In which I get serious about race

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Sarah rings up over the Jimmy Carter flap. She is uncertain whether it helps anything at all. ‘It just turns Obama into the black guy,’ she says. She says her friend L, who is black, is uncomfortable about the whole thing, thinking it makes black people look victimmy, that they must have an old white guy riding to their aid. ‘Obama’s a big boy,’ she says, ‘he can look after himself.’ ‘And,’ says Sarah, who does not have any of the utopian visions that I am sometimes prey to, ‘why is it always gangs of white liberals who go on the television and get hot under the collar about racism?’

I take her point, even though I am a white liberal who gets hot under the collar about racism. I see that it is politically disastrous for Obama to have to talk about race while he is trying, against all the odds, to get his healthcare legislation passed. I understand that it is reductive and stupid for him to be just the black guy. But the fact remains that he is black, and there are white people who still, even now, in the shining 21st century, really, really care about pigmentation. I find it odd that people mind so much about something that is, literally, skin deep. I find it curious that racism is so ingrained, when we all started out black, it’s just some of us went to live in Finland, and there was a vitamin D thing which evolution had to sort out. But ingrained it is, and I think that is something that people should talk about. I think it should be spoken of because by letting the daylight in, a remedy might be found.

Most prejudice comes from fear and ignorance; it is much easier to hate someone if you know nothing about them. So throw up the windows; talk, instruct, argue, educate. I also think it should be spoken of because it is intellectually interesting. I could go all poncy and talk about investigating the roots of racism, and the psychology of it, the fear of the other, the Jungian projection of the shadow; I could talk about the forms it takes, the code words, the dog whistles, the soft prejudice and the hard hatreds. But really all I want to say is: why, why? I mean really: why? It is just skin. In pure aesthetic terms, it is much more beautiful than the pinkish often mottled stuff that Anglo Saxons got. As Martin Amis once wrote: who decided that white was best?

Yet it seems that the prevailing conclusion is, both here and in America, that it is unhelpful to talk about it. The British decided, fairly early on, that Obama was not really black at all. Not in the pejorative sense of not black enough that made him an object of suspicion among the black community in America early in the primary campaign, but in a more world-weary sophisticate pose. Come on, he wears sharp suits and talks his erudite talk and does not refer to women as hos; he falls into no stereotype, so let’s just get past the racial stuff and talk about something more germane. (Interestingly, this was rather the position that the candidate himself took, not wanting to put himself into an ethnic box, and he would have got away with it had it not been for the pesky Reverend Jeremiah Wright.) So now that President Carter has waded into the fray, the reaction on this side of the pond is very much Sarah’s. ‘It makes everything personal,’ she says. ‘I want people to talk about the policies, not about the man.’ The consensus seems to be: move along, nothing to see here.

I think this comes partly from an old British hangover of stiff upper lip. Despite the Jeremy Kyle Show and the rise of reality television, there is still an idea among the commenting classes that too much hysteria and letting it all hang out is a bad thing. But I also think it is because prejudice in Britain is a different animal than its American cousin. It absolutely exists, but in a more low key way; it is febrile and complex, prone to sudden swerves in direction, hard to get a handle on. Take the odd case of the Irish. There was a genuine hatred of the Irish from the 1960s, when boarding houses in Notting Hill sported signs saying: no blacks, no dogs, no Irish, to the 1970s, when anyone with an Irish accent was automatically assumed to be a member of the IRA. By the 1990s, the Irish were so lavishly adored, considered so much hipper and more glamorous and more romantic than the prosaic British, that Britons poured into Dublin every weekend, ostentatiously drank pints of Guinness, and listened to nothing but U2 records.

As for black Britons, attitudes towards them are hard to pin down. Young black men are disproportionately likely to come from broken homes, fare badly in education, and become involved in crime. They face bigger barriers in the employment market than do white Britons, pointing to lingering prejudices that trace their roots back to Windrush and the race riots of 1958. On the other hand, Britain has the highest incidence of mixed race marriages in the Western world, ‘voting with their squishy bits’ wrote Hugh Muir in The Guardian. The number of black MPs, while small, reflects almost exactly their proportion of the population - 2% in each case, which is much more impressive than the percentage of women members – 17% in parliament, 50% in the populace. Trevor McDonald is a Sir, a pillar of the establishment, a national treasure, and consistently voted the most trusted newscaster in Britain. It is tempting for me, as a hopeful white liberal, to look at the admired black faces in British life – Lenny Henry, Adrian Lester, Diane Abbott, Dame Kelly Holmes, Marianne Jean-Baptiste – and think of them as living proof that we are all fine. It is easy to remember only the good parts of race relations in this country: the passionate fervour among students for Nelson Mandela at the height of the struggle against apartheid, the two tone craze in the eighties, the moment in the early nineties where all the white kids in Notting Hill felt that the height of cool was to act black (whatever that meant). I have never walked down a city street and been regarded with suspicion simply because I am a certain colour, so I may be talking out of turn here, but for all the stains on our history – Stephen Lawrence, Handsworth, stop and search, the nights when Brixton burnt – I still feel that anti-black sentiment in this country is less visceral and less violent than that which exists in America. I could be completely wrong about this, but my suspicion is that it is for one central historic reason: there were never slaves picking cotton in British fields. The British enthusiastically embraced the slave trade until Mr Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury came along and spoiled the party, but it was a distant, unseen thing. There was no equivalent of Thomas Jefferson and his plantation. There was, most crucially, no parallel here of the American South.

It is because of Jimmy Carter’s pedigree that I think he should be taken seriously. He is a son of the south; he remembers segregation. Yet, in many areas of the American media, he is being treated as an out of touch old man who knows not of which he speaks. His words have been twisted back against him: he is apparently shutting down debate, playing the race card, tarring all of Obama’s honourable opponents with the racial brush. It seems to me entirely uncontroversial to say that prejudice still exists in America, and that some of it is directed against a black president. Oh, say the critics, but we elected a black president, and he got a 70% approval rating as recently as January, so that knocks that argument on the head. They conveniently forget that people candidly admitted to news reporters before the election that they could not bring themselves to vote for a black man. They ignore the posters of Obama as a witch doctor, as a monkey, eating watermelon. They gloss over the insanity of the birthers, who claim furiously that Obama was actually born in Kenya, and is therefore an illegal alien who should be deported. The people who still insist that Obama is a secret Muslim and that they want their country back are not doing it because they dislike his plans for healthcare.

Sure there is racism in this country, says the strange and bullying Joe Scarborough on his MSNBC morning show, in the same tone of voice as if he had said ‘sure there are traffic jams in this country’, as if racism was a fact of life, a minor inconvenience, something that people just had to learn to live with and not bitch about. Scarborough, who frequently talks of America as the greatest nation on earth, then goes on to say that this opposition to the president is not racist, and that to call it that just shows that those crazy liberals have lost the argument. This is an oddly common conflation: a liberal points out that there are racists who do not like Obama because he is black, a conservative immediately says that the liberal is calling all opposition to Obama racist and therefore the liberal has got nothing better to say than ‘ooh look bigots at six o’clock’, which, of course, liberals always do because they are genetically programmed and can’t help it. Scarborough then circles back to the clinching circular argument: America is great, America elected a black president, only America could do this, therefore America cannot be racist. Joe Scarborough is on the moderate right wing. On the far right, in the addled minds of men like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, it is Obama himself who is the racist, with, according to Beck, a real ‘hatred of white people’, and the poor white people can’t say anything about that, because if they do the ‘liberal media’ will say they are all, every last man jack of them, drooling haters of black people.

