Writing Workshop: Day One

Posted by Tania Kindersley.


This week, I am giving a writers’ workshop as part of the Aboyne Arts Festival. I thought that it would be an interesting experiment to give you an edited, written version of what I am talking about to the class each day, so that you can follow along from wherever you are in the world. It is quite a lot to read, and you may decide that this does not work in blog form, but I am going to try it out and see where it takes us. Let me know your thoughts.

Introduction.

Over the week, I am going to talk about writing in the abstract, the way a writer’s mind works, how to think of yourself as a writer, how perhaps to skew your perspective on the world just a little bit. Then I will give you some technical hints and tips and general advice – adjectives and semi-colons and narrative techniques. Then I might talk about the new places for you to develop your writing, blogs and social networking sites, in particular Twitter, which I think is much more interesting than most old media types seem to. Finally I shall give you some basic ideas about how to get published, how the world of publishing works, and why you should not do anything without an agent.

We are going to do some quick writing exercises to free up your writing muscles and get the fear monkey off your back. All writers live with fear, mostly the fear that the perfect book that lives in their head will never, ever make it to the page. Something happens between the head and the fingers – you sit down to type and that pristine story is gone, as if there is a vital neurone missing somewhere, a connection that did not quite fire.

And there are the other fears, that you will never get published again and end up broke and forgotten and people will give you pitying looks in the streets and the only time you will ever see any evidence that you existed is when you occasionally see a lone copy of one of your books in the remainder bin. So there’s quite a lot of terror to go round. But what you have to learn is to get it away from you while you are actually writing, to master the inner critic, who needs only the smallest excuse to start marching around your head bitching about how you really will never fully master the intricacies of the English language and you might as well give it all up and do something interesting with sheep.

The Fear.

The Fear takes many forms. The most profound is the secret, crippling conviction that you are not allowed to be a writer unless you have certain qualifications. You must be born in the right place, to the right parents, with the right education. You must also have a specific God-given talent, a feeling for words, the equivalent of a musical ear. The other form of the Fear is an internalised memory, of teachers mostly, telling you that no, no, it is not done that way, and if you do not do it in the correctly prescribed way you will never amount to anything. There are rules, there are criteria, there are things that people expect. All of this is nonsense. I cannot stress this enough. I will say it again: all of this is nonsense. The point about writing is that if you are willing to work hard enough, to listen closely to your own voice, to push past the terror, you will be able to do it. I’m not saying it will be easy. All good writers know that writing is hard. Bad writing is a simple matter, you just have to put your fingers on the keyboard and go. Serious writing, and writing is serious, is difficult. But if you put in the time, it is not beyond your reach.

So you have to bash past the voices in your head that tell you you don’t have the right stuff to be a writer, that you didn’t do it the correct way at school, that you don’t have the right pedigree. Start thinking of yourself as a writer; describe yourself as one, if you are brave enough. A useful psychological exercise is literally to give yourself permission. All humans need ritual and ceremony: send yourself a card, have a private inaugural of your writing life. Imagine your inner critic as an actual person, a bitter old crone called Glenda, and each morning before you begin to write, banish her from the room. Swear as much as you like while you do this, you will find it cathartic. Anything to crush the idea that somehow you do not have the right equipment, that you are not allowed. There is no secret password, it is not a club that only a select few may join. Anyone with fingers and an inquiring mind can write; it is a craft and the more you do it, the better you will get. Some of you will start off with a natural advantage, in the way that some people have an acute visual sense or a feeling for mathematics, but if you concentrate hard enough, you can produce good prose, even if you do not have lunch with Martin Amis every day.

The best way I have found to get around the fear, this idea that somehow you are not permitted to be a writer, is to do what writers do (and I don’t mean get drunk at parties and punch people in the nose and sleep with persons who are married to someone else). You need to write. Find a desk, set a time, close the door, turn off the telephone and do it. Writing is like a muscle, you need to flex it every day or it will grow soft and flabby. Good writing does not fall out of the sky like magical rain; it is built from day after day after day of honing that writing muscle until it is ready for the Olympics. Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting idea that genius is not born, not a genetic freak or a random lightning bolt of extreme talent, but that it is developed after ten thousand hours of practice. I don’t know where he got the figure of ten thousand from, but it sounds about right to me. The only reason I can now carry a tune is because I have been doing this thing pretty much every day for twenty years. I cannot just order myself a brilliant Virginia Woolf mind, but I can damn well train up those writing muscles until they hurl me down the track like Linford Christie in his pomp.

Authenticity.

Authenticity is possibly the single most important thing in good writing. By authenticity I mean that when you write you must express your actual true self, not some dressed up Sunday best version of what you think a writer should sound like. Any fakery or phoniness will destroy any attempt at good writing. You have to have the audacity and the faith to be absolutely yourself. If you start using long words and fancy phrases because you think they sound ‘literary’, you are doomed. Ernest Hemingway built an entire glittering career on words of one syllable.

Tell the stories that fascinate you (as someone whose name I cannot remember once said: if your writing does not keep you up nights it will not keep anyone else up either); use the words that you love; map the people you understand; throw about the ideas that stimulate you. The moment you start thinking about an audience, or agents, or publishers, or, God forbid, the market, your writing will die on the page. Writing is like a dog like that, one false move, and it lies down on the carpet and plays dead. The false note is death to writing, because the readers get it at once, they have some superhuman radar that lets them know when it is not your heart that is in it, and they, like Dorothy Parker, do not just put the book down, they hurl it with great force. As they damn well should. If you have to put on a front because you don’t trust yourself to be interesting enough why should anyone be interested in you? So the paradox is, and writing is filled with paradox, that in order to give the greatest amount of pleasure you have to be solipsistic – the only person you should ever write for is you. If you entrance and delight and tickle yourself, chances are that you will have the same effect on other people.

The other paradox is that while you are having all this belief in your one true self and trusting your instincts, you must also work constantly at refining and developing your craft. I know it sounds madly pretentious and phoney to talk about ‘your craft’, but that is the best description for what it is. So while you should trust your voice, you should not be so overcome by its innate brilliance that you neglect to throw a whole bucket of work at it. This is what second and third and fourth drafts are for. It is here that you may cut and polish and edit. You should not confuse self-belief, which you should welcome in, with self-indulgence, which you must ruthlessly exclude. The best writers in the world will write a rotten or pointless or redundant paragraph. What makes them good is that they have the discipline to cut that paragraph and not look back. Your words are precious but they are not set in stone. You must hunt down worn phrases and repetition and waffle like a beagle and throw them out. But before you do that you need to develop a trust in your very own voice, your unique thoughts, your own ideas, or you will have nothing to work on but a poor pastiche that struts and frets its hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.

An exercise:

Now, try a five minute writing exercise. It can be a snapshot, a haiku, a stream of consciousness; it can be completely abstract, just words on a page, a very specific description of something, a memory, a conversation, even a miniature story. You can write a story in six words, they had a competition for it once. ‘Man bites dog, dog tells all’ is a story, even though it plainly breaks the law of physics and involves a canine who can speak. But it is a story.

There is no SHOULD in this exercise. There is no A plus. It’s just to loosen you up and shake the demons and the gremlins out and to get your hand moving across the page. It’s to get rid of any self-consciousness and fear. I want you to do it without editing, without thought, without stopping; work on pure instinct and see where it takes you. The point of this exercise is to get past the Fear, to let your one true voice out, and also to see your strengths. You will be able to see if you have a vivid visual sense or a facility for language or a natural feel for rhythm (rhythm is very important in writing; one syllable too many or too few, and a sentence will collapse on itself; the exact right number of beats, and it will sing). Let your mind run free. You may surprise yourself.

I’m going to give you a word and I want you to write for five minutes and the word is Blue.

A practical note.

Possibly the best book on writing ever written is almost a hundred years old and still in print. It is Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. And the most valuable piece of practical advice that she gives in that marvellous book is that every morning, before you are even really awake, you should roll out of bed, go straight to your desk, and write without thought or reflection for twenty minutes. The idea is that you tone up your writing muscle and you also access your subconscious, because you are still in a dreaming state; the hard, ruthless, rational part of your brain has not yet had time to kick in, and so you will find hidden jewels, unexpected ideas, thoughts you did not even know you had.

I have a slightly refined version of this, since it is not always possible to write the moment you wake (baths must be taken, breakfast made, children taken to school), and, also, you may find twenty minutes is a long time to do free writing in this way. My version is to set aside ten minutes at any quiet time of the day, vow to yourself that no one will ever see what you are about to write, thus giving yourself absolute freedom to make a mess and embarrass yourself, and then write fast about anything at all that is in your head until your time is up. This trains up your writing muscle, helps you vanquish the Fear (no one will ever see, so no one can point and laugh), and, most important of all, builds up the habit of writing. Habits actually create grooves in the brain, worn connections between neurones, which is why they are so hard to break. But a good habit, developed over time, can make something feel like second nature to you. You begin to get withdrawal symptoms if you do not do it. In this way, writing becomes not a chore or a duty or something to be dreaded, but a familiar, known, loved friend.

