Yes, it’s me, Jacintha Farquar, the unfortunate mother of the abominable Moons – that’s Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV to officialdom and ‘IVy’ to those fools who think him capable of stepping out of his self-centered and self-satisfied little world long enough to offer them some tenuous parody of friendship.
Well as always I have to go around behind him like the proverbial pooper-scooper cleaning up the mess he makes and, specifically, I have been asked to contribute to this blog to try and remedy some of the dreadful drivel he spewed here in the past about how to write.
He has no fucking clue – seriously!
Go read his book if you don’t believe me, no not that god-awful supposed sci-fi thing ‘Fatswhistle and Bucktooth’, I mean the laughably titled How to Start Writing a Book . I did my best to try with that too, but you’ll see if you take a look at it.
Anyway, back to the task in hand and one thing I see many of you writers struggling with is people having social intercourse. No, get your minds out of the gutter the lot of you! That means conversation, discussion, argument – communication between people.

Life Lessons for Writers – Eight: Social Intercourse

In the world of writing you don’t call it that of course, probably because the schoolboy giggles would get the better of you and then you’d not write a bloody word for the next week. You lot call it ‘dialogue’.
Do I really need to take you back to school, sit you down and explain simple things like where to put commas in dialogue and the difference between a speech/dialogue tag and an action tag? I hope not, but if you need that then stop trying to pretend you are writing a book and go and look them up so you have the faintest notion of what I’m on about.
Let’s assume you are over the baby gate and romping along at least at school pupil level here.

First thing to remember is to avoid ‘talking head’ syndrome when the reader has no idea of where/how the conversation is taking place. Begin by setting the scene, tell us where the chat is happening and who is present:

Mary and Tom sat down for dinner at their dining room table with their daughter Ella and her new boyfriend Paul.

Next important point ‘said’ is good. Consider:

“This tastes lovely,” Tom exclaimed.
“Thank you, dear,” murmured Mary.
Ella tapped her plate with her fork. “Well done, Mum,” she cheered.
“What is in the pie?” Paul wondered.

You get the point. Of course you wouldn’t just put in ‘said’ for all those which brings us to the third point, use action to indicate who is talking where you can:

Tom smiled across at his wife. “This tastes lovely.”.
“Thank you, dear.” Mary blushed, she had been working on the meal all day in honour of this special occasion.
Tapping her plate with her fork, Ella drew everyone’s attention. “Well done, Mum.” She lifted her glass in a toast.
But Paul didn’t seem to notice, he was poking at the food on his plate. “What is in the pie?”

Hardly brilliant prose, but you can see how it brings the conversation to life.

Next point, try to keep your conversation appearing real. Now that means you leave out all the repetitions and ‘um-ing’ and ‘er-ing’ that we all do in natural speech, but it also means you don’t have your characters declaiming speeches full of posh words at each other either. If you have a character who does that they will seem like a pompous twat to your reader!

Oh yes, one more thing. Don’t do this, it drives me bloody potty, like scraping a fork over a plate:

After the happy couple had left Mary and Tom cuddled up together on the sofa.
“Oh Tom, do you think they will be as happy as we are?”
“I’m sure they will, Mary, they seem made for each other.”
Mary sighed and looked thoughtful.
“Well, Tom, I am not so sure of that as you seem to be.”
“What do you mean, Mary?”

People do not use each other’s names all the time in conversation when it is obvious who they are talking to.  Do. Not. Do. It.

Alright, that’s your bloody lot. I’m not paid by the word for this you know, so bugger off the lot of you and let me get back to Netflix and pernod – one of my favourite cocktails…

