Deliveries

Last Thursday:

(1) My brother's second daughter was born.

(2) I submitted my PhD.

Welcome to the new world!

Bondage

So, ladies and germs, things are not optimal chez Xtin at the moment. The new year has failed to live up to its New Start, New Me promises and so Pluvialis and I have agreed to plump for the Chinese New Year, which will be one of the Rat. Bringer of material wealth but also pestilence and death. Excellent. Better to be rich and poxy than poor and sterile, I always say.

I, did, however, laugh out loud a minute ago upon discovering that the title of the new Bond flick is: Quantum of Solace.

Um ... what?

Bwahahahaha! Oh, that is just so magically, operatically bad. It is bad like mayonnaise is good. It is bad like novelty socks with an expensive suit. Bad like salesmen who say "utilise" and "my colleague and myself" a lot. So expansively, generously, exhilaratingly bad.

God, I fucking love it.

New converse

Stage One: My feet.
Stage Two: THE WORLD.

I also bought a pair of classic Dr-Who-style optical white with the red and blue trim, for when I tire of global domination and feel like being a Time Lord.

Retrospective addition to Xtin's New Year's Resolutions 2008: BLING THE FEET.

Aspects of the interior

I haven't been outside lately. The weather is cold and dishwatery and I feel like a prey animal carefully scraping damp soil around the front door. The horizon is lines of books, the poinsettia slowly dropping its bracts, sheaves of drafts barely awry for I hate rectangular things to be at an angle but not so much that I square off 350 pages of dog-eared A4.

I wander the house, idly fending off the wild entropy of houses, pile a dirty-snow heap of whites, wash a dish, a cup, another cup, another cup -- what have I been drinking? An immaculately parrot-eviscerated raisin shell behind the bedroom door. He sits damply on my shoulder beaking his scapula after a bath in the kitchen sink, fanned red tail and temperature-testing tetradactyl toes ginger under the tap, soundtrack close-packed oscilloscope squeals of delight watery glub-glub trills in the stream, roused wet feathers the sound of old paperbacks thumbed.

A late Christmas package comes from my brother. A knife, letter stamps, paper and ribbons, a necklace of wood stained red. I hold the knife in my hands --- the gift one should never give but that we have exchanged many times in our lives, the eye-crinkling, lung-filling euphoria of the fine blade. It is a cleaver, medium and squattish for vegetables, honeycombed hollow japanese handle a miniature steel catacomb. I roll the ribbons around my fingers. The bird puts triangular punches into glossy white paper. How I miss him, tall dark-eyed piece of myself who reaches into my mind and mails it to me wrapped in ribbons like tropical birds.

Once upon a time

Once upon a time, there was a psychic blackbird who lived near a very twisty old yew tree. Among other things she'd found out that determinism was false, when GOOG was going to break USD500, and where the local sparrowhawk hung out. Being psychic was sometimes very good indeed, but mainly it sucked, which is pretty much what you'd expect.

She ran a little fortune-telling booth under the yew tree, where her customers could enjoy the arils while they waited. One day, a giraffe came to see her. He was a very brainy theoretical physicist with diffuse ambitions and many failed love affairs. They looked at one another, brown-eyedly.

The blackbird saw that she was going to fall wildly in love with him. But that was all she saw. This is why being a psychic sucks.

She sighed.

The technology stuff is overbought, she said. Go for commodities.

Moral: futures are for the stockmarket.

New Year haiku

A bird, a man, a
boy bravery chokes patience
water in my lungs

Christmas haiku

Moon-in-the-water
Turned a white somersault, yes,
And went floating off


Oshima Ryota
(1718--1787)

All things nice

It's Christmas Eve, and I want to bake. I want floury smudges on myself and cinnamon filtering under the door to my bedroom and sugary, buttery blobs of batter between my fingers. I choose some spiced Christmas biscuits from Nigella's domestic goddess cookbook. I grind pepper into a little bowl and rattle and clatter among the spice bottles for the mixed spice and soon a honey-fragranced dough is turning in the red KitchenAid.

