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My computer glitched before I was able to edit the above.  The second to last paragraph should read:

In the Sydney Review of Books Julian Novitz discusses The Bone Clocks in relation to all of Mitchell’s previous novels. Each is a stand-alone work, but the reappearance of characters from one to another, creates loose inter-textual links. Novitz suggests a similarity between this approach and box sets and cross-over TV series.

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@purofilion  @ichabod  @arbutus

In reading through my last post just now I spotted a slip which I failed to pick up yesterday evening when I read it through before hitting Submit.    ‘  because an artist does speak to you personally is no reason to dismiss him or her …’ should, of course, read  ‘  because an artist does not speak to you personally is no reason to dismiss his or her work as trivial.’  You probably understood what I meant anyway, but I feel bound to mention it.

puro   The critic on the New Yorker I  referred to was James Wood.  I had no quarrel with his review as a whole since, although his verdict was on balance unfavourable, he discussed the novel at considerable length and in a relatively even handed way. If I had read the review before buying the novel I would have concluded nevertheless that it was something which I wanted to read.  The only thing which jarred was the part I mentioned – his opinion that the ‘voices’ of the different narrators were virtually indistinguishable, an opinion which seemed to be based solely on the fact that the narrators are all highly articulate and, to a greater or lesser extent, display a facility with vivid, arresting and sometimes witty similes and turns of phrase.

Other reviewers seem to think as I do, though.  Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times refers to Mitchell’s ‘ventriloquist’s ability to channel the voices of myriad characters from different time zones and cultures; his intuitive understand of children … and his ear for language’; and Pico Iyer, also in the New York Times Sunday Review describes him as ‘  famous for his gift for channelling voices’.

Most reviewers seem to have found the fifth section, in which the metaphysical and paranormal elements of the plot come to the fore, to be the weakest part, although there are at least traces of such elements in most of Mitchell’s writing and it is not something I have any problem with.  according to Joe Lloyd in Culture Whisper Magazine, his earliest influences were Ursula le Guin, Susan Cooper and Isaac Asimov, which makes sense (and, for the record, Ursula le Guin reviewed the novel for the Guardian).

In the Sydney Review of Books Julian Novitz discusses The Bone Clocks in relation to all of Mitchell’s previous novels.  Each is a stand-alone work, but the reappearance of characters from one to another creates loose inter-textual links.  Mitchell himself has written that ‘Each of my novels is a single chapter in a larger volume that I’ll keep working on until I die.  If I were to choose a title for that volume, I would call it The Uberbook’.  Novitz suggests a similarity between this approach and box sets and cross-over Ties.

The Bone Clocks is a fairly hefty work – 620 pages – but for those of you who have no patience with long novels, this might be mitigated by its subdivision into a sequence of relatively short novellas.  Personally, if I am enjoying reading a book, then the longer the better, whether I binge read or tackle it in short snatches, a chapter or two at a time.

 

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@arbutus  @ichabod  @purofilion     I suppose Jonathan Jones redeems himself slightly, in that after the response to his initial piece he did bother to actually read one of Pratchett’s books, but he still comes across as a condescending intellectual snob.  People like him seem to have a very narrow definition of what constitutes art or ‘literature’, and I have little patience with such a pretentious and high falutin’ point of view.

The purpose of art, whether in fiction, painting, sculpture or music, is surely communication; and if the artist has some personal message, vision or perspective on the world and is able to communicate something that message, vision or perspective effectively, then as far as I am concerned it is art, whether the number of people whose view of the world and humanity is changed or enlarged is few or many; and in the case of Terry Pratchett’s novels, it is very many.

To Jones, ‘Small Gods’ is the ‘novel as distraction’ and the prose ‘ordinary’.  Evidently he does not find the perspective offered by well crafted fantasy underpinned by a humane and wise intelligence enlightening, and cannot appreciate Pratchett’s playful delight in the use of language; which is fair enough, although it is his loss.  I just find it hard to reconcile this with his claim to be a fan of Doctor Who, unless it is a kind of cognitive dissonance between his childhood self and his adult persona.

Not every artist, in whatever medium, can speak to everyone, but because an artist does speak to you personally is no reason to dismiss him or her as trivial.  I recently finished reading ‘The Bone Clocks’ by David Mitchell. I bought it without prior knowledge because I had enjoyed reading other novels by him, and I found it the most absorbing of all of them; in fact I read it twice in succession because, like many Doctor Who episodes since SM took over as show runner, the full import and the details could only be appreciated and absorbed the second (or third) time around.  After I had read it I looked up some of the reviews to see what others had made of it.  On the whole the reviews were favourable, although many had been put off by the unorthodox narrative structure and/or by the underlying but integral paranormal theme. But I was particularly struck by the something said by the reviewer in the New Yorker.

The novel is divided into six separate but interlinked sections set in successive decades between 1984 and 2043.  The first and last sections are narrated by the same character, Holly Sykes, firstly as a fifteen year old and at the end as a woman in her seventies.  The intervening sections are narrated by four other characters with whom Holly’s life intersects as a secondary but crucial character. The reviewer in the New Yorker thought that one of the major flaws in the novel was that the narrative ‘voices’ were more or less indistinguishable, whereas I had found them so clearly distinct that I could immediately visualise and ‘feel’ the characters, even in the difference between the fifteen year old Holly, acutely alive to every sensory impression even as she struggled to cope with emotional trauma, and the Holly as a grandmother in failing health, anxious for her grand daughter and adopted son in a world going rapidly to hell.  So whose view should carry the more weight?  Or are both valid?

In my view the role of a critic or reviewer is to give the readers a flavour of the work so that they can decide if it is worth investigating further, not to dictate what they should consider worthy of regard.

 

 

 

 

 

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@ichabod    If you click on ‘Forums’ at the top of the Home Page you will find all the series/episodes which have been discussed listed under the Doctor concerned.  So if you want to access the discussion of any episode in S8, just click on ’12th Doctor’

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@bluesqueakpip   My sentiments exactly!

On the other hand, we have to allow for the fact that the technology is improving very rapidly.  I still recall with a shudder the computer I was issued with when I started a new job in 1991.  It was a Toshiba portable, with programs running on DOS and with only about 20MB of memory;  and the dedicated program which we were expected to use for writing reports was a nightmare, even by the standards of the day.

