dom.blog

A whole chocolate cake

A couple of weeks ago I made a cool discovery: an audio cassette tape onto which I’d recorded my parents telling me stories as a child. (You can hear a baby crying in the background, so it was obviously at the expense of their other children, but never mind.) Listening back, one of the things I love most is their deadpan grimness. My mum didn’t just invent a hungry fox, she invented a hungry fox monologuing rather manner of factly that “if I don’t catch anything, I’ll probably die”.

This probably owed more than a little to Roald Dahl, whose dark humour and grotesque violence continues to save generations of children from too much happy-clappy chirpiness. So it was a delight to go and see Matilda the Musical with mum and no-longer-crying-baby Katie on Wednesday night – with the added bonus of music and lyrics by the wonderful Tim Minchin. And it reminded me that the scene of the Trunchball forcing Bruce Bogtrotter to eat a whole chocolate cake is one of the best moments of children’s literature ever.

A small tax refund

Since my educated guess is that drink at Parliament is still generously subsided, does drinking a bottle of House of Commons claret on Caroline’s terrace count as a partial refund of income tax? Either way, it was another nice evening with Matt and Caroline, who are slowly getting over the fact that I still turn up from work in jeans and t-shirts. My defence is always that I’m in the entirely unambiguously profit-hungry private sector. So take that!

A pot of tea and some cake

Grace was down from Warwick last weekend to see relatives from Norway, and by Sunday we had ended up in Richmond: strolling by the river, having tea in a National Trust café – it’s always been all about the cafés – and perhaps having second thoughts about the wonders of Scandinavian life. Yes yes, they might all be happy, long-lived egalitarians with money, snow and good schools, but is that really worth a lack of pubs? Or having to stay outside as a nursery child until it hits minus ten degrees? Let’s not kid ourselves: we are children of cheap alcohol and wet play. (And perhaps unsurprisingly, apparently also rickets.)

An inauguration for the wedding plates

Two weeks back, Sanna, Saoirse and I made our way to Abbi and Paul’s new abode with the usual quantities of wine, delicious vegetarian cooking and Saoirse’s many, many, many baked desserts. (So many, indeed, that we had to samples back home, though obviously in my case this proved a simple matter of leaving them in the kitchen to disappear.) We were all quite honoured to be the first to eat off their wedding plates, during a meal where at some point I must have confessed to never having seen The Fast Show because by the end we were definitely watching episodes of that. And ah, weren’t the 1990s such a long time ago? The hair! The clothes! The lack of smartphones!

Which reminds me, actually, of the scene in Matilda the musical where her dad threatens to have her banned from the library for the rest of her. “No more books! No more reading! No more stories!”. Naturally, it was at this point that Katie leaned over to me, shrugged and said “hey, she could just get a Kindle”.

When I was little my parents made repeated attempts to get me to learn French, play the piano and put clothes in a cupboard rather than stewing them across the floor. Naturally I now do none of these things, not because they would be intolerable cruelties, but just because even the yawningly unrebellious need to hold on to something. (I remember a discussion at uni when we all realised what boringly pliant children we’d been, and that this probably wasn’t a coincidence.) Anyway, the point is that while these attempts at indoctrination clearly failed – parlez-vous anglais? – when it came to going on long walks I think I got a bit of Stockholm syndrome instead. I’m quite sure I didn’t used to approve of being dragged across Hampstead Heath, but this long ago transformed into a middle aged urge to stroll, which explains Grace and I actually spent her last Saturday in London going on a ramble. An actual ramble. In the actual countryside.

Well, Surrey.

It was my idea, obviously, although at this point I must make a major shout out of gratitute to the legendary diamond geezer because when I got home at one in the morning on Friday night I still hadn’t the foggiest clue where we should go. Thankfully my slightly inebriated brain followed the sound logic that “bloggers know everything and are always prompt e-mailers”, so by the time I woke up in the morning I had an itemised list of six potential destinations complete with links to past blog posts and travel instructions. Utterly amazing, and even if one day I discover he’s actually an elaborate PR-front for London’s tourism industry and written by a team of creative writers, fact checkers, proofers and site editors I’d still be very grateful.

In the end I plumped for Box Hill, found an awesomely detailed walk (which fulfilled my main criterion of having a pub in the middle of it) and set off to get lost, get back on track again, say nervous hellos to people passing in the other direction, locate the approximate clearing for Hagrid’s hut, upload photos of maize because neither of us knew what it was and still get the train back in time for Doctor Who. Determinedly uncool fun with unnecessary technological flourishes… I think I’ve just written my life’s mission statement

Look at this – I’ve rambled on (aha) for so long that I’ve run out of time to mention the two book launches – “sorry, I know we’ve just had a nice conversation and everything but you’re Alastair bloody Campbell so I definitely need to be embarrassing and get a photo with you now” – or the myriad of fun drinks, dinners and Daily Mail bashings recently. I just thought I’d prove that I do occasionally leave the city.

(By the end of the week this had mutated again into a Rebecca Black-esque celebration of Friday. Made me smile.)

This definitely deserves a post: Abbi and Paul’s wedding on Saturday! I was looking through my photos to put this together and realised that my very first photo of Paul only dates from April last year – somehow it seems like a lot longer, but only because they’re such a great couple who are so definitely right for each other. So congrats guys And thanks for giving us all an excuse to get dressed up and dance embarrassingly for many hours! (Photos will find their way onto Facebook eventually – but if you want the whole lot now, just holla and I shall e-mail.)

One of the most memorable nuggets of British social history I ever gleaned from my degree was a discussion in some journal article or other (now that’s referencing!) of friendships, and specifically how the working class experience of friendship differed profoundly from its middle class equivalent. Note that this was social history and is almost certainly no longer applicable for a host of obvious reasons, but I still find it helpful when thinking about the modern evolution of ‘friendship’ into the twenty-first century Facebook ‘you’ve been tagged…’ version. It was this: the working classes were much more likely to have one main ‘set’ of lifelong friends who were each connected in a multitude of ways. This happens if you all grow up in the same area, go to the same school before progressing to work locally together and have low rates of migration in and out of the area. The middle classes, on the other hand, would accumulate lots of little ‘pots’ of friends over their lives from growing up, going to school, university and then working with all sorts of different people in different places. Your friends, on the whole, don’t know each other – from your perspective, the entirety of your social relationships orbits you.

Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, naturally. The middle class version is great for networking, variety and – depending on how you feel about this – living out different personas. It’s also less vulnerable to great social changes that affect a whole community: whole industries suddenly closing, for example. But it might also be more vulnerable on an individual level, prompting feelings of alienation (‘…do I have any real friends?’) and demanding quite a lot of time and energy to keep it all going. It’s not that it lacks ‘community’ as such, since it’s a hotchpotch network of bespoke communities, it’s just that no one community is geared to look out for those people who suddenly drop out of all friendships.

Anyway, none of this is particularly helpful for anyone interested in making a choice between the two since we’ve all surely moved inexorably towards the ‘middle class’ way of friendships. Don’t get me wrong – I like it this way – it’s just rather complex and intricate. And also, it makes it harder to blog. I’ve had many fun times over the past couple of weeks, and caught up with lots of good friends, so it’s hard to know where to start. Robert’s back from America. Saoirse hosted a really fun dinner party and made some delicious gnocchi too. Harriet and I seem to have settled into a twice-yearly routine of going for a drink in The Island. And… well, instead of just listing things, I’ll spam you with recent photos instead