Six Degrees of Separation: July 2021

Six Degrees of Separation is hosted by Kate of booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com.

The starter book this month is Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which I haven't read but have certainly heard about. Until recently I've always been very pernickety about punctuation and grammar, but I am now making a determined effort to lighten up. There are some sentences in which the correct use of apostrophes and colons is essential; as Truss points out, get them wrong and you change the meaning of the words themselves. But often these things are academic points, and I've decided that as long as the reader understands what the writer is saying, we should perhaps stop being so fussy; punctuation has become, for some, a form of snobbery.

A book I have read, however, is The Girl's Like Spaghetti, also by Lynne Truss and aimed at a younger readership. In her introduction, Truss says;

‘I see (the apostrophe) as a tireless Good Punctuation Fairy, flitting above a page of words, looking for anything that's a bit of a muddle, then waving a wand to make it clear......If it sounds complicated, don't blame the apostrophe. Blame the people who didn't come up with different marks for the different jobs. They were very, very shortsighted. Especially when it come to the word its.’

The rest of the book is filled with excellent  and very funny illustrations by Bonnie Timmons, all used to explain the use and effect of the apostrophe. My favourite is 'Students' refuse to go in the bin' contrasted with 'Students refuse to go in the bin' - and there's also 'The tiny cat's home' v The tiny cats' home', 'Those smelly things are my brother's' v 'Those smelly things are my brothers'. and many more. 

Spaghetti leads us to Italy. When I was a child in the 1960s, spaghetti came wrapped in blue paper, one size and one make only. My mother would not buy it - 'how am I supposed to fit that into a saucepan?'  But for people more sophisticated than us, even to be able to buy spaghetti was a treat. 

After the Second World War, those who had in the past been privileged to holiday in foreign climes yearned for the food they had eaten there. In a Britain still enduring a diet of root vegetables, semolina and dried egg, few could obtain the olive oil, lemons, butter, garlic, almonds and red wine after which they hankered. Elizabeth David had spent most of the war years living around the Mediterranean; on returning to England in 1946, she was appalled by the standard of food. Rationing was still in force.

‘There was flour and water soup seasoned solely with pepper; bread and gristle rissoles, dehydrated onions and carrots; corned beef toad in the hole. I need not go on.’

In 1950 A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared, its now iconic illustrations drawn by the artist John Minton. No less than The Observer's reviewer said

'(It) deserves to become the familiar companion of all who seek uninhibited excitement in the kitchen' (!)

The book has remained in print for over 50 years. (In 1954 David published Italian Food, for which she had carried out extensive research on location in Venice, Rome, Capri, Siena, Florence and Milan. It was a great hit with the metropolitan litterati. The rest of Britian probably stuck steadfastly to Marguerite Patten and her piped mashed potatoes...)

Many modern cooks cite Elizabeth David's books as their inspiration, among them Delia Smith, the late Jane Grigson, Nigella Lawson and Nigel Slater. I love Slater's Kitchen Diaries, in which he writes so evocatively of meals he has cooked in his North London kitchen through the year. Sometimes I even get inspiration for dinner that day, but more often I just soak up the luminescent prose and imagine. 

Toast is Nigel Slater’s book about his difficult childhood and his early career, which began in the kitchens of  the Savoy Hotel. Toast is what Nigel’s adored mother dished up every time her cooking went wrong (which was often.) Nigel loved that toast, even though he fantasised about meals that didn’t come out of a tin or packet. After his mother’s early death from asthma, the brash, competitive Mrs Potter was employed as a housekeeper. She tuned out endless fabulous food and far, far too much of it in her attempts to win Nigel’s father over. Eventually she succeeded and the three of them move to the country. Nigel loathed her.  Toast was made into an excellent television film, in which the ever brilliant Ken Stott starred as Mr Slater, with Helena Bonham Carter in her element as the ambitious Mrs Potter. 

Another of Ken Stott’s television roles is as the police inspector star of Ian Rankin’s Rebus series. Stott is perfect as the bad-tempered, rule-breaking, maverick detective working in the areas of Edinburgh that tourists rarely see. All of the books in this series are good, but I particularly enjoyed The Naming of the Dead, in which a young, media-friendly politician falls to his death from Arthur’s Seat during an important GI summit.  Did he fall, did he jump, or was he pushed?  And in all cases - why? 

There are no seedy sides to Alexander McCall Smith’s Edinburgh. His immensely popular Scotland Street books stay firmly in the affluent New Town, with the the occasional foray to the floatarium at Stockbridge or the Steiner School in Morningside. 44 Scotland Street, the first in the series, introduces us to the inhabitants of a typical Edinburgh tenement building - but for anyone who thinks tenements = slums, please know that these tenements form a very important part of Edinburgh’s UNESCO World Heritage status; they are beautiful neo-classical and Georgian buildings with manicured communal gardens (kept locked, with keys only available to local residents) whose apartments are highly sought after. 

In McCall Smith’s world they are still occupied by middle class people; artists, poets, academic ladies of a certain age - while in reality most are now Air B & Bs or the pieds a terre of the super rich. The New Town is often more like a Ghost Town at weekends, although still a fine place for a stroll. 

Nevertheless, McCall Smith’s books are very entertaining, especially for those who know Edinburgh and the very Edinburgh ‘types’ that he satirises. None is more easily satirised than Irene, yummy Mummy and helicopter parent par excellence, who makes her son Bertie’s life a misery with her insistence on the 7 year old attending Italian classes, learning the saxophone, wearing pink trousers and practising yoga. Bertie attends the Edinburgh Steiner School, which McCall Smith pillories mercilessly (all Bertie wants is to go to George Watson’s, one of Edinburgh’s many prestigious private schools, and play rugby.) 

I have to challenge McCall Smith on this one a little though, as one of my own daughters is a Steiner alumna, and she had a very happy time there (and, contrary to the preconceptions  of some, emerged with all the usual exam passes, proceeded to university and has just graduated.) 

I’m not sure there’s much connection between the first and last book in my chain this month - but I enjoyed this one. 

Next month’s 6 Degrees will begin with Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge.