Rhubarb

Molly Peacock's The Paper Garden (Mrs Delaney Begins Her Life's Work at 72) and a dish of  stewed rhubarb with ginger

Rhubarb. It's great cooked with ginger and some sugar. I bake mine in the oven. Got some locally grown on Saturday from the greengrocer in the High St. The furthest away from home I ever ate rhubarb was in Tashkent, where it grows wild on the hills and they call it a herb or medicine. I have photographed the dish with Molly Peacock's magnificent, thought-provoking memoir, a poem in prose on the life of the 18th century artist Mary Delaney: '...a collage about collage, and a meditation on sexuality, friendship and creativity.'(Victoria Glendinning, quoted on the back book jacket). One of the most surprising, rewarding and excellently-written books I HAVE EVER READ.

To Recuse

Should one wear a hat?

A new - old - verb has suddenly hit the headlines: to recuse. This is what David Cameron claims he did with respect to the News Corporation's proposal to buy the balance of shares in - in other words to gain 100 per cent control over -  BSkyB. The dictionary definition of this useful word is to remove oneself from, usually in the context of a judicial process eg because of a conflict of interest. The noun recusant was used in England in the 16th century to describe those, usually Roman Catholics, who refused to attend Church of England services. Church attendance was compulsory in those days, like wearing head covering of the appropriate kind. Vestiges of these social mores once subject to the sanction of the law linger in 'dress codes' - should one wear a hat eg for a wedding? for a funeral? A decision about what to wear is often a matter of how you show respect for others, or for the occasion, or not as the case may be. I remember distinctly the frisson that ran round a formal reception with royalty present when a young, rich, titled (Hapsburgs, as I seem to remember), recently-married couple ran hand in hand in jeans and flip-flops round a room full of women in formal attire and men in dark suits.Their wealth, youth and exuberance, in their honeymoon' bubble'  excused them, but they were clearly violating an unwritten code, they were in flagrant breach of etiquette. Society depends on people keeping to not only the letter of the law, but the spirit. Oscar Wilde once said that Britain was the homeland of the hypocrite and our only protection of our hard-won freedoms is an independent judiciary, an elected parliament, and a free press. Here endeth the lesson. Amen

D&G Literature Development Forum

It is a perfect spring morning in Moffat - pictured above: the old mill leat looking west along Burnside and (top) birch trees on the leat. Yesterday was the first meeting at Gracefield, Dumfries of the Literature Development Forum. There were thirteen of us round the table, representing Wigtown Book Festival, CABN (the support organisation for creatives in D&G), the four arts hubs, The Bakehouse, Moathouse Brae, Moffat Book Events, the University of Glasgow's Crichton Campus and CatStrand. The forum will be a regular (we're not sure yet how frequently)opportunity to meet, to receive information, exchange it and generate synergy between our component parts. One early fruit of our networking, I hope, will be a book launch event in Moffat in July, to coincide with an exhibition at The Moffat Gallery of black and white photographs of Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden in south Lanarkshire - the book is about an artist who wove clothes out of grass with a poem by Chrys Salt of The Bakehouse. I was also given a reading tip by David Borthwick (representing the University of Glasgow literature and creative writing): Robert Pogue Harrison's Gardens - an essay on the human condition. I read and enjoyed Pogue Harrison's Forests - the shadow of civilization when it came out some years ago. My reading list for my holiday was a mixed success. Five Red Herrings by Dorothy Sayers was quite literally like reading a railway timetable, the plot turning entirely on a dreary catalogue of calculations about whether any of the five suspects could have travelled on various branch line trains; the new biography of Wittgenstein aroused in me three quarters of the way through a rebellious refusal to find out any more about this tortured man who could not seem to find peace or fulfillment however much he tossed and turned and gave away. However - and this is a crucial 'but' - I do think he was onto something when he said that there were events and emotions where words fail, and in these circumstances 'one must remain silent'. Ray Monk's biography of Becket, in my view, is not particularly well written. Andrew Wheatcroft's 'The Enemy At The Gate' is so packed with information that I could only manage it in bite-sized chunks washed down with lighter stuff. I started my Anne Tyler download (I was reading everything on Kindle) Back When We Were Grownups and found the scene set, of a family at odds for various familiar - even understandable - reasons too much like real life for relaxation. The first page of the Norwegian thriller, Per Petterson's To Siberia did not grip me possibly because of poor translation. I came to Kathleen Jamies Sightlines late in my travels, but when I did, I was rewarded by her gentle humour and vivid descriptions of her interesting adventures in unexpected places such as the whale room of Bergen's Museum. As I said at the beginning, it is a perfect spring morning here in Moffat: blue sky, no wind etc so I will get myself out and about now.

