Fiesta in Andover

Andrew has kindly sent me this list from Waitrose in Andover.

I think these people must have a lot of bomba rice in their cupboard, and so, to celebrate the birthday of their twins (Jake and Jenny, 15), they're planning a huge paella.

With ciabatta. How unauthentic.

Incidentally, Andrew has a suggestion for a tv spin-off from these posts. TV chefs get a random list and have to devise a dish based on the ingredients.

It's close to Ready Steady Cook, but if my niece's sister-in-law is reading, Channel 5 is desperate these days.

My mother's superstitions

A chance remark from my brother in law has reminded me of the bizarre range of superstitions my mum had. Right until the end of her life she could surprise us, by quoting an appropriate reaction to a given situation. Here are some that I remember:

"If you wish to live and thrive, let a spider run alive" - to this day, I can't kill a spider, and will go to enormous lengths to rescue them from the bath.

If you pour out a pot of tea that someone else has made, you'll have ginger twins. (Thinking about it, this must only apply in domestic situations.)

If you give someone a present of a purse or wallet, you should put some money it. This will mean it will never be empty.

Be careful when you're stirring food on the cooker: stir with a knife, stir up strife; stir with a handle, stir up scandal.

Never cross knives.

If the palm of your right hand is itchy, you're going to come into some money; the left hand, you're going to have to pay some out.

If you get a kind of crema on your tea, you may be coming into some money: the amount depends not on the size of the foam, but on how long it lasts.

If your ear's burning, someone's talking about you.

It's unlucky to put new shoes on a table. But I think everyone knows that.

I'm sure I've forgotten loads. Dear readers, few as you are, what superstitions did your parents have? And what's wrong with ginger twins?

There's life out there! Oh, hang on a minute ...

Astonishing news in the Telegraph this morning. On Titan, a moon of Saturn, experts "have discovered that life forms have been breathing in the planet’s atmosphere and also feeding on its surface’s fuel".

That's amazing! They've really discovered life forms outside Earth! This is the biggest event in history ever! So who better to report this than Andrew Hough, who, according to the Telegraph, is "a general news reporter, who covers everything from courts and investigations to 'quirky' internet stories."

Well, at least the Telegraph links to the NASA coverage of this story, which amounts to "nah, not really".

Women Beware Women

Theatre is my summer substitute for football. It gives me that same feeling of sharing experience and emotions, and the same uncertainty of outcome.

Last night was my first play of the summer: Women Beware Women at the Olivier. It's a Jacobean revenge tragedy, which means that, as the song goes, everyone ends in mincemeat. (A bit like any Millwall game.) But before that, it was quite funny. Which makes me think that it owes a lot to Blackadder. (I'm grateful to @lifeformnamedsi for planting this idea in my mind.)

Hang on a minute, you say, but surely it's the other way round. How can this play, from the 17th century, be influenced by a television comedy from the 20th century. Maybe you should phone the helpline the BBC kindly offered for people affected by the issues in this week's Doctor Who. ("Hello? Yes, I hope you can. You see, I seem to have my sense of before and after, causality and consequences, confused. And I can't sell any of my paintings. Say that again? Depression? Mental illness? No. How dare you!" Click.)

But without Blackadder I don't think the production could have been the way it was. Blackadder gave us a framework for understanding historical figures, which this production exploits. To take an example. An idiot boy, called "The Ward", is offered a young woman in marriage. As part of his examination of her suitability, he wants to know if her "underparts" are wild and hairy. Cue lots of business involving him and his servant trying to engineer a situation where they can see up her skirt. Another time he dances with his bride to be and performs a grotesque parody of sexiness.

So the first half of the play was very much in this mould. The text was spoken so that full weight was given to the obscene puns, and there was genuine laughter in the packed, sweaty theatre. In the second half, though, you have to understand the intrigue, the plots that determine who is going to kill whom and why, and that doesn't benefit from the Blackaddering. In the final scene, the director seems to have given up trying to make events clear. The Olivier revolving stage became a carousel of mayhem (and maybe we can see here influences from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. I know I can, but I can see them everywhere.) For five or ten wordless minutes there was a whirligig of stabbing, raping and poisoning. And at the end, a stage littered with bodies, and a sense of not knowing what just happened.

