The Hippocras

Alright this is gonna be another odd one, I warn you in advance. I’ve been doing rather a lot of grading.

Despite that, last week I got one of my strange ‘cook foods of the past’ bees in my bonnet and made some lamb stew, following a medieval recipe. I made a curious gingered bread (most emphatically not gingerbread). And I made some hippocras.

Hippocras is usually made with wine, sweetened a bit, and then heated up, with spices (and perhaps fruit) added – cinnamon, ginger, and cloves all seems to have been common, with anise and rosemary showing up among others. You let it slowly warm and the flavours infuse through before you drink it.

(I made a non-alcoholic version)

It’s a very old beverage (apparently enjoyed by the ancient Romans) and obviously the antecedent of some things we drink today, perhaps including sangria, which obviously is not served warm any longer but is still dangerous to the unwary. The somewhat odd name comes from the step of straining it through cloth to remove the bits of spice (and perhaps fruit), the perfect device for which was reputedly invented by Hippocrates (yes, that Hippocrates) or he may have simply used his (reputedly) expansive sleeves.

Anyway, what you end up with is a rather tasty, sweet and warming beverage that, in well-to-do households, would have been served at the end of many meals. It was thought to aid in digestion (and who knows, it may well do) but was also probably just quite a nice way to wind down an evening.

But in more modest households, hippocras would have been a special treat. Wine was more expensive than ale, whatever was used to sweeten it would have been an expense, and the spices, even more so. So hippocras would have been an indulgence for special points in the year (like the one we are now approaching, as I am writing this).

I thought about that, as I was doing my cooking: having the hippocras warm by the fire through the day, to be shared with visitors at a special time of year. It’s an idea that appealed a lot, perhaps especially since we can’t do such things this year, or at least not literally. But what a lovely way of building and maintaining connections – and that we can still do.

So, in the days and weeks and months ahead, I hope we shall all find suitable means of emulating the hippocras for ourselves, however that ends up happening, in the hope and trust that in a year’s time, we shall be able to genuinely visit one another’s hearths again.

There, I said it was going to be a weird one.

Thank you for reading.

John Le Carré

So as you may have noticed, I’m late with this again, because both Tuesday and Wednesday were days when Life Intervened and I did not want to rush through this week’s entry. That’s because the only thing that makes sense for me to write about this week is the passing of John Le Carré, and I would like to do the best job of it that I can.

If you read the blog much, you will know that Le Carré has been one of my favourite writers, both as a creator of stories that I enjoy and as an artist whose craft I admire. Admittedly I came to read and like his work relatively recently, and that may be just as well because I’m not certain Younger Me would have appreciated it.

Le Carré, of course, is best known for his spy stories, but they are quite far from the spy stories of Bond or Jason Bourne, full of judo fights, gun battles, and volcano bases. Le Carré’s stories are generally sparse on what is usually classified as action, and thick with mood, character, and brain work. I suspect his is a more accurate picture of the real ‘wilderness of mirrors’ of espionage; you’ve done at least something right if some of the terminology you invented for your fiction gets picked up by those who are really in the trade, as Le Carré’s did.

But Le Carré’s characters do tend to be nearly the polar opposite of a James Bond; his most prominent creation, George Smiley, is short and fat, certainly no match for a team of assassins, but someone who understands detail, people and their motivations, and knows how to manipulate all these things to his advantage. He is also, at least on some level, a basically kind soul. As others have pointed out, in what is now his final appearance, Smiley (finally tracked down reading quietly in a library) apologizes for putting his friend to any trouble, invites him to dinner, and offers to walk him to his train.

There’s brain work for the reader, too, which is one of the reasons I admire his craft; there is a great deal that is suggested and there for you you to figure out without being explicitly told, so that I find his stuff demands a reasonable level of attention, but then also deeply rewards a careful read. I tremendously admire his ability to convey character and atmosphere despite saying very little at all.

