Gorwydd Caerphilly

Mass-produced Caerphilly cheese of the kind generally available in supermarkets tends to have a simple flavour profile: salty, mildly creamy; somewhat tangy; and a dryish, crumbly texture. A farmhouse-style Caerphilly like the Gorwydd one shown above is altogether more complex. As the photo illustrates, it has a pale-coloured heart around which is a deeper yellow layer within its edible rind. The pale part of the cheese has something like the quasi-citric tang of its factory-made namesake, whereas the outer part contributes rounder and deeper notes, and the rind an earthy mushroomlike quality. The overall effect is that of an harmonious chord of flavours, as opposed to a single note.

The Trethowan brothers who make Gorwydd pioneered the revival of farmhouse Caerphilly after the style had become all-but extinct. It was named for the farm in west Wales where they first made it, a name retained after their relocation to Somerset in south-west England. I bought the wedge in the picture from the Newhall Farm Shop near Chepstow. It’s a delicious cheese that is meanwhile mild enough not to alarm the unadventurous.

Kursuus-sectâ

Twenty years ago, I learned of an exhibition that had been staged in Rotterdam in 1983 called Imaginaire Landen, which collected various artworks that mapped or described imaginary locales. Intrigued by some of the names of the artists and writers represented in the show, I ordered a copy of the exhibition catalogue. This, when it arrived, turned out to be a box containing numerous unbound leaflets printed in Dutch, along with sundry additional pieces of ephemera, among them a box of matches bearing the name of a non-existent airline (but with real matches inside); a weird card-game; a button-badge; numerous maps, blueprints, charts and tables; schematics of dreamt-up metro networks; a musical score; and even a little bag containing coarse black sand, some pebbles, and a broken cockle-shell, purportedly from the imaginary island of Atipé. Also there was the wine-label shown above.

The fictional location that produced the wine was one called Spokanië (or Spocania) an island-group ostensibly in the Atlantic to the south-west of Ireland: originally the brainchild of Rolandt Tweehuysen, a Dutch linguist. Given his line of work, it’s no surprise that the language of Spokaans (or Spocanian) is a significant part of his creation. According to wikipedia, it has a “a dictionary of over 25,000 entries” and is “one of the most elaborated artistic languages ever created”. Many other aspects of the islands and their inhabitants have also been described by Tweehuysen and others, with two books and an extensive old-school website devoted to the subject.

Back to the wine-label. From this page on the web-site (with the help of Google Translate), I’ve learned that it’s from the southern side of the Tjokky Mountains in the Neno district of the island of Tigof. It’s specifically a product of the Hogorit-Qualâ estate, and is a Kursuus-sectâ (or ‘blood wine’), a term used in that part of Spocania for light red wines akin to French Beaujolais or Burgundy. What kind of vintage might 1980 have been, I wonder?

Churston Deckle

Shown above, the striking design on the cover of a folder containing an old set of writing paper and envelopes. I would say the image and its colour-scheme suggest a ’70s origin. The paper within is an orangey shade given the name ‘peach bloom’. Below are the contents of the folder when opened out, with one of the envelopes' flaps folded back to display part of the bold design in its lining, one which echoes the cover image.

The sheets of paper are watermarked Churston Deckle, this being one of the many product-lines sold by John Dickinson & Co. Ltd (previously: 1, 2). Those words don’t appear on the outer packaging, however, which merely describes the contents as “distinctive deckle-edged writing paper”. I wonder if the brand may have had old-fashioned associations by that time, and perhaps this set was an attempt to appeal to a groovier, younger public?

Ligotti

Here we see the books currently in my library from the pen of the idiosyncratic American horror writer Thomas Ligotti.

Second from top is my copy of the first UK edition of his debut short story collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1989). This is a book I’d first read in ‘92, having borrowed it from Cardiff Central Library. At the time I was very unhappily acclimatising to the misery of my first proper full-time job, and I found a perverse comfort in Ligotti’s bleak worldview. I meanwhile greatly enjoyed his way with words. To paraphrase a line from the story ‘Vastarien’, I felt as though “the book had found its reader” and became an immediate fan. After much searching I found a copy of my own in early ‘94, at the Cardiff branch of ‘Forbidden Planet’.

