You can’t say that, by Ken Livingstone

These are Ken’s memoirs and, like several other books I have read recently, was a recommendation from a friend. My heart sank slightly at the size of it – 710 pages in the paperback edition – and it has taken me months to finish it. The weight of it was a disincentive to carrying it to read on the train, and it is a relatively serious read, which meant it was not always something I felt up to tackling at bedtime. However, the recommendation was entirely justified.

If you lived in or near London during the period covered – from the late Sixties right up to 2011 – you will recall at least some, if not all, of the events covered. And it is an entertaining read – Ken has quite a wit and although there are endless details of political in-fighting, some of which I will admit to gliding over, it was always interesting and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. I suspect that every reader will take something different from it, to support their own beliefs and prejudices, but what I think I had not realised before was for how long political discussion and disagreement has been overshadowed by personal viciousness and muck-spreading. The book largely succeeds in redressing the balance for those who only remember “Red Ken and the scandals at County Hall” rather than what actually happened. 

Ken is no saint but his book reveals him as a careful thinker and a conscientious worker, in striking contrast to his successor as Mayor. I know which I would rather have on my side.

Obsession

I am not proud of my indiscriminate promiscuity. I must have done the deed thousands of times and, no matter how invigorating, entrancing or utterly pleasurable it was, I very rarely return to the same partner and most of the time I cannot even remember their names or what they looked like. When it is over, the itch to repeat it starts almost immediately, to do it again and again and to do it better. 

But that’s how it is, isn’t it, when you are a compulsive reader of books?

Words of warning

This blog is going to change.

What seems now like a long time ago, I was an employed person, working full-time in a library, specifically in bibliographical services, and having opinions about such things which I occasionally thought worth sharing, although quite often I felt I had to bite my tongue. I created a blog to discuss professional issues and advertised it to those who I thought might be interested, and was gratified by your feedback. It provided a really useful space to air ideas and opinions and to learn from other people.

At the same time, I had a private life (albeit not much of one) and I created another blog, this one, which focussed on those things which happened to me as a private person and which allowed me to write about anything and everything which interested me. I kept it deliberately pretty anonymous and I didn’t advertise it much, if at all. Probably no one read it, and that was fine by me, because it was (and remains) the process of writing that satisfied me. 

Slowly, over the last eighteen months, things have changed. I retired from paid employment and although I still think about libraries and what happens in them, and what should happen, and why it sometimes doesn’t, I admit that what used to be a tight focus on bib services has gradually widened. Because of that, I stopped writing on my professional blog. After all, I could not assume that its readers would be interested in all the other stuff.

The distinction between professional and private life is always a precarious one. Years ago, what happened at work stayed at work and what happened at home stayed at home. The journey between work and home acted as a pretty safe seal, an airlock, between those two different worlds. Over the last five years, things have changed and especially the arrival of social media and mobile devices has meant that what were two distinct areas of life have bled together. And the distinction between my two blogs, which was always artificial to an extent, became difficult to maintain and difficult to justify. And now, with my change of lifestyle bringing the freedom of retirement and it no longer being the case that I feel it prudent to maintain a public face which might be cooler, more rigorous and more focussed than my private face, I am killing my other blog and this is going to be the only one.

I hope I shall meet here some folk who have travelled across, as well as some new readers. There may even be some library-related stuff starting to appear here, because I am still engaged with libraries, and this is going to be the place where anything and everything can be raised, whatever world it comes from. So, thanks for listening – and I shall keep writing, and hope that some of you will keep reading. 

Welcome to my new world.

Farewell, old friend

I didn’t want to see our old cooker being taken away. I get quite sentimental at times like that and tend to believe that inanimate objects have some sort of souls, whereas I have met human beings where it would be hard to make a case for them having any kind of soul at all. Our new cooker had been delivered and dumped, all white and shiny and wrapped in plastic and polystyrene, in the middle of the kitchen – and suddenly the kids shouted for me to come, to come at once and, not thinking, I did. So I saw our dear old cooker being wheeled unceremoniously away on a trolley and thrown, without much care, into the back of a van and driven off. And yes, I shed a tear and was mocked for it.

I have spent so much time with that old cooker. I have mopped it and polished it and cursed the stubborn spills; I have cooked all sorts of meals on it, from everyday suppers to celebration dinners, and baked all the birthday cakes for eighteen years. Half-witted with tiredness I have stood gormlessly and watched the kettle boil on it; I have leant against its comforting warmth on cold days and nights. It has been loyal always - I have burned toast, boiled milk over, and turned out a few entirely inedible productions, and always blamed the cooker, and it stood silently and never argued its innocence. And at the end of its life we just threw it away.

I daresay I shall get used to the new cooker, the nasty thing. But it is going to take a while.