Cutting out shapes in dough is a fabulous, time-travellingly Christmas thing to do. I never did it at Christmas when I was a kid -- mine was not a baking family -- but it makes no difference. It's a direct line to being four years old, like the smell of paste, cutting things out of the newspaper, making a sandcastle. In the brand-new chi-chi kitchenware shop that's just opened in Cambridge I chose the moon shape because I love the moon. And also they were completely sold out of stars.


The house smells evocatively of cloves and cinnamon and Bing and Harry Connick compete for crooning laurels in the living room. The bird loves the big band accompaniments and dances around looking like a tiny green Christmas decoration, with his festive red tail and burnished tummy feathers. There's a fantastically garish Christmas stocking from my Dad, sporting gilt-threaded appliqué snowman and Santa, under the enormous poinsettia that Pluvialis got for me before she left for Maine. A strand of soft blue yarn is peeping out of the box that my old friend Crinkly-Eyed Smile l sent me from Australia. A green-and-white bag all the way from China, from International Woman of Mystery, with exotic unknowns inside.

Later, I'll call my mother, whose timezone dances the sugarplum fairy ten hours before mine. She has a basketful of goodies from me. I wish I could sit on her bed and watch her open them. She might even like these biscuits, she of No Sweet Tooth. They're spicy and biscuity and have a hint of honey -- the vaguest scent of eucalyptus. My love affair with honey is decades old, and I couldn't possibly be unfaithful to my Australian bees.

Spiced Christmas Biscuits

300g plain flour
1 tsp ground mixed spice
2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
100g unsalted butter
100g dark muscovado sugar
2 large eggs, beaten with 4 tablespoons honey

Preheat oven to 170°C and line baking trays with silicon paper.

Mix together the flour, salt, pepper and mixed spice in your mixer or processor. Add the sugar and butter with the motor running, and then slowly the egg and honey mixture. Don't add all of this if the dough starts to come together before it's run out. Form the dough into two discs. Wrap one in clingfilm and put it into the fridge.

Dust your work surface and the other disc with flour. Roll out to about 5mm and cut out your shapes. Smoosh remaining dough into a ball and wrap in clingfilm, while you get the other disc out of the fridge. Roll and cut out. Add the remaining dough to what you had left over from the first disc, and roll out ... continue until you've used up all the dough.

Put shapes on trays and bake for around 20 minutes. It can be hard to see when they're done -- if they're not doughy on the bottom, they're cooked. Put on wire racks to cool.

Xtin's notes

Nigella recommends that you ice these with a plain white glacé icing, which puts me in somewhat of a quandary. Me and icing have a fraught relationship. In the first place, I tend to think it makes things too sweet. But these biscuits are spicy enough to handle that, and are even perhaps not quite sweet enough to be left plain. In the second place, I just hate icing. I hate making it, and I hate the actual part where I ice something. Why is that? Mysteries of the Xtin Bake Psyche.

I'm hoping I'll get away with a simple dust of icing sugar.



Merry, merry Christmas.

Treasure

A few years back, after one of those desultory wanders around the video shop that afflicted millions of poor little Westerners before the advent of Netflix and Amazon DVD rental, Pluvialis and I ended up on the floor of the living room with two Ben & Jerry Wiches, watching National Treasure.

We were really ready to enjoy this movie, you understand. After the Half-Hour Browse Of Death in the video store, your standards are as tenderized as minute steak.

Pluvialis and I laugh quite a lot. There was the time that the birdoole fell backwards off the bedroom curtain. Then there was the time when we were in Waitrose and she decided to mess with my head over the pronunciation of "gravadlax". Then there was the time that I faux-swatted at the parrot with a pillow because he was chewing the bedhead, and accidentally whacked him under the bed instead, with bemused tweeting emerging from the depths. That one went straight into the Pluvalis--Xtin mythology.

National Treasure put all of these into the shade. I don't remember anything about it except for the part, close to the beginning, when Our Hero Nicholas Cage unearths a ship that's supposedly been under the snow in Antarctica (!!!) for more than 150 years by dusting a couple of inches of powdery snow off the surface of ... gadzooks! The ship's nameplate!

OK, no, I remember there was some stuff about the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well. And, um ... the FBI.

