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(This episode is marked as explicit because of derogatory language.)
Episode image is a detail from a photo by Charles Adrian.
Content note: There is some suicidal ideation described at around the twenty minute mark.
Returning to normal service after last week’s break from Page One In Review, Charles Adrian takes his time to talk through three of the biggest books he has been given by guests on the podcast.
Amos Oz died on the 28th of December, 2018. You can find an article about him and his life-long entanglement with the developing Israeli state by Bernard Avishai in The New Yorker here.
You can find out more about Jackson’s Lane Theatre and what they are currently programming on their website here.
Correction: During the reading of Amos Oz’s A Tale Of Love And Darkness, Charles Adrian missed out the word “kind” in the first description of the brown man, his rescuer. The sentence in question should begin: “A brown man with big bags under his kind eyes…”
You can find out more about Vipassana meditation on their English language website here.
You can find out more about Jack Munroe, aka The Bootstrap Cook, on their website here.
Anna Sulan Masing was featured in Page One 27.
You can read about Voices At The Table on their website here and read a review of M. F. K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me by At The Table co-founder Rebecca May Johnson in the Times Literary Supplement here.
The first Voices At The Table event happened at Lassco Ropewalk, near Tower Bridge in London. You can find out more about Lassco on their website here.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 95, Page One 97 and Page One 98.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 10th September, 2020.
Episode released: 13th October, 2020.
Book listing:
A Tale Of Love And Darkness by Amos Oz (trans. Nicholas de Lange) (Page One 95)
Grace And Grit by Ken Wilber (Page One 97)
Borderland from The Art Of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher (Page One 98)
Links:
Amos Oz and Israel in The New Yorker
Gastronomical Me review by Rebecca May Johnson
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Hello and welcome to the 182nd Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 25th Page One In Review. Normal service has resumed.
Today is Thursday the 10th of September, 2020. It's a day after I recorded the previous Page One episode. I said I might record this episode today and indeed here I am. It's a lovely day today - the sun is out. The air is cooler than it was, let's say, a month ago but the sun is warm today and I... yeah, I have to admit I like that combination. It's not a very damaging admission, is it. I [laughing] really enjoy it when the air is cool and the sun is warm. I think that's just... oh, it's just lovely.
Anyway, I have three books to talk about today. For anybody who is new to the podcast: Hello and welcome. This is a book podcast and in these Page One In Review episodes, I'm talking about all of the books that I've been given by guests on the podcast over the last eight years. I have, yeah, three books for you today and as I think I announced at the end of the 24th Page One In Review they are big books and they get bigger as we go along. The first book is already a fairly big book and then, yeah, as I say, [laughing] they get bigger.
I... If I'm not careful I will just... I will just spend the whole episode dwelling on the... the size of these books. That's partly because I'm overwhelmed by the idea of books at the moment, as I explained a little bit in the previous episode - in Page One 181 - but also they are... they... they're significantly bigger, I would say, than most of the books I've been given by guests on the podcast. In general people have given me slim paperbacks not higher than the length of my hand and I don't have very big hands.
[page turning]
This... This first book that I have to talk [laughing] to you about is... it's a paperback - they're all paperbacks, actually, that I'm talking about today. It's a paperback. It's just a bit taller than my hand is long but it's quite thick. It was given to me by Karin Eli during the 95th Page One. We had that conversation somewhere in the basement of some faculty building in Oxford. Anyway, Karin gave me A Tale Of Love And Darkness by Amos Oz.
It's a... It's a memoir. It's the story of... I think mostly the story of Amos Oz's childhood. I don't know how old he becomes over the course of this book. I think... Okay:
He takes us…
It says on the back:
He takes us on a seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's war-torn streets in the 1940s and '50s, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his fussy, logical father, and his dreamy, romantic mother.
So, yeah, I don't remember much about the marriage. I remember that it's set in Jerusalem. I remember that it has very much to do with the founding of the State of Israel. I don't know if his parents were involved in that or if they just knew people... I think they might have known people who were involved in that. Yeah. I think... So. I think this was beautiful. I just... I read it a while ago and it's just one of the many, many books that... that I don't remember very much about.
