My Books Game

Here is a list (in no particular order) of ten books I would recommend. Not necessarily the most important ten books of my life; more like the best ten of the ones I've read recently. Ten books that I would honestly recommend right now.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome

The Irresistible Revolution, by Shane Claiborne

Collected Poems 1908-1965, Siegfried Sassoon (Faber and Faber, 1961)

Stardust, by Neil Gaiman

Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

The Mabinogion (I'd recommend Sioned Davies' new translation)


If you've read any of them, let me know what you think.

I'd love to know what ten books other people would recommend. Post a comment if you have time - the first ten (or five!) books you'd recommend if somebody asked you what to read next.

Speedy Bread

Here's how I make bread. I think I originally got the recipe from the side of a packet of Sainsbury's strong white bread flour. It's really quick and easy. I usually put half of the dough in a large loaf tin and divide the other half between two small ones. You can also make rolls or a bread mountain (handy if you only have a baking tray).

You will need...

750g strong white bread flour
25g butter
2 teaspoons salt
1 x 7g sachet of fast action dried yeast
450ml water
a bit of olive oil

First, put the flour in a large bowl. Rub the butter in (you can use margarine if you prefer), then stir in the salt and the yeast (salt necessary to make the yeast do its stuff).

Then mix the water in and pull it all together into a big lump of dough.

Knead the dough for at least ten minutes. You can knead it on a floured surface, but I actually find it makes nicer bread if you don't add any extra flour at all. It will stick to the surface a bit at first, but it just pulls off again. I find the bread is nicer if you make sure you knead it for a good long time too.

Divide the dough up into loaves or rolls or whatever you want. Cover each lump of dough in oil (I use olive oil) and put in the tin/on the tray. Cover with a tea towel and leave somewhere warm to rise. I usually leave it for about 50 minutes.

As the dough finishes rising, preheat the oven to gas mark 8, which is 230°C or 450°F.

Bake for about 15 minutes if rolls, a bit longer for loaves (20-30 minutes, depending on how done you like it). Supposedly it's ready if it sounds hollow when you knock it (although I heard that refuted somewhere or other).

Then just let it cool. I'm trying freezing some of the rolls from my latest batch, so I'll let you know how that goes. But really it's best served warm (with butter and honey... mmmm!)

African Snow

Yesterday me and my mum went to Trafalgar Studios, London, to see African Snow - Riding Lights' first West End production, a play about Olaudah Equiano and John Newton, and the horrors of the slave trade. The play is mainly biographical, telling the story of Equiano's life interweaved with the outline of Newton's history. Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped with his sister from a high-status family in Africa, separated from her, and sold as a slave, after many years and much cruelty managed to work his way to freedom. Having been a slave in England he had learned to speak, read and write English, and he later wrote a book: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself.

Probably the thing that most struck me about the play was the way that Olaudah's name was stolen from him when he became a slave. He is re-named Gustavus Vassa by a British Naval captain who calls Olaudah Equiano a "nonsense name". Thoughout the play Olaudah reminds us of his real name, pronouncing it in a beautiful, musical way. His memory of his sister throughout the play is emphasised by the repetition of her cries of "Olaudah!" as she begged not to be separated from him. Olaudah's name, in African Snow, is symbolic of his freedom. As a slave he is known as Gustavus Vassa - he is dismayed at being baptised as Gustavus Vassa - but, as soon as he purchases his freedom, he joyfully reverts to his true name, Olaudah Equiano.

John Newton comes across as a very wretched character; and with good reason. He was master of slave ships in his time, even after his conversion to Christianity. I'm not sure at what point in his life he wrote the words to our well-known hymn Amazing Grace, but African Snow certainly portrays Newton as a man who was not able to find peace after all that he has done. "I was young," he pleads, and, "I didn't see."

And us? What don't we see, today? I had been thinking that African Snow might pose a more direct challenge to its audience: there is still slavery in the world today - what are you going to do about it? The play does not. But in the back pages of the programme we do find a challenge. "Tonight's play takes us back more than 200 years, when there were four million slaves in the world. Now there are over twenty million." We could all be John Newtons ourselves, without even realising it.

Want to do something about it? Various websites (listed in the programme!) provide various ideas (e.g. lobbying MPs, spreading awareness, signing an international declaration/petition). Try visiting www.stopthetraffik.org, www.antislavery.org or www.setallfree.net. The Church Mission Society website also has information about modern day slavery and ideas of what you could do to help with the campaign against it.

Toy Trains

We had some children round to play today. Ostensibly their parents were visiting our parents, but we know really that the two little boys had come to play with our Brio. It's been in the loft for years. With the youngest of us now aged fifteen, I think we're deemed to have outgrown it, but it's simply not true. Both our small visitors had lost interest and wandered off to find the Hairy Maclary books long before Ed and Thom had finished trying to make the track fit around the entire sitting room.

