The Spirits - Richard Godwin

A long time ago when I read the River Cottage Mushroom handbook it explained the importance of having at least 2 mushroom guide books to confirm what you were identifying. John Wright is a wonderful writer, I really enjoyed that book, but I'm not actually that wild about mushrooms so never got another one. I do think that anybody who is at all interested in cocktails needs at least a couple of recipe books though, and sort of for similar reasons. 

With a modicum of self-control cocktails are unlikely to poison you (please drink responsibly) but there's a lot to be said for being able to compare recipes for classics, and having something to cover all moods. I have a small handful of reprints of older books which have taught me a lot, and a couple of more contemporary volumes which are great too - though they mostly lean towards aperitifs, vermouth, and other things along those lines. 

I have strong opinions on what makes a good home cocktail and a good home cocktail making guide. The key principle is that they have to be relatively easy to make - so no overly specialised equipment, and not to many hard to source ingredients. If I want that kind of cocktail I'll go to a bar. Richard Godwin (you can subscribe to his The Spirits newsletter (he describes it as like a book club but for drinks which it is) to get an idea of his style is excellent at providing the perfect to make at home recipe. Having followed his weekly bulletins for most the summer I ordered the book fairly soon after seeing it was being reissued. 

A limited number of ingredients means you can invest in reasonably good quality spirits without spending an absolute fortune (you get out what you put in, spending an extra couple of pounds for a good mid range vodka, gin, rum, bourbon etc is worth it) which also matters. The great thing about Godwin, and this book, is that he takes what he's doing seriously, but not to seriously. There's a lot of history and information here and an excellent selection of classics - old and modern, and a whole lot of varietaions on them. Basically something for every mood or occasion.

This is another important thing about making really good cocktails at home - balance is important and so are proportions, but my idea of when a drink is sweet or sour enough might not be yours. The only way to get it right for you is to test. When you're stating out a book that actively encourages you to make adjustments as wanted is really helpful. Godwin also suggests substitutions which is possibly my favourite thing about his approach to drinks writing. This really is a book that will help you (me) make the most of what I have to hand.

It doesn't hurt that it's a genuinely enjoyable book to sit down and read too. My copy arrived looking like it had already seen some life, and in the 24 hours since it's seen some more. I've tried the Daquiri Mulata (dark rum and coffee liqueuer with lime juice and golden sugar syrup - an excellent twist on the classic) and am going to bed shortly to read up on punches - of which I'm promised plenty. 

(at time of writing the best price I've seen it for online is via Blackwell's)

Goshawk Summer - James Aldred

I started reading this book this morning, and have read it every moment I could since until I finished it. It was only about 50 pages from the end that it struck me that a book written by a photographer, which describes scene after scene, had no pictures in it.

'Goshawk Summer' is a sort of diary from James of his experience of 2020 - coming back from a work trip in East Africa filming cheetahs just before the first lockdown, he ends up on another assignment in the New Forest following Goshawks and other wildlife for the spring and early summer. It's an odd time to read about, not least because my lockdown was endlessly extended by being in Leicester where restrictions remained in place for almost all of last year.

When I did get out of the city and moved in with my mother to help her post-op (almost exactly a year ago) it was just before the second lockdown. We were in a quiet Leicestershire village which has its pretty bits, but also a lot of pig farms and mud - it's not any kind of tourist destination, very unlike the New Forest. For James, there's the sense of being an interloper first in the Goshawk's territory, and then as restrictions lifted, in the human territory of the forest where the residents got increasingly fed up with the hoards of visitors that descended as soon as they legally could. 

It's an excellent book about observing, changing baselines, and what the future might hold. Goshawk's in the UK are a success story of illicit reintroduction - it's likely that most of the growing wild population are escaped or deliberately released birts bought in by falconers. There are other species recolonising spaces in the same way - pine martens are another predator making their way back into the forest, and there's a steady stream of stories in the news about beavers successfully doing their win thing too. What we don't know is the effect they'll have on ecosystems, and how we might have to learn to live with some of these animals.

Most of us will remember the strangeness of Spring 2020 - the subduing of human noise and activity contrasted by a burst of noise and activity from, around here particularly, the birdlife which suddenly and wonderfully seemed to have the parks to themselves. How those first weeks had an otherworldly, out of time feeling, when everything was uncertain, but also we had no idea how many people would die or how long we would be living with covid for. Also how they were followed by people colonising previously quiet spaces with no thought for anything g or anybody who had been using it before. My park became unusable due to the number of drinkers and drug users who moved into it.

