In an animal hide hung from a thong-lashed frame set over a fire, a savoury broth bubbled. Careful watch was kept to make sure the liquid didn’t boil down too far. As long as the level of boiling broth was above the level reached by the flames, it kept the temperature of the skin pot too low to burn. Ayla watched Uka stir up chunks of the meat and bone from the neck of the bison that were cooking with wild onion, salty coltsfoot and other herbs. She tasted it and then added peeled thistle stalks, mushrooms, lily buds and roots, watercress, milkweed buds, small immature yams, cranberries carried from the other cave, and wilted flowers from the previous days’s growth of day lilies for thickening.
The hard fibrous old roots of cattails had been crushed and the fibres separated and removed. Dried blueerries they had carried with them, and parched ground grains, were added to the resulting starch that settled in the bottom of the baskets of cold water. Lumps of the flat, dark, unleavened bread were cooking on hot stones near the fire. Pigweed greens, lamb’s quarter, young clover and dandelion leaves seasoned with coltsfoot were cooking in another pot, and a sauce of dried , tart apples mixed with wild rose petals and a lucky find of honey steamed near another fire.
From the book ‘The clan of the cave bear’ by Jean M. Auel

The decibel level of the conversational roar in the drawing room is rising. Most of the guests have had two or three glasses of wine by now. Ralph and Carrie exchange a glance. Ralph raises an interrogative eyebrow; Carrie nods. She begins to direct guests towards the dinning room, where a line soon forms around the long mahogany table, cooing and exclaiming over the appetizing dishes. The guests take their laden plates back into the drawing room, the television room – which have been opened up and tidied for the occasion, with chairs and cushions and stools arranged invitingly in small arcs.
From the book ‘Thinks’, by David Lodge

An Austrian woman, a tourist in London, got chatting to some youths aged fourteen (fourteen!) to seventeen, they seemed to her friendly and she went for a walk with them. Which was a bit naive of her, perhaps, but it was daylight, and she probably thought of them as children (she is thirty-two herself, it said) and being a foreigner she probably didn’t understand their conversation too well, or read the signs in their body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, etc., for they must have been nudging and winking at each other, exchanging glances, sniggers, sotto voce comments. They lead her to some deserted spot where they stripped her and rapped her , ‘repeatedly’ the newspaper report said, then flung her naked into a canal, though she pleaded with them not to, and told them she couldn’t swim – which probably saved her life, actually, because she could, and managed to drag herself out of the canal on the other side. I pictured her, sobbing and shivering, bruised and bleeding, streaked with mud and slime, staggering along the towpath until she found somebody to help her. What struck me was that she said she survived this ghastly ordeal by ?separating her mind from her body as much as she could? . I wonder what Ralph Messenger would make of that. It seems to me a good argument for dualism.
From the book ‘Thinks’, by David Lodge

Emily is on the kitchen with her boyfriend Greg, a tall, gawky boy who is in some awe O Ralph. They are squatting on their haunches, peering into the oven through its glass door, at the meatloaf which Emily has prepared for supper.
Ralph suppresses a belch.
‘Yeah,’ says Emily, in a slightly insolent drawl.

He is about Ralph’s age, a little stouter, with a red leathery complexion and big hands. In the hairy tweed sports jacket he favours he looks more like a farmer than a doctor. He pushes, presses, probes with his big spatulate fingers. ‘All right ,’ he says. ‘You can put your togs back on? He goes back to his desk to write some notes in Ralph’s file, using a gold-nibbed fountain pen.’You’ve got a lump on your liver’

Ralph gives Hope a hug in the hall, sweeping her off her feet and whirling her round on the black-and-white-chequered floor. The child laughs with glee. Then he kisses Carrie and looks at her. Ralph waits until Hope has scampered off to her room to be reunited with her favourite dolls and toys
From the book ‘Thinks’ by David Lodge

