Category Archives: humour

June 8, 2012 · 5:28 am

Top Dogs

‘I would like, to begin with, to say that though parents, husbands, children, lovers and friends are all very well, they are not dogs’. How true.

Elizabeth Von Arnim wrote this opening sentence in her autobiography. And I could well write the same. Without going back to childhood to catalogue all the doggie divinities who’ve ruled my affections, in the last forty years of my second marriage we’ve clocked up round-about fifteen or seventeen assorted dogs.

 It’s difficult to be accurate, because it depends on whether we count the dogs we had for a few weeks before realising they were going to kill the others from jealousy, or the ones who adopted us for periods, but couldn’t stay the distance or had to be reluctantly returned to the owners they’d run away from. Thinking about those ones breaks me up. I wish we’d just kept quiet when I saw one poor lab slink back to his master with his tail between his legs.

We rarely chose the dogs who shared our lives. They came to us, sometimes because they had no home, or because some-one rang and said a dog needed a home. And there always seemed to be lost dogs needing to be rescued. One day my husband came home from work to find the family in the back garden, two cavaliers and a saluki, and a Pyrenean mountain hound tied up in the front as I didn’t dare let the saluki see a rival.

So we had a number of afghans, six Cavalier King Charles spaniels, two at a time, a labrador or two, a boxer, several salukis, a borzoi, a mastiff, a mastiff boxer cross. The borzoi had been found lying on the concrete floor of a cage with a scarcely healed broken leg, the boxer-mastiff cross had been left to starve when his owner went to prison and the girl friend walked out. When found three weeks later, his black coat had bleached to pale cream, and his ribs stuck out like a concentration camp victim. The vet said he had one more day in him.

 It took months to get him back to black, and if we went out without him, we left the lights on, and a big sack of dog biscuits open by him, so he always knew there was plenty of food. The dogs who had been in happy homes, and were being “let-go” for various reasons, usually took about six months to settle in and realise that this was their new home where they were loved. The rescued dogs settled in straight away, with devoted gratitude. They knew they had been rescued and that they were only too welcome with us.

One little Cavalier King Charles who looked like a grumpy Charles the Second with his long curly black ears framing his face like the King’s wig, finally rolled over for me to tickle his tummy as he lay on my un-made bed in the sunshine, after six months. That was his turning point. Another cavalier made it clear she belonged, when after six months her previous owners came to see her, and when they left, she remained on the steps with us, and watched them get back in their car. But even the sad, badly treated, rescued dogs would often crane to look when they saw a car that looked like their previous owner’s car. What intelligence and what loyalty.

My brother’s labrador, after my brother’s three years absence overseas, when he visited the farm, didn’t wait for an invitation, but went straight out and sat in the back of the land-rover till my brother drove off with him. Who says animals don’t remember?

Two dogs are more fun than one dog, and three dogs are even more fun. On the rare occasions when we had one dog, he or she ran the house, and became top dog, so it was actually better for our self esteem to have at least two dogs. True, there’s less room on the bed, when you have two, and two lots of snores and scratching and general re-arranging can be somewhat disturbing, but I read in an English survey that we are not alone in this, and that seventy per cent of dog owners sleep with their dogs, and a surprisingly large number said they’d rather sleep with their dog than their partner!

Our last dog was a bull mastiff, the gentlest creature in the world but so strong that he pulled my husband over, and broke two ribs. He finally departed for the great kennel in the sky, leaving us with just the cat, after a life-time of living with dogs, and going to the vet and bathing and walking and brushing and feeding and de-fleaing.

 I’m now down to looking after an elderly husband. And instead I drive him to the doctor, the dentist, the hearing aid repair people, the specialist, the optometrist. So I don’t walk as much anymore. I don’t miss the bed-time ritual of getting them to go out and pee, especially on cold rainy nights, but I miss everything else. So I have to cuddle the neighbours’ dogs, which include a black Labrador, a black and white English pointer, a little black bitsa, and a blissfully snorting bulldog, his master’s pride and joy.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

When hungry and in a hurry, there’s nothing like pasta. Any pasta. I always keep freshly grated Parmesan in the deep freeze, so in hungry emergencies all I have to do is boil some pasta, chop some parsley, and when the pasta’s cooked and drained, stir in a beaten egg with cream and parmesan, and sprinkle over parsley. The other quickie is to saute tomatoes in olive oil, add garlic and parsley if you fancy, and tip the tomatoes over the pasta with parmesan on the top. I even love pasta with just melted butter and Parmesan. Hunger is the best appetiser there is.