How do you find Windows 10?  I had been considering upgrading, then the recent setback bumped me back to Windows 8 – which was what was installed when I bought the PC – and I have today had to re-upgrade to Windows 8.1 before contemplating anything further.

@janetteb    I will go back over the conversation on Dickens and 19th century novels to see if there is anything worthwhile that I can add, although I think that the ground has been pretty well covered.

The latest discovery at Durrington Walls is fascinating, but it is just one of a whole series of revelations about the prehistoric landscape around Stonehenge.   Ground penetrating radar and other non-invasive techniques of investigation, such as have been used in this survey, are rapidly transforming the nature of archaeological investigation*.  One of the first things which we budding archaeologists were told to keep in mind back in the day, was that ‘excavation is destruction’ and therefore not to be undertaken lightly or without adequate means of comprehensive recording.  And now we have the means to learn a great deal without having to excavate and destroy, even if excavation may ultimately be needed for verification of the details.

* But they haven’t revealed anything under Stonehenge, so the reboot of the universe must have done away with the undercroft where the Pandorica was stored  🙂

 

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I was itching to join in the conversation about Dickens etc. but alas, I have had to spend the better part of the last few days dealing with the aftermath of a Trojan which had managed to sneak past my firewalls.

Resetting my computer to factory default and then re-installing various bits of soft ware and reloading my documents from backup was tedious but straightforward.  But then the stupid machine tried to install more than two years’ worth of updates (166 of them) all in one gulp, and gave itself massive indigestion.  So for almost 24 hours I was locked out of the system while it tried to sort itself out.  Then, when it had done so, I had to spend almost the whole of yesterday installing the updates manually in small batches. The only thing that saved my sanity was the fact that I had some cryptic crosswords* to distract me while I was doing so.

* Of course, there may be some of you who think that an addiction to cryptic crosswords is in itself a mark of insanity, in which case I will admit freely to being bananas (but not psychopathic)  🙂

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@craig   I sent you an email a short while ago regarding difficulties I was having logging in.  Then it occurred to me to run a full system scan, which seems to have resolved matters.  It looks as if I had acquired a Trojan, which may have been the source of the problem.  Sorry to have bothered you.

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Reverting to the subject of Mieville’s novels, word is that BBC 2 have commissioned an adaptation of The City and the City.

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@miapatrick   Well put.   It is one thing to say, ‘I’ve read the reviews and decided on that basis that this book is probably not to my taste, and another to conclude that ‘not to my taste’ necessarily equals ‘poor; of no literary merit’, especially if many highly respected writers and critics consider it excellent.   It goes even a step further than the ARSE fans who, for example, think that Moffat is a bad writer because they, personally, don’t happen to like/understand what he writes – or, for that matter, the Pratchett fans who dismiss the works of Jane Austen as ‘chick-lit’..

I was not angered by the Jones article; I just thought it absurd – another reason for me not to take his opinion seriously, since his judgements appear to be entirely subjective.  And I was amused by his admission, made without any obvious sign of embarrassment, that he had only just got round to reading Mansfield Park.

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Pause to answer the door bell; then check the link, which appears to be broken.  Try again .

The door bell was the postman with a parcel which proved to contain a gorgeous sari from my sister-in-law, who has just returned from visiting family in India.  Goodness knows when or even if I will have an opportunity/excuse to wear it in public, but it was a beautiful thought.  I will have to make the choli myself, but I have another which I can use as a pattern.

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@arbutus  @purofilion  @ichabod

Curiouser and curiouser!  I was idly trawling through the Guardian archive and was more than a little startled to realise that Jonathan Jones, whilst doubtless deserving of all the epithets cast in his direction, is also an out-and-out Doctor Who fan . Whether or not his fandom comes with ARSE is not entirely clear, though it would be in character.  I remember reading the articles in question, but the by-line had not registered.

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@ichabod    Agent provocateur is an apt term for Jonathan Jones, since that seems to be the effect he often has on readers.  I am not sure whether he adopts a contrarian pose because he gets a kick out of winding people up, or whether it is a kind of ‘everyone is out of step except me’ pretentious arrogance.  And you are right, he is not young.  Judging by his photograph I would guess his age as mid fifties at least.

@whisht   Your recollection of Perdido Street Station is similar to mine.  I found it mesmerising and haunting on one level, but also exasperating at times.  I was less impressed by The Scar and Iron Council, but Embassytown which explores some interesting ideas about language and communication is different again, being more tightly constructed and closer to straight science fiction. I have a copy of The City and the City and keep meaning to read it, but haven’t yet got round to doing so.

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@ichabod    To some extent I agree with your opinion of Mieville’s novels – a little too convoluted and baroque in style, although I don’t necessarily find such qualities, or indeed the length of a book, to be a barrier to enjoyment provided that the work draws me in and engages my full attention. So maybe the problem for me is that I am not entirely on his wavelength.

Embassytown is, however, somewhat different from other books of his that I have read, and I would recommend that you at least try it.

@lisa  I saw that Kos diary yesterday and went so far as to follow the link to the original Truth-out article.  Very worrying in all kinds of ways.

And to change the subject again; the Guardian Art critic Jonathan Jones has started a storm today with short article in which he starts by saying that he has never read any novel by Terry Prachett and never intends to, before going on to dismiss the entire oeuvre as populist potboilers of no literary merit  🙄

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@lisa

They just seem less bothered by anything unconventional probably because in their young lives they’ve been bombarded with so much more then previous generations

That is a very good point.  A lot of things which children today take for granted would have seemed almost as fantastical as the Tardis to those of my generation – although as an avid reader of science fiction from a young age I like to think that I would have coped.  The rate of technological change accelerates almost exponentially, and people seem to adjust accordingly.  In addition, children today are used to seeing increasingly realistic CGI depictions of the fantastical in films, on TV and in computer games, and even though most of them will be perfectly capable of distinguishing make-believe from the real, this would perhaps make it easier for them to adjust to and accept the new and unprecedented.

