A sun symbol made of light and blood

Some massive jellyfish had washed up at St Cyrus when we took Floof for a scamper on Sunday. The sight sparked a fragment, which isn’t much, but it’s nice to have produced something new. I suspect this belongs in the same world as the unpublished (but prone to receiving good personal rejections), genderqueer Swimming Lessons for Girls.

Jelly

It always started with the jellies. There were occasional rafts of them in all seasons, globular forms flattening like griddle cakes on the white sand without the supporting embrace of the ocean. The children would come running, screaming, “They’re coming! They’re coming!” and the old men puffed their pipes and squinted over the heather at the tideline, then settled back against the daubed walls of their houses, eyes glittering like winter sun on chop. Those were the small ones, no bigger than a forearm’s length across, innards forming patterns passed on as jumping games for eons. They baked in the sun until they were the same colour as the sand, and then the tide took them back.

But when the big ones came, crystalline orbs driven up onto the sand by waves big enough to crack rocks, the men got off their benches and put out their pipes. They went to the burn and filled their waxed pails, ensured the wet peat was banked high above the strandline and all the rooves were sodden.

Because when the big ones came, the ocean-goers, the deep swimmers, crashing ashore in storms that brought mass strandings of silver, flung birds bent, broken and bloody against the dunes, and turned unwary seals to carrion, those Others were not far behind.

Kelpie spotting

It’s a common misconception that kelpies of Scottish myth were horses. They are always horses in popular media. Those shapeshifters emerging black-maned from rivers and lochs to lure unwary humans to a nightmarish end being devoured amongst the weeds in the dark depths.

The Bard himself said:

When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord
An’ float the jinglin icy boord
Then, water-kelpies haunt the foord
By your direction
An’ nighted trav’llers are allur’d
To their destruction.

But kelpies weren’t always horses. They could be any animal that might founder in a way that would bring the unwary human to the water. If you can’t catch a man by inducing him to ride you, then why not be more antlion about it and get him to come to you?

Calves, sheep, goats.

Deer.

Kelpie

At about 20s you can see where the fins used for swimming turn back into legs. I filmed this standing next to my significant other and our very excitable derpwolf, but this “deer” seems quite nonchalant about it. When I looked down, I found a line of hoofprints leading into the water.

I wonder if they were noticeably deeper than the ones the animal made on the way out.

hELlo. I lOvE yOu. CaN I tOuCh yOu?

AI generated woman's smiling face in front of a humanoid shape with smashed-up featuresI discovered This Person Does Not Exist recently. It’s a fascinating project, in which two competing and opposing systems form a GAN – a Generative Adversial Network for machine learning. In short, while some machine learning attempts to minimise the distance to a specific image, a GAN has a system generating images in an attempt to fool another system which is there to identify fakes. Most of the images are impressive in how boring they are, but every so often the AI throws up an image that attempts to give the main subject a friend.

It almost never works. And every single one of these aberrations hits the low topography of the Uncanny Valley.

Maybe it’s because I watched a lot of Johnny Morris as a child, but I find it impossible to resist inventing conversations between these… Beings? Creatures? Whatever. Between them and their human companions.

 

A young boy looks direct to camera, smiling slightly. To his right is a misshapen head with one ear sticking out like a cup handle.When Barry was told his family was going to play host to one of the aliens as they attempted to learn about humans, he was initially delighted. It took a while to get used to Blogfert’s attempts to pass as human, not to mention his belief he should appear in every single photo Barry’s mum took, especially when Barry was the subject.


A smiling man looks direct at camera. What appears to be a fist with an eye looks over his right shoulder.“Friend Gok! Look! If I put an eye onto a fist, I can check myself for errant wood-based orifice cleansing material after exiting the emanation facility! I have the BEST ideas.”

 


A young girl looks directly at the camera, smiling. A fleshy appendage is close to her chin.“If you do not smile, I will rest my soft appendage upon your person. Your previous sonic emanations lead me to the supposition this does not delight you.”