There's a lot to think about in all this about how we need green spaces, how we need to better distribute them, take some of the pressure off of the national parks and well known beauty spots and consider if the pattern of land use and ownership that we currently have is working for enough people. The indications are that it is not - selfish behaviour is both frustrating and understandable (to an extent). There are the younger people denied the festivals that would normally punctuate their summer treating the forest, in the same way, they would campsites, oblivious to the reality that there isn't an army of people to clean up after them. The dog owners who fail to keep their animals on a lead or under control around nesting sights and resent any commentary. The people who park in gateways and driveways, who block the roads and mow down an endless array of roadkill. The angry locals who are all out of empathy for people desperate to get out of their houses.

All of it needs to be part of a wider national conversation. Aldred makes no bones about how he feels about it all, but he doesn't overburden the reader with his commentary either - it's very much about what he observes. There's hope here as well as worries for the future, and specifically the future of the forest. Plenty that can be fixed with only a little thought and education, and just maybe a greater awareness would help us approach some of the bigger systemic issues for which there are no quick fixes. 

There's also an endearing insight into a life (wildlife photographer who travels the world) that might sound glamorous, but also involves a lot of time standing in a wet ditch being bitten by midges, and a deep appreciation for the things we still have, whilst we still have them. This would also be an excellent book to read with Stephen Rutt's 'The Eternal Season' and James Rebanks 'English Pastoral'. All three cover the particular moment we find ourselves in, in practical and accessible ways. Aldred and Rutt particularly encourage observation, and once you start to see what's happening, and begin to grasp the complexity of these natural systems, I for one find I desperately want to be part of the answer before it's entirely too late. 

The Crow Folk - Mark Stay

The cold I'm afflicted with is hanging on like a snotty limpet (I wish it would go, I'm thoroughly fed up of feeling constantly tired and bunged up - and it's only been just over a week, so how people are coping with long covid is beyond me). Never the less I've dealt with a bowl full of windfall quinces and have a satisfying 13 jars of jelly to find a home for now and haven't fallen entirely behind on my reading.

Work asked me to read something I wouldn't normally go for (contemporary) so I chose Mark Stay's 'The Crow Folk', which I also thought was young adult, although now it's on the shelf it's designated science fiction/fantasy rather than teen. Working out where things should be shelved is one of the hardest parts of working in a bookshop. There's a remarkable number of titles that defy easy categorisation and run the risk of becoming almost impossible to find again once they're buried on what might not be the right shelf.

With 'The Crow Folk' though I feel that the slight ambiguity of where it belongs is in line with the tone of the book which is somewhat uneven. The heroine is a 17 year old girl, Faye, who is just discovering that the mother who died when she was 4 might have been a witch and that she might have inherited her magical abilities.

The basic premise is good - somebody has opened a door, and something nasty has come through it - Pumpkinhead, a minor demon who is bringing the scarecrows to life and setting them on the villagers. Pumpkinhead desperately wants the book Faye's mother wrote for her (apparently something that was entirely forbidden). Meanwhile Faye is struggling to find answers about who and what she is, the war is rumbling on in the background, the other local witches are angry with each other, and there's never anytime to sit down and read. 

The problems begin early on with a silly mistake where elderflower heads for cordial turn into elderberries for a couple of pages - which is it? And what time of year does that make it? Faye reads as somewhat younger than 17, and I would think this was perfect for teens except that some of the jokes about sex landed badly for me - like a much older uncle trying to tell you mildly smutty jokes. I couldn't see the point of them or imagine who was meant to be amused. Her relationship with her father and the rest of the village doesn't really work either in my opinion.

The wartime setting doesn't feel particularly well researched either - I didn't check up on some of the details because by that point I didn't care enough, but it felt off. It's a shame - it's not a bad book, the blurb quote that describes it as a Doctor Who meets Worzel Gummidge is especially accurate. The scarecrows would make excellent Doctor Who monsters and provide some proper chills. I was never a fan of Worzel Gummidge, but if that combination sounds like a winner to you have a look at this. Otherwise probably don't. 

Fire and Ice - Emma Stibbon RA

Not even a head cold could spoil my absolute excitement over getting this book! I've admired Emma Stibbon's prints for a few years now, but even her prints are currently well out of my price range, and they're not quite D's thing so even if I could afford one there's the question of if we're going to live together how much I should be taking his taste into account? In fairness, it needs to be more than I've done in the past (not at all), or half my most treasured possessions will end up jostling for space with the half of his I don't much care for in whatever dark corners we can find to hide them in.  

Anyway, I can stop trying to save or convince when it comes to Emma Stibbons thanks to this Royal Academy produced facsimile sketchbook. It's even better than the Norman Ackroyd books I have from the same series (we both love Norman Ackroyd's work, there won't be any need to negotiate there).