But what I do remember, which is unusual, is where I was when I read the passage that I'm going to read for you now during this episode. I generally... You know, when I look at all these books that I've been given I don't... I don't have strong memories of where I was when I read any of them but this one for some reason I do. And this particular passage, as I say... I remember that I was on the way to see something... some show - I don't remember what that was - at Jackson's Lane Theatre, which is up in… I was going to say Archway but it's not... Highgate [/haɪgeɪt/]! It's just outside Highgate [/haɪgeɪt/] station - or Highgate [/haɪgət/] as I think it is perhaps more properly pronounced. And I was early and I got out of the the tube - I was taking the Northern line to Highgate in case you're interested - I got out of that Northern line train at Archway and I sat on a bench at the bottom of Archway Road. It was a... It was a lovely warm evening - perhaps a day not unlike today. I think the air wasn't necessarily hot and stifling as it can be in London but the sun was out and it was a lovely evening just to sit and read a book. And I then... I remember I underestimated how long it was going to take me to get from Archway on foot up... up the hill to Highgate and to the Jackson's Lane Theatre. I think it is very nearly late as it happened. But I was reading this passage.
It's a passage in which the... well, Amos Oz - the narrator, the writer - as a little boy was taken by his child-minder, Greta Gat, to a clothes shop where she was going to try on some clothes. It's quite a long passage. I'm not going to read you the whole episode, I'm just going to read you... it's a little... it's a section towards the end of the... of the episode. Basically, Greta has gone to try on some clothes. She's left Amos, who's very young at the time - I think he's four and a half, he says... I think that's right - she's left him waiting for her outside the changing room and he spots this very small woman who he mistakes for a child - he calls her a witch. And he follows her and, kind of, fancies her, I think. And then he's scared when he sees that she's not in fact a child and he runs away from her gets lost. He seeks shelter in a cupboard under the stairs in this shop, where he finds a tape measure that he describes here as a snail. So those are all important things. You'll... You'll hear me talk about the dwarf witch - yeah, I'm sorry about that language - and you'll hear me talk about the... the snail. And... yeah, I don't... I don't remember exactly why this episode is significant. I'm reading it for you because I have such a clear memory of where I was [laughing] when I read it and I thought that was quite unusual and notable.
In any case, this is a Vintage Paperback edition of A Tale Of Love And Darkness. I wish I could tell you more about it - about the contents of it, I mean. It is 517 pages long and I'm reading you from pages 221, 222 and 223:
One may reasonably imagine that, on reflection, Auntie Greta decided that from every angle it would be best not to tell my parents.
ie about the adventure in the clothes shop.
She certainly saw no reason to alarm them after the event, when everything had ended well and safely. She may have feared that they would judge her to be an insufficiently responsible child-minder, and that she would thereby lose a modest but regular and much-needed source of income.
Between me and Auntie Greta the story of my death and resurrection in the Arab clothes shop was never mentioned, or even hinted at. There was not so much as a conspiratorial wink. She may have hoped that in time the memory of that morning would fade and we would both come to think that it had never happened, that it had only been a bad dream. She may even have been a little ashamed of her extravagant excursions to clothes shops: after that winter's morning she never again made me her partner in crime. She may even have managed, thanks to me, to recover somewhat from her addiction to dresses. A few weeks or months later I was taken away from Auntie Greta and sent to Mrs Pnina Shapiro's kindergarten in Zephaniah Street. We continued however for a few years to hear the sound of Auntie Greta's piano dimly in the distance, at dusk, a persistent, lonely sound beyond the other noises of the street.
It had not been a dream. Dreams dissolve with time and to make way for other dreams, while that dwarf witch, that elderly child, the face of the killed fox, still sniggers at me with sharp teeth, among which is a single gold incisor.
And there was not only the witch: there was also the snail I had brought back from the forest, the snail I hid from my father and mother, and that sometimes when I was alone I dared to take out and play with under the bedclothes, causing it long erections and lightning retreats back into the depth of its lair.
A brown man with big bags under his eyes [sic], neither young nor old, with a green and white tailor's tape measure round his neck and both ends dangling down on to his chest. He moved in a weary sort of way. His brown face was wide and sleepy, and a shy smile flickered for a moment and died under his soft grey moustache. The man leaned over me and said something to me in Arabic, something I could not understand but that I nevertheless translated into words in my heart, Don't be frightened, child, don't be frightened any more now.
I remember that my rescuer had square, brown-framed reading glasses, that didn't suit an assistant in a women's clothes shop but rather, perhaps, a heavily built carpenter, getting on in years, who hums to himself as he walks along dragging his feet, with a dead cigarette-end between his lips and a worn folding ruler peeping out of his shirt pocket.
