vinegar

Chop up the apples and the onions and put them into a big pan. The great thing about using up the apples in this way, is that you can use all the very tiny ones that will never be much good for eating.  I put them into the vinegar right away, and then they don’t start going brown and sad looking.  Add everything else, bring it to the boil and then let it simmer for three hours or so.  Give it a stir every so often.  You can tell it’s ready when it goes fairly thick and, if you draw a wooden spoon across the mixture, it leaves a channel that doesn’t immediately fill with liquid.

In the meantime, sterilize your jam-jars.  The easiest way of doing this is to put a titchy bit of cold water in the bottom and give each jar a minute in the microwave.  You’ll have to sterilize the  lids too, and the easiest way to do that is by boiling them in water for a while.  (Five minutes or so should do it.)  Then – carefully because they’re hot (der!) – put the jars in a warm oven to dry out.

Then put the chutney into the warm jars with a little greaseproof or waxed paper insert on top of the chutney.  That stops the metal in the lid reacting with the vinegar in the chutney.  Then wait two to three months… if you can!

The Importance of Being Bone Idle

Assiduous readers might have noticed (!) that I’ve recently published a book on Amazon’s Kindle.  Now, one of the ways that a basically idle writer can escape work (ie, the hard stuff where you sit down and actually make the stuff up) is by dickering about on a computer.  You know the sort of thing:  read the emails, reply to the emails, read all the emails on any lists you subscribe to (Crime Through Time and DorothyL in my case) reply to same, check the lyrics on Google of that song that you can’t place, and – and this is a real trap – check your ratings on Amazon.  Geesh, that takes time!  I can’t tell you how long you can nosy round Amazon, gently reassuring yourself it’s sort of work.  This is the sort of inner dialogue that goes on.

CONSCIENCE:         Well, here we are, bright and early, ready to start work, yes?

SELF:                          Let me just see what the rest of the world is up to, yes?

CONSCIENCE:         You could do some work first.

SELF:                          Whimper!  What if the editor’s emailed?  I can’t miss that, can I?

CONSCIENCE:            Okay, just check.  See?  There’s nothing there that can’t wait.

SELF:                          But… But… I need to see if anyone’s left a review on Amazon. (BRIGHTLY) I need to know about that, don’t I?

CONSCIENCE:            Do it later!

SELF:                          Now!  Want it now!  (IN DEFIANCE OF CONSCIENCE LOGS ONTO AMAZON)

CONSCIENCE:            (THWARTED, CONSCIENCE RETIRES INTO A CORNER AND SULKS.)

This is roughly the sort of thing that happens most mornings.  However, every so often, SELF scores the winning goal, so to speak.  You see, the thing about Amazon is that the ratings are updated every hour, and if some kindly-minded individual (or even small groups of same) has bought your book that’ll send your ratings soaring.  And if you don’t check your ratings NOW, as SELF would say, you’ll never know that for one brief shining moment, you’ve actually blipped on the Top Anything.  And yesterday morning, after CONSCIENCE and SELF had had their usual knock-down, drag-out fight, SELF proudly reported to CONSCIENCE that – wait for it – Frankie’s Letter was Number 76 in Kindle’s Action and Adventure category, Number 14 in Spy Stories and Tales of Intrigue (Incidentally, when was the last time you logged onto Amazon and thought, “D’you know what, I fancy a Tale of Intrigue” or, when the partner of your joys and sorrows says, “What are you reading?” reply “A Tale of Intrigue, darling.”? My other half would think I was bonkers) and Number 9 – Number 9! – in British Detectives.

SELF had a celebration.  CONSCIENCE has moodily admitted that SELF sometimes has a point.

Gone Fishin'

I suppose it started with Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall, the floppy-haired and engaging cook and food enthusiast of TV’s River Cottage series. Week after week Hugh grows, hunts and finds ingredients for an always wonderful meal which he whips up on the beach, in a field, or on a boat in what always seems to be perfect weather with a bunch of really good mates.

In the recent series, Hugh was catching fish. He made it seem entrancing.  And the idea is, O Idle Viewer, that we couch potatoes can also pop down to Jersey for a bit of Sea Bream or up to Skye for a chance at the mackerel etc, etc.  (The episode where he ate a bit of jellyfish is not one I’m going to copy.)  But, jellyfish aside, it all looked wonderful.

