Emily's Articles

Ginger Rogers in Cheek to Cheek by Emily Tellwright, 2026 New Year Books I had more time than usual for reading over Christmas and New Year, mainly because I abandonned social media. Fortunately, Santa had provided me with lots of interesting things to read, and it being a time for relaxation I picked the lighter options first. If you have read my writing style page, you will not be surprised that many of these are old books, or re-publications of lost works. There is a lot to be learned about plotting, pacing and the balance between plot and character from good vintage mysteries and thrillers. I am sorry to say that I find that the literary quality of many of these superior to contemporary serious fiction. The times we live in call desperately for new stories. I strongly believe that that is true on every level, from politics and economics to light entertainment. That means that the literary but entertaining style is much more appropriate now than experimental language and forms. Engaging plots and characters expressing important feelings and ideas in lucid, readable, good quality prose are what is needed. Reviews With this in mind, I am doing a short video series reviewing my Christmas reads on our YouTube channel with a new short coming out every couple of days. I didn't enjoy all the books, but there was something to learn in every case. Here's the first one. You can subscribe to the channel to hear when new videos are available. New Year Art: More Gingers The Ginger Rogers drawings series is progressing. I am hoping to launch the Fred and Ginger products on the store in February. They have all been challenging, and today's image had pressures of its own being by far her most famous outfit ever. You probably know that if you slow the Cheek to Cheek dance sequence (from which this post is taken) down you can see feathers floating off the dress and getting in Fred Astaire's face. Feathers The feathers are not too difficult to capture, but the pose and proportions need to be just right or she morphs from the epitome of 1930s elegance to a dumpy cloud! Finding contrast and definition in a large block of white is difficult, and I am pleased with the result. One of the things I have noticed while working on these drawings is how the movement of the long skirts closely alligns with her legs underneath, even in this very fluffy example. If you follow the line of her left leg up from her shoe, you will see that it is also the line of the shadow in the skirt. I had expected the dresses to have more independent movement. And that's a note of caution for modern digital photographers. When you draw something complex, you have to spend a lot of time looking at what is really there in front of you. You find that often reality is not what you expect. When I trained in Affinity Photo, I was shocked at the degree to which digital photgraphic processing involved taking an image and then altering it to fit some fashionable fantasy that had nothing to do with what had been in front of the camera lens. History of Feathers The original dress is now in a museum (if anyone knows which one, do put it in the comments). A staff member at a feather processor developed a technique for straightening the feathers to give this elegant, drapey effect. She guarded the secret and never passed it on, and no one has managed to recreate it. So this dress is unique. New Year Books and Art It's been a turbulant start to 2026 for JB and myself at Castle Sefton Press with family and financial challenges. (We are both fine now, so please don't worry). And as ever I seem to be behind where I'd hoped to be. However, we both have new projects under way. I have almost left social media altogether, having previously written about my problems with Meta. Much as I enjoy making short-form videos for TikTok, I have not managed to find anyone interested in my style of reading and writing after four months. I think this is an image problem of the platform. There is no reason why people with those tastes shouldn't be on TikTok, but they probably have a negative idea of what it is like and think it is not for them. So I'm not sure that there is much value in my trying to keep up with the relentless demands of the algorithm. I also think that there are worrying signs that TikTok UK is moving in the direction of Facebook. Less content is being shown to followers and there are more prompts for payment. Whether this has anything to do with the US takeover, I couldn't say. Perhaps all social platforms self-destruct from greed and control when they get big enough. I'm developing a presence on Pinterest and YouTube instead. New Book I have a title for my new novel, which I hope will be the first in a series. I'm planning to sit down and get the first words onto paper in the second week of February. I'll let you know if that happens. It's forming as something deeper and more serious than Ghost Train in my head. But I expect there will be a fair amount of humour when it emerges onto the page. New Art As well as the Fred and Ginger series, I have an abstract series that will be launched around Easter. Over summer I'm hoping to extend my range of animal art and add it to a greater range of products. I had thought of adding some of our range to Etsy, but the fees are now eye-watering. And like TikTok Shop, it is stuffed with what I can only describe as tat being sold at prices that don't even cover the cost of the materials that formed it. Sometimes I feel that launching an online store today feels like opening a shop in Pompeii just as Vesuvius started to erupt: the infrastructure on which you have placed your business is collapsing around you. Thanks So that makes supporters like you more valuable than ever. Thanks once again for reading this post, and do subscribe if you haven't already. I will never send spam or share your details, and you can unsubscribe at any time. If you like videos, consider subscribing to our YouTube channel too, and perhaps visit Castle Sefton Press. Sharing is helpful too, but only with those you think would enjoy my work. I'll be back soon. Hopefully with the finished Fred and Ginger series and news on the start of the new book.

Christmas Tree, by Emily Tellwright, 2025 Christmas Art Breakthrough I'm so pleased with this year's festive art work, not only because so many friends and family members have said how much they like it. I'm delighted because the painting marked a major development in my acrylic painting (the first of my Christmas breakthroughs). A bit of personal art history I have been 'doing art' for as long as I can remember. One of my childhood memories is of coming across some old metal tubes of dried-up oil paint with stained and faded labels. Very excitingly, this was grown-up paint that I wasn't allowed to use, or even touch. So of course it had a magical attraction for me straight away! As a teenager, I did begin to use oil paints. And over the years since school I have had a varied mixture of artistic instruction. We had an art room with a tutor for students at my college, I've been on various courses and to classes and learnt from artist friends. The result of this patchy training was that by my 30s I could produce a good oil painting in terms of the image, but had no technical knowledge of the materials. I'd heard of 'fat over lean' and 'oiling out', but I didn't really know what they meant. In my final attempts at oil painting, I tried to apply what little I'd picked up about them, with the result that the paintings went badly brown and shrunken in places. Action and circumstance I decided that as soon as I had the opportunity, I needed to undertake proper study of the technical aspects of oil painting. And then circumstances changed, and it was a long time until that opportunity came about. By then I was living in a different place, and although the opportunity for study was available, the space and environment were not suitable for oils with their slow drying and strong fumes. This was when I decided to take up acrylics. Actually, I'd grown up with a very negative idea of them. They had none of the magic of those old, forbidden paint tubes! And I'd had one art tutor who had specifically compared them to the emulsion you put on walls and told me to avoid them as they had no character or beauty. Technical developments I'm fairly sure that the technology behind acrylic paints has improved greatly since then. And some of it was perhaps prejudice too. But they are still very different to oil paints, as I soon discovered. Particularly in drying time: acrylics dry fast. I am a slow worker. I like to lose myself in the detail of the painting. I like to make a few colour mixes with the knife at the start and then tweak and mix with a brush as I go. And, quite often, I like to paint wet-on-wet (adding wet paint onto a painted surface that is still wet). I was soon in trouble with all of these techniques. A lot of paint that had dried on my palette while I was working was wasted (and it's not cheap!). I was unable to mix into previous mixes, because they'd dried. And attempts at wet-on-wet became simple overpainting, because the under layer was already dry. I was still producing acceptable-looking work, but I was not enjoying the process! I was uncomfortable painting, and not feeling that the finished works were truly my style. Christmas Tree Breakthrough And then, just like magic, things came together in this picture. It's almost always the way with the technical side of creative work that if you just keep going one day you just 'get it' and everything falls into place. With the use of Gloss Glazing Medium (a mixing medium for acrylic paints that increases flow, gloss and drying time), a stay-wet palette and a few other ad hoc additions, I was suddenly painting in my old familiar way, but with acrylics. Stages Stage 1 In this case I am using canvas board, although I often prefer a smooth board. I'm not a lover of stretched canvas as I don't enjoy the 'give' you get in response to your strokes. I have put a colour wash over the board and drawn the scene in lightly in pencil. Stage 2 I have started to paint in the background, building up smooth layers of colour with a synthetic filbert brush. Before starting I mixed some of the background colours and some greens and yellows for the tree and left them on a stay-wet palette. Stage 3 I like to work from the back to the front as far as possible. The background is now complete. I have sketched in the darkest shadows on the foreground objects to create three-dimensional images. At this point, I can take advantage of the fast drying time of the paint and step away for a short break to let the background dry. This will allow me to lay the foreground objects on cleanly. It is also good for my eyes to have a rest! Stage 4 The foreground objects are mostly laid in using a smallish hogs hair brush and a thin synthetic sable-type. I've used wet-on-wet here, but then let it dry before the next stage. Stage 5 The foreground objects are finished, mostly using the thin sable-type brush. The front parcels are particularly tricky because the image was not set up with painting in mind and the lighting on these very neutral objects is rather ambiguous. I decide to tweak them at the end. Stage 6 I lay in the tree and the tinsel using the hogs' hair brush. I tend to be a tight, detailed worker and the background and foreground objects are all in that style. For the tree itself, I want to paint much more loosely and freely in contrast. I usually work with a small palette of colours. So far on this painting I have used Titanium White, Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue and Cadmium Yellow Light. At this stage, I thought that another yellow might have been a better choice! I also have the Gloss Glazing Medium on my palette. Stage 7 The tree, tinsel and lights are complete. I was concerned that the centre of the tree looked too flat, and my stern resident critic JB agreed. So I did a little more on that before completing the decorations. I have worked wet-on-wet quite a lot here in an attempt to get some glow and sparkle. Now I let the painting dry so that I can lay the hanging decorations on top. But I keep some of the greens and yellows on the stay-wet palette to deal with overlaps and touching up. Stage 8 The finished painting. I added some Cadmium Red Medium to my palette and worked in the decorations in two layers. I worked wet-on-wet in each layer but let the paint dry in between layers so that I could lay clean light and shadow over the colour. Then, I also tweaked the difficult foreground parcels, although I think that they remain the weak spot of the painting. I hope you've enjoyed this insight into my new-found painting process and rhythm. Reliving it has been a pleasure for me and made me want to get painting again! A Different Seasonal Breakthrough An instant to reflect It wouldn't be Christmas and New Year without some reflections on the past year and on the future soon to come. The combination of the solstice (here in the Northern Hemisphere at least), a close-to-universal holiday and the start of a new year make it the most appropriate time for that. If you know some mathematics, you might know that if an object is moving in one direction it has to have an instant of stillness before it can begin moving in the opposite direction. That's exactly how Christmas feels to me, that moment of stillness before a change of direction. It's one of the reasons I love it so much. High Society I happened to be rewatching an old movie this morning: High Society. It's a good quality, entertaining film combining a well-constructed stage play with a score by the incomparable Cole Porter and a star cast on top form. One of Porter's lyrics from 'Well, Did You Evah!' caught my attention:   Have you heard it's in the starsNext July we collide with Mars?Well, did you evah?What a swell party this is! I thought that this summed up rather well what it feels like to be alive at this time. Everywhere you turn things are disintegrating and getting worse. Violence, destruction and horrors abound and we are accelerating on the path of our own destruction. Taking Back Control I've been feeling resentful about all this. I am by nature a happy and optimistic person (JB thinks idiotically so!), but I could no longer be so in the face of such a continual onslaught of human stupidity of the nastiest kind. I felt that I was being robbed of my true nature. But I've had enough of this. I can't pretend that I think things are going to get better in the near future, either globally or personally. Still I'm going to fight back and do everything I can to maintain the natural human joy, love and hope that is within me as much as I can for as long as I can. Starting as I mean to go on With that in mind, I most sincerely send you my love and best wishes for this holiday time. I look forward to sharing more creative work filled with fun, joy, love and hope with you in 2026. Have a swell party everyone!

