Category Archives: environment

August 25, 2012 · 1:09 am

Happiness is Our Birthright

I was sitting in my favourite coffee place perversely enjoying a cup of hot chocolate when a young man walked in, carrying his year old baby girl.

As he waited in the queue I saw him drop a kiss on the baby’s head, and I thought to myself, she’s going to be alright. I’d just finished writing a story for a parenting magazine, about bringing up emotionally stable children. I’d turned it round to write a headline, happy children become stable and intelligent people.

Because it’s easy for parents to think they have to be perfect, I made the point that it’s loving parents who take the time to listen and to remember the golden rule about doing to others as you wish to be done to you, who make the difference…

We all want to be comforted when we’re miserable, to be heard when we say something, to enjoy the company of those we love, to have enough to eat and drink and get enough sleep – which is exactly what babies need – they are people too!

But the really important thing for people to know is that cuddling is the answer to all the ills of mankind! Modern research has shown that when babies are happy, talked, too, sung too, cuddled, included, have lots of eye contact, what are known in neuropsychology as the “ the hormones of loving connection” nourish the brain and stimulate the growth of connections in the regions of the brain concerned with regulating emotions. The simple things that loving parents do with their babies, help them to become a considerate, loving and confident people from the very beginning.

This nourishment for the emotional centres of the growing brains makes children feel secure and happy, and means they tend to be more independent, confident, more resilient, empathetic and caring. Children who are comforted when they’re upset, grow up knowing that nothing is really a disaster, so they are the ones who don’t panic or go into despair when things go wrong. Because they learned when they were little that everything passes, they can cope. Adults who didn’t get this sort of  supportive parenting tend to re-act to stress with in-appropriate behaviours like flying off the handle, losing their temper, blaming other people, or going into despair and depression -because they grew up with a lot of fear and no faith that life would support them.

This is other side of the coin – the research which has shown what most mothers instinctively know, that it’s bad for babies to be left to cry. Imagine being tiny and helpless, unable to move or speak, with crying our only way to get attention when we’re hungry, frightened, lonely or whatever, and we can begin to imagine the panic and powerlessness of a baby left to cry. And if we knew that the person we relied on was there, but ignoring us, we’d feel even more abandoned and hopeless. We’d learn that we can’t trust the people we love and need.

Researchers now know that when a baby is left to cry, cortisol levels rise in the brain. If the baby is lovingly comforted after a stressful incident, the body absorbs the excess cortisol. But if the stress happens regularly the cortisol levels remain high and become toxic to the brain cells. Cortisol can cause damage to the emotional centres of the brain, and if this happens regularly children grow up prone to anxiety, anger and depression. The old advice to leave a baby to cry has meant many insecure and sad children.

Psychologists now feel that this deprivation of loving attention, comfort and understanding of a baby is responsible for many problems in older children – problems ranging from ADHD, depression, panic attacks, phobias, eating disorders, anxiety and substance abuse. So children and young adults with these problems are not innately troublesome or born with a pre-disposition to these problems. They simply didn’t get enough emotional food for the brain- those hormones of loving connection.

All of which means: cuddling is good for babes, crying is bad for them – and the same applies to us all. If you’ve ever cried yourself to sleep from misery, and felt that awful depression when you wake up un-refreshed, you’ll know how it is for far too many babies – simply because their mothers don’t know.

If we saw a ten year old sitting and crying while we were chatting and having coffee, we’d ask her what the matter was. But if it’s a baby crying, too often we simply ignore him. So I make it my life’s work to admire people’s babies in the supermarket or elsewhere, and then say, you know the more you cuddle him, the happier and the cleverer he’ll be, and if they’re interested, explain. Often young mothers react with huge relief, as though they’ve been given permission to cuddle as much as they want. (They may also say what a boring old bat, when I’ve gone!)

Maybe we could change the world if we all cuddled our babies, and rushed to comfort a crying one. No more sad and miserable children getting punished for behaviour they don’t understand and then growing into depressed or angry adults, taking it out on the world which felt so harsh to them when they were babies. And we could probably all do with lots more hormones of loving connection ourselves, too.

And then maybe when we all have enough of them, Love will at last prevail.

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Out for lunch today, so we just needed a light supper. Leeks are still cheap and plentiful, so leeks it was tonight. Take enough leeks for two – they vary in size so much, that it’s easier to estimate your own. Butter an ovenproof dish, split the leeks lengthways and lay them in the dish. Stir 300 grammes of freshly grated Parmesan cheese into 400 mls of thick cream. Pour this over the leeks and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake for twenty minutes until the leeks are cooked and the cream is bubbling.

Meanwhile hard- boil an egg per person and chop them up. Scatter the eggs over the leeks, and cover with more grated parmesan. Put the dish back in the oven for about five  minutes until the cheese has melted, and then give it a quick grill to brown the top.

Serve with crusty bread and some salad.

 

Food for Thought

I am as young as the most beautiful wish in my heart, and as old as the unfulfilled longings in my life.                   Saying of the pygmy Kalahari Desert Bushmen

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August 16, 2012 · 3:13 am

I’m Crazy for Power

Yesterday afternoon I was thrown out of the cinema. Friend and I had gone to see our favourite film before it went off. Quarter of an hour into the familiar dialogue, chuckling at the jokes we’d laughed at before, the film disappeared and a weak little light appeared at the top of the stairs. We waited for them to fix the tape, but instead a girl appeared and said it was a power cut. Great gnashing of teeth. I was thankful for the feeble light by the stairs, imagining what it would have been like to have been plunged into total darkness, and a stampede for the only exit at the bottom of the stairs.

Sitting around outside, they finally told us to go home. Couldn’t give us a refund, because the till wouldn’t open without electricity. So they gave us another ticket.

