Blood letting

Today's session turned out to be curiously ... bloodless. Actually, no it didn't - there was the brunette who looked a bit like

I, Claudia

Claudia Winkleman and she was drinking her tea, fine, and everything and then she just said, "I want to be sick" and we all held our breath (and our own plastic cups of tea) while she decided whether she was fibbing.
 
She wasn't fibbing, but then she wasn't sick either. There's a slice of you that says hah hah this is where I score Brownie points, leap up to help her, put her into the crash position and administer the Heimlich manoeuvre all at the same time. Yay.
 
Instead at least four highly trained nurses were at hand and they'd whipped out a screen before you could say syringe. We gingerly placed our cups back on the table and I returned to my custard creams. It used to be TUC biscuits

but heck knows where they've gone; it's ages now since I saw a TUC biscuit at a blood donor session.
 
I've already told the story of how Dave got me into giving blood and I'm sorry now it took me quite such a long time to make it a regular occasion in my calendar.

Last thing: we were issued with a new set of instructions today to help you relax while you're being drained. Its thought is that if there's a diversionary activity you can undertake while 470ml are being leeched out of you you're less likely to feel faint. Huh. Didn't help Claud. Here goes: you clench your buttocks and legs together over five second, and release the clench over ten. You try it. All I managed to get was a seriously sidelong glance from a nurse who wondered why I was trying to point my knob at the ceiling.

You have in your hands a masterpiece

When I was travelling the tube all those years ago I never needed to do any research to find out which book I should be reading next - all that was required was to look around at my fellow travellers. Their thumbed copies of The Beach or An Instance of the Fingerpost or The Starr Report took me to Books Etc on Piccadilly sooner than anything else.

Now the information comes other ways but best of all it comes from other readers. Serving in a bookshop you're never short of knowledge from the customers. They led me to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 11.22.63, Did You Really Shoot the Television? and far more. Even now I've only just started to read a copy of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, bought then for storage for today's rainy day.

The Hare with Amber Eyes slipped under the radar. Oh we were selling it ok, and it did well in hardback and softback, but I never traced it beyond the back cover which in the best tradition of great publishing gives absolutely nothing away but forces you to purchase. And even though I've offered reviews myself I'm not one for reading the words of others, preferring by far to be surprised when I'm given the book as a present or as a personal recommendation from someone who's read it themselves and has found out it's lengthened their lives.

Cassie lives opposite. She's the great great great grandniece of Jane Austen, and she's adorable. Did I slip too many greats in there...? ML and I and her share cat-sitting duties and she drinks Earl Grey. If there's a parcel to be taken in or a tradesman who needs giving money to envelopes will be slipped through letterboxes at dead of night without the need for words. She it was who offered me the Hare to read and she'd chosen it with care.

It disappeared in a swoop. I'd jotted her an email to thank her for its loan and said then that I didn't need to find time to read it, the time found itself, compelling me to get to the end of this triumphant, heart-rending story of a group of 264 netsuke figurines. Nah. It doesn't sound like a story, does it? See what I mean?

Edmund de Waal writes with the precision of a chemist and the eye of the artist he is. His favoured medium is porcelain. That's how he's achieved his life's success. But he fashions words just as beautifully and I'm grateful to him, and Cassie, and all the Ephrussi for a perfect read.

ML goes gardening

ML's back from the Twentypence Garden Centre. She has items for our gardenette. Pelargonium? Stocks? I know so little ... "One of them is rare and unusual," she says.

 

I look at the rare and unusual one. It's the one at the back in this picture. It's a brown stick with a Latin name: Rarus Unusualis x Wotonearthus. Its label tells us it will grown to four feet high. That's tall for a brown stick.

 

Some time back I wrote a radio commercial for the garden centre which was rejected by the client. I created a character called Bob who worked at the centre and the text ended with this couplet:

 

"And I'll find him at the Twentypence Garden Centre Wilburton?"

"Yep, just ask four Bob. Twentypence? (laughs)"

 

Well it tickled me.

Reading

During my time at Waterstones I took for granted that reading was part of the job. We've all got a favourite book . Here's mine. It remains the only book I've read twice, first in 2002 when Maz introduced me to it and then ten years later when I used the opportunity of the Waterstones Book Group in King's Lynn to re-read. It lost nothing in those ten years.

I also took the chance to write to Michel Faber and ask a couple of questions, notably why the book had no perceptible ending. He wrote to say that Sugar's story had ended, quite simply.

It had to be enough and of course he's right. Any writer has the power over love or death for any of their creations; if we've chosen to fall in love with a character then that's our problem, not theirs.

Good book. Great writing.

Mila's Ely

St George's Day and everything's starting to look a bit sunnier hereabouts.

An Australian bloke tells me that last Sunday was the warmest day for seven months. That's a long winter. This picture from Ely's Jubilee Gardens shows that at least the tulips know how to find the sun and that we should follow suit.

Warner Brothers are shooting Jupiter Ascending in the cathedral. This means Mila Kunis is in town together with Eddie Redmayne and Sean Bean. It's all good for business and means that Ely Cathedral makes its sixth appearance in a major movie. Its CV is growing.

Cate Blanchett was here for Elizabeth: the Golden Age, we've watched The Other Boleyn Girl being filmed and most recently the cathedral doubled for Westminster Abbey and the coronation of George VI in The King's Speech. Sadly though it missed out on Harry Potter.

