Lentils are for consolation

When we feel sad, in my family, we soak lentils. This is my mother's recipe for kichri, the Iraqi Jewish rice and lentils dish we eat for consolation. It's the most comforting food I know.

Kichri

Two mugs of basmati rice
One mug of red lentils
75g-100g butter
Three teaspoons salt
One teaspoon tomato puree
Two cloves of garlic, chopped
One teaspoon cumin
Half a teaspoon turmeric
Three onions, sliced
A pack of halloumi cheese, sliced
A teaspoon of curry powder
Three and a half mugs of water
Sunflower oil
Greek yoghurt

Wash the rice and soak it for half an hour. Wash and drain the lentils.

Melt half the butter in a saucepan and fry the garlic, cumin and turmeric, and then the tomato puree. Add the drained rice and lentils and stir fry it all for a minute, then add the water, salt and the rest of the butter. Mix it all, cover the pan and boil it until the water has evaporated, then reduce the temperature to a very low simmer.

Meanwhile, heat some oil in a frying pan, add the curry powder then the onions. Cook them over a low heat until they are dark and caramelised.

Take half the rice and lentils out of the saucepan and put them aside. Put the onions and cheese on top of the rice and lentils in the pan, then add the reserved rice and lentils on top. Cover the pan and keep warm. If you're my mother, invert it onto a round plate so it looks like a cake. If you're me, tip it over any which way. Serve with Greek yoghurt on the side. Here again, there's divergence. My parents spoon the yoghurt over the top. My brother and I smush the yoghurt into the kichri and very delicious it is too.

Confabulating and Macbeth

I was blown away by Cheek by Jowl's Macbeth, and particularly the moment when Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost, and Lady Macbeth says "my lord is often thus / And hath been from his youth... / The fit is momentary". I've always read it as her lying desperately to cover up. But Will Keen played it as though he was having a seizure. His hands splayed, his eyes roved, his fingers fluttered. It was very delicately done. And it worked brilliantly.

In a seizure, you often see things that aren't there. Flashing lights at the edges of things, the world gone Cubist, blurred or spinning, things looming up or sliding away, colours gone hectic...of course it varies from person to person, and even from seizure to seizure. But it made perfect sense that a man who is in torment because he's had his friend murdered might see his dead friend.

And it wasn't his first seizure either. The production is played without any props. At first it seemed tricksy but then came the dagger speech. And if, again, it was a seizure, well of course Macbeth might not know what was real and what was a vision fuelled by guilt and terror. He might see daggers.

The other thing he might do is confabulate. It's what psychiatrists call it when, faced with irreconcileable or unlikely things, a person makes up a story to make sense of them. Macbeth might think a dagger is real, or that Banquo is haunting him. I've had the more mundane experience of feeling, during a seizure, that I was spinning or floating in space, way above the ground, putting out my hand and touching a carpet, and instead of concluding I must in fact be on the floor, instead feeling almost outraged at the poor taste of my hosts who have carpeted their ceiling. I want to be a person who doesn't see (or feel) things that aren't there so I forget about reason or even politeness. I am outraged by my at the idea of a carpeted ceiling. I make a mental note to express this outrage when I come out of my seizure. Later, when I find myself on the floor and realise my mistake, some of that outrage lingers. And the experience of spinning or floating towards a carpeted ceiling feels more real than the aftermath.

So it makes sense to me that Macbeth might be made more gullible by his seizures, more willing to believe the witches, less able to tell the difference between what's real and what is not. And as for me, well, I've always liked making up stories.

We make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy

is a bit of a quote from an essay by Jean-Marie Hérault de Séchelles, from an essay called The Theory of Ambition. There's more:

We make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy—at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable.

I found it in Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. I'm reading a lot of historical fiction as I get to (nearly, nearly, I hope) the first draft of a my historical epic, and after I read how she made Cromwell human (attractive even, in a Tony Soprano kind of way, but then I've always had a penchant for practical men) in Wolf Hall, I wanted to see what she'd done with the French revolutionaries. I love Hérault de Séchelles's idea that out of sadness, something shifts.