One final note:

Please forgive any editing errors in this. I have to prepare for tomorrow’s class, and very much want to get this up on the blog, so I have not been as rigorous as I would like about doing my usual edit for grammar and repetition and general typing. Not quite practising what I preach, but maybe the best rule of all in writing is that rules are made to be broken. Any piece of prose without a little transgression in it is a sad thing.

In which I share with the group

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Hello, my name is Tania and I am an addict. Today I have had to face that I am a writing - more specifically typing - junkie and an intervention may have to be mounted.

Yesterday, startled by the arrival of the kind Asda man with the sort of dull but necessary shopping that I like to delegate to the internets, I spilt a glass of water on my poor, chugging computer. It was four years old and had been getting rather creaky for some time, but I am not one of those web 2.0 people who update their hardware every five minutes (where do all the old laptops go?), and I loved its shiny old keyboard and its sleek black design and it was good enough for me. But the water was its death. The shift key went, and the page down key, and the return key, and possibly most tragic of all in my punctuation-obsessed universe, the semi-colon key. Imagine a life without semi-colons; it is unthinkable. (I would like you to know that I did not put that semi-colon into that sentence for comic effect, it was just muscle memory.) More fatal than all of those, some of which I might have been able to work around, was the loss of the letter L. I am always banging on about not taking things for granted; I like to make mental lists of the tiny things in life that bring me joy and make everything possible, like opposable thumbs; I pride myself on taking pleasure in the small things. But I had never, ever contemplated a life without the letter L in it. Every time that I write the word Love, I shall now pause and give thanks for the 17th letter of the alphabet.

So, today was Sunday, the day of rest. An unexpected sun was blazing gaudily out of the Scottish sky. My plan was to prepare for a workshop I am giving next week, and sit outside on the grass with the dogs, and do my work with pen and ink. I write often in a notebook, I am not a slave to the machine. But, dear readers, I could not do it. A day without typing turned out to be impossible. I could not put up a blog post, or send out a tweet on Twitter, or send emails, or just sit and write at my computer, which I do every day. My addiction was so out of control that I found myself in my car, on the hottest day of the year, making a seventy mile round trip to the airless palace of technology that is PC World. In all this beautiful weather, I spent an hour, voluntarily, in a room without natural light. (The owners of PC World should be prosecuted for subjecting their employees to cruel and unusual treatment, making them work in a place without windows like that.)

Like all addicts, by the time I arrived, I was shaky and irritable with withdrawal symptoms. I grew baffled by choice. Very pale people kept following me about trying to sell me things. (I can't blame them, in that environment, they are probably all suffering from the beginnings of rickets from lack of vitamin D.) All the computers were either ugly, stupidly expensive, or had nasty stiff keyboards. 'I want shiny keys,' I said to one man, who looked at me as if I were speaking Urdu. 'I'm a writer, you see,' I said, which left him no wiser. If you are bashing away at a keyboard all day, it must be the right keyboard, neither too firm nor too loose; it must feel right under the fingers or the thing is hopeless. I love the fact that I can touch type at seventy words a minute, when I'm really cooking; I love the sensation of the keys under my fingers, and the small clicking noise they make when I hit them. All this must be right. So I kept testing and pondering and asking plaintively, like Greta Garbo, if I could be left alone.

There was a model I liked, but it was over my price range. 'Could you knock fifty quid off?' I asked one of the pale, sunless people. 'No,' he said. 'But I could throw in Norton for a discounted price.' Didn't he know I was in cold turkey? 'I hate Norton,' I said. I was rude; I am never rude. 'I would pay not to have Norton.' More incomprehending staring followed. 'There is a recession on,' I said to absolutely no effect. So then I went and looked at a bigger, cheaper model. I picked it up to check how heavy it was and set off the burglar alarm. 'I have to pick it up,' I said, as all the pale people came running over.

I finally decided. An hour, how could it have taken a whole hour of my life that I shall never get back? Then there was a lot of faffing around with guarantees and is this the correct address and shall we set up a direct debit for aftercare. 'Can't I just pay?' I cried, desperate. 'I don't want to give you my full address, I just want to pay and go.' At this point, the manager was called.

In the end, I escaped, with my beautiful, red, slightly too big Dell in its crisp brown box. My addiction was fed; I could type again. The semi-colon was restored to me. I hit the open road, and started smiling all over my face. I realised that even though it was insane to be compelled to drive all the way to Aberdeen on the sunniest day of the year, if I had not I would not have seen the country in all its pomp. The grass was the green of emeralds and the mountains were a distant blue and I passed gangs of pretty sheep and a clutch of Highland coos (as I now call cows, in deference to my adopted land) gazing out from under their long fringes with that slightly quizzical look that they all carry. I thought: people come from miles away to make this drive, it is one of the great trips of the world. And to make it even sweeter, I have a pristine new computer on my back seat, with a socking great 250 GB of memory and an L key that works.

In which I ask a question

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I was going to tell you all about my trip, but it’s a long and delicate story and would involve downloading pictures and I can’t find the cable (as usual). Also I had a little stomach bug yesterday and I’m a bit achy and my brain is still not in full gear. But since I have left you for so long, I can’t just have a terrible blank space, so I am offering my question for the day. Which is: why is it tacitly accepted that having power is such a perfectly marvellous thing?

I’m thinking of the young people out on the streets of Iran while the Mullahs cower in their bunkers wondering what the hell Twitter is. I’m thinking of Aung San Suu Kyi, whose birthday it is today, a slight, gently-spoken women who strikes such fear into the Burmese generals that they seize on any excuse to lock her up forever. I’m thinking of the two young female journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, sentenced to twelve years hard labour in a North Korean prison by a regime so paranoid and power-crazed that it will not allow outsiders anywhere near it, and lets its people starve while it sets off nuclear explosions.

In the reporting of all these stories, the absolute accepted fact is that the state actors will do absolutely anything to cling onto power because it is the holy grail, the golden ring, the ultimate prize. President Obama is routinely described as the most powerful man in the world, sometimes with admiration, sometimes with irony. But the real irony is that compared to the theocrats and the dictators and the generals, Obama has surprisingly little power. He has an electorate to deal with, an unpredictable Congress, and a right wing opposition which often seems frankly insane. He might be able to fly his lovely wife to a fabulous night out in New York, but he can’t stop an Iranian election being rigged, or prevent Aung San Suu Kyi from being incarcerated on bogus charges, or even get his own citizens out of North Korea. At home, I suspect he would quite like to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and endorse gay marriage, but he dare not, because of the residual power of the religious right. He will find, like any elected leader, that he must trim and search for the middle ground and wheel out his famous pragmatism, however much it might chafe against his more idealistic self. Yet he looks so much happier than all those leaders for life, with their hatchet faces and their empty eyes and their suspicious minds. I think what drives his opponents, foreign and domestic, wild with rage is that he actually looks as if he is enjoying himself.

My suspicion is that this is partly to do with his own character, but also because he understands very well the limits of his own power. He has eight years at most, and then he can settle down and write another book, which will give him and us a vast amount of pleasure, because he has a lovely feeling for prose. He said recently that his highest ambition was to be a good father. The problem for all the dear supreme leaders is that they will never have that luxury. They might not have read Shakespeare, but they know well enough to be afraid of the hungry lean men who are jealous of their supremacy. The flaw in absolute power is that it breeds absolute rivals. All dissent must be crushed, all challenges, imagined and real, eliminated, all rivals vanquished. Imagine how exhausting that must be; no wonder the tyrants look so twitchy and cross. If they make the mistake of not being just a bog standard dictator, but a religious zealot as well, then their waking hours are crammed with hunting down the homosexualists and adulteresses and infidels. There is simply no time for anything as small and human as pleasure.

Other, lesser forms of power are also accepted as desirable – the power of beauty or stardom or great riches. But the great beauties live in terror of age, which will stale their infinite variety, and the stars are stalked by nightmares of the time when their glitter will dim and the new kid on the block takes over their name in lights, and the tycoons tense themselves fearfully for the next crash.