Stibbons is fascinated by landscapes and environments in flux. These sketches cover volcanos and trips to the Arctic and Antarctic. Each sketch comes with a thumbnail and some notes at the back which give useful details about the media used, and the landscapes represented. It answered some of my questions about how she does what she does in her sketches (the answer was gouache along with watercolour) but mostly I'm still slack-jawed with awe (and because of the cold) by how she captures the moments and moods she does. In one sketch it's possible to see where ice crystals formed in the paint as the watercolours froze whilst she was working. 

These books are really worth looking out for and grabbing if they cover an artist you admire. It's not quite like owning an original, but it's a lot closer than I expected to get and does feel a lot like having my own private exhibition of sketches to enjoy. I'm also attracted to the old fashioned idea of having an album of sketches to flip through - in the same way, that one of Jane Austen's characters might have done, or Anthony Trollope's young people would have flirted over. On a night when Instagram is down the charm of a book of images cannot be overstated. 

The Monsters of Rookhaven - Pádraig Kenny

One of the bonuses of working in a bookshop is the range and quantity of books that come your way - there is a considerable expectation to read and for me, it's also an expectation to widen my reading into more stuff by contemporary writers. 'The Monsters of Rookhaven' is a children's book (9-12 year age range) and also one of our books of the month. I wouldn't normally have picked it up, but it was sitting in the staff room and once I started I really wanted to see it through.

As I'm still struck down by a hideous cold (my voice has almost completely gone today) the 9-12 years reading range was also just about right for the level of concentration I could muster. It's a testament to the quality of the book that I finished it in an evening. The range of children's books has come on in leaps and bounds since I was a child, and even since my much younger brother and sister were this age. There were great books around then, just nothing like the choice we have now.

The monsters of Rookhaven are a family who live on an estate hidden from the world by a magical glamour. The only people who know about them are the local villagers with whom they have a covenant - they'll stay inside their estate in return for food. It's an arrangement that's worked well for hundreds of years until the magic wears thin and a couple of desperate children find themselves on the wrong side of the glamour. After that things start to get complicated.

It's a smart and funny book about family, love, right, and wrong. The concept of who and what is monstrous keeps shifting, the tension ramps up nicely, the book is complete in itself, but there are plenty of things left to explore in further installments of the series. It's set just after the second world war which gives the perfect opportunity to explore how grief affects people, and families as a whole, in a way that feels natural. 

I really liked the main characters - Mirabelle who is subtly different to her family and doesn't understand why. Jem and Tom, the children who find themselves in this strange new world - especially Tom whose behaviour is so often morally compromised but who's doing the best he can for his sister. The friendship this trio forms feels natural too, they're all outcasts of one sort or another. 

The threat that comes for Mirabelle and her family is genuinely scary, the more so because it's evil at its most plausible and underneath its monstrous trapping all too easy to believe in. Uncle Enoch, the family patriarch is a satisfying character too. He has difficult decisions to make and maybe my favourite thing about the book is the way that Kenny breaks these down for us. Altogether recommended for the younger readers in your life and for anyone who feels really grotty and wants a slightly gothic distraction from their cold based woes. 

Poppy Cooks The Food You Need

There are things I miss about lockdown - mostly the being able to stay at home, or stay at mum's home and hang out with her dog part of it. I wasn't very sociable before Covid, and now I have my first head cold since sometime in 2019 I miss the solitude or the excellent company of the dog even more. Colds are such an utterly miserable experience (I'm confident this isn't covid - tests agree, and I've been vaccinated against flu and pneumonia this year - I still feel shit). 

It is not the mood to approach Poppy in, she looks incredibly glamorous on the cover of her book (although she probably gets colds too, and probably bundles herself up in an old dressing gown and oversized slippers when she does) and reminds me that I should probably try and get to grips with Tik Tok which is where she made her breakthrough. 

Poppy's lockdown story is one I genuinely find encouraging. She lost her sous chef job at an exclusive members club in March 2020 (if I'm reading the bio correctly) but started cooking on Tik Tok as a creative outlet. She was a hit, fast gathering over a million followers, and now there's a cookbook getting some really good notices as well. Poppy undoubtedly did the hard work to get to this point, over a decade working up from the bottom in kitchens is tough by any standard, so I love that she's now getting to do this (hopefully) on her own terms. 

I'll also happily admit she's a phenomenon that had mostly passed me by. I don't even look online for written recipes, I'm aware that all sorts of things are happening out there but I'm very much a book person, a habit I can't imagine breaking at this point, so I'm glad Poppy has broken through into mainstream publishing with her impressive love of potatoes to show me what I've been missing.

