This Blog Again...

Quorntroversy!

I’ve spent a large part of my life living with vegetarians.  I’ve never been one myself.  Thought about it at one stage of my life and decided I’d probably have to go the whole way if I was going to do it, veganism, no more leather shoes or belts, and being kind of lazy decided against it.  I do subscribe to the idea that human beings eat far too much meat and it is a grossly inefficient way to use the waning resources of our planet.  But that kind of dovetails with my own relative lack of interest in or strong desire for meat and my contentment with the idea of eating it occasionally and selectively.

But anyway, living with vegetarians tended to divert my cooking skills – such as they are – away from meat recipes and I built up a fair knowledge regarding how to use wholefoods etc.  Getting protein from pulse/cereal combinations or dairy products seemed to work for me.  But as the years went past, there were times when I got a bit tired of using the same products over and over.  Maybe I wasn’t being imaginative enough or looking in recipe books with sufficient enthusiasm, but I began look out for anything with which I could vary my diet – without going to too much extra effort.

Enter ‘quorn’.

I think I first heard about quorn when it was being marketed as a new product in the mid to late 1980’s.  At first I was snooty about it.  Why manufacture something to be like meat in the first place?  Also it seemed kind of pricey and I’ve lived most of my life on a tight budget.  So the best part of 25 years passed without me trying it, as far as I can remember.  It wasn’t ‘til I found myself in a new relationship with a woman who’d taken to using the stuff, utilising it in some rather pleasant recipes, that I realised what I’d been missing.

I’m not sure it would convince any confirmed beefsteak fanatics.  But if you cook it right, you can add a lot of flavour to it and –particularly in its ‘chunk’ form - it has for me an agreeable texture.  Great in curries, wraps, casseroles and more.  And some of the quorn products turned out to be tasty too, burgers and escalopes and such.  So far so good.

However, times and partners have changed, and my received wisdom on this is under question once more.  Quorn is a microfungus, derived from soil mould and grown in vats.  It is subsequently heated and vitamins and nutrients are added to it.  It is a ‘processed’ product.  We are told that certain processed foods are bad for us – reconstituted meat products being a prime example.  Could it be, it was suggested to me, that quorn might be in the same bracket?

It was an upsetting question.  I’d got used to using the stuff, enjoying it in many of its marketed forms, and it seemed cheaper these days.  Would I have to go back to my old pre-quorn ways?

Well, on the home front, I’m still working to defend it.  I’ve been thinking about the word ‘processed’ and what it really means.  ‘Food processing is the transformation of cooked ingredients, by physical or chemical means into food, or of food into other forms,’ says Wikipedia.  So it includes cooking, mincing, slicing and dicing, and pickling for example.  As far as I know no such processes has an intrinsic tendency to make food ‘bad for us’, far from it in a lot of cases.  It is pretty much inseparable from the concept of cooking.  Or so I tell myself. 

Not only that but I’ve yet to locate any information regarding health issues associated with quorn consumption.  Okay, I haven’t looked that hard, so if – oh you precious and rare readers of this blog – you have come across any such information, do please let me know.  I will view it with an initially sceptical eye, of course, but I’m always open to good evidence. 

I have to go now.  My stomach’s rumbling and quorn burgers await me.

Incidentally I’ve received no financial or other incentives from Marlow Foods for this blog.  Chance’d be a fine thing…

Our Flying Dog

With my partner at this time, I go to an animal rescue centre and we return home having taken possession of a flying dog.  It has ginger fur and in some ways resembles a corgi, but it is also bat-like.  It has very large, furry ginger wings that make a ‘swish’ sound when it flies.  Take-offs and landings can sometimes be a bit dodgy, but up in the air it moves with grace and elegance.

It seems to take to living in our home, and although it is perfectly capable of flying out of our sight and covering considerable distances, the dog always returns to us.  In fact, usually on return, it is pleased to see us.  There is tail wagging, eye contact and a clear desire to be stroked and made a fuss of.  It has a strong healthy appetite and we feed it on a 50:50 mixture of dog and bird food – on which it thrives.

We train the dog to carry messages to family and friends.  At first we encourage it to carry the messages by mouth, but they tend to arrive somewhat chewed and saliva sodden.  So we devise a pouch which we attach to its collar, and after dealing with one or two aerodynamic issues, we find this works very well.  We send messages only to those who will treat our dog kindly, and feed it or give it treats before it makes the return journey.

