Poetry x 10

The first half of December is, for me, the least propitious time of year for reading. There just never seems to be any time for it. Rather than write about books I’ve just finished (there are none), I’ll have to cast my net further back, in this case bringing up ten of the single-author poetry books I’ve read this year. Three are by Nobel laureates: Wisława Szymborska (1996); Tomas Tranströmer (2011) and Louise Glück (2020). I ordered Glück’s The Wild Iris in what was effectively a very delayed resction to her winning the prize: I’d seen a great deal of praise of her work, of which I’d read scarcely any. I owned collections by Szymborska (and by Primo Levi) in the past, so these were re-aquaintances rather than fresh introductions.

Seven of the ten are books are translated, variously from the Russian (Aleksandr Kushner); Italian (Levi); Venezuelan Spanish (Eugenio Montejo); Czech (Kateřina Rudčenková); Polish (Szymborska); Swedish (Tranströmer); and Romanian (Liliana Ursu), with the remainder by American authors. Not pictured, but also read in 2024, were volumes by John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson and Frank O’Hara; by Álvaro Mutis; by C.P. Cavafy, Ágnes Nemes Nagy and Giuseppe Ungaretti; and by British & Irish poets only Christina Rossetti & Ciaran Carson. All of which was part of the effort to fill out my poetry bookshelves.

In a dream I look down
at the wide Chinese river at dawn
intoxicatingly bright lanterns swaying above it.
I have to write a poem about this right now, I tell myself,
before I wake up
before the first light –
while it’s all still true.

—Kateřina Rudčenková (translated by Alexandra Büchler).

Lunchroom

The photo above depicts the lunchroom/break-room/kitchen at the offices where I worked in Sweden. I must have taken it on one of the occasions I was obliged to work on a weekend, hence the crowd. As these places go it was rather salubrious, an appealingly bright and airy space leading out on to a large deck overlooking an inlet of the Baltic Sea. The cooking facilities were limited to a few microwaves, however, and there was a row of vending machines along the wall behind the camera, to which I had recourse regrettably too often: the contents were usually mediocre at best.

The kitchen facilities at my current offfice are even more limited – there are no vending machines, nor is there any kind of view. We can however, make use of the canteen which is run by another of the building’s tenants, which offers more choice, though not full hot meals. At other erstwhile places of employment the facilities ranged from the completely non-existent (a van selling sandwiches might stop by during the morning) to fully-equipped canteens. One office was connected to a logistics depot with a canteen serving hearty, subsidized meals to the drivers and warehouse staff; while the place I worked in Italy had a very good canteen providing free lunches and, even better, a proper coffee bar complete with a barista, in the person of the lugubrious Lucio.

I took the picture above on Fuji Neopan 1600 film, loaded in my Nikon FM3a. I developed the film myself in XTOL.

La Toja

Lately I’ve been using Spanish-made La Toja shaving soap. It’s the kind of ordinary old-school soap that is hard to find nowadays on the UK high street, where canned gels and foams predominate. I obtained several sticks of it via ebay earlier in the year. Rather then applying soap directly to my face and lathering in-situ, I usually build up a lather first in a bowl, so I grated and pressed a couple of the sticks into the wooden bowl in the picture (the same one as I used for that purpose before), in which I load the brush before lathering in the white enamelled metal bowl. I had previously used ceramic bowls for lathering, but after dropping and breaking a couple, descided to try this one.

The brush in the picture is a small, inexpensive horsehair one made, also in Spain, under the recently-defunct Vie-Long brand. Horsehair is quite a bit softer then the bristle brushes I typically use, and to my mind is slightly better-suited for lathering creams and softer soaps than the likes of La Toja. I’d intended to whip up an impressive lather for the picture, but I was in a rush and it wasn’t going to plan, hence the mediocre one shown.

Forest Flower

Above is a vinyl copy of the 1967 live album Forest Flower by Charles Lloyd. Despite its being “one of the first jazz albums to sell over a million copies”, I had never heard of it, nor of Lloyd, until very recently.