Food for Thought:    God, I can push the grass apart

                                    And lay my finger on Thy heart.     Edna St Vincent Millay

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June 6, 2012 · 3:20 am

Present but not Tense

Leaving my monthly meeting, I drove home under the full moon. As I left the city and began to drive through empty country roads with no street lights, the moon shone whitely down on the fields and hills, so that they looked as though they slept under a frosting of snow.

 I sang various rough and ready versions of arias from La Traviata, which was still on my mind, cracking on the high notes, and missing the low ones entirely as I flew along the quiet roads . At the meditation group I’d been to, I sat next to two sisters, not twins, but so alike in spite of seven years between them, the youngest only twenty-one, that they could have been. Both beautiful, gentle and good. I was the oldest there by a good twenty years, and they were the youngest. It made me feel good just to look at them.

At the end of an hour’s driving under the moon, I walked to the edge of the cliff when I got home to watch the wide path of light across the sea. No sound but the susurrations of the waves licking against the rocks below. As I made my way down the path to the door, I eased a few ripe guavas off the over-hanging branches, and sucked their tangy sweetness, spitting out the pips.

And I awoke to the sound of the tuis, the black and turquoise song-birds with their white bow-tie bobbing at their throats, singing their sweet songs to each other in the trees around the house. In the warm winter sunshine I took my breakfast tray into the garden and sat on the garden seat, and watched and listened to six tuis in the pururi tree above me. They sucked the honey out of the pink flowers with their long curved beaks, and warbled love-songs to each other as they sprang from branch to branch.

The albertine rose which should only flower in spring is blooming riotously over the trellis arch, where it twines into the ivy and the perpetually flowering mutabilis rose. With blue ageratum sprawling around the garden beds, and deep pink cannas, pink daisies and purple pansies, the garden feels as flowery as though it’s summer instead of almost midwinter.

 To have time to stand and stare like this is one of the great compensations for that stage of life when playing tennis is a distant memory, and climbing mountains a permanent impossibility.

 When I was young I used to look at older people sitting in deck-chairs gazing out to sea, instead of racing along the beach, or plunging into the sea with shrieks of laughter. Poor old things I patronisingly thought to myself, life must be so boring. I know better now. They were probably enjoying themselves far more than I, savouring the little things in life that I was far too busy being busy to even to notice.

 Some people call this mindfulness. In his book ‘Peace is Every Step’, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has a chapter called Present Moment, Wonderful Moment. And that’s how it seemed, sitting in the garden eating my toast and drinking my coffee this morning.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets means racking my brains for something quick and spoily to give my grand-daughter when she comes tomorrow to teach me how to use my computer ie, get into Facebook, and all the other wonders of social media.

 Since we’re having roast chicken tonight, I’ll keep the breasts for lunch tomorrow. I’ll make a thick parsley sauce, almost emerald green with parsley, and flavoured with some of the chicken essences and some sliced mushrooms sautéed in butter. I’ll chop the chicken breasts into small chunks and stir into the sauce. I have some emergency puff pastry vol au vents in my store cupboard, and they’ll be filled with the chicken mixture and heated up. We’ll eat them with new potatoes and salad. A quick emergency pudding will be artisan ice-cream made by the chap down the road, with meringues – another store cupboard stand-bye for grand-children, all doused in a chocolate and cointreau sauce from a gourmet bottle given to me at Christmas. That should do it!

PS. The best way to have green green parsley is to plunge it into boiling water for a minute. When you take it out and chop it, it keeps its bright emerald colour.

And now some Food for Thought: A job is what we do for money; work is what we do for love. Mary Sarah Quinn

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June 5, 2012 · 2:23 am

Let Us Eat cake

Poor Marie Antoinette. She never said it. But she’s suffered from that blighting propaganda ever since. What she needed, and still needs, is a good spin doctor to right her wrongs, but until she gets one, her name is indelibly associated with cake.

In the days when a woman’s place was in the home, and preferably in the kitchen, cake was part of that equation. I grew up in the fifties when women were still supposed to be there, and watched my stepmother struggle with the expectations around cake. Her steak and kidney puddings had to be tasted to be believed, her steak pies with perfect pastry were sumptuous, as were her heavenly steamed ginger puddings and apple pies, but cakes were not her thing.

The pinnacle of cake-makings skills back then was the Victoria sponge. A pretty boring version of cake, and now long out of favour, but back then, the classic Victoria sponge was a firm cake cooked in two tins, and glued together with raspberry jam, the top sprinkled with icing sugar. Simple, but like all simple things, more difficult than it looks.