The man eyed me for a moment, not through the lenses of his glasses, which had slipped down his nose, but over the top of them, and after scrutinising me closely, and hiding another smile or shadow of a smile behind his neat moustache he nodded to himself two or three times and then reached out and took my hand that was cold with fear into his warm hand, as though he was warming a freezing chick, and drew me out of that dark recess, raised me high in the air, and squeezed me quite hard to his chest, and at that I began to cry.
When the man saw my tears he pressed my cheek against his slack cheek, and said, in his low, dusty voice, pleasantly reminiscent of a shaded dirt road in the country at dusk, in Arabs' Hebrew, question answer and summing-up:
‘Everything all right? Everything all right. OK.’
And he carried me in his arms to the office that was located in the bowels of the shop and there the air was full of smells of coffee and cigarettes and woollen cloth and the aftershave lotion of the man who had found me, different from my father's, much sharper and fuller, a smell that I wanted my father to have too. And the man who had found me said a few more words to the assembled company in Arabic, because there were people in the office standing and sitting between me and Auntie Greta who was weeping in a corner, and he said one sentence to Auntie Greta too, and she blushed very deeply, and with that, with a long, slow, responsible movement, like a doctor feeling to find out where exactly it hurts, the man passed me over into Auntie Greta's arms.
Although I was not so keen to be in her arms. Not quite yet. I wanted to stay a little longer pressed to the chest of the man who had rescued me.
After that they talked for a while, the others, not my man, my man did not talk but just stroked my cheek and patted me twice on the shoulder and left. Who knows what he was called? Or if he's still alive? Is he living in his home? Or in dirt and poverty, in some refugee camp?
Yeah, I... There are a couple of things that I loved about - more than a couple of things. I really like that... I do like that passage. I love the description of the man passing Amos over to Auntie Greta “like a doctor feeling to find out where exactly it hurts”. I think that's... that's gorgeous. And then... Yeah, and then the care - I see... I think of it as care - the... the care that he takes wondering where this man might be, whether perhaps he's in a refugee camp. Earlier he's told us that Auntie Greta was killed in the siege of Jewish Jerusalem in 1948:
An Arab Legion sniper, with a diagonal black belt and a red keffieh, fired an accurate shot at her from the direction of the Police Academy that was on the cease-fire line.
But there it is. So: A Tale Of Love And Darkness by Amos Oz. It's gorgeous prose... yeah, and I think it's like that throughout.
Okay. What's next?
Oh yes. So that was the... that was the book that Karin Eli gave me for the 95th Page One. The 96th Page One was my conversation with Will Ellis, who I shared a flat with years and years ago when we were both eighteen and learning Italian in Florence in Italy. He now lives in Zürich and that's where we had that conversation. In any case, he didn't give me a book. Not because I prepared him badly. [laughing] I often say... When... when I'm talking about a guest who hasn't given me a book I will say that I prepared them badly. Sometimes that's true, sometimes that's not true. Sometimes I'm just being polite. In this case I don't... [laughing] I don't feel any need to be polite. Will was not prepared for our conversation although I'm sure that I had told him exactly what was required. But we did... we had a... we had a very nice conversation and... Anyway it's on the... you can find it... If you go to pageonepodcast.com and look up the 96th Page One you can listen to our conversation there.
The 97th Page One was my conversation with Barry Ferns. We had that conversation in Gospel Oak in London...
[page turning]
... and he gave me... Barry gave me Grace And Grit by Ken Wilber. This is subtitled Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber. So this is, kind of, broadly the story of Ken and Treya meeting and falling in love and Treya almost immediately is diagnosed with breast cancer. And then... So most of the book is the story of the four years that they spent together, her... the treatment that she undergoes, the time that she's in remission, and then when the cancer returns and the further treatment, and then her death.
They are both also very interested in spirituality - and Buddhism in particular. Ken Wilber, I think, is a... I think he has a training in psychotherapy so he, I think, is very interested in finding some kind of marriage between Western psychoanalytic traditions - Freud and Jung - and Buddhist meditation traditions - particularly, I think, Tibetan Buddhism. Treya is more ecumenical in her outlook from what I can remember. And this book is mostly written by Ken but he's used quite a few sections from Treya's diaries and from her other writings so you get both of their voices here and they're both... they both have very compelling voices. It's a very... It's a very compelling story and frequently, Yeah, quite a grueling read.