Helen has arrived early, by prior arrangement, to help with the food preparations. Most of the serious food – the poached whole salmon, the famous cured ham on the bone, the variegated salads – had been supplied by a local catering firm, and it is already laid out in the dining room beside stacks of plates and sets of cutlery wrapped in thick paper napkins. But Carrie likes to prepare her own canapés. Helen has been entrusted with the task of chopping and slicing crudités for the savoury dips. Carrie herself is peeling fresh prawns and impaling them in toothpicks, separated by cubes of ripe pimiento, like miniature sish kebabs. In the large square hall, with its floor of black and white flags, a table has been placed to serve as a bar, with bottles of red and white wine arranged in two symmetrical phalanges, separated by a large tray of gleaming wine glasses. Shortly after Ralph has left the kitchen the two women hear the regular pop1 pop! of corks being pulled with the aid of the screwpull . More distantly the strains of cool instrumental jazz percolate from the hi-fi in the drawing room, where Emily is placing little bowls of nuts and pretzels in strategic places. The Messengers are experienced party-givers and everyone knows their function and how to perform it. The front doorbell rings.
‘The first guest’, says Helen, superfluously.
From the book ?thinks? by David Lodge

Monday 17th of March. Another weekend has passed in thrall to the Messengers.
It had been agreed that I would stay the night after the party on Saturday, so that I could drink without worrying about driving myself home. I felt a little self-conscious, standing beside Ralph and Carrie in the hall and saying goodbye to the last departing guests, as if I were part of the family – but that is what In seem to have become.
‘Adopted’, was Jasper Richmond’s word. It was somewhat disturbed by its remarks, but he’s a rather malicious gossip, and probably everything he says should be taken with a pinch of salt. If Carrie is being nice to me just to keep tans on Ralph, it seems a risk strategy. He’s already managed to kiss me once, and would have done again on Saturday night if I’d let him.
After the final stragglers had gone. I helped collect the soiled plates and glasses from various rooms on the ground floor, and to stack them in the kitchen ready for the domestic help, who was coming in next morning specially to attend to them. Carrie made us a delicious nightcap, and we sat round the kitchen table sipping this concoction and discussing the higklights of the party before we retired to bed.

From the book ?Thinks’, by David Lodge

I went to the Messenger’s cottage yesterday for lunch, as arranged, It’s situated in the middle of pretty picture-postcard Cotswold country- pretty even this time of the year, when there isn’t a leaf to be seen on the deciduous trees. The road wound and undulated between dewy meadows and green humpbacked hills dotted with sheep, through villages embalmed in a Sunday morning hush, past ancient churches and neat farmhouses and snug thatched cottages. ‘Horseshoes’ has a thatched roof, but it’s more of a house than a cottage – double fronted, built of mellow Cotswold stone, its walls covered with wisteria which one can imagine dripping with mauve blossom in May. It has low, raftered ceilings, and a bumpy flagged floor covered with rugs, and a huge open fireplace in the living-room. Needless to say it’s provided with central heating and other mod cons, all tastefully integrated into the eighteenth century fabric.
Here the Messengers’ family simulates the life of English country folk for one or two days a week: Carrie bottles fruit and make preserves on the oil-fired Aga. Emily rides the pony she keeps at a local stable, and Ralph chops wood for the open fire or takes the younger children out for rambles and bike-rides. At the back of the house, however, a more exotic and sybaritic note is struck: a balcony, or ‘deck’ as they call it, has been constructed on two levels, with a redwood hot tub on the lower level. The effect is rather bizarre as you pass from the English eighteenth century of the house to twenty-century California in the back garden, like walking through different film sets in a studio.
After lunch ( a superb leg of local lamb, roasted to perfection, with slivers of garlic and sprigs of rosemary delicately inserted into its layer of fat) we went for a walk around a circuit of lanes and footpaths in the neighbourhood.
My ‘ lunch’ invitation stretched inordinately, and in the end we left the house together at about seven o’clock. Suddenly the pace of life speeded up. Everybody bustled about, supervised by Carrie, picking up things and putting them away, resetting thermostats and turning light off, drawing curtains, and fastening shutters, making the house secure for another week. It was as if the curtain has come down on some dreamy pastoral idyll and the company was suddenly galvanized into actions shedding their costumes and packing up their props before moving on to the next venue. We parted in the lane outside the house as we got into our respective cars. I said goodbye and thanked them sincerely.
Form the book ‘Thinks’ by David Lodge

