The Long Ships, by Frans G. Bengtsson

The BEST Wedding

A man from Halland told them about a great wedding that he had been present at in Finnveden, among the wild people of Smaland. During the celebrations, a dispute had broken out concerning a horse-deal, and knives had quickly appeared; whereupon the bride and her attendant maidens had laughed delightedly and applauded, and had encouraged the disputants to settle the matter there and then.

However, when the bride, who belonged to a well-known local family, saw her uncle’s eye gouged out by one of the bridegroom’s kinsmen, she had seized a torch from the wall and hit her bridegroom over the head with it, so that his hair caught fire. One of the bridesmaids had, with great presence of mind, forced her petticoat over his head, and twisted it tight, thereby saving his life, though he screamed fearfully and his head, when it appeared again, was burned black and raw. Meanwhile, the fire had caught the straw on the floor, and eleven drunken or wounded men lying in it had been burned to death; so that this wedding was generally agreed to have been one of the best they had had for years in Finnveden, and one that would be long remembered. The bride and bridegroom were now living together in blissful happiness, although he had not been able to grow new hair to replace that which he had lost in the fire.

A Session at the Thing

[Many problems were settled at the Thing, but…] when a difficult altercation had arisen between stubborn men, so that no agreement could be arrived at, the matter would be decided by single combat between the parties concerned on the flat grass before the Stone. This was regarded as the best entertainment of all, and any Thing during which at least three corpses had not been carried from the combat ground would be thought a poor and unworthy session.

Kings Used to Send Envoys to the Thing

The King at Uppsala and the King of the Danes had been wont to send trusted men to the Thing, partly to safeguard their rights and partly to keep an eye open for outlaws who had escaped their clutches; but the farmers had greeted these envoys by removing their heads, which they had then smoked over juniper fires and sent back to their masters, to signify to the Kings that the border peoples preferred to manage their own affairs.

The End of the World That Didn’t Happen

The year ended without the smallest sign having appeared in the sky, and there ensued a period of calm in the border country. Relations with the Smalanders continued to be peaceful, and there were no local incidents worth mentioning, apart from the usual murders at feasts and weddings, and a few men burned in their houses as the result of neighborly disputes.

The Treasure Chest

It was filled with gold, which the river water had not tarnished. Most of it was coins, of many different sorts and sizes, filling the chest to its rim; but among them, many precious ornaments lay bedded, rings great and small, chains, necklaces, clasps, bracelets and suchlike, marvelously worked–“like lovely pieces of pork,” thought Toke, “in a soup of good pease.”

The Widow

They had with them Torgunn, Rapp’s widow, whom they had found starving and half-dead in the wild country. She had escaped from the bandits, and had run and walked as far as her legs would take her. Toke’s men had taken turns to carry her back, and three of them had already proposed marriage to her, which had revived her spirits; but none of them, they said sadly, had seemed to her to be as good a man as Rapp.

From Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

“Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad – Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but’, people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays – every bit of it.

What a wondrous place this was – crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? (‘Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.’) What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners’ Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course.

How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state – in short, did nearly everything right – and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things – to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view.

All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.”

In a sunburned country, by Bill Bryson

“Snakes are more of a problem. . . Common brown, western taipan, western puff pastry, yellow-backed lockjaw, eastern groin-groper, dodge viper…” I don’t remember  what she said exactly, but it was a long list. “But don’t worry,” she continued.  “Most snakes don’t want to hurt you. If you’re out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over  your shoes.”

This, I decided, was the least-likely-to-be-followed advice I have ever been given.”

**************************************************************************

“At this time I was following with some devotion a libel trial in which two government official were suing a publisher over a book containing scurrilous and, as it proved, groundless allegations implying sexual indiscretions in times gone by. With each passing day the trial had taken on the exhilarating air of farce. Just recently a former leader of the opposition had taken the stand, for no reason that any sane person could deduce, and had begun recounting lively stories of alleged sexual improprieties by other ministers who were not remotely connected to the book or trial. But what had attracted me to the case in the first place, and what made it all seem particularly special, was the simple happy coincidence that the two ministers at the heart of the affair were named Abbot and Costello.”

*********************************************************************************

“At at reception for some minor awards presentation–the East Gippsland Young Farmers First Novel Award or something, which I attended because I was just so pleased to get an invitation to anything and because cocktails were promised–I was standing with two female publicists when some obviously self-infatuated bigwig breezed in.

