I recommend some stuff

You should read Maggie O’Farrell’s book, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox.  It is the most exquisitely written, well crafted and clever book I have read all year.

It was one of those books where I wanted to finish it immediately because I had to know what happened, and yet I wanted to savour it slowly because I didn’t want it to finish.

I haven’t read a book like this for months.

It has been such a joy to read. It really has.

It is about a woman called Esme Lennox (surprisingly) who is incarcerated in a mental hospital in Edinburgh when she is sixteen years old, labelled schizophrenic.  It is never entirely clear whether she is actually mad or whether her failure to fit into the rigid mores of Edwardian society are what doom her.  The unresolved question and the tension it adds to the story are one of the things I love best about the book.

Esme’s story is interwoven with that of her grand niece, Iris, who sixty years after Esme is imprisoned receives notice that the mental hospital is about to be closed down, and provision has to be made for Esme.  Iris has never even heard of Esme and the discovery of this new relative impacts her life in ways she cannot begin to imagine.

The writing is lucid, beautiful and has a dreamy quality which adds to the eeriness of the story.  O’Farrell’s eye for detail is rendered wonderfully in prose which at times verges on the poetic, but which is never sentimental, and which only serves to heighten the edginess of the mood she creates and the darkness of the subject matter.

Here is the description of Iris receiving the letter about Esme:

‘The typeface on the front makes her pause, half-way to the counter.  It is small, cramped, each letter heavy with ink, the semi-circular heart of the e obliterated.  Iris holds the envelope close to her face and sees that the shapes have been pressed into the grain of the manila paper.  She is running her fingertips over them, feeling the indentations, realising that it has been done on a typewriter.’

It’s just beautiful.  I am going to make a point of tracking down and reading everything else O’Farrell has written.  She is unbearably good.

I am watching with great glee, The Great British Bake Off.  Every week lots of very tense people gather in a tent, forced to perform unfeasibly high standards of baking, while being judged by the doyenne of the British baking scene, Mary Berry and a glamorous baker I have never heard of before, who is unfeasibly called Paul Hollywood.  Last week they did cakes.  This week they had to do biscuits and other baked goods, including making the perfect scone, and macaroons.  It is very, very tense, and rather amusing.  I am envious that each contestant has a different coloured Kitchenaid mixer, even though I have one myself already.  They just look so nice in gangs of vibrant colours.  I would like one in lime green and one in hot pink to clash violently with the baby blue one I already have please.

The programme is presented by Sue Perkins, who I love, and her comedy partner, Mel Giedroyc, who I am quite fond of.  They provide light hearted banter when people whose choux pastry has gone soggy are trying to kill themselves by drinking neat vanilla essence and jabbing themselves with an icing bag.  They also provide interesting baking related facts such as the information that the digestive biscuit was originally created as a cure for flatulence, and that the British public consume 52 digestive biscuits a second.  We must be a particularly farty nation.

Tilly and I are totally entranced.  I am not entering.  The lecture on scones by Paul Hollywood made me nervous to the point of tears and I was only watching the programme.  It’s a scone eat scone world out there.  I will just stay in with my 52 digestives thanks.

I am currently listening to this:

I know I am old and not at all hip to the beat, but it’s still a great tune and a great video.

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