Originally published at Book of Lost Nights. You can comment here or there.

For the Bank Holiday weekend I decided to do something special – Cormarye, which is roasted pork in a red wine, caraway, coriander and garlic marinade, with the drippings made into an accompanying sauce and served on a trencher of bread, with “blaunchyd porray”, or creamed leeks. I’ll describe the leeks in another entry, and for now just stick with the Cormarye.

Cormarye

Take Colyandre, Caraway smale grounden, Powdour of Peper and garlec ygrounde in rede wyne, medle alle þise togyder and salt it, take loynes of Pork rawe and fle of the skyn, and pryk it wel with a knyf and lay it in the sawse, roost þerof what þou wilt, & kepe þat þat fallith þerfro in the rosting and seeþ it in a possynet with faire broth, & serue it forth witþ þe roost anoon.

This is another recipe from the Forme of Cury, and again I’m using the modern translation of it from the Hieatt, Butler and Hosington book Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks.

It couldn’t be simpler. Basically you pound the dry ingredients together in a mortar and pestle to a paste, add the wine, prick the meat and let it marinade in a container for a couple of hours, after which you roast it.

You will need:

• Pork loin for roasting – Hieatt and Butler call for 2lb, but I’m going smaller with 560g.
• 1-2 tsp caraway seeds
• 1-2 tsp coriander seeds
• 2-3 garlic cloves
• ¼ tsp salt
• ¼ tsp pepper
• 240ml (1 cup) red wine
• Chicken or pork stock
• Breadcrumbs (optional – you could use the top of the trencher, see below)
• Sourdough round loaf, for trencher.

1. Put the seeds in the mortar and pound them as fine as you can get them. When you’re satisfied, add the salt, pepper, and garlic, pounding everything into a mulchy sort of paste, as shown. (Your kitchen, however, doesn’t have to be as heroically filthy as mine).

2. Add the wine and give it all a stir.

3. Take out your pork, and give it a dab with a paper towel. Prick it all over with a skewer or meat fork so that the marinade can get into the meat.  (The medieval recipe tells me to ”fle the skin” which I guess means flay or remove it, but the modern recipe omits this step, so I kept it on.)

4. Pour the marinade mixture into a container, ideally one not much bigger than the roast itself, or you could do it in a waterproof bag. Put the meat in, ensuring it’s well covered. Leave to marinate for two hours.

5. Pre-heat the oven to 220°. You need to work out the cooking time, which is 25 minutes plus 25 minutes for each extra 500g. Place the roast in a shallow roasting tin and blast it for 30 minutes at 220º. Then turn the heat down to 180° and leave it for the rest of the cooking time, basting occasionally.

6. When the roast is done, take it out of the tray and leave it to rest for 15 minutes. In the meantime, pour off the grease from the top of the juices in the pan, and put these into a small saucepan. Add as much as of the stock as you require to make up the sauce you need and bring it to the boil. You can also thicken this sauce with breadcrumbs, adding them until you achieve the right thickness and then blitzing the sauce with a blender.

Your roast is now ready to serve.

If you want to go full native, medieval food was traditionally served on a bread ”trencher”, a loaf with the top sliced off. Meat was placed in the trencher but sauces were served seperately, and guests dipped their morsels of meat into shared bowls of sauce.   

I didn’t have a trencher, but I had a bit of sourdough loaf, so laid the meat out on that:

Was it nice?

Delicious, actually. The meat had this sour-spicy thing going on which was very different and spoke of an intriguing cultural alienness – it would be hard to name a world cuisine it resembled, though possibly Eastern European would be nearest. And the marinade dyed the exposed meat this interesting shade of purple, which was kind of cool.

It would definitely be worth considering if you fancied a change.

Originally published at Book of Lost Nights. You can comment here or there.

Babylon Steel by Gaie Sebold

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a fantasy romp featuring the titular Babylon Steel, a brothel madam/swordmistress who lives on the chaotic and varied Scalentine, a tiny plane which is fed by a number of magical portals disgorging numerous strange refugees and other travellers. Babylon herself has been one such refugees, but having settled down in Scalentine she will find that she and her crew at the Red Lantern will be drawn into the search for a missing girl which will culminate in a confrontation between her and the mysterious past she’s left behind.