OK, and me too. There's something slightly addictive about Brio :)

Insomnitractors?

Why am I awake at 5am? I guess the real reason is simply that I'm not very good at sleeping. After one or two nights of good sleep, my mind seems to rebel. 'Oh no,' it says, 'not falling for that old trick again. Sleep? There must be thousands of more interesting things to do!'

And so here I am, having spent the night reading Marina Lewycka's novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and typing up notes to do with Northern Cross. I quite enjoyed the novel, in a light reading sort of way: it was diverting. The front cover describes it as "extremely funny" and "mad and hilarious". I have to say that I didn't really spot either of these attributes (although for part of the book I did get an odd feeling that I was missing something - that jokes were being made at somebody's expense, only I was not quite sure whose, and that I was missing the point by taking things too much at face value. Whether this had more to do with the increasingly tired state of my brain than the author's intentions, I cannot be sure).

On the subject of books... Waterstone's once again lured me in with their three-for-two offer. This time I had a good excuse, in the form of a book token I needed to spend (it had started falling apart). Almost every book I could see looked like it had some form of special offer sticker on it today. In the end I opted for a biography of Jane Austen which I've been wanting to read for a while, and a couple of novels I'd seen reviewed in my brother's old copy of Books Quarterly. All of which ought to give me something to keep my brain happy the next time it decides to go insomniac.

Nettle Soup

Yesterday morning Richard Mabey's book Food for Free arrived in the post from play.com. Paca and myself had been intrigued ever since spotting the book in the National Trust gift shop on Holy Island. It is a most interesting little volume, giving details of various different edible plants which can be gathered from commons, hedgerows and gardens, and some ideas of how to use said plants once collected. Seeing as nettles are fairly prolific in my back garden, and usually easy to identify, and had a very proper-looking recipe attached to them, we decided to begin our first foray into self-sufficiency by making everybody some nettle soup for tea.

Note that I said nettles are usually easy to identify. Perhaps this is often because you've brushed a little too close to the plant, and ended up getting stung. Well, the moment we needed to identify them (who knows what untold dangers could be caused by serving bramble soup, or unidentified garden herb soup, by mistake?) we were both seized by irrational doubt, such that we forbore to pick any until we'd got two or three stings each, just to be sure...

You can hold a nettle plant without getting stung, as long as you only grasp the centre part of the leaf between two fingers - the stingy white hairs are only on the stems and around the edges of the leaves. However, actually picking a sufficient quantity for soup might have been a bit painful without taking some precautionary measures. I wore gloves and used scissors; Paca picked carefully, with the aid of a tea-towel. It didn't take long to gather the requisite 'four handfuls of nettle-tops', and we headed back into the kitchen.

The first step of the recipe is to "Strip the nettles from the thicker stalks, and wash". That seemed pretty tricky to us, without resorting to rubber gloves, so we contented ourselves with swishing them around in a colander for a bit, and carefully pulling out some of the stems. Once added, with chopped potato, to the fried onion in the pan, the nettles began to wilt, very like one would expect spinach to do. Indeed, as we added the vegetable stock, the nettles continued to behave like spinach. They reduced a great deal, and began to come apart just about enough for one bowl of soup not to end up with all the nettles in it. However, to give the soup a smoother texture we decided to liquidise it a little bit anyway, which turned out to be a good decision.

For seasoning we used nutmeg (recommended by the recipe), as well as pepper and a little ginger and cinnamon (not mentioned in the recipe, but good anyway). The potato made the soup nice and thick, and along with the flavours of stock, onion and seasoning the nettles were rather delicious. Other members of the family were somewhat dubious of our new delicacy before tasting it, but I think in general it was found acceptable - certainly there wasn't any left over! Nettles are apparently very nutritious, containing lots of iron and protein. To me they do taste a bit like spinach - I think better than spinach. And quite apart from that, I'm sure knowing some of the ingredients to be gathered from your own garden will always make a meal taste better.

Pilgrimage

Northern Cross is a great way to celebrate Easter. We walk for all of Holy Week (i.e. the week before Easter), carrying an eight-foot cross, and arriving at Lindisfarne on Good Friday. Easter weekend is then spent on Holy Island. Anyone's welcome to come, and there are various different legs - one aimed at families, one more contemplative, and some more strenuous routes - with lighter or heavier crosses to carry and different amounts to walk per day as appropriate. It's great: you meet interesting people, walk through some really good countryside, experience very warm hospitality, and hopefully come closer to God by celebrating Easter in a meaningful way. Even if you don't want to walk every year, I'd recommend trying it once! Visit the website for more information, or have a look at my photos.