For various reasons, I have been thinking a lot lately of the things over which we have absolutely no power: mortality, illness and age. These are the crux of the human condition, and the only things that arm us against them are love, family and friendship. There are other, smaller consolations: in my particular case, two elegant black dogs, the ability to make soup, anything that makes me laugh until my stomach hurts, and occasionally a large shot of vodka. The thought of power as a desirable attribute seems tiring and pointless. There are certain people out there who will always want it, but those people are fools, and I think it is important not to forget that fact. The underlying notion that runs through the news at the moment, that the quest for power is natural and explicable is, I believe, incorrect. It is inexplicable, because it leads only to misery.

Ah, that’s better. As always, tremendous thanks for letting me get that off my chest. I had not intended a rant, but a rant it turned out to be. I think it was one too many pictures of young Iranians being intimidated by the religious police. Tomorrow I shall be more temperate and calm. Or perhaps not.

Return

All the way back up the long, long prairies of concrete that are the M6 and the M74 I was thinking of the perfect First Blog Back. It would be philosophical, mildly comical, thought-provoking (of course) - a glorious, out-from-behind-the-red-velvet-curtain flourish of a return. I seem to remember it was going to involve musings on grief, friendship, love and the very nature of happiness. There was going to be a slightly unexpected picture of the dogs looking puzzled in the car park of the Westfield, just to keep you all on your toes.

But the thing is that after driving all day yesterday, on about four hours' sleep, hopped up on five double espressos, half a pack of pro-plus and a couple of Solpadeine, today I am so tired that I do not know what my name is. My brain has fallen into a primal fugue state, and all I can do is gaze out of the window like a fool and think that even though the sky is the colour of dirty washing up water, it is still my heavenly Scottish sky and I could not be more glad to see it. Everything is very green and still here, my garden is bosky and overgrown, the lawn all shaggy like one of those Hollywood actors who grows questionable facial hair 'for a part'. I have missed the lilac, but my peonies are blooming like gangbusters, in the deepest most improbable scarlet you ever saw. All I can do is contemplate these small, welcoming things, and sit very, very still until I can think serious thoughts again. Then you will get a proper, worth every moment of your time sort of post. Until then, I just wanted to say hello, and that I missed all my wonderful readers, and that I am home safely, and normal service will be resumed very shortly.

A brief adieu

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

To all the Dear Readers - Sitting in the hills of Cumbria, half way to the south, with the last gasp of internet access I shall have for I'm not quite certain how long I think I must not rudely and abruptly disappear without a Word of Warning, but send you a little so long. This is a slightly impromptu trip, and I am not quite sure how long I shall be away from home. I fear I shall have withdrawal symptoms from the blogosphere. I was becoming very excited about the comment boards had gone crazy after the madness that was Carol Sarler.

In the meantime, I hope Sarah will do a bit of posting to keep you entertained (she has a much, much busier life than I do, which is why she really only makes guest appearances) and please have a lovely browse through the archives.

Think of me on the road with two sleek black dogs lying on their black sheepskin rug in the back of a black car. Sadly a few scratches and an incipient attack of rust prevent the car from being quite as elegant as the dogs. But even so. I am thinking of dying my hair black just to fit in.

Missing you all, but I shall be back before you know it. Taniaxx

Oh, my last dying gasp before I sign off - Breaking news is that Simon Heffer will stand against his local MP. SIMON HEFFER!!!!!!!! And you know I never use exclamation marks (with apologies to Cassandra Castle). But - SIMON HEFFER!!!! I do think that more very, very angry middle-aged men is just exactly what our great democracy needs. No really, the crosser the better. Let's have P Hitchens for Chancellor and J Clarkson for Foreign Secretary. And then watch Mr Heffer lead us to victory.

Can't believe I am ending this on a note of ranting sarcasm. It was supposed to be all bluebirds and cherry blossom. Never watch BBC 24 whilst blogging, is my advice. Really am stopping now.

A heartbreaking work of staggering stupidity

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Four days ago, an article of astounding bigotry appeared in a national newspaper. A prolific journalist called Carol Sarler had seized on a survey carried out by Dr Caroline Gatrell, which reported that company bosses were refusing promotions to childless women. These freakish creatures were, according to the good doctor, seen as ‘cold, odd and somehow emotionally deficient in an almost dangerous way.’ Employers are apparently loathe to have women working in their offices who ‘lack an essential humanity’ (and really, who could blame them? It would be like working with lots and lots of cross-dressing Dick Cheneys.). Ms Sarler was overjoyed; at last, she too could come out of the closet and admit that she too thought childless women were bizarre beyond words. She was giddy with relief and delight. She now had permission to state proudly what she had long been thinking: when she looks at a woman who chooses not to have a child she thinks: ‘Lady, you’re weird.’

For four days I have resisted writing about this. It’s partly that I am so damn bored of the confected mothers vs non-mothers divide that the media seems determined to keep chugging tiredly along. It’s partly that, old feminist that I am, I really hate attacking other women, even ones who write insane columns telling me how weird I am. It’s partly that almost all of my time has been taken up looking for my essential humanity (I could have sworn I left it down the back of the sofa).

I think if Carol Sarler had confined herself to the weirdness remark, I might have left it, and gone and done something more interesting. I might have shrugged my selfish shoulders and muttered about free speech and everyone being entitled to an opinion. But in the last line of her piece, she officially Went Too Far. ‘So three cheers for the employers who are catching on, who don’t want to people their workplaces with the cold, the calculating, the sad and the mad.’ This is so far off the reservation that I can stay silent no longer: I must speak. I must say: how would you like your prejudices Ms Sarler, over easy, or sunny side up?

Let us have clarity: I am not carelessly throwing words about. A prejudice is an unfavourable opinion formed without knowledge, thought or reason. There are no empirical studies that I can find which demonstrate women who have no children to be ‘cold, calculating, sad or mad.’ There are some studies which suggest that women who do not give birth actually have a slightly higher level of mental health than mothers, and the same or better ‘life satisfaction’ but these are quite small scale, and I would not necessarily find them definitive. The only absolute proved characteristic of the non-mother is that she is statistically likely to have a university degree. The number of graduates not having babies hovers around the forty percent mark. This much we know, this can be mapped. Everything else is pure, irrational supposition. It is blind, here-be-dragons, flat earth partiality.

Mothers, as we all know, come in all shapes and sizes. There are kind mothers and drunk mothers and funny mothers and mothers who can’t get through the day without a fistful of Xanax; there are organised mothers and academic mothers and confident mothers; there are tactile mothers and strict mothers and mothers for whom guilt is a way of life. I know very few saintly mothers, but I expect they exist. You could take all those descriptions and apply them just as easily to non-mothers. Women who decline to breed can no more be herded under one simplistic umbrella than can those who long for nothing more than tiny pattering feet. There are twenty-seven excellent reasons for not having children, not one of them on the Cruella de Vil scale; ‘I am evil and I hate sweet chubby little babies,’ is not necessarily the deciding factor.

What is so odd about the cold calculating mad sad vs selfless and filled with essential humanity argument is that it is so reductive. Working by Ms Sarler’s assumptions, we must conclude that Jane Austen and George Eliot and Louisa May Alcott and Helen Mirren are radically worse human beings than Katie Price and Kerry Katona. By this logic, we must infer that Angelina Jolie is six times finer than Oprah Winfrey. To follow this reasoning to its conclusion, we must state frankly that Kylie Minogue, Renee Zellwegger and newly famous singing sensation Susan Boyle are clearly inhumane, drunken, sex-crazed bitches. (Ms Sarler has a lovely little riff in her article that it is not the mothers who are bitching and coming in with hangovers and making eyes at the boss. You see, mummies don’t drink, cannot even see other men because they are so blinded by love for their husbands, and never have a common thought or mean.)

I could go on. I would quite like to explain why it is that not having a child is not a definitive act of selfishness. I might tempt you with a diverting little rant on over-population. But the awful thing is that this whole argument is boring me so much that I am losing the ability to type. There are women, they are different, they make different choices, some of them are nice and some of them are nasty. There are some females who like Play-Doh and some who don’t; it is not a mark of moral courage or higher integrity. So could everyone just stop with the stereotypes, and stop, stop, stop putting the child-full and the child-free into invented conflict, and calm down and have a nice cup of tea. I, obviously, will not have time for the tea part. I still have to locate my essential humanity. I am almost sure I left it in my coat pocket.

The unexpected loveliness of a flatbread which is really not a flatbread at all

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Finally, it is time for the flatbreads I have been tantalising you with.

First of all, I should admit that they turn out not really to be flatbreads, as such. Second of all, I happen to think they are the most delicious thing I've eaten since the old queen died, but I have very particular tastes and you might think them perfectly disgusting and want your money back.

