Why I hate facebook.

We all complain about it. But we also complain about eating too much cake, even though the cake was delicious. We want it – but we hate that we want it.

I hate that my facebook abstinence lasted all of three days. I had such good intentions… but then I needed to get in touch with someone about work and had no other way of contacting him. I was trapped by the omnipotence of facebook. It is the line the great god Zuckerberg cast and we’ve all been hooked. Thrash about as I may, would I expire if I was yanked totally free of the tormenting object?

Enough with the metaphors. We’ve all got our personal grievances to air so for now, by way of starting the conversation, I shall tell you why I hate facebook.

Whoever said “let bygones be bygones” was a wise, wise man. I bet he never used the words “social network.” Because on facebook, it is impossible to live out this command. Everyone is simply too connected. Even if you “defriend” that ex, or that nasty colleague, there are all the middle people to consider, the people who know the people who know the people. And, since we’re all voyeurs at heart, we’re bound to check up on that person by indirect means (i.e. someone else’s facebook page). It’s like there’s nowhere to put your past anymore because your past has become a computer file. Delete to your heart’s content, baby, but that shit’s been published… and computers have a looooong memory. Let’s be honest: we all have stuff to hide, a few (hundred) skeletons in the closet. But being an active member of facebook is like living on the cover of a tabloid. Somewhere, somehow, a full-color picture of your cellulite will surface.

There are the privacy settings, of course. But then someone finds out that she isn’t privy to the whole package – and voila, you’ve got a situation on your hands. Facebook makes real living awkward because we simply know too much about each other. Not only does the mystery in the relationship disappear, the security does too. It’s just not safe to live exposed; that’s why there’s therapy. We all need a place to air our dirty laundry but it’s far healthier to pay someone to act interested – at least that person is bound by law to keep your confidence.

And if you’re not ‘fessing up to stuff, you’re probably just plain boring. That’s my other major beef: instead of doing interesting things with their lives, people are spending all their time on facebook waiting for other people to do interesting things with their lives. But then the people who are doing interesting things start bitching about everyone else’s boring status updates and then the once-interesting people become equally boring. Facebook is a vicious cycle of exhibitionism and voyeurism – or, put another way, masochism and sadism.

Facebook loves pain. Trust facebook to give you that final push over the edge. You thought you were getting on all right, you had finally comes to terms with the relative mediocrity of your life and/or situation and/or relationship, and you felt better believing that everyone was more or less in the same boat. Then, wait, you see that Person X has landed her dream job! And Person Y is blissfully married with three perfectly adorable children with above-average IQs! And Person Z is travelling all over the world because he has loads of money and loads of time! And so-and-so just got published and is rumoured to be Booker material, and so-and-so met the love of her life, and so-and-so’s business is exorbitantly successful! One needs a self-esteem of iron just to make it to the end of the home page.

But maybe that’s just me. Maybe this, all this stuff I’ve been going on about, is just me: insecure, ashamed, bombastically immature. I am, as this post sufficiently demonstrates, the perfect “online social network” candidate. I belong on facebook – I’ve got all the right neuroses.

And so, before I log back in to see what’s happening in the lives of all those people I would otherwise never, ever think about, let me offer one final analogy:

Facebook is like the scab I can’t stop picking. (Yes, I do believe that should be just about grotesque enough…)

mixing work and pleasure

It’s Monday, my favorite day of the week. On Mondays I work at Urban Larder, a little shop/cafe on Mill Road, where I sell homemade cakes and loaves and chutneys and other delicious things of various sorts. Everything in the shop is made with love and care – and served just the same way. You needn’t be a food aficionado to stop by, but if the thought of real, hand-stirred mayonnaise makes your heart warm, you belong with us. Or with me, rather, since I’m the only one behind the counter on this most underrated of days.

I just finished the lunch “rush” (a few sandwiches, a couple pasties to take away), now I’m enjoying a Tea Pigs peppermint cuppa. Pretty soon I’ll help myself to some local cheddar, a bit of Essex-reared ham, and maybe even a gluten-free brownie from our friend Sophie’s magic oven…

Whoops, spoke too soon. My lunch plan was thwarted as one of the regulars dropped by. This is no Starbucks, you see. Here at the Larder we’re not racing to meet corporate targets, we’re not pushing people into an assembly line of “consumers.”  We have only three tables and from any point in the shop, you’re close enough to chat to whoever is behind the counter or, for that matter, anyone at the next table. It gets a bit Cheers-y, to be honest.

I don’t want to disparage Starbucks – I go there often enough. But I go to s’bucks when I want a place I can sequester myself, a place where I feel comfortably alone in a crowd, where I can ignore and be ignored (once I have my coffee, that is). Here, on the other hand, no one can hide. Just one small room without any corners. You can happily be left alone if you like, but chances are, you’ll start coming here for the opposite reason.