And, d’you know, I’ve got a fishing rod.  To be honest, I’m not sure why.  I’ve spent various seaside holidays where we’ve succumbed to the lure of fishing trips, and then I've  been lumbered with doing something (like cleaning, scaling, gutting and cooking) to a mixed batch of finny denizens.  And, what with one thing and another, I’ve been led to reflect that seaside fish is better deep-fried and wrapped in newspaper with plenty of vinegar and a portion of chips.  But Hugh F-W made it look sooooo much fun.   “Can we,” said Helen, swivelling round from the couch where she’d potatoed, “go fishing?”

Now, there’s certain obstacles to be overcome; even the most passionate Mancunian will agree that Manchester is not lapped by the ocean waves. Or traversed by swiftly-flowing rivers (not that you’d want to eat out of, at any rate) or, indeed, the willow-fringed, grassy-banked, sparkling trout streams of my imagination.  So when I went to the local angling shop, and asked where I could go fishing, I wasn’t very surprised when the bloke behind the counter shrugged and said, “The canal.”

Oh, and I needed a rod-licence, too. And a landing-net. And bait?

Nothing, I said firmly, as he reached for the maggots, that’s minging.

Maggots are undeniably minging.

Plastic maggots, then?

Plastic maggots?

So, yeah, okay, I know it’s odd, but I spent £1.99 on a packet of plastic maggots.  They smell of pineapple which fish apparently find irresistible.  They like sweetcorn too, apparently. Where on earth do the fish get these advanced tastes from?  I can understand a fish in the Huddersfield Canal being switched on by the scent of old shopping trolleys and take-away cartons, but sweetcorn and pineapples?  Maybe they migrate…

So armed with niffy plastic maggots, sweetcorn, a rod licence, a net and a bit of hope, I stationed myself by the canal, baited the rod and waited.  Helen sat on the picnic rug and, sketch book in hand, whiled away the time until she could get busy with the landing-net.

Now before anyone wonders if they’ll shortly be called up upon to choose between flowers or a donation to charity, let me reassure you.  There is no way, ever, that I would eat anything out of that canal.  All I want to do is snare a fish, admire it, take its photograph and return it to its native element. This (see my thoughts on cleaning, scaling, gutting and cooking above) seems like a good deal to me. I’m not sure what the fish would think, but it might entertain some mordant thoughts on the nuttiness of human behaviour.

The fish tried.  They loved the sweetcorn.  They ate it off the hook and came back for more.  That rod is the most complicated way of giving a fish a healthy snack ever devised.  We re-baited the hook and tried again.  And again.  And then It Happened.  There was a massive tug at the line.  Now, there’s not just tiddlers in that canal.  There’s at least one twenty-pound pike and the way the rod bent double I could believe I’d got it.  The line must have stretched, because I reeled in and reeled in and still there was a terrific threshing in the murky waters.  “Reel it in, Mum!” yelled Helen.  “I’m doing it!” I said… And then Helen put the net in the water. Now she didn’t mean to hit the fish, but she did.  And broke the line. There was a clunk, a final tug and the fish was gone.  An irritated-looking shiny black back rose twice out of the water and that was it.  This never happened to Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall.  Fishing on the telly is easy.

Frankie's Letter

Whisper it softly, but I think I’ve just published a book.  Yes, I know, it’s normally something anyone’s in two minds about, but this is an ebook, you see, and I’ve got nothing to hold in my hand.  You know when you go onto Amazon? Well, buried in the reviews and the ratings and all the general gubbins, there’s a bright little message saying words to the effect of, “Are you an author or publisher?  Then publish on Kindle!”

Now, I’ll be honest.  I’m not a Luddite, exactly, but I’d never really fancied ebooks all that much.  And then our Jenny celebrated her 16^th birthday with an ipad.  Wow.  I mean, seriously, wow.  It works like greased lightning and the books on it are amazing. Ebooks suddenly seemed like a really good idea.

So I thought okey-doke….  As it happens, I have a book – a book that I’m very fond of – that’s never seen the light of day. It’s called Frankie’s Letter – remember that title.  Make a note.  A note to the tune of, “Frankie’s Letter.  What an enthralling title for a book.  You know, I’d love to read a book called Frankie’s Letter.  Frankie’s Letter sounds terrific.  I wish I owned a book called Frankie’s Letter.”  Bounce up and down on the spot if you like – I’m not at all judgemental and, besides, it’ll entertain the kids and bewilder the cat.   Frankie’s Letter. It’s not a Jack Haldean but a complete new venture.  It’s a First World War spy thriller, which I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing.  I’ve always wanted to write about the period of the First World War, but I didn’t want to write a war story as such.  The war was so immense and so shattering to the people in it, that simply telling a straight-forward war story seemed – well, irrelevant, somehow.  After all, with the world crashing round your ears, hunting out fingerprints and pondering long and hard about how deeply the parsley had sunk into the butter on a hot day or whatever seemed trivial.  I mean, I’m as fond of sunken parsley as the next person, so to speak, but the circumstances have to be right.