I was part of the original workshop for the initial draft, but even then it was clear it was something special. The writing is great – Gaie has a light, lucid prose style and the city shows a fantastic and playful inventiveness. Babylon is a tough but likeable heroine ably supported by a well-drawn supporting cast, and all in all, it’s a wonderful fun read. Highly recommended.

View all my reviews

Originally published at Book of Lost Nights. You can comment here or there.

So my number one task last weekend was to see The Cabin in the Woods, which I caught alongside Battleship on Friday.

The Cabin in the Woods (2011)

 There has been some bloggery on tor.com about the impossibility of talking about this movie without actually spoiling it. It’s a difficult call, as the meta-esque Truman Show fixings attached to the story don’t appear like some triumphal twist in the third act – they’re actually featured all the way through, and the movie opens with them.

However, it’s not some lame reality TV show pastiche (I think saying that doesn’t qualify as a spoiler) but considerably cooler, and it plays on something I love – the juxtaposition between our squeaky-clean and virtually connected modern lives and the lost and ancient world of ritual and story that haunts and shapes everything we are, serving the idea that that old world of gods and monsters is far closer than we think. What’s not to love? Let’s leave it at that.

On the other hand, the thing about Battleship is simply this: it’s nonsense. It’s a madlibs-style mashup of other terrible alien-invasion-meets-boo-yah-military-porn, and it’s ludicrous, and practically everything in it is rubbish, whether it wants to be or not. Asking if Rihanna or Taylor Kitsch were good in this is like asking people critically injured in the Boston Molasses Disaster if the molasses tasted okay or could have done with being a bit more caramelly. Stuff explodes. Stereotyped characters experience perfunctory arcs. Loads of soldiers run about shouting, but all of the action involves the same six people. And the alien design sucks (basically humans with spiny beards and four opposable fingers). Sucks hard.

Plus, it’s based on Battleship, one of those peg-based boardgames we were all reduced to before somebody was kind enough to invent the internet. So don’t. Just don’t.

Originally published at Book of Lost Nights. You can comment here or there.

So this last weekend was Easter, and Easter means Eastercon, which was in Heathrow once more.

I didn’t spend too much time there this year, as I am in a sort of a white heat on the book at the moment after weeks of it being stalled, but I did catch a couple of panels, hear a reading, and for the first time I did a crit workshop there with my writing group, the T Party.

I missed the Friday, but on Saturday morning I came in for the How pseudo do you like medieval panel with George R. R. Martin, Juliet McKenna, Anne Lyle and Jacey Bedford, moderated by Anne C. Perry from Pornokitsch. The discussion centred on the balance writers strike between historical authenticity and what makes a historically set story palatable to a modern audience. This is a huge problem when you’re writing in a historical setting, or even a fantasy setting with a historical basis. Going “full medieval” can be a little like going “full retard” to quote the immortal Kirk Lazarus. There are many readers who would be put off by the rampant sexism and classism, the endemic physical violence to maintain social and gender distinctions, and the absolute and all-permeating religious devotion which directed every last detail of people’s lives. It’s hard to sympathise with people who think something like the Crusades would not only be a great idea, but who would race each other to join up.

On the other hand, there are lots of fascinating culicues and crooked alleys in the past which you turn up in your research, but which would stop your story dead if you paused mid-text to explain them in your text.

Still, it’s undoubtedly true that many fantasy novels have a pseudo-historical setting, and the most popular, particularly in epic fantasy, is the medieval one, with knights and wizards duelling it out against a Dark Lord in a magical feudocracy. I plucked up the courage to question the panel on this and why they thought this particular milieu was so popular. Personally, I suspect it is because the idealised version of this setting seems remote enough to cast our own dreams and desires for a simpler, more chainmailed time upon and yet not so remote as to seem alien and alienating. For example - there used to be a lot of literature on whether space aliens built Stonehenge - but you don’t see much about ET building York Minster, though the relative ratio of labour to technology is pretty similar. This fantasy medieval setting is served in fiction as a mix of savage splendour and violence, a notional frontier where men are real men, women can fight in tin bikinis, and people that spend all day in dark rooms reading can turn out to wield unstoppable cosmic magical power when it suits them. Which is enormous fun for everybody involved, of course, and I’m not complaining.