Before going home, I said I’d just get some tomatoes for my husband’s supper – cold – since I was going to Tai Chi. The grocery was in flat panic. Dark, with no lights, blinds down over the open chilled shelves. I asked to give them some money for the tomatoes, but they had to go to the back and find the key to manually open the till. Then they didn’t know how much they were, because the price would have come up on the till… so off they went to the office to find the list of stock prices, and finally I managed to buy the tomatoes. Thank heavens I didn’t need any petrol. The whole little town was buzzing in despair and panic, no-one could even go to the loo.

Back home, I thought about The Great Storm of four years ago. Most of the country had been blacked out, but power was restored over a few days. In our neck of the woods however, where concrete power poles had been crumbled all over the road  like biscuit crumbs, and a tree had come down over the generator across the road from us, we were powerless for five days.

A different world opens up. We catch rainwater on the roof, store it in a huge tank, and pump it into the house. But no electricity equals no pump, equals no water. No water for drinking, washing, washing clothes, washing dishes, flushing the loo. No power meant no cooking, no lighting, and no TV or stereo. Luckily we could open our garage manually, but some friends had no other way of getting into their garages, and were marooned with their car behind the immoveable garage door.

So I boiled water on a camp fire and on the wood burning heater, fried eggs and bacon, and boiled soup. Didn’t dare open the deep freeze for fear of losing the still frozen contents, and resented opening the fridge for butter, milk and the like. The village store was in darkness, their fridges going on a generator, the garage was closed. No help at the fish and chip shop. Unwashed dishes piled up. Unwashed clothes accumulated. We had to get used to unwashed bodies. Some people cooked on their barbecues, some people had no form of heating except electricity, and froze.

After a couple of days we began to gingerly adjust. I drove to a nearby town which had the power on, and bought water and lots of extra pairs of underpants and panties. My husband thought of using buckets of water from the swimming pool next door – my daughter’s holiday home – to flush the loo. I never got used to not having my electric blanket, but at least we had a hot water bottle. Candles made the house look and feel beautiful, but the light wasn’t good enough to read by at night. Some neighbours used miners’ lamps, clipping them round their heads to go to bed and read. It worked apart from the large circle in the middle of their foreheads from the pressure.

I read today that the Blessed Bill Gates has offered a prize for a loo that works without water, electricity or a septic tank – all components of our system here – a loo that costs only five cents a day to run, preferably captures energy, and discharges no pollutants. A number of brilliant solutions have been invented. And the idea is to provide safe sanitation for the 2.5 billion people around the world who don’t have it.

I think we should all be able to buy these loos. Our over-crowded world desperately needs sustainable solutions like these for everything. We need alternatives to electricity, oil and coal … we need a dozen more Bill Gates’s to find solutions that involve the sun’s sustainable energy, the wind, the waves. For a few days, we in our village experienced a few temporary discomforts when power was unavailable, but were able to get outside help from places that did have power.

But there will surely come a time when there won’t be enough of anything. The world’s population is estimated to grow to between nine and ten billion within forty years – the lifetime of our grand-children. Two hundred years ago the population of England and Wales was eight million, compared with 56 million now, and it’s the same sort of increase  all over the world. So we urgently need more solutions like Bill Gates’s loos.

This is not cause for despair, for all is not lost. Mankind is brilliant at creating marvellous inventions, and resolving problems when it wants to. I’m reading a book called ‘The Great Disruption’ by Paul Gilding about how you and I can do something to help resolve these problems. Watch this space – I’ll let you know!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Having had lunch with a friend in her bay window overlooking a long, white, empty beach nearby, and then afternoon tea with a couple of friends to swap books, I hadn’t really thought about what to feed us in the evening. Something quick was wanted, so I fell back on my old standby, my un-orthodox version of kedgeree, made with a tin of salmon – cheap too.

A cup of long grain rice on the boil, two eggs on the boil, half a cup each of sultanas and frozen peas soaking in boiling water, and I was ready to begin. After gently frying a chopped onion in oil until soft, I added a couple of cloves of garlic and a chopped up knob of fresh ginger (you can always use powdered, but fresh is nicer).

When the garlic is soft, sprinkle a teaspoon of powdered cumin, turmeric and a bit less of coriander into the pan, and let them cook gently. I sometimes also use some made up curry powder as well, and vary the amounts of the spices depending on how hot I want it. Better to start with less, and increase it, than find it’s burning the roof off your mouth (I have been known to add some brown sugar to take the edge off a too hot curry).

Now open the tin of salmon and drain, and add it to the mix in the frying pan. Drain the peas and sultanas and stir them in. Add a knob of butter if it needs lubricating. Drain the rice, and add this, gently stirring with lots of chopped parsley. I always find that adding another generous knob of butter improves the taste. Pile onto the plates and chop a hardboiled egg over each helping. Usual caveat – serves two greedy people generously, and three to four well-behaved people – add an egg for each person.

Food for Thought

Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth.

Lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust.

Lead me from hate to love, from war to peace.

Let peace fill our hearts, our world, our universe.

No, not the prayer of St Francis of Assisi, but a translation from the Upanishads by Satish Kumar  Born 1937.  Jain monk, nuclear disarmament campaigner, founder of Schumacher College, in Devon, England which teaches green values and sustainability, and present editor of Resurgence magazine

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August 13, 2012 · 10:33 pm

Culture, History, Glamour and Beauty

There’s a mysterious magic in some names and places, names like The Akhond of Swat, places like The Forbidden City, Venice, Timbuctoo or Mandalay. Sadly as the world has shrunk, and tourism has tainted so many remote places, some of the magic has melted away. It’s as though the less we know, the more romantic a place is.