I would come home from school in the afternoon, and find my stepmother had had another go at a sponge, and was pretty down in the mouth, because as usual, it had sunk in the middle. As much as we were allowed to do, I fell on these failures, and revelled in the sunken, soggy, sweet middle – the best part of the cake, I thought. Sadly, years later, I discovered that my stepmother thought I was sending her up when I enthused about how delicious it was.

A few years later, living in Malaya, she was rescued from the kitchen by an amah who certainly didn’t bake cakes. Instead, like every other amah, she delivered a tea tray with rich tea biscuits and tiny Malayan bananas to the bedroom every day at four o’clock, to wake the dozing memsahibs from their afternoon rest in the tropical heat. With the pressure to produce the perfect sponge lifted from her shoulders, my stepmother began to be more interested in cake, and one holiday I came home from boarding school and was invited to experiment with making something called a boiled fruit cake – no creaming and beating, just a bit of mixing and boiling before baking.

So began the process of producing a cake in the tropics in the fifties. First the flour had to be sieved to get the weevils out. Every egg had to be broken into a separate cup to make sure none of them were bad, as indeed, many of them were. The rest of the makings came out of the food safe, which was a primitive cupboard made with wire mesh to ensure some movement of air in the sticky heat. It stood on legs two feet off the floor. The legs were placed in used sardine tins or similar, which were kept filled with water, to deter ants from invading the food.

The cake was simply a mix of all the ingredients and then baked. It wasn’t just soggy and sweet in the middle, it was soggy and sweet all through – just my sort of cake.

When I had my own kitchen, my ambition to eat cake was permanently at war with my determination never to get bogged down with the hard labour of creaming and beating that seemed to be involved in making a cake. But I found a temporary solution in the first months of my marriage – a cake that didn’t even have to be cooked – it was made from mostly crushed biscuit crumbs, melted butter and chocolate and finished off in the fridge. It was even a success with old school friends who’d mastered the whole baking thing, and could even do a crème brulee.

But the real break-through came when reading the old Manchester Guardian as it was called then. Highbrow though the womens’ pages were, Guardian women were not too cerebral to eat. And hidden away one day in a sensible article on cakes – nothing frivolous, just egalitarian, down to earth, common sense advice – I found the answer to cake-making. Instead of creaming the butter, or beating it with the eggs or the sugar, all we had to do was MELT the butter and stir it in.

This simple technique I applied to chocolate cakes, lemon cakes, you- name- it cakes. It ‘s carried me through a life-time of eating cake and I’ve never even considered making a Victoria sponge.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Threadbare gourmets sometimes have to break out, and there’s no point in trying to make something delicious and then economising on the ingredients, so cakes for hungry paupers still need their full quota of butter, eggs and sugar. Apples, though usually the cheapest fruit, are also one of the most delicious. So this is an apple cake, complete with melted butter.

You need two large apples peeled, 150 g melted butter, a cup of castor sugar, two large lightly beaten eggs, a teaspoon of vanilla essence, one and a half cups of SR flour.

Grease and line the cake tin. Mix the sugar, butter, eggs and vanilla, sift in the flour, and then slice the apples into the mix and stir. Tip into the cake tin, and sprinkle some caster sugar over the top. Bake in a moderate oven – about 160 degrees, for 45 to 60 minutes. Test with knitting needle or similar to check it’s cooked through, and leave in the tin to cool completely.

A message to the friends who read this blog – Now that my computer is behaving itself again, I’m enjoying being back on the air! I’ve had good reports on the easy bread recipe.

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June 2, 2012 · 4:33 am

Blondes or Brunettes?

The slogan ‘Persil washes whiter’ was my first experience of discrimination.

There, under my affronted eight year old gaze were these huge hoardings, and on one was a  sparkling white double sheet pinned to the clothes line, and blowing in the wind, with a sparkling  blonde admiring with smug pleasure her domesticity. On the matching hoarding a grey sheet was pinned to the line with a brunette looking glum – presumably Persil thought sluts looked glum as well as dark-haired.

So I grew up feeling the injustice of assuming that because a woman had fair hair, she had other advantages. As the blondes paraded across the world’s stages, on screen and telly and magazine front covers, the feeling that gentlemen did indeed prefer blondes continued to be reinforced. And the blondes were undeniably gorgeous – sex bombs like Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, would-be princesses like Grace Kelly, real ones like Diana. Even Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister was a blonde. Blondes seemed to have all the advantages, based not on gender, talent or nationality, but hair colour.