After the snow-dusting escapade Pluvialis and I started laughing and yelling at the screen at the same time. Every thirteen seconds or so we would yell the next wild plot development at the characters and then high-five our preturnatural screenplay prescience. Pluvialis kept saying, damn, Xtin! We should write one of these! We can put Diane Kruger into a pink Vera Wang! That totally counts as a plot development!

A couple of weeks ago, I sent her the link to the latest in the franchise: National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Seriously. You don't even have to go and see it to get all the health-giving laughter. Just watch the trailer. Maybe twice. And in case you needed anything further, herewith a plot summary from the New York Times critic Matt Zoller Seitz:

"To acquire the cleverly named Book of Secrets, Ben plots to kidnap the current president and blah, blah, blah purple monkey dishwasher."

To that we say, amen.

Tuesday haiku

frost, yesterday's spoon
blue tit, milky oat fragment
I'm hungry again

Things seen, 2

In May, walking home, I saw a hedgehog. I haven't seen one lately, but I don't need to, for I have Boy in Yellow Converse instead, a man more like a hedgehog by the day --- simultaneously the appearance of the friendly, the everyday, the familiar, that which belongs in the stories of what is good and right; and the wild, the fleeting, the moment that is captured and thought over, that which belongs only in the story.

On Saturday night, with a plastic cup of Fitou in one hand, I rubbed between the paw pads of a fine grey-and-white tom cat at a party. He observed me out of slitty eyes and concaved his spine with a sound only an interrogative cat can make, an uprising diaphragmatic trill of vaguely determinate import. His white belly fur furls out like a concertina paper lantern. In a bowl in the kitchen there are tiny ginger biscuits from the Netherlands and party-sized Mars Bars on the mantelpiece. Boy in Yellow Converse --- who at this time of year favours terribly retro white leather trainers with red stripes --- wanders the crowd, arching over it with mythological tallness and a Polaroid. His targets warm to him with the shy affection of strangers, clustering to his piked leanness like goslings to watch the images take shape. I talk to a girl with glimmering American dentistry in her smile and a formidable brilliant-cut diamond on her hand which flashes as her hands stir the air, she laughs, chipping high split cadences. I watch the dip in her throat, shorter than she.

On Wednesday my feet are cold again. Spongy, rabbit-combed turf and clover underfoot and Pluvialis a few hundred feet away at the fence calling Mabel out of a tree. She whistles, pushing her hair out of her eyes with the back of a hand that will later be bloodied. She hefts a quail in her hand and catches it, which has the absurdly loose-jointed action of dummies pitching over waterfalls in cheap action flicks. Mabel! The quail goes up again. I shuffle in my wellingtons, watching rabbits dancing everywhere, white flash-flash-flash gone into the hedge, under the sod. Suddenly a movement near, and I turn my head. Straight, impossibly straight, against the ground like a burnt butter hoverbeast, and fast. A silence in my mind. Black tipped tail, perfect like a calligraphy brush dipped just-so into the ink, and words come back to my thoughts all in a rush, David Attenborough, The Children of Cherry-Tree Farm, stoat! A small purposive furry sinew with a blaze of white under his chin. Rabbits in his nose.

There he goes.

I recover my voice. Stoat! I yell to Pluvialis hundreds of yards away, uselessly but I cannot help it. Even at the distance I can see her amusement at my eight-year-old delight and she displays a thumbs-up. I am ruining her day's hunting because I am distracting Mabel. I dance around on the hillocky warrens trying to keep warm, tinkering with malteasery piles of rabbit droppings with the toe of my boot. Pluvialis gets Mabel to the fist and wanders back to me with the distinctive rolling, sailorish gait she has when booted and disappointed. She sighs, circumflexing an expressive black eyebrow.

She gives the hawk a wing to pluck. Mabel is all at sixes-and-sevens and Pluvialis is accidentally footed. I see the stoat in my mind, skimming the ground, low wide-arc ears cupped to its head. She sucks the back of her hand. The silvery late afternoon glints go out of the light and we go back to the car.

M, ever maternal, puts Savlon on Pluvialis' hand and we drink coffee out of cups with wildflowers on them. S, the guru, rolls a cigarette and Pluvialis smokes her Camels. There are three pointers. I am wildly, wildly in love with these dogs, lithe and silly and brilliant. The black and white alpha bitch rests her muzzle in my lap and I hold her head, cupping her ears and running a finger down the groove in the centre of her lovely skull. I remember the gleaming, coppery afternoon in September when I watched her quarter the field in Barton for G's barbary. She had leaned against my knees, warm flanks alive with delight, miles to run, the fabulous smell of everything, the promise of things hiding.