Featured Image for Enshittification and Exhaustion: The Continental December News You might have been expecting something a bit more festive from me than a post about December news. Don't worry, I promised two blog posts in December, and the second one will be seasonal and celebratory. Today I'll be bringing you up to date with recent developments in my author, artist and publisher life. And refreshing the blog with a change of emphasis. Recent Developments Marketing In October, I finally began marketing Castle Sefton Press. There had been some book marketing before then, but nothing on the art side of the business at all. Very few people knew it existed! And I was about five months behind in getting started. We had a few strange setbacks in setting up the Castle Sefton Press store. That meant there were a lot of delays in launching. In addition, I was learning the whole process of WordPress and WooCommerce as I went along, which meant that some times I had to go back and make changes. By the time we were ready for marketing, my work rate was slowing down. I think I am a reasonably good learner, but when I came to learn the various social platforms – not being a natural user of social media – I was struggling because my mind hadn't fully processed all the previous year's new information. I had already learnt so many new technical skills in that time. Marketing is also a difficult subject because there is far too much information available. Most of it is poor quality and a lot of it expensive. So simply finding good, clear learning material on how and where to start can be very time-consuming and involve multiple false-starts. And you are chasing a moving target, because all the platforms and their algorithms are changing all the time and the pace of that seems to be accelerating. Meta As I was embarking on this final process in getting the art and book business off the ground, Facebook changed its algorithm completely. That included the way Meta advertising works. (Meta owns Facebook and Instagram along with other platforms that I don't use such as Threads and WhatsApp). This was a great blow as not only was it more to learn but there was uncertainty as to whether Facebook ads, which had been planned to be our primary paid marketing, would work at all for us any more. In fact, after a stressful few weeks I have abandoned Meta. (I still make an occasional Facebook post for our small group of followers). As a business, Meta was suggesting adding content on average nearly three times a day across Facebook and Instagram in return for 'reaching' about 40 people. Our existing followers were not being shown our posts. There were bugs in our business portfolio that were going to cause issues with advertisements. There is no technical support available, not even a robot. I had begun on Instagram getting a hundred or so views on a post. By the time I stopped, I was getting around five views per post. The algorithm seemed to be punishing me for not adhering to its posting demands or paying for adverts. I decided enough was enough. I don't mind working to build a following, but this is no longer an option on Meta. You are participating in a control game designed to force you to comply and spend. Enshittification The collapse of Facebook as a platform with any real use or purpose is a good example of the process described by Cory Doctorow in his book, Enshittification. Through greed and stupidity, the internet is destroying itself. One example he gives of this is AI search results. AI produces search results by crawling other articles on relevant topics, and these are then shown at the top of the search results. This means that you are most likely to click on the AI results rather than on the articles with the original information. But many of the sites hosting those articles depend on clicks and the corresponding advertising or purchases to survive. They are starting to disappear as the AI search results that have used their information take their traffic. So the range of information available for AI to crawl is reducing and hence so is the quality of its output. Amazon Amazon is another great example of the degradation of online platforms. For all its many ethical issues, Amazon still functions fairly well as a bookshop. I'm not saying that I recommend it as a bookshop – I certainly don't – but in most cases you can still find and buy the book you want on there with few problems. And I don't believe that it is the only villain behind the demise of bookshops. (You will be able to read more about this on the blog as soon as I get round to writing the article!) But Amazon has destroyed many other kinds of shops and producers, particularly in technology and electronics. If you try to find a small item of electronic kit – a small microphone, say – you may never get beyond the hundreds of Amazon results, peppered with those of eBay and other massive shopping platforms. Most of the products look similar and have indistinguishable reviews. Indeed, they probably are all the same mass-produced rubbish. If there are genuine products in those pages of search results, you will never be able to find them. Anyway, the chances are that the genuine sellers and manufacturers have been driven out of business by a combination of Amazon's aggressive charges and proliferation of cheap, fake products. New plans All this means that it's more difficult for a small online product business to get established than it has been for a long time. I have new plans for December onwards, but it means growth will be slower than expected and there will be even more work, trial and error involved. It is a tremendous relief to be free from dependence on Meta, though. New Plans for December Onwards Alternative Platforms Pinterest I have hopes of Pinterest as a long-term growth platform for Castle Sefton Press. I have some good resources to help me start building our profile there. One of the other difficulties of starting the marketing late has been that I was beginning in the run up to Christmas, and the special demands of that season have got in the way. I have learned a lot to prepare me for this time next year, but it's meant that I haven't got far with Pinterest yet. TikTok and YouTube I'm now active on TikTok making short videos. Actually, they are not always that short, being up to ten minutes in length. I'm not sure how effective this will be for the business, but I enjoy it and unlike Meta, TikTok gives you reasonable exposure with no conditions at all. I am also adding all the video content to YouTube, and I'll be improving the quality of our channel there over the next month. Other Options Alternative social media platforms, shopping platforms like Etsy, in-person events and collaborations are some of the options available that I'll be considering. I will be trying to get our books into some libraries. Bookshops remain largely a hostile environment for us. If you buy your books mostly from physical bookshops, it's worth remembering that they only stock the most mainstream works, and that there is a vast range of books available that they never consider, ours included. (There are exceptions of course, but this is still generally true). New Creative Work Art We already have a lot of new art products planned for 2026. This will include the Fred and Ginger Collection, one of which is the featured art for today's post. John Blake has been developing some fun and creative ideas in the run up to Christmas and we are hoping to add those as product ranges too. I plan to concentrate more on painting for my regular art practice immediately after Christmas. So more colourful images will be coming your way. Books I am determined to begin my next book in January, and it may be part of a series. Beginning is always difficult, but once I start I am generally a reasonably fast worker. It would be nice if it could be published before the end of 2026, but that is probably optimistic. However, now the business is established I hope to carry on writing and keep producing books without the long break there has been since Ghost Train. A Change of Emphasis I see the future of this blog as being more focussed on the process of my work. That will include writing, once I've started again, art and the business. I want to outline some of the reasons behind the change. A Consequence of TikTok Videos Making short videos means that I am chatting about the random ideas in my head into the camera, rather than writing them on this blog. I have never felt lost for words or ideas, but this month I found that all the current themes I would have written about here had been spent in videos. You can watch all the videos on our YouTube channel, where I am currently chatting about gift wrapping and books. A Consequence of Marketing Castle Sefton Press is a marketing nightmare. We produce fiction and art, and there are two of us but only I appear in the publicity. Given that focus and consistency are the two main requirements for any marketing programme, most advisors would tell us to restructure our business. Perhaps into separate businesses. I am strongly in favour of keeping it as one, because my original vision was of a complete creative business. John Blake and I have both been musicians, writers and artists and in the course of those experiences we've both met and worked with many very talented creative people. In every branch of creativity you find those for whom that is their whole world. All those authors who insist you must write every day, for example, and musicians and artists whose every waking breath is centred around music or art. It's never been like that for either of us. Since a child, I have always been widely creative: writing prose and poetry, music, visual art, dance, cookery, gardening, home decor and design, knitting, embroidery and more. Neither of us writes or produces artwork every day, but we are creative every day even if only in simple domestic or business tasks. Creative Business The way forward with presenting our business is to focus on this approach and diversity. And that will require some creativity from me! There's no guarantee of success of course, but I'm happy to carry on anyway. It's very hard to get anything unusual and outside current trends noticed at all, though of course if something different does get noticed it will often take off. I feel that if I make the focus of this blog part of that new approach, it can support me in doing this. Consequences of Writing I haven't been in the process of writing a book since I started this blog, because I have been busy setting up the Castle Sefton Press business. Once I am writing again, the blog is bound to have more about the writing process and an author's life. (That doesn't mean there will be no more recipes and food talk!). December News: Starting as I Mean to Go On Latest Art Ginger No 2 Today's featured artwork is the second Ginger in my collection of six Ginger Rogers poses taken from dance sequences in the films she made with Fred Astaire. Charcoal and chalk seemed to me the perfect media to capture these active black-and-white images, and so far I am pleased with the results. Resemblance The most difficult part is capturing a vague resemblance. The source images are blurred, being stills taken from digital reproductions of 1930s films (which have not always been well restored, depending on which film in the canon it is). The drawings are quite small – around A4 size – and this makes getting exact detail with charcoal challenging. Fred Astaire has a very idiosyncratic head shape, and once that is mastered, he becomes recognisable. Ginger is far more difficult. She has distinctive features, but they are masked by prominent make-up which changes as the fashions progress through the films. In this pose, the shadows cast by the powerful studio lights leave only her heavy eye make-up visible. In the previous drawing, last month's featured image, a different and thought-provoking issue of resemblance came to light. Ginger, as a major Hollywood star, was generally photographed and filmed, in more static scenes, from particular angles which were thought to favour her. When you take a still from a dance like this, you can end up with a view of her face that is very unfamiliar. And that is just what has happened in last month's drawing. It is a fair representation of the shot, but not instantly Ginger-like, because you are simply not used to seeing her features stretched in profile. Distinctive Pose One of the things I have found about drawing Ginger that is very distinctive, and that I had never noticed until I began drawing her, is the way she combines perfect stillness and movement in one pose. Both the poses so far show this beautifully. I think I have managed here to portray the perfect, motionless poise of her right side, while her left is still active. In the previous drawing, her upper body is statuesque while her feet are still alive. At first I thought that this was just the effect of her dresses – they keep moving after she has stopped – and they certainly accentuate it. But I have decided that it is definitely a feature of her dancing. It's actually quite different to Fred Astaire. You can take a still at any point of Fred's dancing – I have done quite a few! – and he appears perfectly still and poised throughout his body. Quite astonishingly, he seems to move smoothly through an infinite series of perfect poses when he dances. Like a living animation. Thoughts turning Christmas Lumpy and uneven. The real December news is that I have just been putting the almond icing on the Christmas cake. Very badly! Like so many tasks that you only do at long intervals, just when you think you have finally mastered it (last year I did it perfectly), you have a lapse. Happily, it will still taste good. I am also about to write Christmas cards having finished this year's seasonal art work. You will be seeing it in progress in the next post as it marks some interesting technical developments in my painting. And there will be December news of a different kind, with plans of all kinds for the new year. So until then, I hope you are enjoying the season and not finding it too tiring or stressful. Or making too much of a hash of your icing!