Being a wizard in a world where magic wasn’t supposed to exist wasn’t easy. His studies took all his time and left little for earning the money he needed to support himself. So home for Brandon Grey was a rented bedsit on the second floor of a converted suburban house. He was very tired having been up since dawn to practice a new incantation and then an afternoon stint as an Uber driver had tested his goodwill to humanity to its limit.
“Mr. Grey?”
Brandon hesitated between steps and resisted the impulse to swear. Instead, as he turned, his face was already wallpapered with a polite smile.
“Mrs. Howard!” His tone made of the name an answer to her question.
Mrs. Howard was his landlady. She lived on the ground floor. A big-boned thirty-something divorcee with a pack of rude children and a permanent short temper. From the open door behind her he could hear sounds of youthful discontent.
“It’s mine!”
“Gerroff me!” Then an ear-piercing shriek of protest.
“Mum – Shane’s taken the controller again!”
Despite the title being given three distinct syllables of intonation, ‘Mum’ seemed not to hear.
“You put out your rubbish Mr. Grey? It’s bin day tomorrow.”
Brandon maintained the smile and broadened it.
“I’ll do that as soon as I have got myself in,” he assured her. 
“Great and can you wheel the bin ‘round the front when you’re done?”
His smile still fixed Brandon assented. But his thoughts were traitors to the smile. He was getting fed up of being used as an odd-job man for the Howards. Seemed not a day went by and he was asked to do one job or another. Another yell of protest from behind Mrs. Howard decided him.
“But you know, your Shane is a big lad now. He could do with that kind of responsibility. Why don’t you get him to do it?”
As he spoke he added a small push of willpower. But Mrs. Howard had seen off two husbands and the bailiffs. She stared back nonplussed.
“I don’t think so. It is a heavy job.”
Brandon held her gaze and tried harder. No words were spoken. For a moment the woman looked perplexed, then her expression cleared. She half turned her head towards the open door and called out.
“Shane, you stop playing that video game and go do the rubbish!”
“But mum you said you’d get the poxy old lodger to do it!”
It was a red rag to a bull and Brandon was forgotten as she stormed back into the lower apartment yelling loudly and apparently adding to the chaos rather than resolving it in any measure at all.
Allowing himself a moment of satisfaction, Brandon opened his front door, dropped his jacket on the couch and made a coffee.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Prunella teaches you how to cook like a toff!

You know there is something seriously wrong when the Hon Rodney comes home with the following: flowers, champers, chocs, and a guilty grin. If it isn’t April he probably doesn’t want you to do your wifely duty in the bedchamber, so you should be prepared for the worst. 

The silly ass will have volunteered for something that he knows you are not going to like. It could be any one of many things, but my particular bête noir is the fundraiser in the garden.

My garden is my pride and joy, and it is famous across three counties for the wonderful collection of camellias, and, later in the year, my cherished roses. And then himself comes home, all pink jowls and pinky ring and only bloody well wants to host a garden party in June. Not unnaturally, one’s first reaction is profane in the extreme. However when one digs beneath the belly fat and the little vanities, the Hon. Rodney isn’t such a bad spouse so one is obliged to make the best of a bad job. As our daughter, Caroline, once said: ‘Taken by and large men are at best unsatisfactory and at worst complete wastes of oxygen. On that scale the Pater wasn’t such a bad bargain.’ But I digress. The garden party.

Having firmly established that there is zero chance of anyone setting foot in the rose garden, one needs to make a plan. Not anywhere near as simple as it sounds. I have known women whose gardens have been so far decimated as to be unrecognisable. 

I have been through so many incarnations of this horrible possibility that I feel qualified to offer the following advice. If you have a room that opens out onto the lawns, so much the better (if not a marquee on the tennis court is your only viable option). Fortunately for me, the Hon. Rodney’s billiards room has a wall of roll-back glass doors (erected in the roaring twenties for his sun-mad grandmother – who ended her days looking like a walnut with dyspepsia and was living proof that you can be too rich and too thin). Be that as it may the room is ideal, and it has a wide terrace which commands views of my precious roses. Note: do not provide chairs otherwise the assembled company is likely to remain until the sun goes down. Indoors, the billiards tables can be moved to the sides of the room and covered with plywood and large cloths to serve as buffet tables. He doesn’t like it a bit, but a certain sense of justice makes him admit the fault lies with himself and the hypnotic appeal of the bosom of the yummy mummy whose fundraiser we are suddenly supporting.

So far so good. Now to the food and the drink.

Food.