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@ichabod    On the subject of human-alien communications of the non cliché variety, have you read China Mieville’s Embassy Town?   In TV and film SF it is obviously easier to opt for humanoid aliens and a compatible form of oral communication, extending even to the hardwired grammar; but I find it strange how relatively rarely, even in novels, the possibilities and difficulties of communication between alien species with radically different evolutionary histories, different biology and different nervous systems have been explored.  I suppose that it is just more convenient to presuppose convergent evolution.

As for the young feminist firebrand, sigh!  Perhaps I was especially privileged, in that I grew up in an environment in which I had no reason to doubt – and was in fact encouraged – to believe that I could be and do anything I wanted, provided that I had the necessary innate ability and was prepared to work for it, so it is not for me to criticise those who have had to struggle. But when it comes to people demanding that drama and other works of fiction should only portray the world according to their view of what it, ideally, should be, I draw the line.  In my view, the more art (in its broadest sense) is didactic, the less it is persuasive.

@arbutus   I am truly fearful for the future of the BBC, and wish, without much hope, that the views of Ianucci and others like him will have some impact on the decisions made.  I have signed petitions and submitted my opinion at every opportunity, but I get the impression that our current government is so thoroughly insulated inside its little bubble, and so thoroughly impervious to anything other than its own ideological beliefs and the interests of those who back it, that the decisions have already been made.  I try not to be pessimistic, but it is difficult not to feel that we are governed by people who are intent on jettisoning pretty much everything this nation has which we can be reasonably proud of.

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@purofilion   My post yesterday was, of course, little more than a summary of points I made earlier in relation to this episode and on Kill the Moon, although I thought it worth repeating, on the assumption that @TheConsultingDoctor might not have had the time or patience to wade through all the pages of previous comments.  But I am enormously pleased and gratified that the discussion led you to look more deeply into the western tradition.  I once read somewhere that even the Brothers Grimm felt it necessary to do a little editing, to smooth the rough edges of some of the orally transmitted tales which they recorded but, if so, I don’t think that this did much to dilute the essential nature and impact of the stories.

puro and @fowl   Gradually and at intervals I have been re-viewing last season’s episodes in preparation for the next.  It has been raining all day today, and my choices were: a) to tidy my study and do some long overdue filing;  b) to do some house cleaning and attend to the ironing which has been piling up; c) to catch up on some reading, whether or not of an ‘improving’ nature; or d) to re-watch some more episodes of Doctor Who.  So I spent part of the afternoon watching Flatline and In the Forest of the Night, bearing in mind your thoughts on the children’s apparently blasé attitude to the Tardis.

First of all when Maebh first enters the Tardis she gasps in amazement but says nothing, and when the Doctor says  ‘The Tardis.  It’s bigger on the inside, or didn’t you notice?’   she replies  ‘I just thought it was supposed to be bigger on the inside, so I didn’t say anything’ .  And later she says ‘I find everything confusing, so I don’t say anything’.  I can remember exactly that feeling when I was a child; when everything, and especially the natural world, had a sharper and more immediate impact on my senses, when even the smallest detail could be almost overwhelming in its clarity, but I had no means of telling what was normal and what was unusual, so accepted everything as it came, without comment, even as I drank it in.  And yes, I do remember vividly what it felt like, even though now, in relative old age, I can frame it in a different perspective.

Later in the episode, when all the children enter the Tardis, they exhibit hyperactive curiosity, poking into everything, but don’t display the reaction which the Doctor has come to expect.  He says  ‘Haven’t any of you been struck by the fact that it’s, look, it’s bigger on the inside’  And Ruby, whom we have already seen is somewhat literal minded and ‘unimaginative’ in the judgement of her teachers, says ‘There wasn’t a forest.  Then there was a forest. Nothing surprises us any more’.  Which seems a reasonable observation in the circumstances.  When you have spent a morning adjusting to something seemingly impossible, one more impossible thing might not have quite so much impact.  As you say, puro, children can be remarkably resilient in the face of outer threat or strangeness; it is threats close to home which tend to be the more difficult to cope with; but what these children wanted most, in the end, was the reassuring presence of their parents.

P.S.  There was one detail which escaped me on previous viewings, and that was Maebh’s surname  – Arden, as in Forest of … ; and I would guess that this was intentional rather than coincidental.

 

 

 

 

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@TheConsultingDoctor    This is a somewhat belated response to your post #42142, but the views you expressed interested me.  I did not dislike the episode to the extent that you evidently did, but although I found things in it enjoy and appreciate, it did leave me dissatisfied. Not, however, for the reasons you expressed.  The counterfactual ‘science’ did not bother me particularly, because the story was clearly couched in terms of a fairy story, with specific references to some well known tales – and I am not talking here about the bowdlerised and sanitised (not to say Disneyfied) versions of fairy stories generally considered suitable for children, but the kind which I grew up with: a straight translation of the stories collected by the brothers Grimm which I, little ghoul that I was aged 6-10, relished.  The problem for me was that In the Forest of the Night, as fairy tale, did not evoke that same dark magic.

To my mind, it is a mistake to think of Doctor Who as straight science fiction, because for the most part it never has been, at least in the strict sense.  This question was discussed at some length in the Kill the Moon thread, and there were several who agreed with me that it was at most ‘soft’ science fiction or science fantasy, when it did not cross the boundary in to pure fantasy.  I don’t think that there are many who have a problem with this, as long as the ‘science’ is presented in terms of handwavium and impressive sounding gobbledegook.  Where it gets difficult is when, as in Kill the Moon and, to a lesser degree in this episode, the story depends on something which contradicts established scientific fact or theory.  At that point one has to just give up, or accept that the Whoniverse is not our universe and go with the flow.

As for ‘basic Whovian knowledge’ and the Tardis talking; how much consistency has there ever been across the 50 year + history of Doctor Who?  If we get bogged down in the minutiae, that way lies madness  🙂

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@craig   Thanks.  Consigned to oblivion as soon as spotted in my inbox, but I was wondering whether I should post an alert.

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Oops!  ‘special coordinates’ in the above should read spatial coordinates.  That’s what comes of writing before caffeine intake has been sufficient to enable full brain function.