In September I bought a cheap LP copy of Roland Kirk’s album The Inflated Tear. It was part of a mid-’70s German re-issue series called That’s Jazz, where the records all had die-cut gatefold sleeves with a silver laminated finish. My enjoyment of this record was fresh in my mind, when, the very next day, during a look around Heart of the Valleys Records in Blackwood, I picked up another LP from the same series: Dream Weaver by the Charles Lloyd Quartet. While Lloyd’s name didn’t ring any bells, I’d heard of the Quartet’s drummer (Jack De Johnette) and already owned some albums by the pianist, none other than Keith Jarrett. The asking-price was more than I’d paid for The Inflated Tear, but I took a chance on it anyway. I’m glad I did, as I liked Dream Weaver even better.

In its sleevenotes there was mention of Forest Flower and of that later record’s great success. Listening to some snippets courtesy of YouTube, I felt that it too would be my kind of record. It’s just as well I didn’t try to seek it out on-line, as, seven weeks later, I found a ’60s copy of Forest Flower in the wild, in excellent condition. This was at ‘The Vinyl Spinner’ market stall in Monmouth (whose proprietor goes by the name Andy Rainbow). The price was a little higher again than I’d paid for Dream Weaver (though no more than the going rate, as per Discogs). Considering it’s a 57-year-old live recording of an outdoor festival show, the recording quality is excellent. From my first few listens, I’ve been especially enamoured of the closing few minutes of “Forest Flower - Sunset”.

Caws Teifi

Caws Teifi (caws is pronounced like Klaus without the ‘l’; Teifi like ‘Tivey’) claim to be the longest-established artisan cheesemakers in Wales. Caws is simply the Welsh for ‘cheese’, while the Teifi is a river not far from the farm where their cheese is made. The operation was founded in 1981 by a Dutch family, which explains why their cheese is made in the Gouda style.

They use unpasteurised, organic milk to make a number of variations on this signature product, including half a dozen or so with added flavourings. One of these (the first of them I’ve tried) has local ‘laver’ seaweed added to it. It’s an excellent pairing. The cheese is sweetly mild, while the seaweed adds a subtly complementary touch of marine saltiness.

Gruss vom Krampus

The first greeting card of the season arrived in the post today: the slightly unconventional one above. The design features the malign Krampus seemingly dragging some badly-behaved childresn toward the edge of a precipice, and, presumably, a fearful fate. Gruss vom Krampus means ‘Greetings from Krampus’. My correspondent wasn’t sure if the card would arrive by Krampusnacht, but it has, and with time to spare. On the back of the card is the following text, perhaps more directly applicable to other designs than this one:

Vintage images bring to mind comforting memories of a simpler age. An age where Holidays were more about families and friends, and less about dollars and cents.

These images are from the 18th and 19th century. From Saint Nick to puppies and kittens. Please enjoy these images and wishes for a splended Holiday Season.

Michael Cisco

Shown above are the eight books on my shelves by American author Michael Cisco, arranged in order of publication. At the bottom is a first edition copy of his debut novel The Divinity Student (1999) which was my introduction to his work. Above that is The Tyrant (2003) in hardback. I missed out on his novels The Golem (2004 – a sequel to The Divinity Student) and The Traitor (2007). Once upon a time I owned his first short story collection Secret Hours (also 2007) but wasn’t so fond of that one so gave it away. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by notices of The Narrator (2010) when it came out, and very much didn’t regret buying that one: first edition copies of it seem relatively few & far between now.

Also hard to find nowadays are his novels published by the Chômu Press: The Great Lover (2011); Celebrant (2012) and Member (2013). Sadly I missed my chance to get copies of these, having been persistently short of funds when they came out and then letting opportunities pass by to get them before they fell out of print, by which time money wasn’t in quite such short supply. I did at least manage to read the first two of them in ebook form. I was quicker off the mark with what has so far been his longest and most ambitious book Animal Money (2015), though only got around to buying its follow-up Wretch of the Sun (2016) last year. Small presses have been responsible for issuing all of his books to date, hence their sometimes fitful and patchy availablity.

There are still copies of the spectacularly morbid Unlanguage (2018) to be had, and likewise his second story collection Antisocieties (2021). I was surprised how much I enjoyed the latter book, given my lukewarm reaction to Secret Hours but it demonstrated that Cisco, often a novelist of excess, was also quite capable of cool restraint. I’m not aware of anyone else who writes quite like him. The wikipedia article about him suggests genre labels of horror, dark fantasy, weird fiction, surrealism and phantasmagoria, which isn’t inaccurate, but still doesn’t give the whole picture. Who else would write a macabre novella drawing heavily on the work of Spinoza with a songbird as its protagonist? – that’s what we have in Ethics (2022), which is at the top of the pile.