A serious woman looks directly at the camera. There are flaws in the rendering of her face that look like artificial material showing through.“Thank you for agreeing to a date night, designated owner. It is my happiness to entertain you. Please excuse me for the mishap rendering my outward demeanour only 72.7% aligned with your preference. I did not expect making salted caramel to be so violent. Do not worry, HOOMANS [TM] will service my flesh skin under warranty.”


A bearded man looks to the right with a bemused expression. Something that resembles a hand with many fingers curled into a loose fist strokes his right cheek.“Mate, I know you THINK that looks just like a human hand, but no.”
“You cannot tell me that I have failed to replicate your appendage, friend Jeremy. Observe! The texture is identical.”
“Largog, mate, did we ever establish whether your species could actually count?”
“I can have no limbs or many, friend Jeremy. We count in base 23. This is an approximation, and, if I say so myself, a pretty darn good one.”
“Oh mate, no. Just no.”


A small boy looks directly at the camera with a self-satisfied smile. Something very strange that looks like it is made of flesh, teeth and hair is on his right.“Hey, psst. Charlie. Did I ever tell you about the time I had to squeeze into a bottle to hide from Mrs Gilfencamp, but I’d just been showing Sheniah that I could have hairy armpits if I wanted to? Here. Turn round. This is what it looked like.”
“Yes, Flimgon, you told me last week. Shut up. I’m thinking about the expression on my big sister’s face when she finds out I’ve left one of your disgusting shapeshift boogers in her Fluevogs.”


A man wearing glasses looks aghast to the left while some sort of fleshy appendage strikes his face.“HEY. Do NOT insult Friend Jeremy! I strike you in your monomorphic mandible!”


I suspect lockdown is starting to get to me.

My thanks to all the wonderful peeps on my facebook thread for supplying me with some of these images, and to Phil Wang at the University of Michigan for the prompt machine.

The Shape of Noise

We live in a noisy world. Synaesthesia means that ambient sound has a profound effect on my physical comfort and mental well-being. When a loud, sharp noise, such as a firework or someone hitting something with a hammer, has an effect like being smacked round the head with a baseball bat — it can be physically painful — then it’s vital to curate your ambient sound. The shape of noise around me is as important as my chair or my screen or the pen I’m using.

Sound affects my writing. Sometimes I need to have a particular playlist for my work, and it’s not “sounds of the 80s” or something that might be described as incidental music if it were a TV show. It’s a certain shape and texture of sound. I wrote Ludwig listening to Deeper Inside A Cave Near A Rushing Waterfall. More often, however, I deploy a variety of ambient soundscapes to block out, or at least filter, intrusions from the world outside. I have a long list of 12 hour ambient YouTube mixes, such as this one of the Mariana Trench, or this 6 hour International Space Station. For a more customised ambience, I also have A Soft Murmur, which is great for evocative soundscapes, and which I enjoy so much I paid for it.

Podcasts don’t generally appeal to me, because I don’t really enjoy listening to people talking about things unless it’s Radio 4 and I’m cooking, but this morning I discovered Field Recordings, and was hooked. There’s an article about the creator, London-based radio producer Eleanor McDowall, at The Guardian. She developed it after a year in which a relationship broke down, and she began to suffer burn-out at work. “It felt like something that would give me a bit of space and respite,” she says.

I understand exactly what she means.

Some of it doesn’t work for me, being too urban or too full of people, but I’ve found some treasures in their back catalogue. Currently, I have the pleasure of sitting inside a hollow tree in Sergiyev Posad, Russia. It almost sounds like being on an old square rigged sailing ship, with the ropes and lines creaking as the sails catch the wind. Most of the recordings are less than 5 minutes in length, which makes them less useful for ambient filtering purposes, but still. If you’ve ever wondered what it sounds like to sit and listen to summer rain, distant thunder in Old Leighlin, Ireland, or if you always had a hankering to listen to Barred Owls in White Rock, British Columbia, then head over there to see — and hear — what’s on offer.

The music of water

I listened to a fascinating programme on Radio 4 yesterday about what was lost under Kielder Water when the dam was built. The landscapes, the communities, the culture. I learned Kathryn Tickell played the last music ever to be heard in the buildings swallowed by the water, mere hours before the flood came. Today, I am listening to her exquisite pipe playing on Spotify, but I thoroughly recommend this programme if you are at all interested in British folk music or liminal spaces.

