Silver Hands
At the Oxfam in Monmouth on Saturday they had several flamenco LPs, of which I bought two: Flamenco Guitar and Flamenco Guitar vol. 2 by Ricardo Baliardo aka Manitas de Plata ('little silver hands'). These were 1966 releases in mono on the Philips label. The recordings had been made in Arles, France, in '63, and first issued in the U.S. in '65. The guitarist had not, before then, authorised any commercial release of his playing. As well as his guitar one hears Manitas' voice on a few of the tracks, as well as the voices of his cousin José Reyes and son Manero Baliardo. These additions have tripled my flamenco collection, which previously only included a single Paco de Lucia LP.
Sunday evening I enjoyed my first raclette-based meal, with the cheese melted at the table in a special-purpose raclette grill. To my mind this was a better means of distributing molten Alpine cheeses than a fondue.
Raclette, good as it was, has to share cheese of the week honours with the piece of Montgomery's Mature Cheddar I picked up from the Marches Deli in Monmouth (who have done remarkably well to re-open so soon after the damaging floods there last month). This is a dense, dry, richly savoury cheddar with mellow fruit and nut notes. My slice was also adorned with a few veins of blue mould, imparting some further complexity to its flavour.
I finished reading Arturo Pérez-Reverte's first novel The Fencing Master yesterday (in Margaret Jull Costa's translation), and felt well entertained by it. Had I not found it so engaging its flaws might have bothered me: the characters are all more or less stereotypical; the story takes some time to build momentum; there was one turn of the plot that struck me as highly implausible. On the plus side, it was well-written and commendably concise. Moreover its setting (Madrid in 1868) was well-realised; and the tangled political background underlying the book's events was neatly and unobtrusively sketched. It's a tale in which the titular fencing master, an old-fashioned, upright (and uptight) man in his later fifties has his world upended when an enigmatic young woman asks him for a course of lessons, thereby unwittingly drawing him in to a dangerous web of intrigue and betrayal.
Deployed on the back of my second-hand copy is a blurb calling Pérez-Reverte “The thinking man's Robert Ludlum”: were there any would-be readers actually flattered by that line? It led me to wonder, who, if anyone, might nowadays be styled the thinking man's Dan Brown? The thinking woman's Colleen Hoover?
Having forgotten a few items on Saturday I returned to the supermarket early this morning: it was alarmingly busy even at 06:45. My condolences to those who had to visit later.