Aleppo is one of those romantic places, but we’ve always known plenty about it, and it’s still a magic place. It’s so old that people were living there over seven thousand years ago. It’s seen every conqueror in history, from Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Mongols, Mamluks and Ottomans, and now the Assads. It’s architecture is older than the Greeks, legend has it that Abraham lived nearby with his flocks, Alexander was here in AD 333, and Saladin made it here too, among many others.

Since the sixteen century many Europeans lived here too, as Aleppo was the first city to have its own consuls, the first being the Venetian consul who built his house here in 1599. The same family have occupied it for centuries, like many other Europeans who came from places like Italy and Austria and stayed, building handsome homes, collecting exquisite works of art and historic libraries. The famous Baron’s Hotel which rivalled all the great hotels of the world hosted royalties from all over the world – mostly Europe! – travellers like Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor, statesmen like Theodore Roosevelt and Earl Mountbatten, the rich and famous like the Rockefellers and Charles Lindbergh, Agatha Christie and many more. The great Citadel has stood defiant for centuries, the Souk is the longest in the world at nearly 13 kilometers, while all around are ancient ruins, Roman and Greek, Crusader, and Assyrian.

And now – like Babylon, where US troops dug tank trenches, and wiped out ancient Sumerian cities; like Kabul, where the museum with relics from Alexander’s visit was obliterated by Russian and Taliban fighters; like the Bamiyan Buddhas, bombed by the Taliban; like Bayreuth, once called the most beautiful city in the world, destroyed in civil war  – this treasure, which is not just part of the heritage of the Middle East, but is the heritage of humanity, is also being destroyed. Both people and history are being shown no mercy.

The famous Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers has been shelled by the troops of Assad, an Assyrian temple has been destroyed, and battles have been fought among the famed “dead cities,” the Graeco-Roman cities long abandoned, but preserved in the dry heat of the desert.  When the rebels take refuge behind the thick walls of ancient castles, Syrian troops haven’t hesitated to destroy these historic monuments in order to kill their countrymen hiding behind them.

Queen Zenobia’s legendary city of Palmyra is surrounded by Syrian troops, camped in the castle above the city, and there’s a tank park in the Valley of Tombs. It’s even rumoured that trenches have been dug in the Roman city. All these places, like the places devastated in Iraq, have nurtured many cultures for millenniums, from Sumerian and Byzantine to Christian and Moslem. And desperate men are destroying this heritage. Places of beauty, symbolism and significance for mankind are once again being devastated, as was much of Europe in World War Two, and the previously untouched historic cities like Sarajevo and Dubrovnik in later conflicts.

Africa is also our heritage, the cradle of the human race, that mysterious continent which hosts so many magnificent creatures seen nowhere else on the planet. And the native people who live there today are part of the delicate balance between man and nature, that unlike westerners, they have managed to preserve where they are left in peace. But here too, the ancient, misty culture of mankind, and the existence of the unique creatures who share this world with us, is threatened. Not by war here, but by heartless pleasure seeking. The Masai who inhabit the Serengeti in Tanzania, are facing eviction so that rich oil millionaires, kings and princes from the Gulf can hunt and shoot the wild life there.

The Arctic and Antarctic are also the common heritage of us all. And they too are being despoiled by the oil rush, by tourism, by global warming and power struggles. Our planet is so small now that we are all affected by whatever happens. Recently on TV, Professor Brian Cox, the famous physicist, picked up a huge diamond, and told his astonished audience that we are all so connected that when he rubs the diamond, it affects the stars in space.  So we are certainly all affected by all these events happening in our small world. We Are all one, as the mystics have always asserted.

What can we do to make a difference? Thanks to souldipper.wordpress.com pointing me to Scilla Elworthy’s video on TED, I know that there are many people working to end conflict in all its forms. And the best way? Start with ourselves… which means that though we may hate what’s happening, we can’t hate the people involved – because they all think they’re doing the right thing just like you and me!

And you can help the Masai by Googling Avaaz.org Stop the Serengeti Sell-off.

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

An inpromptu little gathering for drinks with a few friends meant rustling up something to soak up the wine, so they would n’t, in the words of a funny article I read, have to drive drunkenly home through country lanes. A dish of olives, and some chicken pate and crackers were the usual nibbles, but I decided instead of doing something with salmon that I’d make a sardine pate. Quick and easy. Two tins of sardines, four tablespoons of cream cheese, some squeezed lemon, salt and pepper, and lots of finely chopped parsley. No need to bother with a mixer – which I don’t have – it mashes into a lovely smooth spread/dip- call it what you will. With thin slices of artisan olive bread left over from lunch, it was a hit, and cheap withal.

 

Food for Thought

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is only of interest to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.             E.F. Schumacher. 1911 – 1977  Economist and writer of ‘Small is Beautiful ‘.

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August 5, 2012 · 1:47 am

Atomic Terror Started in a Tent

On July 16 in 1945,  the first atomic bomb was detonated near Alamogordo, and a few weeks later was dropped on Japan on August 6 

 The bomb that blasted

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

And scarred the whole world

Exploded unbeknown to me

 

No adult thought to tell a child

That we could all now

Be destroyed

In the twinkling of an eye

No-one mentioned

That man had become

The shatterer of worlds.

 

The savants of the western world

Toiled in the dusty desert

To create fission

They even feared

Would conflagrate our world.

 

Playing at being gods

Not in white coats and sterile labs

But in dust and heat

Stripped to the waist

In a home-made tent

Rigged up at the foot of a puerile tower

Invented to try to reduce

Unknown quantities of fall-out

In the first attempt

To detonate an atom bomb.

 

The core was carried in a valise

In the back seat of a car

And driven over a bumpy road

To where eight scientists

Waited at base camp

To assemble the plutonium pieces

In silence with their own lives in the balance

Eight men worked in deepest concentration.

 

The murderous device now ready

It was carried on a stretcher

To the car

And continued its journey

To the tent in the desert

Beneath the searing sun

Where the final team of scientists

Waited in the dim cool shelter.