But now they climb into our laps and cock their floppy ears and glance every now and then to S, the Super Alpha of the house, while he mocks me gently for my shameless adoration and craven capitulation to the insistent wet-nosed nudging for more ear-stroking. M confides later that this is rich, since he sleeps with the bitch cupped spoon-style into his belly.

At home I stand on the street, wiggling my frozen toes and puffing frost, watching the odd, Grimm-esque yew on the fence, alive and rustling with birds gobbling the squishy red seed cones. A mistle thrush dances out on a dropped, curving branch haphazardly bunted with needles and missteps, falling through the greenery, a soft papery sound of wings striking, a leopardy breast and bright eye, bobbing uncertainly on a too-far twig. Cocks its head, chocolatey go-fast stripes moustachioed. What?

Inside a tight ball of ladybirds sleeps behind my bedroom blind. I make tea.

Little ice

It hasn't snowed yet. I yearn for snow, the magic of the far away and story book, Christmas card of places cold in December. Dancing fluffy flakes clumping and bursting like handfuls of paper torn into bits and thrown around with a kind of triumphant reproof. The odd, ear-muffling silence before, like the sound of the door closing on soundproofing. Everything white and crunchy and unlike itself. But if not snow, then frost.

Frilly, tiny fronds of ice clinging to everything, frozen silvery lichen. Crisping just short of silently underfoot, a milimetre of shiny ice on a recent footprint, a leaf curled and candied, crackle. A morsel-toting blackbird prints tiny greennesses on the clipped hedge dove-grey through the ice. White sheets everywhere, tyre-tracked on the road, over the courts, everywhere there is a shadow, suddenly where the sun don't shine blinged.

I break off a piece of a spider's web, hard for a split half-second like spun sugar, no time to think, a smudge of sticky cold between my fingerpads as though it had never been there.

Tuesday haiku

Between the pages
a folded ladybird is
sleeping upside-down

Small things

The thing I like best about my iPhone other than, you know, the whole thing, is the itty iPhone-shaped black chamois polishing cloth which has 'iPhone' oh-so-prettily debossed along the bottom.

The therapeutic effects of idly polishing one's gadget with a unctuous little cloth like a miniature cubic black kitten ironed flat have been wildly underestimated.

Peter

I have new shoes. I am tall, new degrees of vision, the tops of things. Black gown, black gown on that, all black, the perverse precognition of objects.

It is cold in the court and I look at the lamps at each corner, frosted. Peter was playing squash. Pluvialis pressed to my ear, I say something. nothing. Peter was playing squash.

I go back to the table. Smeared long exposure evening dress, zoom burst wine glasses, the sound of my heels striking the wood, the tops of things. A crisp frame of the master's brown eyes, cocked sparrowlike, perspective-forced candle comas. Then I am on the other side of the table and she holds my hands, tiny and splintered. Tears on her knuckles and I am at home, Pluvialis holds my shoulders, my ribs hurt.

At the funeral a shifting, rippling mass of people makes no sound at all. Kippahs against the sky like something fruiting under frost. It is cold, colder and the soil is dark and we breathe water. The field behind us spits skylarks flip, flip watery mordent of sunset and desperation. I pull my gloves on and off, on and off, running my fingers through the wind. I put earth into the grave. I sleep cheek to the sod, wake cold, again and again. I burn myself, my hands, doorways are strange, thoughtless trajectories treacherous, keep out of reach of children. I will sit still a lot.

Vaulted wood inside after, I hold his wife's hands, we see each other for the first time, she is like the bloody pages of a book come to life, a staggering battlement of power and grief with a black cap of cropped hair. Our eyes meet and it is knowing that on the fens you are underwater. You have been abandoned, she says. A silence. The smell of tea.

Later on the wrong side of Trinity long tailed tits trilling through water shearing a wet birch, silent blackbird, the kigo of not happening.

Radical packet

Today I've been reading about the development of packet-switched networks.

