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We were on our own for Christmas and Boxing Day this year, so we had a couple of quiet days. After a hectic time at the tail end of this year, it was great to just stop and do very little. On Christmas Day itself, we cooked a crackingly good dinner (salmon en croute, in case you were wondering, with stir-fried carrots and sprouts and roast potatoes and parsnips), opened some presents and watched Doctor Who.

While we were eating dinner, and for a while afterwards, we listened to a World Routes which Mr. Bsag had recorded from Radio 3 earlier in the month, in which the presenter Lucy Duran travels to Georgia to listen to the traditional polyphonic choral music. I’ve been a fan of Georgian music for a long time, but the live recordings (if you’ll forgive the tautology) in the programme were incredibly good. While we were eating, we heard a couple of hymns by the St. Panteleimon Chanters (their name gloriously close to Lyra’s daemon, you notice) recorded at a funeral. That might sound an oddly depressing soundtrack to Christmas, but it was beautiful, ethereal, peaceful music, and far from depressing. In fact, it almost made me want to convert to Orthodox Christianity and move to Georgia, just to have the St. Panteleimon Chanters sing at my funeral. The only slight flaw in that cunning plan is, of course, that I wouldn’t get to hear the music at my own funeral.

They moved on to the traditional ‘table songs’ of the Tusheti region, which is my favourite Georgian style. This included some live recordings of the Tsinandali choir which blew me away. While I listened to their music with a huge lump in my throat, I tried to think what their music reminded me of. It was on the edge of my mind, but when it popped to the forefront, I was rather surprised: their music is like a wolf pack howling. That sounds like an insult, but actually I mean it as the highest praise. Like a wolf howl, there are shifting pitches, voices supporting and intertwining with one another. And like a wolf howl, it speaks to you of joy, longing, sorrow, exultation, fear, power and a wildness that immediately raises the hairs on your neck, and fills the night with electricity. It was a very special experience to hear the recording, so I can’t imagine how powerful it must have been like to be there and hear it live.

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I’ve got a secret liking for Heston Blumenthal’s ‘In Search of Perfection’ cookery show on TV. On the one hand, I’m somewhat appalled by his sheer profligacy with energy and ingredients in order to produce a very small quantity of fancy food. On the other hand, it’s hard not to be drawn in by his enthusiasm, and by his scientific approach to creating what he regards as the perfect dish.

Given the season, it was inevitable that this week’s programme was about creating the perfect Christmas meal. While most people feel pretty daring if they try cooking a goose for Christmas dinner, rather than the staid old turkey, Heston — as usual — took culinary daring to a new level. He was determined to have a first course (after the wafer that smelt of babies) containing gold, frankincense and myrrh, stubbornly refusing to accept (until the last minute) that myrrh actually tastes pretty awful, and is bitter as hell. Obviously he doesn’t pay attention to the lyrics of Christmas carols. He reluctantly admitted defeat on that one, and whittled the myrrh twigs into teaspoons to stir the frankincense tea with, but you could tell that he felt it was cheating.

Each of his dishes seems to take about a week to complete, in 43 easy steps, some of which require vacuum pumps, liquid nitrogen or an edible, heat-proof gel that sounds distinctly unappetising. He must have a carbon footprint the size of China: he travelled to Siberia (which, incidentally, looked absolutely ravishing) for 2 pints of reindeer milk to make into ice cream, and many of the 43 easy steps for each dish seem to require boiling something for 5 hours.

The funniest part (though not for the geese involved, I’m sure) was his attempt to raise geese in a calm, stress-free environment, feeding them on pine needle-laced food to impart a Christmassy flavour to the meat. I’m sure he’s right that meat from calm, unstressed animals tastes better, but I’m not so sure that chasing two geese around a field, holding them in a very awkward and unpractised manner, and then isolating them in an unfamiliar stable away from all their mates is the best way to produce a serene Anserine environment. When Heston ¹ placed the goose in a very flimsy enclosure within the stable, it evidently presciently decided that Something Was Terribly Wrong, and immediately bust out of the enclosure to make a break for the safety of the field and its flock mates.

¹ For some reason, he held his goose gingerly away from his body as if it was an unexploded bomb. ↑

When I was in school, we used to be allowed to take in board games for the last day of term. Right now, I really wish paid employment followed the same pattern. I’ve got a pile of things to do before I finish for Christmas on Friday, but I’m so exhausted that I’m having tremendous difficulty getting them done.

All I really want to do is play Hungry Hippos or Cluedo with my friends. And while we’re about it, I wouldn’t mind a four week long holiday.

This past week was very frosty, so I ended up getting the train to work. The compensatory benefit for putting up with packed, late-running trains and grumpy fellow commuters was the opportunity to see some truly stunning sunrises. The station platform faces east, and you see big, open skies over the nearby range of hills.