“Oh look, it’s Bruce Darling,” observed one, and with a kind of distant, perfectly encapsulating disdain added, “He’d go to the opening of an envelope.”

*******************************************************

“One of the people interviewed was a man who had arrived from Hungary as a teenager after the uprising there. On his first full day in the country he had gone as instructed to the local police station and explained in halting English that he was a new immigrant who had been told to register his address. The sergeant had stared at him for a moment,  then  risen from his seat and come around the desk. The Hungarian recalled that for one bewildered moment, he thought the policeman might be about to strike him, but instead the sergeant thrust out a meaty hand and said warmly, “Welcome to Australia, son.” The Hungarian recalled the incident with wonder even now and when he finished there were tears in his eyes .I tell you sincerely. It’s a wonderful country.”

 

From the Peppermint Tea Chronicles, by Alexander McCall Smith

Matthew and Elspeth’s toddler triplets ask where their dear budgie has gone. The bird is dead, Elspeth explains.

“He’s gone to heaven,” she said, aware, even as she spoke, that this explanation created as many questions as it purported to answer.

And that proved to be the case. Where was heaven? Did people go there too? Were there lavatories up there? These theological complexities, she realized, could not be answered, and she had brought the discussion to an end by giving a piece of toffee to each boy. This stuck their jaws together, and silenced them–a simple expedient, even if not one advocated in most contemporary child-rearing manuals. Later, when she told Matthew about it, he had said that he did not want to bring the boys up to believe in things that weren’t there. “Ghosts, heaven, all those things,” he said. “Why fill kids’ minds with nonexistent clutter? They only find out the truth later on.”

“And Santa?” asked Elspeth.  “And the tooth fairy?”

Matthew hesitated. How dedicated a rationalist did one have to be to deny the existence of Santa Claus? One of his own clearest early memories was of the moment when he had been told of the nonexistence of Santa. The truth had been conveyed to him by his father, as he stood outside in the garden of the family house at Fairmilehead. . . .

“Which way is the North Pole?” he had asked his father. “I want to to see if we can see Santa.”

His father, bending down, had whispered in his ear, “You don’t believe in all that, do you Matthew? Now that you’re a big boy, you don’t have to pretend.”

But he had not been pretending. He had believed in Santa in the same way in which he believed in Waverley Station or the Flying Scotsman, or any of the other things he could touch and see.

His father had continued, “You still get presents, you know, even if you don’t believe any more. ”

This had calmed his fears, but it had still been an overwhelming, sad moment for him. Now, remembering that disappointment, he realized that Santa was the one myth that we might try to preserve when all others had been debunked or expired. It was a small sprig of hope in a relentless world, a tiny island in the shrinking domain of childhood innocence.  Talking animals, A.A. Milne, counting rhymes, nursery stories were all being taken over by mass-produced, de-cultured electronica of modern childhood.

Anthony Burgess–Shakespeare

…to his back, like a hump, was strapped a miraculous but somehow irrelevant talent. It is a talent which, more than any other that the world has seen, reconciles us to being human beings, unsatisfactory hybrids,not good enough for gods and not good enough for animals. We are all Will. Shakespeare is the name of one of our redeemers.

Anthony Burgess–Inside Mr. Enderby

Heartburn

So far she had eaten all the anchovy toast, five egg sandwiches, a couple of pikelets and one squelchy little pastry, and yet contrived to look ethereal, mountain-cool. Enderby, on the other hand, who, because of his heartburn, had only nibbled mouse-like at a square of damp bread and an egg-ring, was aware of himself as gross, sweating, halitotic, his viscera loaded like a night-soil collector’s bucket.

Verse

‘I thought people didn’t actually find verse offensive,’ said Enderby. ‘I thought they just despised it.’

 

Reading Fem, a Ladies Magazine

He was shocked and touched by letters sent to Millicent Goodheart, a blue-haired lady with sharp red talons and a gentle smile: ‘He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.’