 

The core was hoisted manually

Before being lowered into the waiting bomb

The only sound

The ticking Geiger counters

Occasionally an instruction

And then the monster

Was winched by hand

To the top of the shoddy tower

And a pile of mattresses

Twenty feet high

Placed beneath

In case it fell!

 

A hundred feet above the desert

In a strong wind

The brutish metal sphere

Covered with leads

Connecting sixty-four detonators

Swung in the rain and thunder

Waiting for zero hour.

 

And when it came

In the blackness of night

The darkness turned to light

A blazing sun glared on the horizon

Lighting up the desert

And a slow roar of sound

Rolled across the land.

 

As the fireball

Raced into the sky

They watched from a bunker

And some wept

Some laughed

Some were silent

One had goose pimples

As the world changed forever.

 

In this cumbersome

And homely way

Using mattresses and suitcases

The sweat of their brows

A temporary tent and teamwork

The greatest terror

The world had known

Came into being.

 

And this gives me heart.

Mere men, in their own

Unskilled and make-shift way

Can re-create with gentleness and patience

The new world

That we all ache for.

Our puny efforts are worthwhile

For God wastes nothing.

 

More Food for Thought

If it is to be, it is up to me.         Advice for life for his boys, from an anonymous English schoolmaster

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July 18, 2012 · 11:59 pm

Real Things Matter

It has to be real coffee. I can’t bear the taste of instant coffee with that smell of dry cleaning fluid lurking beneath the coffee fragrance.

No tea bags either. I reverted long ago to a tea-pot and a tea caddy. I love the meditative ritual of boiling the kettle, spooning the tea leaves from the caddy, and enjoy using a beautiful circular shaped silver spoon with a little intricately worked handle. I wonder who used it for this purpose in the past. When the tea is made, the pot goes on a tray with a cup and saucer with Redoute roses on it, a matching milk jug and tea plate. There’s also a little cream French provincial jug which holds hot water to make the tea weaker if I want. It’s Twinings’ lapsang souchong, the delicate smoky taste such a habit now that I never drink anything else.

I sometimes think that this will be my greatest deprivation when I’m shunted into an old people’s home – which is why I’ll be drinking a nice pot of hemlock before that happens.It’s the same with the ritual of the breakfast coffee and tray. It gives me such a sense of well being to enjoy these pretty things, instead of keeping them for best, and to eat and drink good, honest, unpolluted foodstuffs. There’s also a feeling of mindfulness as I savour these little things.

There’s no way I’d have mucked- around butter on my table either. We have the real thing, not some mixture with chemicals and oils to pretend to ourselves that it’s better for us than butter. I simply can’t believe that a pure substance like butter could be bad for you when the other is filled with all sorts of food substitutes.

The fact is, I don’t want any substitutes in my life. I want the real thing. I don’t want plastic plant pots in my garden, I want lovely terra cotta pots, the sort you find in Beatrix Potter’s pictures of Peter Rabbit in Mr McGregor’s garden. I don’t want hybrid dwarf ageratum and stunted shasta daisies and miniature dahlias in the garden. I want the old fashioned blue ageratum with long stems to loll for most of the year at the back of the border. I want tall straight Shasta daisies, not mean little blooms cowering among the lavender, and in autumn I want those big shaggy dahlias shaking their blowsy heads at the sun, not struggling to find a space among the marigolds. Same with bouncy blue agapanthus. Who wants miniature agapanthus when the real thing is so gorgeous?

I’ve always hated synthetic fabrics. Give me real wool and cotton, linen and silk any day, whether we’re talking clothes or furnishings. And now they’ve discovered that many of the synthetics we use in curtains and carpets emit fumes which are dangerous to health – so why use them? Same with many building materials in modern homes. Houses of yesteryear, built using natural products were not unhealthy like so many modern homes. And we now also know that many of the synthetic fabrics in homes are easily inflammable and burn fast, unlike wool which takes a long time to catch fire.

Apart from the safety and health aspect, natural fibres and natural building products are beautiful.  Worse, our devotion to synthetics and plastic means that we’re using up oil to create much of the litter that’s strangling our planet. The monstrous islands of rubbish as big as continents in the oceans, are made up of plastic. The plastic breaks down into tiny shards and gets into the fish food chain, and finally into us. Serve us right.

Then there’s plastic bags! When I lived in Hong Kong over forty years ago, plastic hadn’t caught on, so we’d take home our food from the markets wrapped in real leaves and tied with real dried reeds. These small parcels were exquisite little works of art, and every Chinese shopkeeper and hawker could create them and tie them with the same instinctive skill. Even in English villages back when, we used string bags to carry our groceries home, not disposable plastic bags. Disposable of course, is a misnomer. Throwaways, yes, but then it takes aeons for the plastic to decompose.

And yes, in my day, of course we had the real thing – cloth nappies. And though the debate rages about the good and bad effects on the planet of disposables versus cloth nappies, at least you can go on using cloth nappies for years afterwards as dusters, car cleaning cloths, and so on, if you don’t pass them on to someone else.

 Actually, the debate over babies having the real thing is not funny, but is sometimes a matter of life and death in developing countries.The big global conglomerates, many of them American, have run such successful campaigns convincing Third World and Asian mothers that their babies are better off with powdered milk, that in Thailand for example, only five per cent of mothers now breast feed their babies. Babies all over the undeveloped world are being fed milk products which too often are mixed with polluted water, for lack of good hygeine. In China, unscrupulous middle-men added industrial additives to New Zealand milk powder to make it go further, and make bigger profits, with the result that thousands of babies ended up in hospital with serious permanent internal damage, and many died. So having the real thing is actually not a frivolous matter. It can be the difference between life and death. And what can be more real than a mother’s milk?