And they are just very good stories, too. Obviously it helps if you have a least some interest in espionage, but what Le Carré is really good at is conveying people (or at least, a certain kind of people) and what they’re like, the flawed choices they make and the reasons they make them. I admire that as well.

You could say the tone of a lot of his work is bleak: victories tend to come at a cost, people turn out to not be who you thought they were, and sometimes situations have no good solution. Smiley’s greatest victory is finally accomplished in a way that obviously leaves him quite dismayed about how he had to do it. However, if Le Carré is bleak about the world he once inhabited, and about the results of the work of politicians and spies, he is often fairly optimistic about people and their nature.

One of the last things Smiley says: ‘We were not pitiless, Peter. We were never pitiless. We had the larger pity. Arguably, it was misplaced. Certainly it was futile. We know that now. We did not know it then.’ We did our best, basically. We tried to do something good. I increasingly believe that is all we can expect of ourselves, and each other – try to do something good, the best way we can. It won’t always work out, but it’s still important, and worthy, that we try.

Anyway, without lapsing further into philosophical ramblings, I hope it’s evident that John Le Carré was a writer who made you think, both while you were reading and after, and who made you care about his characters and believe them as people. I love reading them, I admire the craftsmanship in them very much, and I am deeply sad that we shall have no more from him.

Thanks for reading.

Internet Hole Adventures

Ok, so likely everybody has experienced the ‘internet hole’, where you start off looking at one thing, which leads to another, and another, and so on until eleven hours have passed. Most of the time, this is an entertaining, if sometimes simultaneously alarming, waste of time. Sometimes, though, the hole leads somewhere unexpectedly good.

So it was with me this past Monday.

I started out reading a column by a baseball journalist whose stuff I like. He always (perhaps especially at this time of year) gets into a lot of non-baseball stuff. That day he mentioned, more or less in passing, that there had been some new Tom Petty music released this fall.

(Longtime readers will know that Tom Petty is among my favourites)

I investigated this, which was a treat, learning along the way that “Leave Virginia Alone” was originally written by Petty, cut from the album he wrote it for, and thence ended up being recorded by Rod Stewart instead.

(I like the Tom Petty version better, unsurprisingly. It was part of what got released this fall)

Reading about this led me (through Reddit) to an interview with Stevie Nicks in which she was talking about parts of her relationship with Petty, including a time where she had been struggling to work and asked him to work on a song together. To which he said “just go to your piano and write a good song. You can do that.”

Which, a) neat story, but also b) advice I felt like I needed to hear also. Obviously I am not a songwriter, and no Stevie Nicks of any kind of writing, but still, the central idea of just going and doing some art and trusting your ability to do the thing is indeed essentially what I need just now. (Not going to try to unpick all the reasons why, I think, and many of them you can likely guess because we’re all dealing with a lot of the same crud.) Not been an easy fall/early winter. Not showing any signs of getting much easier.

But: go to my computer and write a good story. I can do that.

Thanks for the advice.

And thank you for reading.

The Future Changes

Ok buckle up, this is going to be one of those rambly ones, I fear.

Warning aside, I would be remiss in not starting out this week’s entry by marking the passing of actor, weightlifter and bodybuilder David Prowse, known to every Star Wars fan as the actor who physically portrayed Darth Vader. Although Vader’s voice is hugely famous, Prowse provided the looming physical presence and the body acting that also made the character one of the most recognizable and best-loved villains of all time.

Prowse’s relationship with the franchise seems to have been complex, and I’m not the right person to try to unpick that. I think any fan of Star Wars would want to join me in thanking him for having such a vital role in making a beloved story come to life.

—-

Alright, the rambly bit. I’ve been thinking about the changability of futures again lately, for a few different reasons. Part of my pandemic self-care has been watching old episodes of Doctor Who, and I recently landed on the serial ‘Time Flight’, which has many a problem but is delightful in several ways.