I swear this isn’t a marketing campaign for Urban Larder; Lord knows I’m not paid to boast. I just happen to write about things I love because I want you to love them too. To “feel the love,” so to speak: the suppliers’ love for their product, the shop owner’s love for her “child” as she calls the shop, the customers’ love of their favorite place to go for a cup of soup and a greeting that’s equally warm.

I finished my nibbles and am contemplating a cup of artisan chili hot chocolate. I’m listening to Alison Krauss sing Down To The River to Pray and I’m watching the activity of the working class and the yummy mummies on Mill Road. In the window of the shop, a young blonde reads a magazine and takes a lazy sip of her fairtrade orange juice. I feel at home… and I dream – oh, how I dream! – of one day owning a place that others will also call home. A bookshop, a cafe, a wine bar – the ideas mingle in the softly lit interior of my mind, and I dream…

Back to work. I’ve got scones and honeycomb and dried porcinis to sell. But if you are ever in the Cambridge area, please come see us. There are no pretensions here (it’s not all organic and free trade and artisan) – just some real good stuff and real good people.

Fortnam and Mason is fine and dandy (dandy indeed!) but at the end of the day, being one of the “little guys” has its perks. I know where I am and I am happy. This space doesn’t just want your money (though, as a small business, that’s nice too).

We just want to matter to you, as much as you matter to us. Cheers, to the power of food.

london on a tuesday

A half empty train, the cheapest, no tables. A window seat, I pull my pantyhose up past my belly, I pull the grey second skin from my calf, where it stuck, glued with clear nail polish. There’s a girl beside me, she doesn’t look at me, she understands, and off we go to London. Whittlesford Parkway, Harlow Town, Sawbridgeworth, a history of names unfurling, white-skin names, like the red-skin names I know: Sask, Sask, the train’s slick rhythm. With an hollow ache in my belly I write, I write to forget I live outside of my words, ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world,’ so new worlds I make. Her name shall be called Whitney, and a novel is begun and Liverpool street has arrived and still, ache, ache, I cannot eat here, not with man-made floors beneath me, not in a hurry, not with so many signs beside me. I respect the sacredness of the meal and I travel, I travel, another train, underground. I go where I can eat because body must be respected as soul must, I don’t fill it like a slot machine, I cajole it like new plant growth. My baby, my belly strapped in with elastic and denim, I will be contained, and now I’ve made it, to St. James’ Park. I find a seat beside a woman with a laptop and a phone and I feel safe because here is woman, here is wealth, the two big w’s, and I pull out the small tub of pesto I’ve been saving like pennies and I dip the crostini, ‘a free bag of crostini with every purchase of homemade pesto,’ and I say to the pigeons, I won’t share. Someone feeds a squirrel. I feed me in sunshine, I came all this way for the sunshine, for the proximity of monuments, for the sight of people going in all directions, for the molting swans, I came for the pesto I brought with me. A drop of oil on my thigh, crumbs on my mini-skirt, I finish, I stand, a task completed like a good book over, a good movie rolling credits. I walk with an apple in hand because I like when people walk with apples. Here’s a palace, here’s a gate and on the side: three wheat sheaves beneath a lion. I recognize it and no one recognizes me and I feel that it’s a big world, it’s big enough. Through Green Park, past the Ritz where the doormen talk of things, not work, and watch my legs as I pass and I know I have a run on the back of my calf and I feel it. Someone leans out a van and moans at me, yes moans, and I am embarrassed by the cravings of the flesh, into Fortnam and Mason I duck. I wonder for a moment if I have found heaven, if I have entered paradise by accident, until I see the woman behind the marzipan fruits sweeping broken bits of sweets from the floor and suddenly everything is ordinary, the served and the serving. I wonder where she lives. At the crosswalk, a man motions to let me walk in front of him and I think kindness cannot be buried by a population too big for virtue, but kindness might just be manners in fancy dress. England survived the fall of its empire not because it kept calm and carried on but because it was polite and that’s why Canadians say sorry too much. I find a train, I find another street I’ve never been down, I find a pub. The Cock. I like the feeling of going inside. Crowded heads in crowded booths look up and I wonder if my skirt rode up in the back and my underwear is showing, so it’s to the bathroom before I get beer and that’s always the way it is with women. There’s a table free in a corner and I take it though a wall blocks me from the people I would watch and The Mail has been left on the table. I read a work of substance. A girl alone in London having a pint I must text someone, I must feel connected, I must bump into a stranger and say I’m sorry and look in his eyes and then, then, I feel I’ve been here. I watch the elderly bar maid pick up glasses. I leave and it’s much colder outside.

