Lusts of the Flesh #6

After my intemperate book-buying spree(s) in the Borders Closing Down Sale, I not only had to assemble six new bookcases, but also had to sort through all my books and cull them. I'd rather club a baby seal over the head than cull my books.

After four hours, I had one book in the charity shop pile: The National Trust Handbook 2002. After five hours, I'd added another book: a very worthy vegetarian cookbook, all brown rice, beans and carminative qualities. Eventually I added a book about The Chinese Art of Conning Money Out of Gullible Westerners (The Joy of Feng Shui) and one on aromatherapy. Look, it was the '90s: everyone went through a hippy-dippy phase.

And then I had to lie down and mainline ginger and Sal Volatile.

I suppose I ought to make my point. Books are a Lust of the Flesh. The solid weight in the hand, the texture of paper (soft and loved as a worn leather glove or smooth, crisp and new), the font, the cover, the familiar publishing logos. The makers of Kindle and other e-readers would have us believe that books are obsolete, outdated, so very yesterday. Phooey! I bet the Kindle will go the way of the Beta Max video tape - anyone remember Beta Max? Anyone remember video tapes?

We buy pulp fiction along with our Utterly Butterly and Fray Bentos pies, and forget that books were once so very precious they were chained to the shelves of the Bodleian Library and no-one, not even the king, was permitted to borrow one.

King Charles I: I'd like to borrow a copy of La Chanson de Roland, please.
Librarian: Sorry, your Highness, but that will not be possible.
King Charles I: But I am the King!
Librarian: Yes, Sir, but that is a book.

I was taught to love books but also to treat them with respect; not to crack their spines, make dog ears and certainly not to write or draw in them. I remember the horror of being given my mother's original copy of When We Were Very Young and discovering that she'd coloured in the pen and ink illustrations. Wicked, wicked child.

Still, a colleague has written a book about Robert Louis Stevenson's reading habits - having tracked down his original library and studied the comments he'd scrawled in the margins of his books. And the Bodleian librarians not only know that Romeo and Juliet was the most popular of Shakespeare's plays, but that the divinity scholars read and re-read the balcony scene more than any other. The evidence is on the Quartos: all grubby finger marks, worn page corners and even an elbow print where one reader rested on the book and swooned.

I cannot bring myself to write in the margins of my books (the memories of beatings and coal cellars linger) and so any future reviewer of the Moptop Archive will think I had a mind as empty as a drunkard's purse.

I shall go to my maker (a small factory in Taiwan) with a head full of characters, plots, poems, plays, obscure literary conceits and the odd drug deal in Baltimore. Take my jewels! Take my furs! Take the Limoges porcelain! But leave me my books.

Lusts of the Flesh #5

Today's Lust of the Flesh was experienced yesterday. Yesterday afternoon to be exact.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors. ~Alice Walker

Take two bad friends, two teapots, tea-cups and saucers, loose leaf tea (Earl Grey & Scouse Breakfast), a three-tiered glass stand, finger-sandwiches (no crusts), homemade shortbread, coffee cake, orange cake, buttered fruit loaf, scones, clotted cream, strawberry jam (no honey), and little pink cubes of quivering, sugar-dusted Turkish Delight. Mix in a view over the Albert Dock, some scurrilous conversation, a waiter with a propensity to dampen trousers and there you have it - Afternoon Tea.

A Proper Tea is much nicer than a Very Nearly Tea, which is one you forget about afterwards. ~A.A. Milne

In 1944, Great Grandma Nicolson took afternoon tea in a tearoom in the Kyle of Lochalsh. Upset at having been 'overcharged' for the mean slice of Dundee cake she had consumed, she is alleged to have swept the remaining contents of the cakestand into her capacious handbag. This charge has made it into print - Memories of Raasay (Berlinn) - but, of course, every Moptop family member denies the allegation conceding only that Great Grandma Nicholson did go a bit strange and did, in her latter years, do the gardening in her nightdress.

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea ~ Henry James.

Coffee shops are all very well, but they don't encourage lingering. Noisy, clattering places, with metal machines that hiss and spurt like geysers. No towering cake stands - plain baking at the bottom, tiny fancy cakes at the top - but engorged muffins (as painful as they sound) and rocky biscotti (ill-designed for frail British teeth).

How much more civilised the world if we stopped each afternoon for tea? Sipped and spoke? Politely shared the last meringue?

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. ~Thich Nat Hahn

Then let us meet in the Maritime Museum! The top floor dining room, riverside. I’ll be there at three, just in time for afternoon tea.

Find yourself a cup of tea; the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things. ~Saki

Lust of the Flesh #4

Each morning, on Skye, my great-great Grandfather (and probably several Greats before him) ate half a teacup of coarse oatmeal for his breakfast. Boiling water was poured over the oats and the saucer laid on top of the cup for a few minutes to let the oatmeal steep. Then, whilst the oatmeal was still far from cooked, it would be eaten with a pinch of salt. My Demon Aunt (she of the famous Malteser Biscuits: Take seventeen family bags of Maltesers, crush them, add ten bars of melted chocolate, 2lbs of melted butter and a few biscuit crumbs, press into a tin, cover in more melted chocolate and decorate with Maltesers) said that the uncooked oatmeal would continue to swell in the stomach and kept Grandfather full all day.