Book review: Mythos

Over Christmas I read, and very much enjoyed, Mythos — national treasure Stephen Fry’s retelling of the Greek myths. I love books about myths, and am lucky enough to have an extensive collection of myth and folklore gracing my shelves. My own introduction to the Greek myths was in the form of the classic Robert Graves, when I was young (so not that particular edition). I was fascinated by these all-too-human deities, who used their great power in the pursuit of goals and desires that seemed rather petty and trivial in the grand scheme of things; entirely self-serving and capricious. This depiction of deity as being similar to humans, but on a much larger scale with everything they did and felt; the idea of deity personifying aspects of human experience, was one I found fascinating, and still do. (Not that I would have been able to put that into words when I read them for the first time.)
Mythos, by Stephen Fry, cover image depicting Pandora opening her box

Fry concentrates his tellings around that concept. His gods are not Laurence Olivier swanning around in a toga with sparkly FX. He talks of gods as unpredictable, yet all-too-knowable. They are jealous, envious, bear grudges far beyond the scope of any inter-generational feud. They will bend the heavens for their favourites, and cheat, lie, steal and exert brute force to get what they want. Fry draws parallels with powerful politicians of today, and brings a dry wit and humour, as well as his obvious love of words, without going so far as to analyse the stories. He is, as he says in the foreword, interested in the telling of the tales, not pulling them apart to see how they tick.

Mythos doesn’t go as far as the Age of Heroes, but there’s plenty of material to cover before then. Despite previous reading on the subject, I learned some things. That’s always immensely satisfying — it’s why we read such books, after all.

The one downside is that some of the editing errors are blatant, mostly footnotes comprising — verbatim — part of the sentence referencing them. It appeared someone decided certain parts of the text should be in footnotes rather than as asides within the main body, and vice versa, and then went through and copy-pasted but forgot to delete the original. The occasional typo I can forgive, we’re only human, but this happened often enough that I started to wonder if this edition was a draft that had accidentally made it to press.

Editorial gaffes aside, if you want a modern version of the Greek myths interpreted for a modern audience, in a voice so clearly Fry’s one can practically hear him reading them aloud (if someone else ever does the Audible narration, it will just sound wrong), then Mythos is worth adding to your library. If you prefer a drier, more classical take, then you will have to look elsewhere, such as Bulfinch, or brave the eccentricity of Graves.

More word fuel: Bread. Nommy, nommy, home-made bread.

What better accompaniment to freshly brewed coffee than soft, delicious, home-baked bread?

Fresh from the oven
Here’s one I made earlier.

We make all our own bread. It started as an experiment, because I was having trouble with wheat. Marko read somewhere that the commercial method of bread production, the Chorleywood Bread Process, can produce bread that some people find problematic, because it is so fast the yeasts don’t have time to break down the gluten properly. This might or might not be true in my case, but my experience of home made bread has been a positive one, and I don’t enjoy commercial bread any more.

It might seem like a lot of effort, but it really isn’t, and while the resulting loaf works out more expensive than a standard sliced white from Aldi, my preference is to substitute quality for quantity where it makes sense to do so. Each 1kg loaf we make does us for anything from 4 days to a week, and while the process takes a few hours, the amount of actual work involved is about 15 minutes, and it’s well worth it.

So if you’re having a day at home writing, and fancy breaking up your writing with an activity that doesn’t take your mind away from the story, try making some bread.

For reference, all my flour comes from Marriage’s Millers these days. I’ve tried lots, and their flour consistently produces great results. I most often use a 50:50 blend of Strong Wholemeal and Very Strong Canadian White flours, but you can make up the full weight with whatever flour you like, as long as it’s bread flour. I also have a baking dome by La Cloche, which Marko bought me for Christmas last year and is the most frequently used piece of specialised kitchen kit I own apart from the kettle and the Chemex. It makes superb bread in a standard domestic oven. For proving, I use a 1kg lined wicker proving basket.

You don’t need to use either a dome or a basket — the following recipe can be baked in a 1kg (2lb) loaf tin. If you want to do that, the dough should go into the tin for its second proving. Alternatively, you can use the dough to make a plaited loaf or some other shape that will hold itself together on a tray for the second prove.