You could spend three weeks concocting pretty finger food. Or. Go to your nearest supermarket and grab a very large trolley full of ‘Party Food’ plus olives, cheese, and an assortment of potato-based snacks – I will leave it to you to decide what my plan of action might be. While you are shopping don’t forget paper plates, disposable serving dishes, and paper napkins. Never mind the environmental objections to disposables. Look at it this way. The amount of power and water the dishwasher would use to clear up after a hundred middle-class oiks will more than offset the throwaways.

Drink.

This is not the occasion for cocktails or punch. Send the Hon Rodney to Oddbins (other purveyors of wine and beer can be found dotted across our fair country) with a shopping list and instructions to hand same to the employee who offers to help him.  If left to his own resources the booze would cost thousands of pounds. While he is there he gets to hire wine glasses by the box. Do not risk the Waterford crystal on fundraisers; some will get broken and it’s all but irreplaceable. When the HR arrives home, a little worried that ‘nothing over a tenner a bottle’ may mean undrinkable, open a random bottle and drink it between you. He has no palate, and as far as most women are concerned, a glass of wine is a glass of wine.

And that is how it’s done.

Important notes: One – this is a very good time to obtain a nice new diamond, or that good looking hunter you’ve been pining for. Two – do not forget to place Mellors in the entrance to the rose garden with a shotgun and instructions to repel boarders (there is no need to insist that he puts in his false teeth).

Look out for more tips on how to cook like a toff!

Friday in the morning mist
Thinking of the ones I’ve kissed
Those who walked a step ahead
Yet in my life were shining threads
Those I’ve loved and somehow lost
Who found the bridge and walked across
Reminding me that, though life ends
Across the stream I’ll find my friends

Jane Jago

“Did you really kill a dragon, Gran’ma?”
Hepsy had to hide a smile and scooped her youngest grandson into a hug. It was the end of his fifth birthday party and he had been running around waving the wooden sword his grandfather had made for him, pretending to kill imaginary monsters in the vegetable patch. Now the family sat at table eating a simple birthday meal. Hepsy and her husband, Poll, their middle son and his wife and five grandchildren ranging from mid-teens to the birthday boy.
“Who’s been telling you tales like that?” she asked.
“Was Da. He said you killed a dragon, you and Gran’da. Is it true?”
Something in his tone made her realise it was not just a question wanting a story. She released her grandson and caught her son’s eye. He swallowed the mouthful he was chewing and sat back in his chair.
“Word is there’s a dragon back on High Top. Been taking cows from Vasserdale and burned a farm to the ground. Shal willing, it won’t fly this way.”
“Dragons don’t just turn up places,” Poll said. “They have to be hatched and that takes a lot of magic. It means they will have a master.”
“Or a mistress,” Hepsy put in. “Is there any word of a dragon being seen on Prank’s Peak or Scale Height?”
Her son shrugged.
“Those places are the other side of the mountains. We don’t get word from there often. Was a minstrel up from Durmouth though. Seems there’s war over the Marches again. Hobs and trolls.”
“When I’m grown up I’m going to fight hobs and trolls.”
Hepsy mussed her grandson’s soft hair.
“That’s just what your da said at your age, and now look at him, the finest carpenter in Wyvernvale.”