The first message sent over ARPANET was from UCLA and read "login". Or it would have, but the system crashed before the "g".

So actually the first message ever sent over a packet-switched network was "LO".

As Quine would surely have said, Lo! A packet!

Isn't history delightful?

Tuesday haiku

tales of knives and men
force daybreak against the dark
Flash fox mike: nick, tuck.

Absolutely plum

Back in the days when I was a bored corporate drone, I was a competitive cook. I had a large group of friends who were all also bored corporate drones, and we relieved our boredom by entertaining one another with wildly complex and fussy gourmet dinners. Foodie fundamentalism of the Everything from Scratch manifesto. Reduction sauces that took four days to make. Carefully stacked towers of --- well, pretty much everything. Every piece of cookware crusted with dreck and later handwashed, because my corporate dronehood was not the sort that came with an enormous Bateman-style crib of chrome, glass and dishwashers.

So much for that stage of my life. Now I'm into more deliciousness, less palaver.

The instruction to watch out for the case of a cake is the dead giveaway: "In another bowl ..."

No no no. No other bowls, thank you very much. Before you know it there will be exhortations to add four different kinds of mixture alternately with a cooled melted batch of something which must then be folded gently into some eggwhites whisked to soft peaks. Whisked in another bowl, naturally.

My stalwart and justly famous chocolate cake requires a single bowl, and doesn't even need me to break out my fire-engine red KitchenAid mixer. (Although I confess this may be a demerit). In general, I'm prepared to tolerate two bowls. That rules out almost everything which requires whipped eggwhite, and I court controversy now by telling you, one and all: forget any cake which would have you whip eggwhite. So not worth it. Right now there is a cake waiting for you to bake it which is just as delicious and twice as impressive as any of those which preciously claim to be light and fluffy on account of the blessed whipped albumen. And this from a chick with a mixer that whips three of the gelatinous little bastards into soft peaks in 55 seconds, so trust me.

All of this, cooks and cake-lovers, to introduce a cake I baked for the first time last week which at a stretch meets the Two-Bowl Limit, but it's rather moot by dint of being a palaver. But oh, mercy -- it is so worth it. The wonderful, wonderful moody dark sweet-and-sourness of autumn English plums, zinged up with sugar and cinnamon and baked onto an almondy, buttery puck of batter like a rich fruity openfaced sandwich. Pink plummy stains in the slices, warm spiced air all through the house.

The recipe is named after a German friend of great Australian chef Stephanie Alexander's family, who first gave it to them. The recipe is for a 28cm springform, which is an enormous tin -- the typical one is about 23cm. I baked mine, appropriately, in my fabulous dark-blue enamel Dr Oetker 26cm springform which Pluvialis brought back from Germany for me -- that was the trip where she and JH Prynne greeted a goat in a German forest.

I didn't cut down the quantity, figuring that I could leave aside what batter was oversupplied. Alexander cautions that it is important there not be too thick a layer of cake, an admonition I endorse having made it. On consideration, I'd reduce the quantities by a third for my tin. If you have an everyday springform, I'd halve this recipe.

Ripen your plums really well -- arrange them on a plate and admire their dusky-cheeked bloom for a few days. Eat one or two. Do you see those tiny rednesses, like miniscule plummy blood vessels? Your plum is ready.

You must serve the cake warm. The recipe (which is from The Cook's Companion) suggests that you can warm leftover cake in the oven for 15 minutes wrapped in foil, so I did that for my dinner guests. But since then I've had brilliant tea-break success whirling a slice in the microwave for 25 seconds. Indistinguishable. And ready before the kettle boils ...

Mieze's plum cake

275g softened unsalted butter
250g sugar
200g plain flour
200g self-raising flour
pinch of salt
3 eggs, lightly beaten
100ml milk
1 cup ground almonds
12-15 plums, halved and stoned

Topping
125g butter
200g sugar
2tsp ground cinnamon
4 eggs

Preheat oven to 180°C and lightly grease a 28cm springform tin. Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, then mix in flours and salt. Add eggs and milk to make a soft dough. (The mixture should drop easily off the spoon). Spoon batter into prepared tin (it should not fill more than a quarter of the depth as the cake rises a great deal) then sprinkle over ground almonds. Arrange plums, cut-side up, on the top, starting with the outside edge and working toward the centre. For the topping, melt butter and stir in sugar and cinnamon, then allow to cool. Whisk eggs well and stir into cooled butter mixture. Spoon over and around plums. Bake for 1 hour until cake tests done in the centre. Serve warm with cream or icecream.

