I said, ‘Excuse me. I will ask you something if I may. Can you perchance tell me…’ I raised my head to look upon her in the eye and asked, ‘How do you make a chip?’ (Andrea Levy, Small Island) Continue reading “Food and alienation”
Category: The Novel
Cooking for the clergy
With Covid-19 raging through nearly every country in the world right now, it would probably be appropriate for me to devote a post to ‘pandemic literature’ (perhaps Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year [1722] or Albert Camus’ The Plague [1947]). However, I suspect that, if food is referenced, it is far from tasty, and I also think that, at times like this, we might need to seek solace in a different type of literature. Continue reading “Cooking for the clergy”
Food fit for a king
In my last post I wrote about food celebrations for the Queen’s coronation in Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum. This post carries on the royal theme, but with a focus on what the monarch eats. Continue reading “Food fit for a king”
Royal Celebrations
Whilst I’m no fervent royalist, some of my fondest memories as a child are of royal occasions. I was seven on the celebration of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, and I remember the party that took place in the street we lived on in Bristol. The children – and possibly the adults too – dressed in red, white and blue, and my best friend Claire and I wore red, white and blue striped ribbons in our hair. There was music and games, and when evening fell the children were packed off to bed whilst the adults continued partying and dancing in the street until the early hours of the morning. Continue reading “Royal Celebrations”