 The next thing I saw was the Mainstream published SF&F panel, which I really wanted to catch as I had never heard Nick Harkaway speak – I loved The Gone Away World wholeheartedly, and his latest, Angelmaker, is saved as treat for me on the Kindle when I get two minutes together to actually read a book for pleasure. He was on a panel with Jo Fletcher from Jo Fletcher Books, Maureen Kincaid Speller and Damien Walther, moderated by David Hebblethwaite. The panel debated the usual problems of genre ringfencing which seems to go on in the literary community at large, but observed that despite some holdouts, this seemed to be breaking down in places. Essentially to publish a genre book out of its comfort zone and into the mainstream is to take a risk – it may fail in the mainstream arena, and then also fail with its natural demographic as it was never marketed to them. On the other hand, success in the mainstream arena means big rewards in terms of sales and opportunities. 

I drove home for a few hours then and came back for fellow T Partier Tom Pollock’s reading from The City’s Son, the first in his forthcoming Skyscraper Throne series. But my satnav, Darth, was sulking with me and the room it was happening in appeared to be in the middle of the sort of labyrinth, so I missed the first few minutes (though was not eaten by a minotaur, so that’s a result I guess). This was a shame, as it was a great reading – featuring a new scene that had changed from the workshop draft I’d read – and delivered with great dramatic panache.

I had to get back to work, as things had been painfully slow on my book and the sudden rush of creativity needed riding out, so I didn’t return until Monday, when I was down as part of the T Party Writer’s Workshop, and we were critting work submitted prior to the con by attendees. It was divided into two halves – the SF and the Fantasy sets, and I was in the fantasy half with Francis Knight (who has just sold the Pain Mage trilogy to Orbit) and Martin Owton.

The set up is similar to the actual T Party meetings, and you read the work beforehand, makes notes, and then everyone goes round the table and talks about the work. It was a really interesting thing to do and the work was great – hopefully some will consider joining the group!

It overlapped, so I missed the YA Dystopia panel moderated by Caroline Hooton, also of the T Party, and had Tom on the panel  – I don’t write YA but I do do dystopia – and Gaie Sebold’s Performance for the Petrified: Giving a reading workshop, but I got a chance to have a drink and a mini-catch up with the rest of the crew before I got back to the slave galley and picked up the oars again on the book. It was too bad I saw so little (didn’t even make it to the Dealer’s Room this time), but managed to turn that into considerable word count, so swings and roundabouts I guess. Hopefully I’ll be able to indulge more at Fantasycon this year…

Originally published at Book of Lost Nights. You can comment here or there.

So I tried my hand at a little medieval cookery. More specifically, I wanted to do a medieval feast, but it seemed wilful madness to attempt to cook the whole gamut of an ancient meal full of unfamiliar recipes, and then expect people to eat the results of the experiment. I mean, I know, I know, that if there is a total systemic failure, Domino’s is only a phone call away… but still. In the end it seemed smartest to do it in occasional stages.

The first thing I tried was an hors d’oeuvre/supper dish, “frytour of Pasternakes, of Skirwittes, & of Apples”, which basically translates as carrot, parsnip, and apple fritters, served with an almond milk and saffron sauce. 

Frytours of Skirwittes with almond milk

The recipe I used is taken from Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks by Hieatt, Butler, and Hosington. This particular recipe is a translation from one of the same name in The Forme of Cury, a famous medieval cookbook compiled by the “Chief Master Cooks of King Richard II” and committed to vellum around 1390.  

“Frytour of pasternakes, of skirwittes, & of apples. Take skyrwittes and pasternakes and apples, & perboile hem. Make a batour of flour and ayren; cast þerto ale & yest, safroun & salt. Wete hem in þe batour and frye hem in oile or in grece; do þerto almaund mylke, & serue it forth.

The recipe implies that you can use all fruits and vegetables and cook them together, but I decided to start small and begin with parsnips. Later, I tried it with apples.

The ingredients are as follows (the measurements Hieatt and Butler give are in US cups, I’ve converted them to metric here):

• Almond milk (optional – see below)
• 10 saffron threads soaked in a very little boiling water (optional)
• 2 – 4 parsnips (or the same amount of carrots, or 4 – 6 apples)
• 1 packet of yeast
• 155ml (2/3 cup) lukewarm ale or beer plus another 60ml (¼ cup) to dissolve the yeast in
• 2 eggs, beaten
• Additional saffron to colour the batter (optional – Hieatt and Butler omit this in the modern recipe, but it is present in the medieval one)
• ½ tsp salt
• Oil for cooking (if you want to go full medieval, this can be butter or lard or dripping)

 The first step is to make the sauce, if you decide to have it. To be honest, the sauce was quite bland and much more and messier work than making the fritters, so you can comfortably skip it. But in the interests of completeness, and because I did it, dammit, I’m including the instructions.

