The Susanne

Howards End by E. M. For­ster is an abso­lutely enchant­ing read. I’m only about halfway through at the moment but I’m head over heels in love with the story, the char­ac­ters, the lan­guage, the author.

A very typ­ical Mod­ern­ist novel, and pub­lished in 1910, it fore­shad­ows right from the begin­ning the tur­bu­lent cen­tury which lies ahead of it. I’m not going to reveal too much about the plot, but seroi­usly, you must exper­i­ence this won­der­ful book!

Here’s the recipe for the cook­ies I wrote about, the ones inspired by the art­icle from Cook & Eat on leftover-​cookies. They’re non-​dairy and incred­ibly sweet!

Makes about 24

• 100g margarine
• 2 1/2 dl sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/2 dl flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 dl shred­ded coconut
• 1 dl hun­dreds and thousands
• 1/2 dl dark chocol­ate (chopped)

Pre­heat the oven to 180 C.

Mix the egg, lemon juice and vanilla in a bowl.

Use your mixer to cream the mar­gar­ine and the sugar until it is really fluffy. Pour the egg mix over and beat until it’s all mixed and creamy.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, chocol­ate and the hun­dreds and thou­sands, and add to the egg/sugar/margarine mix whilst mixing, until it’s all combined.

Scoop spoon­fuls of cookie dough onto parch­ment lined baking sheets, and place in the oven, one sheet at a time.

Bake for about 10 minutes, but my advice is to keep a close eye on them from about 7 or 8 minutes as they turn brown really sud­denly. You want them just golden!

I came up with this last night when I was crav­ing pasta but also saw there were loads of veget­ables in the fridge that had to be eaten. I even threw in a little cheese even though it makes me ill, just because cheesy pasta is so yum. This made one huge por­tion that I couldn’t finish, so I sup­pose it will feed two girls or one man.

• 1 por­tion spaghetti
• 1/2 cap­sicum (green bell pepper)
• 1/2 onion
• 6 cherry tomatoes
• 8 small broc­coli florets
• 1 dl grated Jarlsberg
• 10 slices cured ham

Slice the cap­sicum and the onion thinly (about 1-2 mm thick). Cut the toma­toes in half. Cut the ham slices into 1 cm strips.

Boil the spa­ghetti in 2 L water with a little salt and veget­able oil.

In a skil­let, sauté the veget­ables (except the toma­toes) for about five minutes. Add the toma­toes and sauté for another minute. You don’t want them to turn to mush.

When the spa­ghetti is done, drain and put it back in the pot. Add the veget­ables, the ham and the cheese and toss. Serve imme­di­ately on deep plates.

Yum!

This is the only Sher­lock Holmes story I have read. I read a Donald Duck ver­sion of the story once when I was little and liked it very much — read­ing the ori­ginal story at 21 I loved it. It is only in later years that I have redis­covered my taste for mys­ter­ies; I used to love Jane Austen and con­tem­por­ary Amer­ican and Irish authors and didn’t even con­sider all the great mys­tery lit­er­at­ure out there.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had to bring Sher­lock Holmes back to life for The Hound of the Bask­ervilles, having appar­ently killed him off earlier when he tired of him. I can under­stand why he killed him: he was being con­stantly mis­taken for his char­ac­ter by the hoards of ador­ing fans, and I sup­pose he missed having his own iden­tity. In this story, Watson is given a chance to try his invest­ig­at­ive skills. Com­mend­able, yes, but then Sher­lock didn’t really let go, did he, hiding out in a cave and keep­ing a watch­ful eye on his ‘trusted’ assistant.

The story is known to all I sup­pose, and if it isn’t known to you I strongly advise you to read this book. It’s so good.

Well let me just start off by saying that I have found my call­ing. My voca­tion. I’m going to be a lib­rar­ian. I just love my job! It’s as simple as that. Now I do real­ise that it has very much to do with my co-​workers. But I really enjoy the work as well. I can’t believe it hasn’t occurred to me until a year ago that this would be a per­fect job for me! I, who have been a book­worm since before I could walk. Who used to recite poetry from my favour­ite book as soon as I could talk (I ‘read’ to friends and family. I held the book the right way up, on the right page, and ‘read’ the poems, which I had mem­or­ised because I loved them so much). Here’s the lib­rary where I’ve worked three out of the five days I’ve worked this week and where I’ll be work­ing most days from now on as well:

I’ve been made ‘Facebook editor’ at the lib­rary because I was the only one who knew how to use it – now I’m not going to be work­ing there all summer so I’ve star­ted teach­ing the others how to do it. But today I expan­ded into making ‘pages’ so that instead of simply having a pro­file for the lib­rary we will now have two ‘libraries’ that people can become fans of. And I’m adding books to the lib­rary on each page, one by one. I have spent most of today on it, in between lend­ing books. So far I’ve added just over 100 books to each lib­rary. I think I might even spend some time doing it when I’m not work­ing, just because I enjoy it and I want the pages I’m making to be the best possible!

This is the first time I’ve had a job that I feel like I could do for the rest of my life. I think I would be incred­ibly happy as a lib­rar­ian. Now, I’m not going to go to lib­rar­ian school. I did con­sider it for a while. But it sounds so boring with all the cata­loguing courses and all that. Plus I already had the cata­loguing thing down after the first day on the job, it’s that simple! I’m going to finish my BA in Eng­lish lit­er­at­ure and then go for a mas­ters in ‘litteraturformidling’ which trans­lates to some­thing like ‘literature mediation’ or ‘conveying literature’ or some­thing like that. I’ve dis­covered that there’s not really any term for it in Eng­lish which is  really right.

I know that more and more lib­rar­ies are focus­ing more on get­ting people inter­ested in lit­er­at­ure and that I’m almost cer­tain to get a job with that mas­ters degree. And that way I can still go to uni­ver­sity instead of the col­lege crap which is lib­rar­ian school with com­puls­ory attend­ance eight hours a day, like high school. Oh no, I’m over that. I like the uni­ver­sity system of lec­tures and sem­inars and respons­ib­il­ity for own learn­ing. Yep.

Mum’s going away to Lofoten for a week, and I’m pretty happy about it. Not because I want her gone, but because when she’s gone I’ll be able to cook again. Yey! I’ll prob­ably be pretty tired from work most days, but still. I can finally decide for myself what to eat again. And I can make it too. And…ohh! The excite­ment would be too much to con­tain if I wasn’t extremely tired. I’m def­in­itely not used to work­ing full days and full weeks! At least I’ll have Sunday off which is good as I want to tidy my room. My old room, where I grew up, and it shows the signs very clearly. All my clut­ter is still all over the place, so my plan for Sunday (except for cook­ing) is to go through all my stuff and chuck out the rub­bish, donate old clothes and accessor­ies to the Salvos and keep what’s left over tidy.

I’m excited about tomor­row as well. I’m work­ing till two, then The Boyfriend’s family are stop­ping for coffee on their way to their cabin in Trysil, and then I’ve an airport-​date with Maria. August is just too far away, I must get a Maria-​fix now I have the chance.

Our Shakespeare tick­ets arrived this week and I stuck them on my mirror. We’re going to see The Merry Wives of Wind­sor at the Globe! Oh my good­ness, I feel so priv­ileged! I sup­pose it will be very touristy and all that, but frankly I don’t care. I’M GOING TO SEE  ONE OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS AT SHAKESPEARE’S OWN THEATRE!