Whenever it departs, bearing a message, we stand outside our house – which is high on a hillside – and watch it swish and soar away over woodland below us until it is out of sight.  Back inside our house there is a sense of absence.  We look forward to the day and hour when it will reappear, barking to announce its arrival if we are not outside awaiting it.  Often it will have brought back an answer to one of our messages.  Somehow this always seems the best way to keep in contact with our friends and family members.

In our living room we have a large cushion filled basket where our dog sleeps.  Like many a dog, it likes to circle round and round in its basket as if making some kind of considered choice, before settling to lie down and sleep.  The last thing it does before closing its eyes is to lazily open its wings, stretching them up, then relaxing them so that they drape over the sides of the basket, their tips touching the carpeted floor.

Paving Slab Earthquake

Working with and supervised by a more knowledgeable gent, I find myself modifying a stretch of paving.  We are replacing old metal drain covers with more decorative ones.  It’s challenging labour for me, since I am not a physically strong person, but somehow the work seems to be getting done.

Temporarily alone, I notice that one of the drain covers I’m trying to lay is not a good fit, and I start shifting and re-arranging the paving slabs around it so that I can improve on this.  People are passing me by on the street while I work, and after moving slabs for a while I look up and notice that the people I am seeing are distressed.  It turns out that – unnoticed by me – there has been a small earthquake.  Apparently, the cause of this earthquake is me, moving paving slabs.  Beyond the part where I have been working, the scene looks disastrous.  Parts of the paving have collapsed completely into huge, open potholes, others totter precariously.  People are trying to keep their balance, and/or jumping and running towards more secure surfaces elsewhere.

I turn from this scene to look down at the place where I have been working.  I notice that, as in an archaeological dig, I have exposed older layers of paving from decades ago – some with thick glass slabs inserted amongst the stones, others with just tarmac.  I find this interesting, but mainly I’m feeling guilty on account of being the cause of the recent earthquake.

But at this point my supervisor and fellow worker returns.  He tells me not to worry, it’s not my fault, it’s the Council’s.  All I’ve done is to expose an underlying fault in the way the upper layer of slabs was laid, and it will be the Council’s responsibility to come and fix it.  I’m not so sure he’s right.  I feel I ought to do something about it, but I’ve no idea what and all of a sudden the idea of moving paving slabs at all seems impossibly difficult.  So I accept what he says, and we leave.

A little further on we see a group of people milling around parked cars on the roadside.  Unsure what they might be doing, I ask my worldly-wise companion.  He tells me they are checking to ensure that none of the cars are parked too closely together.

The Unidentifiable Factory Job

I have a job in a factory.  It’s something on the administrative side, possibly involving the gathering or processing of data.  It appears that I am contriving to spend time not actually doing my job.  I am managing to get away with hanging out on city streets, looking in shops, going to cafes and visiting friends of mine who are at home.  When I do go back to the factory – where men are working at big lathe-like machines – no one seems to be aware that I am skiving.  Not only that, but the truth is that I can’t actually remember what my job consists of.  When I talk to other people in the factory, especially to any other admin workers I encounter, I try surreptitiously to pick up clues about what it is that I am supposed to be doing there.  If I am directly asked about anything that I am doing, I seem to be able to get away with bluffing, using what little I do know to give an impression of someone who knows what he is doing.  I’m starting to feel increasingly guilty about this.  Everyone in the factory seems to like me and to be quite happy with whatever it is that they think I am doing.  I feel that I owe it to them to be doing my job properly.  If only I knew what it was…

Relatively Little Noir - thoughts on my work after reading M John Harrison

Invited to review it for the estimable ‘Tears in the Fence’ magazine, I have recently finished reading M. John Harrison’s collection of stories and short pieces titled: ‘You Should Come With Me Now’.  Though aware of MJH and having read some of his stories but none of his books over the years, I had mixed feelings about what I’d read.  However, you can read about those as and when the review gets published – hopefully later this year.

But it did get me thinking about some aspects of writing and why, in my own, I make certain choices and not others. 

M. John Harrison has embraced the word ‘hauntology’ to describe some aspects of his work.  I first came across this term in the early 2000s in association with arty music ventures by the bands Broadcast and The Focus Group.  It seemed to relate to their interest in 1970s visions of the future in TV drama series such as ‘The Survivors’ and the later ‘Quatermass’ productions, with musical reference to the BBC Radiophonic workshop and it productions.  The word now has a fairly sophisticated definition in Wikipedia: ‘The term refers to the situation of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction in which the apparent presence of being is replaced by a deferred non-origin, represented by "the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive.".’  How you get from the first reference to the latter, I leave with you – but Harrison I think is talking about the latter.  Many of his stories play on a sense of liminal presence that is never quite clearly defined.