Our last trick is the use of a sourdough flour improver. Our sourdough is around three years old, and I’ve tagged a method for making one at the bottom. It’s not necessary to include this, and you can either leave it out or put in quarter of a cup (about 4 tablespoons, or 60ml) or plain, live yoghurt instead.

This recipe makes an 800g loaf. Or thereabouts.

Ingredients

  • 600g flour (strong white, strong wholemeal, or a blend of flours, as long as they are strong bread flours) plus a little more for dusting the proving basket, if using
  • 100ml boiling water
  • 260ml cold water
  • 1 tsp sugar
  • 1 tbsp dried yeast (unlike Paul Hollywood, I do NOT use the fast acting kind, which contains flour improvers, but the kind that needs to be activated in water)
  • 1.5 tsp fine sea salt
  • Half a cup (about 120 ml, or a ladle full) of sourdough starter OR quarter of a cup (about 60ml) of plain live yoghurt (optional)
  • 1 tbsp olive oil plus a little more for oiling the proving bowl, the kneading surface and the tin/tray/dome

Method

1.Dissolve the sugar in the boiling water. Add the cold water, then sprinkle the yeast in and mix thoroughly. Measure out the flour into a large mixing bowl.
2. Go away and do something else for fifteen minutes. Perhaps a timed writing exercise. Adam Maxwell has a fun prompt generator if you’re stuck for ideas. Or how about a picture prompt from Flickr? I keep a Pinterest board just for story prompts — feel free to use one of those.
3. Now your yeast mix should be nice and frothy. (It could take longer if your house is cold. If this is an issue, you can use 150 ml boiling water and 210ml cold water to give it a boost.) Add it to the flour along with about half a cup of sourdough mix or the yoghurt, if using. Mix it together thoroughly with a butter knife, so all the flour is incorporated. It might be quite sticky: this is fine.
4. Go away and do something else for twenty minutes. Perhaps another timed writing exercise. You could use the results of your last one as a starting point or try something different. Maybe a random Wikipedia entry. Or pick a scene from one of your favourite stories and write about what one of the bystander characters was doing before the scene started.
5. Now that the flour has had a chance to absorb all the water, and the yeast has started work, add 1 tbsp of olive oil and the salt to the dough. Squidge it all together and turn out onto an oiled surface. Knead. Try not to add any more flour, even if the dough feels sticky, unless it’s more like wrestling with an amorous squid than kneading.
HOW TO KNEAD: Pin one edge of the dough ball with the fingers of one hand (usually your non-dominant), as if it had teeth at the other end and poisonous spines, and the only way you could keep it from escaping or turning round to bite you was by pressing the fluffy top of its tail to the ground. With the heel of the other hand, push the dough away from you, stretching it to about as half as far as you can reach. Take the distant end, fold it in half back over itself towards you, then turn the dough through 90° (a quarter turn) and repeat. Once you get the hang of it, you can try the double fold (stretch as far as you can reach, fold, press down, fold again, turn, repeat).
6. Knead until the squid wants you to stop — the dough will tighten and feel like it wants to stay a ball rather than be your BFF and cling to you for dear life. At this point the surface will be smooth and soft, but the dough may still be a bit sticky. That’s fine, as long as it’s happy being a ball. This takes about ten minutes, which is just enough time to think about what you’re going to write next, or for your subconscious to get to work on that tricky plot point that’s been bothering you.
7. Round the dough.
HOW TO ROUND THE DOUGH: On an oiled surface, and with freshly oiled hands, flatten the dough into a round then pinch a bit of an edge, pull it out and fold it back in to the centre. Repeat slightly further along, as if you were creating petals and folding them into a bud. Once you’ve done this all the way round, turn the dough over and use the edges of both hands to smooth down and spin the dough, tucking it under itself. Gill Meller of River Cottage has a video showing the process — start at 4:45 to avoid listening to his sales pitch for the oven he’s using.
8. Place the rounded dough in an oiled bowl (I use a 3 litre Pyrex mixing bowl), top down to get it oiled, then flip it so the top is uppermost. Cover in cling film. Now go away and do something else while it rises, which can be anything from 1 hour to 4 hours depending on room temperature. I often bring my dough with me into my office/writing space so I can keep an occasional eye on it.
9. Once it has doubled in size, knock it back by prodding it firmly with a fist, and repeat the ROUNDING step. If you’re using a round proving basket, dust the basket with flour and put the dough in with what will be the base of the loaf uppermost. If you’re proving it in a tin, shape the rounded dough into a fat sausage with your hands, tuck the ends under, then put it into the oiled tin and press down so it reaches the corners. If you’re shaping your loaf some other way, do that instead. Cover your dough with either a damp, lint-free dish towel, or stick it inside a plastic bag.
10. Go away and leave it to rise again for around half an hour to an hour. It’s easy to tell when it’s ready if it’s in a basket or a tin: once it has grown just higher than the top of the tin or the basket you’re good to go.
11. FOR A TIN:
Slash the loaf with a very sharp knife or smoothly serrated bread knife, once in the middle and again about halfway to either end. Spray the surface of the loaf with water and place into a preheated oven as hot as you can get it. If you like, you can throw a few ice cubes into the bottom of the oven. Bake for 10 minutes, then spray again and turn down to 200°C (180 fan) for a further 30 – 40 depending on your oven.
FOR A BASKET AND DOME:
Turn the dough into the oiled base of the dome, slash once right across the middle of the loaf (you might need to make repeat cuts to get the slash deep enough — it should be about half the depth of the loaf), cover, then put into a cold oven. Switch the oven on to 200 °C, bake for 35 minutes, then remove the cover and bake for a further 15-20 minutes.
12. Turn the loaf out onto a cooling rack. If it’s done, it should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.
13. Leave to cool for at least an hour — the sooner you cut into it, the sooner it will start to go stale.