Ginger No 1: Let's Face the Music and Dance, by Emily Tellwright, 2025 Comfort Food It's November. According to the Met Office we have actually lost about two hours of daylight during October! Which perhaps explains why we often feel in need of comfort at this time of year, even though January and February are usually so much colder and bleaker. And looking at the state of the world, I think we all feel the need of it anyway. Can we find some comfort in our food? Different comfort foods for different people In Food, Culture and Identity I mentioned the recipe for pasta with simple tomato sauce that Zeno might have given to Clyde when he was shocked and tipsy (Ghost Train, p.82 for paperback readers). That's a good example of what I would call comfort food: something fairly simple and mildly savoury that lines your stomach and nourishes you; something that puts no strain on your digestion or tastebuds and that you can almost always get down however you're feeling; something that leaves you feeling satisfied and somehow reassured. Comforted, in fact. I also gave an example of a culture whose identity had been shaped by a food myth. I expect our ideas of what makes comfort food varies according to our culture and identity. For example, people from South Asia might well be soothed by something with plenty of chilli, but much as I like it, I would never choose it as comfort food. Chicken soup inspired by a traditional Jewish recipe is widely recognised as comfort food, but this particular recipe would never be my choice. I doubt whether I could feel comforted by eating something that I knew had used up a large proportion of the weekly shopping budget on its own! Good chickens are expensive, so for me chicken soup will always be something that happens to bones and leftovers. I'm including a recipe for my own comforting, silky, savoury cream of chicken soup. It's very economical too. Ultra-processed junk Unfortunately, many of us now turn for satisfaction to ultra-processed foods which are formulated to give us combinations of refined fats and sugars that are highly addictive. I'm not blaming consumers for this, as there are a plethora of reasons mostly beyond their control which cause them to do this. These products are not food and shouldn't be on shop shelves packaged and labelled as such any more than methylated spirits or cardboard. Satisfying cravings and feeding a voracious addiction, which is what many of these products create when regularly consumed, is not the same as comfort. Implicit in comfort are elements of nurturing and wellbeing. Ultra-processed foods do not bring health or even nourishment. They make you unwell and dissatisfied in order to make vast profits for huge corporations. Obviously, I'm not here to provide dietary or health advice. But I can bring hope. I suffered from food addictions and digestive issues quite seriously earlier in my life, but I am completely recovered. It's not a matter of resisting temptation for me. My body no longer recognises ultra-processed junk as food, and I would no more put it in my mouth than I would methylated spirits or cardboard. So if you've been sucked in by this stuff and feel it's ruined your health, take heart. You can get over it and still love and enjoy real food. My Comfort Foods The pasta with simple tomato sauce topped with some grated cheddar cheese would certainly be one of my comfort foods. There is something comforting about tinned tomatoes and cheddar cheese seems to feature in most of my choices. In addition, this is a dish that fellow Castle Sefton Press author, my partner John Blake, cooks very well. He's not much of a cook, so this pasta has the added benefit of being an enjoyable hot meal that I haven't had to cook myself. We always have the ingredients in the house, and it costs very little, all of which adds to its relaxing qualities. Salad I'm still vaguely surprised when I see a recipe for salad. Now many of these are delicious and some of them are classics. But I rarely make them. It doesn't enter my head, because somewhere in my consciousness the meaning of 'salad' has been fixed for a long time. Cookery writer Madhur Jaffrey often gives her recipe for 'Salaad' that appeared on their table at home for every meal. It always contained tomatoes, cucumber and onion and they 'ate it with everything.' (Curry Easy, p. 231). We didn't eat our standard salad with everything, although I've always loved it and probably would have if given the chance. But it did have standard ingredients, the most essential being lettuce. Lettuce as a comfort food "What?" I can hear you saying. Well, it's true. I love lettuce. It's soft and crunchy, sweet and bitter, very refreshing and a natural receptacle for a dressing. It's very good for us but does contain a drug with mild sedative, analgesic and euphoric properties. Perhaps I am a food addict after all! It was these properties of lettuce that Beatrix Potter was thinking of when Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny fall asleep after gorging on Mr McGregor's bolted lettuces in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The recipe My comfort food: salad So, to make what passes as 'salad' in my head, you need a large bowl, some lettuce, salt, pepper, vinegar and some salad servers or tongs. Wash and dry your lettuce, break or tear it into bite-sized pieces and put it into the bowl. Now you add whatever suitable vegetables you have in the fridge, cut into bite-sized pieces, aiming for a variety of colour and no more than say seven varieties in total. One of them needs to be some kind of onion – red, white, shallot and spring onion are all good. Cucumber is always in there for me, but after that the other vegetables could be tomatoes, peppers of any colour, radishes, grated carrot, cooked beetroot, celery, fennel, apple, kiwi fruit or kohlrabi. You could add some sprouted seeds, mange-tout, french beans or even tinned sweetcorn but it's starting to become something less recognisable at that point. The dressing A colourful version of 'salad' with beetroot The standard here is 3 parts extra virgin olive oil to 1 part cider vinegar with a good pinch of English mustard whisked together. I prefer to season the salad with salt and pepper rather than add it to the dressing. Sometimes I might add extra vinegar or a little sugar. My mother used to serve this salad with hot roast chicken and curried rice with sultanas and flaked almonds. It's a delicious combination that favours the extra vinegar and sugar dressing. If you are eating the salad with plain meat or fish – it's particularly good with grilled trout or steak, if you can afford such things – you can replace the oil dressing with a little mayonnaise thinned with a drop of vinegar. Staple Accompaniments If I had to choose between bread and potatoes, it would be potatoes every time. To turn this salad into my ultimate comfort food, it needs to be served with potatoes of some kind. Chips are good, as are jacket potatoes, but for maximum satisfaction and comfort I require either boiled new potatoes or mash, depending on the season, with butter and grated cheddar cheese. The sweet solidity of the potatoes, the richness of the butter and savouriness of the cheese mixed with the diverse crunches of the salad and the sharpness of the vinegar make this something I could eat day after day. I sometimes have! Comfort food in action We both had COVID right at the beginning of the pandemic when England had just gone into lockdown. I was not in great health at the time, and other circumstances made it a particularly stressful situation. I lost my appetite completely for the first few days. The first sign of recovery was when I started to eat again, and the first thing I had was 'salad' with potatoes and a tiny piece of steak. I went on to eat that every day until I was better, and it really felt as if it was feeding me back to health. Divine Cream of Chicken Soup There is a fashion now for calling things the 'ultimate' version, and this is perhaps what I am intending for cream of chicken soup here. But ultimate sounds much too active and aggressive for this most elegant and gentle of comfort foods. I once saw an Escoffier recipe for duck soup which I can no longer find. (If you have a resource for this, or know that I have misremembered, please let me know in the comments). Escoffier boiled whole ducks for days and then creamed and sieved them, bones and all. Now I am not going to those lengths, but that kind of condensed, concentrated flavour is what I'm looking for. You might call it 'essence of roast chicken'. I think of it as the real flavour that roast chicken flavour crisps are trying to mimic by artificial means. Mysteriously Unfashionable Judging by the number of cans of cream of chicken soup on the supermarket shelves, people still like it. And yet I couldn't find a good recipe online. Those there are have too many ingredients. They distract and disguise the roast chicken flavour that is the essence of the dish. And as for a velouté, such an unfashionable thing is never mentioned. But you will never get a silky soup that caresses your spoon without it. And that bit of flour in the velouté is what allows you to make a thick, satisfying soup with a powerful flavour using very little meat. I'm a great believer in Fanny Cradock's advice to buy the best food you can afford and treat it with enormous respect. Here we are doing that by extracting every last drop of flavour and nutrition from our chicken. [Video to be replaced – original file was hosted on WordPress and needs re-uploading to Shopify Files.] Three recipes in one So you have eaten all your roast chicken and are left with the bones with some bits clinging to them and perhaps the giblets, some bits of skin or some leftover roasting pan juices. That's all the chicken you need for this. And you don't just get soup. You can pour this soup into small cups or moulds, chill it and turn it out as terrines to eat with toast and salad. Or you can spread the cold soup, which will have a smooth, lightly jellied texture, on sandwiches as chicken paste. It's also extremely good for you, being essentially bone stock. So it's delicious, versatile, cheap and healthy! On the other hand, it is a bit of a fiddle to make. But you can spread the process over two days, or even freeze the stock and meat before blending and reducing to complete the recipe when you have time. You can also freeze the cooked chicken carcass if you haven't time to do any of it when you have the leftovers to hand. The Recipe I have used a pressure cooker for the stock. As well as saving time and fuel, pressure cookers make the best stock, stews, dal and dried beans. They are also excellent for stewed fruit, cooked beetroot, risotto, pot roasts and many other dishes. I encourage you to invest in one. If you cook, you won't regret it. But I have included instructions for making the soup in an ordinary pan for those who don't have one. Don't be tempted to skip the sieving. You will never get the smooth texture without it and you might end up with shards of bone in your soup. As long as you use a metal sieve it's a lot easier than you might think. And don't leave out the mace. It's the one essential flavouring here that is going to bring out the chickeniness. Eat your soup safely. It is quite safe to reheat it providing that it has been stored in the fridge and thoroughly heated through but I wouldn't reheat it more than once. And always cover the surface of any waiting or stored soup with a piece of baking parchment to stop a skin forming. Equipment Pressure cooker Wire sieve Large jug Plates or wide bowls Medium saucepan Stick blender or liquidiser Wooden spoon Metal spoons Flat whisk Scales Baking parchment Ingredients 1 roast chicken carcass 1 small onion, peeled and halved 1 carrot, peeled or scrubbed and halved 1 stick of celery, halved 1 blade of mace 1 bay leaf 3 oz butter (or the chicken fat made up to 3 oz with butter) 3 oz plain flour 3½ fl oz double cream (or 6 tablespoons) Salt Black pepper Water Method Put the chicken carcass with any loose bones and giblets into the pressure cooker or large pan. Add the vegetables, bay leaf and mace. Press everything down firmly with your hand. Add cold water until the carcass is just covered. Put the lid on the pressure cooker, bring to high pressure and cook for one hour. If using the pan, cover and bring to the boil then simmer on as low a heat as possible for two-and-a-half hours. Let the pressure drop naturally, and then open the cooker and strain the contents into the sieve over the jug. Tip the solid contents into one of the plates or bowls. Cover the liquid and let both liquids and solids cool. The liquid can be refrigerated as soon as it is cool enough. Before the solids get too cold, strip the meat from the remains into the other clean plate or bowl. Make sure you get every last bit! Discard the remains, including the vegetables and spices, and refrigerate the meat. Once the liquid is cool enough for the fat to have solidified on top, you can carry on. This will take some hours so you could leave it overnight. Remove the stock and the meat from the fridge. Skim the solidified fat from the top of the stock. You can use this for the roux later, or freeze it to make superb roast potatoes in the future. Put the stock into the medium saucepan. Put the meat into the jug or the liquidiser and add a few tablespoons of the stock so that it will blend. Now put the stock on a high heat and boil it hard to reduce it. Meanwhile, blend the meat to a paste. Remove the paste to a clean bowl or plate. Set up the sieve over the jug and then rub the paste through the sieve with the metal spoon. Don't forget to scrape the underneath of the sieve with another, clean, metal spoon. Once sieved, add the meat paste to the boiling stock and continue to boil and reduce the whole down until you have 2 pints or just under. If you go too far, just top up to 2 pints with water. Add the cream to the stock and leave it all in the jug. Now make your roux for the velouté. Wipe out the saucepan. Melt the butter, or chicken fat and butter, and then using the flat whisk, mix in the flour until smooth and cook the mixture gently for a minute or two. Add the hot stock mixture, ladleful by ladleful, whisking to keep the mixture smooth and keeping the heat low. Once it is all added, switch to the wooden spoon and keep stirring and raise the heat to medium. Soon the soup should develop a silken texture and be just thick enough to coat the back of your spoon. Check the seasoning and add salt as needed. Add just a turn of black pepper – you don't want it to mask the chicken flavour. Now let the soup simmer for a few minutes to cook the flour and then it is ready to eat! Note: Don't forget to cover the surface of any uneaten soup with baking parchment to prevent a skin from forming. Digression into family history The Staffordshire Oatcake My final comfort food is the Staffordshire oatcake, a cross between a pancake and a flatbread that is made with a yeasted batter of wheat and oat flours. I've never met anyone who didn't like them, and why they haven't spread countrywide like other regional British foods I don't know. Certainly, most local people have to leave room in their luggage for quantities of oatcakes whenever they visit family in other parts of the country. I don't know why they don't make an appearance in Ghost Train either. I expect as a non-local, Clyde was yet to discover them. I'm sure he'll like them when he does. Staffordshire Oatcakes These days, oatcakes are almost always eaten with cheese. For my father, though, who was born in 1922, they were more of a general staple. He would eat them with bacon, sausage, cheese, eggs, chops, steak or butter and jam in the same way we would bread. History The oatcake has an interesting history, and there is an excellent book about it, which also contains recipes to make your own oatcakes if you can't buy them where you live. JB has been making his own since COVID. The cooking takes a bit of practice, and is much assisted by having a proper iron griddle. You can also read a quick précis of its history in this excellent article by Jenna Goodwin, where you also have the opportunity to download a free book of (rather eccentric!) oatcake recipes. Jenna mentions that oatcake making in The Potteries (as Stoke-on-Trent used to be called) 'was often a cottage industry, with elderly widows making dozens of oatcakes daily on an iron bakestone to earn a living'. (Bakestone is pronounced 'backstun.') Some of my family were doing just that. All the Emilys All the Emilys. Clockwise from the top: Emily Mountford, Emily Platt, Emily Booth. There seems to have been a tradition in my mother's family to call the eldest daughter Emily, and here we have my grandmother Emily Mountford with her mother and grandmother. All the Emilys were renowned cooks, with visitors always dropping in on baking day. I believe it was great, great-grandmother Emily Booth who was making the oatcakes to sell from home, but I'm not entirely sure. Whoever it was, as a girl grandmother Emily Mountford was sent to the brewery to get the yeast for the oatcake making. Barmy Oatcakes This is very interesting, although it didn't occur to me why for a long time! We know where the grandmothers lived, and we know where the brewery was (Parkers in Burslem). There would have been several bakers nearer than the brewery in those days where bakers' yeast could be bought. And there were some very posh bakeries about the same distance away as Parkers. So why go to the brewery? You would get your yeast from the brewery if you were baking with the ancient British method of ale-barm. From pre-Roman times, bread in Britain was leavened using the yeasty froth that formed on the wort when ale was brewing. In southern Europe, sourdough was the traditional method. The clue is in the name, and ale-barm bread was sweet rather than sour. Sourdough must have been much more difficult in cool, damp north-western Europe, and ale brewing was commonplace in Britain. The ale-barm method would particularly lend itself to a batter such as used for oatcakes. So I'm fairly sure that my family were making their Staffordshire oatcakes with ale-barm. Which makes them one of the last surviving uses of this very old technique. Making oatcakes today Sadly, I don't have the family recipe for oatcakes. Can we try to recreate the ale-barm flavour? I've never had the chance to try, and I would need to do some research and trials too. What I do recommend is Bioreal Yeast which contains strains of natural yeasts and lactic acid bacteria grown on organic grain. You can read a bit more about its advantages in this blog post from Shipton Mill. I wish I could share some with you. But do look out for Staffordshire oatcakes and try them if you get chance. You'll always be looking out for them after that! And may your food and this blog bring you some cheer and comfort in the darkest of days.

