I have a new passion in my life, and it's LU Rich Tea Biscuits, these cookies that are sort of like the bottom half of a Petit Ecolier but without the chocolate slab on top, and butterier.
Of course, it's an unseasonable eighty degrees outside, so it seems rather silly to be sitting around eating tea biscuits after lunch (and dinner). Tea biscuits are the sort of thing that I think go with rainy, fifty degree days in March or November. To be eaten with tea, of course.
But I think I've gone crazy for tea biscuits because as I've mentioned before, I tend to want to eat whatever people are eating in the book I'm reading at the moment. And over the past week or so, I've been indulging in a re-read of Cold Comfort Farm, which I first discovered a few years ago in the "British Literature" section of the McNally Jackson bookstore on Prince Street, and bought within minutes of opening it. I'm glad I did, because it's the sort of thing that I like to peep into every once in a while, and in fact lately I've developed a sort of obsession with the heroine, Flora Poste, who as of this moment is officially my idol. (Long gone are those high school days when I wanted to be just like Dorothea in Middlemarch... I can't remember why anymore, but I think it had more to do with what I perceived at the time as unselfconscious candor, than with her choice in husbands. I'll have to reread it to find out!). No - instead I want to be like the ever-sensible, determinedly cheerful, Flora, who likes everything to be neat and tidy, and whose favorite book is The Higher Common Sense by the Abbe Fausse-Maigre. If only such a volume really existed!
Cold Comfort Farm was published in 1932, and apparently Virginia Woolf was absolutely disgusted when it won a prestigious award in 1933 (the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse). It's really a parody of a certain sort of British pastoral novel, and the florid, "earthy" style popularized by DH Lawrence and his many offshoots. Young Flora Poste enters this rural setting, where every bud and dew-drop is ripe with symbolic meaning and her relatives are mired in unhappy drama, and marches straight through, determined to get everyone into order before getting on with her own life.
The biscuits appear in a scene in a tea-shop where she encounters Mr. Mybug, a writer who just loves tramping around the countryside on long walks in any weather. Excerpt below:
[Flora] was just beginning on her fourth buscuit when she became conscious of a presence approaching her from behind, and before she could collect her faculties the voice of Mr Mybug said:
'Hullo, Flora Poste. Do you believe that women have souls?' And there he was, standing above her and looking down at her wtih a bold yet whimsical smile.
Flora was not surprised at being asked this question. She knew that intellectuals, like Mr Kipling's Bi-coloured Python-Rock-Snake, always talked like this. So she replied pleasantly, but from her heart: 'I am afraid I'm not very interested.'
So I say, if this Flora is eating biscuits when she makes this sort of reply... I want some, too!
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