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@supernumerary   The questions concerning the accessibility/non-accessibility of Gallifrey which were raised in Listen and in Time of the Doctor have not been answered explicitly in subsequent episodes, but I’m not sure that there is really any mystery.  My understanding, for what it is worth, is that since the removal of the time lock* Gallifrey  is once again accessible at any point before the time war.  Clara discovered this by accident in Listen, but the Doctor apparently does not realise it – or he does realise it  but has no wish to revisit it in the past.  Since Gallifrey was removed to a pocket universe or separate dimension it is inaccessible, although communication was possible through the rift in our universe which we saw in Time of the Doctor.  Missy teased the Doctor by telling him that it is where it always was – which, if she wasn’t lying outright, might mean that it occupied the same special coordinates in a separate or alternative universe.

*or perhaps, more accurately, since the events chronicled in Day of the Doctor which meant that Gallifrey was not destroyed and therefore the time lock was never established

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@missy    If it helps, the question of the toy soldier and its trajectory through time and space came up again recently in a discussion on the Death in Heaven thread, with @janetteb and myself offering different theories.  Janette’s explanation was the more elaborate and entertaining; mine a more boringly straightforward loop, and probably neither is entirely correct because we are still missing at least one crucial item of information; namely the precise relationship between Orson Pink and Danny.  All may become clear if/when Moffat provides that information – and I think it unlikely that he would leave such a tantalising thread dangling   🙂

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@craig  Thanks for pointing me to this, I would have missed it otherwise.  It made for interesting reading, as did some of the comments BTL (give or take the usual suspects).  One which made me hoot loudly enough to startle my next door neighbour was ‘Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was a perfect gentleman. CPO Pertwee might have been a different matter …’ .  One of the problems I always had with Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was the memory of him in The Navy Lark!

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@purofilion   @janetteb     The pyrolytic cleaning function is a built in feature, and I think that it requires a special kind of vitreous enamel oven lining and thicker than usual insulation.  There is no smoke and no risk of fire, unless you leave a dish towel or oven mitt hanging over the oven door.  I once ruined an oven mitt that way, though it didn’t actually burst into flame.

Quite a few European makes of oven offer a pyrolytic model, in quite a wide range of prices.  Mine is a Miele built-in, multi-function oven and pretty much top of the range.  I bought it 13 years ago when I decided to blue a large chunk of my savings on a kitchen refit, and opted to go for  what I knew to be a very reliable, if expensive brand, on the principle that it would last several times as long as a cheaper one and thus be better value in the long run. So far it has functioned perfectly.   The salesman’s comment was ‘Lady, you have expensive tastes’; and a friend observed that I was indulging champagne tastes on a beer budget (archaeologists are not well paid).  My smug response was that it was all a matter of priorities and careful budgeting   🙂

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@lisa

She/he has often not thought thru various situations and still doesn’t

With that you have just summed up the Master’s – and now Missy’s – fatal and abiding weakness.  He/she never thinks things through properly, which is why he/she never succeeds, however elaborate the plan, and why, in the past, he has so often ended up having to join forces with the Doctor to undo the mischief he had caused.  And maybe, in his/her subconscious, that was what he/she really wanted all along   🙂

@ichabod

Sonic *oven cleaner* — if I had one of those, I might actually use my oven!

What you really need is an oven with a pyrolitic cleaning function – probably no more expensive than a sonic oven cleaner would be, and it has the advantage that the oven really does clean itself.   You have to take out the racks and shelves and clean those separately, but that is the easy part.  For the rest, you just close the oven door, turn the dial to ‘pyro’ and leave it.  The door locks, the oven heats up to 500 C, and all the gunk on the oven lining burns away.  After a couple of hours or so the oven pings to signal the end of the cycle, and all that is left are traces of white ash which can be wiped off with a damp cloth.  S’wonderful!

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@janetteb  @bluesqueakpip     I have only just started my pre-9th season re-watch of last season’s episodes, and had forgotten Seb’s remark.

So either Missy was less efficient than she claimed in harvesting the minds of the dead and some escaped her net, or Danny was a foundling, parents unknown.  If the latter, then either a) you were right, Bluesqueakpip,  in your original suggestion that Danny had a son by a previous relationship, and Orson was descended from that son,  or b) perhaps Orson is, in fact Danny himself, mind retrieved from the matrix data slice and re-embodied, but perhaps with mind and memory a bit scrambled, in which case Danny and Orson are a kind of loop in themselves; or c) Danny is retrieved from the matrix data slice and re-embodied, and then goes on to have a child from whom Orson is descended (which would explain how Orson knew about the time travelling)

I’m  afraid I still can’t quite bring myself to believe that Rupert/Danny’s presence in the children’s home, his ending up at Coal Hill School and his meeting and subsequent relationship with Clara were all the direct result of manipulation by Missy: there are too many variables with too many possible outcomes, and it would all have required a positively supernatural degree of foresight, even for a Time Lord obsessed with the Doctor and stalking him.  It was enough that she arranged for Clara to meet the Doctor.

All is good, though, when it comes to bonkers theorising.  I tend automatically to reach for Occam’s razor, which is probably why I am not much good at it    🙂

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@janetteb   That is a wonderfully convoluted and bonkers theory, but I am not sure that it works, since there is no way, legally, that Missy could have got her mitts on Danny’s belongings, whether or not he died intestate.  If he had died intestate, the rule in England is that his estate would have gone to his next of kin, however remote, and I know from personal experience that they go to a great deal of trouble to trace next of kin, down to cousins at several removes.  If no next of kin can be traced, then I think the estate of the deceased goes to the state.  If he had made a will – and as a serving soldier in a war zone he almost certainly would have done, even if he had not updated it since – he couldn’t have left it to 3W because he did not know about it prior to his death.

The fact that he was in a children’s home as a young boy does not necessarily mean that he was an orphan or, if he was, that he had no living relatives.  In fact, in that awkward first date he says that he has been occupied with ‘family stuff’.  As @bluesqueakpip pointed out early on in the discussion of Listen, it is even possible that he had a child by a previous relationship.  Orson was vague about the time travelling ancestor, and he could be descended from a brother or cousin, if not directly from Danny.

It may be a more boring explanation, but I think that the trajectory of the soldier through time can be explained as another, relatively straightforward closed Moffat loop.