Chance, a drawing of a dog by Emily Tellwright Divas and Christmas Preparations This month I'm reclaiming early Christmas preparations from associations with rampant commercialism. And after viewing a recent opera performance, I explain why I don't believe that teamwork always produces the best results in creative works. We need divas! Finally, as part of the seasonal preparations, I am sharing the recipe for my mother's much-demanded mincemeat. But first, a personal note This blog is, frankly, a personal indulgence. I don't think I have too many of those, especially now that Beech's Chocolates has closed and The Brothers has finished on Talking Pictures TV. In last month's article I talked about discursive thinking, and I don't seem to be able to write an article without juxtaposing at least two topics. This makes the posts difficult to categorise, difficult to optimise, difficult to fit in groups and as a result, difficult for readers to find. But I've decided I don't care. I bend to all these requirements in all my other work, but this is the space where I put my own preferences above the demands of algorithms. Emily Tellwright's blog is never going to be a commercial venture. Readers are valuable Writing these articles is valuable to me, because it keeps me writing during periods when I am focussed on the art or publishing sides of Castle Sefton Press. But it also gives me an outlet for ideas that would otherwise create a backlog in my head and make creating new fiction more difficult. It also matters very much that someone is reading them! I don't expect ever to have a large following here, but I do need an audience to receive and react to my output. So thank you to everyone who takes the time to read what I write. Comments are very much appreciated too. And if you do know someone who's sufficiently eccentric that they might enjoy my content, then please send them a link to an article you think will interest them. There are share buttons at the bottom of every post, and the grey one that looks like an armoured paper-clip will open an email with a link to the post. Early Preparations for Christmas A love of the festive season I love Christmas, and there doesn't seem to be any amount of grief, cynicism, poverty or age that is going to make a difference to that. I've written before about the things you carry through being the ones that really matter to you, and a deep connection to the Christmas season is one of mine. Christmas at Castle Sefton Press Interestingly, hardly any of my friends or family share this feeling. Many of them are not keen, and even the most positive are merely prepared to go through with it because it's happening and only enjoy it if it goes particularly well. Every year I beaver away cooking, decorating the house and preparing gifts knowing that I'm mostly doing it for myself. Because it's something that I want to do. It's not that I feel I have to do it. I know that many people feel that pressure, but I have had years where I haven't celebrated at all. It's freeing to know that you can do that, and reinforces my knowledge that the only reason I engage in the annual rituals is from choice. Deep roots There's no doubt that I owe some of this to my mother. She was in her element at Christmas, being talented at decoration and cooking and being a great lover of home. She also had an ability to generate a feeling of magic, and nothing makes things memorable for a child more than that. Some comes from me. As the events of Ghost Train develop, Clyde finds in himself a great love of home, a deep connection to the seasons and a perennial innocence, all of which make Christmas attractive to him. Although Clyde and I are mostly not very alike, these are things we do have in common. And then there is history. In the darkest days of December, I feel the influence of all the souls who have come before. Everyone who has saved and scraped and planned and worked to give themselves and those closest to them some warmth, cheer, joy and indulgence at this time. However opulent and extended or meagre and brief. I'm never truly alone in my celebrations. For those who don't enjoy it Those who come from cultures that don't celebrate Christmas seem, in my experience, better able to ignore it. It is those who feel bound up in the occasion, but find it stressful, difficult or even repellant, who suffer the most. It is hard to escape reminders of what is coming on mainstream media, in the shops, and even at work for at least two months beforehand. I don't expect everyone to be like me. To those who don't enjoy it and have a choice, I say feel free not to engage with the occasion. To all those who cannot choose and find it an unhappy time, I can only send my heartfelt wishes for better circumstances for you. Either way What I do notice is that all sides complain about Christmas preparations starting too early. The haters moan because they have to suffer reminders of an ordeal to come for longer, and the lovers moan that the special nature of the celebration is being ruined by commercialisation and overextension. Reclaiming the seasons Whether you enjoy the festive season or not, I urge you to stop regarding early preparations for Christmas as something negative. Do complain about rampant commercialism, waste, over-production and blatant profiteering. They may be more in evidence at this time of year, but they are always happening. The big retailers do plan for Christmas of course, but it's only an expansion of the type of planning and exploitation that they are always engaged in. The people to whom planning early for Christmas is most important are those doing all the real and vital work which makes the true festive season. Farmers and growers Carrot in a paper bag Were your parsnips and Brussels sprouts sown at the beginning of December? Of course not. Be thankful that those who provide your fresh food at Christmas started planning a long time ago. Growing crops and keeping animals in the British winter are challenging and hard work. Just a few hundred years ago there would have been hardly any fresh food at all at this time of year. Thanks to the planning of farmers and growers, even if you are not celebrating at least you have something to eat in December. Art and craft When you visit the Christmas makers' market or local art and craft stalls just before Christmas, have they magically produced their wares in the last few days? Of course not. Handmade things take time to make, and they will have been gradually building up stock through months of painstaking work. Tiny zero-waste businesses If you want to buy a book or an art print for a gift at the last minute, you will have to buy a mass produced one from a big retailer that has access to huge stocks. The stock that is unsold will be wasted, or in the case of books, destroyed. Tiny independent businesses like ours that print your books and art to order need time to make your products. And with the extra demand at Christmas, both on the printers and delivery services, that time can be longer than usual. By last-minute shopping, you are supporting the big commercial entities that you might have been railing against. Harvest Time I first think of Christmas every year in September. This happens quite naturally, because it is harvest season, when most vegetables and the autumn fruits are ready. These get made into preserves to give as Christmas gifts. I also start making Christmas foods such as mincemeat at this time, as they need time to mature to taste their best. I often make other gifts too. This takes time and preparation, such as looking through my knitting wool and patterns, as well as making the items. Every year I do a special artwork for Christmas cards to be sent to friends and family, which will go into the shop the following year. Homemade preserves These seasonal preparations weave through the autumn season as part of its character. They gently build excitement towards the solstice celebration. When better to have our biggest and most extravagant festivities than in the shortest days of deepest darkness? And Christmas is the closest thing we have to a universal holiday now in Britain, which adds to its special feeling. Realism Don't engage with any of this if you don't want to. But whatever you decide, please don't make the mistake of thinking that because your supermarket has a Santa-shaped shell of vegetable fat and sugar with a pinch of cocoa on its shelves in October that any evidence of Christmas before December is a destructive consequence of modern capitalism. Things of real value and quality made, or grown, by humans almost always take time. By remembering that, you will be moving away from the commercial exploitation that so disgusts you. A Night at the Opera Recently I was able to go the Royal Opera House's live screening of Tosca at a local theatre. As with Christmas, I seem to be in a minority among my friends in liking this opera. They point out to me, with justification, that the balance between drama and lyricism in Puccini's music is over-skewed towards the dramatic in this work. And perhaps they find it too violent. An LP of Tosca It's not my favourite opera, but I do love it. I like drama, I rather empathise with Tosca herself, and E lucevan le stelle is musical genius. I didn't enjoy this production, however, and when I was forced to go home at the second interval because I could no longer bear the overloud volume that was making the music inaudible, I didn't feel it was a great loss. Anna Netrebko was in great voice, and was on fire in the first act. It's a great role for her. But it was impossible to stand hearing her rendition of Vissa D'arte blasted out like heavy metal with all the top notes reverberating. Sadly it means I won't be going to any more live-streamed operas. It's all in the score I am a great admirer of Sir Antonio Pappano, who I think is one of the most talented musicians we have ever had in the UK. He was musical director of the Royal Opera House until last year, and I was expecting that I might not like the approach of the new director as much. I felt they were bound to have appointed someone of a contrasting style. Pappano probably understands as much about Puccini's music as anyone except Puccini himself. With him, the interpretation always begins with the score and he finds the complete meaning of the work within the music. If half a century (almost) of being a very average musician has taught me anything it is that this is always the case with great composers. Historical, biographical, traditional and technical knowledge can all help you to read the score, but everything you need to fully realise the music is in there. Non-narrative expression The production of Tosca that I saw last week took very much the opposite approach of developing a narrative around the opera and forcing the music to fit it. It's fine for people to do that and for audiences to enjoy it of course – I am giving an opinion not a criticism – but to me it's nonsense. Nowadays everyone seems obsessed with stories or narratives. Music and visual art that should stand alone as forms of communication in their own right have to be described and explained for us to enjoy them, apparently. The greatest thing about classical music for me is that it is a non-narrative form of expression. It conveys so much more than words can. That's how it can be so unbearably, intensely emotive. Listen to the music. You don't need words to tell you what it means. I love words, but don't expect of them something they can never achieve. In Defence of Divas The other key to Tosca is the personality of Tosca herself. She is a blend of passion, innocence, religion, professional confidence, personal insecurity and ultimately, strength. It is the reaction between her nature and the historical circumstances that drives the plot. This means that for the show to work, the character of Tosca has to dominate. It has to be the thing you are most bound up in, or you're just watching another story of the miseries of war and abuse. And for that you need the singer playing Tosca to have a huge personality as well as a great voice. You need, in fact, a diva. I've seen Anna Netrebko in many roles, particularly live from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and she can project a dominant persona even if she's not one of the greatest prima donnas. It became clear from the interval interview with the director that his approach had toned that down. Difficult I wish I could remember where I saw an interview recently with a Hollywood film director talking about 'difficult' stars. (If anyone recognises what I'm talking about, let me know in the comments). He was saying that he never expected the great Hollywood stars to behave in an ordinary fashion off-screen. He didn't think that was 'difficult' of them because they were exceptional people who could walk out and put down a unique and powerful performance that would communicate with millions of people for years to come. (I'm not condoning abusive behaviour. Nothing excuses that.) The performing arts need these big diva personalities with the ability to project themselves. Opera needs them. Tosca certainly needs them. Teamwork There was a great emphasis on teamwork in this current production of Tosca, and I think that may be responsible for the dumbing-down of Anna Netrebko's performance. Of course, everyone involved in a production is important to its success. But teamwork is not some kind of cultural communism where the back-desk viola players and the wardrobe supervisor have equal weight to the musical director and the lead singers in the performance of an opera. In the recording of E lucevan le stelle that I shared above, Pavarotti adds a few additional beats here and there. You can feel the conductor and every member of the orchestra hanging on those extra-long notes, waiting to catch him when he moves off. That's teamwork, without attempting to tame Pavarotti's divo quality (not that anyone could, I'm sure!). As Cavaradossi's heart is breaking with the tragedy of his life, so is Pavarotti's and, such is his power as a performer, so will ours every time we hear it. My Mother's Mincemeat I've been talking about early preparations for Christmas. Most traditional English Christmas food such as mincemeat and fruit cake is quite simple, but to taste their best they just require the right combination of good-quality ingredients and time. Mincemeat requires cooking (sour) apples, and I always make mine as soon as they are available. If you have any left after Christmas, it will taste even better, topped up with a little brandy, next year. Texture I think texture is very important in mincemeat, so follow the instructions for chopping the ingredients carefully. You don't want to end up with something sloppy – you can buy that in the supermarkets! If you take the time to get this part of the preparation right, you will have mincemeat that still has some bite twelve months from now. Walnuts rather than almonds are key to the texture too. Almonds are quite hard and are excellent in Christmas cakes and puddings. Walnuts have a contrasting combination of softness and crunchiness that is perfect for mincemeat, and the bitter edge blends with that of the spices and the treacly sugar. Finally, try to get some whole candied peel. It will elevate the flavour all your Christmas baking and fruit cakes from now on. And it adds yet another layer of texture to your mincemeat. I don't know what they do to the ready-chopped stuff that's widely available, but it never tastes anything like the real thing. Suet I've noticed that there are recipes popping up now for mincemeat without suet. Some use butter instead. You can't make mincemeat without suet. The texture and flavour are all wrong. Traditionally, mincemeat was made with raw beef suet put through a tabletop mincer. This was a remnant of the old English recipes that combined minced meat with dried fruit and spices in the way that some middle eastern cooking still does. If you can get good quality beef suet, and are happy to do this, it will give you a strong-flavoured, old-fashioned mincemeat. But you will need to make sure the mincemeat is always thoroughly cooked before you eat it – no pinching a spoonful from the jar! You can use a packet beef suet of course, but these days I use vegan suet so that everyone can eat my mince pies. You can buy this in any supermarket but it does generally contain palm oil, the production of which can be environmentally harmful. Suma in the UK produce a vegan suet that uses sustainably produced palm oil, and you can buy it online or in many independent health food shops. Spices This is very much my mother's recipe – I have mentioned her great talent for celebrating Christmas at home – but I do have an addition of my own. That is the spice mix. I add half of the spice amount from a good quality commercial mixed spice blend and half from my homemade Garam Masala. Garam Masala means, I believe, 'hot spices', because it contains the spices that are thought to heat the body in Ayurveda. By the time you have added this alchemical blend to your rum-soaked mincemeat, it will leave you feeling like this: I use the recipe for Garam Masala from Madhur Jaffrey's New World Vegetarian: 1 tablespoon cardamom seeds, 1 teaspoon cloves, 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 teaspoon black cumin seeds, a 2in cinnamon stick, half a nutmeg and a curl of mace all whizzed up in a grinder. My Mother's Mincemeat This is the ultimate rich, chewy, warming traditional Christmas mincemeat for your pies. very large bowl sharp knife chopping board scales vegetable peeler food processor large sterilised jam jars 8 oz currants 8 oz raisins 8 oz sultanas 8 oz cooking apples (use firm, sour apples) 2 oz candied lemon peel 2 oz candied orange peel 8 oz suet (beef or vegan) 4 oz walnuts 1 lb soft dark brown sugar (use the darkest sugar you can get) 2 tsp mixed spice (see the recipe intro) 1 lemon (grated rind and juice) dark rum (a few tablespoons) Add the suet, sugar, currants and spice to your bowl Put the raisins and sultanas into the food processor and pulse until they are lightly chopped. Don't let them turn into mush! Then add them to the bowl. Lightly chop the walnuts by hand. Walnuts are soft and this is easy. Aim for a variety of sized pieces, with the largest being about the size of a pea. Add the nut pieces of all sizes to your bowl. Slice the lemon and orange candied peels by hand. Cut each piece into thin strips about 1/4" or 60mm wide. Then cut each strip into squares. There's no need to be too precise about the size as some variation helps the texture. Add the pieces to your bowl. Peel the apples and cut them by hand into cubes that are about the same size as the peel or a little larger. Add these to the bowl. Grate the lemon rind into the bowl and add the squeezed lemon juice. With clean hands and jewellery removed, put your hands into the bowl and give everything a good mix. Add three tablespoons of the rum and mix with your hands again. If the mixture feels a bit dry, add another tablespoon. Cover the bowl with a plate or a clean teacloth and leave it to stand for 24-48 hours. After the resting period, uncover the bowl and with clean hands give the mixture another mix. If it is thoroughly moist right through it is ready to pack into sterilised jars. If not, add a drop more rum and mix again before putting into jars. Don't add too much rum. You don't want liquid lying at the bottom of the bowl. You can always add a drop more alcohol later if the mincemeat seems a bit dry. Store your mincemeat in a cool dark place until you want to use it. The longer you can leave it, the better it will taste. When you are ready to use it, turn the whole jar out into a clean bowl and give it a good stir. Add a little brandy if it is at all dry. Return it to the jar before taking out what you need for your recipe. Don't be tempted to chop the nuts, peel and apples in the food processor. The result will be a very mushy mincemeat. Put the radio or an audiobook on, and take the time to enjoy a bit of therapeutic knife-work!