I... I didn't love it as much as Barry did. I... I don't really get on with Ken Wilber. I... I... yeah, I got a sense from this book - and then I went and watch some YouTube videos of his talks - he's... I don... there's something quite hierarchical about his conception of spirituality and meditation. He's quite interested in achievement and yeah, I... that... that doesn't appeal to me at all. There are times, for example, when he talks about how good Treya is at Vipassana meditation - she does, I think, three or four retreats and comes back and she is apparently an expert. I just... I... yeah, I don't think that's a very interesting way to think and talk about meditation - and... and spirituality in general. But, yeah, that's a disagreement that I would have with Ken Wilber were we ever to meet, which is... which is unlikely. I also think... I mean, it's... it is also, this book, to a large extent a hagiography of Treya. I mean, explicitly, at... you know, towards the end when he describes her death. He really does want to portray her as... as a kind of saint.
What... What is, I think, really good about the book is that he... I think he does a good job of portraying the ups and downs of their life together. I don't think... I don't get the sense that he sugarcoats the experience that they had. And there's an intellectual rigour to this memoir. So yeah, this is another memoir, isn't it. Two memoirs. I think... actually... goodness, it's all memoir today, pretty much - or at least you could see it that way - this episode.
So... yeah. Basically, it's a... yeah, it's a... it's a chunky book full of a huge amount of different stuff and all the way through it is this cancer story which you know from the beginning is... is not going to end well. I wanted to read you a bit from... it's not quite at the middle of the book, it's, sort of, in the first... maybe at the end of the first third of the book, I would say. And this is... So Ken is talking about a period when Treya has finished her first course of treatment for the cancer and she's in remission and everything's great and they've moved to Lake Tahoe and, you know, they're optimistic and looking to the future and things are really not great. And I think it's a... Yeah, it's a - to me - a really interesting part of the story and a really important part of the story. And I think people who are carers of really any description will... I imagine they will recognise this: that sometimes it's not the periods of greatest stress that are the most difficult to deal with, that sometimes it's the period following that when everything seems to be going back to normal and then you have time to deal with all of the emotions that you've been... that you haven't had time to deal with before. And I think that's what Ken is describing here.
So anyway. This is published by Gateway... it says:
by arrangement with Shambala Publications, Inc.,
PO Box 308, Boston, Massachusetts... USA.
It is 413 pages long and this is the beginning of chapter nine - Narcissus, Or The Self-Contraction and I'm going to read you from pages 138 and 139. And I should warn you that there is some suicidal ideation described in this passage.
IT IS 7:00 A.M., a bright, beautiful morning in North Lake Tahoe. Our house is situated about halfway up the mountainous hills that rise dramatically from the most beautiful lake in North America. From every window in our south-facing house you can see the entire lake, the stunning white beaches edging it, the black mountains in the background, covered with snow nearly year round. The lake itself is a color of azure-cobalt blue so intense, so deep, so electric, I wonder if there isn't some sort of huge power generator hidden somewhere in its depths: This lake doesn't look like it is just blue, it looks like a switch has been thrown and it has been turned on.
Treya is sleeping quietly. I take a bottle of Absolut vodka from the shelf and I very carefully pour four ounces into a cup. I drink it in one quick gulp. This will last me until exactly noon, when I will have three beers with lunch. Throughout the afternoon, I will drink beer - maybe five, maybe ten. For dinner, a bottle of wine. Brandy through the evening. I will never get drunk. I will never pass out. I will rarely even get tipsy. I will never neglect any medical problems that Treya has, nor will I shirk any fundamental responsibilities. If you meet me, you will not suspect I have been drinking. I will be alert, smiling, animated. I will do this every day, without fail, for four months. And then I will walk into Andy's Sporting Goods on Park Street in South Lake Tahoe, to buy a gun meant to vaporize this entire state of affairs. Because, as they always say, I can simply stand it no longer.
It has been two months since Treya finished her last chemotherapy treatment. Although the treatments were physically punishing, Treya's enormous strength and courage have seen her through the worst times. Once again, she has been given a clean bill of health, although with cancer that never means anything (you are only pronounced cured of cancer when you die of something else). Once again, we have been looking forward to finally settling down, possibly even having a child, if Treya's period returns. Once again, the horizon has begun to look clear, fresh, inviting.
