The blackberries from the allotment are so fat and juicy that they taste of blackberry wine.
I picked enough for several crumbles,
Or a big blackberry and almond cake.
Or should I defer gratification
And make blackberry vodka?
Decisions, decisions. The Foragers' transparency code
(Section 1, Urban blogger : Type D, easily distracted) decrees that having publicly declared said blackberries,
They shall not be left to go mouldy in the fridge.
Although this has happened in other years.

It feels like autumn ...

I have blackberries and Bramley apples in the kitchen, ready for the first crumble of the season.

I'm engrossed in TV costume drama. Classier by far than Downton Abbey!

And I'm getting deeper and deeper into an 800-page Russian epic. (Loving the grand scale of it after a bit too much Virginia Woolf.)

I'm looking forward to tonight's dinner which will be delivered to my door by a Czech chef who lives less than a mile away,

Drinking teas that taste of autumn fires

And feeling thoroughly glad that the heatwave is over.

They were hay-making in the meadows today.
That's not a sign you see very often tied to a London gate.
You could tell it was London because there weren't any poppies in the swathes of hay.
Only a few thistles.
But there was a flock of green parrots swooping over the field.
I walked across the meadow, feeling too hot.
Down the blackberry lane.
There weren't many ripe ones but it felt too much like the end of summer.
Then I spent the rest of the afternoon with a pot of Lapsang and Virginia Woolf.
Which felt appropriate as she lived only down the road.
(But did she like orange cake?)

Now I know you shouldn't believe all you read in the papers, but they did say that London's museums and galleries were deserted ...

Otherwise I wouldn't have chosen a Sunday afternoon to visit the newly-refurbished William Morris Gallery. It was heaving with people and I hadn't realised that it only reopened a couple of days ago.

I wanted to like it more than I did. (Let's face it, you have to be keen to trek all the way to Walthamstow.) Never having been before, I don't know what it was like before the revamp.

It must have been a lovely house in Morris's day. But it is completely devoid of atmosphere and I didn't feel any sense of the man. (Anyway, he only lived there in his youth. It is really William Morris's mother's house.)

It feels more like a William Morris Visitor Centre; you can feel that unsympathetic hand of local authority ownership. (I mean, red bean-bags for seating ... are they useful?Are they beautiful?)

So glad I saw the collection when it was displayed in stunning surroundings last year.

But in future I'd prefer to visit here.

This week I've been catching up ...

And, whew.... tonight I made it to the end of an eight hour marathon of gripping BBC Shakespeare. It has taken me a while, in fact I could well be the last one to get to the finishing line, but some nights it's not what you feel up to when you get home from work.

I've also been catching up with a very quirky book that kept me engrossed yesterday evening as a change from the highbrow stuff.

And I took a break in the middle of Henry V to make Sue's wonderful elderflower drizzle cake, which turned out perfectly - and has restored my confidence after a couple of gluey, banana cake disasters. Thanks, Sue.

I didn't blog about it at the time because it was a busy week, but I also caught up - at a theatre I'd never even heard of before - with a very good stage adaptation of a gut-wrenchingly, powerful book. The Lost Theatre is aptly-named and there were only 12 people in the audience which was a shame.

I haven't caught up with Mrs Dalloway because I've been too hot/too tired/too busy, so maybe I should set her aside. Back-to-back Virginia Woolf is proving too much for bedtime reading.

Our tickets were booked within an hour of them coming on sale. There was much fretting about travel arrangements when we belatedly realised that the date we'd chosen clashed with the first day of another big event. (Thankfully, London hasn't ground to a standstill - we didn't even have to queue for train tickets this morning -  possibly because everybody was at home in front of the telly.)

This was a pilgrimage ... to Dickens' house at Gad's Hill, which is hardly ever open to the public. (It's a boys' school.)
From the moment I arrived at Rochester railway station, I was walking in his footsteps because this was the spot where 10-year-old Dickens caught the mail coach to London, travelling alone, packed in damp straw to absorb the bumps ... on a coach that was melodiously named Timpson's Blue-Eyed Maid.
We walked past the theatre where he saw Shakespeare's plays and Grimaldi the clown.
We walked up the High Street to the house that inspired Miss Havisham's Satis House, almost expecting Estella disdainfully to invite us in.
We saw the Swiss chalet that Dickens constructed from a Victorian IKEA kit that was delivered in 58 boxes and where he worked on Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend and wrote the last words of The Mystery of Edwin Drood before he died.