Almond Milk

Almond milk turns up a lot in medieval cookery, and it’s a direct consequence of the fact that dairy products were forbidden during Lent. I’ve baked using ground almonds instead of flour, and that’s always been fabulous, but I’ve never used it as a liquid before.

If you are having the fritters with the recommended sauce – a thin almond milk affair coloured and flavoured with saffron – and unless you’ve managed to pick up a carton of that new almond milk for the dairy intolerant (I certainly didn’t see it at my local Sainsburys today, and odds-on it’s pre-sweetened anyway) you’re going to have to make almond milk from scratch. Lucky you.

To do this you’ll need the following:

• 60g (2 oz) of ground almonds
• 120ml (½ cup) of boiling water
• Clean cheesecloth or muslin

To make the sauce:

1. Put the ground almonds in a jug or bowl and pour the boiling water on to them. 
2. Give it a stir, and then leave it to thicken. How long is up to you, but probably at least an hour and the longer the better – ideally overnight.  
3. When you are ready for the milk (I did this while the batter was left to rise), set up a jug or bowl and drape the cheesecloth over it (I used a thin tea towel).
4. Pour the almond mixture into the centre of the cheesecloth and gently wring the liquid out of it into the jug. Try to get as much liquid out as you can without forcing the almondy bits through the cloth (you can keep the almondy bits to reuse for another pass at a second, thinner almond milk, if you wish).

Wringing almond milk out of soaked ground almonds

You can now flavour and colour the milk with a little saffron. Put the strands in a tea cup, pour a tiny amount of hot water on them, and then swirl them about and leave them for five to ten minutes. Then chuck the lot into the milk and stir.

One thing I found with the sauce is that it is extremely bland – I added a sprinking of salt and white pepper (the medieval pepper of choice) to raise its profile a bit.

 Making the Fritters

To make the fritters:

• Dissolve the yeast into 60ml of lukewarm ale or beer in jug (I used pale ale I warmed slightly by pouring into a pan and leaving it on cooling hob on the stove – removing it when it was blood warm). Mix the flour and salt into a large bowl.
• Pour the yeast mixture and the rest of the ale into the flour mix and stir with a wooden spoon. 
• Add the beaten eggs, stirring them in, but not too much – just enough so that all the ingredients are thoroughly combined.

Pouring yeast mixture into the flour

• Now cover the bowl with a tea towel or pierced cling film and put it somewhere warm and draft-free to rise for an hour, or until it roughly doubles in volume.
• While this is happening, get on with your fruit/vegetables. Put a pan of salted water on to boil.
• Wash, peel, and slice your parsnips or carrots into round chunks about ½ inch wide (if using apples, peel and core them and do the same, so they come out as rings).

Parsnip chopped for tossing in batter

• Pop them into the boiling water, and boil the parsnips for ten minutes, the apples for about six. You will not be frying them for long, so you want them with a slight bite but not too much.
• Drain the fruit/veg in a colander and let cool.
• When the batter is risen, put a frying pan on for a medium high heat and add oil. Be generous, it is a fritter after all and there’s no point pretending it’s health food – or you could deep-fry them if you have the kit.
• Drop the slightly cooled veg/fruit into the batter and stir to coat all the pieces generously. With your fingers, fish each piece out and drop it carefully into the frying pan, so the oil doesn’t spit at you. Let each piece get golden on one side before turning it over. The fritters should puff up around the filling.

Cooking the fritters

• When both sides are done, take them out and drain them on a paper towel before serving with the sauce, along with the medieval staples of bread, butter, radishes and olives. Pour the rest of the ale into a glass and drink with it.
• Feel exponentially fatter.

Was it nice?

The parsnip fritters were easy to make and looked lovely, though for a modern palate, quite bland and required a lot of seasoning – I suspect, subconsciously, that I’m expecting fried foods to be a lot saltier and sweeter. I kept thinking that these would be awesome with a sweet chili sauce. There’s a real statement there about how our tastes have changed without us knowing it.  

That said, the batter really came into its own with the apples – there was something about the beery, sour batter and the sweetness of the apples that just hit the spot. Yum. Sadly, I didn’t take any pictures of the apple ones because I was too busy eating them. That’s really all you need to know.