After the family had gone, Hepsy went into her still room where she made potions and poultices, pickles and jams and pulled out the chest from beneath her work counter,  where she pushed it away over thirty years before. Opening the lid she took out the two pieces of her staff and fitted them together, murmuring some words as she did so.
Then she went out and stood in their small garden, shielding her eyes from the low sun to look towards the mountains. High Top could be seen piercing the sky with its needle spire of rock. What she could not see from below though was the steep path that wound up to the plateau from which the steeple of stone began. Nor could she see the cave mouth that led to the lair. But memory told her they were there. Memory and loss.
A sound made her turn.
“You gave me a promise you’d not be using that anymore,” Hepsy said, as Poll came out of the house, her gaze rested on the sword he held in one hand, it’s blade shimmering with a blue light so the runes etched into it stood out. Then she gave a little sigh. “But then I gave you a promise I’d not be using this.” She hefted the staff and small sparks shimmered like dust motes in the air around it. “Looks like we both done broke that vow. But the big question is, what should we be doing?”
“We knew it would happen again,” Poll said, his voice heavy with sorrow. He slid the sword home into the loop on his belt and the blue light faded. Hepsy noticed the buckle was three notches up from the mark showing where he used to wear it. It was not all that had changed since he last took up that sword. His hair then had been thick and black, now it left the top of his head uncovered and was thinning and grey. But then her hair had once been the colour of a wheatfield before the harvest and now was nearly as white as the melting snows.
“We knew,” she agreed. “But I’d not thought t’would be in our lifetime. I thought we’d won the right to have our peace. We’re too old to do it all again. Not now.”
Poll put his arm around her and held her close.
“If not us – then who? The children? The grandchildren?”
Now that was a thought too terrible to dwell upon and Hepsy shook her head. “No. But it’s a dreadful long walk up to High Top and my back and your knee…”
“My knee will bear my weight long enough for what we have to do,” he said gently. “Besides, we’ll take horses this time. Hue owes me for last winter still, he’ll let us have two of his hill ponies.”
Which was a comforting thought because it really was a parlous long way and a terrible steep climb up the mountains. She shivered slightly at the memory and Poll hugged her.
“Less of that, woman. You pack what we need and I’ll go see Hue. We can set out tomorrow with first light. We’ll have to try to find the others and that won’t be easy.”
Hepsy nodded and he released her, his gnarled hands gripping her, work-worn fingers for a moment as he did so.
“They might be dead,” she said. “Do you think we can do it without them?”
Poll drew in a deep breath and looked out towards the mountains, his gaze homing where hers had, to the needle of stone above High Top. “I don’t know, love. I think we need four of us to unlock the seals, but… Well, let’s put out that fire when we can see if it’s burning.”
He was right. Of course. Which left just one question in Hepsy’s burdened heart.
“What do we tell the children?”
For a moment she wondered if he had heard her. She hadn’t spoken loudly and his hearing was no longer so perfect. But then he looked down at her and smiled sadly.
“I think we should tell them nothing,” he said. “They wouldn’t understand.”

The next day they were up before the dawn and Hespy fed the chickens a final time and explained to them that Hue’s wife had promised to come feed them in her absence. That done she went inside and searched deep in her clothes chest. It was still there. At the bottom. She looked at the long robe with its split skirt and fingered the heavy fabric, embroidered with gold and silver symbols with regret. She would no more fit that any more than she would the wedding dress she had given to her eldest daughter. Instead, she chose her most practical clothes and a pair of Poll’s old breeches and decided that maybe looking the part wasn’t so important anymore. She put her hair into a braid and studied the weather-worn face that looked back at her critically from the small hand mirror.
“Still as beautiful as ever,” Poll told her and for a moment his face and hers were captured in the same glass. This mirror never lied and it showed him as he was, which was always a reassurance.
“You and your silver tongue.” She laughed, slipping the mirror into the pouch at her belt where she had already secured some of her most potent potions. You never knew, after all.
They rode out under cloudy skies without a backwards glance.
The countryside swept down from their village to where the River Wyvern wove its way along the bottom of the vale. It was the picture of peace and rustic harmony, with cottages and houses dotting the landscape, roofs tiled with the blue flecked slate from local quarries and walls built from the dark grey rock brought down from the mountains. 
The mountains themselves lurked like ominous misshapen giants, stretching fingers or lifting shoulders towards the sky. From the gentle slopes of the vale, they rose to bleak and desolate heights.
The two barrel-shaped hill-ponies seemed happy enough to set a smart pace. Poll had managed to find his old dragonhide targe which he looped over his back and Hepsy was pleased to see the gemstone set in the pommel of his dagger was not glowing. Maybe things were not so desperate as they thought? Maybe it was all rumour and no truth? Maybe…

E.M. Swift-Hook

The artwork was inspired by a description in this piece and is by Ian Bristow. You can view the creation of it here and enjoy the music he composed that the story also inspired, perhaps whilst reading…

This might be better titled ‘how to get away with being an old bat’ or ‘things you can say in your ninth decade without being arrested’.

