Graveside Tribute

For fifty-seven years running, a mystery man has been placing roses and a bottle of cognac on Edgar Allan Poe's grave to mark the horror writer's birthday, the Guardian reports.

What Flavour is Your Novel?

I can't eat cheese and Branston pickle sandwiches without thinking of D.H. Lawrence.

See, cheese and pickle sandwiches were my staple diet the summer I worked in Barnaby's toyshop, and hungrily read Women in Love, The Virgin and the Gypsy and The Rainbow in quick succesion during my all too short lunch breaks.

Edgar Allan Poe is the scent of overripe bananas. His Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Birmingham Library copy) was squashed at the bottom of my rucksack with the remains of my picnic lunch as I trudged 22 miles across the Malvern Hills on a sponsored walk. (Coincidentally on the same day as those guys landed on the moon.) Neither book nor banana survived the trip.

Ipoh Chicken Rice with extra beansprouts is the flavour of my induction into science writing. I devoured Steven Jay Gould's essays in that shop in Section 5 in between teaching practice observations. (Hmmm ... why do men have nipples? Glad I know the answer.)

A Suitable Boy smells of the calamine lotion I had to dab on when I had shingles.

Many of my more recent reads taste of fishball mee soup from Centrepoint.

Pucuk ubi masak lemak* is going to be the flavour of John Banville's The Sea. I'm doing an awful lot of my reading these days in the canteen of Damansara Specialist Hospital, going for physiotherapy for an achilles tendon that refuses to heal. (Step class goddess no longer.) And the Malay food in the canteen is surpringly good, including this dish which is a favourite.

This information may save some PhD student a lot of time as he embarks on DNA research into the various little stains on the library of the famous Sharon Bakar.


*Tapioca leaves cooked in coconut milk.