Class is held in an ugly building in a fashionable area and I’m buzzing from the beer when I take my seat. I take it and it is mine for two hours, I listen and I speak when I have something to say and when it’s over I take longer packing up my bag so that I am alone on the staircase with the window that looks on to London traffic in the night and I walk slowly down three flights and I’m on the street, I’m underground, my classmates caught an earlier train and I don’t have to acknowledge that I know someone here in this mole’s den we pretend not to share, we pretend we’re alone.

I am alone, among the crowd staring at orange lines on black. I wander between baguette sandwich stalls and think about cappuccinos and the cigarettes I didn’t bring along because I never smoke but I like to carry them. My train comes. I go home watching my reflection in the window because as far as I know there’s nothing outside and no one here.

The Art of the Cookie

People the world over complain about the atrocity of British cuisine. But this attitude  is an atrocity in and of itself. England has introduced me to many culinary delights: roasted parsnips, flapjacks, Wensleydale, and cider, to name just a few. But one thing England seems to have neglected is The Art of the Cookie.

Now when I say “cookie,” if you think “Maryland,” you prove my point exactly. I’m not talking about “biscuits.” I’m talking about those steaming trays of round bumpy lumps your mom used to pull out of the oven on a Saturday afternoon and serve to you with an ice-cold glass of milk. And the ones you would find later in the freezer, stored for weekday lunchboxes, that you would stealthily nibble when Mom wasn’t looking.

Oh, the glory of homemade cookies! I am hard-pressed to find something similar in this land of shortbread and hobnobs; it seems the cookie has been reduced to a package, to a function even. Just something you get with your coffee. A little nobbly unremarkable , entirely forgettable bit of the whole.

It’s all wrong. Cookies don’t come from a factory, they come from the kitchen. They come from that spoon your mom gave you to lick (raw eggs and all). Cookies make lots of dirty dishes, cookies make a floury, buttery mess of your counter. Cookies make your house smell like the happiest place on earth.

Cookies were the first thing I learned how to bake. My mom made oodles of them – after all she had three lunchboxes to fill: mine, my brother’s, and my dad’s (as a farmer, he spent long, long days on the field and sugar was as essential as his thermos of coffee). And though we got Oreos once in a while, it was only for variety’s sake. I don’t remember a time when I opened the freezer and there wasn’t a store of homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies to be found. Because my mom had the perfect recipe and, more importantly, the perfect touch. To this day, I’ve never seen it matched.

Hers was the recipe I followed when, at 16, I used to invite my usual horde of girlfriends over for a late-night hottubbing session. Our hottub was outside, on the back deck, and in winter the four or five or six of us would scurry across the few feet of ice and snow to jump in and feel “the tingles.” We brought with us, always, a massive bowl of homemade cookie dough, whipped up just minutes before. With spoons in hand, our faces barely visible in the steam, we’d soak, talking about boys, floating that bowl from one to another till it was finished or the bottom had melted or someone had accidentally got chlorinated water inside. Perhaps not the most hygenic or the healthiest of habits, but it was glorious. Positively glorious.

Tonight, I’m home alone. I’ve got my sweatpants on, my wine opened, and I’m baking cookies. Oatmeal raisin cookies – the best flavor in the world and don’t even try to contest me on that.

I just took the last batch out. They are the most perfect little darlings; and yes, I do anthropomorphize my baking creations (it doesn’t stop me from eating them, of course). Thank you Smitten Kitchen, I shall use this recipe again. Possibly tomorrow, as these may have disappeared by then.

Even if I’m the only one eating these babies (now it’s just getting weird…) I like to think England appreciates my wee bit of influence. Sorry, McVities, but you’re just not up to snuff.

the state I’m in

I’ve recently joined the ranks of The Unemployed.

“Un” is a rather negative prefix isn’t it? Suggesting an absence, the lack of something, the “not.” I am not what I should be. But here, this place among the overqualified, overeducated, over-stimulated, overrated young masses, is where I chose to be. Quite frankly, I did it because waitressing full-time made me want to stick my head under the meat cleaver – luckily I had no energy left after all those split shifts or I might have done. But now, the “un”-ness I find myself in is to be undone. And soon.

It is terrifying to live without an income. Some might call this freedom, but I don’t. Freedom for me means being allowed to do what I love to do most – write – and earn money from it (in freedomland I would also have a lot of time to bake and to consume said baked goods with people who share my appreciation of all things floury).

“So,” you might say, “Why don’t you use all this ‘free time’ [now there’s an oxymoron…] to write?” And my response would be: “Do cover letters count? ‘Cause I’m writing a hell of a lot of those.”

No, that’s only my instinctive retort. My real answer is: I am.

I am officially a freelance writer now. I write for Suite101.com, and I write about anything I like (which, as you know, is mostly books and food). I might get paid for it – depending on whether or not people click on the ads that are linked to my articles.

So, if you ever feel like doing me a favor, you can! It’s so easy! Just click on those ads to “flatten your belly,” or whatever! After you’ve read my articles, of course.