Not knowing what just happened isn't necessarily a bad thing of course. And you could make a case for it being of a piece with the play: events spiral out of hand in a society ungoverned by any morality. But actually that's a pretty poor resolution. It's as unsatisfactory as the superficial resolution of the play itself. The Duke's brother, a Cardinal, appears and gives the moral that without religious authority and fear of God, this is what becomes of society.

We can't take the Cardinal as the voice of truth, for historical and dramatic reasons. Historically, the role and value of a Cardinal in 1620s England would be at best ambiguous. Dramatically, he's a lightweight, and his simplistic characterisation (portrayed in his simplistic reasoning, in which human passions just don't figure) disqualifies him.

Women beware women ... A very striking feature of the play is the prominence of female characters. Three of them have an extraordinary amount of lines, and they are actively instrumental in moving on the action of the play. They either begin corrupt or become so very quickly. On the face of it, the title suggests this is a cautionary tale, but again that seems an inadequate summary.

The production's had good reviews, as far as I can see, largely because of the humour, which I shouldn't disparage. But I don't think it holds together. I think this isn't the production that will make sense of the play to a current audience, despite the help of Blackadder, David Brent and Hitchcock.

Whatever you love

If Nicola Barker is my favourite living novelist writing in English, then Louise Doughty may be my favourite person who writes novels in English. You understand the difference? I enjoy Nicola Barker's books much more, but don't know if she's a nice person. Sometimes it's better not to find out. When I first read James Joyce's scatalogical letters to Nora, I was shocked. (Which says more about what kind of naive idiot I was than it does about him.) But I know Louise is a kind and generous person, with a real passion for the cause of the underdog.

Reading Louise's new book, Whatever You Love, feels a bit like reading the diary of someone disturbed and damaged. That's because she's written it to be that way, not because she is either of those things. What she has is an extraordinary ability to imagine and describe the worst kind of pain. In this case, it's the death of a child. There's a relentless examination of the effects of that death on the child's mother. Louise drags you down into this hell, and you have to trust her to pull you back out of it. Does she? Well, kind of. The ending isn't redemptive; things don't suddenly get better, but that's realistic, I suppose.

There isn't much in the way of plot. A few mysteries are posed and resolved, but that isn't the point of the book. The narrative is above all concerned with answering the question of what it takes to get over such a loss.

Why do I prefer Nicola Barker's books? The key thing is the brilliance and daring of the writing. While Burley Cross Postbox Theft was a series of letters, she didn't hesitate to give those letters an unlikely verbosity and sparkle. Louise is much closer to a realistic tradition. This book is a first person narrative, and Laura, the narrator, occasionally speaks in flat sentences, sometimes using awkward clichés. I think Louise would agree that she doesn't do fireworks; neither do I, which may be why I like it so much in writers like Angela Carter or, in a different way, P G Wodehouse.

So, am I recommending this book? Yes, obviously, because it's by someone I admire so much. But it's a tough read, and while it may increase you understanding, it won't cheer you up.

Beim Kaufengehen

A real treasure trove in my inbox, from Clive and his daughter, my niece, Caroline. First two, from Waitrose in Sundridge Park, where the one in German is more comprehensible than the second, to whom chicken seems to be important.

And then two from Waitrose at Bromley South. A fairly sparse barbecue and Lies and Tangerines, a new film by Mike Leigh.

Blackpool? And I don't say this often: WTF?

Just over a year ago a draw with Blackpool meant that Charlton's relegation to the third circle of hell was confirmed. They (Blackpool) were rubbish (admittedly, so were Charlton, but we'd got used to that by then). I blogged that match wondering how they weren't in the relegation mix too, and assumed it must have been because they never gave up, in contrast to Charlton, who gave up in the warm-up half the time.

Well, once again I've proved my lack of skill as a pundit, since Blackpool have got into the Premier League through the play-offs. I haven't followed the second division this season, so don't know if they've suddenly acquired some skill or if they've just built up that spirit. But to go from last season's team to promotion is astonishing. It's a huge achievement by Ian Holloway, and if he stays with the club it'll be fun to have him on telly more often next season.

I'd rather have Blackpool and Holloway in the Premier League than a lot of the teams and managers that are there, and I wish them well, but surely they've got to be the hottest favourites for immediate relegation since, well, Burnley last year.