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!

Loved the book, hated the stuff in it. This is the story of a bright young girl grow­ing up on a trop­ical island some­where in Oceania, and whose life is changed forever by the atro­cious­ness of civil war. Her teacher saves her: he intro­duces her to the world of Pip and of Vic­torian London by read­ing his stu­dents Great Expect­a­tions. Offer­ing her another world to escape to when the real­it­ies of life prove too cruel or hor­rible to bear, the book is some­thing for Math­ilda to cling to and it ulti­mately paves the way for her to find her pur­pose in life once she escapes and begins to build her own life away from the Island.

My summer job star­ted yes­ter­day. I work at the local lib­rary and so far it is simply amaz­ing, the best job I’ve ever had. My co-​workers are great and very good at taking coffee breaks. I pretty much had the shakes all last night. Bril­liant! The spring semester is over and done with and I got some pretty remark­able exam res­ults, so I’m happy with that. Have ordered pretty much all of the autumn’s cur­riculum already and one of the books arrived yes­ter­day. The Bed­ford Com­pan­ion to Shakespeare.

Can’t wait to read it. Shakespeare is the course I’m look­ing for­ward to the most. I’ve already bought tick­ets to see The Merry Wives of Wind­sor at the Globe when Maria and I go on our adven­ture to London in August and I’m very excited! So in pre­par­a­tion I’m plan­ning to read this whole book, cover to cover. I’m think­ing it will offi­cially make me a Shakespeare-​nerd. But who cares, the book looks great and it’s on my cur­riculum for next semester. So I reckon I’ll accom­plish two things by read­ing it now: one, I’ll be much, much better pre­pared for the Shakespeare course than I’ve ever been for any­thing in my life, and two, I’ll be in a pos­i­tion to bore Maria with a never-​ending supply of Shakepearian tid­bits and geeky facts. Yey me.

Ran into an old friend today also, well she came to the lib­rary. We were close at school then lost con­tact the last year of high school — around the time I broke up with my boy­friend and she star­ted going out with him. No anim­os­ity, it was just that she was in the same group of friends as he whereas I was not. Espe­cially after I broke up with him, as his friends were obliged to hate me. Obvi­ously. It’s a matter of loy­alty. So this girl and I had coffee, well I had coffee, she doesn’t drink poison. But it was cool talk­ing again after all these years. Shar­ing uni anec­dotes and boy­friend stor­ies. Yeah she’s still with the same guy. One woman’s trash is another woman’s treas­ure, isn’t that what they say?

So yeah, the job is work­ing out great, I’m having loads of fun and even more coffee. Home life is… chal­len­ging. Going back to living with your par­ents after having lived on your own is incred­ibly hard. I sup­pose it must get harder with time because I don’t remem­ber it being this dif­fi­cult last year — but maybe that was just because I worked more and was always just exhausted and didn’t have the energy to notice my par­ents at all. I miss cook­ing a lot. I miss decid­ing what to make, i miss shop­ping for food, I miss making things I want and the way I want them. Now it’s more like this:

parent: ’Susanne, do you want to help with dinner?’

me: ‘Ok. I’d love to make some sauce.’

parent: ‘No, I don’t think we’re going to have sauce today. I’m going to make this, and that, and the other, and that’s it.’

me: ‘…’

I don’t blame them. But it’s hard dammit! The bunny, on the other hand, is still thriv­ing. He jumped onto my lap the other night, I couldn’t believe it. Appar­ently that’s a rare level of tame­ness in a bunny.

Last week­end was a pretty cul­tural one by my stand­ards. A blues fest­ival on Sat­urday and the opera on Sunday. The band we went to see is called The Black­birds and my mum’s friend’s rock­star son is in it. They’re really good! Both tech­nic­ally and cre­at­ively, I simply love some of their songs. Also the scene of the fest­ival was so beau­ti­ful, right on the water at Nesod­dtan­gen in the Oslo Fjord, the even­ing sun warm­ing the audi­ence and the sea breeze from the fjord bring­ing good cheer and stir­ring our appet­ites for music. Just lovely.

Our outing on Sunday was to see another of mum’s friends who is a ballet teacher at the Opera School of Ballet. There was a stu­dent show­case and she had choreographed the first part. The whole thing was beau­ti­ful but mum’s friend’s was the best by far. A little because we know her, more because it was the young­est stu­dents, but mostly because it was a beau­ti­ful per­form­ance, it had a clear story and beau­ti­ful music and the kids were really really good and looked like they all had fun. The second half was for the older stu­dents and there were some pretty ridicu­lous acts going on, espe­cially one very ‘modern’ one fea­tur­ing just one girl doing jerky, restricted movements to awful ‘music’ (if you can call it that). A couple of acts were great though, and all in all I thought it was bril­liant. The stu­dents were all so good, and the cho­reo­graphy was, for the most part, lovely. And I heard sev­eral remarks that it was the best thing to show in the new Opera house since it opened. Appar­ently a pretty dis­ap­point­ing ballet had been on last week — this how­ever, was as far from dis­ap­point­ing as it is pos­sible to get.

Well — the lib­rary closes in 15 minutes. This has taken me all day to write, in between work and coffee. I’m off, ta ta!