What I especially love about cooking is when things go quite wrong, but turn out to be rather wonderful after all, even though they bear no resemblance to what you set out to make. This happened to me this week when I bought some new flour home (pictured above). It is from Dove's Farm, and I love Dove's Farm, it all seems so good and wholesome, although I suddenly realise I know nothing about it and the whole thing could be a clever marketing ploy, secretly owned by a shell company controlled by Dastardly Dick Cheney. Let us hope not.

Anyway, I had not tried this flour before, and when I had a sudden urge for flatbreads, I got it out and set to work. There are many flatbread recipes, but I have found that the easiest is just flour, salt, water and olive oil. It makes quite a hard bread, but I like that. I was not concentrating very well, thinking about twenty-seven other things, when I suddenly realised that with this new flour the dough was not coming together very well. I looked closely at the packet to discover that it was gluten-free, wheat-free, everything-free. This explained the flakiness of the dough - gluten is, as you all know, what gives dough elasticity. Well, I thought, this particular flour will be very good for shortcrust pastry and shortbread and anything else which requires excessive shortness. In the meantime, what would I do about my abortive flatbread? I could not even roll the thing out with a rolling pin, because it just fell apart. But I refused to give up and chuck the whole lot away, because it is a waste, and I hate waste. My mother grew up in the war, and remembers rationing well, and I have inherited her horror of throwing away food, which is why my fridge is always filled, as is hers, of little bowls of leftovers, which I am impelled to craft into some new dish if it kills me.

In the end, I found that if I pressed the dough into little patties with my hands I could persuade them to hold together long enough to get them into a frying pan. I cooked them rather dolefully, anticipating a dry, unsatisfying mess. Imagine then my delight and amazement when I bit into the result and found that instead of a crumbly, unsatisfying thing, the little bread was chewy and even slightly gooey and fabulously moreish. I ate three in a row, hardly able to believe my luck.

So, from this incipient disaster, I have an entire new creation. I should say they are like a cross between a flatbread, a potato cake and a pikelet. I recommend eating them straight from the pan, with lots of butter, as you would a Scotch pancake: a perfect tea time treat.

For about twelve little cakebreads take:

Two cups of Dove's Farm gluten and wheat free plain white flour, a good pinch of Malden salt, a glug of olive oil (I reckon this is about two tablespoons), and half a cup of water. Mix up into a firm dough. You may need to add a little more water if it is too crumbly.

Then, carefully, take little balls of dough, and flatten them out in your hands into small cakes. Get them as thin as you can - there is a moment where they will just break apart, so a little trial and error will happen at first. Then put them in a dry frying pan and cook over a medium heat for two or three minutes each side, until they are golden. Smother in butter and enjoy. They are best hot, but still very good once they have cooled.

The anatomy of a bad mood; or, in which I show you my dark side

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The anatomy of a bad mood.

Moods, unlike proper, rubber-stamped emotions, are difficult to map, and hard to disperse. I like a reason for things. If I am sad, I usually know why; if I am angry or happy, I can see the origin of it. I am quite intolerant of people who indulge their moods, and let a rotten one infect the atmosphere like smoke, so that everyone else must suffer with it. I have read all the damn psychology books; I know that you cannot change the thing itself, but you can change the way you think about it. I like to believe that we have some dominion over our own selves; we are not unregulated pre-rational creatures, constantly startled by woolly mammoths. I am a tremendous believer in the wonderful attribute of free will: somehow, somewhere along the line, for a reason that even the neurobiologists still cannot quite explain, we developed oddly large pre-frontal lobes, which gave us the power of reasoning, and choice. One of my enduring beliefs is that humans, unlike other mammals, do not have to be slaves to our baser natures, chained by our own instincts. One of my crazier ideas, nurtured by too much education, is that you can think your way out of almost anything. Come along, fire up that grey matter, and all manner of things will be well.

So when I wake up, as I did this morning, in a five star stinker of a mood, the kind that you can’t dodge (everywhere you go, there it is) I have several instantaneous reactions. There is a cussed refusal to accept it: this is not right, this should not be happening now. There is a dogged desire to hunt it down and find out where it came from: there must be a reason for everything. There is a slight sense of disgust: oh for God’s sake, you are not living in the Congo, butch up. And there is a determination to find a remedy: now, how am I going to shake this off?

Then there is the slide into a disconcerting division of self. There is the good, rational, well-brought up self, which knows that life is earnest, life is real, and you just have to get on with it. This self understands how to call in The Perspective Police and write a little gratitude list: I have all my arms and legs, I live in a nice house with two enchanting dogs, I have command of all my faculties. I am not being held in a Burmese prison, or watching my children be sold into prostitution. I do not live in a theocracy, where I may not go outside without a close male relative by my side. Even as I count these blessings, and remind myself of the reality of things, there is another self, the one that slinks out of its lair when the bad mood hits. This second self is like a furious child, who cannot be reasoned with. This self says: I feel shitty and I won’t do my work and I’m not going to tidy the kitchen and why won’t everyone just bugger off and leave me alone? And then there is a shouting match between these two entities going on in my head, and I mostly want to go and lie down in a darkened room until it has passed.

There are remedies. I find that drinking a great deal of black coffee, putting Janis Joplin singing Take a Little Piece of My Heart on the stereo and shouting along to it at full blast is tremendously cathartic. Sometimes just jumping up and down in a room and shouting fuck fuck fuck fuck very loud can get those demons out. Walking in the open air can be good, although when I am really grumpy I may refuse to go outside. And, of course, there is writing it down. Writing a thing down is the surest way I know to draw its sting; there is something about getting the hurling words out of the head and onto the page which has an almost miraculous restorative effect on the sanity.

But thinking of this now, I wonder: must a remedy be the first resort? Clearly every functioning adult must work out a way of banishing hideous moods, so as to avoid spreading the contagion over innocent bystanders. It is unfair to drag other people into your demonic day. But what if the house is empty, and you have a little space? I tend to think of bad humour as a moral failing in myself: I must be a little ray of sunshine, come on, of course I must. Jung had the idea that deep in our dark side lies a lode of gold; by refusing to countenance the blacker side of human nature, we cut ourselves off from our greatest potential. Which is all very lovely in theory, but quite alarming in reality. It is so much easier and more comfortable to be sanguine and blithe. I begin to ponder: perhaps, sometimes, in the safety of my own room, I should just sit with my filthy mood, and see where it takes me. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just a thing. (Oddly, even as I write those words, I feel my shoulders begin to come down and my mouth curving into a small smile.) My co-writer Sarah, who has a good practical streak in her which I lack, is quite straightforward about these things. ‘I am in a terrible mood,’ I say, when she calls up for our daily morning talk. ‘Oh, all right,’ she says, unfazed. ‘I’ll ring back when you are less grumpy.’ She knows that not all things can be, or even must be, fixed. Let it run, and it will pass. I, on the other hand, must anatomise every element, explain it, put it in its place, until order is again restored to the universe. She knows that a bad mood is just a bad mood, not a national emergency.

I wonder how much of this is a woman thing. I know that not everything in the whole wide world can be put down to gender, but there is still, even in these post-feminist times, a low expectation that women should be sugar and spice. We are not really supposed to get scratchy and shouty, because we are the ones who are spilling over with empathy until our ears fall off. There is, even now, a lingering idea of the importance of being ladylike. I think this might be a contributory factor to my excessive alarm at a bit of bad temper. But I think the real fault line is my own irrational belief that everything must be rational. I don’t like things that just gallop up for no reason and take over the day.

Much as I long to imagine there is an answer to everything, and an explanation for everything, and a nice neat solution to everything, I may have to concede that this is not always the case. Maybe I should finally learn to understand that life is messy and muddly and unpredictable, and, however much I might want to, I can’t make it shiny and straightforward and explicable every day. The entire underlying premise of Backwards is the importance of accepting one’s very human flaws. I know this to be true. It’s just that every so often I have a slip, and fall back into the mad idea that the human condition is, in fact, perfectible. So I am going to sit very still, and embrace the random and the messy and the inexplicable, and put on Janis Joplin very loud indeed.

If you do one thing today

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Rush, rush, rush to the BBC iplayer and listen to Nothing But Blue Skies by Dominic Power. It was easily the best thing on the wireless last week, bar none.

I was noodling about on the listen again facility last night, and stumbled upon this. It is an afternoon reading, which is not a category of Radio Four that I hold much love for. Sometimes, even the mighty BBC falters, and its choice of short fiction often seems determinedly mundane, as if there is some kind of quota that must be filled - the 'we simply must have more about elderly Sikh ladies living in Bolton' school of thought. There is also a peculiar subset of single women talking to dead boyfriends (to be fair, I might be making this one up, but I seem to remember a season of that kind of thing which almost entirely removed my will to live).