Red House

Here’s a picture I took in the summer of 2005 of a bright red house. It was located on a rocky islet called Stakholmen which is just off-shore from one of the harbours in Karlskrona, Sweden, where I then lived. One could reach the island via a small foot-bridge. The house was neither permanent nor a dwelling-place but rather a work of art put there for a few months, an installation entitled Fårjaglov, the brainchild of a Malmö-based artist named Peter Johansson. Får jag lov means ‘If I may’ and is what one might say when inviting someone on to the dance floor. The artwork’s title, then, might be translated as ‘Shallwedance’.

The house was as bright red within as it was without. I would have liked to have taken some better shots of it – alas the Pentax Optio S4 point-and-shoot camera I had then was as limited as my photographic knowledge at the time. I didn’t witness the house’s arrival or its departure: one day it was there; the next it was gone, and Stakholmen went back to being a plain old lump of rock with the graffiti-covered remnant of an old gun-emplacement on it.

Crystal

I am the owner of two heavy crystal platters that I seldom have any reason to use. They were wedding presents for my late wife and her first husband. His family were wealthy so the occasion, it seemed to her, was something of an extravaganza. The platters, along with two substantial crystal bowls, ended up with her after their divorce, and have ended up in my sole possession since her death.

One has a floral design with a hint of Art Nouveau about it, the other, a little smaller but thicker, has abstract patterns cut into the glass. After years of careless storage, both of them are scratched and far from pristine. I can’t imagine they have any financial value. Unlike the bowls, they are at least still intact: if only they were more useful!

BEAK>

Above are my CD copies of the third and fourth albums (> > > and > > > >) by the Bristol band BEAK>. I first became aware of their music about eight years ago, having heard some of it on the radio. By 2018, I was curious enough to order > > > soon after its release. The follow-up > > > > didn’t appear until earlier this year. Thanks to a recent birthday, I now have a copy of that one too.

Theirs is a sound that is warmly wonky & murkily analogue, with indistinct vocals and insistent grooves. On Discogs, > > > > is inexactly categorized as “Krautrock, Post Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Experimental”. There is certainly more than a little of Can’s influence in some of my favourite tracks of theirs, such as ‘Allé Sauvage’ from > > > and ‘Ah Yeh’ from > > > >. I wonder, with the recent announcement of the departure of co-founder and drummer Geoff Barrow from the band, if a new line-up will produce a > > > > > at some point?

Squash

The global food supply chain wizards have contrived it such that butternut squash is available year-round in the UK. Other varieties, presumably all grown domestically, have only a short season in autumn, now seemingly over for the year. I bought the squash in the picture last weekend. This morning there were none in my local supermarkets.

This was a vegetable unknown to me in childhood. Its very name induced some cognitive dissonance as at that time I knew squash as a fruit-flavoured drink. I don’t think I as much as tasted any of the gourds until my late teens or early twenties. Now I look forward to squash season. I usually just roast the stuff; or sometimes I’ll have it in soups.

Subject: Earthquake

The job I had in Rome in the ’90s came with a three-month notice period, which was no small chore to work through. Toward the end of that time I printed out a small selection of the emails I’d received during my two years there as mementoes of what was easily the weirdest of the workplaces I’ve known. The one shown above includes some earthquake safety advice, which, if I recall correctly, arrived the day after a somewhat significant tremor, which I think would have been one of the aftershocks (magnitude 5.6) following the Umbria and Marche earthquake of Sept. 26th ‘97.

There was one earthquake that occurred while I was in that office whose effects I specifically recall, though I’m not sure if it was the one that gave rise to the email. The ground wobbled for several seconds; coats swayed on coat-stands; water sloshed in a fish-tank in an office across the corridor; a soprano voice exclaimed «Dio mio!» nearby. It was strong enough for a newbie like me to feel a certain frisson; but by no means severe enough to be frightening. The last earthquake I experienced was even less spectacular: “Britain reacts to an ‘underwhelming’ earthquake” ran one BBC News headline. At home reading a book on a Saturday afternoon there was a noise as if something very heavy had fallen over some distance away. Only later did I learn it was a magnitude 4.4 tremor centred about 40 miles to the west.

Hypnerotomachia

I don’t recall when or how I first heard about the mysterious book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Certainly by the mid-to-late ’90s I’d read a bit about it, not imagining that within a few years I’d come to own not one but two copies of the thing. The year 1999 marked the 500th anniversary of the book’s publication, with new editions forthcoming to mark the occasion.

First I got my hands on a 2-volume set issued by Adelphi Edizioni of Milan in 1998, in which vol. 1 (pictured above) contained a facsimile of the book, and vol. 2 (which I no longer have) a translation into modern Italian, introductory essays, and hundreds more pages of additional commentary. My rudimentary knowledge of Italian fell a long way short of my being able to read the text, so I was delighted when, the following year, Joscelyn Godwin’s complete English translation was issued by Thames & Hudson “in the same size and format as the original” (handier editions followed).

Finally able – in principle – to read the book, I then failed to reach the end of it. The narrator’s progress through a his dream-world, a kind of pagan paradise strewn with magnificent buildings and colossal ruins, gets to be numbingly repetetive when its fantastical architecture is described in virtually fetishistic detail. Even so, I’ve kept hold of these volumes: they look good on a shelf and maybe I’ll have a second go at traversing the text one of these years.

Fruit

In the very rainy autumn of 2009 I tried my hand at some still-life photography in a makeshift studio set up in my garage. The monochrome shot above of a bowl of fruit is one of the better results of those efforts. I took the picture using Adox CHS 25 film in a Mamiya C330S TLR camera, and developed the film at home using Tanol. I like how this combination gave the apples and pears the appearance of a metallic sheen. Sadly, the hand-made stoneware bowl I used in this picture broke soon afterwards.

One other fruity black-and-white film photo follows below: on finding a freakish ‘conjoined’ pair of plums in a punnet from the local supermarket in late 2013, I thought I’d make a pictorial record of its existence. I used a Nikon F80 loaded with Kentmere 100 film, which I developed using XTOL.

SM7

I’ve mentioned before how an Olympia SM5 typewriter properly started my enthusiasm for these machines. The SM5, when it was new, was a mid-range unit: solidly-built, with plenty of features, but perhaps lacking a certain finesse. I had to wait a long time before getting my hands on one of the flagship Olympia portable models. Not until the dying days of 2022 did I ‘win’ an ebay auction for a 1961 SM7 (shown above). It cost me £50, plus the price of petrol for a trip to Bath and back to collect it.

On getting it home it typed beautifully – the feel was significantly better than the SM5s I’d used. Alas, I’d only been typing for a few minutes when something went awry and the drawband became unseated, rendering my new toy unusable. Disinclined to attempt to fix it there & then I put the machine to one side to wait for the right kind of rainy day to come along. Many rainy days came and went until a very wet Wednesday in late September, when, with the aid of a few simple tools and a pair of very helpful YouTube videos, I removed the carriage, straightened out the drawband, put some tension into the mainspring and then put everything back together again, re-attaching the loose end of the drawband to the end of the carriage as I did so. It’s been typing very well ever since.

While the default colour-scheme for the SM7 was an off-white with green details, they were also made in pale blue, like mine, and in a salmon pink. I thought installing a blue ribbon in it would be a nice touch. It’s wearing its sixty three years very lightly but is not without a few issues. The paper support doesn’t spring out smartly when the button is pressed: some encouragment is needed. Pressing the TAB key induces only a sluggish response from the carriage. And the carriage lock doesn’t work properly. I may yet attempt some further tinkering: for now though I’m just happy to be in a position to use it.

Reflection

Belatedly forming an appreciation for the music of the folk/rock/jazz/blues quintet Pentangle during the pandemic, I obtained a 2-CD compilation of theirs and imagined that would be that. Last year though, I happened to find a fairly early pressing of their second album Sweet Child in a local used record shop and impulsively bought it for a tenner. That would have been a better bargain if both of the two discs in it were original: LP#1 in the copy I’d picked up had been swapped in from a later (worse-sounding) re-press.