Toward the end of that same year I spotted Ligotti’s second book, Grimscribe (1991), listed in a mail-order bookseller’s catalogue. How that copy (of the UK edition – published by Robinson, ended up in a US Carroll & Graf dust-jacket is a long story I won’t get into). Story collection #3, Noctuary (1994) came into my hands in ‘98. I suspect it would have been among my first on-line book orders, but I can’t specifically recall. The remaining five volumes were definitely all on-line orders, all placed as soon as I’d heard of the titles’ having been published.

My Work is Not Yet Done (2002) is a collectable volume, coming as it did with a bookplate signed by both Ligotti and illustrator Harry O. Morris. More sought-after still is the Durtro edition of Teatro Grottesco (2006). Hardback copies of Ligotti’s essay The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010) likewise seem to be decidedly uncommon. Rounding out the set are the small volume of two stories that is The Spectral Link and the collection of interviews gathered in Born to Fear, both published by Subterranean Press in 2014. My copy of the former might have been worth more if my dog hadn’t got his teeth into it.

At one time or another I’ve also owned copies of The Nightmare Factory; In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land; Crampton; Sideshow, and Other Stories and Death Poems. Of these I sold a couple and gave away the remainder. There are only a few of his works (most notably The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein) that I haven’t read at all.

Big Hand

Here’s a photo of a disembodied hand, a surviving fragment of an ancient statue, to be found (at least as of August ‘97) in the courtyard of the Musei Capitolini at Piazza di Campdoglio in Rome. There must be many, many thousands of similar images out there similarly snapped by a significant proportion of the Museums’ very numerous visitors.

Ninety-seven was the year I finally got my hands on some of the desirable gadgets of the day. A JVC ‘Micro Component’ CD player (and speakers) and a Canon IXUS compact ‘APS’ camera. The IXUS was a great-looking little thing – all brushed metal and black plastic – with a nifty retracting zoom lens. It wasn’t the sturdiest device, however, and after four years' light use it conked out.

The ‘Advanced Photographic System’ must have been one of the last hurrahs of film photography, before the digital imaging juggernaut rolled in. I held on to about a dozen of the exposed APS films I’d shot, which, a decade or so later, I sent off to be digitally scanned. The ‘big hand’ was one of the frames in the first roll I ran through the IXUS. APS frames had a rather elongated 7:4 aspect ratio, which I’ve slightly cropped here.

Torpedo 18a

Pictured above is my 1954 Torpedo 18a typewriter. The difference between the 18a and the 18b being that the latter came equipped with a tabulator, while the former did not. I bought this one in December ‘17 from an ebay seller somewhere in Devon or Somerset. It was a pre-Christmas impulse-buy that cost me something like £35, postage included. As I recall it arrived packaged in an old Fortnum & Mason box.

For obvious reasons, a German company using ‘Torpedo’ as their brand would have raised more eyebrows than profits in mid-20th Century Britain, hence for the UK market these machines went by the name ‘Blue Bird’. This one is a ‘Torpedo’ having been destined for France: it has a French AZERTY keyboard-layout, which is likely the main reason I was able to buy it relatively cheaply. Despite years of use, I still frequently mqke the sqme old mistqkes when typing on it. Also, its platen is rather hard, with the type-bars consequently liable to try to stamp holes in one’s paper.

On the plus side, out of all the portable typewriters I’ve used, this one has my favourite typing action: very responsive & sweetly snappy. The type itself is an appealing ‘Congress’-style one. I have a blue ribbon installed in the 18a, obtained from FJA Products in the U.S., which has served me well. I’d order more from them if the postage rates weren’t so prohibitive. When not in use, the machine resides in its smart metal carrying case. When I bought it, all that remained of the case’s handle was a steel strip. I later re-upholstered this with a section of a dog collar I’d found in a vaguely similar shade of grey.

Turbulence and Pulse, etc.

Latterly added to my shelves, and shown above, is the album Turbulence and Pulse by the South African drummer, composer and bandleader Asher Gamedze. It was released last year, another fine offering from the people at International Anthem. For a taste of the music see Gamedze’s quartet play a live version of ‘Melancholia’, one of the tracks on the album.

It’s acoustic jazz with an old-school sound agreeably reminscent at times of Charles Mingus, with its unison horn passages and powerhouse rhythm section, in which Gamedze is very ably aided & abetted by bassist Thembinkosi Mavimbela. Shaped by American traditions it may be, but it also has an accent and an attitude very much its own. I’m less convinced by the vocal contributions of Julian ‘Deacon’ Otis on a couple of its numbers, but they may yet grow on me. If this and my one other slice of South African jazz (Shabaka And The Ancestors' We Are Sent Here By History) are anything to go by, then further exploration of that country’s music will be well worth my time.

