I Don't Think You Can Buy Stardust In Tesco's

One of the many things the Blue Kitten was given for Christmas was this lovely seasonal sleepsuit, bearing the legend 'Little Pudding Recipe':


Look a little closer, however, and it becomes clear that this so-called 'recipe' is deeply deficient:


To be specific, it reads as follows:

A sprinkle of sugar
A spoonful of stardust
And lots and lots of love
Eggs

This is optimistically illustrated with a picture of a Christmas pudding.

I don't think you have to be Delia Smith to recognise that combining these four ingredients is not going to result in anything resembling a Christmas pudding.

At best, and I feel that the end result will depend very heavily on your interpretation of 'stardust', you might end up with a slightly gritty pancake.

Alternatively, you might end up with a slightly gritty omelette, depending on how many eggs you choose to use. The recipe itself is quite vague on the subject, but the accompanying illustration suggests that there should be two, and moreover that they should have smiling faces and be wielding spoons.

I am not sure what to make of this. Should we infer that the eggs are to be actively involved somehow in preparing the pudding? Are they to be persuaded to collude unwittingly - even cheerfully - in their own gastronomical demise, like Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb in the castle of Harfang?

Should the eggs be made to beat themselves?

There's no real way of telling, because the recipe is unhelpfully tight-lipped on the actual preparation method. But a trembling finger of suspicion must be pointed in the direction of the sinister character at top left, whose broad smile and jolly demeanour may well have lured the hapless, trusting eggs to their imminent and untimely demise.

Fortunately, the Blue Kitten remains blissfully unaware of this grotesque subtext, and contents herself with sucking on the sleepsuit's stripy sleeve and dribbling liberally down its front. The time for her edification in the twin disciplines of cookery and battling evil will come, but not yet.

IN OTHER NEWS: I woke up this morning to learn that I'd been canonised during the night. It had to happen sometime.

What Not To Wear

I have a spiffy* new drab-coloured knitted woollen dress thing, which I am very pleased with as I got it in the Monsoon sale for a mere twenty-five pounds. As it was in the sale I can only assume that drab knitted woollen dresses are now hopelessly unfashionable, which suits me fine, as 'hopelessly unfashionable' is my signature look and I am sticking to it.

(I have, for example, chosen to ignore the persistent skinny jeans and boots-on-the-outside trend, and blithely continue to wear bootcut jeans with nary a thought for what whatsername Carter-whatsit might have to say on the matter. Whatsername Carter-whatsit will get her comeuppances when the horrid skinny-jeans and boots-on-the-outside trend finally goes away and I will turn out to have been deeply stylish all along.)

Anyway, this morning I thought I would début this new dress to the world by wearing it to one of the West Country's hippest hangouts, viz. Costa Coffee in Falmouth High Street**. With some black opaque tights and black knee-length boots it would look quite the thing, I thought. Thus attired, I descended to the living room and declared myself ready to venture forth into Society.

'Oughtn't you to put some trousers on first?' asked Mr BC, mildly.

Harrumph.


* Sorry, I've been reading P.G. Wodehouse.

** Which isn't actually its name at all.

I'll Pack Next Weekend, Honest

For someone who's meant to be packing up her flat ready for the Big Move, I'm having a lovely time merrily filling it with more stuff.

Here are some things that have found their way into the flat over the past few days:

1. A 1940s wardrobe that I bought ten years ago, and which has been in the possession of my brother and the lovely L for the past five years or so. Inside it's divided into wood and glass compartments with neat enamel labels reading 'Shirts', 'Hats', 'Ties', 'Pyjamas', and so on. 'There's one section that leads to Narnia,' said my brother, matter of factly, 'but I got bored of that one. I prefer the 'Hats' section now.'

2. Two office chairs, one orthopaedic, one not.

3. A large, old, seaman's chest (the wood and metal sort, not a torso, that would be horrible), of the sort that, if my life were a Susan Cooper novel, would probably yield up an ancient brass telescope case with a rolled up map inside with obscure instructions written in Old English, pointing to the location of the resting place of the Holy Grail. (I've checked though, and it only has air fresheners in it.)

4. Two more Pantone mugs. I already had the orange one, and now I have the lime green and the red one* as well. These are the greatest mugs ever, and I will not stop until I have them ALL.


5. A black silk 50s-style dress with a big bow on it, for the awards bash on Thursday. In my mind I look like Audrey Hepburn in it. Then I remember that Audrey Hepburn wasn't five feet tall with a scruffy blonde mop, and that I probably look more like a dwarf version of Jilly Goolden.

6. A second-hand copy of The Fields Beneath, by Gillian Tindall, which I had a copy of before and then lost**. It's the most engaging and beautifully written bit of social history you're ever likely to read. It's a very female take on history: eschewing dates and battles and timelines for a more organic view of how London's ancient past can still be sensed and detected and felt in the present.

(In fact if Tim is still on his mission to read more stuff by female writers, then I highly recommend this, and I'm sure Chuffy! will back me up.)

Here's an extract:

In this sense, the past can be said to be still there, not just existing in the minds of those who seek it, but actually, physically, still present. The town is a palimpsest: the statement it makes in each era is engraved over the only partially-effaced traces of previous statements.