The other month I found an early-’70s copy of their fifth album Reflection in another nearby emporium. While the gatefold sleeve (shown above) wasn’t in the best of shape, the disc within sounded very good. And it only cost me a few pounds. Now here I am hoping I might find albums nos. 1, 3 & 4 too. Perhaps I’ll eventually let the CD compilation go. Meanwhile I’ve been watching some of the wealth of fascinating footage of the group to be found on YouTube. This performance, for example, filmed for Belgian television in 1972, includes three of the songs from Reflection.

Palo Cortado

Last night I sipped a couple of glasses of Gonzalez Byass ‘Leonor’ Palo Cortado sherry. It was my first taste of this style of sherry, which is reputedly “a wine with some of the richness of Oloroso and some of the crispness of Amontillado”. While marked Seco (‘dry’) it wasn’t without sweetness – or some illusion of it – with hints of dried & candied fruit among its flavours. Compared to the old Amontillado I tried earlier in the year, this is a less intense, easier-going drink, nearer the middle of the road (in a good way) with the mellowness of age not having altogether effaced the freshness of a younger wine.

Pizza Pie

Above is a recipe for ‘pizza pie’ scanned from a leaflet that would have been packaged with a ‘girdle’ (i.e. a griddle) sold in the UK something like 50-60 years ago. The griddle had been given to my mother back in the late ’60s or early ’70s. She passed the leaflet on to me after I’d started cooking with a bakestone, on the off-chance the recipes might be of some use. The one recipe I tried (for Cheese Scones) wasn’t a great success, so I haven’t attempted any of the others, some of which in any case are none too appetising.

On the front of the leaflet: “Gateware Cast Aluminium Girdles … Guaranteed for 10 Years … Make delicious Scones, Potato Cakes, Oatcakes the Traditional Way”. On the back: “The largest range of Cast Aluminum Cooking Utensils in the World … Gateware Products Limited … Contractors to: The Government, Shipping Lines, Local Authorities, Hospitals, Education Authorities”.

Clearly this pre-dated the general encroachment of pizza into British culture: it’s as if the writer of the recipe had heard about it without ever actually having eaten any. My first experiences of the stuff were scarcely any more authentic: the first generation of frozen pizzas to make it to our household in the early-to-mid ’80s were small, bready things topped with grated cheddar along with something vaguely tomatoey. By the time of my first visit to a Pizza Express in London ca. ‘87 (which, compared to what I’d been used to, felt like the epitome of sophistication!), I’d gained a much better appreciation of what pizza could be.

Virago

On recent visits to Broadleaf Books in Abergavenny I could not help but notice their plentiful stock of used Virago “Modern Classics” paperbacks all arranged together in their distinctive dark green livery. Last time I was there I decided to buy some of them, picking out a couple of the slenderer volumes: The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman and Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man. They have joined eight other books already on my shelves bearing the Virago/VMC imprint.

There have been others that have come and gone in the past. The first one I bought, ca. 1990, was Jane Bowles' Two Serious Ladies. I was curious to try it having been much impressed by Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky. It may have been quite a while before my second Virago, as, for too many years, male authors heavily outnumbered female ones in the fiction section of my library. This was oddly specific sexism on my part as there was always a more equal gender balance in the non-fiction and poetry I read. More recently I had copies of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show and The Corner that Held Them. And, in addition to the four books of hers shown above, I owned Barbara Comyns' novels Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead and The Skin Chairs. If shelf-space weren’t at such a premium, I would have held on to them all.

The copy of Comyns' debut novel Sisters by a River in the picture has ‘Virago Modern Classics’ on the cover but a Penguin logo on its spine. The same author’s Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and The Vet’s Daughter are both from printings post-dating the dark-green colour-scheme. At the bottom of the stack is an ’80s VMC hardback original in the shape of Jennifer Dawson’s The Upstairs People, which I sought out after her first book The Ha-Ha had hit the spot for me. The other two hardbacks are both short-story collections by Daphne du Maurier (The Birds and Don’t Look Now) and are from the decorative VMC ‘Designer Collection’ launched in 2008.

Paddy

Having recently posted a cat picture, I thought I’d better post a dog picture too. Above is a photo of Paddy the Labrador taken at a rare quiet moment at the end of the lost year of 2011. I call it a ‘lost’ year as it was a blur of exhaustion, mainly on account of the highly-strung animal in question making his chaotic way through puppyhood. He would have been about fourteen months old when I took the picture.

