Meal matters

The rain continues: viciousness combined with vindictiveness and a personal animosity, character testing, will sapping moisture. If I spend another Christmas in this god forsaken water washed sun denied apology for a country in which I will not be able to top up my tan I will not be responsible for my writing. And the food . . . don't start me!

Food is becoming something of a problem in Catalonia, well, at least the food for the Christmas meal on Christmas Day. We have been presented with a menu for some fifty euros (£35) which Toni has derided as ruinously expensive and he has urged his sister to look for another restaurant. For this absurd sum of money we would have various canapés to start with pan Catalana, followed by a Christmas soup which is composed of pasta and small meat balls in a consommé; followed by fish (for my choice); finishing with a dessert. Included in the price is Cava, wine, water and coffee. As you can see, hardly worth it, is it? I sometimes feel as though I am living in a different universe; roll on living in Spain!

While reading The Pickwick Papers I have been both surprised and also disappointed by the format of the novel. The picaresque style is deeply unsatisfying, with the incidents being insubstantial and facile. The characterisation is weak to the point of derision with the character of Mr Pickwick himself being the least satisfactory with Dickens constant reinforcement of the quality of the character being less than convincing. He is a cipher; a mildly amusing cipher but a cipher nevertheless. In the preface to the edition of the novel that I have Dickens says that he rejected the stereotype of various characters going off hunting as the basis for the book, but the early chapters do not show that amount of originality. What you can see are the first ideas of elements which are going to be of major importance in the future novels.

Now that I have come to the part of the novel where Mr Pickwick has been sent to the Fleet the ‘real’ Dickens is emerging: the whole tone of the writing has been changed. The intensity of the descriptions and the emotional involvement is markedly more personal and engaging. The descriptions of squalor and the unfair systems which produce personal misery are immediately emotive and compelling. A feeling of personal fury is apparent in the writing: this is the Dickens that I like to read, though the weaknesses in his vision for improvement are immediately apparent with Mr Pickwick’s money providing relief rather than suggesting changing the system. I am beginning to enjoy the read!

And think of all the volumes to come!