So having got this off my chest, I’m now going to make Welsh rarebit for our light evening meal. It’ll be brown bread, cooked by the local artisan baker, unprocessed cheddar cheese, real butter, and to my chagrin, the milk will be the processed stuff we all have to consume by law. No-one nowadays knows what fresh untampered -with milk tastes like. In my childhood, the cream used to sit at the top of the bottle of real milk delivered to the doorstep, and in cold weather, the sparrows would peck through the lids to get at the cream. They knew the real thing when they saw it.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Cheese goes further when used as Welsh rarebit, rather than straightforward cheese on toast, and the difference in flavour and texture is rather attractive for a change. So using an ounce of butter and a level tablespoon of flour – somewhere between half to an ounce, melt the butter and stir in the flour until smooth. Add enough milk, or milk and half beer, to make a stiff mixture. Then add a teaspoon of mixed mustard, a few drops of Worcester sauce, salt and pepper, and about six ounces of grated cheese. Stir it altogether and make sure the cheese is amalgamated. Don’t overcook or the cheese will become oily. Spread this mixture on four slices of buttered toast, and grill until golden brown. Serve at once. This amount will satisfy two greedy people, or four well-behaved people.

Food for Thought

Pilgrim,remember                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              For all your pain                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        The Master you seek abroad                                                                                                                                                                                                                You will find at home                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Or seek in vain.                 Anonymous 7th century poet

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July 12, 2012 · 12:08 am

Passion in Provence

Just back from seeing The Well-Digger’s Daughter for the second time, but not for the last time!

I see it’s called an art house film… so a film that has no violence or sex pictured in it, seems to be an art house film apparently. Good for art. So I didn’t feel like a voyeur having to watch heaving bottoms, and listen to other people’s orgasms, and I didn’t have to feel like an accomplice watching fighting, stabbings, shooting, and mayhem.

Instead I watched a story of life and death, love and birth, human pain and human greatness. It was set in the magic countryside of Provence, harsh, rocky, grey mountain ridges giving way to long stretches of olive groves, long avenues of ancient poplars, clear pebbly streams with dappled water beneath the branching pale green trees, and empty, dusty white roads. The well-digger’s farm house was the dream of most westerners, a weathered stone house with faded green shutters at each window, stone sinks and arched door-ways inside, pottery jugs and big old- fashioned soup plates for the cassoulet for dinner. Old barns, a stone parapeted well, and views over empty country-side completed the dream. Long shadows lay across green meadows, and grasses swayed in the evening breezes.

 It was that time before telephones, so children ran errands, and felt useful, people wrote letters which were kept and treasured, instead of e-mails quickly deleted, everyone walked miles for lack of public transport and was fit and healthy, while children got enough sleep every night without TV or computer games to keep them awake. It was that time before sprays and pesticides, wind farms and traffic fumes, tourists and agribusiness had changed the old ways, the old beauties, the centuries-old peace.

The music – some of it from old twenties and thirties recordings – pulled at the heart strings the way those wistful plangent sounds of old records always do. And the clothes! – old fashioned thirties summer dresses, elegant coats and hats and shoes. A green crocodile pochette that matched a shapely green coat… a clotted cream coloured cardigan edged with wine dark ribbon, matching the thin maroon stripe in the girl’s cream dress… the scalloped collar on a simple black dress, embroidered round the edge of the scallops in dull red and green.

But these were the delicious details. The people were the story -the well digger- implacable and generous, warm hearted and narrow minded, honest and angry all at the same time; the other father, weary, hen-pecked, dignified and distant; the possessive, petulant mother; the spoiled only son; the well-digger’s troubled, tragic daughter. The emotions of love and lust, anger and unrequited devotion, shame and guilt, grief and joy, swirled round these people as the Second World War broke out. And the birth of an unwanted baby brought together all these warring people and humbled their pride, softened their grief, opened their hearts, melted their anger, dissolved their arrogance and dispelled their petulance. 

There were some lovely lines. The rejected lover, prepared to marry the girl he loved, who was carrying another man’s child, is told by her angry, bitter father: “Felipe, you have no honour”, to which Felipe replies, “I have no honour, but I have plenty of love”. (How much pain and grief men’s honour has brought to women, and still does, as we read of so-called honour killings, and women strangled, stoned and even shot by machine gun, so as not to diminish this strange concept of murderous egotism, false pride, and cruelty wrongly named honour.)

When the possessive grandfather tries to claim authority over the baby, his new son-in law says, “He doesn’t belong to you. You belong to him.” And the other grandfather replies, “That’s right, the old can only serve the young”, like all grandparents, putty in the hands of his grandchild.

No doubt everyone who sees this film will understand it differently, depending on their age. But as a grandparent, it reminded me of the days when my grandchildren were small, and I discovered for the first time the bliss of giving unconditional love. The sort of love which accepts the loved one as a perfect and beautiful soul, knowing that all the foibles and  problems that parents see, don’t really exist; the sort of love that  knows with perfect certainty that their grand-children will grow up to be strong and good even if they don’t eat all their vegetables!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Padding is what families need in cold weather, and these two puddings fill the bill. They are hot plain puddings, but also delicious, and old-fashioned puddings are becoming fashionable again. They both need sultanas, washed and then soaked in boiling water to plump them up and make them juicy.

The first, batter pudding, needs the same ingredients as Yorkshire pudding, eight ounces of self raising flour, two eggs, and enough milk and a little water to mix to a pouring batter, plus a pinch of salt. Beat the eggs into the flour and salt, and add the liquid gradually. Leave in the fridge for half an hour. Heat a baking pan with a knob of fat until smoking, and pour in the batter, which you’ve just beaten again. Add the drained sultanas, and bake in a hot oven for an hour, or until risen and cooked. Serve immediately with knobs of butter and brown sugar sprinkled over. A hot and homely pudding.