Race is complicated in America in a completely different way than it is here. It provided one of America’s finest hours with the civil rights movement, the I have a dream speech, the brave freedom riders, the men and women who walked across the burning bridges. It also, within living memory, revealed America’s darkest heart, in segregation, lynchings, Jim Crow, Klan rallies. There was a moment of giddy hope when Obama was elected that he alone could symbolise a glorious post-racial future, that the better angels would prevail. A young black woman was interviewed just after the election, and told the reporter: now I can tell my son that he can be anything he wants to be and mean it. It was one of the most moving moments of the entire campaign. When the man who stands as that glittering role model is depicted in crude posters as a monkey eating a banana, what conclusion is that same young boy to draw?

Sarah is right (she is almost always right) that there is danger of putting Obama into a nice neat little corner labelled: the black man. She is correct that there is an absurdity to seeing tormented white liberals agonising over race, although I would rather see that than white conservatives saying that there is nothing to worry about. But I do think President Carter was also right, and if the shining city on the hill is ever to be built, the fetid bog at its foot must be drained. Politely not mentioning it will not make it go away. Surely this is the time when everyone should be talking their heads off?

The Eye of the Beholder

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I have been thinking this week about beauty, and the images of it that trap women. Scooting around the internet I have learnt that Saudi women long for nothing more than a nose job, Japanese women are having unspeakable things done to their eyelids, Jordanian women are ashamed of their olive skin and are buying skin whitening products by the bucket, and every last American woman is on a diet. All the fashion insiders are saying, in the wake of the magazine-shows-woman-with-actual-stomach affair, that the idea of models getting any bigger than your little finger is a funny joke.

I suddenly wanted to look at women who did not look like models. I am not anti-beauty. I smile when my eye falls upon lovely Audrey Hepburn, or ravishing Ava Gardner, or bewitching Julie Christie. I have a tremendous penchant for those outrageously stylish ladies of the fifties, like Babe Paley. I came of age in the eighties, when the supermodels were truly super, and Helena Christiansen and Tatjana Patitz and Christy Turlington were in their pomp. But the modelliness of models is now so self-referential that it has started to eat itself, and the actresses, sadly, are following in their wake. There is a sameness to the pictures of today's beauties that feels thin and meaningless. If 'beauty' is all there is to see, then horizons narrow and views warp. I suddenly wanted to cast my eye on women who did not look as if they belonged in a magazine.

So I found these. Some of them are anonymous. Some are famous. One won a Nobel Prize. One revolutionised American cooking. One is a supreme court judge. I like them because they look real to me. Sometimes, authenticity is its own form of beauty.

Something to make you go Ah

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I hate to do this to my non-Blighty readers, for whom the BBC iplayer is a ruthless no go zone, but there is something on there which I think everyone who can see, should see. It is episode two of Stephen Fry's Last Chance to See: The White Rhino. I am not a mad fan of nature programmes, possibly because of having seen too many in my youth. My school thought it educational for us to watch every last episode of David Attenborough that was ever on ever, even though generally they believed television was the work of the Devil. I remember loving them at the time, but once I grew to adulthood the thought of having to see one more fruit bat, or a fellow puffing about in the African bush, or someone doing a special whispery wildlife voice just became too much. So it was in a desultory nothing-else-is-on mood that I sat down to watch this, and only really because it was lovely Stephen. And sure enough, there was the whispering and the puffing about and the fruit bats. But it was all quite fascinating and there was a bit of Congo politics thrown in and some interesting little interchanges between Fry and his conservationist friend, and I learnt the difference between the White Rhino and the Usual Rhino (nothing to do with colour; shape of the mouth, apparently). So I kept on watching. And then, at around twenty-one minutes in, something so unexpected happened that it actually made me cry tears. I am a terrible old weeper, especially over animals, something I inherited from my sentimental Celtic father, but I don't think my reaction was just sentiment. I think this might have been the most confounding and emotional moment I have ever seen in a wildlife documentary. Or maybe I am just a soft old fool. Well, watch it and see. Whether you weep or not, I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mvbbx/Last_Chance_to_See_Northern_White_Rhino/

Who is this woman and why does she matter?

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I was having a nice quiet Sunday, browsing around on the interwebs, listening to a fascinating programme on Radio Four about how the Celtic Tiger got caught by the tail, eating cold sausages, and thinking gentle thoughts about autumn, when I stumbled upon the name Rachel Zoe in Miss Whistle's blog. I felt rather like one of those old crusty judges from the 1960s: 'Who ARE these "Beatles"?' (Answer, always: 'A popular beat combo, m'lud.') Luckily, the enduringly considerate Miss Whistle, who is much more well-informed but just as baffled as I, had put a link to a New York Times article about the lady.

As I read it, I had a vague sense of memory. I had read about this person before. I remember thinking that her story was so dull and marginal that it never encroached beyond the edges of my consciousness. There is only room for so much in one brain. The great, drunk, talented John Barrymore would never learn his lines when he went to Hollywood to make films after a long careeer on Broadway; hapless underlings would have to contort themselves with idiot boards. David Niven once asked him why he did not just memorise the damn things, and Barrymore said something like - 'My mind is filled with beauty, the Queen Mab speech, Hamlet's soliloquies, why would I want to fill it with this garbage?'. My mind is not quite as crammed with beauty as Barrymore's was, but it has enough beauty in it for me to give up reading Tatler. I admit to occasional unseemly interest in the odd famous person (for some reason, I am riveted by the opera that is Brangelina) but a story about a stylist has me turning the page.

When I first read about Rachel Zoe she was just blasting into the public square, for a very sad reason. She got thin famous people, and made them thinner, and then told them what to wear. From my lofty perch on the moral high ground, I thought this a poor thing. There is a fabulous running sketch in the current series of The Mitchell and Webb Show, one of the funniest comedy programmes on the BBC (go to the iplayer and listen for yourself) where they have a panel of old ladies asking people to explain what their job is for. This week the old dears got in a futures trader. 'How does it help, dear?' they asked. 'Wouldn't you rather open a little shop?' I felt rather the same about Rachel Zoe. How does it help, exactly? But now she is not just a liminal figure familiar only to those in the know, she has a television show and the kids love her.

Reading the piece in the New York Times, my mouth actually fell open like that of a cartoon character. I felt even more antiquated and out of touch than those old Beatles judges. The money quote: '“It’s such a racket,” said one head of publicity at a major studio, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of angering any actresses who work with Zoe or other top stylists. “During awards season, when you are nominated or presenting an award, then it makes sense to have a stylist. But now, B and C list stars are demanding stylists for everything. The level of insanity is very high. But the bottom line is, if you don’t give them what they want, the actresses say they won’t do any press, that they won’t appear at the premiere. Sometimes I feel like saying, How difficult is it to just go out and buy a dress?”'.