A fresh loaf of bread
The finished loaf, next to a standard mug for scale (see previous post for how to get 5 of these from one Chemex coffee maker).

NOTE: you can make a slightly smaller loaf using 500g flour and 300ml water. The 5:3 ratio is the starting point for all basic bread recipes. You can always use the Bakerybits dough calculator for other quantities.

To make your own sourdough starter, take 150g of strong white flour and mix it with 150ml of tepid water in a bowl. Whisk thoroughly, wandering around, harvesting yeast from the air like a perambulatory sky anemone. When I first did ours, I kicked our wood pile a few times and ambled around outside for ages, singing to the yeasts in the hope of luring them from their aerial manoeuvres into my bowl. Cover and leave for 48 hours. Add another 150g of flour and 150 ml of tepid water. By now it should have started bubbling a bit and smell a bit sour. Don’t worry if not, it can take a few days as this method uses only aerial wild yeasts, and they take a while to adapt to their new home. Leave for a further 48 hours, then discard half the mix and replace with 150g flour and 150 ml water. After another 48 hours you should definitely be seeing bubbles, but it might smell acidic rather than pleasantly sour. Keep feeding every couple of days until the colony has settled down and it smells nicely sour and a bit yeasty, almost like beer froth. It is now ready to use. We keep ours in a tupperware tub on top of the breadbin, and it is fed 1 – 2 times a week with strong white flour (i.e. whenever we make bread). It behaves best when the mix is quite thick, like drop scone batter, and it is beaten vigorously at feeding time. Every couple of months we transfer it to another tub and wash the one it’s in.

Chemex brewing for the caffeinated caterpillar

It’s a common generalisation that writers are fuelled by coffee. (I know of one or two who reserve the coffee for the editing part, but it remains part of their process.) I consider myself one of the unfortunates who was born with a less than optimal quantity of caffeine naturally present in the bloodstream, thus being obliged to consume more merely in order to obtain some semblance of normal function. I drink a lot of it, and therefore am particular about it. My beans are fresh ground at home in a burr mill grinder approaching its fourteenth birthday, and every three weeks I buy freshly roasted beans, storing opened packets in an Airscape vacuum canister.

I believe I’ve tried just about every form of coffee making known to man with the exception of, thus far, cold brewed and the vacuum system used by Hannibal (the latter firmly out of my price range). I have a single cup drip filter, an Aeropress and a French press at work, choice dependent on how much time I have to make the coffee. At home I have a drip machine, stove top espresso maker (Moka pot), turkish coffee pot (Ibrik) and a Chemex.