Here are a couple more jazz or jazz-related albums that have made an impression on me lately. Also from last year, Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning by Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, hitherto known as a trumpeter (and formerly named Christian Scott), who has turned to using his voice, in conjunction with harp-like instruments inspired by the West African ngoni and kora, and has produced a striking record heavy on the percussion and replete with call-&-response vocals. Hear for example ‘Shallow Water’.

And the first 2024 release to reach me: Mary Halvorson’s Cloudward, a sequel of sorts to her wonderful ‘22 album Amaryllis, one that features the same sextet line-up as that earlier record. Apart from Halvorson’s highly-distinctive guitar work, Patricia Brennan’s contributions on the vibraphone are, for me, particular highlights. An example track is ‘The Gate’.

Pistachios

In my provincial ’70s British working-class childhood, nuts usually meant peanuts: plain salted peanuts, or, less often, in ‘monkey nut’ form. Around Christmastime there would be bowls of mixed nuts in their shells: hazelnuts, walnuts, brazil nuts. And a nutcracker nearby. Occasionally one might have almonds. I daresay pecans and cashews have been available for much longer, but as far as I was concerned they may as well have not been invented until the mid-’80s.

Pistachios likewise weren’t a part of my formative snacking experiences. I don’t recall when I might have first tried them – possibly in my teens. Now they are my favorite of all the commonly-encountered nuts. The ones pictured above are some Tesco own-brand roasted & salted pistachios that I ate while working from home this morning.

Spare Stamps

When I send letters I like to adorn them with special-issue stamps, especially now the standard Royal Mail stamp designs are so remarkably ugly. Special issues come in sets, often with an assortment of denominations, some of which tend to be more readily-usable then others. With the passing of time and the consequent increases to postal rates, I’ve accumulated a variety of the less readily-usable ones which are still awaiting an opportunity for affixing to an envelope.

The examples pictured above are from the Pride set (2022); from Royal Navy Ships (‘19); Blackadder (‘23); Cats (‘22) The Gruffalo (‘19) and Rugby Union (‘21) respectively. Perhaps in time I’ll be in a position to make a decorative arrangement out of them all. Oddly, a couple of the letters I’ve sent recently have had their (Spice Girls, ‘24) stamps seemingly removed while in the mail. Has a ’90s pop fan taken an acquisitive shine to them? Did their adhesive somehow fail? The latest letter I received was likewise missing its stamp.

Imperial Parchment

This box of Imperial Parchment paper, obtained recently via ebay, is something of an oddity. It’s announced as “a Terston product”, that being a brand-name used by George Waterston and Sons of Edinburgh and London, who went out of business over twenty years ago. The watermarked sheets within have an old-school look and feel, and the other text printed on the box, about the paper being “Hard Sized and Air-Dried” etc., is likewise redolent of a bygone era. Yet the box itself seems flimsily new.

Could this stuff be old stock re-packaged in the company’s declining years, or re-sold ‘posthumously’ by someone who acquired it when the manufacturer ceased trading? Might it even be counterfeit, unlikely as that seems? I may never know, but it’s good, relatively thick & heavyweight paper & there’s plenty of it.

Poems of Today

The latest addition to my collection of obscure anthologies of translated poetry is Poems for Today: from Twenty-five Icelandic Poets, a 1971 publication from the Iceland Review Library selected and translated by Alan Boucher. Specifically my copy is a ‘74 reprint that was purchased in Iceland in ‘76, for 720 ISK (judging from the inscription on the half-title page and the price-tag on the back cover). The inscription suggests the original owner lived out on the Western Isles of Scotland.

I enjoyed the poems. As one might perhaps expect there’s a good deal of boreal gloom in them. “Hard it is to bear on a mountain road / a full load of autumn forebodings” writes Jóhannes úr Kötlum, the oldest of the poets featured, in his ‘Traveller’s verse’. In the same author’s ‘Climacteric’ one finds a note of atomic-age anxiety, while elsewhere, in Stéfan Hördur Grímsson’s ‘Term of reckoning’, there is ecological unease. I don’t know if it was a sign of the times, or a characteristic of the selection, but only one of the poets whose work was included was a woman – Nína Björk Árnadóttir.

