I Laugh Out Loud

On our way to badminton this evening, my son and I were catching up.  Whilst we were discussing school, Aled Jones told us that the flute concerto we had been listening to was by CPE Bach.  Carl Philipp Emanuel was the fifth child of JS Bach.

“It must have been hard for him,” I said, “following in his parent’s footsteps.”

“Yes.  Big shoes to fill.”

“Is that how you feel?”  I asked, with a wink in my voice.

He looked puzzled.   Blank even.

“Oh … you mean you!”

“I got a good review of my poetry last week in a magazine.  The reviewer called my language ‘Larkinesque’.   Do you know who Larkin was?”

Pause.

“D'you mean Shane Larkin of the New York Knicks?”

Still laughing!

I Launch A Website

There are quite a few things which I have intended to do for a while.  It's been 5 years since I updated the photo albums, for example, and I still haven't learnt how to tango.  Learning to tango was my new year's resolution for 2013.  I did 'phone the Shrewsbury tango club in May 2013, but they said I had to come with a partner, and I haven't got round to that bit yet.

I've been meaning to create a website ever since I heard that it was essential for any writer wishing to be published to do so.  It's about profile and presence, apparently.  It makes perfect sense.

The problem is, I've always been good at being distracted.  At primary school, I spent a lot of time staring out of the window watching the London planes grow their leaves.  As a teenager, I lay around in the chaos of my teenage bedroom on Saturday mornings reading just one more chapter of whatever novel I was into.  Once, at the height of my first Thomas Hardy phase, my mother came in and commented that my room looked like a jumble sale.  I told her I'd intended to tidy up but that Bathsheba had just met Sergeant Troy.  I can still hear her next words: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".  

Sources suggest that it was Virgil who got the ball rolling with this particular source of guilt when he wrote in the Aeneid that "the descent to hell is easy".  Bernard of Clairvaux wrote that "hell is full of good wishes and desires", and John Milton, in Paradise Lost, fanned the flames of fear by commenting: "Easy is the descent into Hell, for it is paved with good intentions."

There are different ways of interpreting this proverb, but none of them are comforting.  The implication is that getting into hell is as straightforward as leaving your clothes lying around on the floor. Hell was a serious business in our house, and I felt my mother's words as a sentence, instead of an expression of simple frustration.  And we know what happened to Sergeant Troy.

Even now, whenever I put something off, even goals I've set for myself, I feel my feet slipping a little.  So, when I launched my website at 11pm yesterday evening, it felt as if I was, at long last, getting more of a grip.  

http://lizlefroy.wix.com/liz-lefroy

I Bend The Rules

As part of our ongoing fiftieth birthday celebrations, my longest-serving friend Helen and I decided that we would take a photograph each day of February.  Here are my 28.

I Study A Photograph

I started at South Hampstead High School in 1975 and left in 1982.  This is a photograph of my form in our first year.  We were called Upper III 13.  Our form teacher was Mrs Audigier.  On our first day, she taught us to pronounce her name by writing 'Mrs ODJ' in white chalk on the board.

We had to sit alphabetically and I can still remember the names of every girl in the class, from Jacqueline and Rebecca to Suzanne and Victoria: we were together, more or less, for five years, until we were reorganised in the sixth form.

The year after this photograph was taken, Gina became seriously ill.  I remember our headmistress, Mrs Burgess, coming to tell us that she had died.  We were in the middle of a Geography lesson.  None of us learnt a single thing from Miss Smith during the rest of that lesson.   Lucy died the year after we left school.  These losses are some of the hardest I've had to try to understand.  They colour my feelings about my school years with sadness.

I hadn't seen this photograph for forty years until earlier this week.  What I had remembered about it is that I was sitting slightly apart from the rest of the class and I looked grumpy.  I remember my feelings of shame when the proof came back from the photographers and my parents didn't want to buy it.

When I look at this photograph now, I see beautiful girls with eccentric potential.  We aren't lined up neatly, and we don't care.  I see myself as fierce and resentful.  Instead of feeling shame, I feel proud of my young self's containment and her survival instincts. I remember the warmth I felt towards Emma.  I see Noele in the back row, who I hardly knew then but with whom I was to develop a long-lasting friendship.  And I see Madeleine: the beautiful, wild American girl who friended me out of the blue on Facebook this week and reconnected me to this part of my life - Madeleine, from whom I first learnt about Sigmund Freud, about star signs, about trick or treating, about glamour, about other ways of framing the world.