On Tuesday, I was treated to the display you see in the photo above as I waited for my train. The low level clouds were a deep, rich orange against the pellucid blue of the sky. Above, the clouds were a wispy pink, spread across the sky, with a wonderful rumpled texture. A tongue of golden flame — a herald, marking the point from which the sun would rise — pointed straight up into the blue. As I watched, it became brighter and more intense, turning into a pillar of fire. Within a matter of minutes, as I watched, this intense, glorious show faded back to normality.

If I hadn’t been waiting with nothing to do, if I’d been busy getting on with my day, I would never have seen this incredible spectacle. If I’d seen it start, then looked away with better things to do, and looked back, I would have missed it. And that moment would never happen again in quite that way. It would be lost forever.

By coincidence, I came across this Ezra Pound poem today, which seemed to articulate the slightly blue mood I’ve been in for a couple of months, and that this pillar of fire shook me out of.

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Ezra Pound

‘Tis the season for boilers to break down, apparently. My parents were staying with us at the weekend, and returned on Sunday night to a freezing house as a consequence of a non-functioning boiler. It wasn’t a total surprise — they had a plumber over to look at it on Friday — but they had hoped it was fixed. As they couldn’t get anyone over to look at it again before today, they’ve had a few days of wearing all their clothes in the house, and shivering around a tiny fan heater. Reading John Kelly’s Voxford blog, I see that he has been having the same trouble. Boilers work hardest at this time of year, of course, so it’s not so surprising that they tend to fail in winter, but I also suspect the action of Sod’s Law.

John (an American currently living in Oxford) also puzzles over the curious British tradition of the glacial toilet or bathroom. As with many things you take for granted about your society until they are pointed out by someone from another country, it is an odd phenomenon when you think about it. I have two theories:

1. Within living memory, many people in this country used to have to walk down the garden path to an outside toilet, which would have been freezing and draughty in winter. The advent of the ‘inside toilet’ was treated with suspicion at first, and often regarded as unhygienic and liable to make people ‘soft’. Perhaps, as a concession to this view, indoor toilets were designed to be freezing, as a kind of compromise. It may be unhygienically indoors, but, by God, you’ll freeze your knees off using it, just as Nature intended.
2. The typical British boiler and radiator system is pretty pathetic. Once the water has circulated to the last radiator in line, it tends to be no more than tepid. Perhaps the toilet tends to be the last in line?

We don’t really suffer extremes of temperature in this country, but it still surprises me that we don’t have better heating for cold, damp winters. I knew a Finnish woman at University who said that she had never felt as bone-cold as she had in Britain, despite regularly experiencing temperatures much lower than those typical of the British winter. She said that there was something about the damp cold, coupled with the inadequate heating and insulation of British houses, that seeped into her bones.

When I was a child, we used to regularly visit an elderly relative in Norfolk. She lived in a bungalow, heated only by a coal fire in the living room, and she was very sparing with the coal. Even at the height of summer, it was colder inside the house than outside. In winter, it was bitter. I don’t think I’ve ever been colder, and I still shiver when I remember sitting in that living room. Don’t even get me started on the toilet… Still, Auntie Norfolk (yes, that’s actually what we called her) was as tough as old boots, and lived to well over 90 years old. Perhaps central heating does make you soft.

A while ago, we removed one of the many laurel bushes that were gradually taking over our garden. I don’t mind laurel (the leaves are shiny, and it’s evergreen), but it is intent on garden domination unless you ruthlessly prune it. Anyway, there was just too much of it for our taste. That left a gaping hole in one of the beds, which we filled in the summer with annual plants like sweet peas and climbing nasturtiums, but we wanted something a bit more permanent. Our garden is a rather uniform green for much of the year, so we were after something with nice flowers, but that would also be a good resource for wildlife.

After seeing an offer in the Guardian newspaper, we decided to go for Rosa rugosa rubra. It’s apparently pretty tough (always useful with our less-than-expert gardening skills), has lovely, scented, wine-red flowers for much of the summer (perfect for the bees), then deep orange-red hips in the autumn (great for the birds).

They were delivered on Saturday morning (at an absurdly early hour for the weekend, waking Mr. Bsag and I, and my visiting parents). We were busy entertaining my parents for most of the weekend, so the first chance we got to put them in their new home was late on Sunday afternoon. Luckily, the torrential rain that had persisted for most of the weekend had stopped, but it was still very damp and cold, and starting to get dark.

Despite the weather, it felt great to be outside, digging the ground over and clearing some of the neighbouring plants to make room for the roses. Our bamboo plant has been mounting a stealth expansion campaign, throwing shoots up among the trunks of our Euonymus. Now that the last leaves have fallen from the Euonymus, the bamboo’s dastardly plot is revealed, so I took the opportunity to get in there and hack back the bamboo shoots. Again. I suspect that it’s a lifetime of work.

After a lot of digging, we got the bare-rooted rose plants in place. At the moment, they just look like rather sad brown sticks poking up above the earth, but they hold the promise of voluptuous scent and sumptuous colour in Summers to come. I keep looking out of the kitchen window at the roses-to-be, imagining the fresh, green shoots waiting for the Spring to come.