Iceland’s spectacular landscape features heavily - its mountains, fells, pristine pools and all-but-empty roads; and there are striking lines about the harsh splendour of winter at those latitudes – “Our passage through storm-whirled thundering polar darkness soon at an end / on the wind-polished ice-blue pane a whitening cloud” writes Hannes Sigfússon in an excerpt from ‘Winter pictures from the life of poets’. There are summer idylls too, though, and poems about non-Icelandic landscapes set in deserts and sprawling cities.

The country’s legendary and mythical pasts also cast long shadows: there are some echoes of the sagas; the occasional glimpse of an elf. We also read something of the poverty and hardship of times past, as in Jón úr Vör’s ‘Lean months’: “And do you remember the endless / milkless midwinter days, / the lean months’ left-overs, / salted scraps soaked in the pail…” Less weighty contemporary concerns crop up too: one of the poems is about the novelty of Mediterranean package holidays. There follows one of the poems in full.

Wait while it sings

When a bird first sings on your bough
do not go straight away — but wait while it sings
though its song be strange to you and new
wait while it sings although you thirst
with parched throat about the fire and hear
springs trickle at the foot of the hill; still wait
in the bright night while it trills.
Its lyrical tongue will cease in the night’s
quiet and peace among you in the flames’ light —
a strange tongue — wait nevertheless;
you will not enjoy that voice for long
for it will fly off when it has released
the heart-child from chains and freed
those clear eyes, quick small fingers
and little feet; brought to your ears
in the leafy thicket; wait while it sings.

—Thorsteinn frá Hamri.

Daffodils

As it’s the time of year when the daffodils are proliferating hereabouts in gardens and along roadsides, here is a photograph of some daffs in a vase. I took it back in 2010 with my Mamiya C330 Pro S camera, most likely with the standard 80mm lens-pair attached. The film was Adox CHS 50 (now discontinued) which I developed at home using Tanol. I was very pleased with the way this shot turned out.

Car-key

Whereas most people are eager to learn to drive as soon as they’re of the age to do so, I was keen to avoid having to get behind the wheel, and for the first decade of my adult life, arranged things around being able to walk where I needed to go, or else to take public transport. When my first proper employers subsidised a course of driving lessons for me, I dutifully took them, but wasn’t sorry when I failed the test that followed.

Things changed when I met my wife. She tolerated train-travel, but disdained buses. Meanwhile she liked to drive, and was happy enough for the most part to do the driving for us both. For another decade or so this worked out tolerably well, until a change of location and a change of circumstances obliged me to knuckle down and start taking lessons again. It did not come naturally to me, and I failed test after test. Only after months of struggle, and at the sixth or seventh attempt, did I belatedly pass.

This serves to explain why, although I’ve owned seven cars in my time, I’ve only driven five of them. Car no. 7 is a 2016 Citroën C1 in plain white, the latest in a line of small, low-powered and (relatively) cheap vehicles. Its key is shown above, with the prong folded away. I’ve had this one for less than a year. I like it quite well, though wish it had a CD-player rather than the bluetooth music-playing contraption it came with. At least it does have a radio.

It's Better to Travel

The music I heard as a very young child came in the form of the pop hits of the day issuing tinnily from transistor radios. On my first exposure to heavier & harder rock I didn’t care for it - I called it ‘rough music’, so must have valued a certain softness & smoothness in the tunes I heard. In time though, I lost that aural equivalent of a sweet tooth and grew to appreciate the merits of roughness; eventually coming to disdain music I considered to have too smooth or glossy a surface. These latter sentiments prevailed – albeit with gradually proliferating exceptions – well into my forties. Even now I’m deeper into middle age, I often still find myself oddly resistant to certain lower-friction sounds.

A few of last year’s vinyl acquisitions brought me back to music I’d formerly overlooked for those reasons, among them Secret Combination by Randy Crawford; Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway; Sade’s Diamond Life; and (pictured above), It’s Better to Travel, by Swing Out Sister. From the last-named, I was unavoidably familiar with some of the singles, espcially ‘Breakout’, their most successful song. I liked the tunes well enough, and Corinne Drewery’s smoky vocals, but had been less fond of the sheen of their polished production. Now, thirty-odd years on, I can at last better appreciate it for the fine album that it’s always been.