And then I got my big idea.  Yup, write about the war but write about the war from a distance.  I needed someone who was capable of acting on their own (as a hero who has to keep trotting off for orders is not very heroic!) who was affected by the war and, ideally, could affect the war too.  Hang on a mo.  What about a secret agent?  What indeed. And so Anthony Brooke was born.

He was and is a doctor, but, because of his fluency in German (Hey!  He’s my hero!  He can have whatever attributes that come in handy!) he gets swept up and sent of to Germany at the start of the war as an undercover agent.  All is well until another agent comes staggering into his room and, with his dying breath, tells Anthony there’s a spy in England who knows Big Stuff and, if Anthony reads Frankie’s letter, it’ll tell him all about it.  That’s the start and I think it’s pretty good, not to be overly modest about it. Anthony ends up back in Dear Old Blighty where there’s some very dodgy dealings going on, with beautiful, jewel-encrusted women, mysterious deaths, more spies (it was sort of “buy one, get one free in the spy shop” that day) grand country mansions, a spot of romance (see the jewel-encrusted woman above) and so on and so forth.  Ace.

So back to the Kindle process.  There’s a nice little message when you’ve finished uploading the book to say that for the next 48 hours your precious book is going to be “Previewed” (a sort of electronic limbo, I suppose) and then… Well, hopefully it’ll be on my Amazon page and everyone can get stuck in and start reading.  But it is odd about all this electronic stuff.  Somehow or other it’s hard to believe it’s real.  Fingers crossed.  Oh, and did I mention the title? Frankie’s Letter.

The gentle art of getting noticed

As you can see from the excited squeak of joy below about Killer Books, I was pretty pleased with things this week.  I seemed to spend so long chewing the carpet about not being published, that when it finally happened, I thought words to the effect of “Here we go!  It’s all plain sailing from now on.”  (As a matter of fact, I thought nothing nearly so coherent;  I thought, if you can dignify the process by the word “thought” “!!!@**” or perhaps “???” and even,“^&%!!” with a quick “$*&!!£!^^” thrown in for good measure.)

And, I must say, being published is a lot – so much - better than not being published but it does mean that there’s new challenges.  Publicity, for instance.  Now you know – because you’re obviously a well informed, thoughtful type of person – that my books are excellent.  Not only are they easy to read with gripping stories, they can, at a pinch, be used to prop up a wonky table, stop a sofa cushion from sagging, provide a really classy mouse mat, serve as a platform for a performing gerbil or act as a very small pillow.  However, not everyone knows that.

And that’s where publicity comes in.  When two or three writers are gathered together, it’s the subject that always crops up.  This isn’t personal, you understand.  I am typical of many and live for Art alone, but editors love sales.  It’s just altruistic kindness to them, you understand.  So what on earth, apart from shouting in the street, which will earn you nothing but censorious glances, can you do?  Well, there’s magazines, of course.  Writing Magazine is always a good bet, as they frequently carry stories about the newly-published. (I’d recommend Writing Magazine anyway as an excellent way to keep in touch with the writing world). Depending on how thin the news is,  local papers can be interested in a local author.  (Sometimes news in local papers can be very thin indeed; my favourite local paper headline is “Worksop Man Dies Of Natural Causes”). There’s local radio, too.  That’s sometimes iffy in its results, though.  I did two and a half hours once on local radio.  I thoroughly enjoyed it but I can’t say I had a huge listening public. Peter was away and my Dad, a keen tennis fan, was watching Andy Murray.  One man rang in to ask if we could stop talking and play more music and another texted to say that he hadn’t got one of the jokes.  Ah well, you can’t win ’em all…

The internet though…  For anyone of a certain age – and in this context that means anyone roughly over twenty – it’s incredible how easy it is to be in touch with someone a few thousand miles away.  When A Hundred Thousand Dragons came out, I emailed the independent bookshops in the USA to tell them about it.  The addresses are there on the internet.  Beth Kanell of Kingdom Books, Vermont, read the book and really liked it (Yo! Result!) and submitted a review to the monthly round-up of books promoted by the Independent Booksellers’ Association – and bingo!  Dragons is a Killer Book.