It's not just that the short stories chosen for broacast are so often so uninspiring, but there is the granite problem of the readers. Reading for radio is a very particular art. There is nowhere to hide, no television pictures to distract the listener, so every tic, affectation and hint of phoniness is amplified. Actors often make the elementary mistake of trying to perform the thing, all breathiness and misplaced emphasis and special voices. There is one particularly maddening actress who is always rolled out whenever any poetry needs doing; someone obviously once made the mistake of telling her that she had a well-modulated voice, and she does so much damn modulating, carefully pronouncing every single syllable, delicately hitting each consonant in a 'look at me I'm reading POETRY way' that I think my head is going to explode.

In Nothing But Blue Skies, all these dangers are brilliantly, gloriously avoided. It is a perfect, polished jewel of a story. It has everything you want in short fiction: it is human, unexpected, oddly lyrical, faintly mysterious. And like a huge fat cherry on the top of a luscious cake, it has Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio giving a platonic masterclass on how to read. I have never heard her do anything like this before, and she is rather a famous actress, so you could imagine the whole thing might be a car crash of misplaced ego. But she knows absolutely that fiction should be read quite flat - too much light and shade, too much expression and intensity, and the thing becomes about the reader and not what is being read. She lets the story take centre stage, without self-consciousness. She has a beautiful lightness of touch, and her voice is so natural and beguiling that I think there should be a law passed saying she should be made to read everything. (Along perhaps with Sam West and Alex Jennings, two other actors who are glittering stars in this field.)

So there you are, that is your present for today. I apologise to my international readers - I know that sometimes I taunt you with the wonders of the iplayer, and cruelly, it is not available outside Blighty. I do not know why this is, when I can happily indulge my obsession with American politics by watching Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, even though I am not a US citizen. Let us hope that the Beeb comes to its senses soon and fulfils its international remit.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kbj2y

Back to basics: or, the calming properties of tapenade

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

After all the hype and hysteria of the last few days, political news coming at us like the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire, I have fled back to the comfort of food. Most specifically, I am sheltering under the umbrella of tapenade.

Tapenade is not something I make. I like the idea of it, I think I might even have bought a jar or two in my time. Black olives, olive oil and garlic are three of my very favourite things. It comes out of the earthy heat of Provence, a region that produces some of the most delightful cooking in the world. In fact the more I think of it, the more I fail to understand why I do not make it every day.

I turned to it yesterday on a sudden, imperative whim. I was reading of LibertyLondonGirl’s culinary travels through California, and luxuriating in her description of the tasting menu at the Bel Air Hotel, when I saw the word tapenade and decided that that was exactly what I must have, right now. I leapt from my desk, rushed to the shop, bought all the ingredients, and came home to make it.

I had vaguely assumed that it was pretty much just olives and olive oil and maybe some garlic. It turns out that it also includes capers and anchovies. The name derives from tapeno, the Provencal word for capers. It appears that capers were brought to France from Crete by the Greeks in the sixth century BC; they were preserved in olive oil and stored in amphora (the capers, not the Greeks), where they became mushed down into a sort of paste – thus the origins of the tapenade. It is unclear where the olives came in. For such a simple thing, it arouses quite a lot of discussion. There are purists who say that you should leave the garlic and anchovies out; there are gadflies who throw in everything but the kitchen sink – I read one recipe for ‘cucumber and orange tapenade’ which sounds so revolting that I don’t like to dwell on it. Some people add lemon juice, or brandy, or mustard, or thyme. There is a mystifying subset which insists on throwing in tuna. Delia says you can make it more ‘aristocratic’ by adding sun-dried tomatoes. I find this mildly peculiar on several levels. I don’t especially see the need for poshing up what is a basic rustic dish. And I can’t see much that is aristocratic about sun-dried tomatoes, an ingredient invented by the peasants of southern Italy, and so peculiar to them that the Northern Italians had hardly even heard of sun-dried tomatoes until they became fashionable in London in the 1990s.

As well as a myriad of different versions of tapenade, there are a hundred different things you can do with it. I like the sound of using it in tomato tarts, and Gordon Ramsey has a lovely idea of spreading it on toast soldiers and eating it with creamy scrambled egg. But as always, I went for the most simple recipe and the simplest way of eating it.

Here is what I did:

Took a jar of Kalamata olives, rinsed them, and pitted them. The pitting took ages, and I had to press and fiddle to get the stones to come out, but all the serious chefs who talk about tapenade insist it is really worth it, because olives without stones do not have nearly such a rich flavour. Luckily the rather diverting Museum of Curiosity was on the wireless, which helped take my mind off the dullness of the job.

Then I threw the olives into a blender with a small clove of garlic, three anchovy fillets and a glug of olive oil. Blended the whole thing up until it was a rough paste.
(Did you notice the omission? No capers. I love capers and would have included them, but they are beyond my local shop, and despite the fact that this entire dish originates from the capers in the vats in the sixth century BC, I did not notice their absence. Probably next time I would add a very few, the ones stored in salt, not in brine.)

I sliced a baguette as thinly as I could and toasted the little rounds under the grill. For perfection, I think a good Italian bread would be better – again, the limitations of my local shop – and I imagine that sourdough might be sublime. I spread a generous amount of tapenade on each toast, added a sliver of Capricorn goat’s cheese and a little suggestion of Parma ham on the top. All the textures worked fabulously well: the crisp of the toast, the black fleshiness of the tapenade, the yielding softness of the cheese and the smooth of the ham. Also, the cool tang of the goat’s cheese cut the saltiness of the olives beautifully.

I mention the brand name of the cheese because it is one I am particularly fond of at the moment, and I highly recommend you track it down. It is made by the Lubborn Creamery in Somerset and has a lovely delicate flavour and a thin washed rind; it is like a very fine brie in style, and utterly delicious.

Is there a sense of proportion in the house?

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

All right: I'm going to have one last shot at it, and then I promise faithfully I will stop and give you my new recipe for flatbread.

I freely put my hands up. When I said I was not sure how angry the phlegmatic British public was about the expenses row, I was being too optimistic. The public is now officially Angry. Although I still wonder at the amount of time it has taken for them to get furious, and how much of that fury has been stoked by raging, unremitting newspaper headlines. Many of the stories in the papers are skewed to put the very worst possible spin on some fairly ordinary claims, and all the pundits have been using incendiary language from the start. Peter Hitchens did a particularly hilarious piece on This Week on Thursday where he sat in a rather enchanting greasy spoon and claimed that the ordinary people, like those eating breakfast around him, were absolutely livid at the venal shenanigans of their elected representatives: ‘everyone is angry’ he said, angrily. The diners around him continued to eat their beans and chips and sausages with calm decorum; I’ve never seen a collection of people look less cross.

Still, the letters pages, call-in shows and the set of Question Time are exploding with ire. One pensioner told one newspaper reporter that she would not be surprised if people got guns and started shooting MPs. The always rational Diane Abbott said that the public wanted to see MPs hanging from lampposts. The exceptionally tired old trope of ‘they are all the same’ is being repeated so frequently that I expect soon to see it etched in stone above the Members’ entrance of the House.

Despite everything, I still think the anger is out of all proportion. The system of allowances is antiquated and wrong, and should be fixed. The fees office is clearly run by very strange people indeed. Some of our parliamentarians have behaved as fools or knaves. All this is true and should not be glossed over and excused. But I still say it is not the most scandalous scandal in the history of scandals.

Let us look at this on a purely financial level. A huge part of the anger derives from the notion that MPs are living high on the hog at public expense; people talk of wanting their money back for the lav seats and moat cleaners and housekeepers. It’s our money, the outraged citizenry is saying, and we want it returned with interest. Well, taking into account salary, expenses, allowances, and staff wages, the cost of each MP to every taxpayer in the UK averages out at around £4 per year. Obviously, some people pay more tax than others, so Stephen Fry probably pays about a tenner for his MP, while someone on the minimum wage pays about 40p. But for the sake of argument, let’s take the £4 figure.

Here is what the latest round of spending on Afghanistan cost each taxpayer: £1400. I should remind you that in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent, the government is properly corrupt (they would shriek at the idea of measly pipe under a measly tennis court), girls have acid thrown in their face for daring to go to school, the poppy is flourishing, and our brave boys are bogged down in Helmand Province. If you want to get really angry about something that deserves proper incandescent fury, read James Fergusson’s brilliant book A Million Bullets and you will see what I am talking about.

Here is what the the financial crisis and the bailout of the banks will cost each taxpayer, according to the International Monetary Fund: £5,000. So it would take your MP a thousand years to charge you as much. Bear in mind that the scale of the disaster could easily have been avoided if the bankers had not be stupid enough to bet the farm on complicated financial instruments that they themselves often did not understand, if the regulatory agencies had actually done their job, and if someone, somewhere, had listened to Paul Krugman.