Kathleen Jamie - Sightlines

I only felt ready to read Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie's new collection of meditations and memories, just before dawn this morning, as we were approaching Maloy on this last day of my round trip sea voyage from Bergen to Kirkenes. Her genius is gently to release one's own capacity to remember, and see the world and one's life in it afresh. Such is the power of her writing, that when I put the book down to go and fetch an early morning cuppa, and looked out of the window at the serried rows of houses built on the steep slope up from the quay, I was instantly reminded of many other such early morning arrivals at ports from the west of Scotland, to the 'panhandle' archipelago of Alaska and the islands of Greece, with pleasure at discovering a pattern. Jamie does not over-write. She draws you in to an apparently slight anecdote; intrigued, you read on and are rewarded by a sense of recognition, the greatness in apparently small things, life relished and its mysteries shared. I warmed to Jamie when I heard her being interviewed by Jenny Murray on BBCR4's Woman's Hour about Sightlines and  she explained simply that, like runners, writers of prose have their optimum distances - and hers - as a poet -  is the extended essay. I think she may have even mentioned the word count. 3,000 words? I forget. But she has certainly 'found her distance' with this book and its predecessor, Findings. It is an exquisite early spring morning here in Norway, the sun is fast shedding its warm bright light on the spruces and crags of the coast as we thread our steady way south through the archipelago of islands towards Bergen.

Norway Notebook - summing up

The Richard With docks at Bergen tomorrow, at the end of our round trip up the coast of Norway north to Kirkenes on the Barents Sea. I have made a few notes for anyone who might be interested.

1. Service: Because the Hurtigruten service is just that - a service for mail, passengers and goods -there is a pleasant overall sense of being part of something useful,not just rubber-necking.
2. Safety:Very professional, totally reassuring. There was a comprehensive safety drill for staff one day when most passengers were ashore on a trip, and a helicopter rescue drill another day. Judging by the number of small fishing boats darting in and out of every harbour, and the number of pleasure craft waiting for the summer season, seamanship is second nature to Norwegians.
3. Hygiene: Bordering on the obsessive, which, knowing what we do now about bugs, is as it should be. 
4. Staff: No-one can be good at everything, and when I am at sea I value safety and professional seamanship far above obsequious waiters and waitresses. My hunch is that, like the Portuguese (another great seafaring nation), the Norwegian genius is not best displayed waiting at tables or serving behind the bar. There is a certain 'take it or leave it' attitude, which has its own charm not least because it reminds one of home. See also 'Downside' below.
5. Weather: At this time of year the weather apparently is often good (according to one passenger from Northern Ireland who is on his 6th trip). We have had 12 days of more or less unbroken calm and at times extremely hot sun.
6. No crowds: both the ship and the many ports we called at are less busy than in the summer peak season. 
7. Cost:It is significantly cheaper at this time of year than in peak season May, June, July and August.
8. Contrast:There is a delightful contrast between the cosiness, not to say luxurious comfort, of the ship and the extraordinary wild scenery - like the alps or the Himalayas -  passing right outside; not in the far distance, although that too, but very often right outside the window.
9. Fellow Passengers:There is something very soothing about the fact that most passengers are not English, and so their conversations in (say) German or Norwegian are just a hum in the background. We are mostly elderly, which can be a bit depressing as we gather at the door of the dining room as if at the gates of heaven. There is also the slight awkwardness, skirted around gracefully in the Hurtigruten guide book, that the retreating German army in 1944, under orders from Hitler, burned every house and destroyed every particle of infrastructure north from Tromso. It must be extraordinary for a German more or less anywhere in Europe to be faced with these stark historical reminders wherever they go. This circumstance is rendered all the more pointed and poignant now when, despite her best efforts, Germany is once again in the firing line with regard to the euro currency crisis. Caught between the Scylla of inflation and the Charybdis of 'squeeze', she is damned if she does and damned if she doesn't bail out the failing economies of Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Italy - and, some would add, France. The only time I have heard German voices raised was when a woman in a group sitting at the next table in the ship's library was (I gathered) expressing her exasperation at the euro situation. That said, there has been a sprinkling of younger couples, some with babies in prams and parties of excitable school children as we have gone along. Because this is a service calling at many ports every day sometimes only for 15 minutes to allow passengers (and their cars) on and off, there is a very welcome diversity of occasional workmen, in their oilskins and rubber boots or businessmen in suits simply using the ship like a bus.
10. Wildlife: There are lots and lots of different sorts of seabirds, including sea eagles, I have seen one dolphin (or it might of been the smallest sort of whale), one sea otter in harbour. To my surprise and in complete contrast to the west coast of Scotland, not a single seal.
11. Downside: A couple of days ago, a dreadful (to me) saxophonist played mournful versions on Deck 7 of 'middle of the road' hits as we entered every harbour and steamed through one of the most spectacularly scenic narrow passages between towering cliffs. In the words of Mrs T, 'No!No!No! No!' Also the snooper I discovered in my cabin looking at my laptop, which has meant that I now carry my laptop with me everywhere and at all times in my backpack.
12. Food:Delicious, frequent, plentiful.
13. Drink: Staggeringly expensive. One ill-advised bottle of very ordinary Chilean rose on the first night (not drunk all at once, I hasten to add) cost me £47. A small glass of house white costs 75 krone, nearly £10. Is our Chancellor of the Exchequer missing a trick? On the plus side, once you buy a Hurtigruten tin mug with lid you are entitled to refills of free tea and coffee day and night for the whole trip. 
14. Dating:For the lovelorn lady passenger, there is a surplus of single elderly gents. 
15. Dress Code: Check shirts, jeans, upmarket shell suits, jumpers, zipper jackets, fleeces, gilets  trainers and loafers are the order of the day and night. Almost no-one 'dresses for dinner'. When they do, they look out of place. Los Angeles has triumphed over Lingfield, Lille and Lubeck.