All that time ago Warner Brothers auditioned the King's School Ely  for Harry Potter. Nobody's sure to this day what went wrong but it never made it to the recalls. There's no doubt now though that the city's making up for lost time.

Morning gin

I'm entranced by Aldi and its new home in Ely. Ok, I've been in there once since it opened in March, but like the Archers on Radio 4 it's good to know it's there.

I find these words in The Guardian

• Described as having a "ripe, citrus aroma with rounded spice and a touch of juniper", Aldi's Oliver Cromwell London Dry Gin is distilled "for a clear, crisp, complex flavour".

It's ten to nine and I've just done the shopping, but £9.65 for a bottle of gin that's just won the Silver Award from the International Wine and Spirit Competition has to be worth investigating especially as the Lord Protector is a bit of a local hero in these parts.

Find the gin no problem and I also find Tanya, waiting for me on the till with her best ten to nine smile. The gin is the only thing I've bought. Tanya doesn't approve: I'm not offered a bag and the smile has gone. I slip a credit card into the terminal. "No credit cards," she says.

I fumble in my wallet for a joint account card, mainly because Moose Lady will be sharing my purchase with me. I wave the card. "The gin is for my wife," I say.

Now Tanya knows I'm lying, that I'm an alcoholic and that no-one buys gin at ten to nine in the morning without having a problem. "Enter pin," she says. I enter pin.

Other shoppers are now watching and I'm sweating. In a last attempt to regain some truth I say, "We're going to share it." There's a massed silence and I leave for the car park. On my way there, bagless, I try to conceal the gin from an elderly couple by stuffing it into my shirt. They look at each other, aghast that they're watching an alcoholic shoplifter in action.

Moral: buy online.

What the Dickens

Sure, it would easy to say well there's this guy who looks a lot like Charles Dickens and he works down at the train station. Or I could say do you mind if I take your picture and put it on +Google because to my mind you could do well if you wanted to do some sort of tour as Dickens.

 

Is it me? I don't think so, and yet nobody had told him before. I'd be his agent, like a shot.

Porcini but not heard

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJZb-xmGfq0

You imagine you can live your life without the porcini mushroom. You'd be right. Shrivelled and dry, unscrewing the lid of a jar of the things and sticking your nose in is like rolling around in the hamster cage.

A questionable analogy; I've never knowingly harboured a hamster.

But I'm offered a recipe for a mushroom risotto and one of the two types of mushroom required is the porcini. I head to +Waitrose Kenya. Oh. No I don't, well not to Waitrose Kenya, more to Waitrose Ely. Dhruv's recipe (I think Dhruv rhymes with prove and not with dove but I might be wrong) asks for a handful of the porcini.

In the stocks and gravies and handy things in packets aisle I discover Cook's Ingredients. Helpfully I find a plastic jar, even more helpfully labelled A Handful of Porcini Mushrooms.

Back home I've gathered all the ingredients together. I'm enjoying the Madeleine moment now with the jar of porcini, even if I never knowingly harboured a hamster. Maybe I was a hamster in a previous cage. I dash them into a porcelain bowl and add 150ml boiling water.

Long story short, the boy's going to go far if his mushroom risotto is anything to label him by. Even further when we realise that he's right in saying that making a risotto requires one of those recipes which we really should embed now. Like making tea.

Forever Bexley

http://bygonekent.org.uk/memories/open-all-hours

Julie's done a lovely job here. It's all too easy to get a little mawkish about the past, to slip it into a golden bubble and to long for it again. Today, it's worth remembering, is the good old days: in another fifty years someone just like Julie will be popping together a set of references to a remembered past and someone else will be going ahh at its light.

And if it's acceptable that these are the good old days then it must follow suit that regret is insubstantial, and cannot exist. We can't change the past, thank goodness, and we have no operation over the future.

Time will tell. And it always tells the truth.

Mrs Wol

She's trying her hardest to be part of the family. All we know is that as a kitten she was locked away outside someone's house and given little, if any, love. As a result, and after two days here, she's finding it hard to trust us. Not surprisingly.

Inevitably the naming has been tricky. She looks a bit like an alien and mostly like a snowy owl, so we wandered through all the owl names we could find (after ET) and stopped short at Wol, having ignored Hedwig. Jane had to re-read just a little AA Milne to discover that Wol was decidedly male.

So our snowy cat who looks a bit like an alien is now called Mrs Wol. And still she's having trouble trusting us. Hmm. Is there a connection?

No fool, Jim

http://www.jim-kelly.co.uk/

It's his birthday today, Jim. My first sight of him was at the end of Platform 9 at King's Cross, waiting for the 17:45 to Ely. Like many habitual city commuters he waited for the train in the same way you'd wait for a bus; it's there to do a job, don't get stressed by it, it'll appear.

What set him apart was the laptop, slung round his back like a guitar, and the stillness. His head had already left his workaday world and had tuned in to something else. I often watched his back - all the best actors know how to act with their back; wondered what sort of story it told. What the job he'd left was, what was the job he was going to, or at least pondering.

When his first book appeared and his CV became more public I discovered that my hunches were correct, that he'd worked as a journalist, successfully, for fifteen years at the FT and that during those long commutes he was writing his first book. Philip Dryden was born on the 17:45 to Ely.

While I read, Jim wrote. Now we drink beer together, and neither of us read or write while we're doing that.