Odds and ends

 

A quiet day, but not without interest.

The first batch of bread of the new year, batch No.764, the first as it happens for around two months. Turned out OK, but it won't be sampled until tomorrow.

A left-over soup. Maybe as much as a pound of left over boiled potato, mashed. A portion of left over broccoli (not the purple sprouting sort of old), chopped. Some sticks of fresh celery, chopped cross-wise. All simmered in a little water for half an hour or so.

A couple of onions. Three rashers of 'Jolly Hog' back bacon from Sainsbury's. Cooked in a little butter. I had thought that I had burned the onions, but actually they tasted pretty good. Maybe that is how French onion soup - which, as it happens, I am not that keen on - gets to be so brown.

Add onion and bacon to the vegetables, along with a little water. A few minutes before the off a stump of chou pointu, including the finely sliced central stalk. One needs a bit of bite.

It turned out very well, with just a very modest portion left for breakfast. The bacon was good too, despite my reservations about the meat from Sainsbury's. See also reference 1.

Next up was the new look TLS where there was a review of one of those books which are a cross between what used to be called a coffee-table book and a monograph about something odd but rather commonplace at the same time, in this case the herring. The review told me that kippers were cold smoked herring. What a lot of twaddle I thought. Has the author never seen all the black tar dripping out of the louvres of the roof of the smokery at Craster?

Checking I find that cold smoking is the term of trade for smoking while not actually cooking. So a relatively cool smoke. While hot smoking cooks. Slightly confused by some cold smoked flesh being eaten without cooking - although one would not want to do that with a kipper.

It has taken me a long time to get there, considering how many kippers I have eaten over the years.

Domestic affairs close with our garage doors - ancient bi-folding doors - conceived well before bi-folding became one of the must-have things for the suburban householder. A phenomenon which has swept over Surrey over the past five years or so. All the rain we have had recently has made them swell and they are sticking quite badly. Action required, but I expect that, all things considered, we shall go and see how the River Mole is doing at Leatherhead. Maybe it has flooded again. Reliably exciting.

Maigret

Today we took in the first Davies rendering of a Maigret story which I did not much like. Perhaps it was a mistake to read the text in parallel, although I don't think that that was the whole problem. See references 4 and 5. BH liked it well enough.

Perhaps now we are thirty episodes in, BBC is starting to use the stories which do not fit the television so well.

Perhaps they have taken too many liberties with the plot, leaving the wrong stuff out. For example, I thought they made far too much of Mme. Maigret fussing about the bed-bound Maigret smoking. The time could have been better used. Although, to be fair, I noticed one change which tidied up a loose end in the written version. Maybe what it was will come back to me.

The story also includes the word 'Jew' a good deal more than would be considered proper now, in part a reflection of the waves of migration across Europe after the First World War, with one of the factors here being the massive loss of French manpower during that war. They needed the migrants then - in something of the same way that we need them now. But it is also the case that he was probably wise to flee France for the US when the Second World War ended: in the uncertain times that followed, he may well have got into difficulties. His brother went to what was then called Indo-China, ending up getting killed there.

And while I am in knock-Simenon mode, it is also the case that, while Maigret himself rarely resorted to violence, Simenon was far too keen on extracting confessions from suspects by marathon interrogations, sometimes going on for days and usually without a lawyer being present. Simenon spends a lot of space moaning about how such things were not permitted by the new wave, educated in universities rather than on the streets and wearing suits rather than nailed boots - the mark of the French beat policeman of the 1930s.

Maybe the mark of a talented man who fought his way up from somewhere near the bottom - but was still jealous of the men in suits who had been to university.

The BBC, to its credit, omits nearly all of this in its versions of the stories.

Note also the confusion between the life of Simenon and the life of Maigret - a confusion carefully fostered by the man himself. A subject to which I shall return shortly, in the context of reference 9, another bit of holiday reading.

Financial Times

The proposed Board of Peace gets more grotesque by the hour. Maybe Congress will wake up and rein the President in. See reference 6.

While I thought that the piece at reference 7 got it about right. A genuine value add, in that it was, to my shame, an angle I had not thought of. Shame because the disease in question is one that we suffered from here in the UK for half a century. A disease which Portugal, for example, got over a long time ago. While the French are still in its grip.

We also have the suggestion that the whole Greenland business is fuelled by confusion brought on by the use of the Mercator projection, in which places anywhere near the poles are apt to be badly distorted. Greenland is not as big as Africa - or as well endowed with interesting minerals. While the Southern Ocean is a big place and Australia is nowhere as near its pole. Think equator.

PS 1: I don't suppose I shall be buying the herring book (reference 8), but I did fall for a couple of others in the TLS, despite resolutions to the contrary on this subject. To be fair, I did get rid of half a metre of books a couple of days ago. Not exactly one in, one out, but a step in the right direction.

PS 2: geek note: the FT has been a little careless here. The map above downloaded as a .png file - while they usually take the trouble to use .avif files - rather more fiddly to copy into a blog.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/02/not-dahl.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipper.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_(cooking).

Reference 4: Le Fou de Bergerac - Georges Simenon - 1932.

Reference 5: The madman of Vervac - Rupert Davies, BBC, after Simeon - 1962.

Reference 6: Benjamin Netanyahu joins Donald Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’: Israel will join countries including UAE, Morocco and Belarus on body that US president wants to adopt UN-like role - Mehul Srivastava, Max de Haldevang, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 7: Always beware a declining superpower: Even under normal leadership, a status-anxious US would be lashing out - Janan Ganesh, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 8: Rigby's encyclopaedia of the herring: Adventures with the king of fishes - Graeme Rigby - 2025.

Reference 9: Les Mémoires de Maigret - Georges Simenon - 1950.