The ones I felt were most successful were not easy or comfortable reading.  Nor I suppose are conventional horror stories, but they tend to be a form of entertainment on the whole - the cerebral equivalent of a roller coaster ride, you might say.  The stories that affected me in Harrison’s book lacked that sense of visceral satisfaction (if that’s what you get).  Instead, I felt, they delved into all the layers of human corruption – in the broadest possible sense of the word.  Physical and mental illness, obsessive thoughts and behaviour, alienation, disjunction, etc.  They left me with a queasy feeling, which – on the positive side – disrupted my complacency, but at the same time made me uncomfortable with the very state of being human.

Clearly something of an acquired taste!  Another writer whose work frequently delves into this mire is Alan Moore, but I have the advantage of knowing Alan well enough to know that his moral compass can be trusted.  His horrors have a purpose and are often balanced by the beatific.  Harrison I can’t be so sure about – especially where his stories lose me, as a good few did.

Okay, so the question is – this is interesting material, why don’t I explore it more myself in my stories?  I don’t completely shy away from it, as there are certainly a few of the stories in ‘Wilful Misunderstandings’ which touch on this territory.  But my tendency is to add other elements, humour being a primary one.  (I should add that there is humour in Harrison’s book but it is very dark and dry.)  So my story ‘Marinating Jeff’ could conceivably be a Harrison scenario, but my choice of storytelling mode was curiously lighthearted.  Why?  I’m not sure – maybe it was the only way I could handle the material.

But the majority of the stories take in a more positive approach to human nature.  It’s not that I feel some kind of fuzzy, new-agey view of my fellow human beings – far from it.  I think we have let ourselves become well and truly fucked by corporate capitalism and by far the majority of us have our heads buried in the sand about it.  What we think of as ‘civilisation’ has proved entirely dysfunctional.  Nevertheless, on an individual level and often at a local community level, I find I can’t help liking and loving my fellow human beings.

There is a saying: ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ and I don’t doubt there is truth in it.  But without good intentions, I think we’d have arrived in hell already.  So let’s not under-value them.  I can’t put a figure on it, but I suspect that most of us try to live good lives.  Our understanding of the situation may be too poor to be in any way effective, but we try to do right by our fellow human beings and the planet on which we depend.  There’s a lot of self-delusion in this of course and I include myself amongst the deluded.  With a more enlightened system of education, and relieved from ever-insidious corporate propaganda designed to keep us consuming, we could conceivably do better.  So I don’t want to lose myself in cynicism and negativity.  I want to celebrate people, as well as explore their failings.

Looking into the dark side has its values – our perspective is skewed if we ignore it or try to hide away from it.  I’ll confront it in my writing when it seems appropriate (certainly the novel I’m working on has some very dark aspects).  But I’ll leave it as much as I can to those who probably do it better than me.

Tough job.  Someone’s got to do it.  Thank-you Alan, thank-you MJ, and also William Burroughs, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Jim Thompson, Samuel Beckett – to name but a few predecessors - for going there, finding something worth saying and bringing it to the attention of at least some of the reading world.  I’ll continue to follow my own intuitions, in somewhat more well-lit land.

                                                                    M John Harrison

Mr and Mrs Mystery

Oh Mister Mystery
I’m in your constant ministry
Open up your canister
& show me something sinister


Bring me things I can’t describe
Carvings from some tattooed tribe
Deposits from a distant star
That shouldn’t be but somehow are
And as though unmeant to linger here
Let them all one day disappear

Or stretch apart my mental range
With something cute but rather strange
That has migrated too far north
And now meanders back & forth
Treading only obscure paths
It can’t be caught in photographs

With tales of odd amnesiacs
Seers and synaesthesiacs
Folk who dress as bears & cats
Wolverines & tangle-tailed rats
Let me peer through dark partitions
At those who’ve lost all inhibitions


Oh Mrs Mystery
I need your subtle palmistry
Open up your bag of tricks
Throw miracles into the mix


Show me frogs in great profusions
Falling from blue skies
Show me statues with contusions
As tears of blood drip from their eyes
Mandala cut in wheat field scene
The name of God in an aubergine

Experiments with weird results
Which folk would rather think were lies
You’ve stuff to start the strangest cults
But I have found it no surprise
As through your secrets I still dive
Much stranger yet
            to be
                    alive