Perhaps the unkindest cut of all to a brunette, was the remark of the woman who served me in the corner shop. She had always been a perfectly acceptable and slightly mousy person with light brown hair. One Monday morning after a long weekend, she stood behind the counter triumphantly blonde and beaming. I made no comment. But as the weeks went by, I asked her if she felt different now she was blonde. She looked at me with sparkling eyes – “I’ve never had so much fun in my life. I’d never go back to being dark”. I walked out gnashing my teeth.

The world’s brunettes didn’t give me much encouragement either. Jane Russell was too brazen to be taken seriously, while Jackie Kennedy, with her little girl voice, tragic destiny, and un-used opportunities to change the world in some way with all her influence and mana, was a bit of a let-down. Then there was tragic, raven-haired Queen Soraya, the beautiful Persian empress dismissed because she didn’t conceive an heir. She simply retired to the ski slopes in her large black sunglasses which became her trademark long before Jackie Kennedy learned to hide behind hers. I longed for both these women to have used all the goodwill and influence at their disposal to achieve something great.

But the times they are a-changing, and the habit ‘of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move’ and in what seems like a just re-arrangement of destiny, brunettes are now beginning to have their day in the sun. It began with the blessed Mary, the long haired Australian brunette who married the Crown Prince of Denmark, and then the also-blessed dark-haired Kate Middleton who snaffled her prince from under the noses of countless blonde society beauties.

Better still, some research has shown that brunettes tend to be paid better than blondes in the work force, as they are perceived to be more intelligent that blondes. Now we’re talking. And then there are the blonde jokes, many relayed to me by my grandsons who have more of a foot in the modern world than I. Maybe the crest of the wave was reached the day I was served with my coffee by a pretty blonde waitress. She wore a slogan on her t-shirt, which read: “Speak slowly. Genuine blonde”.  A statement which told me many things, and laid my old demons to rest.

And as the years go by, while Persil’s blondes may continue to wash whiter, their roots will only get darker. Brunettes, on the other hand, will grow old gracefully – I think! 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

It’s a bright sunny day in this corner of the Antipodes, and absolutely freezing. So I’ve the hot pot on for comforting pea and ham soup.After washing the dried peas, several handfuls or more, put them in the hotpot. Add three chopped carrots, and a hambone or pieces of bacon if you haven’t got a knuckle from the butcher. Then add a chopped onion, a couple of chopped celery sticks, one or two chopped garlic cloves, a bay leaf, salt and pepper. Cover with boiling water, and leave to bubble away for five hours or more on high, or until it’s all cooked. Fish out the bone, by which time all the meat should be falling off it. I whizz the peas and vegetables in the blender, leaving some to make the soup a bit chunky.

Before eating, stir in lots of chopped parsley, and if you like, make some croutons – good bread cubed, and fried in olive oil.  Make plenty, and freeze the rest for another cold day. You can use lentils if you haven’t got dried peas, and make sure the dried peas aren’t old, or they’ll never really soften. I sometimes use some chicken stock cubes if I use lentils in this recipe.

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May 31, 2012 · 8:54 am

Love is the food of music

I saw La Traviata yesterday for the second time in three days, and I’d see it again if I could. Typically, the ultra-modern designer had imposed his ideas on the story and the staging, but he couldn’t change the glorious music, and the heart-breaking love story – so much more moving than Romeo and Juliet.

So Natalie Dessay was required to play Violetta as a heavy drinking tart, not the elegant refined courtesan the real Marie Plessis was. On the other hand, the power and the glory of Il Magnifico, the Russian bass-baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, lifted the angry, arrogant, interfering father, the in-advertent villain of the piece, to heights of nobility. There was hardly a woman in the audience or at the New York Met, from which this opera was beamed, who wouldn’t have flung herself at his feet, as the roar from the audience testified. And of course, he’s not just a glorious voice, but also a pretty face – named one of the world’s fifty most beautiful people in a People magazine poll.

But tart or not, Natalie Dessay reduced me to tears with the pathos and beauty of her singing and acting in this part. She looked as ravaged at the end as though she really was dying both of TB and a broken heart..

I hurried home and googled Greta Garbo playing the same role in the film ‘Camille’ in 1936. When I was a teenager, my stepmother asked me to go to a cinema matinee with her. I went from politeness to see this old film from her sentimental  past.