Sorry to sound like an informercial. I’m actually pretty excited about this venture; it’s always exciting to see your name in print. And my reviews aren’t bad, if I do say so myself. If you agree, or even if you don’t, leave a comment on the article and at least I’ll know I’m not talking to myself. Although I do that too.

But the state of my sanity is a matter for another day. For today: I’m unemployed, I’m a freelance writer, I guess I’m sort of self-employed, I hope I get a real job soon. End of story. Or maybe just the beginning. This is all very… unfinished? Let’s hope so.

Best Served Chilled

Until you have known the bleak immensity, the impenetrable blankness, the madness-inducing eternity of winter on the North American prairies, it can hardly be understood, much less described. But having grown up in southern Saskatchewan and endured many a bone-chilling winter there, I can testify that Robert Goolrick is more than capable of transporting his readers to just such a place.

A Reliable Wife is as much about a season, a season endured in a place as hostile as the temperatures, as it is about a marriage. It is about desires as deep and as numbingly cold as the snow. And it is about surviving – both the winter without, and the winter within. As surely as the deadliness of winter brings life so does the pain of betrayal call forth healing in Goolrick’s hell-bent yet hopeful tale.

The novel opens and closes with a chill. “It was bitter cold,” our story begins, “the air electric with all that had not happened yet.” By the end the air is cold but has lost its intensity. Still, the threat of uncertainty and of loss is not absent in the twilight of the novel – to thaw one’s soul is to make oneself vulnerable to both life and death, though neither is wholly desirable. Or so Goolrick would have us believe.

Goolrick certainly holds a tight rein on his story; the plot, while engaging, is noticeably controlled. But is our author, finally, too involved? At times, the sense of an abiding presence overwhelms the story, a “presence” that determines the fate of every player; however, it does not seem to be the author’s. Rather, this reader felt that she was in the uncomfortable position of knowing too much, a ghost that unwillingly haunts the poor tormented living. Reality is warped in Goolrick’s novel and the experience of reading it is, to some degree, an ethereal one – but an ephemeral one as well?

The story is delicate, almost insubstantial in that the unreal, the spiritual, is more prominent than the real – but it is also solidly, sordidly human. And so is Goolrick; his language is not transcendental, ultimately, but jarring and at times so obviously manipulated. But where does that leave the story itself? While Goolrick attempts to crystallize his characters, they live. They move outside of his control simply because their story is a familiar, a believable, a touchable one.

The tale begins with the arrival of a woman who lives for beginnings. How appropriate, then, that she arrives during the first blizzard of the year 1907. Waiting for her, on a remote train station platform in Wisconsin, is a man who has avoided beginnings since his life “ended,” who has lived in the wide open space of the middle, the stable and the predictable, the un-dramatic that Catherine detests. After years living in staunch, unflinching loneliness, Ralph Truitt has taken the risk of placing an ad for a “reliable wife” – but he soon learns that, not only is his faith in her misplaced, his faith in himself, in his competency, his impenetrability and his courage, is too.

The train is late and the immoveable Ralph is shaken. Everyone knows what is happening; the villagers have come to the station, pretending not to watch the man that employs each one of them, the man who has built his fortune upon their backs. Ralph will not stand to be embarrassed – not in his town, not in front of these people whose disposable lives border always on madness and despair, whose children testify to the warm fullness of their marriage beds and bring into ever starker relief the chill of Ralph’s own. They condemn with their very lives his lust; they mock, silently, eternally, his aching need. The train is late and the snow is beginning to fall. As the silence of winter descends, Ralph wishes he had never cried out, that he could stay ensconced in the safety of his silent routine, his quiet, predictable wealth.

But he has not weathered the years as well as he thought. Looking at himself, as he prepares to meet the woman he ordered like a pair of boots from the city, he finds a fool, someone whose weary countenance and old eyes reveal the relentlessness of his longings, the eternal pain of his losses: his little Italian wife, his infant daughter, his dreams. He has not escaped the despair that surrounds him, or even masked it. Daily he reads the newspaper accounts of hard-working, ordinary people gone mad and, until now, has thought himself safe from their world. For years, he has seen what the heartless, unflinching climate and the bitter isolation have done to others, he has read their stories from a distance, he has heard of how a man can kill his own soul and bring with him, on his journey to hell, the ones he professed to love. “Such things happen” – in a small town in Wisconsin at the turn of the century. Ralph knows. But he does not know, does not see, what has happened to him, until it is really happening. He is waiting for the future in a present that has been frozen for twenty years.