When a publicist at a movie studio, where reality is a faintly elastic concept, says 'the level of insanity is very high', you know that madness has run off the scale. I have been thinking of September 11th over the last few days, as have so many people. I did not write about it here, because it is almost impossible to give it words without sounding portentous or sentimental or filled with platitude. Before that, I was thinking about the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. I was thinking a lot about the Poles. No one can think about the big things all the time, not even me. Even I, with my irredeemably poncy sense of being a femme serieuse, have to wonder occasionally whether all the stories about Jennifer Anniston are true. But when a woman who makes nothing, says nothing of interest, writes nothing, produces nothing, gets paid $6000 dollars a day for dressing very thin people, I start to think that something might have gone a little awry.

A walk in the woods

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Over at The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan has a lovely feature called The View From Your Window. Readers of his blog send in snapshots from wherever they are, from Tokyo to Montana, Bogota to Berlin. The pictures are not always terribly good, but they carry a curious fascination and power, as if they are opening up the world before my very eyes, one snap at a time. I am not in writing mood today, but a glorious Indian summer has descended on Scotland, as if in gentle apology for the rotten actual summer that came before it, so instead of an essay on world affairs, or people's stomachs, or horses I have loved, or recipes I have cooked, I am giving you some views from my walk this morning. (This goes with especial love to my ex-pat readers in California, where the wildfires have been raging: a cool draft of the clear north, to remind you of dear old Blighty.)

Do you see the moon is still up? And the colour of the sky? Sometimes there are no words.

The view right up into the branches of the oldest and gnarliest and most bent of the great horse chestnut trees.

Someone left a table out. I can see no clear reason for it. But it looks rather glorious, abandoned out there in the long grass.

The burn, with the dogwood in full fig. I remember when that dogwood was eight inches tall.

And, of course, one of the dear dogs, because a blog isn't really a blog unless it has a dog in it. Look at her, all ready for her close-up.

In which I am entirely self-indulgent

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I have several secret vices. One of my most secret is that when I am in need of reassurance I get out my old racing videos and watch Desert Orchid beating everything in sight. It makes me wildly happy for some reason. It all happened twenty years ago, and yet it never feels old to me.

I was doing this yesterday, and trying to work out what exactly it was about Desert Orchid. He was not the most beautiful horse in training, ‘this woolly thing’, his jockey Simon Sherwood once called him. He did not win everything; there were days when he got beat out of sight by horses whose names are now forgotten. He never went anywhere near the Grand National. And yet he struck a chord in the heart of the nation; crowds would flock to distant courses to see him run; hats would fly in the air on the days when he roared home; hardened commentators gasped when he stood off two strides too soon over his fences. ‘It’s the courage, the courage of the horse,’ one of his fans (he actually had an actual fan club) once said.

It was many things. It was his bold, front-running style. It was his colour, the bright grey that made him stand out. It was the fact that he ran with his ears pricked, which is rare in racing. It was the way that he would give away lumps of weight to other horses and still win. It was that whatever the odds, or the going, or the competition, he would never bloody give up. Sometimes I swear you could almost see him gritting his teeth with determination in a close finish. It was something about his character – the quality that the racing people call, with easy admiration, ‘genuine’. It was, mundanely, that he was around for a while, six long seasons, from his wild novice days, to his seasoned King George triumphs. It was, more fancifully, that he seemed to know, perhaps more than other horses, that he had won, and what that meant. It was that he leapt over his fences like a stag, while others laboured.

He did not come along in a depression, or after a war, like Seabiscuit or Phar Lap, when a weary public needed lifting. It was not exactly that combination of a complicated time and a simple horse. But it was the eighties. It was an era of the rabid free market, of greed is good, of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The hard conservative ethos had won the argument. Barrow boys in red braces had taken over the City. Money was everywhere, and conspicuous consumption ruled. The internet age was yet to arrive, and mobile telephones were still the size of bricks, email was hardly dreamt of. Yet there was the suspicion of the globalisation and technology age that was about to dawn; there was the sense of that. Perhaps there was something about the sheer, uncomplicated goodness of this brave white horse that took people back to a simpler time. He was not paid a million pound salary, or troubled by notions of sponsorship, or trammelled by politics. He was what he was; he carried conviction, simplicity and the heart of a lion. He would battle through the mud and the rain to do what he was trained to do, without asking a single question. He held his head high. Perhaps there was something in the zeitgeist that responded to that. The British knew that they could not afford to go back to the dark days of the seventies and the three day week, where bodies lay unburied and rubbish strewed the streets. At the same time, there was a faint sense of contamination in the new age of raw greed and naked free markets; money was growing into a god, and it left a faint aftertaste that no amount of Chardonnay could wash down. Could it have been that this glorious, blazing, grey horse reminded Britons of a simpler, better time? They knew that time only existed in their imaginations, but they craved it still. They needed something to represent it; they needed an icon. Desert Orchid was that icon.

And beyond all that, a truly great horse only comes along once in every three generations. The old racing people, who have seen it all, will usually give you no more than three or four true champions after sixty years watching the game. Almost all of them will say Arkle. They might talk of Mill House. And then they will say Desert Orchid. He was great because he won over hurdles, in a flat gallop; he was great because he won over fences, in a collected canter. He could go over two miles, in the sunshine, and over three and a half miles, in the sleet. The story was that he hated going left-handed, but he battled up the hill at Cheltenham to triumph in atrocious conditions, to take the blue riband of jump racing, the Gold Cup. He made history, by winning the King George Chase four times, even when the doubters said he could not make it. He seemed to delight in proving people wrong. He won 34 races and over £600,000 in prize money. All this counts, and yet that was not quite it.

There was something rare and remarkable in him which set him apart from the herd, and made him such a joy to watch. I remember laughing out loud, when he would put in an extra stride and take off outside the wings, so far away from a fence that you could not believe he would land safely on the other side. I remember yelling my head off when he won his final King George. When he finally, miraculously pulled ahead up that endless Cheltenham hill, I cried like a girl. There was something extra in him, which drew tears from the flintiest of eyes. The x factor, that indefinable thing that put him above the rest, was, I think, in the end, incredibly simple. It was that he loved it.

In which one stomach does not change the world

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I feel I should roll myself up into a crazed ball of words over the Lizzie Miller affair. Everyone else has, after all. It’s a subject on which I feel strongly. I am not famous for being short of an opinion. I am a mouthy feminist. And yet, and yet, I am tempted to say...nothing.

It won’t happen of course. The last time I said nothing was sometime in 1979 and that was because I had bronchitis. But for some reason, I am tempted to say: so what? Here is what happened, for those of you who have been too busy following the murky Al Megrahi business or the increasingly strange debate over American healthcare reform: a very small picture of a pretty model with a slightly protruding stomach appeared in the back pages of Glamour magazine. The readers of Glamour wrote to the editor saying they were very happy to see a photograph of a real woman. The newspapers picked up on it, and decided that it was the end of fashion as we knew it. The model herself, a beautiful 20 year old called Lizzie Miller, added a footnote about the hall of smoke and mirrors that is the magazine business, reopening the airbrushing debate that has been chugging along for some months. In an added twist, it turned out that Miller was too large to model so-called plus size clothes, despite only being a size twelve herself. The headline writers had a nice time: ‘flabulous’, screamed one. The columnists piled all over each other (one tried to be controversial by stating that if women did not have perfection to aim at, what else were they going to do with their time?). The message boards lit up with every variety of comment. And the world said: excusez-moi?