Ever since I discovered LaunchBar (several years ago now), I’ve felt that any Mac (indeed any computer) without a launcher triggered by abbreviations is broken. Once you get used to hitting a hotkey, then typing a few characters to find anything on your computer (applications, files, bookmarks, address book entries and so on), having to browse file system hierarchies feels positively 20th Century. I cut my launcher teeth on LaunchBar, then switched to the dashing and rebellious newcomer, Quicksilver. Quicksilver is somewhat more powerful than LaunchBar in some respects, and is extensible with plugins, but with great power comes a certain amount of complexity, and it can be difficult to remember exactly how to use all of the features. For example, there is a great image manipulation plugin which you can use by feeding it a file and a string of commands (for example to change a TIFF file to a PNG and resize it to particular dimensions), but I don’t use it often enough to remember how to format the commands, so I have to look them up. Again. I’ve also found it slightly unstable at various times, so I’ve tended to switch back and forth between LaunchBar and Quicksilver, pulled between the conflicting forces of stability and excitement.

Since installing Leopard, I’ve been almost tempted to revert to using Spotlight as a launcher, because the speed has improved enormously. But it’s still the Scooty Puff Jr. of launchers, so I can’t quite bring myself to do it.

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Reading a review in the Guardian of The Golden Compass — the film adaptation of the first part of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (HDM) trilogy — I was not sure whether to be excited or appalled. I’m a massive fan of Pullman’s work, and HDM is one of my favourite books of all time. Despite ostensibly being books for children, they are as rich, subtle, disturbing, intriguing, exciting, and many-layered as any adult book you are likely to find. Even after reading them twice, there are still aspects I don’t fully understand or that I wonder about, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

ThoughtBadger and I had a brief conversation about this in the comments for my review of the last Harry Potter book, so I know I’m not the only one who feels a certain dread about the films. One of the things which troubled me most about the review by Peter Bradshaw was when he said, “…to this non-Pullman-reader, the claims often made on behalf of his legend about striking a blow for rationalism against religious authoritarianism don’t precisely hold up.” He also describes the film as “deeply conservative”. If they didn’t capture the fierce, rebellious exhortation for everyone to think for themselves, use their own intelligence and live this life, rather than hoping for a life hereafter, then the film will be a terrible failure. It’s true that the books only gradually reveal the full import of what Dust is over the course of the trilogy, rather than at the start, but I hope that they didn’t miss the point completely.

I’m worried about the characterisations, too: according to Peter Bradshaw, Lord Asriel is a “gallant hero”. One of the brilliant things about HDM is that none of the characters are entirely good or evil (or even what they seem at first), but rather real people with complex emotions, personalities and motivations. From the start in the book, Asriel is a very ambiguous character, and far from being a gallant hero. He’s an adventurer, and appears to be on the side of good, but he’s ruthless, arrogant and seemingly out for personal glory. Mrs. Coulter is also not purely evil at all, though she is rather chilling in the first book. From the clips I’ve seen, Lyra (played by Dakota Blue Richards) appears to be rather a delicate, wistful child, which is a million miles away from the way I see Lyra.

At the start of the book, Lyra is a tough, independent tomboy, running over the rooftops of Oxford colleges, and starting fights with local kids. She’s fierce, brave and scruffy, and has a tendency to lie to get her way or to talk up her own achievements. But she is also deeply empathetic to the feelings of those around her, and has a strong sense of natural justice. At one point in the first book, she unselfconsciously puts herself into a situation which horrifies and disgusts the adults around her, purely to provide what comfort she can for a boy in a terrible situation. Iorek Byrnison (the armoured bear) rebukes the adults hanging back where Lyra jumps in, because he shares Lyra’s deep sense of honour and justice, and the importance of keeping one’s word. Throughout the books, the things she has to go through make her more serious, and she loses her innocence. In short she grows up, which is one of the themes of the series — what does it mean to be an adult? Pullman’s thesis (I think) is that the mythical expulsion from the Garden of Eden was the best thing that ever happened to us¹ — that losing our innocence and gaining knowledge about ourselves and the world around us is a precious, important thing, and not something to be mourned.

I could ramble on about HDM for ages. Just the other day, I was thinking about how skilfully and subtly he shows us what it might be like to have a part of your spirit² as a separate, external being. Daemons in HDM are not airy, ghostly things, but warm and solid animal-formed beings. They can speak, and people and their daemons have discussions and even arguments over what is the right thing to do. But a daemon isn’t a kind of magical conscience like Jimminy Cricket; neither a person nor their daemon have all the answers, but they must come to understand the world together through discussion and joint experience. The remarkable thing is that Pullman describes this thing which is very far outside our experience in such a natural and vivid way that you feel rather lonely without a daemon of your own by the end.

The mainstream cinemas around here are pretty dire, so I’d probably wait until this came out on DVD anyway, but if anyone else goes to see the film (particularly anyone who loves the books), I’d be curious to know what you think of it. I might summon up the courage to watch it if it’s not a total travesty.

¹ Since I don’t believe in this, I think of it as a metaphor. ↑

² The closest word I can get to his idea of a daemon, but it’s not quite right. ↑