Sunny Summer at Stonehenge by Emily Tellwright, 2025 ' "Detective stories contain a dream of justice. they project a vision of a world in which wrongs are righted, and villains are betrayed by clues that they did not know they were leaving. A world in which murderers are caught and hanged, and innocent victims are avenged, and future murder is deterred." "But it is just a vision, Peter. The world we live in is not like that." ' Thrones, Dominations, Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh, 1998. The fictions we love I love British Library Crime Classics and classic crime fiction in general. Despite being a great self-analyser by nature, I still don't know why I like detective stories so much. In which case I'm even less clear as to why murder mysteries as a genre are so wildly popular. I can feel the pull, but I don't understand it. Cosy mysteries are one of the biggest genres in fiction at the moment. Have a think about that: cosy murders, killings with no 'unpleasantness'. How does that make any sense? Some of my British Library Crime classics collection Making Sense It doesn't, of course. And that brings me to one of the myths of classic crime fiction, and a good deal of other crime fiction, that is part of its appeal. It creates a world that makes sense. Or at least one that you can work out if you have sufficient information. The stories take place within a world where people behave logically even if it's in consequence of irrational feelings. If you happen to be interested in true crime as well as crime fiction, then I'm sure that you realise that this is nonsense. People are not rational. In my experience, many of them struggle to be logical unless they have been taught. (Sadly, the English school mathematics syllabus doesn't seem to find logic important, even if it is one of the most useful skills that mathematics can teach the average non-mathematical person.) Famous Crimes During the classic crime era, authors and readers were so in thrall to the idea that people were rational, that there were quite a few attempts made by authors to deduce the 'true' solutions of famous crimes. Penguin published very popular accounts of famous trials. Perusal of these will soon convince you, I hope, that people do not behave rationally. If you find reasons why one protagonist's behaviour would be logical then you render the others' nonsensical. Often there is no solution where everyone behaves comprehensibly. A more modern example that springs to mind is the notorious White House Farm case. Nothing in that story makes any sense at all, not least the actions of the police. Justice or something else? I don't think most people are looking for myths of justice as Lord Peter Wimsey says. At least not nowadays. But I do think they feel comforted by a world in which everything is explicable if we can find enough information. An existence that is always comprehensible if we only look hard enough. Classic crime fiction, where the solution is almost always revealed, gives satisfying closure. And that's a myth, because life is not always so tidy. A Fairy Story Interestingly, there is one subject in which the assumptions of rationality and perfect information are taken as a given, indeed as a basis for modelling. And that is economics. I'm not suggesting that modern economics was influenced by detective fiction, but perhaps they both grew out of an intense belief in rationality that was fashionable in the early twentieth century. The abhorrence of eugenics became popular about then too. These are quite important assumptions, because most of the world's economies are run according to models that rely on them. And look where we are. A mathematical model can only give a meaningful result if it is based on valid assumptions, and most of human society is run on the basis of a system that assumes the complete nonsense that people are perfectly rational and perfectly informed. The people who follow these models generally believe that money, a human construct with no physical reality, is always in limited supply, but that the resources of our finite planet are capable of supporting infinite growth. Ironically, a perfect example of human irrationality. Immunise Yourself Against AI We Are Not Robots Humans are certainly capable of sound logic, and it is a valuable skill that should feature more in our education. But we are not governed by it. And the premises for our logic often come from feelings, memories, associations or even biological triggers. They are not necessarily rational. For example, if I now feel like eating a banana I would, quite logically, find the nearest banana and eat it. That might not be rational though. I might have just had a meal and not really need any more food. The nearest banana might be in Tesco and if I eat it without paying for it, there may be unpleasant consequences. And – to borrow from the madness of economic theory – even if I do travel to Tesco for the banana and pay for it before I eat it, that may well be a less than optimal use of my time and resources. Anyway, even with my limited technical knowledge, I can guarantee that there is currently not a single AI bot on the planet that is currently feeling like eating a banana. We are not robots, so why limit ourselves by the comparison? Discursive Thinking It may be lack of confidence in their own logic and memory skills that leads so many to be in thrall to AI. (You can read an article by me about our official AI policy on the Castle Sefton Press site). But lots of us don't like it and don't want it. What can we do? The answer is to abandon the worship of logic and rationality and embrace all the human traits that robots don't have. Let's take AI as a challenge to break out of our settled moulds and explore just what we can feel, taste, desire, imagine, love and more. We can also embrace a kind of logic process that is not robot friendly that I shall call 'discursive thinking'. Part of the definition of discursive in my Shorter Oxford Dictionary is as follows: Rambling, digressive; extending over or dealing with a wide range of topics. Proceeding by argument or reasoning. Let's combine the two for thinking that rambles over a wide range of digressive topics with perfect logic. Bots struggle with that. They don't like digression. I know this because it's naturally the way I write, and I also know how difficult my articles are to optimise for search engines! I don't think bots understand the link between Tinned Salmon and the Totality of Life for example. Overheating Perhaps if enough of us try to be wildly human and very unrobotic we will cause enough bot confusion to melt a few data centres. Just a thought. The great detective Back in classic detective fiction, there is a very famous detective whose thinking is of the discursive kind that I have just described. Who consistently runs rings round the best of Scotland Yard by letting her mind ramble over a wide range of trvial topics with faultless logic? Miss Marple of course! Like Kitty Packard in Dinner at Eight (though for very different reasons), she could never be replaced by AI. The British Police in Detective Fiction 1950s Staffordshire police uniforms I've mentioned before that there tends to be a subject that naturally forces itself on my intention and this month that has been the police. The police are always in the news of course, and they are almost always in crime fiction. In addition we visited the excellent Cheshire Museum of Policing and I came across a very interesting book about the Metropolitan Police's relationship with the film industry, The Metropolitan Police and the British Film Industry, 1919-1956 by Alex Rock. The Police There have been lots of concerning things in the media about the police recently. From institutional racism and misogyny in the Met, to the arrest of pensioners holding pieces of cardboard and the lack of availability of officers to attend fairly serious crimes. These are all things that we should be concerned about, but they are not new things. In Clive Emsley's well-researched and entertaining book The Great British Bobby, we find that from the earliest days the British police were a mixture of the corrupt, drunk and violent and the committed and competent. There were some good detectives as early as the Bow Street days. But officers were always constrained by their superiors, the government and the laws they were employed to defend. And there were always problems finding enough good recruits. It's always been a difficult and dangerous job too, as well as being underpaid, underfunded and understaffed. And there has always been a good deal of public hostility towards the force. An interesting article about the current situation from police officer Alfie Moore suggests little has changed in these regards. The public have not always had a positive image of the police. The Establishment It's only to be expected that a body created and designed to defend and support the established laws and government of our country should defend and support the establishment. By which I mean the established power structure of our society. And sadly, in the context of history, it's no surprise that an establishment-supporting institution harbours racists and misogynists. But there should have been much more progress here. In an organisation that constantly deals with the violent and faces violence against itself, you can expect that that will provoke violent reactions in some. And any social structure based on power over others will always attract some bullies. At one time school teaching was the same. The bottom line is, the police do a difficult, demanding and very necessary job. If we don't like things that they do in defence of the establishment, or the culture of the force, then we should be looking to get ourselves a better establishment for them to serve with a better culture for them to be part of. The Perfect Policeman So if the current issues around the police are not new, why are we so shocked by them? Could it be because the English have a preconceived idea of what our police are like? Would that preconceived idea be of someone fair, committed, respectable and tough but unarmed who justly defends the good laws of a free country? Someone like Jack Hawkins' characters in the excellent 50s films The Long Arm and Gideon's Day, perhaps. Have we have forgotten all those unpleasant wide-boy cops in The Sweeney and other 70s shows as quickly as we did the post-war consensus? Or did we just never really believe in either of them? Ted Willis and the Craft of Screenwriting Dixon of Dock Green If you're younger than me you may not know who George Dixon is. But for anyone who remembers the 1960s, he probably springs to mind as the perfect British police officer. PC Dixon was a fictional policeman played by Jack Warner the 1950 film The Blue Lamp who was then given his own BBC TV series which ran from 1955 to 1976. The character became something of an institution, known as the idealised beat policeman who knew all the locals, was always ready to help and was above reproach himself. It has since come to be regarded as a ridiculously cosy portrayal of police work. Another myth of crime fiction. In Alex Rock's fascinating book (mentioned above), I discovered that The Blue Lamp was made under the control of the Metropolitan Police to portray the image they wanted for the force. This was both to improve the public's relations with the police, which were deteriorating after the war, and to improve recruitment. Nevertheless, on the limited evidence available – very few of the 50s and 60s episodes survive – I think the television series was initially more than comforting propaganda. Not So Cosy The TV series was created and written by Ted Willis as a character-based drama about the working life of an ordinary policeman. Willis was an extraordinarily prolific writer of film, television and novels. His early work in the 1950s was 'kitchen sink' drama – i.e. about British working-class life. To me it's far more convincing than the 'New Wave' and other much lauded writing of the late 50s and early 60s. I particularly like his film Woman in a Dressing Gown, which is well worth watching next time it comes round on Talking Pictures TV. The early series of Dixon are not particularly cosy. There are police corruption and guns and Dixon is not infallible. Most of the characters are neither good nor bad but a mixture of the two, and life is hard for everyone. By the 60s, the series does seem to have become the more comfortable, predictable one that people remember. But if you can consider the early episodes in isolation, they are quality social drama. The change seems to have been at about the time that Ted Willis stopped writing the scripts and others took over. Prolific Screenwriting I've always had a fascination and respect for the craft of writing. In earlier times, British television screenwriters often had to come up with stories under pressure. Their scripts had to work with a very restricted budget and complicated technical considerations. What a skill to be able to keep delivering the goods under those circumstances! I recently saw an interview with Brian Clemens, another prolific screenwriter. He described how working for budget film and television producers in his early days had honed his skills. After being forced to come up with stories for unlikely combinations of leftover sets, or for films that could be cut to different lengths for different markets, he felt he could tackle any script problem that arose in his later career. I do love literature, but I also love to be entertained. I'm not ashamed to be inspired and influenced by retro British film and television. Those people were living on their wits and they often did a good job, and occasionally a great one. The Fictional Policeman I suspect that crime fiction – in books, films and television – gives most people their idea of our police force. The cosy Dixon that emerged in the mid 60s became a comforting reality to some and a ridiculous anachronism to others who believed in a more critical version of the constabulary. A Consciously Created Image Alex Rock shows how, in film, that was for many years an entirely fictional portrayal. This was because the police refused any cooperation or involvement with the film industry. After 1945, when the Metropolitan Police became involved in the industry, many details became accurate but far from all because the Met were so keen to control the force's image. They went on to be equally influential over The Long Arm, which portrayed an idealised CID. The image they sought to portray was well-established in the minds of those in charge. In Clive Emsley's book, he shows how the English police force was consciously developed along different lines to the more militarised French model. There was a determination to keep officers unarmed, on the beat and focussed on crime prevention. But the British government was in favour of the militarised model for colonial police. And they were still willing to call the army out against British subjects if necessary. This is a clear example of how the English ruling classes, needing to co-opt the lower classes into their social structures, and make real their own ideas about themselves, used ideas of English superiority and difference. (And that's something that's very relevant to the current violence and threat of fascism in our country. But that's another article ...) Crime Fiction Books I think that the idea of the perfect British policeman might have been spread and embedded by crime fiction books too. Certainly the majority of authors seemed to have come