This is my subject. I loathe and abhor the bizarre dictates of the fashion and beauty industries. I get very sad when I see successful women growing thinner and thinner before my very eyes. I feel a tinge of melancholy whenever I think of how hungry Victoria Beckham must have been for the last five years. I refuse to go on diets, because I am too greedy, because I love food, because I will not be told what size I should be. I should be out there shouting with the best of them. But for some reason, I find the whole thing an absurd storm in a silly teacup. India Knight, who is exceptionally good at sailing through hype and hyperbole with a true compass, made much the sanest and most adult point in the acres of type generated on the subject when she said that fashion is theatre, and it should not be confused with anything else. It seems to me that the fevered debate about Lizzie Miller and her little stomach has rather missed the point. One photograph is not going to change an entire zeitgeist. The very same newspaper which ran a banner headline celebrating ‘The Wobbly Bits that Shook the World’ had a long feature only three days later headlined ‘Why I’ll suffer any pain to be beautiful,’ describing the writer’s long, painful odyssey through Botox and Restylane. All the columnists who are celebrating the appearance of a real woman work for newspapers and magazines that constantly push the latest diet, the newest cosmetic miracle, the hottest anti-ageing concoction, the makeover that will save your very soul. In those same pages, unrealistic, airbrushed models wander freely like rare creatures moving across the savannah. Perhaps it is the phoniness and hypocrisy to all this outcry that makes me want to say: move along, nothing to see here.

Lizzie Miller, for all her galvanising honesty, is not going to change anything. Many of the very same writers who were lauding her little stomach last week will be going out to dinner this week and refusing the bread (Yeast! Gluten! Too bloating for words, darling!). Designers are not suddenly going to send size fourteen girls down the catwalk. The diet industry is not going to pack up and go home. The magazines will not put away the airbrush. Real women are not going to be set free by a small photograph on page 194 of one glossy; they will not be liberated by a scatter of over-excited headlines. True liberation comes from stepping away from the spectacle. I love nothing more than a heated debate, and yet I think this latest one is not particularly helpful, because it is too hysterical and too shallow. It does not, in the end, mean much.

I think we all have to do the heavy lifting ourselves. I think we have to work out where true beauty lies, and understand that it means something quite different to everyone. For real freedom, women have to go to the profundities, far away from vociferous commentary and one-dimensional aesthetic imperatives. It is a question of priorities. To love and be loved, to contribute some small thing to the sum total of human happiness, to fulfil your potential: these are the things that matter. Real beauty comes in many forms: the ability to laugh at yourself, the talent for listening, the trick of making really good chicken soup. Random acts of kindness are more lovely than a flat belly. It’s not a snappy headline, but it is true.

A brief visual interlude

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Still ill. My nieces say: four days. They come and see me, making cooing noises, take the dogs out, and whirl away again. I adore them.

Seem to have lost the ability to type, but you know I like to give you something, so here is a little visual treat. Lartigue is one of my favourite photographers in the world. When I very first began collecting, I bought two pictures, without quite meaning to (I had wandered into The Photographers' Gallery, in those days in Great Newport Street, quite by mistake): one by Lee Miller and one by Lartigue. In those days, no one had ever heard of him and he was dirt cheap. Now he is no longer a little fishing village but a global conurbation and you must hock your diamonds to get an original. But in the meantime, feast your eyes on his lovely muse, Renée. And tomorrow I shall have retrieved my facility for bashing away at a keyboard.

Word of the day; or, in which I talk a lot of nonsense

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

My word of the day is actually Oof, because this is the sound I am making every five minutes. I have a low level virus. Nothing as proper as swine flu, just the bog standard everything hurts bug. Both my nieces have had it; it is going round the compound. It consists of: pain all up and down the back, as if one has been kicked by a cross Shetland pony; eyes like boiled sweets; general sense of anomie; glands up like steel hawsers in the neck. I have a little grumble about it on Twitter, and the entire enchanting community rises up like one big mamma and sends me every possible remedy, from whisky to golden seal. I take seriously the suggestion from my friend Miss Whistle, who is herself surviving smoke inhalation from the California wildfires, to add some cayenne pepper to my ginger tea. 'If you can stand it,' she says, unwisely, not knowing that even when filthy ill my competitive spirit will not resist a challenge. So my second word of the day is Aaaahhhh, as I drink the spiciest tea I can bear. I cannot tell whether it is doing me any good, but it is so hot that it diverts the pain from my back to my tongue, giving an impression of relief.

Anyway, none of that is the point. I think there is a point, but my brain in fuzzy. Oh yes: I was wandering listessly around the interweb, because I can't concentrate enough to read a proper book, and my muscles ache too much to allow me to doze, and I must do something to distract myself, and I happened upon an article by the interesting academic Sarah Churchwell about how her students were having trouble with the English language. This kind of thing always makes me sad, and I try to pretend very hard that it is not true. It started me thinking about grammar and language and rules and what matters and what doesn't. Her initial complaint was that none of her students could tell her what a complete sentence was. The Greeks or Americans would be able to tell her in a heartbeat, apparently, but the clueless Britons just mutter 'subject, verb, object'. Oh dear, I thought, that is exactly what I would mutter, and I am a writer. I get all lyrical about the semi-colon. I went to a highly-regarded university in the days when you had to sit a separate exam to get in. Could it be true that all these years I have got it wrong? Yes, says Professor Churchwell, and she has the chops to tell me right from wrong: she teaches at East Anglia, she has been on Newsnight with Martin Amis, she is a serious academic. She says that a correct sentence is: subject, predicate, complete thought. Bugger. I am so fucked.

What is worrying about this is that not only have I been wrong about sentences for the last twenty-five years, but that I may also have been wrong in my central, endlessly repeated idea that you must know the rules of grammar in order to break them. When I thought of writing good English I thought of Picasso, and his blue period. I would wager that not that many people know a huge amount about the blue period, Pablo is so famous for his modernist, deconstructed, back to front paintings. When we think of Picasso we think of Guernica, or those great portraits of Dora Maar or the demoiselles of Avignon. (Memo to self: please try and retrain brain not to use editorial we. Memo back to self: much too ill to think of that now, go away.) The correct, almost classical blue period paintings do not shout Picasso. But my theory was: he had to do those to understand everything he could about perspective and how to use light and the way that oil lies on a canvas, and then, once he knew the serious rules about everything, he could bust out and go wild and put people's noses behind their knees if he wanted to. So my theory went that since I knew everything about grammar, I too could go crazy and create knees with noses behind them. I liked to think of writing like jazz: I wanted to improvise and riff about a bit and, you know, play with the form. (My friend the Man of Letters says a day is not a day unless you have played with the form.) I am not as playful as I would like to be, especially not in non-fiction, not as antic as the late great Stan Gebler Davies or the very much with us Caitlin Moran or the enduring Christopher Hitchens. But the idea was there. And now I discover I was working on a false premise because all the time I did not know what a bloody sentence was.

This, interestingly (or not) is still not the point. That was just a sideshow I was allowing myself because my head hurts. The point was, I got to the end of Professor Churchwell's interesting article and there was the word 'apraxia'. Look it up, she says, I had to. No, no, I thought, not me. I may not know grammar from a hole in the ground, but I know words. Words are my bread and butter, my daily oxygen, my swallows flying south for the winter. Apraxia clearly means something to do with suffocation. I know that. In the end, sheepishly, I looked it up. It means the inability to execute voluntary movement, due to some failure in the cortex. Double bugger and arse.