I used a Nikon F80 loaded with Adox CMS 20 document film/microfilm, which I later developed myself in dilute Rodinal. Shooting with a wide aperture as I did here somewhat defeated the purpose of using a very fine-grained film, with much of the frame given over to lens blur – but I like how this shot turned out.

When my wife died in 2013 I had to decide whether I could cope on my own with a full-time job, a high-maintenance dog and two cats. With the aid of doggy daycare I thought I could do it, and I may have been able to make it work over the longer term had it not been for Paddy’s chronic gastro-intestinal problems. With ever more frequent and lengthy bouts of illness the dog became a second full-time job that I could not indefinitely sustain. Via my vet I handed him over, with the heaviest of hearts, to a local Labrador rescue charity in the Autumn of 2019.

Coupe-Choux

Coupe-choux is a French term for a straight razor that literally means ‘cabbage cutter’. With their being called ‘cut-throat’ razors in English, it’s not hard to see why people might be hesitant to use them: one could say they have something of an image problem. My oldest razor, shown above, is a French-made cabbage cutter. While I consider it to be the oldest, that isn’t an assertion I can prove, as old razors are often difficult to date with any accuracy – but some of its characteristics tend to suggest an origin in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Most notably, it has no tail. When dealing with English razors, an absent or very rudimentary ‘stub’ tail would be consistent with a date of manufacture in the late 18th or very early 19th centuries. In France, however, tailless razors were still apparently made and sold throughout the 19th century, where they were known as rasoirs de perruquier. While perruquier means ‘wigmaker’, it was also used as a synonym for ‘barber’, so these would typically have been intended for shaving others, rather than for shaving oneself.

The variable width of the blade (a ‘wedge’, a little over ¾" at its widest), the convex ‘smiling’ curvature of its edge, and the relatively indistinct transition between the blade and the tang would, based on what I’ve read, collectively argue for an earlier 19th-century origin moreso than a later one. Stamped on the tang is the text MARTIN A MARSEILLE and a symbol comprising a cross and a circle. The likelihood is that Martin was a retailer, rather than the manufacturer. The scales are made of horn, with a white ‘spacer’ separating them which I’d guess is a chip of bone.

I spent something in the region of £40 acquiring it via ebay, with a little more outlay needed to get it sent off for honing into shave readiness. It’s a great pleasure to still be able to use an an item that is likely to be over 150 years old, and quite possibly 200 years old. It still shaves very well indeed.

Bilal

An artist whose music I’ve come to appreciate over the last six months is the singer & songwriter Bilal Oliver. When getting slightly better acquainted with neo-soul, his was a name I often saw mentioned. Having sampled a few of his tracks on YouTube I ordered a copy of A Love Surreal (2013), & loved it. Soon after I acquired In Another Life (2015), which I liked nearly as much. Both are idiosyncratic and inventive albums, some creative distance away from the neo-soul epicentre. Favourite tracks: ‘Right at the Core’ from the former record; ‘Satellites’ from the latter.

I was excited to learn of the release recently of two new albums of his: Live at Glasshaus and Adjust Brightness. I gather the singer is backed on the former by a band including Robert Glasper and Questlove; and that many of the songs on it were originally written for his never officially-released second album Love for Sale (2001-03). Inconveniently for me, it was only issued as a limited US-only double LP, with import copies arriving in the UK priced at a prohibitive £70. Adjust Brightness as far as I know has had no physical release at all – at least not yet. I could hear it all on-line but that doesn’t align with my weird, old-fashioned listening habits. I hope there are eventually CD releases of both.

To anyone with 98½ minutes to spare, I can heartily recommend A Tribute To Curtis Mayfield: a fitting orchestral tribute to the great man featuring the WDR Big Band; the WDR Funkhausorchester; a quartet of guest musicians on guitar, bass, drums and additional percussion; and with Bilal and Ledisi providing the vocals. It’s a beautiful thing!

Pitchfork Cheddar

Among the nine hundred and fifty truckles of cheese stolen in London last week there was a quantity of Pitchfork Cheddar made by the Trethowan brothers in Somerset. Pictured above is a wedge of Pitchfork I bought on Saturday – from a legitimate, established stockist I should stress, lest anyone infer any connection with the theft.