I Pop Some Corn

The usual score in my weekly badminton games with my son has shifted from 2 games all to 3 games to 1.  This week, after the game, he gave me a hug and said I shouldn't worry because everything has a tendency towards decay.

When we got home I claimed the sofa space and did one of my favourite things - watched a film in the late afternoon.  I paused it after five minutes having decided to go the whole hedonistic way and make some pop corn.

For me, the two main pleasures of popping corn are hearing the mini phut phut phuts of kernels hitting the pan lid as they turn themselves inside out, and then trying to guess, from a period of silence, when it's all over.  There's a tendency for a few kernels to wait until they see the light of day, then to make a bid for freedom, bursting into hot, fluffy missles which arc softly up, out, then down onto the kitchen floor.

The transformation of a layer of hard seeds on the bottom of a pan into a fluffy mound of polystyrene-textured explosions via the addition of heat and a well-fitting pan lid is always an expected surprise.   This time I used toasted sesame oil to heat the popcorn and it turned out to be a good variation.  

Apparently it's a drop of moisture inside each kernel that makes it pop.  It goes something like this: as the kernels heat up, the water expands, turns into steam and mixes with the soft starchy layer in the middle of the kernel to form a sort of boiling gloop which then breaks through the tough shell when it's heated still further.

After the corn had popped itself, I sprinkled it with caster sugar and ate the lot whilst watching Bill Murray's top class performance in 'Broken Flowers'. The film beautifully resists the tendency to round off a story neatly.

I Iron My Blouse

I have given up on some aspects of ironing.  Some of my best friends iron their socks, and others iron nothing at all.  Whilst I can't subscribe to either of these extreme positions, these days I can justify an unironed pillow case as easily as I can drink a glass of red wine, but a crumpled blouse is still beyond the pale.

As a history student in the 80s, I took a module in 14th century Irish history and I was delighted when I found out that The Pale is not just a metaphor for a boundary but was an actual boundary delineating the area around Dublin identified as the true extent of English rule in the Middle Ages. Whilst the whole of Ireland was supposedly under English rule as a consequence of the 12th century Norman invasion, The Pale was (in places) physically marked out by fences and ditches as the area in which this rule was influential, an area which diminished over time.

The amount of ironing I do has shrunk over the years.  It has taken me a while to retreat from the ideal standard my mother set.  She had a particular day for washing (Monday), and a day for ironing (Wednesday).  When Granny came to stay she helped out by doing the ironing.  But she did it sitting down, which always looked too casual, almost enjoyable.  It probably was, as she also smoked Woodbines and never put more than two pence in the church collection.

Now, the thought of having a whole day delineated as a washing day or an ironing day has a certain appeal.  I would like to be in control of my clothes to that extent, instead of hurriedly ironing a blouse before going to work as I did today.

Granny used to say that heaven for her would be days spent weeding and nights spent in a bed with freshly washed and ironed sheets.  I know what she  meant.  There is something exquisite about the feel of pressed cotton against my skin.

I Conduct An Experiment

In the interests of science, and of my son's soon to be birthday, I want to find out whether cookies baked from frozen dough taste as good as those baked from fresh dough.  In order to know this, I am conducting a controlled experiment.

According to Wikipedia (a source I use when my students aren't looking): "a controlled experiment often compares the results obtained from experimental samples against control samples, which are practically identical to the experimental sample except for the one aspect whose effect is being tested (the independent variable)".

This evening, I have made a batch of cookie dough - chocolate chip - and so far I have baked 12 and I am waiting for a further 6 to be ready. That makes 18 cookies which I hope is enough for a few to make it through to tomorrow evening.  I have frozen the remaining dough - enough for six cookies - which I will unfreeze tomorrow, roll into balls, press with a fork and bake.  The independent variable in my experiment will be the frozen nature of the dough.  Or rather, the unfrozen nature of the dough. Or rather the once frozen nature of the dough.

On my return from work tomorrow, and before badminton, I'll make a pot of tea, sit down and compare the cookies baked from freshly baked dough with the cookies baked from once frozen dough.  I will do this by eating one, then another, being careful not to muddle them up.

The problem is, because the cookies baked from fresh dough will be a day old by tomorrow, another independent variable (one-day-oldness) will have been introduced.   The other problem is, I have to eat one first, and then the other, introducing another variable (order-in-which-cookies-are-eaten).  It will also be a Tuesday.  And I might fancy Earl Grey.  And we will be a couple of minutes of light nearer the equinox.

I seem to have backed myself into an uncontrolled cookie-filled corner of multiple independent variables.  Ah well.