So I thought: all right, let's get a word of the day thing going on the blog, because even I can't know all the words, in their right order. Probably Martin Amis does not know all the words. Although Will Self clearly does. I'll find a nice little word of the day site and paste it in or something, I thought. An occasional series, I thought, I like those. And I went to the Dictionary.com word of the day, which was just what I was looking for, and it said: Carom. Carom? I said. Come on. There is no way that is a word. Someone is having a laugh. They mean careen, surely. It's not even one of those technical terms with very limited use referring only to a particular moment in the moon's waxing or waning. It means, apparently: a glancing off, or, to strike and rebound. People do it in snooker all the time. I used to play snooker with handsome boys in louche pool halls at the wrong end of Westbourne Grove in the days when Westbourne Grove had a wrong end, and not one of them ever used the word carom. They did not say: 'Good lord, that ball is caroming about today.' I shall not tell you what they did say, for legal reasons. So now I don't know what to think. I suppose that Carom must be my word for the day, but I think that chagrin might be more appropriate. I think that snookered might fit the bill better. I think that I might have been better off if I had just stuck with oof and been done with it.

Twenty-seven cheers for the dear old BBC

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

James Murdoch, the son of Rupert, has gone a bit wiggy on the subject of the BBC. In a speech in Edinburgh, he described it as a satanic cult which sucks out of you the very will to live. I’m paraphrasing, obviously. Then he and Robert Peston, the BBC’s business person, started yelling each other at a dinner in front of Kirsty Wark. One of them actually said fuck. In front of stern, respectable Kirsty. The newspapers went crazy. The message boards on The Guardian lit up with exercised citizens saying things like ‘At last, Auntie grows a pair of balls’, and there was a lot of lovely lefty comment about the spoiled sons of billionaires throwing their toys out of the pram.

Actually, if you go and read the speech, it is pretty much plutocratic, free market, management-speak boilerplate. There is a slightly inexplicable diversion into creationism as Murdoch tries to make the very strained analogy of BBC operatives as mad creationists, while he is the lucid Darwinian. It might strike some as surprising that a person would choose this particular moment to mount a rampantly unapologetic defence of capitalism red in tooth and claw, just as that same unfettered capitalism has brought the world to the brink of economic collapse. But the speech itself is not quite as shocking as the reporting might suggest, until you get to the very end. It is as if Murdoch has tried to be fairly sensible, and then, in the final paragraphs, he just can’t help himself. ‘The expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision, which are so important for our democracy,’ he states. ‘As Orwell foretold, to let the state enjoy a near monopoly of information is to guarantee manipulation and distortion.’ He does not explicitly call the BBC Orwellian, as some papers have insisted, but the implication is very clear.

What is really fascinating about this is that it is Murdoch himself who is using a form of doublespeak. I agree with him that a media controlled by the state would be a ghastly thing; shades of North Korea and endless broadcasts praising the Dear Leader. Any government which can censor the news or put out propaganda instead of objective reporting is a severe threat to the democracy that Murdoch so cherishes. But if you take those sentences out of the speech, and let them walk the streets of the actual world, where real people live actual lives, you can see at once how absurd they are. The BBC is not state-sponsored. It is true that it is incorporated by Royal Charter, and so technically dependent for its very existence on our own dear Queen (gor bless you ma’am) but only the very wildest Bilderberg conspiracy theorists would believe that Her Majesty is sitting at an undisclosed location deciding what John Humphreys is going to say on any given morning. The government has the power to approve the licence fee, which is a very long way from ‘sponsoring’, let alone having any power over the content that the BBC sends out into the world. Far from being a puppet of the state, or more specifically the Labour government, the BBC seems to play a happy parlour game of pissing off elected officials. Certain elements of the Right believe that the BBC is involved in an elaborate plot to make sure that black lesbian one-legged single mothers end up ruling the world, with an assist from illegal immigrants. Parts of the Left think that the Beeb is a cringing, pro-Establishment, Oxbridge-infested Trojan horse, determined to bring down New Labour with its own bare hands – remember Alistair Campbell busting into Channel Four news after the Gilligan affair to foam at the mouth live on air? It seems to me that if both sides of the political divide accuse the BBC of bias, then it must be hitting pretty much the right note.

But quite aside from its attitudes or perceived biases, the BBC does not belong to the state at all. It belongs to the people. I know this sounds like the kind of thing a naive unreconstructed bleeding heart liberal like me would say, but it is true. We, the people, pay the licence fee. The BBC Trust is responsible to us. Its remit is to ‘represent the views of the licence-fee payers’ and to ‘ensure the public interest’. Nowhere in even the smallest print of its charter does it say that it must ‘keep Gordon Brown happy’ or ‘advance the devious plots of the State’.

Far from pursuing Orwellian mind-meld, the BBC provides the British public with the most trusted news brand in the world. If you asked the man on the Clapham omnibus, or the lady on the N17, whether they felt manipulated and brainwashed by the BBC, they would both look at you as if you needed strong medication and a lie down in a darkened room. What is even more interesting is that, earlier in the speech, in the less mad part, Murdoch insists that he trusts ‘consumers’ above all. It is his mantra: trust the people. The people trust the BBC. Which slightly busts open his entire argument.

The BBC, like that other beloved British institution, the NHS, is not perfect. BBC3 is a joke. The great dramas that used to stalk BBC1 are now rare as hen’s teeth. Auntie has never offered any contemporary series as beautifully written and compelling as The Wire or The West Wing. The comedy on Radio Four is often frankly embarrassing – Count Arthur Strong, anyone? But against all that are the shining jewels of the BBC – The Today Programme, Question Time, Newsnight, everything David Attenborough has ever done. There is John Simpson and Jeremy Paxman and the entire Dimbleby family. ‘Richard Dimbleby,’ says my mother. ‘That was the voice of the BBC. I remember that hushed voice, as if the Queen must not hear.’ Would any free market, consumer-driven, profit-led organisation ever, in any country, produce a series such as In Our Time, where Melvyn Bragg sits down once a week with a panel of professors and discusses everything from quantum physics to The Peasants’ Revolt? And on radio, where no one can even see his magnificent hair?

The BBC produces some absolute rubbish, but it also does things no privately owned corporation would consider. For all The Sun’s vocal support of Our Brave Boys, would the Murdochs provide something such as the British Forces Broadcasting Service, where the BBC devotes two channels to programmes for the troops serving overseas? Or set up a Gaelic language television channel in Scotland as the BBC did last year? Would any profit-driven organisation run the equivalent of the BBC Asian network? Which private company would keep the World Service going? What would happen to the Persian network, which proved so pivotal during the recent events in Iran?

In his final, bizarre, ringing sentence, James Murdoch says: ‘The only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.’ I could parse that until I was blue in the face, but I am not going to insult your intelligence. A child of ten can understand that profit is not a moral indicator, or a driver of anything. Profit is just itself; it is hard cash; it is reward for a successful business. It guarantees nothing except pay packets and investor dividends. To take this amazingly idiotic logic to its final conclusion, you would have to accept that all non-profit organisations, from Amnesty International to Medicins Sans Frontiers are, by definition, deprived of independence. In fact, you could argue that large corporations built exclusively on the profit motive are utterly dependent: on the whims of their proprietors, the shifting sands of public opinion, the unexpected lurches of global finance. And also, just because I’m on the subject: independent of what? The more I read that sentence, the more meaningless it becomes.