Chemex with two rather pretty mugs
Chemex with two rather pretty mugs but NOT ENOUGH COFFEE.

The Chemex is a thing of beauty, and appeals to me because SCIENCE. I have used my fair share of conical flasks in my time. It also makes the best long coffee, in my opinion. If you like your coffee short, dark, bitter, thick and with crema, this isn’t for you; I generally prefer long to short, however.

It also has literary history: it’s the coffee maker used by James Bond, as specified in From Russia With Love:

It consisted of very strong coffee, from De Bry in New Oxford Street, brewed in an American Chemex, of which he drank two large cups, black and without sugar.

If that were not enough, it’s the only coffee maker to find a place in the Museum of Modern Art.

If you hadn’t guessed already, I’m a bit of a fan.

HOWEVER. It’s not a fast method (hence the machine drip filter for weekday mornings), and nor is it straightforward. Especially if, like me, you are a caffeine monster for whom the standard instructions for a brew to the button (the glass bubble near the bottom) are risibly inadequate.

This, fellow coffee lovers, is a method for brewing a LOT* of coffee in a 10 cup Chemex and keeping it hot while you undertake the business of the day without having it cooking on the stove.

Here’s what you need:

Coffee, kettle, vacuum flask, chemex

Left to right that’s an electric kettle (American readers, I have no idea what you use for boiling water, but use that instead), my trusty Dualit grinder containing 60g of freshly roasted Brazilian Yellow Bourbon, the Airscape from whence came the beans, a l litre vacuum flask and my 10 cup Chemex (CM-10A) containing a pre-folded unbleached filter. (I also use the bleached round unfolded filters, because, again, SCIENCE, but I think the unbleached gives a marginally faster flow so it’s possible to use a slightly finer grind of coffee and thus a slightly more complex flavour profile.) If you are making coffee just for yourself, you may want a larger flask, say 1.5l.Wash the filter

1. Boil about 500ml of water in your kettle. When it boils, put it in the empty flask. Now refill the kettle (ours has a capacity of 1.7l) but don’t switch it on, yet.

2. Grind your beans. It should be a moderately coarse grind, so the coffee ends up the texture of beach sand. While it’s grinding, using about half the water in the flask, rinse down the filter paper. It’s tempting to skip this step, but don’t. It gets rid of any residue from the packing and warms the Chemex. Discard the rinsing water.

3. Put the ground coffee into the Chemex. Switch on the kettle. Using just enough of the hot water still in the flask, soak the coffee until it’s saturated but not floating, then stir. Empty any remaining water from the flask but put the lid back on to retain heat.Stir the coffee

4. Once the kettle has boiled, fill the flask. Use the water from the flask to pour over the coffee in the Chemex, using a spiral motion to ensure even coverage. Fill to within about 5mm of the glass rim. Stir again.Add more water

5. Top up the water in the flask using the water in the kettle. Transfer the Chemex to the stove top. If you have gas or ceramic you’re fine — if you have a coil element you will need a special heat diffuser to ensure you don’t damage the Chemex. Turn on the stove to its lowest setting.

6. Once the water has filtered through, top up the Chemex using the remaining water in the kettle (it will now have cooled to the ideal 90 – 92ºC) by pouring gently down the sides of the filter paper, washing the coffee grounds back down into the mix.

Keep filling7. Continue topping up the Chemex in this fashion using water from the flask, being careful not to overfill, until you have achieved the desired amount of coffee. In my case, this is to the neck.Full!

8. Remove the filter paper, holding it above the Chemex for a few moments to allow any remaining coffee to drain. You don’t want to lose any.

9. Empty any remaining water from the flask (there won’t be much) and fill the flask with coffee. You can now pour yourself a mug using what’s left in the Chemex, safe in the knowledge the rest will stay hot for however long your flask is supposed to keep things hot.

10. Enjoy with your current reading material, or use to fuel words.

Enjoy!

* By “a LOT” I mean about 5 full British mugs, or roughly 1.6 litres of coffee.
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