The answer really does seem to be potatoes, they even make their way into a donut recipe - a perfectly reasonable starch to use and one of the things I'd really love an excuse to make. The book is set up around 12 techniques or recipes, and then builds on them starting with core and staple options, moving into brunch, and potato, then finishing with fancy AF recipes. 

It's a really useful book for the first time away from home, or first time with a proper kitchen, cook. Full of things you want to eat and great for building a repertoire of skills. My generation had Delia Smith, and the doorstop which was the complete cookery course. This book is shorter, better illustrated, and easier to learn from. I'm not saying we were short-changed back in the day, but how we live and eat has changed in the last 30 years and I haven't seen any book which underlines that as clearly for me as this one. 

It's not the recipes that do this particularly - they're an enticing mix of fairly traditional, and contemporary that all sound delicious, and I could probably find in some version or another in the books I already have (a couple of surprising potato suggestions aside). It's some alchemy in the presentation and attitude that feels like a sea change. A different style that I can't quite put my finger on, but that I think we're going to see a lot more of - though probably online rather than in print. 

Buy this for the younger cooks in your life, the ones just leaving home, and get them to cook for you. 

These Names Make Clues - E.C.R. Lorac

If I thought the books were out of hand before now, working in a bookshop looks set to dial it up further - I have so many exciting review copies of things hanging around at the moment (mostly in piles on the floor as that's the easiest way to see them) and I've been buying with enthusiasm too. I'm even reading books too - which is seriously slowing down my knitting, but there are worse problems to have. 

These Names Make Clues is the latest title from the British Library Crime Classics series, it's a particularly intriguing addition to the canon. Lorac (the pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett) was elected into The Detection Club in 1937, the year this came out and the same year as she wrote Bats in the Belfry. Martin Edwards makes a convincing case for the influence the club might have had on this novel which adds to the fun of it. 

Chief Inspector Macdonald is invited along to a treasure hunt in the home of a publisher he has recently met (whilst unknowingly insulting one of the books he publishes). He'd rather stay at home with his book*, something I'm sure most of us can relate to but feels he'll look a fool if he doesn't go - and maybe be a fool if he does. Macdonald does the only thing he can - flips a coin, and finds himself committed to the party. At least it has the lure of a couple of people he'd very much like to meet, although they'll all be operating under literary pseudonyms, part of the game is to guess who each other might be, and to see if the detective fiction writers can solve the puzzles faster than academics or the Scotland Yard man.

It should surprise nobody, or be any kind of a spoiler, to learn that someone is killed during the treasure hunt. Macdonald, probably wishing more than ever that he'd stayed home, feels that something isn't quite right. It could have been a death due to natural causes, bet he, and we, are here for murder. 

What follows is enjoyable - the suspects are a smart lot operating under their own ideas of what constitutes right and wrong. There are any number of red herrings, the pseudonyms are their own form of clue, and there's plenty here that puts me in mind of Agatha Christie, which is a considerable compliment. 

Generally speaking, I think Lorac is an excellent author to turn to if you've run out of Christie's or want something similar but different, but in this book in particular they feel close. This is partly because of the nature of the mystery and its setting which both feel like they might be paying homage to Christie. Lorac's characters behave in their own way (although I suddenly realise however much Christie I've watched, it's a long time since I actually read her), but I'm confidant fans of one will love the other. An excellent mystery to dispel the misery of a cold, wet, autumn evening. 

*The book name-checked is by Peter Flemming, older brother of Ian who was as yet unknown as a writer, which is another pleasing detail I gleaned from the introduction. 

Wedding Planning

This isn't something I ever thought I'd be doing and there seem to be a lot of decisions to make about things I'd didn't know I'd need to know about - like orders of service and when to contact registrars. Nevertheless, it's happening. We've booked a church, set a date, worked out a time, talked to the minister (who is absolutely lovely, and that's another thing I'd never considered - what would you do if you found you really disliked the person who was going to marry you?) and started a job list. 

I've bought wine, because priorities, and also who knows what new inconvenience or expense Brexit has waiting for the unwary wine buyer in the coming year. Decent wine isn't cheap and my family can put it away so this feels like a significant commitment all by itself. 

The job list is mostly fairly tedious stuff that absolutely needs to be done, which has made this last weekend of going up to the Borders to meet Rachel the Minister even more of a delight. She effortlessly made everything exciting again whilst throwing in all sorts of extra questions about things we had no idea about but are now on the job list. She also showed us the inside of the church we'll be getting married in. We'd walked to it lots of times over the years, but had never been inside (assuming it was locked but pre covid it was kept open, which is very much of a piece with why we like this places much).