One is that the villain is (spoiler alert? For a 1980s TV series?) the Master, played by Anthony Ainley, who was the first actor I remember in the part (I must have seen Geoffrey Cheevers’ version first, I think) and so I always kind of associate the role with him. In addition, though, in this episode the Master has adopted a sort of weird Arab mystic fake identity for absolutely no good reason other than that it gives him an opportunity to be a dick to the Doctor eventually. You have to admire that kind of dedication.

However, more relevantly (?), the story centres around the disappearance of a couple of Concorde jetliners, more or less for no really good reason beyond that it was the 1980s, Concorde was cutting edge, and it kind of showed up everywhere for a while. I remember running out of my house to look up at the sky the first few times Concorde flew over – you could always always tell, because of the sound – and it was a cool looking jet, as jetliners go, but it was also the future. That was the supersonic world we were all heading for.

I have also been teaching a 20^th Century history course for the first time in a great many years, and I’ve been working on the last few lectures, most recently looking at the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism in Europe. It’s a little weird to begin with because these are all events that I am old enough to remember (unlike most of the things I cover in most of my classes), and I remember the sense that so many of us had at the time, as walls came down and regimes fell.

First I remember thinking that surely all of this would get undone (ever the cynic, perhaps) because I had grown up in a world with an East and a West Germany and a big wall in Berlin and that the Soviet Union was there as a looming, silent antagonist. Surely, the world didn’t really change quite so much, quite so quickly. But then it seemed it did, and there was a feeling that from now on we were all on the same side (ignoring of course many other important divisions in global society) and that the time of standoffs and rivalries and mistrusts was ending and that we would be cooperating now. We would build things like space stations together, and that was the future.

And then there was the news that Rogers Communications was at least kicking around the idea of demolishing the stadium formerly known as the SkyDome. This is not going to become a sports blog but I remember the opening of the Dome very well, this massive, gleaming place with a roof that moved, that could hold so many people and could fit just about anything. The Dome was the future, that we could go and sit in, in part to watch a game but in part just to be in the place, and maybe get to see the roof move.

Of course, as lots of people have pointed out ever since, the Dome was the future for about a month before they started building a new baseball stadium in Baltimore, a relatively small one that held less people but was like an old-timey park with lopsided dimensions and was just for baseball. Without digging too much into stadiums (I promise), suddenly that was the future, and the future was the past. The SkyDome was an abruptly unwanted abortive future, eventually sold at a cut price to the corporation now thinking of tearing it down.

And Concorde wasn’t the future either. It was too expensive to run and too expensive to fly on, the supersonic future never expanded beyond those few jets that grew old in their promise until finally a tragic accident brought an end to it all. In ‘Time Flight’, they made a point of having the British Airways captain say with pride that he flew “the finest aircraft ever made”, and perhaps it was, but Concorde was another future we never reached.

And so, as well, sadly, was that briefly glimpsed future of cooperation and of everyone being on the same side going forward. (And again, I acknowledge that many would suggest it was always a mirage) But new rivalries were found to replace the old, and now hearing Americans and Russians talk about one another you’d be forgiven for thinking the Cold War had never ended after all. Perhaps it didn’t.

This is rather gloomy sounding, I suppose, but I promise I’m not depressed. It’s just remarkable to me how frequently the future we imagine we’re heading for changes, and those old futures become redundant, sometimes charming dead ends that are fun to look at in an old photo or an old TV series but in some ways more dead than the past, because they’re times that never happened.

Perhaps this sticks out to me because I spend so much time with SFF, which often imagines the future, or versions of it, and (as I’ve rambled on before) we can see those redundant futures in stories as well. Perhaps it’s a useful antidote to some of the pessimistic sense we often have, in this moment, about where the world is headed to be reminded that we seem to be, on the whole, pretty bad at predicting the direction we’re headed in, or at least we get it wrong quite a lot.

Things we can’t anticipate happen, events work out differently than we think they will. The future we imagine disappears, and the one we perhaps never could have conceived of arrives instead.

Anyway. I said this was going to be rambly, and that’s probably quite enough.

Thanks for reading.