I was interested to learn that, at least in (some) early modern theology, Mary was supposed, through giving birth to Christ, have cleansed the “sins” of Eve, which have been used throughout Christian history as a stick with which to beat all women.

Dorothy Leigh, from The Mother’s Blessing, 1616:

“…what a blessing God hath sent us women, through that gracious Virgin, by whom it pleased God to take away the shame, which EVE our Grandmother had brought us to … man can claime no part in it: the shame is taken from us, and from our posteritie for ever. The seede of the woman hath taken downe the Serpents head … “

Thus also the Virgin birth disproved theories that babies were made only with male “seed”, with women being only the incubators.

Funny how this seems to have found little space among male theologians (of this time and later), and that “Eve’s sin” was still being used as an argument against pain control in childbirth in the 20th century.

Above quote and views from Suzanne Trill, “Religion and the construction of feminity,” in Helen Wilcox, ed, Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700, Cambridge Uni Press, 1996, p. 59

So many times, governments have privatised institutions and organisations that have only suffered from the experience. But there is one case, today, in the United States, that is crying out for privatisation: Nasa.

No, I don’t think you could sell the organisation off, but take a large chunk of its funding and use it instead for a series of space prizes – the ultimate might be to send a three-member crew to Mars and back, perhaps, with several incremental awards for progress towards that goal.

Why? Well as the events of today have only further demonstrated, with the suspension of the space shuttle programme, while space exploration and development is an inherently risky business, governments (at least Western governments) are becoming increasingly risk-averse.

In many ways this is a good thing – that governments should value human life and not waste it needlessly is not something to complain of – but it simply cannot be matched to space exploration. What would have happened had the European explorers of the early modern age counted the inevitable cost in our terms? They would have stayed at home.

If this is done by private enterprise, with volunteers freely choosing to take the risks, only then can real progress be made.

It is getting on towards 40 years since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Think of the progress that has been made in Earth-bound technologies since then, but human space travel has gone nowhere.

This isn’t usually a cookery (or brewing) blog but I’ll make an exception for a recipe from Hannah Woolley’s The Gentlewomans Companion or, A Guide to the Female Sex: The Complete Text of 1675, Prospect, 2001, p. 198.

An excellent artificial Wine like Claret, but much better, and by many degrees brisker

Take two gallons of your best Sider, (some esteem Worcestershire Red-streak the best) and mingle it with six gallons of water, put thereunto eight pound of the next Malaga Raisins bruised in a Morter; let them stand close covered in a warm place, for the space of a fortnight, stirring them every two days well together; then press out the Raisins, and put the liquor into the same vessel again; to which add a quart of the juice of Raspberries, and a pint of the juice of black Cherries; cover this liquor with bread, spread thick with Mustard, the Mustard-side being downward, and so let it work by the fireside three or four days; then turn it up, and let it stand a week, and then bottle it up, and it will taste as quick as the briskest liquor whatever, and is a very pleasant drink, and much wholesomer than French-Wine.

The “brisker” bit I’d certainly believe, but I am puzzled by the mustard – I can’t imagine the yeast would like that? I’m almost tempted to try it – I wonder if anyone has come across a report of someone doing so?

War and Peace is a a classic, Jane Eyre is a classic, Gulliver’s Travels is a classic; applying the same adjective to Joe Orton’s play What the Butler Saw feels slightly uncomfortable, yet if you were looking for a piece of literature that perfectly captures its time, while also having universal themes that will resound in any society but a utopian anarchy, it would be hard to beat. If you were selling it as a movie script you might call it Kafka meets Oscar Wilde meets Carry on Matron.

If you take the odd joke from the script in isolation, it could feel like an artefact of its time, and distinctly misogynist, but watching the whole play, staged at the Hampstead Theatre in London, its distinctly subversive and even feminist message are clear. Unjust power is not just corrupting, but perverting, and ultimately self-defeating.

The story begins in classic farce style, with a pompous psychiatrist trying to seduce a hapless young female job-seeker. Naked, she’s shoved behind a curtain when the doctor’s domineering wife appears, then more high jinks ensue when the government inspector turns up. A randy bellboy, who’s trying to blackmail the wife, and a hapless policeman seeking the bronze penis from a statue of Churchill are soon in the mix, and much running in and out of doors, exchanging of genders and clothing, and general chaos ensues.

What makes the play, and this production, work, is that it is absolutely full on. No line is shirked, every situation is exploited, until the end, when the twist is that one final visual gag isn’t played. Any faint hint of half-heartedness, any wavering, would turn this into a ridiculous farce, but fully played, it is real satire.

It seems the play has “has never been produced on Broadway”. Perhaps it should be.

Here’s the Guardian’s review and the director’s explanation of his admiration for Orton.

I owe this idea to the blog Notional slurry, whose author finds that some sets of footnotes, “as long as they’re not the minimalist Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. style (which wears so thin so quickly), make fine poems”.

