Last week's bread had a mould episode, chiz, so I made a loaf of Dove's Farm Organic Seedhouse Bread Flour, crust sprung a bit while baking, I think due to age of yeast, but otherwise okay.

Friday night supper, penne with sauce of roasted red peppers in brine whizzed in blender + chopped Calabrian salami.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple, strong brown flour, maple syrup (also new batch of yeast): v nice.

Today's lunch: tempeh stirfried with sugar snap peas and a sauce of soy sauce, maple syrup, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, cornflour mixed in water, crushed garlic and minced ginger: am not sure the tempeh was supposed to crumble like that during cooking?? served with sticky rice with lime leaves and chicory quartered, healthygrilled in pumpkinseed oil and splashed with lemon and lime balsamic vinegar.

So yestere'en there was a get-together for the Fellows of the institution I have had the honour to be award a Fellowship of, so I thought I ought to Make The Effort and turn up at least for a little bit.

So I trotted off, and in spite of some hitches with the Tube (several trains going to the wrong branch) got to the right stop, and lo, the Scientologists are still infesting Tottenham Court Road, what is this thing that this thing is?

So I crossed the road, going, surely the traffic flow used to be one-way? Confusing.

And went down a side-street, and came to this lovely and surprising thing, which I am sure wasn't there last time I was in these parts, early in 2020:

Alfred Place Gardens

and was charmed.

Then on to venue, where everything seems same as it ever was.

Hearing aids still not optimum in room full of overlapping conversations: but I did manage to have some fairly coherent conversations, including one with old academic acquaintance who was most gratifyingly complimentary about The Biography, all these years later.

So I think a win, even if I did suppose that this event would also include some admin stuff relating to Fellowship, which it didn't.

What I read

Finished The Literary Life of Rebecca West, felt a bit meh about it.

Also finished The Military Philosophers, which is more of Nick Jenkins being in the backwaters of the War while other people die in theatres of war or he remembers dead people. Isobel (wife) actually got to be on stage and have a few lines.

Then, largely because there had been some discussion on troisoiseaux's DW about his works, picked up Dick Francis, Longshot (1990), as it happened to be in a conveniently accessible spot on my shelves; and then went straight on to Come To Grief (this features Sid Halley, who is I think the nearest Francis came to a series protag) (1995); To the Hilt (1996); and 10lb Penalty (1997), which were adjacent. This kind of back to back read really shows up an author's recurrent tropes (quite apart from the hosses and the hero getting painfully done over), like, the mostly quasi-father-son relationships, the quietly competent women minor characters etc etc. The last of this run was the weakest - it's a bit odd, to say the least, to have a plot which is all about politics and Parliamentary ambitions which is rather, um, coy, about actual political allegiances. Francis is very more-ish, though. Interesting that these do not all of them bring things to a tidy conclusion. (I wonder if this is the sort of thing that disappoints the once-a-year on the beach reader?)

Preordered and turned up yesterday, JA Jance, The Girl from Devil's Lake (Joanna Brady, #21) (2025), which, alas, does one of my least favourite crime novel tropes: serial killer with substantial portions of narrative being in their POV.

On the go

Have just picked up, because I felt like it, okay? Rebecca West, This Real Night (1984)

Up next

No idea.

I do feel, Lee Child, that this categorisation is a bit simple:

But I think it’s nuts that people think genre is easier than reaching a very small and reliable audience. Some good, middle-class Julian Barnes or Martin Amis reader, they don’t expect to be 100% satisfied with a book. They put it down and start the next one. When you’re a bestseller, you’ve got to satisfy the person that reads one book a year on the beach. If you leave him disappointed, he may never read another book.

Okay, I read a lot and I very very seldom expect to be 100% satisfied with a book, but the ones that ring the bell are all over the place. I won't say I expect to be satisfied by a book but you know, Middlemarch exists, Tam Lin exists, The Fountain Overflows exists, etc etc, I can always hope.

And what do we mean by being satisfied by a book anyway? I was in Slow Motion Trainwreck Relationship with a person who had some very weird stuff going on about reading and what they would or would not read and somehow being afraid of investing time in reading a book that might not be Right. It was not about satisfaction precisely, it was about having some internal template a book had to match.

Actually I suppose this rather went with making the occasional askance expressions and noises at the kind of things that I was reading, because I may not be entirely indiscriminate in what I read but I do have to be reading something and I will give quite a lot of things A Go.

I also wonder how one fits into the above paradigm people who do read a lot but want the exact same thing with just slight changes, which is also a market that bestsellers aim at, surely?

Also, are there literally people who only read one book a year when they're on holiday (and probably on the plane rather than the beach)?

On another paw (how many have I got up to?) there is Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love who would never read anything (except for Country Life, presumably, if he found the chub-fuddler there) after the transcendant experience that was White Fang.