The first question is, how did the soldier get into the toy box.  It isn’t stated explicitly that it was there already, before Clara and the Doctor arrived in Rupert/Danny’s room, so either of them could have slipped it in.  Danny keeps it as a talisman and, after his death, it is handed down in his family, ending up with Orson; and Orson, for whatever reason, gives it to Clara. Clara then gives it to the young Doctor in the barn, and the Doctor keeps it as a talisman through his many lives.  Eventually, either Clara finds it lying apparently forgotten in a drawer or a cupboard in the Tardis and picks it up as a curiosity, to be produced later when she is trying to reassure Rupert/Danny, or the Doctor had it in his pocket all along and put it into the toy box when he arrived in the room unnoticed,  while Clara was under the bed or while she and Rupert/Danny were preoccupied with the thing under the blanket.  Either is feasible.

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@lisa    That brand of flour is not generally available in the UK, although no doubt it could be ordered on line, via Amazon.  It sounds broadly similar to Allinson Flour, which is what I use.  Allinson offer two grades of both wholemeal and white bread flour – ‘strong’ and ‘very strong’ and I use the latter, because it produces bread which is reliably well risen and of good, even texture.  For everyday bread I use a half-and-half mixture of white and wholemeal flour, but Allinson also do white and wholemeal bread flours with seeds and grains, and a ‘country grain’ bread flour comprising wheat flour, malted barley flour, rye flour and malted wheat flakes.  And of course they do self-raising and plain (all purpose) flours as well.  But there is quite a wide variety of other brands readily available in many supermarkets, including at least one brand of traditional stone-ground flour.  There are still quite a few traditional water mills, and even a few windmills still in operation producing ‘organic’ stone-ground flours, though mostly in limited quantities and available only in specialist shops (I take an interest because my maternal grandfather, though not a miller himself, was the son of a miller and descended from a long line of millers going back to at least the beginning of the seventeenth century).

@Rose2112   I know what you mean about preparation times.  If I am following a recipe I just ignore that bit, knowing that it will take at the very least three or four times as long as stated.  I get the impression that the writers of the recipes assume everyone has the knife skills of a professional chef, whereas if I tried to work that fast I would soon have no fingers left  🙂

 

 

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@arbutus   The problem with baguettes baked outside France is that they are seldom made with the right kind of flour or in the right kind of oven.  Whereas bread in England, North America and (I presume) Australia, is made with ‘strong’ flour, high in gluten, French bread is made with flour from local wheat, which is relatively low in gluten, mixed with only around 20 percent strong flour.  The ovens are of a special type which use steam injection at a certain point during the baking process to produce that distinctive dense and glossy crust whilst leaving the middle soft.  French bakers also, I think, use a relatively slack dough and a fairly long and complicated ‘proving’ method which results in that open texture with unevenly sized holes.  The steam injection process was,  I believe, introduced to France by the Viennese, as were croissants.

As it happens, on a recent visit to France to visit my brother, I  learned something new about baguettes: that there are two kinds.  There are the baguettes traditionelles, which  have the better flavour and keep for at least 24 hours before going stale. and the kind which are more commonly to be found nowadays, which have to be eaten immediately since they turn to cardboard in a matter of hours.

@blenkinsopthebrave   Well, I would hope that the menu on offer aboard the Tardis extends to more than just jelly babies, fish fingers and custard, and jammy dodgers   🙂

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@ichabod     That ‘lemon meringue cake’ sound unutterably disgusting.  Here in Norwich (that’s the original Norwich, in case you were in any doubt) we are fortunate enough to have at least two specialist cake shops producing delectable confectionary.  At one of them, I swear, they must have someone on permanent duty wiping the drool off the display windows.

I grew up near here (I came back to roost after a couple of decades migrating around the UK) and although we rarely bought cakes or baked goods – my mother produced cakes and tarts which were a great deal better than almost everything on offer in the local bakeries, there was one exception.  Shortly after food rationing ended, in the early 1950s, a Viennese immigrant opened a patisserie, and his cream cakes and pastries were on a completely different level!

Bread was another matter.  There was a bakery in the village where we lived which had probably been in the same family for several generations, with a Master baker still making bread the traditional way, in a wooden kneading trough and wood or coal fired brick ovens.  There was no shop.  He baked in the morning and delivered to the surrounding villages in the afternoon, and if we ran out of bread between deliveries, you simply walked into the bake house.  The bread was wonderful, and still warm when he delivered it.  My mother used to leave the loaves to cool on the pantry windowsill, where it would be when we arrived home from school.  Mother always pretended to be puzzled by the fact that when she came to put the cooled loaves in the bread bin, the crusts were so often missing   😉

Some time after leaving the parental home I resorted to making my own bread, although recently I have been using a bread making machine which, if you use the long programme, allowing the dough to prove long enough to develop a good flavour, produces very acceptable loaves.

 

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@purofilion   The griddle I am talking about is like a heavy cast iron frying pan, but flat.  It is heated on the stove top, greased lightly, and the batter is dropped on to it, about a tablespoonful for each drop scone, to form discs around 6cm to 8cm diameter, according to the size preferred.  When one side is done you flip them over (much like making a crepe type pancake, in fact).  Depending on the size of the griddle around four to six can be cooked at a time.  Or a large, heavy, preferably cast iron frying pan can be used instead of the griddle.  Pikelets are made in much the same way, though they are generally larger and a bit thicker and of a different texture. Despite the name, drop scones are quite different from scones.  The one is essentially a small pancake around 2-3mm thick, not unlike an American pancake; the other is made with self-raising flour (or plain flour with baking powder), butter, sugar and milk to form a fairly stiff dough which is rolled out to an even thickness, cut into circles and baked.  Raisins and sultanas are often added to the scone dough, or the sugar can be omitted and grated cheese added if you want them savoury.

As for cooking, I understand your point, though I wasn’t talking about formal ‘dinner parties’ which is not something I have ever gone in for.  When I do entertain people to a meal (not all that often these days, as family and friends live some distance away), it is a fairly relaxed, informal affair.  As I said, I enjoy cooking and will generally choose a menu where a lot of the preparation can be done well beforehand, so there is no pressure involved, I can take my time over it and I don’t feel stressed.  And if there is any last-minute fiddling to be done, the guests can sit in the kitchen with their drinks and chat to me as I work   🙂

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@purofilion

What happened to food being something nutritious you ate just to get on with the rest of Real Life?