How does a relatively expensive farmhouse cheddar made with raw milk compare with a cheaper factory-made one? To me it’s not a radical dissimilarity but something analogous to the difference between a blocky, pixelated image and a fully high-definition one, with the extra money buying nuance and subtlety. It has been characterised as ‘nutty’ and ‘slightly earthy’ which may be so. I’d be more inclined to just describe it as quite like regular cheddar – only better.

Edited to add: in subsequent tastings I have discerned the advertised nuttiness in the shape of an intriguingly bittersweet hazelnut-like note emerging from the mix of flavours.

Thinking on Paper

Above is the back of the card band wrapped around a new Leuchtturm1917 A5 ruled notebook in mint green. As well as the band, the book encloses a leaflet with some information about the Leuchtturm range; a sheet with half a dozen stickers on it for “labelling the title and spine of your […] book when you want to archive it” and “a “thank you very much for purchasing” card. I’ve been using Leuchtturm notebooks for the last decade and end up getting a new one every year or so. I like the quality of the paper & the binding; and I appreciate the high page-count; I’m less keen, however, on the narrow ruling they use.

One application where ISO-216 strikes me as unsatisfactory is that of notebook sizes. I find A4 unwieldy for use around the home; while A5, though not a bad size, is smaller than I prefer. Leuchtturm of course offer an intermediate range in B5 size which I should try – so far I haven’t, as these are less widely-available in the UK than their A4 and A5 lines. The old British Quarto sizes are ideal for me, and I’ve had some luck obtaining thick, wider-ruled vintage 7” x 9" books, though there one is at the mercy of what may or may not turn up on eBay every once in a long while. I’ve tried Stamford notebooks which are lovely, if expensive. They do a ‘Crown Quarto’ size which is just right for me. Their ruling, moreover, is wider and more to my liking than Leuchtturm’s. Their page-counts, on the other hand, are less generous. If Stamford offered a double-thickness ruled Crown Quarto book I’d gladly pay a premium for it.

When I’m working I prefer the extra room afforded by an A4 notebook. The Collins Ideal 6448 A4 book has been my choice for that purpose in recent years. It has good-enough quality paper, wide ruling and a generous 384 pages. It takes me nearly a year to fill one. It’s true (to an extent) for me that “writing by hand is thinking on paper”. Making handwritten notes has worked as an aide-mémoire since my school days. And I’ve scribbled my way to the solution of many a workplace puzzle. In my case, the benefits of writing by hand tend to be short-to-medium term – as a sort of extension of my thought-space. Trying to search back through my work notebooks for older information is often an unfruitful exercise in frustration: in such cases the searchability of electronic text wins out almost every time.

Il Coniglio d'Oro

I’ve long been an admirer of the Italian artist Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, so when I first learned, ca. 2015, of another book he’d illustrated called Il Coniglio d’Oro (‘The Golden Rabbit’) I was intrigued. At that time, however, money was short and it didn’t seem like a justifiable purchase. I’d forgotten all about it until a few weeks ago, when a search at Amazon turned it up – still available, and indeed discounted: I ordered a copy.

It’s a curious book, billed as a piccolo trattato di antropocunicologia (‘little anthropolapine treatise’). Serafini’s illustrations are once again a delight: variously bizarre, whimsical, and unsettling. Here are a few details: 1, 2, 3. With Serafini getting top billing on the cover, I wonder if perhaps the illustrations came first and the text was then commissioned to accompany them. Written by Daniela Trasatti, it begins (after a prologue) with some information about the natural history of rabbits and then a broad-brush survey of the appearances made by rabbits in human cultural history. Rabbit-related symbols and traditions are outlined; characters like Peter Rabbit, Bugs Bunny and Miffy are discussed.

Might this be a gift for the Italian-speaking rabbit enthusiast in one’s life? That would depend very much on the nature of their enthusiasm, with the latter parts of the book given over to a survey of the rabbit in culinary history, followed by twenty-one rabbit-based recipes. It’s all at once an art-book, an essay, and a cookbook. Unsure where the volume should go on my shelves I’ve placed it here for the time being.