Catherine Land, on the other hand, has not stopped moving – from one city to the next, one man to the next, one opium den to another, and bottle after bottle of champagne, night after night of escaping the daylight and the real. From the moment we meet her in a train car, dressed in ostentatious silk and cheap jewelry, we know she is not the plain missionary daughter she claimed to be in her letters. But nothing about Goolrick’s characters remain hidden for long; like raw wind on skin he strips them bare almost before we have got a full-length glimpse. Catherine’s motivation for traveling from the city of her indulgent pleasures to a remote country estate, of dwelling amongst the forlorn, is obvious from the start. She carries a small blue bottle in her suitcase and dwells obsessively on her “plan” – her plan to achieve the only two things that make life worth living: love and money. Ralph, of course, will provide the latter.

But Ralph is not so naïve as to want something so idyllic as love from the arrangement – he loved once, and lost, and he will not try again. He has his own reasons for calling Catherine to him and arranging their marriage. What he has not counted on is her beauty or her lies, or the accident that nearly ruins everything for both of them on their very first night. When a deer jumps in front of the carriage, Ralph is thrown and knocks his head against the wheel; for days he totters on the edge of death, and Catherine finds herself his saviour, needing him to live, to give her what she came for. But she, too, is to serve a purpose; Ralph makes that clear the moment he recovers. Once the fever has broken he tells her, he tells us, everything – the story of his sordid youth, his unthinkable losses, his personal failings and his meaningless worldly successes. And he tells Catherine, in no uncertain terms, what she is there to do. Before the reader reaches the hundredth page of the novel, the plot has been laid out, neat as the crisp linen on Ralph’s loveless bed.

We read the rest of the novel not to see what happens but why it does. We read to see if people can change, if they can weather the winter. Or if they will fall victim to passion that freezes all reason, that cracks open the rational mind like ice and spills its contents like blood. Ralph was raised to believe that he was evil, that his desires were fatal. He has spent his life trying to maintain control, but he, like his poor, helpless workers, like Catherine, walks a tightrope of sanity and the wind, blown by a heartless god, could push him into darkness at any moment. He must be careful. Catherine must be careful. Power is something neither can afford to lose.

And power is destroyed by lust. To want is to die by degrees. As Ralph slowly ingests the invisible venom of the blue bottle he reckons he has brought this fate upon himself, and Catherine is merely the administrator of a deserving punishment – he does not hate her for it, even though he knows she is trying to kill him. Indeed, Ralph gives in. To his desire, to love, and to the fate that he believes is naturally his. “He wouldn’t stop her. He wouldn’t save himself. He loved her. He loved her and she wanted him dead and his son was lost forever to him and that was fine, too. That was what his life had led him to.” But Catherine cannot exult in what was to be her triumph. The love she counted on – the love of a man whose beauty entranced her, whose need for her kept her caged – grows as stale as his cigarette breath. And then he comes home. For the man she loves is none other than Ralph’s own bastard son, born of his late wife’s affair, the boy he mistreated, drove away, and now seeks the forgiveness of.

Young Antonio, beautiful Antonio, holds Catherine’s secrets – her life of whoring, her years of sin and waste. But Ralph, finally, holds Catherine’s heart. He offers her a love unlike any she’s known – a love that is tender, affectionate, unmarked by pain and excess, unsoiled by betrayal and desperation. He offers a simple love, and she gives him a reliable wife. Her secrets, like the trinkets she brought with her from her meretricious past, get lost in the snow and, in the end, are just as inconsequential. There is solid ground at the end of the tightrope. In the end there is also death, there is heartbreak and madness and waste and injustice – and there is the promise of life. Not untainted, not perfect, not without certainty of pain. But life nonetheless, as hopeful, as unpredictable, as messy as the spring.

In places, Goolrick’s prose reads like poetry, like wind. From the first page we see the characters stripped to their souls by the frosty air. If the old “show, don’t tell” rule still holds, Goolrick has not followed it; his characters actions are but a shadowy backdrop to his description of their desires, motivations, and tortures. It is the battle within not the winter without that can ultimately destroy one. And Goolrick depicts these struggles in all their bloody glory; the question for the reader is not who will defeat whom, but who will one choose to be? No one is merely good or bad in the novel; everyone is acted upon by a world where such things, any things, happen. And while we may not suspect what happens next on the journey that is story itself, we know the cast we are traveling with in A Reliable Wife.

It is a novel of secrets, but not for the reader. It is not the surprises in Goolrick’s novel that make it memorable, the twists and turns and fallings-down; it is the naked souls, shivering in the cold, almost too indecent to look at. But is it, finally, too much? Do we want to turn away, to escape, to find someplace warm and well-lit where we might actually encounter a smile?

Goolrick begins his story with lightly falling snow but the weight of snow, when it continues to fall and when it collects, is heavy – very heavy. Under a blanket of snow it is dark, airless; indeed, sometimes Goolrick’s prose feels precisely like that. His sentences in places fall not like flakes but like an avalanche; and the feeling of being barraged, overtaken, is not a pleasant one. In the end, however, I did not have to claw my way out, and I was not smothered. But I was glad, to be sure, for the breath of fresh air. It was getting a bit stale in there.

