Unnecessary glasses of water

I don't want to sound horribly ungrateful to all the lovely people who help when I have a seizure, but why the glasses of water? I don't have seizures because I'm dehydrated. Someone suggested I should write a play called Unnecessary Glasses of Water—perhaps a sequel to last year's A Sudden Visitation of Calamity. One more title and I've got a trilogy.

Sydney Smith and Caroline Rippin in A Sudden Visitation of Calamity

Revolution!

When I get to the point where I can't write at home (i.e. every single day) I usually run away to the British Library. This painting inspired Colin St John Wilson's design; he wanted to create the same focus, space and quiet as enjoyed by St Jerome. I think he did pretty well. I also think Prince Charles was sort of right that it looks like an academy for secret police, which just adds to the fun.

My local, Swiss Cottage, is more soothing. Designed by modernist hero Basil Spence and recently restored, it's all glass and concrete outside, blond wood and sinuous curves inside, swivel chairs in scarlet leather.

Ernst Toller did his best writing in prison. He was in for high treason & when he got out, he could only write in small cramped rooms preferably with barred windows. If I wanted the ultimate writer's room, at Holloway, say, or Broadmoor, maybe I should be pouring my energies into committing some kind of crime.

Sword swallowing; how?

From my research list this week:

Sword swallowing; how?
Persian trade with Europe 1870s
Ernst Toller; autobiography
Catholic funerals; order of prayers, rituals; flowers; wreaths
Stormtroopers pre-1933
Goebbels' speech at bookburnings
Persian coffee; cardamom or just sugar?
Irving Berlin
Chloroform and ether rose petal cocktail
Blue Angel film
Viennese pastry recipes; something with poppyseeds

I love being a writer.

The cake escape

I'm loving The Supersizers Eat... Every week, Sue Perkins and Giles Coren eat their way through a historical period. Angel Delight and Pop Tarts for the Eighties. A cockatrice (made by stitching together a turkey and a piglet) for the Middle Ages. They even recreate the picnic Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette ate as they attempted to escape the revolutionaries. They ate:

Boeuf a la Mode
Carrots in aspic
Petits pois a la Française
Champagne

Aspic was invented for this meal, to stop the carrots flying around while they were making their escape. Probably an unnecessary precaution as their carriage could only go seven miles an hour.

Which reminded me of a story about a woman escaping Iraq in the Seventies, who baked her jewellery into a cake so it wouldn't get confiscated. She didn't tell anyone, not even her husband. And at the airport they encountered a surprisingly nice official, so nice that her husband took it into his head to give him the cake. And of course she couldn't say.