Bread and butter pudding is the same. You need six slices of good bread – not white supermarket pap. Slice them, butter them and cut them into squares or triangles. Arrange them in a two pint pie dish. Sprinkle over the drained sultanas, and then beat three eggs with three to four ounces of sugar. Add the milk, and pour it over the bread. The pie dish should only be half full. Leave to soak for at least half an hour, before baking in a moderate oven (about 350degrees) for about an hour, or until the custard is set. Eat hot.

Food for Thought

Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity we shall harness the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, 1881 – 1955.  Jesuit, philosopher, eminent palaeontologist and mystic, who was banned from teaching, preaching and writing by the Catholic church, his books denied publication, and his most important book, ‘The Phenomenon of Man’ only published after his death. He is still persona non grata with the church fifty three years after his death.

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July 6, 2012 · 1:03 am

The Love of A Lion

If I ever need a lift to the spirit, I check out Christian the Lion on Youtube.

His true story is all there on film, a story that many people reading this may already know. It was back in the sixties, when Christian was bought from Harrods by a couple of young Aussies enjoying the swinging London scene. Those were the days when the late John Aspinall walked around town with a tiger on a lead, and girls had snakes coiled rounds their necks instead of scarves. Nowadays I think people realise how unfair this is to animals, and it probably wouldn’t go unchecked.

However, the owners of Christian did their best for the beautiful lion cub, giving him lots of exercise in a walled churchyard in Chelsea, courtesy of a friendly Vicar,  giving him the run of their home and their furniture warehouse, feeding him with all the food and vitamins a lion cub could want! He played ball, turned out chest of drawers, and generally behaved like a kitten, an ingenuous, irresistible, cuddly kitten. He went out to dinner in Chelsea restaurants with them, and travelled in the back seat of their open sports car looking at the people passing on the pavements.

As he grew older his owners realised that life for a full-grown lion on the streets of Chelsea was not going to work. So they explored places they could take him to where he’d be happy. They couldn’t find anywhere in England. Anyone who loves animals wouldn’t want a beloved pet to end up in a zoo.

In one of those blessed synchronicities, a chap wanted a desk and went to buy one at the furniture warehouse, where he was ambushed by a playful lion cub springing out from behind a chest! The chap was Bill Travers, who with his wife Virginia McKenna was devoted to lions, and had run a charity for them ever since they’d made the film’ Born Free’ about Elsa the Lioness.  

He understood Christian’s dilemma, and contacted George Adamson at his Kora Lion Reserve in Kenya, to ask if they could bring Christian to his place, and set him free. Not an easy goal, to acclimatise a domestic pet to the wild, but finally Adamson agreed.  There are wonderful photos of Christian going off in a Bedford van to stay in the country with the Travers and McKenna, and learning to be an animal outside instead of living in a flat. The young men who loved and owned him, built him an enclosure and a hut, and spent hours sitting with him every day. They left a note on the door of their London flat: “Christian is on holiday in the country”.

To watch the film of each one entering Christian’s enclosure and to see the young lion leaping up into their arms, putting his arms round their necks, is to see absolute love. Finally, in a special cage, Christian flew to Africa, accompanied by his doting owners. They were met by Adamson, who was astounded that Christian sat quietly in the back seat of the land-rover, and got out at regular intervals to relieve himself, and then obediently climbed back in.

The frightening scenes of Christian getting to know other lions, and learning to submit to the king of the jungle were harrowing for his owners and we who watch. Eventually, it was felt he was ready to start his new life, and the chaps went back to London.

A year later, they flew back to visit him, hoping they’d be able to find him. The film of Christian, now a large full grown lion, pacing slowly down the hill, then seeing his old friends,  quickening his pace, and then running full pelt, making  lion weeping sounds is heart-stopping. Then he reaches them and springs at the first man, and puts his huge legs and paws around his neck, and hugs him passionately. He does the same to his other owner, and keeps going back and forth between them, beside himself with joy. He is now so big and heavy that they can hardly stay on their feet, and stagger back. It makes me cry each time I watch it. Then we see on the film, a lioness gently sniffing the two men – Christian’s wife, a completely wild lioness, who seeing her mate connecting with these men, does the same herself.

They go back again a few years later, and this time Christian is a magnificent huge maned lion king, who greets them with great dignity and leads them to his cave up in the hills, and the men sit there all day communing with Christian and his lioness wife and his cubs.

They never saw him again. As people encroached on the land, Christian took his family far away from the presence of men. He was now completely wild, his early beginnings in a miserable zoo, and his cage in Harrods not even a memory. But he took with him into the wild a huge capacity to love, which could be seen in his nuzzling of his wife and cubs. Is this the legacy he has handed down to his progeny?

No-one had ever seen such a huge lion before – testament to the fine food and good diet his owners had given him as a cub. And no-one has ever seen such love between a lion and a man before. The tragedy of it all is that if one lion can develop that capacity to love, so can all lions, and probably all creatures. Worse still, in South Africa they are now breeding lions in enclosures, where people can shoot them for fun through the wire, and they are also being sold for medicines to Asian countries. Along with many others, I hope, I’ve just signed a petition to try to stop this cruelty.

And the hope of the story of Christian is that he shows us that the capacity to love, to be faithful, to feel all the emotions that we claim for human beings, is also inbuilt in all living creatures.  We see it in the videos of dogs rescuing other dogs, of the stories of animals rescuing and protecting human beings, even of a rat leading another blind rat with a straw in each of their mouths. Scientists have just discovered the God/Higgs Particle, but I wonder if we will all discover that love matters as much or more than the Higgs Particle. Apparently after this scientific break-through we now Know more about the universe, but does this make us Feel more loving towards our own planet and all beings on it?