Originally published at Book of Lost Nights. You can comment here or there.

So work is progressing, now that houseguests, five months of housecleaning, and some kind of lurking chest infectiony thing have been seen off in the space of a week (though suspect the chest infectiony thing is not slain, but merely banished to make evil chuckly noises at the bottom of my lungs if I laugh too hard). But before I succumbed to it, I managed to get to the movies.

I remembered reading somewhere that The Artist made less money in its whole run than Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance made in its opening two weeks. This astonished me, as while I didn’t fancy The Artist much when it came out, I also didn’t fancy Ghost Rider: And the rest  (I’m not typing it again. Anyway, it’s absurd). So I got to thinking – maybe I’m missing something?

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011)

Ghost Rider: Nicholas Cage’s Head Is On Fire is a movie about a biker stuntman called Johnny Blaze whose backstory is told in a variety of still cartoon images (this whole movie looked like it cost roughly a tenner to make, incidentally, and the endless parade of production company logos at the beginning suggest that no individual company wanted to be in hock to it for more than £1.50).  In short, I can’t speak about the comic because I’ve never read it, but said biker stuntman sells his soul to Satan (who appears in the form of a slumming Ciaran Hinds) to save his dying father. Consequently he is occasionally possessed by a demon whose name begins with Z and the rest of which I would look up if it actually mattered, honest, and his characteristics involve:

• having a flaming skull for a head (which is, I must admit, very cool, and it’s beautifully rendered in CGI).
• having whatever he’s riding (usually a motorbike, but cars, jeeps, and at one point a cut-down version of the Bagger 288 also feature) transform into a seething hellmachine version of itself wreathed in flames.
• snapping flaming chains about and killing random rent-a-goons with them because he’s just so fucking metal.
• And also some other stuff about eating souls and what have you, according to the script. But he never did this, preferring to just gape threateningly at whatever generic bad guy he had hold of, seemingly forever, until the audience starts to get fidgety and uncomfortable and wonder if they are going to kiss or something.

So anyway, Ghost Rider gets involved with a maverick biker priest (played by Idris Elba) and a chick that also made a deal with the Devil and ended up giving birth to his Lil’ Damien (the mechanics of this conception are not dwelled upon in any way, thankfully). The baby in question has grown up into an entirely unremarkable child actor who’s now being hunted to be the new avatar of Ciaran Hinds, and there is this ancient mysterious group of monks who alone can save him before the prophesised ceremony that must take place at dawn on winter solstice and blah blah blah. You get the picture.

Anyway, it’s all absurd and obviously shoestring but kind of fun and worth admission just to see the satanic flaming Bagger 288, even though all it gets used for is to menace some extras and the bouffant-haired secondary bad guy.

When his head isn’t on fire, Blaze is uncharacteristically subdued, considering that we’re been assured in the opening (cartoon) montage he does motorcyle jumps and moons the audience and is just such a risky daredevil type. Cage plays him like someone who wandered, drunk and somewhat lost, off the set of a different movie - which appeared to be about some guy with weird hair talking about his feelings in a mumbly way. In short, in the one movie where Nicholas Cage could have usefully chewed up the scenery, he doesn’t.

*sigh*

Here’s the thing with me and Nicholas Cage: I really want to like him. I think he’s always an interesting presence even if the movie he’s in is awful. And herein lies the problem, as the movie he is in is nearly always awful. He’s like the deadbeat boyfriend you can never quite finish with, because he’s always sleeping on your couch due to a series of circumstances that are like, “totally and utterly not my fault”. And in all fairness, in a debacle like The Wicker Man (which is slyly referenced in the dialogue in Ghost Rider: It May Be Dumb But It’s Making Money), the awful movie has been directed and written by different people. Nic Cage is just the the dude stuck looking daft on camera, so draws the flak.

So was it worth seeing? Well, it is objectively a bad movie and the joins show. Nothing in the plot makes sense. The final Ebil Ceremony of Ebilness where Ciaran Hinds and his young protege kneel on the stage and sway about in unison is frankly hilarious and the gathered dark forces (described as the Devil’s “most ruthless soldiers” or some such thing) look like they were picked up from LA’s bus stops and are working for food. There is also a pointless CGI sequence of Ghost Rider pissing fire that the director loved so much he uses it two different places in the movie. Do demons need to urinate? Is this even a thing?