I sat through the matinee with her, and she left to go home. I sat through the next showing, and finally the last showing that evening. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. When I looked at it again yesterday I felt the same. Garbo, at the height of her beauty was utterly ravishing, and the young Robert Taylor was an arrestingly beautiful young man. Garbo played Violetta, or Marguerite, as she was called in this film, with infinite refinement, delicacy and tenderness. Her clothes were exquisite, and even her shoulders emerging from glorious confections of tulle and taffeta, were achingly beautiful. I don’t think there has been another cinema star as beautiful and refined as she was.

The interesting thing was that the real Marie Plessis was just as beautiful and refined. Brought up by an alcoholic father, begging on the streets at ten, sent to be a comfort woman at twelve to an old man, escaping to be a seamstress in Paris, she didn’t earn enough to live on, but found, in conductor Sir Thomas Beecham’s notorious phrase, that she had a gold mine between her legs. By the age of sixteen she had taken up with the young nobleman who was the model for Alfredo in the opera, she had learned to read and write, to ride side-saddle, and acquire all the accomplishments she saw that other women had. She was a fast learner. And by then she had already become a celebrated courtesan.

The country idyll with her young nobleman was broken up by his father just as in the opera, which was based on Alexandre Dumas’ book  ‘La Dame aux Camellias’, expensive camellias being her favourite flower.

She was eventually re-united with the young nobleman, and they married in England, though the marriage was invalid in France. But it gave her a title and respectability. The nobleman faded out of her life, but she continued her amazing career, having an affair with Liszt, who appears to have been the only man she ever really loved, and with Dumas who wrote her story. Her salon in Paris included some of the most eminent men of the age, including Honore de Balzac, Alfred de Musset and Theophile Gautier. And then she died at the age of twenty-three.

I’m humbled at what she achieved in such a short space of time, totally self-educated, never showing any sign of her appalling childhood, but personifying grace, beauty,  “ a great deal of heart, and a great liveliness of spirit” according to her lover, Franz Liszt.. She conquered one of the mostly highly civilised societies in the world. What a woman. What a girl.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets.

When I was a single mother supporting two children on a tiny wage, tins of salmon were a staple in my cupboard. This recipe for fish cakes involves a tin of salmon or tinned herrings, mashed potato, an egg, and mixed dried herbs.

Boil and mash the potatoes with butter but only a dash of milk since you want them to be quite firm. Break up the salmon, or herrings in tomato sauce if you can get them, and mix them into the potatoes, including the tomato sauce. You need to work out the right balance of fish to potato, but I find one tin will make about eight round fishcakes. Add an egg to the potatoes and fish to bind them, plus lots of mixed herbs to taste, salt and pepper. Divide into fishcakes and roll in flour. Fry till both sides are nice and crisp and the inside hot. If you have any left over, they can be re-heated in the oven, and I often made a double quantity so there were plenty the next day. Serve with green vegetables or a salad, and make a tomato sauce with fried tomatoes, olive oil, and a touch of sugar if you feel like it.

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May 30, 2012 · 8:46 am

Tale of a Glutton

I found a packet of custard creams at our well-named local grocer, Nosh. This may be of small interest to many people, but not to this foodie, to use a polite word for gourmand. 

I grew up on custard creams as a particular treat in post-war England, and  a delicately dunked custard cream in a nice cup of tea – preferably China tea – takes me back to those distant days of my youth. ( Dunking was also frowned upon in the days of my youth). Whenever friends visit from the UK now, top of my list of please- brings, are the custard creams, closely followed by rich tea biscuits. These are plain and uniquely English – no-one else would bother to look twice at them. But again, they reek of nostalgia for me, the only biscuit to have with an early morning cup of tea in bed, and an infinitely adaptable biscuit, equally at home with morning tea, afternoon tea, or a late night snack.

Neither of these biscuit are available in New Zealand, my home for over forty years, but I still crave for these old fashioned goodies. But now Nosh, to my delight, are suddenly importing one of them. Unfortunately, they haven’t also branched out into another delight which has always been unavailable in this land of milk and manukau honey and lamb and wine. I’m talking about those circular tin boxes, wrapped in stiff and very thick, crinkled, coloured tin foil, containing marrons glacees.  To call them crystallised chestnuts would be to rob them of half their glamour. These too, come tumbling out of visitor’s suit cases on arrival, and it pains me to have to share them in the interests of good manners.