There are absolutely no circumstances under which I am prepared to divulge my precise age but I’ll give you a clue. When I was a girl a ‘glory hole’ was a cupboard into which one crammed everything that didn’t belong anywhere else, and there were twenty shillings in a pound, and people with orange skin would be either ridiculed or hospitalised.

But I digress. Today is not for reminiscence. No. This week’s lesson concerns the things you can get away with under the umbrella of being old and a bit odd.

You can:

• Make constant reference to your age as if it were an achievement. As in…
  “I’m eighty-five, you know.” (Those of us who are only too aware that your state of decrepitude is actually down to seventy-one years and a lot of spliffs will, of course, adhere to the crumbly code and not contradict you.)
• Go to the supermarket in your slippers and a large red hat.
• Spend your pension on fags, alcohol and Belgian chocolate.
• Eat the whole of a big bar of milk chocolate/bag of doughnuts/family pack of cheese and onion crisps/whatever. When asked why you are so gluttonous you merely have to say you are old and there may not be a tomorrow.
• Flirt with twenty-year-old builders.
• Ignore all ‘authority figures’. Never be unpleasant though. Vague, slightly tearful and full of reminiscences of the war works for me. 
• Call your doctor ‘kiddo’ and refuse all forms of advice.

If a person with a clipboard approaches you in a public place it is perfectly in order to do one of the following:

• Develop strategic deafness 
• Shout for help and claim to have been sexually propositioned 
• Answer all their questions as randomly as possible
• Grasp them firmly by the wrist and drag them to a cafe with outdoor tables where you can keep them talking for at least an hour and wrangle them into buying coffee and cake.

And finally. It’s at last okay to air your opinions. You can say the prime minister/president/crown prince/chairman of the board/whoever is a nasty, ignorant, grabby little bar steward. That the latest fashionable television ‘presenter’ is incomprehensible and about as funny as herpes. That quinoa is just middle class rice. And so on. Be the person who says what everyone else is too polite to mention… 

It isn’t given to everybody to be able to identify the precise moment when they fall for the love of their life…

It was Saturday night and the drifter drove his beat-up truck into just one more trail-end town. Truth to tell he would have preferred somewhere livelier as he had money in his pocket, but he was tired and hungry. He parked the Dodge outside a tiny diner only to see the closed sign go up on the door as he swung to the ground. An old timer and his equally ancient dog stopped and looked at him.
“Food at Belle’s Bar over the street’s better than the slop they serve here. Can even get decent coffee if’n you don’t want beer with your meal.”
The drifter tipped his hat in a grateful salute and made his way to Belle’s.

The old timer hadn’t lied about the food or the coffee. By the time the stranger had got outside of a huge plate of savoury stew, a generous helping of peach pie, and three large mugs of steaming hot coffee he was feeling almost human. He decided he might as well stay for a beer while he chewed over his options.

His usual Saturday night agenda involved picking up some lonely woman in a bar and getting invited back to her place for the night. He got bed and breakfast and his lady hostess got what he reckoned to be some pretty hot sex. Something for everybody, and no offence taken if his advances were spurned. However, he had worked for the better part of two months helping a group of dirt farmers plough and weed and build fences, so he was bone weary and he had money enough to get his own room. He’d have that beer and think. He bellied up to the bar and the woman tender stopped polishing glasses.
“I get you, bro?”
“Bro?” the drifter was amused and that made him look closer at the woman. She was maybe thirty years old, and plain of face, but with an infectious grin and the light of intelligence in a pair of strange bi-coloured eyes. She chuckled.
“Yup. Bro. Saves me trying to learn the names of all the damned fools that come in here looking for beer and sympathy.”
He found himself laughing too, and for some reason that felt good.
“I’ll take a beer please, and one for yourself.”