On the other hand, the Bagger 288 is transformed into a gigantic flaming hellsteed, Christopher Lambert appears as a scribbly-faced monk, Giles from Buffy plays the head of the order, the Bagger 288 is transformed into a gigantic flaming hellsteed, there’s quite a sly Twinkie joke, the Bagger 288 is transformed into a gigantic flaming hellsteed, and Nicholas Cage is pretty awesome with his head on fire. So, basically, yes. Awful movie. And I have no idea why it was in 3D. But somehow I enjoyed it.

Originally published at Book of Lost Nights. You can comment here or there.

This summer I took a research trip out to a charnel house.

The plan is this: by checking out peculiarly medieval Christian institutions – monasteries, painted churches, anchoress’ cells, shrines – I can maybe get a physical sense of how a world with an overwhelmingly universal and permeating hardcore Christianity would feel, and to try and reproduce it in the book for the planned extensions to Sleepwalker.

Plus, you know, it was summer and a jolly out is a jolly out:

View from St Leonard's Church, Hythe.

So I jumped in the car and drove out to St. Leonard’s Church, Hythe in Kent, where there is a particularly good example of a charnel house:

Charnel House Door, St Leonard's Church, Hythe.

A charnel house (or to use its less evocative name, “ossuary”) is a place where you store disarticulated bones that turn up in a graveyard while you’re:

• digging other graves
• extending church buildings and know you’ll disturb human remains (which is what is thought to have happened at St Leonards)
• deconsecrating ground that has people buried in it.

These remains need to be stored on holy ground, but you’ve no way of knowing who they belong to or where they should go by the time they’re dug up. You could rebury them, but odds are good in a crowded graveyard that there simply isn’t room.

Stacked bones in the Charnel House, St Leonard's Church, Hythe. And yeah, those are jawbones in the foreground.

This is a common problem. It’s worth remembering that in most ancient graveyards, the graves and monuments you can see represent just a tiny fraction of the people buried there. For instance, I did a little research survey on St. Mary the Virgin in Prestwich. The graveyard had been in continuous use for about a thousand years*. It was the chief church of larger parish, and huge numbers of people were being reported in the register of deaths every year, and yet until the earliest tombstone (dated 1643), not a single one of these was accounted for in the surviving grave monuments. That’s thousands of people we’re talking about, gone without even a marker.

The Charnel House at St Leonard’s is home to over 2000 skulls and 8000 long bones, mostly thighs:

The other end of the central stack, Charnel House, St Leonard's Church, Hythe.

Not sure what I expected when I went in – darkness, a kind of musty smell, fetid rags and strings of decaying flesh, you know – the usual.

Instead the whole room gave off this light, almost airy feel. The bones were clean and white, and uncoupled from their individual owners and piled in neat nubbly stacks against the walls, they looked not so much human but more like some very avant garde wall decoration. It’s not until you see the skulls that it hits you:

Wall of skulls, Charnel House, St Leonard's Church, Hythe.

The bones are not only fascinating and somewhat moving in their own right, but they are also a library of how people lived back then. Some of the more interesting bones (and in one case, hair that was buried with the owner) are picked out in display cases:

Display case in the Charnel House, St Leonard's Church, Hythe.

The bones below show healed fractures, and the one riddled with holes represents a nasty case of osteomyelitis (an infection of the bone – those holes would have been filled with pus and bacteria when its owner was alive):

Healed fractured longbones, and osteomyelitis specimen in upper right corner, Charnel House, St Leonard's Church, Hythe.

So recently I was having a conversation with someone about bones, bodies, and cremation – in particular ashes, and the long, ritualised conversion of something that is unclean, liminal, and taboo into something that is handle-able, if you like, and thus within the pale (here is a very interesting video of the modern version of the process). I felt this very strongly in the charnel house, where the disarticulated bones, sorted by type, suggested not so much hundreds of dead individuals as much as a dead crowd, and their bones felt not so much intrinsically part of them but rather furniture, or grave goods.

Broken skull containing bird's nest, Charnel House, St Leonard's Church, Hythe.

They had been reduced to signs of themselves, if you like, rather than their essence.

All said, it was very interesting, and I’d definitely recommend a visit – Hythe itself is quite charming on a beautiful summer’s day, and the volunteers working on the door were super-helpful.