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

This is dinner party fodder, for when you need a fancy pudding in a hurry. Lemon cream is the answer. All you need is the same amount of plain yogurt as of thick cream, and the same amount of lemon curd, or lemon butter as it’s sometimes called. Whip the cream until stiff, stir in the yogurt and then the lemon curd, and pour into small glass or parfait dishes. It’s particularly good with some grated orange peel sprinkled on the top. Chill in the fridge, and serve with a shortbread or other crisp biscuit. Looks are everything, so I usually put a tiny hearts-ease or daisy blossom in the middle of each dish.

Food for Thought                                     When we do dote upon the perfections and beauties of some one creature, we do not love that too much, but other things too little. Never was anything in this world loved too much, but many things have been loved in a false way; and all in too short a measure.                                                                                                                                                                                                                Thomas Traherne,  17th century poet and mystic who died at 38. The son of a shoemaker, he went to a Cathedral school and Oxford, and became an Anglican divine.

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June 23, 2012 · 8:57 am

Guerrilla Gardeners

Sitting by the fire on a winter’s afternoon, drinking a nice cup of Twining’s lapsang souchong, I gaze through the window-pane at the fence beyond.

On it I have nailed a persimmon and an apple. A tui, its deep turquoise plumage framed by the flaming orange fruit, is plunging his long beak into the persimmon with jerky relish. When he flies away, a blackbird drops in, his sooty black feathers and orange beak also beautiful against the bright colour of the persimmon.

Beyond the fence is a designated road. This means that about a hundred and fifty years ago, this village was surveyed, and that bit of land was set aside for a road. But since the surveyors were reputed to have been working from England, they designed the road to plunge straight over the cliff and into the sea. So it’s only a paper road. Since I’ve been here, I’ve spent a fortune paying the local handyman to spray the purple morning glory growing there which threatened to engulf house, strangle the trees and smother the garden when we first arrived. The sprawling purple flowers have now been eradicated , and instead, orange nasturtiums have colonised the space, along with arum lilies and cannas, and swan plants, to feed the monarch butterflies.

I’ve planted New Zealand flax bushes, for the tuis to suck the honey from their red flowers in summer, and best of all I’ve planted an oak tree. One of my grandsons and I grew it from an acorn in another of my gardens. As the years passed, and we moved from house to house, the pot with the oak went with us. Here, there seemed room to plant this spreading tree without fear of blocking anyone else’s sun. So now, screening the view of a neighbour’s house, and all the trampers walking past on the coast to coast track, our acorn has grown to be about twenty feet tall, and is spreading its branches wide in the boundless space of the paper road.

This makes me, I discover, a guerrilla gardener. Not an urban guerrilla gardener, but a rustic guerrilla gardener. I’ve also taken over the grass berm in front of the house, planted it with curving beds of blue agapanthus and ageratum, pink daisies and lambs lugs, and in spring, sprinkle wild flower seeds which bloom all summer long.

I was thrilled to discover that urban guerrilla gardeners are taking over cities all over the world. In Auckland, they plant lost plots on busy roads and forgotten council sites, and produce vegetables as well as flowers. A group of women in one suburb have approached the residents of streets with wide grass berms, and got their permission to plant fruit trees. The idea of fruit trees laden with seasonal apples and plums and peaches lining suburban streets is delicious – shades of Johnny Appleseed…

I’d always thought he walked the roads tossing apple- seeds along the way, but apparently not, he created orchards on plots of land he bought. From my experience of trying to plant trees along the wayside, he was wise. Mine got broken, nibbled by hungry goats and trampled won when cows were put to graze the long acre – country parlance for the grass banks along country roads.

One of the most inspiring things I’ve read recently, is that now big business has taken over the country-side, and planted hundreds of acres of one crop, whether in the States, England or elsewhere, thus destroying plant and wild life with this mono-culture, gardeners seem to be saving the planet. It’s been discovered that in gardens there are dozens of forgotten species of plants, birds and wild-life, and the more we garden, the more we are doing to save all this diversity, even in cities. We have bee hives now in the centre of Auckland city on the roof of City hall.

So bees are dodging busy traffic and winging their way to the gardens and parks around the inner city, visiting the potted plants of roof gardens and tiny city balconies. The other side of this is that people are concreting over their front gardens for parking and putting in paving and hard surfaces in the back, while developers are buying up land where gardens once were. So we gardeners, urban, country, or guerrilla are vital for all the birds and plants and tiny creatures who’ve been driven from their habitats in the country.

 The world needs our untidy garden corners where leaves and weeds and rubbish quietly rot for hedgehogs and other animals. They need a bit of untidiness, and forgotten corners in which to hide and hibernate, bees and butterflies need our flowers, while birds and squirrels and other life forms depend on our trees and hedges and shrubs. So gardeners of the world, unite and pat each other on the back! We are not just self-indulgently creating our own paradise, we are also saving the planet!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

When you want a treat for children, you can’t go past meringues, – quick, cheap and easy. And the best thing is having the yolks for mayonnaise. Even when times are tough, I only buy free range eggs, and the upside of this is that you know you’ve got good fresh eggs.

So take two eggs, and separate the yolks from the whites. Measure 120g of castor sugar… Whisk the egg whites till they’re stiff and form little peaks when you lift the beater out. Gradually whisk in half the sugar, and it’ll become wonderfully shiny. Then gently fold in the rest of the sugar with a metal spoon –very lightly, so as not to break up the meringue. Using a dessert or table spoon, ladle the meringue at intervals onto a grease–proof paper lined baking tray, and put in the oven on very low heat – 140 degrees. Leave in the oven for 70 minutes for the bigger size, 40 minutes for a small size. When they feel firm, you can lift one and check the underside is cooked. Leave them in the oven until cold, so they don’t go soggy. They will last for ages if stored in an air tight container.

