The Gin Walter and other stories

 

Things move on quickly sometimes, from below. It didn't take long for the Gin Walter to occur to me. Or the Vodka Walter. I doubt if I'll ever have a Rum Walter. Gin isn't good for you, I am aware, and is potentially more dangerous in what is essentially an alcopop.

I think in the official recipe, the gin goes in last because I imagine it infusing itself throughout the glass as it sinks rather than having to find its way up from the bottom. This would be best done by an approved Walter Waiter. Where wine is overseen by a sommelier and coffee by a barista, someone expert in Walter is a Walter Waiter. 

I am now well stocked for my Walter Festival, having found that my nearest Co-op now has all the ingredients. I wasn't expecting that on my way back from the library.

The Schwartz Rembrandt book is clearly a work of great scholarship and a wonderful buy on the recommendation of Laura Cumming. But it's an unwieldy thing to read, and does not 'perch on the hand' like the Caxton, the 'bird with many wings' as described in Craig Raine's A Martian Sends a Postcard Home. 

 

At 550 pages in a solid hardback, neither does The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. I wanted to read that again and was surprised to find it not on the shelves upstairs. The books are well-organized these days but the library index in my head isn't always accurate as to what's there and what isn't. However, the local library had it and it may not need buying because I'll have read it twice.

It's as brilliant as I remember it. You can't be sure things will be.

It is a masterclass in prose fiction with its rhythm, period detail (1922) and tellingly gentle observation that is easier to appreciate when one knows what is going to happen in the forthcoming chapters. One could learn so much from such an object lesson except it makes one wonder at the vast difference there would be between such a masterpiece and anything one might ever produce oneself.

The only things I've really got are a title and an insubstantial story. It might be best left like that, as an idea I can enjoy rather than a hard-won but failed attempt that nobody else would. It would be great to have something finished and done that might be thought of as an achievement but it's best not to fret over it. There are these things, added to every few days, like an ongoing miscellany of not-quite Alan Bennett pieces. One can only do what one can do.