Here is what the airline industry costs every taxpayer in subsidises: £300. Now you may love the airline industry. I am sure that it never indulges in Spanish practices or dodgy expenses. It might be doing more than its bit to promote pollution, but you know, people must go on holiday. But do you really think that is a good use of your hard-earned tax pound?

I could go on, but I know you will lose the will to live. My point is that surely our collective rage should be 350 times higher in the case of Afghanistan and a thousand times higher in the case of the bank bailouts. If I were being really naughty, I might even point out that four quid a year for an MP is quite good value. You cannot even buy a packet of fags for four quid. For this, your member of parliament will sit on select committees, take part in debates, vote on issues of the day, answer hundreds of letters, participate, to a greater or lesser degree, in the formulation of policy, throw surgeries where concerned voters may come with their problems, sometimes mount campaigns on behalf of their constituents, open flower shows, and attend various dinners and events and speaking engagements (which might sound feckless and frivolous and quite fun, but often involves earnest conversation with not entirely fascinating people). They must be prepared to keep no detail of their private life private, be polite at all times, even when in the presence of nutters or crashing bores, and be pilloried in the press. Some of them absolutely deserve to be pilloried in the press, and put in the stocks too, but the blameless must expect this treatment along with the culpable.

On top of all this, they must accept that they will be generally regarded as incompetent at best and crooked at worst. The scale of the recent outcry demonstrates vividly that the expenses scandal only confirmed what most people already believed. All surveys show that Members of Parliament have occupied the same subterranean position in public esteem for years. In 2006, when there was no scandal, they ranked below business leaders and only just above journalists in the three least trusted professions. There is no need for violins; they are grown-ups and choose to go into politics. They must know that a thick skin is part of the job requirement. I am not saying that we should not get angry with MPs; of course we should. That is our right, even our civic duty, as concerned citizens. I feel very strongly about this: don’t just carp on the sidelines, get involved – write a letter, sign a petition, start a blog. There is an idiot strain of non-idea abroad that says we should punish the lot of them by not voting. Peter Hitchens told us solemnly on Thursday that ‘the right to vote is just as precious as the right not to vote’. Some sententious moron on The World Tonight said it was this kind of scandal that led to apathy amongst the electorate; then stated smugly: ‘that is why I have not voted since 1974’. I almost started throwing things. If you do not participate, I think you forfeit your right to bitch, but I am a bit hardline like that. I get all sentimental about the people who died for the right to vote, the women who had to fight and scratch and chain themselves to railings so they might mark their ballots.

So I do not shrug my shoulders and say it does not matter. It does matter, but other things matter much, much more. The electorate has an absolute right to hold the political class to its promises. It is not that fury should not be hurled, but that it should be hurled at the right target. Because when the whole thing turns into a blind witch-hunt, not only is nothing achieved, but the really terrifying scandals go unanswered.

In which I distract you with tomatoes

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I must admit (because like George Washington I cannot tell a lie) that I may have underestimated public anger over the expenses scandal. As more revelations come out in a demoralising drip drip drip, there is a depressing tawdriness in the air. I maintain my perspective point though: I still think that there are things which should inspire greater scrutiny, public indignation, even rage, like the fact that six British soldiers died in Afghanistan last week, on a mission that remains undefined. At the moment, it seems as if our young men and women are fighting simply to stop Afghanistan becoming a failed state. That is blood and treasure that I really care about. I mind desperately that £4.2 billion - billion - of taxpayers' money is being spent on a war that is signally failing in its mission. I care even more that the government can't get the right equipment to the troops, and that lives are being lost because of that. I persist in my belief that the majority of politicians are not corrupt, but I would like the political class to be questioned on what is really going on in Helmand Province. That would be a story I would pay to see on the front page.

But after a week of unremittingly bad news I am going to turn to more diverting matters. It is Friday, after all, even if the sun has gone in. Katharine Reeve over at The Food Digest has a rightly indignant post up about the absolutely disgusting nature of prepared tomato sauces. I have never understood why people would pay quite a lot of money for something which is so easy to cook it makes falling off a log look complicated. Making your own is cheaper, healthier, so much more delicious that there are not the words for it, satisying, and fills the kitchen with a delightfully enticing smell. Inspired by Katharine, I am offering my own version.

Tomato Sauce for Two.

Four fat tomatoes, roughly chopped

Two cloves of garlic

Small pinch of dried chilli flakes, optional

Big pinch of Maldon Salt

Olive oil

Basil leaves

Most tomato sauces involve onions, which must be softened, taking time. They also usually call for tinned tomatoes, or skinned tomatoes, but I like mine fresh and cannot be bothered with the skinning.

Finely chop the garlic; cover the bottom of a small frying pan with extra virgin olive oil and put on a very, very low heat. Cook the garlic, gently, gently, stirring about a bit, for a couple of minutes. It must not brown or it will grow bitter. Then throw in the tomatoes and the chilli flakes (should you choose to use them), turn up the heat to medium, and let it all cook for about ten minutes, stirring a little from time to time. I like my sauce with a bit of bite, which is why I don't cook it for too long. If you prefer a more soupy sauce, then go on for about twenty minutes, in which time the tomatoes will collapse and reduce and the flavours will intensify. Just keep an eye on it to make sure it does not catch.

When you are ready, throw in a pinch of Maldon salt and as many torn basil leaves as you fancy. (I say torn because the purists insist one must never cut a basil leaf on pain of death. I do admit that sometimes I do chop them up, or even snip them in with scissors. It's very naughty, but I find it quicker and easier than tearing.) Taste. You may like to add a little dash of very fruity olive oil at the end, for flavour. Eat with spaghetti or penne or whatever you wish.

Sarah also has her own lovely version of tomato sauce here.

Since we are talking of tomatoes, and it is the season for them, I am throwing in a bonus recipe. I made this last night for my supper, on a whim. I roast tomatoes all the time, but had not eaten them in this way before, and I must confess the whole thing was a roaring success.

Take as many tomatoes as you fancy. Slice them in half and put them in an ovenproof dish. Very finely chop a little garlic and sprinkle on the tomatoes. Then throw a few herbs on top - really whatever you want. I use parsley, or oregano (my oregano has gone crazy this year, so I am using it with everything), or basil. You could go mad and combine all three. They should be fresh, for preference. Then it's just a drizzle of olive oil and a good scattering of sea salt and into a medium oven for fifteen to twenty minutes.

I know I am always banging on about not letting the garlic burn. This is the one thing I make where the garlic will burn, because of the heat of the oven. I think in this case it works, because the slight nutty bitterness you get is offset by the glorious sweetness of the roasted tomatoes.

When the tomatoes are ready, take them out, arrange them lovingly on a nice white plate, and throw over some buffalo mozarella, torn into chunks. The contrast in taste and texture is what made this so delicious - the cool, slightly tart mozarella throws into relief that hot, intense tomatoes. It's a fabulous variation on the classic tomato and mozarella salad. It also looks very pretty, with the whole red and white thing going on. And it is a perfect supper for a tired cook, because the entire preparation takes no more than four minutes, with the twenty minute cooking time giving you a perfect moment for a nice glass of Orvieto.

In which I go all counter-intuitive. Health warning: this is very long, so you might like to get yourself a nice cup of tea first.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I have a soulful black and white photograph of Martin Luther King on my wall. Why would I not? He spoke one of the greatest lines of the 20th century, that he dreamt that one day his children would not be judged on the colour of their skin but the content of their character. In an age where black people still had to ride at the back of the bus, it was an astonishingly bold statement. In any age, it was a one true thing. He was the youngest man ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. His legacy still resonates today.

Martin Luther King was famously unfaithful to his wife. We know this from memoirs by his close associates and observation from a paranoid FBI, which was determined to paint him as an evil communist. There are rumours also of prostitutes and threesomes, which may or may not be true. An ugly subset of the racist internet likes to play up these rumours, to make their claim that the reverend was a phoney and a fraud, who liked paying for sex with white women, as if that would negate every single thing he did for the civil rights movement. The great congressman John Lewis, who walked over the Alabama bridge and got beaten half to death for his pains, knew King, and once said of him: ‘he was not a saint, he was just another human being’, so making the tacit acceptant that he might have not been flawless in his private life.