Two egg whites will make about twenty meringues, which you can sandwich together with some whipped cream. Children love them as- is, and they’re delicious served with ice-cream and fruit- especially strawberries or raspberries. A bit extravagant maybe, but sometimes children deserve it!

Food for Thought:    Ascetism is not that you should not own anything, but that nothing should own you.

 Ali Ibn Abi Talib who was Muhammed’s nephew, son-in-law and closest follower, and one of the Sufi order’s great saints.

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June 14, 2012 · 5:27 am

Farewell to George

George has gone. He gave no warning. I had expected to watch him grow from adolescence into a large hairy black male. I suppose like all adolescents he’s pushed off to find himself, or maybe to find more spacious quarters.

I had had a window into the tiny cosy home he’s left. I had wondered if, when he grew to full size, he would join the other big black spiders I know are living in the hinge of the French doors that I don’t often open. When I do there’s a panic-stricken rush to safety.

George was different. I’d watched him since he was a tiny baby – one of the ones I’d paid the house-washing firm to dispose of. I left George safely on one side of my bedroom window pane during the debate I had with the house-wash people about payment for their very unsatisfactory job. George was my proof. But when his function had been fulfilled, I still felt connected to him, so left him unmolested in his little nest on the other side of the glass, and watched the gradual expansion both of his size, and of his larder, with various tasty grubs and tiny insects.

I enjoyed greeting him each morning. I don’t know what research has been done into the brains of arachnids, but I have had a healthy respect for the intelligence of daddy long legs since I brought a book case up from under the house, and put it on the veranda to paint . I tipped all the baby daddy long legs out at one end of the veranda and took the book case to the other end, and left it while I went to have lunch. The veranda was about thirty feet long, and by the time I returned to get on with the painting, all the baby daddy long legs had found their way down the deck, and returned to their homes in the corners of the book shelves. So these days the long-legged invaders in the bathrooms are treated with respect, caught in a glass, and re-homed out in the garden. My husband watches this routine with disbelief…

But he has n’t read Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s exquisite book called ‘The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.’ She describes living with a snail that inadvertently entered her sickroom hidden in a wild cyclamen brought in for her from the woods. Among the many extraordinary things that I learned about snails from her, is that depending on the species, a snail’s brain has from 5,000 to 100,000 neurons. And amongst other charming things I now know about snails, is that when they lay their miniscule eggs around the garden or wherever, they visit them regularly and keep a maternal eye on them until they hatch into baby snails!

I found that when I put out lettuce leaves at night for the snails to eat in the garden, they left my petunias and other attractive delicacies alone.

Then there was the lizard who found his way inside last week. After a few days I discovered him in the middle of the carpet and nearly killed myself pouncing after him with the glass, finally losing my balance and hitting my head on the edge of the table as he escaped with lightning speed. So I left the French doors wide open all night, and I suspect he found the gap and I hope he is now back in the garden. Like the mouse I kept seeing flicking behind the sofa. In despair one night, I crumbled cheese fragments along the carpet and out through the French doors, Hansel and Gretel style. It must have worked, because there was no cheese left the next morning.

Why spend so much time on the tiniest orders of the animal kingdom? Scientists now tell us that our survival as a species is actually dependent on not allowing the larger animals to die out- and an awful lot of them have done so. And yet the smaller creatures, the bees and the worms and other forms of tiny life are just as vital to our survival. But we don’t know enough about creation to know what is important to the survival of the planet and what is not. What if ALL forms of life are vital to our survival? In her irresistible book ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’, American Annie Dillard, writes that: “of all known forms of life, only about ten per cent are still living today”.

And we know that ninety percent of the big fish in the oceans are now extinct. So maybe, every spider, every snail, every mouse, every insect matters – well, maybe not mosquitoes.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Yesterday I met some friends down by the waterfront to celebrate my birthday. (It isn’t due for a while but I like to spin it out). We were all grandmothers but one, and one friend confessed that when her grandchildren asked her to make pancakes, she didn’t know how. Is it possible to live without pancakes? A staple of my children and my grandchildren, it was the ideal food to fill up hordes of hungry visiting children too. They started with a baked potato each, the inside mashed with butter and grated cheese, and then the pancakes kept coming till they were full. They ‘re cheap, delicious and filling.

In a mixing bowl tip 8 ounces of self raising flour, a pinch of salt, an egg and gradually add half a pint of milk. Beat with a fork until it’s mixed, and then use a beater to whip it smooth. Leave this batter to settle in the fridge for a half an hour.

When you’re ready, beat the batter again, and it may need a little more milk to make it flow well into the frying pan – trial and error. Sometimes some water instead of all milk makes them lighter and crispy, but only experiment when you’ve got the hang of them. Fat, shortening, whatever you call it, is the best for pancakes. In a frying pan, heat a knob of fat the size of a walnut until it begins to smoke, and with a ladle or large spoon pour in enough batter to thinly cover the surface.

Cook till bubbles start to rise and then turn with a slice, and cook the other side until ready to slide out onto a plate (you sometimes have to add more fat to stop it sticking). Sprinkle with brown sugar (white will do, but doesn’t have the taste of brown), fold the pancake in three, sprinkle with more sugar, and squeeze quarter of a lemon over it. The tang of lemon is a must.  Eat straight away. Food for the gods.

The first pancake is usually not the best to look at, but still good to eat… it’s as though the frying pan settles down with the second pancake. I usually make double the quantity, and I only eat mine when everyone else is full, so I too, get the delectable taste of a pancake fresh out of the frying pan. Some people use maple syrup or treacle… but to those of us who have grown up on brown sugar, there’s nothing else like it.

When I referred to sausages in yesterday’s recipe, I should have said pork sausages.

Food for Thought:   It is amazing how much can be accomplished if no one cares who gets the credit.       John Wooden, American basketball coach.

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