Would I do it again? Hmm. It has certainly been wonderfully relaxing, not least because of our extraordinary luck with the weather. And I was lucky with my dinner companion, M. Poirot, who I hope will be visiting Moffat in June on a tour of the UK already arranged with friends from Belgium. We will see.

Bram Stoker in south Lanarkshire, Scotland

Today is the 100th anniversary of the death, on April 20 1912, of Bram Stoker the author of Dracula.Bram Stoker used to stay at Watermeetings a house near Elvanfoot in south Lanarkshire with Sir Henry Irving, whose secretary and business manager he was, and Ellen Terry, when they were touring Scotland with their theatre company. The fourth adult member of the party (Ellen Terry also travelled with her two children out of wedlock, one of whom - Gordon - she surnamed Craig after the rock) was Ellen Terry's secretary- cum -fan club manager  Eleanor Marx, daughter of the notorious political economist. The connection with a farmhouse in a remote valley in the southern uplands of Scotland is that a member of the theatre company in London was born in Crawford, a small village next along from Elvanfoot in the upper reaches of the Clyde, the daughter of the postmaster. After enjoying a brief period of success on the stage, she returned to marry a wealthy farmer many years her senior and would host the Terry-Irving entourage on their tours of Scotland. The River Clyde does not rise, it simply becomes the great river at an arbitrary point: the 'Watermeetings' after which the house was named, where two small streams, the Daer and the Potrail meet.

Shipboard reading

Pictured above and left (to the right of centre by the water's edge, the two-stage plain white building with red roofs): the furthest north medieval church in Norway, at Trondenes near Harstad, originally of wood then stone; said to be built near the place of the first Norwegian Christian baptisms in 999, in a nearby pool.

At the time of writing the Richard With is tied up alongside the quay at Harstad. The sun has broken through some desultory clouds, and it will soon be too hot to sit here by the big glass window of the ship on Deck 4 where the wifi is. I am still reading Andrew Wheatcroft - our MBE chairman's - The Enemy at the Gate, about the 17th century Ottoman siege of Vienna and its knock-on effects; Ray Monk's new biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein - whose tortured life, combining the espousal of ascetic spirituality (including a spell living in a Norwegian fjord) with an addiction to junk culture, continues to exercise a horrid fascination - and the new biography of Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel, Victim by John Guy. This voyage has been accompanied on the TV screens dotted about the ship, by the trial of Breivik the mass murderer last July, first in Oslo and then on an island near Oslo, of 77 people. He was revealed yesterday as having hoped to kill all 500 people on the island, and to cut off the head of the former Prime Minister of Norway who one assumes was either on the island, or had planned to pay a visit to the summer camp taking place at the time.