But isn’t a leisurely meal of good food, well prepared, eaten with congenial friends and/or family members and accompanied by good wines and good conversation one of the great pleasures of Real Life?

Anyway, I like cooking, and if people enjoy what I cook I don’t feel that the time spent on it is unprofitable. When I’m cooking just for myself, though, I generally go for what is quick and easy, or else cook a large quantity of something I really like, so that I don’t mind eating it for several days in succession    🙂

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@janetteb  @purofilion    Where I come from drop scones and pikelets are different things, though both are made on a griddle.

Drop scones are made with a batter which is slightly thicker than ordinary pancake batter and slightly sweetened, but otherwise similar.  The batter for pikelets contains yeast and the finished product looks like a large, thin crumpet, with holes on the surface to trap the melted butter .

@ichabod    I, too, like lemon curd, though I find the bought stuff too sweet and rather bland.  I sometimes make it when I have some left-over lemons, but where the recipe calls for equal quantities of butter and sugar I halve the quantity of sugar, which I find produces just the right balance between tartness and sweetness.  And then there is lemon meringue pie …..

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@pedant

That’s because you forgot the bacon and scrambled eggs.

I didn’t forget the bacon, but that tasted sweet as well

I generally pass on scrambled eggs, because they are almost always overcooked.  And the very thought of scrambled eggs with sweet pancakes and syrup is enough to induce nausea   😮

Interesting about the beer; I always wondered.  At least nowadays, with the rise of craft breweries, there are decent American beers to be found

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@ichabod

in most of the US, sugar is added to EVERYTHING

Yes, I did find it curious that so many things which were supposed to be savoury tasted sweet; and cakes were so tooth-achingly sweet that I avoided them altogether.

I think that it must go back quite a long way.  Someone once gave me a book of traditional North American recipes, and I was amazed at how many of them included sugar or molasses.  I very quickly learned to reduce the quantity of those particular ingredients, or to omit them altogether!

 

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@ichabod   Pancakes are another source of transatlantic linguistic confusion.  Over a period of eleven years during the 1970s and 1980s I spent between two and four weeks every summer working on an excavation in Derbyshire.  During the latter part of that period we were assisted by American volunteers recruited through the Earthwatch organisation.  One year, when the catering was being done by students from a neighbouring catering college, some of the American volunteers asked if we could have pancakes for breakfast.  The cooks, puzzled, but ever eager to please, duly obliged, to bewilderment on both sides. Because what we call pancakes, you call crepes.  The nearest thing to your pancakes on this side of the pond are known as scotch pancakes or drop scones, made on a griddle, and usually eaten at for tea rather than at breakfast.

I once tried pancakes with maple syrup when I had breakfast at a diner in Vermont, but although I love maple syrup I found the combination a good deal too sweet for my taste, especially with sweet cured bacon.  I was warned to avoid the cheaper syrups on offer   🙂

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@arbutus   I think that the linguistic difference is more likely to be between Swiss French on the one hand and Quebecois  and French French on the other.  The French I learned was that spoken in France and one of my brothers has lived in that country for nearly 45 years, and the terms you used are the ones I am familiar with.  Souper is supper, which would be the main evening meal if  ‘diner’ was eaten in the middle of the day, but not otherwise. So possibly the real difference is more a matter of eating habits, such as we have been discussing in relation to the different usages in Britain.

@purofilion  Home made marzipan, yesss!  So much nicer generally than commercially produced product, which all too often has an overpowering taste of almond essence (probably synthetic).  I haven’t made it in donkey’s years, but I remember doing so, generally around Christmas time, and sometimes at Easter, for a Simnel cake.  Fresh ground almonds, a mixture of caster sugar and icing sugar, white of egg and lemon juice or other flavouring to taste – my mother sometimes used orange flower water or rose water – kneaded together gently, et voila!.

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@arbutus   Pudding/dessert   – the ‘common language’ problem again, although ‘dessert’ is also sometimes used on this side of the pond to mean the sweet course of a meal.  Originally, though, ‘dessert’ meant the fruit and nuts, perhaps with a sweet wine, after the table had been cleared of the main meal.  That was in the days when dinners were served ‘a la Francaise’ – i.e. with all the dishes, sweet and savoury, laid out on the table at the beginning of the meal (at large and lavish dinner parties there might be one or more ‘removes’ where the first assortment of dishes was removed and replaced by another).  Around the mid nineteenth century that practice began to be replaced with ‘service a la Russe’, in which dishes were served separately in successive courses as now.

Oddly enough, the word ‘banquet’ in seventeenth century England denoted something similar to the dessert course – candied fruits and nuts and sugary confections served with appropriate wines after the main meal at grand dinners.  Some great houses of that period had a banqueting houses – a pavilion in the garden to which the host would escort his guests to enjoy the banquet.

Over here ‘pudding’ in the strictest sense can be sweet or savoury dishes, steamed or baked – either with a suet crust, e.g. steak and kidney pudding, apple pudding (which we used to refer to as ‘cowboy’s hat’ because when turned out onto a plate it resembled a Stetson), jam roly-poly etc.  – or with a cake-like sponge base and various flavourings- treacle, ginger, vanilla with jam etc.  – substantial stuff to provide fuel for the metabolism in the days before most houses had central heating.  But for a long time now it has been the general term for the sweet course or ‘afters’ – including pies, tarts, fruit fools, fruit compotes, syllabubs, milk puddings and so forth.

@janetteb

Maybe your grandmother found the recipe in English Women’s Weekly

Perhaps, but I doubt it.  I find it hard to imagine her ever reading women’s magazines, and I never saw any in her house.  It is more likely she got the recipe from someone she met in Egypt, which is where they lived from the 1920s until the outbreak of the war.  They were Quakers, so it is also possible that she picked it up either before they went out to Egypt or after the war from some Antipodean Friend passing through.