The conversation is taking place in the hot tub in the back garden of the Messengers’ country cottage. The ground slopes quite steeply away from the rear of the house, and a timber balcony has been constructed with steps that lead down to the garden. Halfway down there is a kind of mezzanine deck in which a redwood tub, some seven feet in diameter and five feet deep, has been fitted flush with the surface. A bench runs round the inner circumference, on which Helen and the Messenger family are companionably seated, hip to hip. The hot water bubbles up between their legs and sends wraiths of steam into the cold air. It is late afternoon, or early evening, and already dark. The only illumination comes from the blue light fitted inside the tub below the waterline, and the lanterns with thick amber glass cowls fixed at intervals on the staircase and along the decks.
Carrie clambers out of the tub, steadying herself with a hand on Ralph’ shoulder. The water streams from her tight, dark swimming costume and pallid heavy limbs. She wraps herself in a towelling robe and thrusts her feet into a pair or rope-soiled mules. ‘Time you kids got out too,’ she says.
Form the book ‘Thinks’ by David Lodge

One redeeming feature of the expedition was that I saw Gloucester Cathedral for the first time. It’s not huge, but beautifully proportionated, built of mellow Cotswold stone, with a remarkable square Perpendicular tower that has delicate fretted stonework running round the top like a balustrade. The cloisters are exquisite – among the finest in the country my Visitor’s Guide claimed, and with justification, I should say. Edward II is buried here. All I know about him is from Marlowe’s play, which may not be reliable, but makes him seem like a real person who once lived and breathed, not just a name in a history book. It seemed extraordinary to stand beside the remains of somebody who lived seven hundred years ago, and know who he was. If Ralph Messenger is right, the atoms of his dust are indestructible. But it is my mind that preserves his identity, and makes a connection between us.
As I trod the worn paving of the ancient aisles, pausing at intervals to admire fine brasses and carved statuary, another literary association came to mind. In the Golden Bowl Charlotte and the Prince begin their adulterous affair at Gloucester, delaying their return to London from a houseparty on the pretext of viewing the cathedral- and there’s a reference to the tomb of Edward II, I’m sure. Did they really visit,it, to give circumstantial plausibility to their story when they returned to their respective spouses, or did they spend every stolen moment in their room at in the inn selected by the resourceful Charlotte? I don’t have the novel to hand to check . James probably doesn’t say, anyway.
I had lunch afterwards at the Cosy Pew Café, just round the corner from the Cathedral, poring over every word in the guide because I had brought nothing else with me to read. I wondered despondently if this was the spinsterish future that awaits me: collecting cathedrals and reading at the table in twee restaurants.

I’d been In Cheltenham only once before, a few years ago, to do a reading at the Literary Festival, and was hardly there long enough to acquire much sense of the place. This morning I drove helplessly round the one-way streets for some time until I spotted the neoclassical hulk of the Town Hall where they hold the Festival events ( a building of dingy brownish stone, with a pompous oversized portico, that looks clumsy against the surrounding Regency terraces of white stucco) and then I knew where I was. I left the car in the first car park I came to, and made for the town centre. It was a cold day, but dry and sunny, and I spent an enjoyable hour hour or so strolling along the Promenade, browsing in Waterstone’s buying a blouse in Laura Ashley and a pair of trousers in Country Casuals, having a light lunch in a café served by waitresses in old-fashioned uniforms with white aprons. I briefly explored a long , two-storied shopping mall discretely hidden in a parallel street, but quickly retreated from its airless atmosphere and tinkling muzak. I followed a sign to the Art Gallery and Museum, which specializes in the history of domestic art and design – appropriately enough because everywhere you go in Cheltenham you see restoration and refurbishment of the old houses and terraces going on, inside and out, a kind of collective cult of the House Beautiful.
From the book “Thinks” by David Lodge