I have put five mirrors in the Swiss chalet (where I write) and they reflect and refract in all kinds of ways the leaves that are quivering at the windows,and the great fields of waving corn, and the salt-dotted river.
My room is up among the branches of the trees; and the birds and the butterflies fly in and out ... 


We were tempted by the biggest secondhand bookshop in the country and a box of Victorian boot blacking bottles (£2 each, outside a charity shop) just like the ones Dickens pasted with labels in the blacking factory. We had lunch in the monastic herb garden of the Cathedral, dashed into the Guildhall to see an exhibit about the Hulks and the great chamber where Pip was apprenticed to Joe Gargery.

And then we caught a bus over the bridge (at least, a more modern version of the bridge) that David Copperfield limped across on his way to find his Aunt Betsey Trotwood.

And all that was before we even got to Gad's Hill ...
Where we had tea in Dickens' conservatory, from teacups decorated with Dickensian scenes.
Deciphered some of his letters, describing his traumatic railway accident in 1865, and another complaining that he was stuck for ideas for a Christmas book. 'I sit in the chalet like Mariana in the Moated Grange, and to as much purpose.'
Saw the mailbox in his porch, and the dumb-waiter that brought up his dinner,  and the corner of the dining room where he had a stroke and died.
But do you know what was almost the most exciting thing of all ....
You might call it an intimate connection with literary history...
It was going to the loo on Charles Dickens' own, original, Victorian lavatory. Still in working order.
(The curator said that they have similar ones at Buckingham Palace.
But I have never 'been' there.)

I'm not sure what took me so long. I've been waiting and waiting for Mrs Miniver to turn up on daytime television, so I could abandon all pretence at being responsibly self-employed and put the kettle on ...
But she has never once turned up on those afternoons when I am so easily tempted to down tools for an old-fashioned movie.
But for heaven's sake ... the DVD was only £2 on Amazon.
I was so sure that I'd seen Mrs Miniver once before, years ago - but now I'm wondering if what I saw previously was the sequel The Miniver Story. (I was so convinced that Mrs M died.)
Who could resist lovely Greer Garson and her quizzical eyebrows? And those amazing false eyelashes. Well, Jan Struther could, apparently, and thought she was 'so damn ladylike.'
And it's hard not to shout at the television when you're introduced to Mrs M's strapping all-American son. Please ... couldn't they at least have given him an English haircut? (It does seem a bit creepy that Greer Garson married him the following year.)
It's not so much a wallow as a fascinating piece of wartime propaganda - with an appeal for cash at the end. And it's absolutely nothing like the book.

But how it must have tugged American hearts, no wonder Churchill loved it  ... from Mrs Miniver quaking in the bomb shelter, to Clem coming back exhausted from Dunkirk, the feisty little fiancée who dies in Mrs M's arms, the rousing sermon in the bombed-out church.

Rachel's review of the book reminded me that I'd never read Jan Struther's less well-known collection essays Try Anything Twice. I thought it would be just the thing for a hot, sticky afternoon after rather too much Virginia Woolf recently.
But although I could detect glimmers of a prototype Mrs Miniver, there's very little of her charm in this collection, and it all seemed rather laboured. And without a leavening of Mrs M's charm and joie de vivre, the snobbishness rather rankled.

Another 1p bargain from Amazon (rather more than slightly-foxed) arrived just in time to slip into my bag for a weekend by the sea. This was Wilfred and Eileen, by Jonathan Smith; a very slim novella, from 1976,  that is due to be republished by Persephone in 2014. I wanted to love it but I couldn't help thinking that it would have worked much better on television. (It was a BBC serial back in the early 80s, although I don't recall watching it. Probably because in those days I was rarely home from work before midnight.)
Wilfred meets Eileen in 1913 during his last days at Cambridge, before he starts training to be a surgeon. Their families don't approve and they marry in secret. It is substantially a true story and dedicated to the daughters of the real Wilfred and Eileen. But maybe because it seemed neither one thing nor the other, it didn't leap off the page as a novel, and there was too much missing from the biographical story. All the Persephone ingredients are there, but the recipe didn't work for me.