If even half of this is true, does it make any difference to the King legacy? He has a national holiday named after him in America; he made an incalculable difference to race relations in a land that was scarred with the memory of slaves picking cotton in the fields. If there had been no Martin Luther King, there would be no Barack Obama. Would I rather not know that he had catted around? Yes. Did my heart sink a little in disappointment? Certainly. I am not so cavalier as Christopher Hitchens, who once wrote that Dr King spent his last night in dissipation and why not? In the same way, I would like to think that the venerable Gladstone did not have some strange obsession with prostitutes. This great classical scholar had a habit of bringing fallen ladies home to tea with his wife, and then going into a room and flagellating himself for being aroused by them. (We know this from little Greek characters that he wrote in his diaries.) This is slightly pathological behaviour, by any lights. Yet Gladstone fought like a tiger, even when he was old and frail, for Irish Home Rule. He did not win that battle, but just imagine if he had. There would have been no IRA. There would have been no Omagh bombing, no knee-capping, no hunger strikes, Lord Mountbatten would not have been blown to smithereens while his grandchildren watched.

All of which is a very long way of saying: flawed people can do great things, and those great things are not diminished by the frailties of the human being who achieved them.

So I find it hard to understand the frenzy of self-righteous moralising that is going on among the media classes. I love the media classes, adore the BBC, and think there is nothing in the rumour that they are all chatterati hacks who know nothing of life beyond the Groucho. But sometimes a story comes along and produces a mad herd instinct where all reason is forgotten, groupthink prevails, and a collective wail of why oh why can be heard throughout the land. The current unquestioned narrative is predicated on the idea that the public wants a snow white polity. This is why all good hard-working decent Britons are enraged (enraged, I tell you) by what has been going on in their name. I am not sure this is quite true. The British have always held a sceptical and unsentimental attitude towards their politicians. They can be ruthless, even towards national heroes. They adored Winston Churchill when Britain stood alone and only the power of his oratory convinced them that the beleaguered island might prevail. But the moment the war was won, they chucked him out. Pundits and commentators are telling us, day after day, that the public has never been so disillusioned by, despairing of, and disgusted at their elected members. Yet look back and you will find polls and statistics that show public faith in politicians has always hovered around a low mark. Last week, when the expenses scandal started cooking up, a survey showed that 60% of the public was interested in the Ghurkha story, and only 40% in the expenses story.

Personally, I don’t really give a damn about Keith Vaz’s scatter cushions. I could not care less about Alan Duncan’s garden. I have very little interest in Gordon Brown paying £6000 to his cleaner. My own cleaner says, when I ask her what she thinks about the expenses scandal: ‘What expenses scandal?’ I explain it to her. She cocks her head. ‘You mean they are taking the piss?’ she says. I say that some of them could be described in this manner. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I suppose we all take the piss sometimes.’ She is bright, honest as the day, and a good mother to two small children. Here is what she worries about: her little boy and girl getting a good education, the damp in her council house, and the fact that she and her partner are paying more tax than they used to. This last revelation shocks me senseless: this was the government that I voted for, partly because it promised to relieve the burden on the low-paid. Everyone is kicking up a stink about class war and the new fifty percent top rate of tax, while none of the newspapers are whipping themselves up into a frenzy of indignation over the fact that a mother of two in a council house who works part time is getting hit up for more tax in the middle of the worst recession in living memory. You crusaders over at the Daily Telegraph – where is your righteous fury over the immorality of that?

Down in the village shop, I try out another little vox pop. Jake, who works the till, a young man with an open friendly face, says: ‘Well, they are human, aren’t they?’ I am slightly surprised. Where is the outrage, the fury, the sense of death of the Mother of Parliaments? ‘I expect if I had an expenses account, I might do the same thing,’ he says, cheerfully.

Would I rather that John Prescott had not claimed for faux Tudor beams at his constituency home? You betcha. There is something awfully de haut en bas about Barbara Follett charging the taxpayer £25,000 for ‘security’. The thing with the moat is absurd. There are clearly many elements that are ropey and creaking about the allowances system, and MPs were idiotic when they voted against expenses being published. My prescription would be: put the whole lot on the internet. Claim what you want, but know that your constituents will be able to see it all online. I am not defending MPs who truly abused the system. They are public officials and should be held to account. But the number of egregious cases is a small percentage of the 645 parliamentarians, probably the exact same proportion of people who might steal something from the stationary cupboard in any large company. This does not make it right, or excusable, but in an ironic twist, probably makes the House of Commons quite representative of the public it serves.

I do not whitewash the expenses revelations, but I do attack the crazed reaction to them. ‘Gerry Adams slams expenses gravy train’ yelled a headline on the BBC news website. In 1987 Adams told the Oxford Union: ‘I have never condemned the IRA, and I never will.’ So it is perfectly fine to blow people up, but claiming for a fridge is beyond any ethical pale. A day later, Stephen Fry dared to point out that there really are more important things to get hysterical about, like waging illegitimate wars, say. Ah I thought: a cool dose of perspective. But the papers called foul. ‘Stephen Fry and his big brain don’t get it’ roared the headline in The Telegraph. ‘Stephen Fry dismisses the expenses scandal in typical arrogant-luvvie style, says Liz Hunt,’ it went on. Apart from indulging in clichéd stereotyping, this entirely missed the point of what Fry was saying, but he was so demoralised by the savage reaction that he confessed dolefully on Twitter that he wished he had kept his mouth shut. (Interestingly, the majority of Twitterers came out of the closet and admitted that many of them were thinking the exact same thing.)

If you want real ocean-going, five-star, fur-lined scandal, try this: the government is currently wasting £20 billion on an NHS IT system that, according to one person involved in the project, ‘isn’t working and isn’t going to work’. It is a story with more turns and twists than a convention of corkscrews. One of its finer elements is that Richard Granger, who was originally in charge, on a meagre salary of £285,000, failed his computer studies course at Bristol. Pricelessly, this nugget was revealed by his own mother, who called up The Observer to talk about it. ‘It was pretty serious, so I had to write to Princess Anne,’ she said (possibly my favourite line in any story in the last five years). Granger is currently threatening Private Eye with legal action for a story they want to run on him. Why is this not on the front page for five days in a row? Why does the press not expect good hard-working Britons to be up in arms about this, which takes many more of their tax pounds and directly affects their lives? Could it be that a man with a tennis court and someone claiming for a chandelier is just a sexier story?

A slightly baffled Italian journalist said on the Today Programme this morning that what British MPs are doing is ‘inappropriate’ but that what Italian MPs do is often ‘illegal’. It is worth remembering, in the middle of all this, that no law has been broken. This is not the Arms to Iraq scandal of the Thatcher years: ‘secret government encouragement of arms sales to a dictator who gasses civilians; ministers misleading parliament; perhaps a quarter of the cabinet implicated,’ as the Economist put it at the time. It is not cooking up dodgy legal opinions to justify torture, as has been revealed in America over the last two weeks – a scandal so big and deep that it takes the breath away, and yet gets hardly a mention in our press. It is not government officials in the Department of Energy having sex with oil industry executives and snorting coke off toaster ovens – another unlovely American political outrage of the fag end of the Bush years. (I do not know quite what a toaster oven is, or if you can claim one on expenses, but I am perfectly certain that very few of our parliamentarians are in the habit of using them to chop out grade A pharmaceuticals.)

I must declare an interest. One of my dear friends is a Member of Parliament. I know him to be a good, honourable and clever man. The gap between the person I know, and the current media version of MPs as chiselling crooks, venally out for everything they can get, is so wide I cannot bridge it. Menzies Campbell, whom I do not know, is a former Olympic athlete who took a steady, principled stand against the Iraq war. Now it has been revealed that he claimed £10,000 for decorating a flat. This one act apparently throws him into the cesspit along with the other scum, so much so that the Daily Mail now refers to him as ‘moral’ Menzies Campbell. This is a man who has devoted his life to public service and always displayed thoughtfulness and rectitude; now he is reduced to having the word moral put against his name in inverted commas. Perhaps more than any other individual example, this demonstrates how mad the reaction to this affair has become.

It is not that the thing itself is not bad. It is. But it is not that bad. It could be so much worse. In the context of wider politics, it may even appear rather petty. What frightens me more than a questionable claim for mole removal is when every single part of the press is following an identical narrative. It worries me when journalists I really love and admire, from Andrew Rawnsley to Nick Cohen to Michael White, are all saying the same thing. The story of what was done over the Iraq war, the questions of intelligence, the practice of extraordinary rendition, the odd saga of the Niger uranium claim, was a true matter of ethics and morality; it was a matter of actual life and death. I can’t remember anyone saying, as Nick Robinson did this week, that those involved in the darker aspects of the war should no longer be known as ‘honourable’ members. Most importantly, many varying degrees of opinion were expressed about the conflict, across all the different newspapers, not necessarily depending on political allegiance. This is exactly how it should be in a democracy that prides itself on a free press. The alarming thing about the current saga is that dissenting voices against the prevailing opinion are not only hard to find, but are pilloried for daring even to question the agreed line. I’m not asking for someone to come out and insist that all MPs are perfect, but I do wish that the press might cock an ear to Stephen Fry, take a deep breath, and rummage under the bed to find its mislaid sense of perspective.