But something has changed this time. Both of us are exhausted. Both of us are starting to fray at the seams. It is as if we both carried a huge and heavy load up a steep mountain, carried it up quite well and set it down quite carefully - only then to completely collapse. Although the strain had been building slowly in both of us, particularly over the seven months of chemotherapy, we both came unraveled rather abruptly, as abruptly as I have introduced it in this narrative. It just seems that one day we were fine, and then the next day life came apart at the seams like a cheap suit. It happened so suddenly it caught us both off guard.
I do not intend to dwell on this period in our lives, but neither will I gloss over it. It was, for the both of us, hell.
There you go. So Grace And Grit by Ken Wilber. That is... yeah, it's... it's a big read and has much wonderful stuff in as well as the stuff that I find [laughing] more... let's say challenging [quieter] or problematic.
[page turning]
Okay. Now... So the last book that I have for you is the... is... [sound of pages flipping] This is the real monster. This is the biggest book that anyone has ever given me. And actually... yeah, it wasn't given to me, was it. I bought it. But... Okay. So this I got as a result, let's say, of my conversation with Cameryn Moore for the 98th Page One, which we had in Kennington in London. She... she was travelling a lot in those days and she was only, as they say in French, de passage in London - she was passing through, in other words - so she didn't have room in her suitcase for a lot of books and I agreed that she didn't have to have physical books. So in this case it really was me - I said: “Don't worry about it”. I remember that quite clearly. Pretty sure I remember that. So she read from her laptop, I think.
But this book, The Art Of Eating by M. F. K Fisher, was the book that she thought I should have and a little bit after our conversation I decided that I really ought to have it and I bought a copy. She made it sound wonderful and it is indeed wonderful. This is... yeah, it's huge. It's a big book. It's... let me see how many pages is it... Well, so including all the index and so on it's 206 pages long but even that doesn't really give you a sense of quite how... It's a heavy book. It's a paperback but it's... it's almost as thick as - no it is! So it's as thick as three of my fingers stuck together. Well, not... hmm actually, yeah, they don't even need to be quite stuck together. [laughing] I don't know why I'm... I don't know why I'm so insistent that you should understand how big this book is. I've... Maybe I'm just showing off. I read it! I read it all and enjoyed almost all of it.
This is... It's... I think I said that it's in my notional list of favourite books that guests have given me even if technically I bought this. The first section of it is the part that I really love. This is... So The Art Of Eating is - and this is, by the way, the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Art Of Eating - it's a collection of a few different books that M. F. K. Fisher wrote. She's an American food writer but also, I would say a memoirist. As I say, this episode is... is all memoir - or almost all memoir. She writes about food and the people who eat it - I think that's what she says - and some of this is really very autobiographical.
She writes a whole book just about oysters - it's called Consider The Oyster - and that includes different ways to cook them. That's quite... I did enjoy that... that book. She writes a whole book - which was first published in 1942 - about how to cook on a wartime budget, which is... yeah, very reminiscent of what Jack Munroe, as The Bootstrap Cook, has been writing more recently about surviving under austerity and at the sharp end of neoliberalism. That's called How To Cook A Wolf, that book. There's, as I say, memoir, autobiography, there's some food history, and then, yeah, the first... the first book in this collection, which is my favourite, is called Serve It Forth. And, yeah, there are many, many chapters in this that I love.
One that I would have loved to have read to you now if it weren't too long is a story called The Standing And The Waiting, which is about returning to a restaurant that she has raved about to her partner. It's a restaurant that she used to go to and she loved it and with her current partner - at the time of the story - she... she returns to the restaurant and she is so anxious that it is not going to live up to the stories that she's told about it. And as they arrive there's a smell that makes them think: “Oh, it's... it's really not going to live up to the stories”. And there's... It's... It's a gorgeous story. It's full of sadness for lost things and full of a, kind of... an awareness of pretentiousness in oneself. It's... Yeah, it's... it's at the same time a celebration of good food and wine and excellent service and... and, you know, a story about change and decay. But. So. Yeah. That's called The Standing And The Waiting. I recommend that story if... if you can get hold of a copy of that.