 

The Ghastly Spaghetti Dinner

Panting with excitement, he took the relevant issue of Fem into the kitchen and followed the instructions slavishly. ‘Enough for four’ he read. He was but one man alone, himself, he, hungry Enderby. He must divide everything, then, by four. He took the pound of spaghetti and broke the brittle sticks into small pieces. He took his frying pan (pity that the recipe asked for a large deep one; still, never mind) and poured one tablespoonful of olive oil. (He had about a cupful of this in his cupboard, saved from sardine tins.) He threw in about a quarter of the spaghetti, lit the gas, and cooked it slowly, turning and stirring. He then added two cupfuls of water, remembering that he was to divide by four, so threw some of the water out again. He turned, breathing heavily, to Fem, while the pan gently simmered. Grated cheese. He grated some with Mrs. Meldrum’s nutmeg-grater and threw it into the mixture. Now this question of onion or garlic. ‘Two large onions chopped’, said Gillian Frobisher, or ‘garlic to taste’. Enderby looked at his garlic, stronger, he knew, than onions; perhaps this one would be equivalent to two of those. Should he skin it? No. The goodness was in the skin: potatoes, for instance. He sliced the garlic warpwise, then woofwise, then threw the bits into the simmering pan. And now. A greased dish. He found a cloudy Pyrex on the shelf, and he liberally coated its inside with margarine. He now had to transfer the stuff from the pan into the Pyrex. He had some difficulty in turning it out; it had stuck to the pan for some reason, and he had to gouge vigorously to detach what was willing to be detached. He flopped the mixture into the dish. ‘Top with sour cream’, said Gillian. There was no sour cream, but plenty of sour milk, greenish on top. He crowned the dish with generous curds, then lit the oven. It had to cook to a slow heat therein, about twenty minutes. Groaning, he placed the dish on the oven shelf, kicked the black door shut, wiped one hand on the other. There.
Damn. He had not, he realized, consistently divided by four. Never mind. And perhaps the spaghetti was meant to turn black. He had heard of smart restaurants where things were deliberately burned before one’s eyes, as one sat cool and well-dressed at a table.

He. . . drew his Spaghetti Formaggio Surprise out of the oven. Its name was not inept. He sat down to it, and savoured mingled hues of burnt farinacity and shouting brutal garlic, loud and hot as an acetylene blast…..

Airplane Food

It had been three tepid fish fingers each, with some insufficiently warmed over crinkle-cut fresh frozen potato chips, also a sort of fish sauce served in a plastic doll’s bucket with a lid hard to get off. This sauce had had a taste that, unexpectedly in view of its dolly-mixture pink and the dainty exiguity of even a double portion, was somehow like the clank of metal. And, very strangely or perhaps not strangely at all, the slab of dry gateau that followed had a glutinous filling whose cold mutton fat gust clung to the palate as with small claws of rusty iron.

The rich widow

Daubs on the walls which must be what were known as rich men’s impressionists, cost millions. He knew that Mr. Schoenbaum was dead from making money. Mrs. Schoenbaum was clearly enjoying her widowhood. She wore a kind of harem dress of silk trousers and brocaded sort of cutdown caftan. Her silver hair was frozen into a photographed stormtossed effect, clicked into sempiternal tempestuousness on a Wuthering Heights of the American imagination.

The Broadway Shakespeare Show

To be or not to be
Smitten by you
Bitten by you
Teased as a ball of wood is teased by a kitten by you:
That is the question
Which harms my indigestion.

 

 

John Banville, Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir

“Dinner” would have been a bowl of beige soup, followed by an off-white plate on to which had been slung two or three thick slabs of grey-brown beef, accompanied by formerly green vegetables boiled to within an inch of their lives, then something with custard on it, the whole thing rounded off–or “driven home” as George Orwell would say–with more cups of tea the colour of tree trunks sunk for centuries in swamp-water.

Hemingway’s masterpiece–one of the best things he ever wrote: “For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”

An Italian writer: “I have realized that alcohol is for the Irish what sunshine is for the Latin peoples of the south.”

Of trees in the Great Palm House of the Botanic Gardens:”Dominant and hugely helpless, can they ever have been small–can they ever have been saplings? They are not disproportionate to us: no, it is we who are disproportionate to them, a pair of Lilliputians confronted by a crowd of Gullivers, planted there in the sand with their hairy thick old socks around their ankles.