Earl Grey

I’m partial to a cup of Earl Grey tea. To my taste, cheap Earl Greys (Earls Grey?) are often unpleasant. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem worth paying too high a premium for a tea where the added flavouring is as important as the accompanying leaves. My preferred point of compromise in recent years has been the loose leaf Earl Grey made by the Brew Tea Co. I’d say their claim that “our Earl Grey Loose Leaf tastes less like hot perfume, and more like proper tea” is well-founded.

It’s my usual choice of drink on those days when I travel in to the office. The cup and saucer shown above are by Yvonne Ellen, and were a gift from my sister.

Stamtavla

A document that happened to come to hand the other day was my cat’s Stamtavla, that is to say his Pedigree (he was born in Sweden, and spent his first year and a half there). Before being renamed Murphy, he had originally been given the name “Adolfsbergs Big Me”. Adolfsberg is a place near Örebro; while ‘Big Me’ apparently derives from his tendency (still in evidence today), to want to be at the centre of attention.

The pedigree documents four generations of his ancestry in full, which is a good deal more detail than I have in my own genealogy. That probably goes some way toward explaining why one of us has often drawn spontaneous praise for his good looks, and one of us hasn’t. Had it been left up to me, I would have sooner adopted an unwanted stray, but my wife was dead-set on getting a Birman. hence all this paperwork.

His family tree contains a bewildering variety of inventive names, many of them utilising somewhat unidiomatic English, or otherwise mixing languages. His father, for instance, went by “Sun Mountain Gimme Love To Give”, while his maternal grandfather was “Centauri’s Autobahn”. A particular favourite name is that of his paternal grandfather’s paternal grandmother, “Ullstrumpans Qumquat”, Ullstrumpan being Swedish for ‘the woollen stocking’.

Vélin de Moirans

Here’s a box of Vélin de Moirans writing paper and envelopes. Moirans is a town in the Isère department in southeastern France. There was paper-making in that area for nearly five centuries, with the earliest mill purportedly dating back to 1480. I suspect this box was made in the late ’40s or ’50s. There’s reference on the back of it to some kind of trademark registration in 1946, which must have been around the time production resumed after its wartime hiatus. Sadly, Les Papeteries Barjon closed down for good in 1977.

The paper is of a very good quality. The sheets measure approx. 16cm x 21.5cm, and are watermarked along one longer edge with the pseudo-handwritten text “F. Barjon Moirans”. The envelopes are lined with dark brown tissue. A slip inside the box assures the buyer about the excellence its contents in French and English, the latter concluding “The Moirans trade-mark therefore constitutes for you the highest guarantee of perfect quality and the best certificate of origin.”

Journey to the South

There are no few novels where an author who has successfully established an intriguing atmosphere, or has brought to life some well-rounded characters, or has described a tantalising series of events, then finds themselves unable to tie together the various threads they’ve been spinning to bring about a satisfactory conclusion. Conversely, there are books where the author has a devised a proper ending, but one they’ve only been able to attain by way of a wearisomely laborious set-up. I’ve met with significantly fewer books in the latter category than the former – to my mind, Michal Ajvaz’s novel Journey to the South, which I finished a few days ago, is one of them.

It could well be that aficionados of detective or mystery stories are more familiar than I with stories that build weakly only to end strongly. Journey to the South is, among other things, a murder mystery. Martin, a postgraduate student, witnesses a fatal shooting in a theatre, at a performance of a ballet composed by one Tomáš Kantor. In the crime’s aftermath, Martin becomes involved with Kristýna, a fellow-eyewitness, who had formerly been Kantor’s girlfriend. The victim of the shooting and Kantor were step-brothers. Before his ballet’s première, Kantor had also been found murdered.

The second part of the book is an account of Martin & Kristýna’s attempts to unravel the twin mysteries of the these deaths, a quest which leads them from their home city of Prague to the Greek Islands – the titular Journey to the South. Theirs is a highly-implausible but colourfully-imaginative quest for the truth. Before we even learn about that journey, however, the bulk of the novel’s first (and longer) part is devoted to a narration of an unconventional manuscript of Tomáš Kantor’s, one which comprises stories within stories within stories. The various ways in which its nested narratives inter-relate with the murder-mystery and its solution are striking and thought-provoking.