to round to that view of the police by the mid twentieth century and probably before. So they were ahead of the movies and the official propaganda. I have no idea why this cultural shift occurred, and if anyone knows of any studies on this subject please let me know in the comments. I am convinced that it was an influential change that affected the reading public's idea of their police force. Not very popular In the early days, the new police were not very popular. Some authors then, such as Charles Dickens, gave them supportive portrayals which did have some influence. But it took a long time for the perfect British policeman to become an established trope. We can see this in early detective fiction and even in P G Wodehouse. The uniformed policeman is a ridiculous figure of fun, and the professional detective is an idiot. Think of Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Or Poirot's patsy Inspector Japp in Agatha Christie's early work. Even Peter Wimsey's intelligent friend Inspector Parker is isolated among stupid colleagues like Inspector Sugg. Change of view Somehow, by the 50s many of us had come to believe in the great British police, Jack Hawkins' fair, committed, respectable and tough but unarmed copper who justly defends the good laws of a free country. Why and how? Partly, no doubt because the police force had improved a lot over time, had become more professional, more organised and had a clearer concept of its role. Policing has changed over the years, as have attitudes towards it. But also, I'm sure, because of some successful attempts at film propaganda. And before that, laying the ground, was a corresponding change in the attitude of detective fiction writers propagated by their enormous popular influence. Agatha Christie You can see the change clearly in the progression of Agatha Christie's work. She starts with the dim-witted but confident Japp but Poirot later works alongside Superintendent Battle and Superintendent Spence, very much of the Jack Hawkins type. And very much the police officers we'd all like to deal with if we ever have to. Miss Marple starts with her foil the blindly robotic Inspector Slack but moves on to the charming and intelligent Inspector Craddock. The brilliant amateur detective goes from being the saviour of justice and the scourge of the incompetent police, to the inspirational colleague and confident of the dedicated professional officer. Partly this must have been for practical reasons, as the development of the force and the scientific side of detection soon rendered amateurs working alone incredible. Perhaps it was even a sign of renewed patriotism and a desire to distinguish ourselves from the increasingly militarised Europe of the 30s. Whatever the reason, the adoption of this attitude by writers reinforced it and cemented it by embodying it in likeable and admirable characters who were actors in addictive and memorable stories. Police officers could now be heroes. The Myths of Classic Crime Fiction So what does classic crime fiction and its myths offer us? And has it a good or harmful influence? Satisfaction Well, like all myths and fiction, they can't do too much harm if we remember they are not real. They do not portray the world and life as they are. They give us the satisfaction of a puzzle solved, and a closed story, which is perfectly acceptable form of escapism. (Jane Austen uses the same technique). As long as we don't get lost in the fantasy and become disillusioned that reality does not correspond. Harmful Influence They portray human behaviour as more logical and rational than it truly is. In fact, other fiction often does that too to make a story 'make sense'. This could have the positive effect of encouraging readers to learn to be more logical, but in practice I think it merely reinforces a false idea of humanity, its motivations and its behaviour. That makes the nonsense of the systems by which we are ruled seem more acceptable. As they cause great suffering and will eventually lead to our destruction, this cannot be a good thing. The Police They give us an idealised vision of our police force that is not born out by the messy reality. I am not in favour of propaganda. We need to know the true state of our police force, so that we can act to improve and support it as necessary. And any police force can only be as good as the laws it enforces and the culture it upholds. But if we have an ideal of our police to move towards – as long as we remember that it is not, and never was the truth – the perfect policeman of detective fiction is a very good one to have. Incorruptible, unarmed when possible, fair, unmoved by class, wealth or influence, keen to help and embedded in the community. Even if that image was created for less than honourable motives, we can be proud to ever have adopted it as what we expect. Coming Soon I'm hoping to publish next month's article earlier in the month to get a little ahead before Christmas. So more will be on the way very soon!

At the Seaside by Emily Tellwright, 2025 A story of food, culture and identity Possibly my favourite cookbook, and certainly my most used, is Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian. I can't recommend it highly enough, even if you're not vegetarian (I'm not). I might have mentioned before that I mainly cook because I like eating, and so I'm naturally drawn to the work of cookery writers who are motivated by a similar enthusiasm, rather than home economics or chef training. Madhur Jaffrey is such a person, having learned to cook as an adult so that she could enjoy some of the food she loved. After twelve years of owning this book, I still find recipes I haven't tried or even much noticed. I recently came across this story in the introduction to the section on corn: 'Corn belongs to the Americas. However, I have been to parts of the world that believe otherwise. On a remote East Indonesian island, where rice cannot survive in the dry volcanic soil, it is corn that is the chief source of sustenance. Brought by the Spaniards and Portuguese five hundred years ago, this grain has been so intricately woven into the island's mythology and culture that locals assume it was always there. The women don mannish hats and dance corn dances in the black earth under the banyan tree, miming the sowing, reaping, drying and even, in undulating motions, the ‘popping’ of the grain. Corn has caused the habitants of older mythologies (such as spirits of the banyan tree) to intertwine with the not-so-old. Corn has entered the islanders’ souls.' What a great example of a human society reinventing themselves. Through food, they merged their old culture with a new identity. And before we have any patronising thoughts about isolated peoples and what they don't know, let me tell you that we all do this all the time. Modern society exists on a bed of often fictional assumptions. These usually involving concepts or commodities now so ubiquitous that they are widely accepted as fact. Indeed, it is the challenge that is posed when groups of people with different sets of assumptions interact at scale that is causing the so-called 'culture wars'. Culture I confess that, being a woman and a bit eccentric, I have never been attracted by the concept of culture. In general, it seems to involve a lot of rules about what you have to do to fit in with everybody else. Through much of recent history, for women that has involved a lot of restrictions, telling-off, victimisation and abuse (particularly if you didn't comply, even by accident). But we do need it. You can't begin every interaction as if you are interacting with someone from another planet. We have to take some shared knowledge as read. It's rather like having caching on a website. If you called up every website completely from its main server every time you used it, it would be slow and use a lot of energy. So some of the static parts of the site are stored nearer to you, in your browser even, and taken as a given when you visit different parts of the site. In a similar way, every time that you mention a car in a new conversation, you don't have to explain what it is to the other person. They know because it's part of your common culture. Ghost Train and a rapid change in identity My type of fiction I love fiction that works on many levels. That's why we describe our books as entertaining literary fiction at Castle Sefton Press. The English language is a wonderful thing and we like to make the best use of its expressive potential. That's where the 'literary' element comes in. It means neither 'difficult', 'intellectual' nor 'elite'. Our books are for everyone who reads English. We love well-plotted stories with twists and turns, interesting characters and humour. This is where the 'entertaining' element comes in. Hopefully, you can read our books just for amusement and be satisfied. That's one level. You might find yourself musing on some overall theme that a book seems to have, and that's another. If you've read Ghost Train – and if you haven't, obviously I recommend that you do, because if you follow this blog you're likely to enjoy it – you might have pondered on some of its themes. And different readers will find different threads of interest in the book, perhaps ones I wasn't aware of myself. Themes To some extent, the book is about how we can retain good ideas from the past and merge them with the best modern innovations to create a synthesis that is better than the old or new on its own. I've talked about carrying things through before. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a balance where we could enjoy the benefits of modern times and some of those things that people miss from earlier days as part of our everyday lives? But the deepest theme that motivated me to write the story was a fascination with how quickly our societal paradigm has changed. Not particularly whether the old one was better or worse, but just the fact that in my lifetime, British ideas of what matters and how we organise our society have changed out of all recognition. I'm fascinated by people older than me who seem to have so immersed themselves in the new that they have forgotten that those old ideas ever existed, let alone that they engaged with them and benefitted from them. English Culture and Identity If you asked people about defining features of Englishness in the twentieth century, you would have probably heard mentioned the famous 'stiff upper lip', repressed emotions, afternoon tea and a just, non-violent society where police never carried guns. That's who we thought we were. And yet if you read The Pickwick Papers, which the same people would doubtless have assured you was quintessentially English fiction, it's nothing like that at all! Mr Pickwick as imagined by Francesca China The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens was first published in serial form in 1836, so not that long ago. Less than a hundred years before the ideas listed above became mainstream. But there are no stiff upper lips and repressed emotions on display. In fact, everyone is quite quick to tell others exactly what they think of them and display a range of passions. There isn't much brave forbearance. Moreover, it takes place in a society that ranges from unregulated to anarchic, where people take the law into their own hands often with accompanying physical violence, and where venturing outside your home territory was truly an adventure. Dinner was taken in the afternoon and tea in the evening. (The book is a terrific romp, full of memorable characters and humour. Well worth reading.) So, twentieth-century England seems to have made up its own version of the corn dance. And yet you still read and hear its ideas of 'traditional' Englishness referred to all the time. It's quite a modern tradition. Madhur Jaffrey About Madhur Jaffrey's work There is a food, culture and identity story relating to the World Vegetarian cookbook itself. Madhur Jaffrey is a widely travelled person, with friends and contacts all over the world. She loves food and eating and is clearly very good at getting people to share their recipes! Many of the dishes in the book have attributions to their originators, and often they have entertaining introductions telling us how she encountered or created them. If you have heard of Madhur Jaffrey, it is probably as a writer and television presenter on Indian food and cookery. I do have several of her excellent Indian cookery books, and the World Vegetarian has many Indian recipes too. But it has so much more. It is packed with authentic recipes collected from North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. They haven't been adapted or standardised and often feel exotic in method and sometimes in ingredients. But Jaffrey is a great translator of food: she can make the cooking and eating of something very new accessible without adapting it. Restricted by Racism I was therefore deeply saddened to hear her speak of a kind of racism she encountered in her career as a cookery writer and broadcaster. She had wanted to do many more books and series on different cuisines, but was always told that as she was Indian she could only write about Indian food. White cookery writers could of course write about whatever type of food they liked. A very colonial attitude. I'm so sorry that she experienced this and that we missed out on all the wonderful cookbooks that she might have created. But I'm also very glad to be able to enjoy and celebrate one book when she was able to extend herself with wonderful results. Madhur Jaffrey recipes in Ghost Train Given my liking for her books, it's not surprising that several of the recipes mentioned in Ghost Train are Madhur Jaffrey recipes. I think the second cookbook I ever owned was her Quick and Easy Indian Cookery, and as I remember it made meals made in a one-room bedsit – bed in one corner, baby cooker in the other – much more tasty and satisfying. World Vegetarian Recipes The first Madhur Jaffrey recipe to appear in the book is that for the veggie burgers that Clyde makes for the bonfire barbecue (p.74 for paperback readers). I was thinking, and I'm sure Clyde was too, of the Bean Curd Vegeburgers on p.237 of the World Vegetarian. These would need to go in a frying pan on the barbecue rather than over the coals directly. (I use a Netherton Foundry cast iron pan). They're still the best vegeburgers I know of. We don't know exactly what kind of pasta dish Zeno gives Clyde when he is shocked and consequently tipsy after seeing the apparition in his living room (p.82). But I think it would be some kind of short pasta dressed with the Simple Tomato Sauce on p.477. This is the perfect quick, tasty, cheap, store-cupboard meal. (Especially for me, as it's a speciality of my partner and fellow CSP author John Blake, which means that I don't have to cook it myself!) It's also the ideal stomach-lining, savoury, easy-to-eat food for someone 'alcoholically emotional.' I like it topped with some grated mature cheddar cheese rather than parmesan. I expect Zeno does the same. Our well-worn Netherton Foundry frying pan Other Madhur Jaffrey books The Courgette Meatballs that Clyde considers making but doesn't on p.169 are indulgent and delicious. It's one of my favourite recipes of all time. Luxurious enough for entertaining, it's also fairly economical and easily rendered vegan by leaving out or substituting the cream in the sauce. It's also quite an easy recipe if you use a food processor for the grating and chopping. It's on p.41 of Eastern Vegetarian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey. The quick Vegetable