What Murdoch clearly wants is a model like that of America, where there is little regulation and no BBC. There is poor NPR, which struggles courageously on through the brave new world, but has nothing like the scope and range of the BBC and is reduced to begging its subscribers for cash. The rest of the radio landscape is dominated by the shoutiest of shouty voices, extremist nuts, and Rush Limbaugh. We have Melvyn, they get Rush. America produces some of the best television programmes in the world, but the actual watching experience is marred by advertisements every seven minutes, so one minute you are watching Jack Bauer and his miraculous never-needs-recharging mobile telephone, and the next moment you are watching an advertisement instructing you how to cure your piles or get a better erection. I am going to go out on a limb and say that the major US news networks cannot hold a candle to the BBC. Because of the profit motive that Murdoch adores so much, serious, respected news anchors like Brian Williams have to insert snazzy little showbiz items into their broadcasts in a way that Huw Edwards would never have to put up with.

Then there are the wilder shores of cable. CNN, the little station that could, had its moment of glory during the first Gulf War, when its reporters bravely stayed in Baghdad under fire and scooped the huge organisations who had pulled out. Now it seems to me a bit of a joke, with gimmicky sets, and reporters reduced to reading out Twitter feeds on air rather than doing any actual reporting. (I love Twitter, but I am not sure that its place is in a serious news programme.) MSNBC sometimes rises to great heights: Rachel Maddow is currently mounting a spirited campaign to investigate the organisations behind the ‘grass roots’ opposition to President Obama’s healthcare plan, but it is spotty and prone to sensationalism and sentimentality. It is often entertainment, more than news.

And then, of course, we have Fox. If Fox News admitted that it was a station devoted to the opinions and desires of the Right, it would be perfectly fine. Free speech and all that. But its slogan is: fair and balanced. In its quest to fulfil its remit of ‘we report, you decide’ it allowed one of its stars, the perpetually strange Glenn Beck, who appears to be having a prolonged nervous breakdown on air, to say that Barack Obama is a ‘racist’ who ‘hates white people’. He offered no objective reporting to back up this extraordinary statement. I suppose at least you could say it meets James Murdoch’s definition of independence: even the old Digger would not put that particular worm into Glenn Beck’s seething brain. The most damning indictment of American reporting, where the free market model holds sway, is a recent Time survey which revealed that the satirist Jon Stewart was America’s most trusted source of news. This would be like British viewers saying that Ian Hislop or The Now Show was their most trusted news source.

I admit my own bias freely. I love and revere the BBC. I cannot imagine life without Radio Four, which is on in every room in my house. I am permanently grateful for Lord Reith and his founding notion that broadcasting should educate, inform and entertain. But I suspect I am not alone. There is a reason that the Beeb is a cherished part of British national life, where Sky is not. Britons are not a bunch of crazed statist commies, as they have been lately depicted in certain parts of the American media, but I think they understand very well that there is more to life than profit. If recent economic events have shown us anything, it is that profit is not always king. Perhaps I am getting a little too misty-eyed, but I actually think that James Murdoch should be grateful to the BBC. It is the gold standard, which inspires all its competitors to do better. It may be the single most important reason that Sky News in Britain is so stratospherically superior to Fox News in America, with respected journalists doing proper journalism, instead of angry men having mid-life crises in front of a live audience. Far from the ‘chilling effect’ that Murdoch warns of, you could argue that good old Auntie has a galvanising effect, making everyone else pull up their socks in true British tradition. And so, everyone wins.

A hostess speaks

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

As you might have noticed, I have had guests all summer long. One of the very few things that makes me sad about my decision to flee London and end up six hundred miles north of Hyde Park Corner is that I miss my old friends. Luckily, the hardier of them will sometimes pack up their entire family, get on plane train or automobile ('is it Charnock Richard services that I should avoid on the M6?), and pitch up at my front door. This of course leads to a girlish ecstasy of excitement, but also, equally of course, a hard dose of hostess anxiety.

The hostess anxiety has several roots. Like those Jewish and Italian mammas who may only exist in our imaginations, I associate good cooking and the taking of pains (flowers in the bedroom, the best sheets) with love, and I want to shower my friends with the love. Also, the poor things have flogged all the way from the south, often with small people in tow, so the least they deserve is as much comfort as I can give them. There might be an echo of childhood memories of my mother, who spent at least a week getting ready for guests, religiously laying out the finest towels, heavy glass bottles of Malvern water by the bed, biscuits in a little tin in case anyone should awake, starving, in the night, and a sheaf of writing paper, should someone be suddenly struck by the urgent need to write a letter. Perhaps there is a batsqueak of defensiveness, a small desire to prove that despite leaving the naked city behind I can still live the good life, so far north. And then there is a massive dose of general overexcitement, because visitors are still a relative rarity, and a delightful excuse to make detailed menu plans, show off my latest culinary invention, get out the loveliest linen.

I am not nearly as anal as I used to be. There were times when the entire house would have to be reorganised for about a month in advance. Now I am older and more blurred around the edges: I understand that my friends accept that I live in a constant state of mild muddle. There is no point trying to hide the piles of paper in my office, or the books that live on the stairs. They are not coming to see Martha Stewart, after all. It seems that they will go on forgiving my foibles, even though I shall never turn into the Organised Person of my dreams.

In being a hostess, as in life, it is the little things that often make the most difference. I think it is reductive and stupid to make rules for these things, just another way to make women feel inadequate about their lives. Ignore firmly any sentence that starts: a good hostess must... Having people to stay does not have to look like something out of a glossy magazine. The best fun can be had with nothing more than some good conversation, a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. But if I were to come over all Martha-ish, these would be my own indispensible elements for a charming weekend:

Flowers by the bed.

This one definitely comes from my old mum. It does not have to be a Constance Spry arrangement; I favour a small Moroccan tea glass filled with pretty things from the garden, usually, in my case, mint and sage as a base, and then whatever is flowering at the time - most recently, a white hydrangea, a deep purple geranium and some marjoram. This is the smallest of the small things, but it is a telling act of care, and also makes you feel tremendously domestically goddesslike as you do it If you do not have a garden, or it is the dead of winter, a little glass of tulips is very fetching, and quite cheap.

A well-stocked bathroom.

I live in a rented house, and my long-suffering guests have to put up with a tiny bathroom with woodchip on the walls and an avocado suite. They all say, sweetly, that it reminds them of the 1970s, when they were small, but still. To divert them from the aesthetic horror, I fill the bathroom with as many luxurious products as I can lay my hands on. They get Floris and Jo Malone and huge bars of scented Portuguese soap. Also: far too many towels. I think you can never have enough towels. Another nice thing is to provide basic items they might have forgotten to pack, so there are always spare toothbrushes, toothpaste, cotton wool, moisturiser, body cream etc etc. I do a little hotelly bowl filled with needles and thread, cotton buds, and what I believe are called 'sundries'. No one ever uses them, but it gives me inordinate pleasure.

The good linen.

Before the credit crunch caught us all in its snapping teeth, I had a rush of blood to the head and bought some actual linen sheets (quite good value from The White Company sale, if you have any money left). These are kept for best and proudly brought out when the visitors come. I am quite hard line when it comes to bedding. I think a spare room should have pristine white pressed sheets, at least four good pillows, and plenty of extra blankets (one house I once stayed in was so cold that I was reduced to getting up in the night and putting on all my clothes, including socks, so that I could get to sleep).