 

 

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@janetteb  Anzacs are little known over here, other than among the Aussie and NZ expats.  As far as I know they are not available in shops – certainly I have never seen them on sale – and no one who encountered them in our house seemed to have heard of them, although many asked for the recipe. They are, as you say, very easy to make and were a great standby.  My mother might say around mid day ‘X  and Y are coming round this afternoon for tea’ and would rustle up a batch of them, plus a batch of scones, in the space of an hour or so.  I will take your word for it in the matter of their ‘keeping’ qualities.  They never lasted long enough for us to test it  🙂

@purofilion   It may be a small consolation, but the women’s cricket team are currently doing rather better against the English than their male counterparts, although today, perhaps because of a soggy pitch, the play has been more than a little slow.

 

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@purofilion  @janetteb   While reminiscing on the subject of afternoon tea, I suddenly remembered that one of the staples when we had it at home was anzacs. Do you know what I mean? – the antipodean equivalent of flapjacks, and to my mind far nicer.  I think my mother got the recipe from her mother-in-law, my paternal grandmother, but goodness knows where Granny acquired it.

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@janetteb  @purofilion   Interesting that Harrods and Fortnum & Mason are now calling afternoon tea ‘High Tea’.  It must be a fairly recent development, I think, and certainly contrary to the usage I am familiar with.  I did once have afternoon tea at Fortnum’s but it was a long time ago, around 1968/9, and they were certainly calling it ‘afternoon tea’ then.  As I recall it cost 7 shillings and sixpence per person (37.5 pence – equivalent to perhaps £5 – £6 in today’s money), but it wasn’t a particularly elaborate or lavish affair.  Afternoon tea was considered rather posh. At home a relatively simple form of it was reserved for when we entertained friends, and when my mother was going shopping in the city she would sometimes arrange to meet friends for afternoon tea at one of the local tea shops.

During my early childhood and throughout my schooldays ‘dinner’ was always in the middle of the day.  School dinners were served at table rather than cafeteria style, and there was no choice; you ate what you were given or went hungry. The meals at my school were cooked in kitchens on the premises and varied greatly in quality.  Some things the cooks prepared were reasonably appetising, but others were culinary crimes.  At my brothers’ school the dinners were prepared elsewhere and brought in in large containers (‘dustbins’, according to my brothers) and were by all accounts uniformly and utterly revolting.

At home we had high tea, or just ‘tea’ when my father got home from work.  At weekends high tea was a more elaborate affair, at least after food rationing ended and foodstuffs which had been absent from the menu for over a decade started to reappear.  My father used to call in at a delicatessen on his way home from work on a Friday evening, and we never quite knew what we would be getting.  After the limitations of our diet during the early post-war years it was a revelation.  As for the main meals, my mother was a very good, though not particularly adventurous cook (my father wasn’t bad, either) but when it came to desserts she was the pudding Queen.

Puro, I would describe Bovril as a savoury drink rather than a soup.  It was also considered very sustaining on a cold day, and I believe was a staple of British Arctic and Antarctic expeditions around the turn of the last century.

 

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@purofilion   I have just realised that I meant to answer your query concerning Bovril,  It is essentially a very concentrated beef extract and looks much like Marmite; even the jars in which it comes are of similar shape and size.  Used sparingly it could be spread on toast or bread, but I remember it chiefly as a drink – a teaspoonful in a mug of hot water.  When, as a child, I was feeling out of sorts and without much appetite, a drink of Bovril and a buttered cream cracker were very comforting.  It could also be used to add flavour and oomph to an anaemic beef casserole (not that my mother’s casseroles were ever anaemic).

Marmite versus Vegemite.  There is a difference, and it will be forever a subject of (mainly) good humoured contention between the British and their Antipodean cousins.

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@arbutus   teapot/pot/saucepan   Ah yes!  the pitfalls of the ‘common language’.  Once, when an American to whom I had just been introduced was, for my benefit, explaining something she had just said, I made her laugh inordinately by assuring her that it was OK, I was pretty much bilingual.  But not entirely so, it seems   🙂

@Rose2112  @Purofilion  On the question of High Tea, I suspect that there may be some confusion here between that and afternoon tea.  Afternoon tea is the light snack meal taken around 4pm and comprising tea (of course) accompanied by small, dainty sandwiches or other savoury morsels, and cakes or pastries.  If it is accompanied by scones with jam and clotted cream, then it is a ‘cream tea’ . High tea is a more substantial meal, eaten around 6pm by those who have had their main meal (dinner) in the middle of the day.  It may consist of cold meats and salad with bread, possibly followed by cake, or a relatively light cooked dish.  Some friends of my family who had a small hill farm in West Yorkshire used, in addition, to have supper at around 10pm, consisting of a hot drink accompanied by home-made scones, biscuits (i.e.cookies) or more cake.  But then working farmers need a lot of calories.

@Rose2112  @purofilion  @janetteb  I was told at a very tender age that my parents’ name for me prior to my birth was ‘Stinky’.  It is a wonder that my psyche wasn’t scarred for life  😉

 

 

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@purofilion   mmmm…donuts.  I don’t eat them these days, but once, for a bet, I ate 12 large cream donuts  (i.e. large donuts, split and filled with whipped cream) at a sitting.  The bet was for a bottle of Irish Whiskey, and I won, but for some reason I have never felt quite the same about donuts since then  😕

Maybe you could eat a whole trifle, but the ancestral cut glass bowl in which the trifle is made is quite large, containing enough for a family of five.  If you are ever over here again you must look me up and I will make it for you.  Then we will see 🙂

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@purofilion  Vegemite?  Vegemite?  Phooey!  just a poor imitation of Marmite, the food of champions – not surprising, since it is a by-product of the brewing industry.  An acquired taste, certainly, but not so much if you were introduced to it in infancy.  I have an American friend who loves it., and I used to take large jars of it over when I visited, but I dread to think what would happen if I tried to do so now.  I would probably find myself detained indefinitely, given the third degree by airport security, and find myself on the ‘no fly’ list from then on.

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@whisht   @bluesqueakpip   If I made a habit of drinking builder’s tea I suspect I would be permanently insomniac and would have no stomach left.  If the tea is strong enough to dissolve a spoon – and that is the definition of builder’s tea which I, also, recognize -, just what do you think it does to your innards?