Biryani that Clyde rustles up for the dénouement discussion (p.218) is based on the recipe on p.171 of Curry Easy Vegetarian. This is one of Madhur Jaffrey's most recent books. I no longer put the rice in the oven but cook it on the hob. Using the oven in Britain today is expensive! I like to serve this with a yogurt chutney. Onion and Mint Raita on p.445 of World Vegetarian for example. Courgette meatballs Vegetable biryani The Indian Banquet I love Indian snack food: all those delicious 'pastries, fritters, kebabs, fried vegetables, salads and chutneys' that Clyde and Zeno make for the Indian banquet (p.226, paperback edition). I don't make that much of it because it's mostly hard work. Many of the world's great cuisines developed using cheap or free labour – slaves, servants or female family forced to stay at home – and hence could be as time-consuming and intricate as they pleased. But here are my favourites that I would have recommended to Clyde and Zeno: Pastries Cabbage and Onion Patties p.226 of Curry Easy Vegetarian. Potato Patties on p.228 of Curry Easy Vegetarian. These are easy because they use puff pastry, which you can buy, and they go into the oven. Everyone loves them, and they are great for picnics and packed lunches too. Fritters There are so many Indian fritters! I love: Cabbage Fritters on p.23 of Curry Easy Vegetarian Cauliflower Fritters on p.57 of World Vegetarian Prawn and Onion Fritters on p.26 of Curry Easy Probably best of all, the Fritters made with hulled and split mung beans on p.215 of World Vegetarian. Kebabs Again there is a lot of choice, so I stick to easier recipes: Baked Paté Kebabs on p.25 of Curry Easy Anglo-Indian Sausage Patties on p.127 of the same book Delicious Chicken Bits from p.17 of Quick and Easy Indian Cookery Zeno's friend's Chapli Kebabs (p.224) use the recipe on p.25 of Quick and Easy Indian Cookery but using minced chicken leg. They are made small and very thin, which makes them deliciously chewy. Fried Vegetables My favourites are: Buttery-soft slices of deep-fried aubergine on p.34 of World Vegetarian Okra Fries on p.32 of Curry Easy Vegetarian. Salad I generally make a salad of finely chopped tomatoes, onion, cucumber and fresh coriander seasoned with salt, ground roasted cumin and a squeeze of lemon juice. Chutneys Another of my most favourite recipes of all time, and one that I'm sure Clyde and Zeno would like, is the Fresh Red Chutney with Almonds on p.105 of Quick and Easy Indian Cookery. The Peshwari Red Pepper Chutney on p.238 of Curry Easy is essentially the same recipe. Hot from cayenne, rich from almonds, yet fresh from mint and raw peppers, this is truly one of the world's most delicious condiments. It goes with most things, but is especially good with kebabs. I think Clyde and Zeno would also have served: Bengali-style Tomato Chutney on p.239 of Curry Easy Plain Tamarind Chutney on p.474 of World Vegetarian Mango and Ginger Chutney on p.491 of the same book. I don't know if they would know the very unusual Afghani Sour Cherry Chutney on p.457, but I'm sure they would serve it if they did. The main courses (p.224) are Bangladeshi White Chicken Korma, p.93 of Curry Easy, and Fresh Indian Cheese in a Butter-tomato Sauce on p.262 of Curry Easy Vegetarian. I'm sure Clyde would make his own paneer. It's not difficult, and the recipe is in World Vegetarian. I'm not sure what mango dessert Clyde has in mind, but it's probably something like Mangoes Mumtaz on p.334 of Curry Easy. Cooking our books Most of Madhur Jaffrey's wonderful recipes are not online, so I do encourage you to explore her books, especially World Vegetarian. Good cookbooks become old friends that are there day-in, day-out to support us in our daily lives. They help us to find pleasure, satisfaction, health and nourishment in one of our essential activities. Hopefully they make it easier too. My well-used copy of Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian If you have favourite recipes from any of the books I've mentioned, please share them in the comments. Or recommend your favourite Madhur Jaffrey cookbook. Back to culture and identity The early history of Europe I've been reading Early Medieval Europe 300–1000, by Roger Collins. It's over thirty years old now, so doesn't include recent archaeological findings, but is still an excellent book. Apart from being short on maps. I have absolutely no idea where, for example, south-western Noricum and western Pannonia were, and it disrupts my reading to have to keep looking things up. (There is a more recent edition, but disappointingly they don't seem to have added extra maps.) That the Roman army was not made up of people from Rome or even Italy necessarily, but of various peoples from the vast Roman empire is now widely known. In its later years, it extended recruitment farther still and included mercenaries from regions outside the empire. In Collins' book we learn that in the early years of his period, groups of people in Europe outside the empire were equally fluid in what I suppose we now call ethnicity. So not everyone arriving in Britain with 'The Saxons' was originally Saxon, and not everyone fighting with 'The Huns' was a Hun. What did they think they were up to? But it's more complicated still, because everyone seems to have moved around a lot, fighting – that they did a lot of fighting is perhaps one of the things about this period that we can be fairly certain of – and groups with names like 'Saxons' and 'Huns' might have called themselves something different not long before. It's not clear where these names and identities came from. And how the people themselves thought of these identities, and what they meant to them, is certainly very obscure indeed. Changes to culture and identity What is clear, is that by the second half of the century, those ideas of identity had changed. The names of these groups of people now took on a fixed identity. And frequently spurious histories of them, detailing their origins and distinctness from other groups began to appear. The West Saxons in England, the Visigoths in Spain, the Franks in Gaul and the Lombards in Italy for example, all had such written accounts of their early history and origins. Christianity may have had an influence on the style of these books, given that the Old Testament is supposedly a history of the Jewish people. What seems certain is that people's idea of ethnicity and belonging to a group had universally changed, and they reinvented history to support that new identity. Another corn dance. Nationalism These new distinct groups of people may have had a new sense of identity, but they had no idea of nationalism. It may surprise you to learn that national determination, something that is widely regarded as a human right, hadn't really been thought of 250 years ago. The idea that these ethnically and historically different groups of people that we have seen created should each have a right to their own government and territory had not occurred to anyone as a theory. So a national identity is not a fundamental part of being human because for most of history it didn't exist. To think that it is is another corn dance. I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with national determination if that's what people want, any more than it's wrong for the islanders to eat corn. But one of the reasons nationalism has, and is, causing so much strife, is that it's a fairly new idea that can't be forced onto the prior arrangement of peoples without disruption. (There are other reasons of course, such as colonial exploitation.) The corn dances of culture and identity So are you doing a corn dance? Am I? Probably. None of us has complete knowledge of history and who we are. But it's always good to seek more knowledge and expand our horizons. The islanders can know that corn came from the Americas and still choose to continue their corn dance tradition without harming anyone. If they choose to.

Summer Storm Near Witley Court, by Emily Tellwright, 2025 Tinned Salmon This is last month's article that I never managed to publish. It was holiday season at Castle Sefton Press and we also had some uninvited visitors. Even though I was going away, the blog was due to go out before I went but at the last minute we had a rodent incursion in the bathroom. Dealing with that took up the time left for the blog and put the subject of tinned salmon completely out of my mind! Happily, we had a lovely holiday and I am back refreshed – and tanned after the recent heatwave. The rats have also departed, leaving me to concentrate on catching up with this post. A Reoccurring Theme I may or may not have a subject in mind for my monthly article, but I never worry about it too much because life always presents something to my mind. Often this happens by way of repetition through something that keeps cropping up in different contexts, raising a little flag in my consciousness. Thus it was with tinned salmon. A rediscovered pleasure I'm not sure now why I decided to buy a tin of red sockeye salmon. We are lucky to have an excellent fishmonger in a local market, but I don't buy salmon from him because I don't eat farmed fish (admittedly with the exception of bivalves). A tin of red salmon. I'm not endorsing the brand. Perhaps I hadn't had time to go to the market, or we were economising so I'd cut out fresh fish, which is rarely cheap. For some reason, I was browsing the tinned fish shelf in the supermarket, and realised that I hadn't had tinned red salmon in years. I remembered how much I used to like it. Environmental concerns I'm not writing about environmental concerns here. I've said that I choose not to buy farmed fish, but you may feel differently. I accept that eating fish at all these days has implications for the health of the planet and our future food supplies. What I do say, is that for your own health and the wellbeing of all life on Earth, including you and your family, do consider the origins of your food. Become aware of where it comes from and how it is produced. Then, as far as you can afford to, you can make informed choices. What you decide on may be different to my preferences, but base your decisions on knowledge not sales propaganda. Proustian recollections Even if you haven't read Proust, and I haven't, you may well have heard of the famous scene in his novel In Search of Lost Time where the main character's memories are drawn forth by the taste of a type of French cake, a madeleine. I don't think how I experience memory, or what interests me about it, much correspond to Proust's ideas, but there is no doubt that food has a powerful effect on my recollections. It was really the appearance of the salmon when I opened the tin rather than taste or smell that made me reflect. The colour, the oily liquid, the speckle of bones and border of thick, grey skin was such a distinctive sight. I haven't made that sound appetising at all, and it doesn't look it, but the skin and bones (cooked in the canning to a safely edible texture) used to be considered an addition to the flavour. And as my mother was always quick to point out, they are very nutritious. Remarkable friends After a fleeting vision of mashing the contents of such tins with vinegar on dreary Sunday evenings – all Sunday evenings are dreary when you have school the next day – I immediately remembered some close friends of my childhood. Red salmon always marked a special occasion for them. I mentioned my 'Uncle' Arthur Robinson in a previous post, and it was his close friends, Hetty and Derrick Shenton that came to mind. Uncle Arthur and his wife, Aunty Lou, used to invite Hetty and Derrick over for a meal every so often. My poor Aunty Lou lacked confidence as a cook, and I can well remember her anxiety during the preparation of any food for visitors. Set menu Fortunately for Lou, whenever Hetty and Derrick came the menu was always the same: tinned red salmon, mashed potato, peas and parsley sauce with Bird's trifle to follow. There was a sound practical reason for this, in that Derrick had lost all his own teeth and found his dentures very uncomfortable. This was a luxury meal that he could manage without using his teeth. I'm sure we can all see the funny side of this. There is much humour in the human condition, and I think it's healthy to enjoy it as long as you're including yourself as a subject of the joke and not employing it as a weapon. It wasn't really a matter of fun for poor Derrick though, whose health was perhaps affected by the nutritional restrictions that his dental problems imposed. A Wonderful Life Hetty and Derrick were remarkable friends. They lived in a terraced house in a small semi-industrial town. Derrick worked in a textile mill, doing long hours of monotonous work in unbelievable noise and no doubt hazardous conditions. Their home was filled with much-loved animals – dogs, cats, birds, fish and others – Hetty's paintings and embroidery and Derrick's music, which he learned and improvised at an electric organ. They loved the countryside and were keen walkers, going out to explore on a motorbike with Hetty on the back. Underlying everything was their independent Christian spiritualism. This was something they spoke little of to others – it was very much a spirituality rather than a religion – but it clearly gave meaning and joy to everything in their existence, even death. These were people whom many might smile at from the heights of their modern sophistication. They had little money or education. Yet their lives were richly filled with creativity, nature, mysticism and joy to an unusual degree. I was so lucky to know them. A Digression on Blandness In my novel Ghost Train (page 22 for readers of the paperback edition), Zeno refers to the British as culinary magpies "picking out the shiny jewels from all the great cuisines." But this wasn't always the case. There are few now who enjoy the traditional diet of the rural people amongst whom I grew up: no garlic or spices, little frying and few sauces. The most piquant taste was likely to be a pinch of pepper, probably white. In her recent book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, Nigella Lawson has a chapter called 'The Loving Defence of Brown Food.' Well, if Nigella can defend brownness, I can stand up for the delights of the bland. Of course foods that are not highly seasoned are not really bland. You experience the more subtle, mild flavours of the base ingredients, that's all. Traditional British cooking done well is a good chance to experience this, but I'll leave a more general discussion of that for another time. Béchamel Sauce In the original edition of Rick Stein's book English Seafood Cookery he talks of reviving his Seafood Thermidor, 'if the taste for flour-based sauces returns (as it probably will).' That was in 1988, and my impression is that we are still waiting. Velouté, the flour-based sauce that Stein uses in the book, is seldom cooked now. That's a shame, because it's easy, cheap, nutritious and versatile. Béchamel, the flour-based sauce made with milk, is still made and eaten as a cheese sauce with pasta or cauliflower, but I don't come across it often in its plain form outside a lasagne. I don't know why, because it's quick, economical, filling and delicious. Almost any cooked vegetable makes a lovely meal when coated in Béchamel, gratinated and eaten with some good bread. I think making Béchamel is a moment to embrace blandness. The sauce has a flat creaminess that lacks the freshness or richness of actual cream. I like to embrace this and rather wallow in it by keeping the seasoning to a minimum. If you let your