Freud used the image of the ancient city as a metaphor for the Unconscious: he envisaged a city 'in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all of the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest ones.' He was talking about the Unconscious of one individual, but perhaps the city is a more obvious metaphor for Jung's Collective Unconscious of the race: we may know nothing about our nineteenth- or seventeenth- or fourteenth-century predecessors on the patch of territory we call ours, but their ideas and actions have shaped our habitat and hence our attitudes as well.

In Blake's poetic vision 'everything exists' for ever: experience is total and cumulative, nothing, not one hair, one particle of dust, can pass away. And in point of fact he was right. Matter is hard to destroy totally, even though it may be transformed by time and violence out of all recognition. In the pulverised rubble lying below modern buildings is the sediment of mediaeval and pre-mediaeval brick and stone [...] Many of our London gardens owe their rich topsoil to manure from long forgotten horses and cattle, and vegetable refuse from meals unimaginably remote in time. [...]

Seeing the past is not a matter of waving a magic wand. It is much more a matter of wielding a spade or pick, of tracing routes - and hence roots - on old maps, of reading the browned ink and even fainter pencil scrawl of preserved documents, whose own edges are often crumbling away into a powder, themselves joining the fur, flesh and faeces to which they testify.

I think it's probably because of this book, which is a social history of Kentish Town in London, that the four years I spent living there seem somehow more meaningful than any time I've ever spent elsewhere.

7. A green shield bug, which has been put out of the window twice, but somehow keeps finding its way back in. Which is amazingly tenacious, seeing as I live three floors up.

In other news, today Mr BC and I met Billy and Llewtrah in the street. Imagine that, eh, just running randomly into other bloggers in the real world! It was as though the very fabric of space and time had been rent, and creatures from the Otherworld had crossed into this one.

It was raining, though, so we didn't chat for long.


* I have been gently reminded that the red one is not in fact mine, and that I must curb my mug-lust lest in my delirious state I also falsely claim ownership of this one.

** It would have been very fitting if the one I bought yesterday in the Oxfam bookshop in Turnham Green Terrace had turned out to be my original, lost copy, but sadly this was not the case.

Oh God, What Am I Wearing?

Hmm, I seem to have come into work dressed as a slightly wrong version of the Queen on a Sunday afternoon's huntin', shootin' and fishin' at Balmoral.

Even though my boots are brown suede and not Hunter wellies, and I got my tweed skirt in a French department store rather than Daks, and my green jacket is a sort of military-style effort and not a Barbour, and my necklace has flowery beads rather than pearls, I still look like I'm about to nick off to spend my Civil List moolah on a couple of footstools for the corgis and a headscarf to keep the pheasant blood out of my hair.

When actually I'm just off to M&S to buy rice salad and nuts.

*waves regally to the cheering mob of serfs, peasants and oiks*

Unsuitable Clothes I Have Worn

I have no real explanation for why I ever wore any of these things:

1. That really short leopard-print miniskirt

2. That even shorter cream-coloured PVC miniskirt

3. That even shorter, furry, dalmatian-print skirt

4. Those black PVC trousers (although actually I really liked them)

5. Those green Red or Dead hotpants (I was drunk when I bought them)

6. Those silver lurex hotpants (although to be frank, I quite liked them as well)

7. That snakeskin-print top (shudder)

8. All these things have

9. Long since been dispatched to the charity shop.

10. Thank god.

Hats I Have Worn, Part 3

Brought to you by the law of diminishing returns:

2005: The cowboy hat.

Enough hats now. Next up: Music I Hate, which, conveniently enough, goes hand-in-hand with Albums I Forgot I Owned.

Possibly.

Hats I Have Worn, Part 2

1993: An extravagant red velvet hat that I bought in an Exeter charity shop, which looked not entirely dissimilar to this:

Needless to say, I didn't wear it out much.

Hats I Have Worn, Part 1

June 1988: The day I left school, my Dad drove me to John O'Groats. I don't know why; perhaps by taking me to the northernmost point of mainland Britain he intended for me to contemplate the finite nature of existence. Or maybe it was meant to mark the passing of a specific phase of my life. Or perhaps it was just a day out. In any case, he took a photo of me sitting at the end of the jetty, wearing his hat, which was some kind of jaunty, nautical peaked-cap affair.

I loathed the resulting photo, since it provided unwelcome and incontrovertible evidence of the fact that I look nothing like Kate Moss. My Granny, however, was determined that this photo should be on the cover of Vogue. Fortunately - for me and for Vogue - this never transpired.

To this day, my brother, my two cousins and I continue to disappoint Granny by completely failing to live up to her expectations. Over the years she's learned to get around this inconvenience by simply making stuff up about us. There's a whole coterie of elderly ladies in the North of Scotland who believe that I am a multi-millionaire property magnate with an army of servants, my brother is the art editor of Country Life, and the Divine Ms P is a strategic adviser to the Filipino government.

All evidence to the contrary (which, as you might imagine, is extensive) is explained away as wilful eccentricity on our part. Luckily wilful eccentricity is also an admirable quality in Granny's eyes, as it indicates a profound, Bohemian intellect. It's my Bohemian streak, for example, that prompts me to go around in jeans and scruffy cardigans when I could easily afford to wear a different Chanel suit every day.

My cousin M's glittering career is harder to fabricate, since he lives next door to Granny and quite evidently works as a team leader in a warehouse belonging to a dotcom company that sells outdoor equipment, but she does her best. Last I heard, he'd been invited to join the Board of Directors and was on track to become the youngest CEO in the FTSE 100.

More hat stories soon!