About absolutely nothing at all

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

For the last two days I have had about forty-seven conflicting thoughts in my head, which I have been trying to wrangle into a coherent and stimulating post for you, and I must freely admit that I have failed miserably. Then yesterday people decided they were coming for lunch. I very much like people for lunch, but it is a little complicated on a school day, and I then further complicate matters by deciding that instead of just giving them ham and salad like a normal person, I must make an Italian feast in the manner of a Neopolitan lady on a Saint's day. Five different dishes were presented. Five. What is wrong with me?

All of which is very long way of saying there is no written blog today. But I hate to leave you with nothing for so long, so as way of diversion - here are some pictures of my dogs, sunbathing. This is surely everything which the dyspeptic critics accuse blogging of being: ephemeral, narcissistic, and of really no possibly interest to anyone much. Or: pointless, witless and feckless, and my friend S and I used to chant at each other when we were young. But there, we can't all be pointful and incisive every day. And they are such ravishing creatures. They might not be entirely useful, but they are beautiful, thereby fufilling at least half of William Morris's rule for life.

That is actual Scottish sunshine. It has been going like that all day. Sometimes I have to look twice to believe it is real.

A lovely spring lunch

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Sometimes it's not so much a recipe you need, as an idea. Your poor mind is harried, nothing in the fridge holds much promise for you, you are bored senseless with chicken. You know you should be swishing around like a domesetic goddess but you feel more like a wanton slattern. I have moments when I have absolutely no idea what I want to eat. Today, I actually quite seriously considered making oeufs en gelee (I do apologise to my continental readers for the lack of accents; there seems to be no facility for these in this medium) simply because I discovered an ancient packet of gelatine in the cupboard at lunchtime.

In the end, good sense prevailed, and I ended up with a delightful lunch of bacon salad, followed by a plate of blackberries and strawberries. It could not have been easier; a child of ten could have made it. Yet despite its simplicity, it gave me an odd sense of contentment and achievement. I made it with care, and arranged it all on a big white plate, so it looked pretty, and took the time to add a certain little je ne sais quoi - a final addition of some torn basil leaves in this case - that made all the difference.

There are as many recipes for bacon salad as there are soi disant chefs. Some ponce around with raspberry vinegar and soft boiled quails' eggs. Others are frankly peculiar - I found one oddity that called for cream, and another that insisted that broccoli would be a good notion. (No, no, no, I shouted, are you mad?). One version decided an Asian slant would be a bright idea, with ginger and sesame oil, despite the fact that bacon is the least Oriental of all meats. I take a good slash with Occam's Razor and think plain is best in this case.

So here is my version, for two:

Take four rashers of streaky bacon. I like mine smoked. Snip it up into strips and cook in a dry pan on a medium heat until crispy. Today, just for the hell of it, I added a little dried chilli, for a tiny bit of spice.

Then choose your leaves. This is largely up to personal taste, but the best result will come from a combination of light crisp lettuce and dark, bitter leaves. I used frisee, which has a particular affinity with bacon - it's a texture thing, I think; then little gem, quite a lot of rocket, and a dash of watercress. Baby spinach leaves are also excellent if you have them. A little sliced celery and cucumber are welcome additions, but absolutely no tomatoes please. This is strictly a green salad. About three generous handfuls will do it.

Put all the salad in a bowl and dress with a good dash of extra virgin olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. I like my salad quite citressy and use about half the juice from half a lemon. If you prefer a more nuanced flavour just squeeze and taste until you hit the exact right proportion. Then add a pinch of Maldon Salt and toss it all about. I used to faff about with French dressings involving Dijon mustard and red wine vinegar and all sorts. Now I find that the simplest dressing of olive oil, lemon and salt gives me everything I crave; I use it on all salads except for tomato salad, where I am such a purist that it is olive oil and salt only.

Scatter the bacon on the top. It should be still just warm but not hot, or it will defeat the leaves. Today, for the hell of it, I added some pine nuts, and some torn basil leaves. Some chopped parsley would be lovely too. I did wonder if one final permissable ingredient might be a smatter of tart goat's cheese; I could imagine that going very well with the salty bacon and crisp salad, and may try it next time.

To follow, I sliced up some fat juicy strawberries, mixed with a few blackberries, and ate them with some plain yoghurt on the side.

I have a suspicion that this might be what my cousin V calls 'girl food'. Today I had it in solitary state, while the dogs watched in disgust. (They only get really excited when I have steak or lamb chops.) But it would be perfect for when your best girlfriend comes for lunch. Or just for you, when you want to give yourself an easy treat.

In which I am (almost) entirely frivolous

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Sometimes even the most concerned citizen must take a day off and think of entirely superficial things. Today is one of those days. Today, I am thinking of body cream. Most specifically, I am thinking of the enchanting, luxurious, recondite and satisfyingly hard-to-find potion that is La Compagnie de Provence's Pommade Corporelle l'huile d'olive encense lavande.

One of the great myths about women is that we must be divided strictly into shallow and profound. Either we may worry about the internecine strife between Sunni and Shia, the rocky state of the body politic, and the collapse of the financial system as we know it, or we may think about shoes. Get back in your box now ladies, you can't have it both ways. You may understand every last ramification of the Middle East conflict, or you may have perfectly moisturised elbows.

This is possibly the biggest most steaming load of tosh in the known universe, and I have no idea why it endures, against all evidence to the contrary. It is one of the reasons that Sarah and I wrote Backwards in the first place. It is why we have chapters on politics and cooking, clothes and philosophy. Sarah, my cherished co-writer, is living one-woman proof of the madness of this reductive view of the female condition. She writes a beauty column, there is nothing she does not know about collagen. At the exact same time, she understands every last nuance and metaphor and piece of symbolism in The Divine Comedy. Dante is like mother's milk to her. She also knows how to bake the best cupcakes known to woman.

So it is true that I woke up this morning thinking about body cream. But I was also thinking about why it is that there are members of the United States House of Representatives who go on national television and equate intelligent design with evolution, as if they were two equally valid, scientifically honest theories, and are not challenged in this bizarre statement by the presenter. I was going to write a passionate child of the Enlightenment post about this very subject. Then I thought: it's Saturday, and I can't be serious every day, and it is important to keep your skin supple, in these Troubled Times. Moisturise, moisturise, moisturise, as my friend Jeremy used to say, apropos of absolutely nothing.

The hunt for the perfect body cream has taken up a small but crucial part of my adult life. The good ones are oddly hard to find. They are too greasy or too thin, they smell like a courtesan's boudoir or depressingly of nothing at all, they are stupidly expensive or cheap and useless. I think, finally, I may have struck the holy grail. Ambassador, with this pommade corporelle, you are really spoiling us.

My enchanting and generous cousin G bought this delicious cream for me a while ago, in a chi chi little boutique in Bath. It has been sitting in my bathroom while I finished up other products; I kept gazing at it in anticipation, as if I were keeping it for best. Today was the time for best. And oh let me tell you of its wonders. It is the exact right constitency - thick and rich without being too unctuous. It glides onto the body and envelops you in soothing luxury. It smells of lavender with a sharp citrus tang; it smells, in some nebulous way, of the Riviera before it got ruined by high rise buildings and the New Russians. It comes in the most elegantly sturdy brown glass pot. I cannot recommend it too highly. If you want a frivolous treat to cheer you up in these recessionary days, it is the perfect extravagance.

On the other hand, if you are feeling too credit crunchy for words, and there is no lovely cousin to buy you treats, you can quite easily make your own concoction. It is not in the same league as this high class product, but it is a very worthy substitute. Here is what I do: go to Boots and get a nice big tub of emollient cream, the kind that has absolutely no scent at all and costs about two pounds. Choose whichever consistency you like; I prefer a good thick one. Take it home and decant a little into a nice glass pot. Add a teaspoon of extra virgin olive oil, the more fragrant and fruity the better. You might like to put this in a little at a time, until you reach the exact consistency you are looking for. Then put in a few drops of whichever essential oils you prefer. I favour a combination of rosemary, lavender and bergamot. Stir it all up, and there you are. Then you can go back to wondering whether the government of Pakistan is going to fall.



The Pommade is only available online at Harrods, in a slightly irritating way.
http://www.harrods.com/HarrodsStore/find/c/beauty/Brand/LA+COMPAGNIE+DE+PROVENCE/p/000000000001730203
Otherwise, if you live in the west country, you can find it at the delightful Mee boutique in Bath.