When we first arrived in this country, Mars Bars, the creamy malted bars with a thick layer of caramel, chewy insides, and covered in wavy patterns of milk chocolate, were also unobtainable. To the uninitiated, the words Mars Bars may be puzzling, but even such an authoritative journal as the UK Financial Times once devoted an article to Mars Bars, reaching the conclusion that they were the only commodity surviving since the thirties which is still worth its weight in gold. This fact of course, gives added relish as I sink my teeth into the lovely soft innards of the chocolate .

I was foolish enough to introduce this scarce treat to the children, so then three of us hankered after them, and again,  distant travellers mentioning a trip to the Antipodes were suborned into bringing a few Mars Bars with them, ahead of the list of biscuits.

When my husband was leaving Heath Row after a quick business trip to London, he remembered at the airport, that he had an order for Mars Bars, and was about to buy half a dozen when he thought to himself, well, why not get the box. So he arrived with thirty six Mars Bars. Sadly, between me and the children they only lasted five days.

I think that is probably genuine gluttony. But so delicious.

My recipes tend to be frugal, and the antithesis of gourmet food, but they are the sort of dishes which would see a thread-bare gourmet through hard times. So perhaps that’s what I’ll call them : Recipes for a Thread-bare Gourmet.

Since our chickens come without the giblets these days, which used to be the makings of decent gravy, I’ve given up gravy. Visitors blanch when I tell them I don’t do gravy as I set the roast chicken on the table. But they soon cheer up when I hand them this dish, a recipe given to me by a French friend. I always have to make lots, as it disappears fast. Gently sauté as many mushrooms as you want in some butter and oil, and add finely chopped garlic. I use plenty, as garlic is half the point of this. While they’re still cooking, add cream and a chicken bouillon cube or two. Let the cream boil up and thicken. If it looks as though the mushrooms might get over -cooked, I just fish them out for this stage. When the cream is the consistency you like, return the mushrooms with plenty of chopped parsley, and season with black pepper, salt if you feel it needs it. I serve this with a roast, or it’s also good for a light supper or lunch on thick toasted slices of good bread with a glass of wine.

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May 29, 2012 · 4:49 am

No offense meant!

I saw a lovely picture of an English toff, dressed up to the nines, at an English country wedding on Sunday. Black morning coat, grey-black pin-striped trou, grey waistcoat – but you couldn’t see it. Instead there was a grey baby cradle firmly pinned to his chest and looped around his shoulders, holding a very newborn baby.  Instead of a top-hat, he was carrying a blue and white spotted bag holding, presumably, all the disposable nappies, wipes and other paraphernalia a Western baby requires.

 He was actually the English Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, but it was his role as a Dad which looked so impressive, as with broad smile on his face, and without a trace of embarrassment, he strode into the wedding behind his wife who was holding their toddler.

Time was when a man like him wouldn’t have even been seen pushing a pram. It’s a great leap forward for men, and mothers and their children, that men are actually not bashful any more about being seen to be caring sensitive fathers, or even sensitive new age guys ( Snags). So it seemed all the sadder to read another item on the same page about how the National Health Service has banned the use of the word ‘Dad’ in its information pamphlets, using ‘partner’ instead, so as not to offend same sex couples.

As I thought about this, I thought how much of our lives these days is taken up with not offending people – Moslems, lesbians, gays, among others – these are the ones that spring to mind, maybe because they seem to be offended more often. But are they? And do we take the same trouble not to offend Christians, men, children, and animals who all also get their feelings trampled on sometimes too. Do we have a license to be offended these days if we belong to a minority group or even a majority group?

It seems to me that when we allow ourselves to be offended by the innocent use of an archetypal word like father or Dad, we are actually taking it personally, and making everyone else responsible for offending us, which is another way of saying,’ making us angry.’

But life is a lot happier and less stressful if we don’t take offence and take everything personally. In his wonderful book called ‘The Four Agreements’, a book which must have made a lot of people feel happier and more fulfilled, Miguel Ruiz deals with the question of taking things personally, which usually means feeling hurt or offended – ie angry.

The Second Agreement reads “Don’t take anything personally.”

‘Nothing others do is because of you’, he writes. ‘What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be a victim of needless suffering’.

He reminds us that by taking responsibility for our own feelings, and giving up blaming other people for hurting our feelings, we can give up being offended and feel free instead. Maybe instead of writing politically correct pamphlets and destroying the use of words that have been valued for centuries, bureaucrats could instead, give the offended a copy of “The Four Agreements”! And maybe pigs Could fly too!