From Don’t Point that Thing at Me, by Kyril Bonfiglioli

On worrying whether someone is an American spy

Why, after all, should anyone want to plant such a man on me? What could I get up to on the journey? What, if it came to that, could he get up to on the journey? Extract a confession from me? Prevent me seizing command of the aircraft or overthrowing the Constitution of the United States?. . . No; clearly, he must be what he seemed, an indifferent-honest executive, perhaps one of that super research firm which sells the State Department advice on where to start its next minor war.

He quotes Bertrand Russell about America

Curiously, I was afraid again. I felt obscurely that this land–‘where law and custom alike are based on the dreams of spinsters’–was nevertheless a land where I might well get hurt if I were not careful–or even if I were careful.

A Difficult Dinner

All I remember is the old Countess opposite me, cramming the groceries into her frail body like one who provisions a yacht for a long journey. “Cur quis non prandeat, hoc est?’* seemed to be her attitude.

*=is this a reason why one should not dine? From the Satires of A. Persius Flaccus

From Auntie Poldie, by Mario Giordano

On Coffee

Coffee drinking in Italy is nothing like the activity portrayed by television commercials. It has nothing to do with coffee as a beverage, only with sugar. Coffee is merely a hot, aromatic, caffeinated liquid designed to dissolve sugar, so you don’t need much of it. It can be small as long as it’s strong, but sweetness is paramount. That’s why many baristas mix coffee and sugar in the filter itself. There’s nothing more bizarre to a Sicilian than drinking an espresso without sugar…

Bella Figura

For this is the worst thing that can happen to any Italian male, especially a Sicilian. Economic crises, volcanic eruptions, corrupt politicians, emigrations, the Mafia, uncollected rubbish and overfishing of the Mediterranean–he can endure anything with fatalism and a bella figura. The main thing is never to present a brutta figura, a figuraccia. Bella figura is the Italian credo. . . .

 

On being on time

Like any private undertaking in Sicily, the playlet began with a delay of two hours or more. Sicilians can be as punctual as Prussians in the professional sphere, but personal arrangements are subject to an elastic expansion of the concept of time. It’s as if those hours must be sacrificed to a demanding god who measures his subjects’ lifetime by the extent to which they waste the lifetimes of others. Besides, every sensible Sicilian allows a margin of at least two hours where private assignations are concerned…

On Pistachio Chocolate Gelato

Innocent though that sounds, it is a typically Sicilian confection as baroque and magnificent as the whole of Sicily’s cuisine. A cuisine like the whole island, a superabundance of aromas, marvels, sensations. A spectacular odyssey for the palate, even in a dish as commonplace as Pasta alla Norma, in which the sweetness of the tomato sauce blends with the salty ricotta and the slightly bitter note of the grilled aubergines. Sweet, salt, bitter, piquant–Sicilian cuisine is all-embracing and pleasurably involves all the senses in a single dish. A gelato must also be like this. Sweet as a whispered promise, the pistachio ice cream salty as sea air, the chocolate ice cream faintly bitter and a little tart like a lover’s goodbye the next morning.

**************
What a splendid TV show this would make! Except there’s only the one translated into English. More on the way, I hope! And reading it was a logical follow on from McCall Smith’s My Italian Bulldozer, also with lots of food and romantic entanglements–no murder though.

From Dunbar, by Edward St Aubyn

 

Dr. Bob was of course relieved that Meg did not require his attention, and was naturally contemptuous of his noisy, knuckle-headed replacement, but he was rather surprised to find how jealous he felt as well. Both sisters belonged to him. He couldn’t stand either of them, indeed he was about to betray both of them, but that was no reason for them to stop desiring him or stop depending on him. There was no satisfaction in betraying people who had already defected. Like the demented sheepdog in Far from the Madding Crowd, he was planning to drive his little flock over the edge of a cliff, but however twisted his purpose he still took pride in his basic skill and could not complacently allow one of his victims to wander off on her own.

 

************************
When they converged for Christmas, or Easter, or for a week at Home Lake in the summer, they showed the same practiced ennui as the representatives of enemy countries listening to translations of each other’s speeches in the United Nations General Assembly Hall.
************************

One of Mark’s ancestors (the first Mark Rush) had been a Puritan dissenter who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower. How could he have known, as he lurched from side to side on that creaking deck, in his dreary black clothes, muttering prayers and scolding his family, that he was on board one of the most fashionable ships in all of history, one that would leave Cleopatra’s barge languishing in the perfumed air as an exotic irrelevance?