Somehow or other, he was still by the bar when it was closing time. He watched the bartender take off her apron and hang it on the beer pumps before he spoke.
“Anywhere I can get a room in these parts?”
She looked at him for a long moment then seemed to come to a decision.
“I got a bed too big for one woman.”
The drifter felt his smile flow across his cheeks. This one, he thought, would be a real pleasure. He held out a hand and the woman came around the bar and put her own hand in his.
“Hi, pretty lady,” he said, “my name’s…”
She put the fingers of her free hand across his mouth.
“Let’s just keep it to bro, shall we? This time tomorrow you’ll be gone and your name’ll be no manner of good to me.”
He nodded his understanding and they walked out of the bar shoulder to shoulder.

It wasn’t early when she slid from his embrace and padded out to the kitchen. He watched her go, marvelling at how comfortable she was in her own nakedness and how much he had enjoyed that nakedness. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. He was still deep in thought when a voice floated in from the next room.
“I’m sorta making breakfast. What do you want on your toast?”
“A couple eggs would be good,” he responded without thinking.
Almost instantaneously a laughing face appeared in the doorway.
“Eggs bro? Sheesh. The sex wasn’t that good.”

And he knew at that moment that his fate lay in a one-horse trail-end town with this woman by his side.

©️ Jane Jago 2018

Yup. Jacintha Farquar. Again. Here to moan in your lugholes about whatever turgid pap you writers seem to think you can hurl at us poor readers with no comeback.
I mean, here to help you aspiring novelists hone your art and improve your technique.
Honestly.

Life Lessons for Writers – Seven: Cultural References

You, yes, you, stop looking away as if this has nothing to do with you because you know you have done it. You will have dropped the names of movies you love, references to books or music you love and that esoteric hobby of yours, somehow into your magnum opus.
Along comes the reader who is twenty years older or younger than you, loving the book and then POW – you’ve lost them. They don’t care that your main character likes listening to Swooky Pizzaface or that the classic scene in Toy Story Two Hundred and Twenty Three was just soo funny. And maybe you were thinking all your fly fishing pals were going to just love that reference on page sixty-two of your post-apocalyptic novel? Well all two of them who ever read the book might do, but for the rest of your readership you’d probably have more reach by mentioning J.R. Hartley…
Did I lose you on that one?
Go Google it.
That makes my point.
One person’s cool cultural reference is another’s ‘Huh?’ or even ‘Ugh’.

Then we come with anachronisms.
Why is it every damn character in the future has a secret passion for 21st Century movies/books/HipHop or history? Now I know for a fact there will be some of you reading this who will be saying ‘Yes, well I have a passion for 4th Century BCE Greco-Roman pottery’. Well good for you if you do, but you know what? There is a reason shows and books about that are not topping any popularity charts.
My son, Moons, won’t even watch a film from the 1990s as he says the visual quality is too crap so by the time we get another century on things from this time will just be sad and dated in the minds of most.
You may fondly imagine readers are smiling as you name check the entire cast of Farscape, but no, they won’t be. They will be being reminded that they are reading a frigging book set five hundred years in the future in which the main character has an utterly unlikely obsession with an old show they never even liked themselves. You will have broken their reading immersion at best and alienated them at worst.
It is not an effing ‘easter egg’ it’s a bloody shambles.

And what about if you write in the past?
Get your facts right. It is not hard to learn when various items were discovered/invented, Google is your friend.
Don’t have someone in Tudor times wave a red rag at a bull – that kind of bull fighting didn’t exist then, and a ‘waving a red rag’ meant flapping your tongue to no good end.
Don’t have your Viking feeling his heart pumping to circulate the blood around his body, no one knew it did that then.
Don’t have a character in the Wars of the Roses thinking about the cells in his body, or talking about a virus or about bacteria – or even germs. They were not known about then.
Don’t have your Roman Senator say he is going to handbag someone or that he fights according to Queensbury rules…
Just don’t…

So in brief make sure your cultural references fit the culture. 

1. Don’t try and shoehorn in pop-culture references to the present day in your distant times sci-fi. Far from being something the modern reader can relate to you will alienate those who dislike your referenced material and break the reading immersion of everyone else. 
2. Do check that whatever cultural references you do use fit the setting both historically and – well, yes, culturally.
3. Don’t impose your own boring geekdom on your poor bloody readers thinking you look clever. You don’t, you look an effing pratt!