At times, Goolrick succeeds brilliantly in his use of a poetic, almost staccato language. His steely words make clean cuts and the shock is breathtaking and powerful. But then he does it again. And again. And through overuse his metaphors begin to fall flat, his once-potent phrases lose their vigour, their ability to startle. The phrase he ends with – “such things happen” – is used just paragraphs before, and countless times earlier, not always in necessary or even appropriate places. And so the ending, rather than being the incisive stab Goolrick undoubtedly hoped for, is a rather flaccid joust that makes hardly a scratch – we know, after all, what’s coming.

But we may forgive Goolrick his clichéd symbolism and his overstated themes (his readers, I like to think, do not need to be knocked over the head to get it) because he tells a good story. Certainly he carries on – about the garden, the poison, the loneliness, the lust, etc. – and the religious overtones do get a bit melodramatic, but this is Goolrick’s first novel and, overall, it is not a bad one.

Though the idea of using a season to highlight the inner lives of his characters is by no means a new one, Goolrick’s winter is perhaps his most skillful creation. I have known that kind of cold, and I knew it again in these pages. Even now, a century later, a prairie winter can murder spirits and undo sanity with its omnipotence. The entrapping whiteness of the horizon, the blinding light of the snow, the malevolence of a sky far more powerful than humanity – these, and the sensation of fear and helplessness they produce, were brought into vivid relief in the novel and I appreciated Goolrick’s true-to-life portrayal.

I am curious to see what our author does next. One can hardly imagine a tale of sunshine and rainbows, but perhaps he will achieve a finer balance. His readers, I hope, will this time not be pushed into the dark world of his creation but rather invited, slyly. For Goolrick knows the art of seduction – at least his sensual scenes would testify as much – and his prose, as well as his ideas, holds the power to entice, even enrapture. I look forward to more of Goolrick’s chilling tales and expect that he is only warming up.

 

Buy one, get one half price!

Just before I left London for a week on the Cornish seaside, I made an important detour to the King’s Cross WHSmith. It’s not the ideal place to shop for good literature but, in a pinch, it’ll do.

I walked out (after paying, mind you) with Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, and The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Both would prove to be worth every penny, though I didn’t get halfway through the former before I found myself back in Cambridge with a lot less free time to dawdle over every awkward word.

“Awkward” – because Alone in Berlin reads like a translation. The written tense fluctuates – carelessly, it seems – between past and present. “He goes” in one paragraph, and “he went” in the next. As the reader I was frustrated at first, until I adjusted to the rhythm. For the translator has done something remarkable in capturing a very specific, very sincere tone of voice. Hans Fallada, or Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, lived through the era depicted and transports us brusquely, jarringly, there – like a train heading for the concentration camp.

There is something eerie in the harsh, jerking prose. Something unsettling – like far-off gunshots. But the story is as seamless as the atmosphere is jagged: in 1940, one angry man decides to quietly defy the Nazis and the cat-and-mouse chase that ensues is gripping. Otto Quangel refuses to be scared into silence, like the rest of Berlin. So he begins writing postcards, and dropping them discreetly in heavily trafficked office buildings. His cards, crudely pencilled in an uneducated hand, have messages decrying Hitler, the war, the Winter Relief Fund, and his aim is  to encourage those Germans who still think like him, who still courageously refuse to accede –  for surely not everyone has become a tattler, a hermit, a wimp?

But Otto is wrong. Everybody is scared. Quangel’s only true convert shoots himself, rather than risk defiance. And in the end, it appears Hitler has truly won. But we, the readers, know the rest of the story. And Fallada did too; which is why his tragic tale ends the way it does: “But we don’t want to end this book with death, dedicated as it is to life invincible life, life always triumphing over humiliation and tears, over misery and death.” Apparently, there is room for redemption, even in Hitler’s Germany. Sadly, Fallada/Ditzen himself did not get time to experience much of it for he died, alone in Berlin,in 1947 – just after finishing a novel based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel who wrote anti-government postcards to no discernible effect and were executed for their actions.

After this heavy, sobering read (which haunts me still, as all good books should), it was a relief to open The Help – like flicking the channel from Schindler’s List to Steel Magnolias. I couldn’t put The Help down; I was having too much fun.

Still, this isn’t a light-hearted read. The issues – and there are plenty in Jackson, Mississippi in the 60s – are dead serious. But the voices that tell the story – Aibileen’s, Minnie’s, and Miss Skeeter’s – are so engaging that you can’t help feeling like you’re one of the girls.