The Borders were also blessedly free of panic or fuel shortages - no queues, no closed petrol stations around us, and we found a couple of excellent restaurants in Melrose; Burt's and Provender. It's a beautiful area with a lot to recommend it for anybody who likes walking, good food, peace and quiet, small towns, and dark skies full of stars. 

The Hawks of Delamare - Edward Marston

I'm kind of fascinated by how much I like this series of books and why their particular formula works so well for me. In theory, I wouldn't have it down as something I'd enjoy so thoroughly - there's not much in the way of the characterisation that normally makes a book come alive for me. The plot for each book is more or less the same in so far as someone is murdered just before Ralph and Gervaise turn up with their commission. They work out who did it, avert disaster - twice now in the form of the Welsh, wrap up the land disputes and move on.

The crimes are somewhat brutal, but not overly described so even someone as squeamish as I am can happily cope with them. Characters are deftly drawn and the fact that they're mostly just sketched in is surprisingly effective. A lot of the Norman barons seem to be a thoroughly bad lot, but both history and a childhood love of Robin Hood make that easy enough to believe. Formula aside, Marston manages to create a real sense of lawless threat with some of his characters - or perhaps the sense that they can genuinely operate above the law simply on the basis of military strength.

This book has one of the few obvious mistakes that I've come across - or at least I assume it's a mistake that a character who essentially commits suicide gets a Christian burial - but I may be wrong to think they wouldn't at this point.

As I started my 4th Domesday book a couple of nights ago (The Wildcats of Exeter) and then regretfully put it aside for more pressing things (I'm reading an excellent book at the moment, but it covers some difficult ground including a harrowing description of an attempt at home abortion and subsequent miscarriage) I realise that a significant part of its appeal is in the certainty about what I'm getting.

Marston clearly knows what his readers like, and he sets out to provide it for them. In my case, that's a mystery where more or less everybody behaves the way I've come to expect, occasional jokes that will make me laugh, villains to properly dislike, heroes that are neither complex nor tortured, and a book that keeps me happily turning the pages when I'm too tired to be much good for anything else until I'm ready to sleep.

My Sorrow Mi Libertad - Robin Harwick

This is a novella aimed at young adults written by an American Ph.D. and based on the experience of people she worked with who wanted their stories told. I found it a curious book to read as I'm not entirely sure who it's aimed at, in places the language felt too formal to be right for a young adult audience, and there's a consciously educational edge to it that blurs the sense of it being fiction. The structure is also quite episodic, so it made sense that it was made up of multiple people's experiences, but had the effect of making some parts of the plot seem a little disjointed, and I kept wondering if it was staying too true to case notes.

That said, the disjointed feel makes sense in terms of the heroine's life, which is constantly being thrown off balance so in some ways it really works. There's also a bit of a disconnect for a British reader trying to understand the American welfare system. 

I think our care systems are probably similar, young people are certainly extremely vulnerable in them in both countries, and education is moving closer to an American model, especially post-secondary school where courses are increasingly expensive. The big differences come with health care and attitudes towards homelessness though. And of the two it's the homeless situation that really shocks me because at least the differences in health care are well discussed. 

Obviously, homelessness is an issue here, and so is begging, but as bad as it is we have nothing like the tent cities that are described - we don't get the weather conditions that Seattle does either, and the idea that people are expected to live like that with no hope of help is a lot to comprehend in a rich nation. We don't have quite the same opioid crisis as America either - so altogether there's a lot to disturb here.

The story centers around Didi, maybe just 15 when the book starts, and sofa surfing whilst her mother is meant to be getting her life together (she's homeless and hooked on heroin, so Didi is trying to give her some space). Social services eventually catch up with her after her school intervenes and she ends up in the foster system, but as a teenager has no chance of getting a place with a family. Instead, she ends up in group homes that she hates, and which become increasingly restrictive as she keeps running away. There's a spell of living on the street with other kids, and then eventually a more hopeful situation with some support and continuity. 

The strengths of the book are in how it shows how easily almost any of us could end up in a similar situation - especially without an NHS to patch us up. Finding a job without an address or a bank account is really hard, and so it goes on. Once you fall between the cracks it's very hard to pull yourself up again. The way Didi comes across as both capable and very vulnerable is excellent too. As the book progresses the problems her chaotic life has created for her become more apparent.

This was a quick and compelling book to read, and definitely a good place to start if you want to discuss issues around homelessness, immigration, the care system, education, and health, with younger people. For UK readers it serves as a stark warning for how much worse some things could be if we don't take care of what's left of the welfare state.