So, there is a genetic connection for porridge being a Lust of the Flesh, but it is more than that. Other more fashionable breakfasts might have their moment in the morning sun - sliced banana and Greek yoghurt, Bircher Muesli, smoked salmon bagels - but nothing beats the silkiness of porridge, the almost jelly-like quality as it forms an island in a sea of milk or cream. Demerara sugar melts across its surface in golden puddles. It slips from the spoon, slides down my throat ... a hard-to-beat combination of a saintly good-start-to-the-day and sinful sensuality.

N.B. Never cover a lover in porridge - it's a bugger when it sets.

Lusts of the Flesh #3

You'd be forgiven for assuming this post is about crumpets. It's not. Instead, I present: The Cheese Sandwich.

A simple snack. Sourdough bread jetted in from San Francisco's famous Boudin Bakery. Pale Normandy butter, glittering with crystals of sea salt. Farmhouse Cheddar Cheese from Somerset, smooth and firm, with long, rich nutty flavours and a sharp almost sour tang at the end.

Slice bread, spread with butter, add slices of cheese - pickle optional - eat, enjoy.

No, no, no, no, NO!

My dream sandwich is made of the cheapest white bread - spongy, almost flaccid but curling slightly at the edges - spread with bright yellow value margarine (Stork in massive catering tubs is perfect), with a pile of grated orange cheese (of no identifiable provenance but definitely not a Kraft Single) and a thick ring of raw onion.

The sandwich must be wrapped in clingfilm and left unrefrigerated for several hours on a shelf just below a display of dry roasted peanuts, next to a jar of pickled eggs which would defy carbon-dating. The cheese will sweat, the margarine gain a subtle rancid quality and the onion will become ever more acrid in flavour. The bread will somehow manage to become both dry and soggy. Ohhh...

I have attempted to psychoanalyse this particular Lust of the Flesh. Hangover food? Afternoons spent in smoky boozers after long and tiring mornings in bed? A giddy stumble to the pub? It wasn't the food, mate, it was the company...

But if this were so, I'd eat burned crumpets dripping in (again) cheap margarine, whilst The Archers Omnibus burbles in the background, and I reminisce happily about feeling utterly, utterly spent.

My perfect cheese sandwich is simply a slutty snack; a true lust of the flesh.

Lust of the Flesh #2

Knickers - high cut, bikini, full, side-tied, French, briefs, not-so-briefs, boyshorts, hipster, tanga - the list is almost bottomless. Beautiful or practical confections of silk, satin, lace or cotton jersey. Knickers that make one smile enigmatically - M. Lisa was clearly wearing pants by Spank (who display their logo prominently) - or smile joyfully as one plucks a pair from the drawer. Monsoon design fabulously inventive knickers, printed with birds of paradise, cherries, Babushkas, cupcakes and more; good for grey days and dull clothes. (Though I'm not sure that Monsoon is the best name for a designer of knickers). Damaris and Agent Provocateur make one drip with lust - figuratively speaking, of course - and the bank statement tremble with exhaustion.

However, the thong or G-string (cheese string in some quarters) is a vile and uncomfortable invention that has neither the fabric content to mysteriously beguile, nor - well - anything much to recommend it at all. Pure nakedness would be more honest. Where is the silk to caress? The lace to finger? The satin side ribbons to drift gently against a plump, pale thigh? The cheeky burlesque-style ruffles rowed across a rear?

My illustration proves that even my perfect peach of a bottom looks lardy in a thong. Most women, not blessed with a bottom like mine, resemble trussed up joints of meat. I suggest going cold turkey, abandoning the thong and embracing the Directoire Knicker known in some circles - crudely and unfairly - as the Granny Pant. After a week, the standard bikini brief will feel like the flimsiest scrap of fabric. Thongs are wrong - and remember there are few sensations more thrilling than having your ruffles ruffled...

Lusts of the Flesh #1

Man cannot live by cake alone, but can have jolly good fun trying.

Coffee cake, lemon drizzle, chocolate & banana cake, date & walnut tea bread, Bara Brith, chocolate fudge cake (served warm or cold), sticky gingerbread, parkin, Dutch apple cake, orange & almond polenta cake, Victoria sponge, Battenburg, French Fancies - O, sorry, drifting off the subject there. Back to cake. Raspberry and white chocolate cake, cupcakes, fairy cakes, butterfly cakes, blueberry muffins, Angel Food, Madeira, fruit cake, cherry cake, carrot cake...

I've only met one cake I didn't get on with. And why would anyone think it a good idea to put beetroot in a cake?