@arbutus  You are probably right in thinking that it is the water that makes the difference.  I am the opposite to you, in that tea never tastes right to me unless it is made in a pot.  Made in a cup or a mug it tends to be insufficiently infused, in which case it tastes thin and acrid, or else it is too strong- not so much builder’s tea as pure tannin.

As for cake, rich fruit cake was for birthdays, weddings and Christmas.  Otherwise it was usually Victoria sponge of one sort or another, and if that went stale before it was all eaten (a very rare event), one made sherry trifle.  I pride myself on my trifle, made with proper egg custard thickened with a little cornflour and flavoured with lemon zest, and with the very best raspberry conserve or raspberry puree.  No jelly (or Jell-O for those you from across the pond), which is just for children’s parties.  Sponge cake soaked in sherry, a generous layer of raspberry conserve, custard and whipped cream, topped with toasted almonds and glace cherries, or other garnishes to taste. My youngest brother has been known to consume half of one at a sitting.

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@purofilion  @janetteb   Ah, cider! that takes me back to the 1960s and the summers I spent working as a supervisor on an excavation in southern England, on the borders of the cider heartland.  The excavations were on a huge scale, employing around 150 volunteer workers at any one time, including people from many countries.  The largest overseas contingent comprised students from universities in the USA, and it seems that many of them only knew of ‘cider’ as a non-alcoholic drink.  ‘No’, we told them.  ‘In this country cider is an alcoholic drink; if it isn’t alcoholic it’s just apple juice’.  Many of them were persuaded to try it but, despite warnings that some ciders were stronger than beer, many glugged it as if it were, indeed, just carbonated apple juice.  More than once, as a consequence, someone rendered themselves legless and had to be carried back to base.

As for tea and other beverages, I’m sorry to disagree @Rose2112  (welcome, by the way), there are many things which can affect the taste of tea – the origin and quality of the leaf, whether the water is hard or soft, the amount of leaf used, whether or not it is in a teabag, and the temperature at which it is infused, (and the water should be at or near boiling point if the tea is to infuse properly) – but I cannot imagine how the receptacle in which the water is boiled could make a difference, and certainly I have never noticed any.  As @bluesqueakpip says, if you drink a lot of the stuff, an electric kettle is far more efficient – mine will boil enough to fill a teapot in two minutes, whereas a kettle or pan on the hob takes four to five times as long.  But you mentioned that you now drink only herbal teas and I am talking about tea derived from camellia sinensis , so what do I know?  The ‘gunk’ which @purofilion mentioned as accumulating in the kettle can be avoided if you if you use a water filter which removes the calcium carbonate in ‘hard’ water.  My water goes through a water softener unit and a filter; the kettle remains free of ‘fur’,  and the tea brews amber-clear, without any of the scum which can stain teapots and cups.

In fact I drink a good deal more than three cups of tea a day – anything up to two whole pots – or more than 3 litres – in fact, and I am a bit fussy about it.  I have given up using tea bags and buy single estate, whole leaf Indian tea – usually Assam or Ceylon, from a specialist shop which stocks a huge range of almost every kind of tea from every tea-producing country.  I also brew it relatively weak, so the flavour is delicate and it does not strip the lining from my stomach.

Coffee, for me, is for weekends, high days and holidays, and I get it from the same shop as the tea. I make it by the jug method, with Colombian beans, freshly ground as needed.  It makes for a well flavoured but mellow brew, which is just as well, because when I do drink it, it is in the same quantities I drink tea, so anything stronger would result in me gibbering from the chandeliers (the chandeliers being metaphorical, in case you should get the impression I live in a palace).

Having written all that, I realise that it probably makes me sound like the kind of pretentious poser that puro described a couple of weeks ago.  I must even confess to keeping spices in glass jars, although that is because I buy them loose from a stall on the market, and I do at least store them out of sight in a dark cupboard.  I like Indian food, and I buy the spices whole, to be ground as needed, because ready-ground spices go stale very quickly.  I used to bake quite a lot, but not any more.  I do not have much of sweet tooth and, nowadays, alas, if I even look at a cake I can feel my waistline expanding.

And now it is time to go and make myself something to eat 🙂

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@purofilion   If it is any consolation at all, Clarke has just received a huge ovation from the Trent Bridge crowd, no doubt in honour of his past record and his graciousness in defeat.  Not a dry eye in the house!

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@fortheloveoftheatre   @purofilion    Re the expression ‘it isn’t half … ‘ you aren’t half …’  I think it probably comes within the definition of litotes  i.e. a figure of speech or rhetorical device in which an affirmative is expressed by understatement or by negating its opposite  – similar to ‘This isn’t bad’ meaning ‘its good’.

Pace puro, it certainly is, or at least used to be a typically British expression.  I associate it particularly with London speech  ‘It ain’t ‘alf ….’ , though I may be mistaken in that,  but I can certainly remember it in fairly widespread use, especially among schoolchildren.  A variant could also be used to emphasise agreement, as in:  ‘This is fun, isn’t it?’  ‘Not half!’

It may be that this particular usage is going, or has gone out of use – perhaps younger members of the forum could say (at which point I will retire to my rocking chair and my knitting – or would if I could knit; but at least I have the rocking chair, bought by my great grandmother shortly after her marriage in 1861).

 

 

 

 

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@pedant   The Guardian shop is offering a T shirt printed with a summary of the innings somewhat similar to that tweet.  I also enjoyed the series of tweets yesterday which showed shocked looking vegetables and fruits, plus an onion – English, obviously – the cut face of which had a positively evil grin 🙂

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@pedant   Was that tactful?  Was it kind?    😈

At around 12 am yesterday I looked in on the Live Updates on the BBC website, just to get an idea of how things were going, and my jaw nearly hit the keyboard.  Not that I am a particularly avid follower of the game or anything – I am not sufficiently knowledgeable for that – but several members of my family are/were, including one of my aunts, who was such an enthusiast that we played the theme from BBC Test Match Special (Soul Limbo) at her funeral!

@purofilion  According to commentators yesterday, part of the problem is that in recent years some national teams have been experiencing difficulty adapting to conditions on pitches away from their home country, which goes some way to explaining why the Australians have tended to do poorly in England lately and, conversely England have done badly in Oz, although I hardly think that it excuses yesterday’s spectacle.

And I’m so, so sorry but  🙂

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