The trouble I had with it all was that the constituent narratives themselves were, as often as not, rather pedestrian and flatly-written. Working ones way into the nested tangle of unlikely stories felt at times like an arduous ascent, through the ways these were resolved felt correspondlingly akin to an enjoyably freewheeling descent. Amidst it all Ajvaz has a good deal to say about the nature of narrative, and how it alters and is altered by the world around it; about art imitating life imitating art, etc.; and about signs and symbols and how they are interpreted and misinterpreted. Ultimately though, I found Journey to the South almost as frustrating as it was rewarding, and wouldn’t recommend it as a point of entry into Ajvaz’s work.

Fridge Poem

With Valentine’s Day just over, here’s a photo of a ‘fridge-poem’ I made for my wife. The fridge poetry “romance kit” may well have been a Valentine’s gift – I can’t recall. I do remember it lay unused for a year or two before I tried conjuring something appropriately romantic from its limited vocabulary; an undertaking that proved more difficult and time-consuming than I’d anticipated. Those thirty-two words were the result.

The ‘poem’ had been on the fridge for a few more years when I took the picture, hence its sub-optimal cleanliness. The photo was an aide-memoire so I’d more readily know how to replace the words on a new fridge in a different house after a move.

‘Endless’ and ‘forever’ are utterances – however sincerely expressed or deeply felt – that the passage of time will make a brusque mockery of. Within ten years of choosing those words, within five years of taking the picture, I was a widower.

SL-1210Mk5

Pictured above is my Technics SL-1210Mk5 turntable. The blue LP spinning on it is a 2020 re-issue of Ahmad Jamal At The Pershing. I bought the turntable some eighteen or nineteen years ago, since when it has provided me with nothing but trouble-free listening pleasure. It was expensive, but in value-for-money terms it has proven to be a bargain.

Coming of age in the heyday of the Walkman, I began buying music on cassette – out of practicality (and for reasons of economy) rather than due to any attraction inherent in the medium. A decade later I made the leap from cassettes to CDs. I didn’t obtain my first record-player until 2001. That was a second-hand late-70s/early-’80s Ferguson unit picked up at a junkshop. While it wasn’t exactly a high-quality item, at that point the attraction was all about the novelty of getting any old crackly sound out of the dirt-cheap vinyl I was buying.

When the Ferguson gave up the ghost, I sought out something that would be easier to connect up to my PC’s sound-card, my focus having shifted to the desire to digitise some of my newly-accumulated analogue music. I settled on an inexpensive Kenwood-brand player which, alas, proved to be a poor choice. The build quality left much to be desired, and nor was the sound quality anything to shout about. My frustration with it led me to consider shelling out rather more for a model with a reputation for solid reliability: the SL-1210.

It took a while to get a Mk. 5 on order as this was a time (2005 or ‘06) when demand was at something of a low ebb. Come the end of the decade the SL-1210 would fall out of production altogether – until the vinyl revival belatedly summoned it back from the dead. Having used it first in digitising music, or for listening through headphones, I eventually did the decent thing and hooked it up to an amp and some speakers, in which configuration it’s done a round decade’s sterling service. The worst thing I can think to say about the thing is that the dust-cover seems to have been something of an afterthought: I ended up badly damaging my original one and had to get an aftermarket replacement.

All Thoughts Fly

In childhood I came to connect the sound of church organs with feelings of chilly discomfort, boredom and alienation. I should know better than to harbour continued prejudice against this kind of instrument, but those early associations have proven hard to shake off. The doleful onset of a traditional hymn-tune is still liable to provoke feelings of disquiet, but when a pipe-organ is used to play less conventional material, I have found I can enjoy it rather better.

A case in point is the album All Thoughts Fly by the Swedish composer and musician Anna von Hausswolff, released in 2020 but only very recently added to my shelves. It comprises seven solo instrumental pieces played by von Hausswolff on a church organ in her native Gothenburg, with some additional electronic manipulation apparently applied thereafter. The resultant music combines elements of the austerely minimalistic and of doomy drone, with plaintive lyricism.

The album cover photo was taken in ‘Sacro Bosco’, a sculpture-garden in Italy commissioned by a grieving nobleman after his wife’s death. Its title is a translation of an inscription (ogni pensiero vola) carved into the statue there of the underworld god Orcus, a “punisher of broken oaths”. Pensiero (I’ve been told) can translate, in certain contexts, not just as ‘thought’ but more specifically as ‘preoccupation’ or ‘anxiety’ – I’ve wondered whether the inscription could be interpreted in that light.