The good linen, seen here in action. That pretty wallcovering is a Chinese-style fabric, designed by my very own talented sister, if I can say that without sounding too swanky.

The good food.

It does not have to be fancy. I used to break out the fillet of beef the moment guests arrived; I do live in Aberdeen Angus country, after all. Now it is more likely to be salmon fishcakes and roast chicken with smashed potatoes with olive oil and basil. In some ways, the simpler the food is, the better, because there is more time for chatting. I think the only rule is that it should be made with love. I have given up doing three elaborate courses. Now, people get a little soup in a tea glass instead of a first course, or some homemade salsa with tortilla chips, then one good main course, followed by watercress salad and cheese in the continental manner, and some Green and Black chocolate to finish. If you kill yourself making a la di dah three course dinner with all the trimmings you will just end up feeling flushed and faintly martyrish, which is not the point at all. Where I do veer into Martha territory is breakfast, where I get quite carried away - berries with natural yoghurt, sausages and bacon and tomatoes, and soda bread hot from the oven with special Deeside jam. After that, I usually have to have a little lie down.

A free period.

Even though I mostly want to spend every waking moment with my lovely guests, compensating for the weeks we spend apart, I have learnt that this does not make for the most successful visit. It can be too much, and everyone, especially me, gets fretful and overstimulated. So my new rule is that after lunch everyone gets a free period. I usually go and lie down on my bed, like an old lady, either reading a book or having a little disco nap. The guests will either mount an expedition of their own - a trip to the bookshop at Ballater, or a beautiful drive along the south Deeside road, where they may see Highland cows and black sheep and even, if they are very lucky, an eagle - or just lounge about in the sun, should there be sun, or, in the winter, sit quietly by the fire with a newspaper. Then we are all doubly delighted to see each other again after tea.

So, my dear readers, there are my thoughts on the art of the hostess. It is not exactly Lady Otteline Morrell, but it seems to work for me. You will have your own theories and strategies. My sister, who can be stricter than I, boils it all down to one, iron-clad principle: guests, like fish, go off after three days.

The house, ready for guests, complete with slumbering dogs on the newly plumped-up sofa. They have NO sense of decorum.

Sarah's lovely children, William and Beatrice, who came to stay this week, watching something very serious on the television, with, of course, dogs in their usual position.

A fleeting salad

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Sarah and her family have been staying for a few days, so I have had no time for blogging. Am now of course in post-hostess exhaustion, so my brain is not working properly. All I can really think of is food. At the risk of going all G Paltrow on your ass, I am giving you my version of a lovely fresh end of summer salad to say goodbye to the dog days of August.

This is not an Official Salad. I just made it up, from what was in the fridge. I like it because it is crisp and sharp and it looks pretty on the plate.

Take a selection of whatever green leaves you love the most. Add a few sliced radishes, a little diced cucumber, a chopped avocado, and a crumble of feta cheese. A herb is nice: flat leaf parsley, or a little torn basil. Dress with a good grassy olive oil, a squeeze of lemon and some sea salt. And for a final je ne sais quoi, scatter some toasted pine nuts on the top. I know pine nuts are terribly 1990s, but I love them, I can't help it. And I have never understood why food is considered something that goes in and out of fashion. Bring on the coronation chicken and trifle, I say.

This is the kind of salad you can play around with - some sliced heart of palm or artichoke hearts might enhance the experience; you could try manchego instead of feta. My only caveat would be, as with all good salads, do not throw in too many different ingredients, or the whole thing collapses into a mess. I wish you, as always, good eating.

The unbridled joy of soda bread

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I have absolutely no talent for making risen breads. It is rather lovely to get to the age when you may admit frankly to your limitations. I am never going to get the trick of anything involving yeast, or kneading; for years all efforts have come out flat, and sad, and just plain wrong. It is clearly not a genetic thing: one of my most vivid childish memories is of my mother's glorious bread. There is a theory that it is to do with the temperature of your hands: hot for bread, cool for pastry. I can do pastry, so perhaps that is the answer. But whatever the reason, the lack of homemade bread in my house always made me a little melancholy. And then, one banner day, I discovered that what I do have the knack for is soda bread.

Soda bread is often seen, quite inexplicably, as the sad, mousy cousin of breads. It does not have the panache of the ciabatta, or the sophistication of the sourdough, or the international va va voom of the baguette. The commercial sort is always rather dry and disgusting. But made in your own kitchen, with a little love and care, it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It is also fabulously easy.

I have guests arriving today, and it has become tradition that a new loaf of soda bread is presented to visitors like an amulet. It is perfect with cheese, delightful with soup, and ambrosial toasted for breakfast with Marmite. And it is the ideal thing for a harried hostess, because it takes literally five minutes to make, half an hour to bake, and comes out perfect every time.

I have experimented for months to find the perfect version, and I think I have finally cracked it; the secret is slightly more white flour than you might think, and the addition of oatmeal, which came about by pure serendipity when I saw a new flour I liked the look of in my local shop.

My very own soda bread:

I do the amounts by sight. Just imagine the size of loaf you want, and use the corresponding amount of flour. I can't be bothered with weighing and measuring, and there is something satisfying about extemporising. So - into a large white mixing bowl put two thirds Doves Farm strong white bread flour, and one third fine oatmeal. I have discovered the most delicious oatmeal from a little place called Golspie Mill in the highlands of Scotland. You can get it in most good food shops, but if you have trouble just use a good strong wholemeal flour instead. Scatter over a large pinch of sea salt, a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, and mix everything up. Add a tablespoon of natural yoghurt. This is important as it activates the raising ingredient. Then pour in enough water to make a lovely loose dough - not too sticky, but slightly on the wet side of firm, otherwise the bread will be too dry. I do this again by sight, just adding the water until I get the consistency I want. Flour your hands and then take the dough and shape it into a flat round loaf. Put it in a baking tin, dust with a little flour on top, make a deep cross in it with a knife, and bake at 180 degrees for half an hour. To see if it is ready, tap it on the bottom; a good hollow sound should greet you. It may need another five minutes. This is for a small or medium loaf; if you are making a very big one, it will take forty minutes to cook properly.

It is best hot from the oven. To keep it, wrap it in foil or clingfilm. Because there are absolutely no preservatives, it will not keep its freshness into a second day, but it will make delicious toast. The most fun, when you have visitors, is to get up early and make it before breakfast, so they come downstairs to the smell of baking bread. I know I am straying into dangerous domestic goddess territory here, but it really does make everyone very happy, most especially me.

The view from the train

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Back from doing an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival, of which more later, and too tired from that and the emotion of England winning The Ashes to do a proper post. But I thought you might like to see what I saw from my train window on Friday, as I travelled down the east coast from Aberdeen. Sometimes I think when the sun shines on Scotland there is nowhere else I would rather be. I felt very happy and lucky, anyhow.

Terrible admission

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Having gone all poncy about the loveliness of Twitter and the idiocy of those who bash it all the time, I must make full disclosure. I rather pompously said in my last post that I try NOT to write about my own life but endeavour to provide Tweets of general interest. Having checked my Twitter feed, I see that I talk about myself all the time - my dogs, my swallows, my pea soup, my rare moments of Scottish sunshine. Oh, the fantasies we entertain about our own actions. So I give you full mea culpa. I still maintain my central point: no one has to read it. If I go on like this, nobody will.

And now, my dear old things, I am returning to the cricket. If Twitter is good enough for Aggers, it is good enough for me.

Into the Twitter trenches, redux

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Dear old Janet Street Porter has leapt onto the creaking Twitter-is-crap bandwagon, just before it disappears out of sight down a dusty road. Her piece is so silly that at first I did not think it worth writing about. I wanted to write about the cricket, or the recession, or the simple beauty of a perfect loaf of soda bread instead. But the little Twitter worm has been twitching away in my brain since Sunday, and so I must rush into the breach or I shall develop an irrevocable nervous tic.

Here is what Janet says: ‘anyone who suffers from the desire to communicate exactly what they are doing and thinking every moment of the day in fewer than 140 characters is best described as a twat’. Delighted by this opening salvo, she goes on to trot out the exact same exhausted arguments that all anti-Twitter columnists so adore: it is mindless, it is narcissistic, it is banal. She takes a dangerous swipe at ‘techno bore’ Stephen Fry, which is just asking for it. If Stephen Fry is a bore, then Janet Street Porter is Dull McDull of the Clan Mogadon. She is furious that proper reviews by proper reviewers are being replaced by one line tweets about cultural events, or that proper conversation is reduced to ‘knee-jerk reactions’. I am frankly amazed that she does not insist that the entire world is going to the dogs.

This is so staggeringly stupid that it almost does not merit a reply. I shall give one anyway, with a weary, patient nod of my head. The first and most obvious point is that no one, not even the most crazed, self-absorbed, absolutely-nothing-else-to-do Twitter users communicate exactly what they are doing at every moment of every day. To say so is just babyish and wrong and asinine. It also betrays a crashing ignorance of the nature of Twitter, which leads to the observation that it is slightly odd to mount a scathing assault on something of which you know so very little. But the more important point, the one that none of the Twitter bashers seem to understand, is that Twitter is not replacing anything. The idea that once you start tweeting you may never again have an interesting conversation or a complex opinion or a deep thought about the human condition is blatantly incorrect. People who use Twitter also read broadsheets and follow politics and have intricate jobs and fascinating friends and rich lives. It is not, as the business people like to say, a zero sum game. There is also this excessively curious idea that no one in real life is ever mindless, or banal, or narcissistic. No, no, it is only on the evil, soul-sucking Twitter that solipsism comes out and does the fandango. Has Janet never been cornered by the pub bore? She has spent her life in London media circles, where there are certain people who make a life’s work of the narcissistic. Do I really have to say again that Twitter is an exact mirror of life, where there are the bores and the non-bores, the generous and the mean, the self-promoters and the self-deprecators, the quirky and the pedestrian? Does she think the power of Twitter is so great that the moment it catches you in its drooling jaws it replaces your brain with a suppurating mass of green gloop? She starts to sound like those Area 51 enthusiasts who believe that half the population of Nevada has been kidnapped by space aliens and replaced by a pod.

The other oddity is that every exponent of the Twitter-is-your-very-own-secret-satan school misses the glaringly obvious aspect of the whole enterprise. Twitter is a finely honed Darwinian tool. It is absolutely survival of the fittest. If you are banal and mindless and narcissistic, no one will follow you. Janet need not worry; the dullards may tweet to their heart’s content about their bagels and their office chairs and what they ate for breakfast, but only one man and dog will read them, and the dog will almost certainly be doing so by mistake. Bores are ruthlessly cut. Ironically, this is much easier on Twitter than in life. At a cocktail party, you have to make up some convoluted excuse about seeing your second cousin twice removed across the crowded room; in Twitter, you merely press a button, with no need for mendacity or bad manners. If it is mediocrity that Janet hates so, she should be celebrating Twitter: it is a harmless outlet for the solipsists. They may warble away into the empty ether without bothering anyone. A possible unintended consequence is that, having got their quotidian concerns off their chests online, they may be less inclined to corner strangers at the bus stop to bang on about subjects of no possible interest. Twitter may, in fact, be saving us from the bores.

In every era, in every corner of society, there have always been exhibitionists. Look at me, look at me, see what I am doing; let me tell you what I think, look at my interesting hat, see how I can tap dance. They have found any possible outlet for their cherished self-expression – the stage, a public square, a newspaper, a sandwich board. As a writer, I have to admit myself to their number. (When I was small, I was told often to stop showing off; ‘oh do pipe down,’ my exasperated grandmother once told me as I rattled on and on about something which could only interest my six year old self.) When asked, which is not very often, I give interviews, I have my photograph taken, I go on the wireless to offer my view of the world. (My proudest moment is when I used the word ‘anal’ on Woman’s Hour. Jenni Murray very bravely took it on the chin. She was asking me about pornography, after all.) What is interesting about my own experience of Twitter is I find it has a chilling effect on my dangerous tendencies to egotism. I purposely do not talk about my latest book or my newest blog post or any kind review that has come my way. I quite often do not talk at all about what I am doing, instead tweeting about something out in the world that has caught my interest, and might be of interest to others. I try very hard to be either amusing or informative or slightly left-field. I do not always succeed, but the attempt is there. I am not certain where this imperative comes from. I have the same feeling that I have about this blog: I am communicating to complete strangers, who guard their precious time; if I am asking them to give me a moment out of their life, I had better give them something good in return.

Twitter is a series of bulletins from an astonishing variety of lives. It does not stand in for life, but is a cherry on the cake of existence. It is a little like the old traditions of sending postcards or telegrams, two great British habits. In my Twitter feed I get blasts from foodies, politicos, mothers, feminists, broadcasters, The Young People, activists, dog lovers, charity workers and the Mayor of London himself. I am in communication with people from America, Rome, New Zealand, Iran, Belgium and Canada, as if I have finally achieved my adolescent dream of being a citizen of the world. My months on Twitter have educated me about things I knew nothing about: the poet Frank O’Hara, the dusty towns of Sicily, ballroom dancing in Pakistan in the 1960s, the streets of Tehran, the sleepy suburbs of New Jersey. The nature of Twitter means that you do not get much detail, but your interest is piqued, and you may then roam across the wide prairies of the interweb until you are educated in any novel area you may wish to explore. Twitter is not War and Peace, nor was it meant to be. But all human life is there, and to knock it for its limitations is as vacuous as saying that a haiku is a travesty of poetry. There is value in brevity; pithy is not pathetic. Do I really have to write this all over again? Is it not time that the droning critics got onto their banality ponies and galloped off into the sunset?

Postscript: should you by any chance have missed the previous Twitter rants, and have a masochistic desire to catch up on my Tweetish despatches from the front line, here they all are. (Amazingly many; I am starting to think the nice people at Twitter should be sending me a fat cheque for services rendered.)

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/04/twitter-random-thoughts-from-broad.html

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-random-thoughts-on-twitter-young.html

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-thoughts-on-twitter-force-for-good.html

http://taniakindersley.blogspot.com/2009/07/in-which-i-get-rather-cross-or-people.html

All right, that's quite enough narcissistic self-promotion for one day. Now I must go to Twitter and tweet about how fabulous and fascinating I am....