palate experience it, it's a sauce with an addictive mildness. Parsley Sauce White sauces, as we call Béchamels, with various flavourings were a staple of British home cooking when I was younger. My mother often made onion sauce, a white sauce infused with cloves containing sliced boiled onions. It was delicious with lean roast pork or even chicken, but I have never managed to replicate her recipe and make it taste as I remember. The standard was parsley sauce, a plain white sauce with added chopped parsley. You still see something claiming to be it in cook-in-the-packet frozen fish. The creamy blandness lightened by the faint aromatic freshness of parsley is good with a robust white fish. I like it with grilled plaice. And it really does make a tasty dinner with tinned salmon, some mashed potatoes and frozen peas. It's best of all served with gammon. Wrap your stiffly-textured, savoury, salty meat in a combination of fresh green parsley and pale bland sauce. A culinary match made in heaven. A word about the parsley. Far be it from me to disagree with almost everyone in the world who assures us that flat parsley is the superior variety. I only say that, for this recipe, you need the traditional British curly sort. Apart from the flavour, the robustness of the curly leaves holds them together in the sauce. Curled Parsley A recipe for Parsley Sauce A classic white sauce infused with parsley. You will need: Heavy-based saucepan Flat mini whisk Small ladle 3/4 pint whole milk (UK pint) 1 3/4oz butter 1 3/4oz plain flour 1 pinch salt 1/2 - 1 oz fresh parsley, preferably the curly variety Add the milk to the saucepan and heat gently until it is hot not boiling. Rinse out the measuring jug and keep it to hand. While the milk is heating, chop the parsley finely. Add the parsley to the hot milk, turn off the heat and put the lid on the pan. Leave to infuse for 30 mins - 1 hour. At the end of the infusing time, pour the milk back into the measuring jug. Wipe the pan out with kitchen paper and return it to a low heat. Add the butter to the pan. Once the butter is melted, add the flour to the pan. Whisk the flour into the butter with the flat mini whisk and allow the mixture to cook very gently for about a minute to form a roux. Now ladle in the milk and parsley mixture a little at a time, whisking the liquid into the roux each time. Once the liquid is incorporated, you should have a smooth sauce. Raise the heat under the pan a little until the sauce bubbles gently and let it simmer like this for a couple of minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the salt if desired. The sauce is now ready. If you are not eating it straight away it keeps well in the fridge and can be reheated, but you must cover the surface of the sauce with clingfilm or damp greaseproof paper to stop a skin from forming. Tinned Salmon Again What did I do with my tin of salmon? What we most often did at home, drain the flesh, mash it with vinegar and eat it with bread and butter. It always makes me think of Mrs Gamp and her pickled salmon in Charles Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit. This recipe was clearly universal across a large part of the country, as it's exactly how George Dixon eats his in the Dixon of Dock Green episode Andy Steps Up. That story involves stolen tinned salmon, and emphasises that it was a pricey treat for most people in the 1950s and 60s. It must still be for many. Smoked salmon I happened to be reading Philip Ziegler's excellent, though naturally out-of-date, biography Wilson: The Authorised Life at around this time. Wilson was also someone who loved tinned salmon with vinegar, and one of his most quoted remarks refers to him preferring it to smoked salmon. Wilson is sometimes suspected of faking his 'man of the people' image, but I think his salmon preference is true. Most people I knew as a child who had tasted smoked salmon didn't much care for it. It is so different to the tinned salmon they knew and loved as a cherished luxury that it came as a disappointment. In those days, you couldn't buy cheap farmed smoked salmon in a packet. It would be wild Scottish salmon, and you purchased it from a delicatessen who would have a whole side of fish on a board and cut paper-thin slices by hand. It was, from distant memory, mildly savoury, drier than the farmed stuff and utterly delicious. My generous parents, who were not well off, bought me a slice from just such a shop when I was still quite young so that I could try it. I was always able to love both tinned and smoked salmon and adored it immediately, but they were lukewarm in their enthusiasm. Like Harold Wilson, they didn't mind smoked salmon, but preferred the robust flavours of the tinned variety. Tinned Salmon and the Totality of Life The tinned red salmon that was a luxury to us has been considered peasant food by the rich who can afford to eat wild Scottish smoked salmon regularly. Those who have considered themselves in the upper classes of our society have often been quick to announce that poor working people have no taste or appreciation of fine food. There may have been some truth in that: most of them never had the chance to develop any! Snobbery I maintain my lifelong position that both tinned red sockeye salmon and wild Scottish smoked salmon are delicious. You might dislike them from personal taste, or have a preference from propinquity, but they are both intrinsically good foods. Those who think the rich only buy the smoked kind because they are gullible victims of upper-class fashion, or that the poor regard the tinned variety as a treat because they are inferior beings devoid of taste have succumbed to snobbery. I have written before about snobbery because I find it such a sad thing. Of course it can cause a lot of harm, mental and physical, to those at whom it is directed. But it's also a tragedy for the snob, because it narrows their horizons so much. Why enjoy one type of salmon and a smug ego when you could experience the deeper joy of two types of salmon and an open mind? Wider implications Much of what we do every day and how we think depends on inbuilt assumptions that we have somehow absorbed as truth, such as 'smoked salmon is automatically better than tinned salmon.' If we are to negotiate the challenges of life ahead, we need to become aware of these and be prepared to be flexible. You don't have to like tinned salmon, just realise that there is nothing wrong in liking it. It's not a huge leap from putting an arbitrary derogatory label on a foodstuff to putting one on another person. And from there suffering and even atrocities follow. The Totality of Life Let's open ourselves beyond our existing paradigm for our own good. There's nothing we need to give up. We can still like all the things we like now, but in the knowledge that what other people like is just as valid. Perhaps, we will find a few new things to enjoy and some exciting different perspectives on life. You can love both wild Scottish smoked salmon and tinned sockeye salmon with vinegar. I'm living proof.

A pastel drawing of the view from St Mary's Church, Kempley. "With all the care and compassion at our command, let us tend the flower of life, for it is for that our brothers and sisters died and we were spared." J B Priestley, Journey into Daylight, broadcast on the BBC, May 11th, 1945, in Priestley's Postcripts, BBC Sounds. Memories of World War II I hope it will surprise no one reading this to learn that I am not old enough to have direct memories of World War II. I am however, old enough to have grown up among people who not only lived through 'The War' as it was universally called, but were constantly remembering it. People whose lives had been permanently shaped by it, sometimes dramatically. In my youth I was sick of hearing about the whole thing. Just don't mention the war, or you'll start someone off ... If you've read my novel Ghost Train you'll know that, even though the story takes place long afterwards, its origins are a consequence of World War II. It's a reflection of how deep and lasting those effects were. What are we celebrating? Forty years on, and I've been hearing a lot about the Second World War again this month. 80 years of VE day? Haven't we just celebrated its 75th anniversary? And the 80th anniversary of D-Day? Britain does have other history worth remembering. Why are the media and government still so fixated with 'The War'? Now that most people who remember it are gone, what exactly are we celebrating? There are many things to celebrate about World War II. So many people showed enormous courage, resilience and determination and put their most compassionate and generous sides to the fore. Great creativity and ingenuity found solutions and new developments in technology, the sciences, medicine and other areas. An evil regime was stopped and there was finally a permanent peace among the countries of western Europe. So let's not allow it to become a media feel-good stunt. It wasn't a football match. Not one of the many people I knew who lived through World War II would appreciate that. If we're going to remember 'The War', let's remember history not propaganda. Real Memories of World War II Real memories of World War II will tell you that it was no one's victory, except perhaps for a few who made money. Our country was devastated by it and encumbered with enormous ensuing debt. Great numbers of our people were damaged mentally or physically if they survived at all. We should also remember that VE day was not the end of the suffering. Not only did the terrors of the war in the east continue until VJ day, but for years afterwards the home population was subjected to rationing and austerity, in particular during the arctic winter of 1946–47. Mental health problems were widespread (see Ghost Train) and there was a severe shortage of housing. Before the Second World War Father: Allan Tellwright on board ship during World War II Grandfather: Alf Mountford, a 'Desert Rat'. 'Uncle': Arthur Robinson in Germany, April 1945. Life had been hard for most people in Britain before World War II. My father, Allan Tellwright, was already in the Merchant Navy when war broke out. He said that the usual treatment of sailors was such that the war made no difference in terms of hardship. In fact they were more likely to get fed on board. My grandfather, Alf Mountford, was forced to leave a good job due to ill health in the 1930s. He competed with hundreds of other men to get the only job he could, as a lavatory attendant, to keep his family alive. My 'Uncle' Arthur's father had lost a limb in the First World War, which had caused great hardship for his family. How would they be celebrating? These were men who were glad to be English, who thought Nazism and Fascism were things that should be fought and stopped and were proud that they'd succeeded. They were not radical or left-wing. But they also saw enough not to think that our side won because we were intrinsically better, or that everything done on our side was unequivocally right. And none of them forgot what they'd given when their country required it, and how little that country had given when they'd been in need. At the end of the Second World War, they all went into work improving life in Britain. My father became a teacher, my grandfather worked in local government and my 'uncle' in what would become the Department of Health and Social Security. I don't think they would find much worthy of celebration in the poverty and societal erosion we see all around us today. They might wonder why we were celebrating at all when we have failed so comprehensively to build something good from what they gave and the work that they did. An Unsung Hero of World War II John Grocott, Pioneering Plastic Surgeon The unveiling of a blue plaque to commemorate another family member who played an enormously important role during World War II took place this month. The life and work of John Grocott FRCS was certainly something to be celebrated and I encourage you to read about him in Ros Unwin's comprehensively researched book, Unsung Heroes of Wartime Stoke. John was born and worked here in Stoke-on-Trent. He won a scholarship to Guy's Medical School in 1927 and in 1939 at the age of 29 was left in sole charge of the only plastic surgery unit north of London. Thousands of injured servicemen came here during the Second World War to have reconstructive surgery. Ros has uncovered some of the incredible, life-changing results that John Grocott achieved for them in a book packed with inspiring stories and great characters. John was a self-effacing man, not keen on publicity, which is partly why his outstanding work and career were not in the historical record. Fellow local author Ros has worked tirelessly to broadcast his story and gain him the recognition he deserves. A Strange Campaign: The Battle for Madagascar by Russell Phillips A little-remembered but significant episode of World War II and a good story. In a month that seems to have been all about memories of World War II, I also happened to read this excellent book by local author Russell Phillips. Not a well known campaign, in the hands of such a capable writer it is interesting in detail, in its effect on the later execution of the war and in the insights it gives into the protagonists. Russell has a clear narrative style that delivers all the details and background within the rhythm of a story, without anything extraneous but with relevant conclusions. It's a refreshing combination, easy to read but intellectually sound. The book has good maps too on which you can follow the progress of the action. Not Perfect I particularly liked the insights into relations between the French factions and between the French and the British, both of which affected politics after 1945. The attitudes of the Senegalese and the Malagasy were also interesting. The imperfect execution of war was also clear. Success was not guaranteed. The British authorities frequently differed and delayed, while everyone had flawed information and made wrong assumptions at some point. Not everything that was tried worked. But there were clever strategy and planning, successful new technology, excellent and courageous research and incredible bravery. Don't Mention the War Identity I love being English. For me it's the best thing there is. But that doesn't mean that I think it's the best thing for everyone, or that it makes me better than other people or that my way of being English is the only way. (I've written before about the relationship between the individual and the collective). It certainly doesn't mean that I think England is a paradise, or that as a state the UK (dominated by England) is a paragon. In fact, I could easily write a long list of things that are pretty rotten about life here at present, and things that our government are doing that are very wrong. Don't mention the war, at least for a while. Let's have a rest from World War II anniversaries for a few years and save them up for the centenaries. In the meantime, we can investigate and remember other aspects and eras of our history and broaden our perspectives about our background, identity and environment. And we can work on making our own times worthy of remembrance. So when those centenaries come round we won't just be waving flags and saying it's great to be British because we were on the winning side a hundred years ago. We can feel glad to be British because it means being part of good things here and now. Things which all those who persevered through World War II, whether they perished or survived, could agree are worth celebrating.