Cover your back: That’s what best friends do
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COURTESY OF ACORN MEDIA
DVD
Northern Lights, 4-disc set, Acorn Media, Silver Spring, Md., 12 episodes, app. 713 minutes, $59.99
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THIS IS A SLEEPER. Much of the brilliance of Northern Lights would likely be lost on many American viewers—but not on most British Heritage readers. We live in a society where everyone pretends to be middle class; in Britain, there remains a strong, proud, unapologetic working class, comfortable in its own skin, with its own traditions, customs, tastes, prejudices, loyalties and identifying markers: Northern Lights unpacks that world with humor, sympathy and a genuine understanding of the people. It’s a world of lager and chippies, not sushi and chardonnay.
It’s Manchester, northern England’s own “City of the Big Shoulders.” Colin and Howard have been best mates since boyhood. They work together, live next door to each other in a neat neighborhood of semidetached houses and are married to sisters—Jackie and Pauline. Since schoolboy day, the lads have been rivals as well, competing over soccer teams and clothes, jobs and Christmas illumination.
When the chips are down, as they often are in life, however, Colin and Howard always have each other’s backs—that’s what best friends do. Through one scrape and life passage after another, the pair find themselves both at odds and in need of each other—and dragging their long-suffering families along on the periphery.
Northern Lights is not light and bright and sparkling. You won’t find this series in any PBS lineup of Britcoms. It is full of comedy, often hilarious, though, and rich with poignancy and pathos as well. It’s a wonderful portrait of working class life, and a grand lesson in human relationships.
Cullen Skink, Cock-a-Leekie and Cockles: This Is Your Cookbook
YES, THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT FOOD, glorious food: cawl and Cornish pasties, fidget pie and fish cakes. More than 200 mouth-watering photos and 100 recipes punctuate this rollicking adventure through the much-maligned classics of British cuisine.
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BOOKS
The Ploughman’s Lunch and the Miser’s Feast: Authentic Pub Food, Restaurant Fare, and Home Cooking from Small Towns, Big Cities and Country Villages Across the British Isles by Brian Yarvin, The Harvard Common Press, Boston, 320 pages, hardcover, $26.95
To call this a cookbook would be deceiving. This is a book about traditional British foods of all sorts done the right way. The subtitle says it all. In addition to easily understood and replicable recipes (using American measures), the book is punctuated by author Brian Yarvin’s informal, chatty sidebars on culinary topics as varied as the Balti triangle, British bacon, Sunday roasts and ruminations on fish and chips.
The Ploughman’s Lunch and the Miser’s Feast might be carrying apples to Ludlow formany British foodies, but it’s hard to see anyone interested in food not enjoying the book. An American food writer, though, Yarvin writes for a North American audience less familiar with British gastronomy. He includes a glossary of British food terms, and explains such things as the difference between a British and American pie crust. He also translates the culinary lingo, with Fahrenheit cooking temperatures and U.S. weights and measures.
This is not a comprehensive tome on British gastronomy. And in all fairness, Yarvin makes a few mistakes (after all, he is a Yank). For anyone interested in food, not to say the preparation of it, though, the book is a visual and textual delight. Yarvin knocks it for six. Few of us may be apt to prepare lamb’s tongue with raisin sauce, but it’s certainly lovely to know how to make a great onion bhaji.
BOOKS
The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain by Allan Massie, Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 384 pages, hardcover, $26.99.
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IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE that the Stuarts ruled Scotland for more than 300 years and a united kingdom for more than a century. In many ways they seem like such an inconsequential royal family. The Stuart family history is a bloody and tumultuous story of betrayal, backstabbing and failed ambition. On the other hand, it is likely as Allan Massie claims, that more than any other single family, they shaped the Britain that we have known for 400 years.
This is the well-ordered story of the Stuart royal family, as it rose to the throne of Scotland in the 14th century and held it despite all the challenges of history through countless wars and rebellions.Massie follows the dynasty generation by generation (chapter by chapter) from Robert II (1371-1390) through to Queen Anne’s death in 1714—then adds a coda on the unfortunate Jacobites that followed. Some chapters are understandably longer than others.
A history book like this could be a ponderous tome indeed. This isn’t such a book. Allan Massie has written a very readable book—revealing character and moving the action without providing that dreaded too-much-information. As the Sunday Times described it, “lively and jauntily paced.”
Chasing 15 generations of royal rascals across 330 pages of text is indeed jauntily paced. The Royal Stuarts is a book for those who don’t relish a dry read. It is highly readable text, with good-sized print. The Royal Stuarts is a highly informative overview of one of the most self-destructive dynasties in European history and a rattling good story as well. Multiple stars.
BOOKS
Queen Elizabeth II: A Diamond Jubilee Souvenir Album
by Jane Roberts, Royal Collection Publications, London, 144 pages, hardcover, $24.95.
MARKING THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of Her Majesty’s accession to the throne, this official souvenir album of her reign is a beauty. Compiled by Jane Roberts, the Royal Librarian at Windsor Castle, the book features more than 300 illustrations—many never before seen. They chart the events and challenges of the Queen’s life year by year, from her birth in 1926 to this Jubilee year.
In addition to rare photos taken by her father (a keen amateur photographer), the volume includes such gems as Elizabeth’s first letter to her grandmother, Queen Mary, written in 1931: “Darling Granny, Thank you very much for the lovely doll’s house. I do love it. And I have unpacked the dining room and the hall. Love from Lilibet XXX.” Her ration book and national identity card from World War II, images from state visits around the world, private moments of the Queen as a mother and grandmother and many more offer poignant insights into the life of this remarkable woman.
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While the book is by no means a biography or comprehensive retrospective on her decades of life and service to the nation, it is a worthy adjunct to such. For any of us with a felt affection for the Queen and a desire to have a memento of this historic Jubilee, the album is a treasure indeed.
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