Xtin's Extra Notes

I never bother to whisk eggs that are about to be added to batter in my mixer. Gratuitous waste of Another Bowl. The instructions are interesting because you would usually add the eggs to the creamed butter and sugar and then the flour and milk to that. I found that the order suggested gave a different texture than my usual buttercake batters, so I'd stick to the instructions. One day I'm going to do it the other way to see if it has an impact.

The genius of this cake is the layer of ground almonds which separates the plum-and-cinnamon layer from the cake beneath -- otherwise the plums would just sink to the bottom of the batter. Pile the almond a little more thickly at the edges of the tin, or your plums will fall down the outside edge. Not that this happened to me.

Poetical histories 4

Poetical Histories No. 4
(1987)
Ospita
Peter Riley

Symposium on Riley at Edmund Hardy's Intercapillary Space

At the traffic light, sometimes, the one in the next car. You look and he is there, not like usually, so many crash-test dummies in real people clothes. Eyes through the road and out the other side, sad folds in the blink, a scrape of jawline razor burn like a washed jam stain. The deoderant tossed hastily onto punch-drunk sheets before he ran out the door wondering about the call he hasn't gotten yet, not realising that a fragment is paying attention to the blue silk tie he saw on some guy on the tube last night which even then he didn't know he thought was pretty but his mind watched it for four stops.

This other person, this other life, and you are sad like you never are for yourself.

Ospita is terribly, terribly sad; musically, mountainously sad, a blackbird sotto voce in a frosted hedge for the spring which seems impossible. It is dying and human voices calling desperation and imperatives and hope and faith shot down again and again until we wish that nothing were left but instead they stubbornly drag themselves through the rooms of the poem smeared with blood and rage. On the cover, a figure in a coat leans in to the receiver in a telephone booth. Merciless instruments of hope and grief and the promise of connections, voices into nothing. The gobsmacking truth of:

......Anger the oxide of faith

The typesetting is large and dark and unpredictable, the first leaf near open-faced, the inside leaves bleeding through the paper, inky petechiae in the right margins of the page before, the moment after you hurt yourself but before the pain.

But it is not the personal, bodily, intimate hurt of reading Prynne, the hot, dry-eyed grief of his rhythms. Ospita is a sadness taken apart, audible but unseen, glimpsed but muted through a window of rhyme and delicate, lilting melody in language, torn-off papery streamers of Shakespearean heroes that never were:

......The ear tips and clouded underwing
......Swoops across the sky. Then where and where
......In this globe of health we balance and bear
......From room to room, where is a lasting thing?
......Where is a good done that also stays it?
......Someone attempts the new soft swing but out
......In the earthglow between mind and chest
......Brilliant metallic birds like kisses dive to rest.

And skyward, birds -- birds everywhere in flight: lapwings, plovers, gulls, swallows, exquisite in their obliviousness, perfect in their presentness.

The poem is thick with houses and landscapes, ground, grass, rooms, fields, doors, sky, and wonderfully, in a moment of spectacular evocative flight, tree-top sarcens. Everywhere is dark and unpromising, slamming and stripping, empty and loud, far and threatening. But at the last, a walk. A walk dredging soil and walls, roofs and grass from the cold and muck and putting them back under our feet and over our heads. No voices but a silent piano waiting.

......Thick with languages I walked without stealth
......The fields of angry farmers, proud
......To be harmless and legal, half and half,
......No one could fathom my strong shoes

In the cover sheet there is a wrinkle in the paper, the odd slashy crease you iron into your shirt when you're in too much of a hurry. Faint and flattened like an old scar.

Fill in the box

Apologies, my warm and yeasty baker's dozen of dedicated readers, for the suspension of transmission. My mother is here, a watercoloured smudge of Australia, motherly love and faint resentment in her wake. Your regular programming will be back shortly. In the meantime, I wanted to share this t-shirt from snorgtees. It speaks to me.