But I am going to read for you a story which I have read once before at an event curated by Anna Sulan Masing - who was a guest on the podcast - Rebecca May Johnson - who wasn't - and Miranda York - who wasn't. They organised - and still, I think, pandemic permitting will continue to organise - events called Voices At The Table and at the first Voices At The Table event, which happened in... at Lassco - I can't remember exactly where that is in London - I read this quite short piece called Borderland, which is on pages 26, 27 and 28 of this copy of The Art Of Eating. Yeah, she's with her first husband Al at this point and they're living in Strasbourg. So this is... yeah, this is Borderland:
ALMOST every person has something secret he likes to eat. He is downright furtive about it usually, or mentions it only in a kind of conscious self-amusement, as one who admits too quickly, “It is rather strange, yes - and I'll laugh with you.”
Do you remember how Claudine used to crouch by the fire, turning a hatpin just fast enough to keep the toasting nubbin of chocolate from dripping off? Sometimes she did it on a hairpin over a candle. But candles have a fat taste that would taint the burnt chocolate, so clean and blunt and hot. It would be like drinking a Martini from silver.
Hard bitter chocolate is best, in a lump not bigger than a big raisin. It matters very little about the shape, for if you're nimble enough you'll keep it rolling hot on the pin, as shapely as an opium bead.
When it is round and bubbling and giving out a dark blue smell, it is done. Then, without some blowing all about, you'll burn your tongue. But it is delicious.
However, it is not my secret delight. Mine seems to me less decadent than Claudine's, somehow. Perhaps I am mistaken. I remember that Al looked at me very strangely when he first saw the little sections lying on the radiator.
That February in Strasbourg was too cold for us. Out on the Boulevard de l'Orangerie, in a cramped dirty apartment across from the sad zoo half full of animals and birds frozen too stiff even to make smells, we grew quite morbid.
Finally we counted all our money, decided we could not possibly afford to move, and next day went bag and baggage to the most expensive pension in the city.
It was wonderful - big room, windows, clean white billows of curtain, central heating. We basked like lizards. Finally Al went back to work, but I could not bear to walk into the bitter blowing streets from our warm room.
It was then that I discovered how to eat little dried sections of tangerine. My pleasure in them is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable. I can only write how they are prepared.
In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window, peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them, as you watch soldiers pour past and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent. If you find the Kiss, the secret section, save it for Al.
Listen to the chambermaid thumping up the pillows, and murmur encouragement to her thick Alsatian tales of l'intérieur. That is Paris, the interior, Paris or anywhere west of Strasbourg or maybe the Vosges. While she mutters of seduction and French bicyclists who ride more than wheels, tear deliciously [sic] from the soft pile of sections each velvet string. You know those white pulpy strings that hold tangerines into their skins? Tear them off. Be careful.
Take yesterday's paper (when we were in Strasbourg L'Ami du Peuple was best, because when it got hot to the ink stayed on it) and spread it on top of the radiator. The maid has gone, of course - it might be hard to ignore her belligerent Alsatian glare of astonishment.
After you have put the pieces of tangerine on the paper on the hot radiator, it is best to forget about them. Al comes home, you go to a long noon dinner in the brown dining-room, afterwards maybe you have a little nip of quetsch from the bottle on the armoire. Finally he goes. Of course you are sorry, but -
On the radiator the sections of tangerine have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow of the sill. They are ready.
All afternoon you can sit, then, looking down on the corner. Afternoon papers are delivered to the kiosk. Children come home from school just as three lovely whores mince smartly into the pension's chic tearoom. A basketful of Dutch tulips stations itself by the tram-stop, ready to tempt tired clerks at six o'clock. Finally the soldiers stump back from the Rhine. It is dark.
The sections of tangerine are gone, and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.
There must be some one, though, who knows what I mean. Probably everyone does, because of his own secret eatings.
I certainly know what she means. [laughs] Oh, I love that and I can't wait for the snow because I want to make tangerines in the way that she describes - and eat them staring out of the windows at the soldiers tramping back from the Rhine.
Thank you very much for listening today. N... Yeah. I don... Actually I'm not entirely sure which books I'm talking about in the next episode but - because there might be one that is not here - but it's quite possible that, yeah, there's an exciting book coming up, which, yeah, I won't tell you about in case it isn't. But... that... yeah, all that mystery left in the air for you. Enjoy yourselves until I return - or until you... whatever. I mean, just enjoy yourselves... continue to enjoy yourselves. Thank you so much for listening. Yeah. Bye.
Jingle
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[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]