pumpkinstrokemarrow

The minus point is the younger of our two Evesham desktops, the one I am typing on now. Its habit of going into massive disc activity everytime you turn it on, activity which lasts for maybe 15 minutes, is getting to be a real pain. Is it Norton? Is it Chrome rushing about getting its latest fix? Is it some obscure punch up between Windows and Chrome? Trouble is, I imagine it won't just be a question of taking the tower down to Ashstead. He would have to come here and see it on its home ground. And that is going to come to more than £40 time he has sorted it out. I shall put up with the pain for a bit longer.

Thursday was the day for boiled beef, something we were into a year or so ago but have not done much recently. The book said twenty minutes to the pound so I gave it double that. Made some presentable gravy out of half a pint of the resultant stock. Not bad at all, although I would have preferred it a little looser. Maybe do it three times what it says in the (usually reliable Radiation cook) book next time.

After lunch, liquidised the vegetables in which the beef had been cooked - carrot, celery and onion - in to the remaining couple of pints of stock. Added some finely sliced white cabbage and some button mushrooms and we had soup for tea. Very nice it was too; with not a seasoning or e-number in sight.

Boiled beef finished off in the tea-time sandwiches yesterday.

After which, lolled around with the TLS where I find a long moan about the fact that a good chunk of university funding is driven by what some bureaucracy thinks the impact of university research on the quality of life of the rest of us has been. The general idea seems to be that if you invent a new sort of disc drive which means that people can store zillions of hours of Michael Jackson chansonery on your telephone, your university gets lots of dosh. If you write some path breaking study about the Norman French poetry of Gaullois of Rheims, your university gets nothing. Now while one might mourn the passing of that more leisured age when university dons could hold their leisured places for ever while doing what they pleased, even while doing little or nothing, that age has passed. Plus there are a lot lot more of them to pay for. Universities no longer live on their endowments (which meant that they could do what they pleased) and need cash drawn from general taxation to keep going. And so we need some explanation of why they get this particular amount of cash and of how it is to be shared out. Someone has to get their hands dirty to do this, although I grant that if there was a wider consensus that the Gaulloises were a good thing to spend money on, the process might be a little less uncomfortable for those that liked that sort of thing. Or if we spent the sort of money on universities that they do in the USA. But the article, at least as far as I got, did nothing more than moan about the discomfort. No sign of any understanding that the money has got to come from somewhere and has got to come from out of someone else's mouth.

The same issue carried a long letter by the translator of Irene Nemirovsky. She was rather upset by a review of her translation of 'The Dogs and the Wolves' in a previous issue. The reviewer had found the book to be rather crudely anti-semitic. I have not read the book in question but I have read 'David Golder' which struck me in rather the same way. Rather sad, given that Nemirovsky was of Jewish stock, albeit non-practising, herself. And on the translator front, I suppose if you have given up the quality time needed to translate eight novels, you are apt to become prejudiced in favour of your chosen author.

The most famous of her novels, 'Suite Francaise', is a much better book altogether. Full of acute observation, of class and of country life. This last perhaps the product of a sensitive and observant person going to live in the country for the first time in her life in the wake of the German invasion of France. A sympathetic portrait of the occupying army. The Fritzes in shirt-sleeves playing with the children of their landladies. A very striking tale of the Germans in the village having a fete in the garden of the local chateau. Eating off tables adorned with the best table linen, wheedled from the better off villagers. The local French would not actually go because that would be unpatriotic, but they did gather in the dusk, in the lanes around the chateau to listen to the music, to participate vicariously and maybe to dance a little themselves. But Nemirovsky does appear to have been almost blind to the dark side of the occupation; almost as if in some sense she was trying to buy her life by being nice about the occupiers. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out.