CURRENTLY READING: For Honour and Fame: Chivalry in England 1066 – 1500 by Nigel Saul

*Archaeology Geek Footnote: Possibly far, far longer. I met a man, an amateur archaeologist who’d done a bit of digging and found some ditch and bank remains, who maintained that St Mary’s was potentially a rare Northern example of a causewayed enclosure. In addition to the earthworks, the fact that the original churchyard site was circular until relatively recently was also extremely telling. It’s a fantastic idea.

Originally published at Book of Lost Nights. You can comment here or there.

Edie Investigates by Nick Harkaway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a review issued with a warning – I enjoyed this a great deal, but it clearly exists as part of the larger context of the author’s novel Angelmaker (the first chapter of which is included along with the story), and which I haven’t yet read. I’m not entirely sure Edie Investigates works in a straightforward way as a piece of stand alone fiction, more as a piece of meta around the novel, like an iTunes Extra.

That said, there was a lot to love here (four stars worth, in fact) – the description of young Edie’s descent to Fender’s Hollow is magical, as is its sequel, the scene on the ship (adored the meditation on the uses of “simpering”). It comes complete with some rather beautiful lines – I particularly loved Edie’s “A fate worse than death – at last.” Can’t wait to get stuck into the novel.

I got very excited after reading Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World and on this showing Angelmaker also looks likely to offer superior pleasures once I make the time to enjoy them. In the meantime, Edie Investigates bridged a gap, and for 99p on the Kindle was a very worthwhile diversion.

View all my reviews

Originally published at Book of Lost Nights. You can comment here or there.

After months of angst and being continuously put off by the extended triangular commute between work, Waterloo, and home, I finally made it back to Million Monkeys for the first time this year. This is the weekly write-in that happens in the South Bank Centre in London.

And of course the minute you show up you wonder why you’ve been away for so long – it was lovely to see everyone again. Folk that fancy turning up for a Monday evening of public keyboard hammering before eventually sighing “I’m spent!” and then having a bit of a drink and a giggle can check out the details here.

The other thing that I wanted to do and then did was see The Woman in Black. This was a bit more problematical. The movie looks great: an atmospheric confection of greys, blues, and muted greens. Radcliffe is convincingly pale and damaged as the widowed lawyer left with a young son. The supporting cast is bolstered with the likes of Ciaran Hinds and Janet McTeer. There are a few genuine shocks as the titular Woman appears in reflections and zoetropes and graveyards and train stations located on the far side of the grave (shades of Harry Potter for Daniel, it seems, wherever he turns).

The Woman in Black (2012)

Spoilers ahoy…

So felt like a wasted opportunity, which is a real shame, as while I can’t be arsed with torture porn you can’t beat a good ghost story.

I also saw Man on a Ledge. The most I can say about that is, if you’ve seen the trailer, you don’t have to bother seeing the movie.

Originally published at Book of Lost Nights. You can comment here or there.

So Saturday night was the T Party Winter Meal (calling it a Christmas Party in February just seems willfully perverse, somehow) at the Three Stags in Kennington.

In attendance were the usual T Party suspects  – Tom Pollock,  Gaie Sebold, Sarah Ellender,  Gary Couzens, Peter Colley, Denni Schnapp and her husband, Sara-Jayne Townsend, Martin Owton, Terry Edge, Mark McCann, Jack Calverley, newcomer Jim Siddle and Rosanne Rabinowitz (the organiser of the night) amongst others. We were also joined by Ben Okri, Booker winner, who was a very nice man. He urged Sara, our chairperson, to give a speech, which she did, and then Gaie said a few words as well. Gaie was fresh off a fabulous reception for Babylon Steel at the SFX Weekender, where the book sold out, so what with that and all the other good news about cover art and uncorrected proofs, it was a fairly upbeat do – except of course I’d missed the SFX Weekender, and had to listen to everyone’s stories about how great it was and how the disco was great and the panels were great and how it was great to be anyone but me. (*Sighs long-sufferingly*).

But in all seriousness, it does sound like it was fab and I was very sorry I missed it.

It’s been a good year for the T Party Writers Group (who will not be changing their name despite the bunch in the US, as apparently “we had it first”). They’ve been going for 18 years now, and in the last two years there have been a series of novel deals for people. And after years of running writing workshops at Eastercon there are now to be a slew of T Partiers moderating panels at Olympus 2012.

Global domination beckons.

So all in all, not bad. Here’s hoping for more good news this year.