Of course, therein lies the problem: Skeeter, who wants to tell the stories of black maids in Jackson, can’t be one of the girls. She’s white – and that’s that. But finally, the women on the other side of the “line” – the ones who live in the kitchens not the dining rooms, who wash the toilets but ain’t allowed to piss in ’em – are desperate enough to talk and Miss Skeeter, aching to be a real writer, is there to catch their stories. But what begins as an agreement becomes an all-encompassing project that will, inevitably, change the lives of everyone involved. Yes, everyone. Because even though no one’s naming names, “the help” know their “white women” will recognize themselves, sho nuff, and then there’s gonna be hell to pay.

The Help is not a perfect novel, but it is a perfectly delectable one. Sweet but not too sweet, rich but not sickly. It lingers but it doesn’t turn bitter in the mouth. Or the heart. In fact, perhaps Stockett’s greatest achievement is in avoiding oversimplification and thus detracting from the substantial heft of her theme. For one thing, the girl doesn’t get the boy in the end – and that is just so refreshing. After all, there are bigger things to worry about

So a quick, desperate shopping trip earned me two great books well-worth their shelf space. But sometimes good things happen in unexpected places; just the other day I found Brighton Rock in Asda next to the testimonies of pets who hear angels – but I think we have the film industry to thank for that one.

The landscape of a bar

is rocky, is steep. Step carefully, step inside – a condensed and continental sabbatical. In a seaside town gone charmless, is the watery-eyed, foregone or forgotten mistress nursing her third glass of prosecco, and the unlikely nurse – a cliff, a wall with edges – softening as it meets the drunkard friend laid flat, slopping against its edges. He calls for more beer. Barmaids reign with henchmen nearby, Hoegaardens at the ready, holding court in chaos, ruling with a bell, a wine-bottle fence – no trespassing. No picking the flowers, no flash photography, respect the environment, look but don’t touch, and for fuck’s sake – well, you never know – throw a pound in the tip jar if you’re gonna be long. Meander into corners, see the tourism industry suffer. Living on halves and broken teeth. But front and centre, a J20 culture, bright, fruity, the next Hawaii, volcanoes and all, lucky for them, bordering the land of dreams. The America of intellectuals on the next table, marryable young bachelor virgins, convinced not of sex but of status. PHD, the only letters they know – and IPA, since Cambridge blue comes in brown. Now and then, a European interruption, skirts up past the thighs, heels higher than the raised eyebrows they meet. The Rocky Mountains, the Alps, the Himalayas – breathtaking. Our Queens sneer collectively; give us our prairies, our moors, the pastoral images of Mother England, mother to none of us – we ponytailed ones pouring pints in seventeen languages. And who will get continental tonight? Not the boss, with his flock of shepherdesses, not the transvestite, lipsticked mouth kissed by Guinness, not the regulars falling off stools – a snogging, shagging culture, reserved for the cultured, tasting of fries and garlic mayo. Head out, away, in somewhere else, our young friend with the old heart, the bell has rung, and ask not for whom it tolls, your time is up, every empire will fall. Stay upright on the way home; alcohol and its blessed effects lives everywhere.

 

home is here.

“Vacation.” Vacate: 1 leave. 2 give up. The American version of a “holiday.” As a Canadian living in England on a work permit, what should I call it when I go to Cornwall for a week with my parents – who inadvertently bring so many Canada-isms with them they almost smell of maple?

Surely proper Europeans wouldn’t qualify that as a “holiday” (no nude beaches?!) But no one can argue I vacated. Took time off work, packed a far-too-large suitcase, emptied my wardrobe, my schedule, my flat. And yet, in a way, I went home…

Generally we take for granted that time moves forward, but it seems to me that when your past catches up with you – for instance, when you spend seven days in a confined space with the people whose genes tangoed to make yours some twenty-odd years ago – time seems to trip up, stumble over itself, land on its ass, so to speak.

I vacated one life, only to land smack-dab in another – one that I recognize too well. All it takes is a single dinner conversation and, voila, there I am at 5 years old, in pigtails, practicing piano, and there I am at 7, dutifully saying my bedtime prayers, and at 12, hiding in my room while my brother rages at my parents, and at 16 making out in the backseat of my dad’s car, and at 17, confessing to my mom…

Well, we needn’t go into all the sordid details. But am I the only the one who finds it difficult to be my self – as I am now, as I hope to be – around my parents? I’m not talking about teenage angst, I’m talking about the illogical, Freudian, easily diagnosable form of grown-up tension – a kind of anxiety that seems to grow with you. No matter that I have been an “adult” for years; I still unthinkingly, automatically, gage their reactions to my words, my actions… and then quickly, accordingly, i shuffle my cards in this ongoing game of power-seeking.

What will I play next – the blame card, my trump? “I’ll never be good enough for you!” Or the humility card? “I know I’m not perfect but I’m trying…” Or maybe I’ll throw down my hand – “Do you want me for me, or not? ‘Cause I’ll happily give you the censored version…” – while I slide the ace of spades up my sleeve. There is no such thing as folding; they’re my family. But there’s also no such thing as a tell-all; because unlike my father, and all fundamental Christians for that matter, I don’t think “truth” is a single word.