 In spite of resolving to give up carbohydrates after reading that too many are what cause arthritis, I still have to feed the resident male, which means carbohydrates. But  I found a way of eating my favourite vegetables, parsnips, which I fear are full of carbohydrates and sugar too, without causing too much damage. (I hope)

Roasted of course with the meat, they ‘re par-boiled first. Then drained and thrown around the pot with the lid on to make rough edges on them. Add some flour and bang them round the saucepan again, till they’re covered in flour. Then spoon hot oil or fat over them in a roasting dish. At this point I usually sprinkle them with maple syrup or brown sugar, but found a better way this time. I sprinkled them with stevia powder, the sweet herb which substitutes for sugar. You buy it in health food shops. The taste was sublime! Crunchy sweet parsnips with roast lamb and all the trimmings.

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May 27, 2012 · 2:50 am

The Windsor Knot

The world’s greatest love story? Not really. The world’s greatest demonstration of what co-dependency means, more like.

I had gone with the Windsor’s to bed with Anne Sebba’s book “That Woman”. Sebba makes it clear that Wallis didn’t want to marry an ex-King, but was happy to be connected to a King, but she doesn’t resolve the riddle of why Edward, an emotionally stunted middle-aged man (Wallis refers to him as Peter Pan in her letters) became hopelessly besotted with a tough woman who publicly bullied and humiliated him. Yet to untie the Windsor knot it’s only necessary to look at Edward’s childhood.

Sebba makes the point that Wallis was determined to marry a rich man because she’d had a trying childhood with not enough money. Well, there are plenty of us in that boat. But many others would have different goals and don’t all want to marry for status and the entree to the best parties. In some ways, Wallis was a classic Southern belle, having learned to listen and please men, dress to perfection and revel in parties – Scarlett O’Hara to the life.

Sebba also suggests that since many aspects of Wallis’s appearance were so masculine, including the lack of breasts, the broad shoulders, big ugly hands, strong mannish jaw, and an apparent in-ability to have children, she suffered from a form of Dis-order of Sexual Development. This, Sebba felt, would have been the unconscious mainspring behind the desire for what Wallis saw as feminine perfection. Whatever the reason, Wallis’s life seemed to be dominated by the desire for status,with expensive jewels, exquisite clothes, immaculate hair-do’s, the best parties, and liaisons flirtatious or otherwise, with rich fashionable people. And these things were what Edward was able to give her.

He already had all this stuff in spades. What he also had was a much worse childhood than Wallis, who had always been beloved. For the first three years of his life he was cared for by a sadistic dominating nanny. When she took him down to the drawing-room for the normal half an hour with the parents that rich Edwardian children enjoyed, she pinched him till it hurt outside the door, so that he entered the room crying. His un-maternal mother Queen Mary, and irascible father, King George promptly sent him out again, as they didn’t know what to do with a crying toddler.

So Edward’s childhood was dominated by a cold distant mother and by the cruel nanny, who finally had a nervous breakdown when he was three, and it was discovered she had never had a day off in three years. It’s a psychological truism that the experiences with parents or carers before the age of three, shape the relationships that we have with our significant others for the rest of our lives. So Edward was simply replicating his childhood and endlessly trying to please a rather cruel and dominating woman who was just like his nanny. The treadmill of of an unresolved childhood.

In psychological jargon, the Windsors had an interlocking racket, and since neither of them changed in all their years together, neither did the racket change. That, it seems to me is the real story of their marriage, not that it was a great love-story, but an enduring saga of co-dependency.

Last night I went to a seminar on the benefits of juicing. So fired with enthusiasm, I’ve decided to give up carbohydrates (as a foodie this deprivation may not last). But before I do, I’m having one last fling with carbs- a freshly baked loaf. This recipe has No kneading or proving in a warm cupboard. It’s simplicity itself.  Just three cups of self-raising flour, a pinch of salt and a bottle of beer made up to 400mls with water. Mix them all together, put in a greased loaf-tin in a medium to hot oven, and cook for about an hour or until it sounds hollow when you tap it. Delicious hot or cold with lashings of real butter.

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May 24, 2012 · 12:19 am

Definitely NOT Birdbrained

Savouring a flat white and a muffin in the coffee-shop court-yard, I turned my head to watch some children peering into the goldfish pond. When I turned back to my coffee a ring of sparrows had silently hopped onto the table and up to the muffin. The clever  things knew that when I turned my head, I couldn’t see them.