You might even call it a meme, if you like. He’s asking you to guess the source of his found poem; I know mine won’t be widely recognised, so I’ll tell you it is the notes to Isabella Whitney’s The admonition by the Auctor, to all yong Gentilwomen: And to al other Maids being in Love, from the Penguin Classics edition of Renaissance Women Poets.
And I’ve decided to reorganise and reshape them a little, to enhance the form …
(But I haven’t added anything, except capitals, just edited away.)

Ye Virgins: referring to women who fall in love
Cupid is the god of love.
Advice do lacke:
IW presents herself as having the authority
to give advice to young women
on love.

Slacke: lax, idle.
Painted: false, deceptive.
Mermaides: famed for their power
to lure mariners to their deaths
through deceit and their alluring singing.

Some use the teares of Crocodiles:
proverbial, cf. Erasmus, Adagia,
‘Crocodili lachrymae’.
Cf. Chaucer’s Troilus, who is advised by Pandarus
to splash his letter to Criseyde with tears
to convince her of the depth of his love.

Troilus and Criseyde
Ovid. . . Arte of Love
Trust not a man: a gendered use of Tilley
‘Try before you trust’,
In store: in mind.
Shrink: shirk responsibility.

SCILLA: not the mythological monster,
but the daughter of Nisus,
king of Megara.
Scylla was abandoned by Minos,
and punished by her father.

Haire by fate:
‘The hair on which his whole destiny depended’

In Ovid’s version Minos does not kill Nisus,
but leaves Megara.

The story of Oenone and Paris is found
in Heroides V.
Oenone was
a nymph on Mount Ida, loved by Paris
before he discovered his descent
from Priam. He abandoned her for Helen of Troy.

Demophoon and Phyllis fell in love when his ship
was washed ashore in a storm.
Phyllis gave him her virginity as a sign of her fidelity,
but Demophoon left Thrace never to return.
Phyllis hanged herself.
The primary account is found in Heroides II.
Transformed so: an almond tree grew on Phyllis’ grave.

Hero was the priestess of Aphrodite.
Leander saw her at a religious festival and fell in love.
He would swim the Hellespont at night to see her,
And was drowned when a storm
Extinguished the light she used to guide him.

The mutual nature of their love distinguishes them
From the other figures IW discusses.

She scrat[ched] her face,
She tare her Heir:
Standard behaviour for grieving women in the Heroides.

I’ve never been a great believer in the “blood is thicker than water” theory. Just because you share 50 per cent, or 25 per cent, or even less, of a person’s genes, there’s no reason why you should have anything in common with them, or be able to get along with them.

Yet it is a persistent myth in our society, one that strikes particularly hard at mothers, who are supposed to instantly bond with their child, to feel an overwhelming surge of love and affection. This is the feeling of Eva, after giving birth to Kevin, who turns out to be a school shooting serial killer in We Need to Talk about Kevin:

“I was angry. I was frightened. I was ashamed of myself, but I also felt cheated. … I thought, if a woman can’t rise to an occasion like this, then she can’t count on anything; from this point the word was on its ear.”

When I learnt that the Orange Prize-winner was a novel on this subject, I’ll admit I wasn’t much impressed. This was the subject of the winner of the 2003 Booker, Vernon God Little and every review I’d read of that made me think: Definitely not for me.

But then I started reading rave review after rave review for Kevin and I thought I’d give it a go. It was a decision I didn’t regret.

I don’t read many “literary” novels – I find them often too slow and too laboured in their cleverness, but this is very definitely a literary novel: it has a complex epistolary structure, not a linear narrative; it is no mystery – you know from the start how it ends, or at least for most of the book you think you do; and you quickly come to realise that every word, every phrase, every little incident, is there for a reason.

This is a supremely crafted book, but it is also a gripping read, not in my experience a common combination.

And it has a psychological complexity few novels achieve. Nothing ever has a single cause – Eva is, of course, asking herself “why?”, but through layers and layers the impossibility of that question becomes evident.

There can be few readers who don’t find something of themselves in Eva, and even Kevin. I was taken by the way she describes in her youth blackmailing herself into doing things that frightened her by just taking one small step at a time – ringing the travel agent, making reservations, paying for a ticket – none of these are in themselves momentous steps, and yet once done, you’re publicly committed to doing something.

There’s the suggestion of course, that Kevin may have worked the same way on the fateful day – a salutory thought when we think about the world today, and perhaps some of the answer to that bigger “how?” we are asking now.

And while there was a ridiculous, trumped-up debate around the Orange Prize about the allegedly “domestic” nature of women’s writing, that charge can’t be levelled at Shriver. Kevin is certainly a product of the politics of the American high school system, and the novel is played out against the background of the post-vote Bush-Gore struggle.

If any novel published in the past year deserves to become a classic, to be read in 100 or 200 years for the insights it gives into life then, this is it. And we can only hope that school shootings will by then be a curious artefact of its time, that has to be explained to readers.