Got things wrong on the food this evening. It was going to be chicken in a spicy tomato sauce with tagliatelle. This was a dish I had cooked 24 years ago on a short holiday in Tuscany and I figured that if the girls didn’t go for the chicken they would at least eat the pasta and tomato sauce. I took the chicken pieces out of the freezer this morning before going to work and of course when I got home this evening they were still more or less frozen. So we just had the pasta with tomato sauce and the girls ate happily. They will be stuck with the chicken tomorrow.

Over the coarse of the last few nights I have picked up again Joseph Mitchell’s Back in the Old Hotel.  I have been reading the last piece in it, Joe Gould’s Secret,  which is one of those pieces of writing that start to turn in on themselves and catch you up short. Joe Gould was a New York eccentric, a bohemian who carried with him the great story of the book that he was writing which was a Oral History of the conversations that he had heard, picked up, as he walked the streets during the middle decades of the last century. He said that the Oral History ran into many millions of words and he always carried round with him the notebooks into which the history was notated. Small pieces of the book were published and a myth grew of this great book that he was writing that somehow would unlock some of those secrets we hold dear.

Mitchell wrote an article on Gould for The New Yorker magazine. He got to know him in the years before and after he wrote up the story. A large part of the piece was on the efforts he made to try and get to see some of the great book that Gould was writing. But in the years that followed the publication of the article in the New Yorker it dawns on Mitchell that Gould is hoarding a great secret about his book and that is that book has never really existed. The scribbled notebooks only contain the same few small sections of the book endlessly rewritten.

As Mitchell he writes about this he muses on a book that he had planned to write, a sort of day in the life of a young man in New York city. That book was never written and as Mitchell writes about this you are pulled up short because after he finished this story Mitchell himself was struck with writers block. He had been a writer for The New Yorker and for the next 30 years he kept an office there. He continued to go to work each day and would go into the office and close the door and so far as anyone knew he never wrote another word. It was almost as if he had been defeated by the letting out of Joe Gould’s secret.

It was something to think about as I turned off the light to go to sleep.

Listening to weird folk and drinking a large bottle of Corsendonk. A drink last sampled late at night in the Gollem Bar, Amsterdam. It might have been the last glass of that that sent me over the edge. in any event one or the other should give rise to some interesting dreams. Unlike last night when the interesting dream at 3.00 in the morning turned out to be the sift sound of the cat sleeping snoring under the bed. It was a gentler snore to that which I am generally used to so I was able to turn over and go back to sleep only to be woken up an hour or so later by the same cat who had obviously had enough of my snoring and was waving its tail in my face. These things don’t normally happen!

The Corsendonk is delicious and was found in a dark corner of cellar. It came in its own tin   swaddled in paper and straw. I might have been saving it for something but there is always a danger with that you end up not drinking it at all. It is a dark Belgium beer with lots of burnt coffee/chocolate flavours. As I am getting towards the end of the bottle I am going to have to start savouring it as it will be a while before I am able to get some again.

Follow the link to their website for a short film and nice pictures. Somewhere else in the cellar I have one of the proper chalice shaped Corsendonk glasses to drink it out of. It is brewed in Turnhout which is just down the road from my sister in Eindhoven so next time I am there I may have to visit.

Well the last of the bottle has been poured into the glass and soon it will be time for bed.

I am feeling tired this evening and will not be eating much. Almost two days have now been survived with me in charge of the kids/teenagers. There have been a few raised voices but no rows yet.

I cooked them a big bowl of chilli con carne which seemed go down reasonably well particularly as I made sure there was a large supply of Doritos (some of which I am finishing off now). I had cooked it last night when it had a good four hours of slow cooking on a very low heat. Tasting it before going to bed I was worried I might have been too heavy handed with the chilli powder and there would be a blanket complaint and refusal to eat. But there was only one comment and most of it got eaten.

The pot of it is back in the fridge now to be finished off tomorrow night.

Having got them into bed I have been trawling the internet trying to find a link to a story of a steamship The Bohemian that stuck a rock off The Mizen in the 1880’s. I was eventually able to find it and this is a picture of Captain William Grundy. He died in the wreck along with 35 men.

One of the items I was able to find includes a letter sent to New York Times from the second officer who was the only surviving officer. He describes the boat hitting the rock and the desperate fight to sort out a life boat and the night spent in the one boat they were able to get away. They had a night on the water and washed up the next day in Dunmannus Bay.

I will need to ask the man with a black beard about it the next time I am in Arundel’s.