And there we have the central issue, the thing we’re playing for: religion. Or theology if you will. Even faith, if you want to go that far – Scripture verses are our chips, the “church” the deck we’re dealing. But I don’t like straight edges, and I don’t see simply black shapes on white. I live in shades of grey, the borderlands – and I don’t necessarily mind.

But am I developing a superiority complex (“Look at the clever little intellectual, asking questions without answers!”)? Have I become unforgiving, ungraceful? Heaven forbid it should be so; I’m only trying to find words for the battle that happens within – my soul, my heart, my mind, whatever – the struggle to please and yet to liberate myself from the pressure of having to please.

But it is not them who implicate me, it is me. Because I cannot stand to disappoint. I take my measure from those around me, from those who profess to love (or admire, or believe in) me most. I have not found my own ground. I have not solidified into an identifiable human. Or rather, a soul. My body is as traceable as anyone’s. And perhaps, for that reason, I am no more than that.

My holiday was, all in all, a good one. Only one emotional breakdown, one tear-stained evening. A pint snuck in, now and again, to take the edge off. Maybe I shouldn’t expect at 26 to know myself. Maybe I should stop focusing so much on myself. Maybe I should just shut up.

I love you, Mom and Dad. And, as with everyone who is unfortunate enough to be at the receiving end of my particular nebulous form of affection, I attach the requisite disclaimer: I am sorry.

Recent meals: a word, if I may

D’arry’s, Cambridge: An unfortunate meal. My scallops were ruined by lashings of wasabi, and the antipasti plate included not artichokes, like the menu stated, but olives. When I complained that I hadn’t been served what I ordered, they made excuses for the server – who was inattentive to begin with – and didn’t take the charge off the bill. Robbie’s pork belly was mediocre and  came with a massive inedible slab of crackling – which didn’t crack, or bend, and certainly wouldn’t have digested well. This dinner would have been a complete fail had it not been for a satisfactory bottle of wine and good company. Plus, we were in high spirits; Robbie was taking me out and I had a new dress for the occasion. So all in all, the evening was just fine, but the dinner left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Literally.

Backstreet Bistro, Cambridge: Can’t go wrong with melted cheese; our camembert fondue was delectable, but perhaps a bit too filling. I couldn’t finish my chicken schnitzel which was a real shame because it was gorgeous. Robbie had pork which he said was okay; the real winner in his dish was the sauce. A bit of pork, a sliver of apple dumpling, dipped in that cream sauce – the perfect bite. A bottle of the house champagne polished off the meal with sparkle. (In fact, we had decided to try Backstreet because I was recently offered a job there. Now, having worked a few shifts, I like it more than ever. Seriously. I’m not getting paid to say that.)

Byford’s Cafe, Holt: The best part of this meal was our bedroom upstairs; truly, if you are visiting Norfolk, you must stay at Byford’s. We were positively spoiled, the room was stunning, the service was spectacular. What could be better than homemade Norfolk shortcake on arrival? Our evening meal was lovely as well, though very cafe-ish. Chicken wings, hunks of fresh bread, a blue cheese salad (Robbie had steak). I loved the fact that they offered a mini-buffet of olives, peanuts, etc. which we could help ourselves to whenever we liked. Our waiter had probably never heard of “silver service” – and thank God for that. He was so down to earth we had a pint with him in the pub after. Then “home” to bed… my God, that bed… (Our one-night getaway was Robbie’s Christmas present from me. It went over well; I think Robbie actually squealed when he saw the room. Honestly, who can complain when they’re staying above an artisan cheese shop?)

15 Devonshire Road, Cambridge: I hadn’t cooked for a while – working in two restaurants, I tend to either eat on the job or live on Ryvita and peanut butter – so I decided it was time to get back in the kitchen. But whenever I promise to make Robbie something special, it generally involves chicken; it was time to branch out. So I made came up with crab and sweetcorn fritters with a lime/chilli sauce, and lemon cod atop a butter bean and basil puree served with roasted tomatoes and an avocado salad. Everything was delicious (if I may say so myself) but the cod wasn’t great, probably because I couldn’t find any fresh stuff… it certainly wasn’t the star of the meal. The fritters were fabulous – fun, deep-fried finger food – and the “mash” I will certainly be making again; it was positively packed with flavor. The recipe called for soya beans but the shop didn’t have those either. My tiny local Co-op frustrates me to no end, but it does force me to be inventive. The other day I made raspberry muffins without raspberries – I used a tin of mandarin oranges instead – and the result was better than I could have hoped: they were possibly the best muffins I’ve ever made. I gave some to the regulars at the pub where I work and got a very enthusiastic response.

Enough food news. I have to get ready for work… where I’ll be serving food all night. Please remember: life is too short to eat badly. May you consume in joy, my friends.