The rules of the pub, hiding in the hedge, and MRI dreaming
With Laird Hunt and Pete Brown
I spent the weekend running away — but it may not have looked like that to all of the people who drove past in the sun and rain while I was planting a hedge.
The hedge did need planting, but what I really should have been doing was going through the final edits on a now-much-overdue manuscript for a book I have coming out in spring. There’s something horrifying about putting the final touches on work that has taken almost three years. It’s not the tweaks so much as it’s the pain of noticing terrible lines, out of date information, and arguments that you no longer fully agree with.
And yet, I maintain that nobody who is any good at writing actually approves of what they’ve written. It is that dissatisfaction that that compels you to go back again and again, trying to cut and sharpen. I was at the pub last night (quite appropriately, given Pete Brown’s column in today’s issue) when I finally accepted that I had to face the monster. I walked home to run through Katrina Porteous’ ‘edits and suggested amends’. Katrina is not part of the editorial team who are birthing this book, she is just a friend with a meticulous eye for detail. All writers need such friends.
Last week, we launched our new podcast, Tell Me How You Write, which sees the team here talk to interesting writers about their process. The author and founder of The Quietus Luke Turner, who was up first, told me that his most productive hours are when evening is fast approaching. He goes at it for exactly 120 minutes before coming up for air; the results, according to those who reviewed his last two books, are well worth reading. Curiously, Luke loves editing. Personally, I’d rather be heeling in hawthorn whips in the rain.
Incidentally, the whips came from Richard Negus, who has a book out with Unbound in the spring. Words From the Hedge is a bold, funny, and very beautiful account of the way that English hedge layers are seeing our countryside change.* England, Richard explains in his book, has lost miles and miles of hedges over the past century — so while I was skiving I was still, in my own small way, doing some good.
Patrick Galbraith
Editor
*For hundreds of years, hedge layers have been employed in the English countryside to ensure that hedges remain thick and bushy. Hedge layers are, as we start to realise how important hedges are as habitat for wildlife, in increasingly high demand.
Queues at the bar
Writer and professional drinksman Pete Brown on how the unspoken rules of British pub etiquette are changing
I felt sorry for the American journalist. Sorry, and a little bit guilty.
I’d arranged to meet her in a pub at lunchtime, to talk about pubs. I didn’t know that she’d just got off the Red Eye and come straight from the airport to the boozer. I didn’t know it was her first visit to Britain. So when I turned up ten minutes late for our meeting, and realised that she was the woman standing in the middle of the pub, staring at the bar with her mouth open, her shoulders slumped, her arms waving vaguely, I felt bad.
When I said hello, she gripped my arm like it was a life raft, gazed at me with wide, bloodshot eyes, and croaked, ‘How do you do… THIS?’ the last word accompanied by her waving at the bar as if it were a lion tamer’s cage.
Over the next hour, we talked about the details that make English pub culture so idiosyncratically special. The ‘invisible queue’ at the bar, where people don’t really queue at all, but the principle behind queuing remains firmly in place. The buying of rounds. The clinking of glasses. The democracy of the pub, whereby real-world hierarchies are left at the door. The demarcation of space, whereby it’s great to start a conversation with a total stranger at the bar, but it would be deeply weird to then follow them to a table.
Pete Brown's Clubland: How the Working Men’s Club Shaped Britain was published by Harper North in 2023
Dreaming back the years
The American novelist Laird Hunt finds himself hallucinating in an MRI machine. He has visions of football, Nebraska, and spent political possibilities
Forgive a man in his mid-fifties, stuck in an MRI tube, his recourse into nostalgia. I was in there hoping to get answers to questions lately posed by a knee badly damaged while playing American football long ago. The MRI machine roared and jackhammered every bit as loudly as I’d been told it would, but the tube was open at the bottom and if I lifted my head a little I could see out the window to an ash tree with leaves the shade of my high-school jersey’s green. I liked wearing that jersey. I even did a few noteworthy things in it – for all I played exactly one game my senior year before the crutches came for me. The Indianapolis surgeon who did the demo and rebuild at the time said I’d be lucky not to walk without some limp for the rest of my life and would probably need follow-up surgery in a decade or so. We’re coming up on 40, mostly limp-free years since he said that, so I suppose it was due.
We had a terrible team. Matter of fact, before a retroactive forfeit by a school we’d lost badly to handed us a win, we were in the running for the longest active losing streak in the state, which made me an okay player on an awful team. A depressing reality that didn’t stop me, during last summer’s Democratic National Convention, from experiencing something like an out of body experience when members of the 1999 State Championship Winning, the Mankato West Scarlets, who were coached by Governor Tim Walz — fist-pumped their way out onto the stage.
Laird Hunt’s novels include Neverhome and Zorrie; A 2024 Guggenheim fellow in fiction, his most recent book is Float Up, Sing Down, which was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Herb and cheese egg-bread
The recipe below is inspired by Carson McCullers' 1940 novel, in the Southern Gothic tradition, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. It features in A Gothic Cookbook, a literature-inspired recipe book that recreates dishes from the best Gothic novels. Tom Parker-Bowles called it 'beautifully written, artfully illustrated, and filled with wonderful recipes.'
The scene
News of Willie, Doctor Copeland’s son and a former worker at the New York Café, shakes everyone to the core. Mick Kelly, instantly and irrevocably haunted by the news, desperately tries to console the doctor with hot coffee. Doctor Copeland’s daughter Portia, meanwhile, implores him to stay and eat ‘a good hot meal’ with her rather than making house calls. On the menu is a comforting trio of fried fish, potatoes and ‘egg-bread’. Often known as Southern buttermilk cornbread, egg-bread is a fluffier, spoonable variation of cornbread, served as a side to mop up sauces or split, like a sandwich, and filled with creamed chicken. This savoury egg-bread recipe is laced with chilli flakes, herbs and chunks of cheese. It’s delicious served in hunks with chilli, stews and hearty bean soups, or just eaten as it is.
Ingredients
500 ml buttermilk or whole milk
Juice of 1⁄2 lemon (if using whole milk) 300 g polenta
1⁄2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
100 g Cheddar, grated
1 tsp chilli flakes
1 tbsp finely chopped fresh rosemary 1 tbsp finely chopped fresh thyme Pinch of salt
3 medium eggs
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan/390°F/gas mark 6. Grease a 23 cm square ovenproof dish or equivalent.
2. If using whole milk, make a buttermilk substitute: pour the milk into a jug and add the lemon juice. Leave for around 10 minutes, until it starts to thicken and smells slightly sour, then give it a whisk.
3. Pour this mixture, or the buttermilk, into a large saucepan and warm over a low to medium heat. Once hot but not boiling, remove from the heat and add the polenta, bicarbonate of soda, cheese, chilli flakes, herbs and salt, whisking to combine.
4. Using a stand mixer or by hand, whisk the eggs until thick and fluffy, then gradually add them to the polenta mixture, beating with a wooden spoon to combine.
5. Pour into your greased dish and bake for half an hour, until puffed up, golden and firm to the touch, with no more than a slight wobble. (If it needs a little longer, put back in for 5 minutes at a time, covering loosely with foil if it starts to look too brown.
6. Pour into your greased dish and bake for half an hour, until puffed up, golden and firm to the touch, with no more than a slight wobble. (If it needs a little longer, put back in for 5 minutes at a time, covering loosely with foil if it starts to look too brown.
7. Allow to cool slightly before cutting into squares, or scooping straight onto plates.
A Gothic Cookbook: Hauntingly Delicious Recipes Inspired by 13 Classic Tales, by Ella Buchan and Dr Alessandra Pino, is out now with Unbound