And if that hasn’t sent you scurrying back to your keyboard looking for the delete key I don’t know what will. So sod off unless you are going to make me another Bloody Mary…

“The men who came out of the hole in the sky, what did they look like, Dylan?”
Dylan thought for a bit and chewed on his pencil. He wanted to help the nice lady, she had been very kind and said he could play with any of the toys in her room.
“They were big and scary,” he said, and started drawing. “They picked up mummy and Gwen and ran back into the hole in the sky with them.”
“Then the hole closed up?”
Dylan nodded. He wanted to explain how the hole had pulsed and made the air around it shimmer, as if it didn’t belong. He wanted to tell the nice lady how he had tried to run through the hole after the men, and seen a strange boat with a dragon’s head on the other side. But he wasn’t sure how to put the images in his mind into words that made any sense. So he kept working on his picture instead.
“There wasn’t really a hole in the sky, was there?” the nice lady spoke kindly. “It was a car or a van that the men got out of, wasn’t it?”
Dylan wondered if the nice lady was trying to make fun of him. He finished his picture and held it up.
“They looked like this.”
The nice lady must have been very tired because her face went very pale and she suddenly fell asleep on the brightly coloured carpet.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Prunella teaches you how to cook like a toff!

The biggest test of any woman’s cookery skills (as well as her patience and tolerance for alcohol) is luncheon for a group of her own sex.
The best advice, honestly, is to never allow oneself to be inveighed into hosting what can only be accurately described as a bitchfest.
Should you be foolish enough I have a few words of consolation.
However badly the occasion falls out there will always be worse in living memory – with the proviso that you remember the three golden rules.
Never serve chicken (by some intervention of Beelzebub it will always be raw in the middle)
Never run out of booze
Never allow your husband/offspring/brothers within shouting distance (they will find it terribly funny to cause mayhem and leave you apologise for them)
So, ladies, to our muttons. Now might indeed be a good time to break out your finishing school cookery. Or it might not. Perfect salmon en croute may be the normal order of the day for you, but with fifteen arch-critics at the door, failure is guaranteed. Burned pastry with raw fish inside is the best you can expect. Do. Not. Attempt. Anything complicated. If you must show off your culinary talents I strongly suggest a casserole which can be perfected the day before and merely heated on the day.
But. Having, unbeknownst to me, been made a member of a group of ‘ladies who lunch’ (I believe my unlamented mother-in-law to have been responsible) I have developed a coping mechanism which I am prepared to share here.
The food.
Tapas. Consisting of whatever you can find at your nearest German supermarket (not Waitrose, or Samantha, Lucinda et al will even be au fait with the price). Shove your purchases onto the best Coalport serving platters and smile your best humbly self-satisfied smile.
The booze.
Unlimited amounts of sangria and/or Agua de Valencia. Shakes head at puzzled young women. These drinks are both ironic and carefully lethal.
Mix as follows.

Sangria

2 litres red wine
1 litre Fundador or similar sherry-based brandy
2 tablespoons muscovado sugar
2 large oranges sliced
1 large lemon sliced
2 punnets strawberries
1 cinnamon stick
2 star anise
1 litre lemonade
Mix all ingredients except lemonade in large jugs at least three hours prior to luncheon. Add lemonade at the last minute.

Agua de Valencia

2 litres orange juice
4 sliced oranges (blood oranges for preference)
1 bottle cheap gin
1 bottle cheap vodka
4 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 bottles cava
Mix all ingredients except cava beforehand. Add cava just before the wenches descend

And there you have it. A no-fail luncheon for your natural enemies.

Just one last thing. Make no attempt to hide the supermarket packaging the food came in. If you do, your husband’s ex-girlfriend will seek it out and parade it about the room. Which bitchery there is no point to if you leave the packets in a neat pile on the kitchen worktop. Benefit two of this strategy is that when a mildly intoxicated young woman demands to know if the king prawns were prepared to Mary Berry’s recipe or Nigella’s you can recommend her to go and read the packet.

Look out for more tips on how to cook like a toff next week!