I used to feed the little rascals at home. All nine or ten of them. Not actually at home. Under a tree outside the garden where I could watch them from the sitting room window. That way less danger from the cat (now deceased)

I also fed the dozen or so minahs, a little way down from the tree so they wouldn’t frighten off the smaller birds. Moist bread for the minahs, wheat and birdseed, and when I ran out, porridge flakes for the others. They loved it all. They told their friends. Within a couple of weeks I had at least a hundred sparrows, four or five doves, some itinerant blackbirds, the odd chaffinch and an occasional thrush.

They had also worked out where this largesse came from. They waited in the plum tree outside the kitchen window and watched me until I came out with their breakfast. And for a couple of hours they sat and barracked me from the plum tree and the garage roof in the afternoon, until I sallied forth with afternoon tea – theirs.

A great whoosh of wings accompanied me to the tree. Then I had to make sure that the neighbour’s ancient lonely dog was not hovering in hope of a dog biscuit. If she was, I had to return with the bird food, and dig out a biscuit and walk her down the road with it, away from the bird food which she would have gobbled up. Dog distracted, back to the birds.

If I was out, they would be waiting for me at the bottom of the road. They recognised my white car, and swooped from telegraph pole to telegraph pole all the way down the street with the car. They’d then hover round the garage yelling “she’s back, she’s back” till I came out. If I went for a walk, they’d fly down the road with me, and wait on the corner.

Finally the worm turned. There were so many birds I couldn’t keep up with them, and was buying a large sack of wheat from the farmers shop each week, as well as extra bread for the greedy minahs – money I could ill-afford. The garden was becoming white with droppings, and I was back to the chaos of when I’d had a bird table. The sparrows could probably have made a pot of tea themselves, they’d watched me so intently through the kitchen window for so long.

A short holiday in Melbourne solved the problem. They gave up waiting. I felt guilty but relieved. They didn’t need the food out here in the country. It was just my hobby which had got out of hand.

But I now have a hearty respect for the intelligence of bird brains.

Feeling a cold coming on, I shall treat myself to a comforting pick-me-up – a tot of Stone’s ginger wine, the juice of an orange, a spoonful of honey and some hot water. It goes straight to the cockles of the heart, and also warms up the chest, and helps a cough.

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May 23, 2012 · 5:42 am

Ladies who lunch

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Lunch is for ladies! Yesterday Friend and I went out for lunch, going first to the new strawberry place run by immigrants from New Caledonia. Friend was saying their drawback was that their English was so poor. “But she speaks French”, I replied. So no sooner had we walked in than Friend greeted her in French, and in a low voice began a conversation in flowing, beautifully modulated French. I had never realised how beguiling French could sound, so courtly and courteous, and also intimate.

Later, at the cafe having Eggs Benedict and a glass of wine, after covering the usual topic – the rigours of caring for frail and elderly husbands, and their growing domestic blindness and latest foibles – we discussed the coarseness of the Windsor men, a propos the latest incident with the Duke of York, and harking back to other incidents with all the Queen’s sons. I introduced Friend to Sir Charles Petrie’s theory about the Hanoverians  – the three types – one, the brutal Duke of Cumberland type, then the extravagant and self-indulgent Prince Regent model, and lastly, the Coburg strain, good and conscientious  –  she was fascinated, and found no difficulty in fitting  the various members of each generation into those categories. We ended lunch by telling each other some of our husband’s jokes. This was a long and laborious process, since neither of us had the gift for timing or even for remembering the punch line, so we struggled with the right words and the sequences, finally muddling our way to the end, and laughing just for the hell of it.

I scored a hit with an ancient joke from the Guardian, some graffiti in a loo, which read: “I love screwing grils”. Someone added the next line: “don’t you mean girls?” and the last line read : “what about us poor grils”, a phrase which has remained in regular use in this family for the last thirty years at least..

The gents stayed home with bread and cheese and chutney and tomatoes. The unkindest cut of all was that we were both so full from our delicious and nutritious lunch that neither of us felt like slaving over a hot stove for them in the evening… They also serve who only stand and wait!.

My man was lucky. There was a chocolate mousse in the fridge left over from yesterday’s lunch for the grandchildren. 

So easy, cheap and nutritious.  Take one egg per person, six squares of black chocolate, a walnut-sized knob of butter, and a teaspoon of orange juide, black coffee, sherry or brandy, depending what flavour you fancy. Slowly melt the butter, chocolate and joices. Separate the eggs. Whip the egg whites till stiff. Stir the yolks into the chocolate mixture until smooth, then gently fold into the egg whites. Pour into glasses – wine glasses  or ramakins, and chill in the fridge.

If I ever felt the meal was rather light on protein, I made these for the children, then at least they’d had an egg. They never complained!

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