Cooker-less cooking

Without a cooker we have been struggling. I had better explain, for the sake of younger readers, that we are old fogeys who actually cook our own food. By that, I mean that we go to the shops (or, sometimes, down the garden), acquire ingredients, and make them into a meal. It seems that we are in a minority and the rest of the world does things differently.

The first awful night, faced with no prospect of dinner of any kind, we went to the Chinese takeaway. On the second night, we went to the chip shop. On the third night, I was home alone and had a bit of salad and a toasted sandwich. Which brings us to the toastie-maker. This is just about the only piece of electrical kitchen kit that we possess which has the power to actually cook anything. It is extremely old and heavy and was one of Grandma’s cast-offs, about twenty years ago, since when, with the exception of the odd burst of enthusiasm, it has sat in the cupboard and gathered dust. We have had quite a number of toasted sandwiches over the last week with the result that enthusiasm waned quite fast but, even if they come out a rather odd shape and only lukewarm by the time they hit the plate, they were about the only hot food we could contrive. Did you know that you can make toast in a toastie-maker, just by putting in a plain piece of bread? The same qualities of weird shape and lukewarm-ness applied, but it is toast of a kind, even if not toast as we know it, Jim. I even found myself looking at the toastie-maker and wondering if it would be possible to fry an egg on it. After a few cooker-less days, you start to think like that.

The next night, we had salad. This was partly because we were getting heartily sick of takeaways and partly because there was food in the fridge which had just sat there and wasn’t improving with time. It was with deep solemnity that we ate the last three hard-boiled eggs, rather in the manner of a shipwrecked sailor eating the last ship’s biscuit when there was still no sight of land. It was a cold night and salad wasn’t the ideal choice of evening meal.

The next day we bought a microwave. 

We have lived with microwave cookers in various holiday accommodation, always regard them with deep suspicion and rarely if ever use them. Grandma has one, which was bought for her by various members of her extended family when she fell and broke her wrist some years ago, the idea being that she could quickly rustle up a hot meal for herself. She uses it now to store her stash of chocolate biscuits, which seems to me to be about the best possible use for it. However, the kids were adamant that a microwave was a wonderful invention and have been agitating for years that we should buy one; during their student years, they assured us that they used little else. Finally we kind-of agreed that it could be the house’s Christmas present this year, although still unconvinced that we would ever use it; and so, buying it last week just fulfilled a half-hearted promise.

It struck me as odd that the microwave, unlike just about every other cooking gadget that we have ever bought, didn’t come with a little recipe book. We got one with the breadmaker, for example, and one with the food processor. Our kitchen bookcase is full of little booklets that came with various bits of kit. Having absolutely no idea how microwave cookery works, we spent an hour wandering round the supermarket picking up items of food and reading the instructions. This way we hoped to get an understanding of what was possible, and what was not possible. A surprising number of things are labelled as “Not suitable for microwave cookery”, including pies and garlic bread. Why you can’t heat up garlic bread in the microwave I have yet to discover. And then the truth dawned that the only use its manufacturers envisaged for the microwave was to heat up ready-meals. Which, of course, we never buy. 

Our hopes dashed, we retired to the supermarket café and this is the time to give a big shout out to Morrisons all-day breakfast. Cold cereal and deformed toast doesn’t make a revitalising start on a cold winter morning, but a few minutes down the road you can get a plate piled high with eggs and beans and mushrooms and tomato and hash browns and hot buttered toast (hot! buttered!) for a derisory amount of money, as long as you don’t mind sitting with all the other poor people and none of your friends or neighbours see you there. I am not surprised that the café was full while the aisles were empty.

But back we had to go and try to find something to heat up for dinner, which was a dispiriting task. Even amongst the meals which didn’t contain meat, there was a lack of anything with vegetables in any recognisable form and portion sizes were tiny while the cost was exorbitant. “How much?” we kept asking.  “How much?” We had already lost our appetites, and reading the ingredients didn’t make us feel hungry. When we cook, we know what goes into what we eat, and I have never used most of the things which are to be found in ready meals. As ever, we compromised.

Over the next couple of days it became clear that yes, the children had used microwaves extensively as students; and no, they had no idea of using them for anything other than quickly heating expensive little plastic trays of questionable content. When I asked them for suggestions as to what we could cook for supper in this exciting new gadget, they had no answer. We began to fear the onset of scurvy, assuming that poverty didn’t do for us first.

None of our old-fashioned cookery books had much advice about microwave cookery. It doesn’t figure in the works of Jane Grigson or Elizabeth David. My trusted old Good Housekeeping book predates it by decades. But never underestimate the value of research skills, allied to logical analysis and the BBC website. Last night my daughter came up to me conspiratorially and said, “Do you know what Dad’s doing? He’s cooking fish – raw fish – in the microwave!” She plainly thought that she had hard evidence at last that her father had reached senility. I smiled serenely. “Yes, my dear”, I replied. “It’s going to be delicious!” And it was.