Another church organ performance I’ve grown to love is Irene De Ruvo’s rendition of Sweelinck’s Fantasia Chromatica on a 17th-Century Italian instrument.

Cesanese

Cesanese is a grape variety native to the Lazio region of Italy. I came to know it during my time in Rome, as the ingredient in the cheapest local red I found I actively enjoyed. The wine in that blue-labelled bottle seemed to me to be best served slightly chilled. On winter evenings in my inadequately-heated apartment it hit the spot just right. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much in the heat of summer. It formed a significant part of my unhealthy alcohol intake in the winter of ‘96/‘97.

The variety’s lack of renown must be due in part to the difficulties its late-ripening tendencies pose the vintner – so says this article – which continues: “When made well, however, Cesanese can demonstrate rich, ripe cherry flavors with some floral characters and sometimes a touch of red pepper.” On the other hand, in The Oxford Companion to Wine (art. ‘Lazio’) we’re told that “most Cesanese is neither well-made nor interesting.” Well-made or not, it’s a wine that seldom seems to leave Italy.

I’d not had a drop of the stuff in at least twenty-five years when I saw the wine pictured above on the shelves of the local Lidl. For old times’ sake I bought a bottle, consuming a large glass of it on a cold night. No flood of Proustian recollection was forthcoming, and I found it good, but not outstanding. Even with my lacklustre palate I discerned cherry-like notes, if perhaps with a faintly sharp edge of unripeness about them. Even so, on returning to Lidl and seeing the Cesanese had been selling slowly, I picked up a second bottle of the stuff.

Final Phonebook

A new copy of The Phone Book (for Newport and South East Wales) arrived here last month. At a mere 152 pages it’s a thin shadow of the telephone directories of yore. No-one would choose to rip this one in half as a feat of strength. I was going to include a scan of its cover in this post, but it’s unlovely enough that I’ll just link to it instead.

Not just another new copy, this is the very last one. The grim words “FINAL EDITION / Hold on to it forever” make that plain. I don’t imagine many will obey that instruction. Very few folk will have any practical use for it, and such utility as it holds will further fade with time. Even from the standpoint of historical interest, any Yellow Pages from the tail end of the last century will contain much more of value than this vestigial thing.

I recall in the later ’90s feeling vaguely perturbed that each new phone-book seemed thicker than the last, wondering where the ever-bulkier unwieldiness of each new edition could be leading. But then there came a point where new phone-books arrived alongside those AOL CDs offering free trials of dial-up internet access, which proved to be, alongside the simultaneous explosion in mobile phone use, the beginning of the end for them.

Foolscap

Late last year I acquired a virtually-unused ream of foolscap paper. It’s ‘Plus Fabric’, made by Spicers, in a larger size and a lighter weight than my other box of the stuff. Foolscap was once the default paper-size for office use in the UK, until A4 eclipsed it during the ’70s and ’80s. Initially referring to a style of watermark, foolscap came to denote specific dimensions, which, with regard to paper for writing, typing and copying, were 8"x13".

When I first began buying refill pads of my own at WH Smith to use for schoolwork back in the early ’80s, it seemed that A4 and foolscap were both equally readily available. Within a year or two, however, the latter size became harder to find, at length no longer being sold at all. I was annoyed as I preferred its elongated profile to the squatter and squarer A4. Having since become so thoroughly accustomed to the ‘new’ format. foolscap now seems oddly oblong. This box of it will be ideal for typewriting purposes - I just now need to find the equivalent of some A5, A6 or DL envelopes I can fold the sheets into.

Fitzcarraldo

Pictured above are the seven books published by Fitzcarraldo Editions that are currently at home on my shelves. An eighth (Mathias Énard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild) is on the ‘to be read’ pile). Another four or five have come & gone. The first one I acquired was Camilla Grudova’s wonderful short-story collection The Doll’s Alphabet.

Fitzcarraldo have brought a breath of fresh air to British publishing with their steadfast endorsement of quality literature in translation. By the expedient of publishing excellent authors previously un- or under-represented in English, their list now includes four Nobel prizewinners. As well as the high quality of the texts, I very much like the consistent simplicity of their jacket designs.

I don’t always find the interior design of their volumes as pleasing, but it usually works well enough. One mis-step (in my opinion) was their ungainly edition of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, too hefty a tome that would have been much better subdivided into two or three volumes. I’ve my eye on a few more of their titles and look forward to seeing what else they come up with!