Category Archives: Uncategorized

October 26, 2012 · 1:03 am

Snails Have Feelings Too!

Not exactly breakfast at Tiffany’s but breakfast at the river cafe. And not exactly breakfast either – I preferred a freshly baked friand and two cups of coffee – my way.

I sat in the spring sunshine and watched the ducks, bottoms up, having their breakfast. The sparrows hopped so close that I could see the tiny inky black dots like a bib in front of the male birds’ necks. As I walked up the steps to the grocer, the scent of the miniature lemon bushes flanking the water-slide bisecting the flight of steps wafted past. The cherry trees were in that delicate stage of fading blossom with a faint green haze of leaf buds emerging. Altogether, so enjoyable that I decided to take my time going home.

Turning down a country road with a few houses at scattered intervals, I slowly drove down peering up long drives trying to see the houses at the end. One long and infinite drive was lined with poplars, the translucent apricot- coloured spring leaves just uncurling, shiny and shimmering with the sun striking through them, and their bunches of pale green catkins wriggling in the breeze.. On one side of the road was a meadow snowy with daisies, and a little further down, was another one sparkling with gold buttercups.

They wouldn’t gladden a modern farmer’s heart, but they did mine. Cows no longer browse on all the herbs and grasses that their system needs, they just get cultivated grass of one variety which feeds them: but this doesn’t give them the balance of minerals and herbs they instinctively seek out when left in organic fields with all these nutrients available to them.

I only know this from a farming friend whose cows needed copper injections, but when someone left the gate open, they rushed out and began browsing in the mixed grasses along the roadside. When their health improved immediately, he was converted there and then to organic farming. I also heard a radio programme last week in which an organic farmer said his vet’s bills dropped from over two thousand dollars a month, to a hundred and eighty a month when he switched over to organic.

Further down the road some horses were grazing contentedly in the sun, one beautiful palamino stretched out on his side soaking up the warmth. I hastily drew up at this curve in the road, for a big clump of deep blue Norfolk Island forget-me-nots had self-seeded and were sprawling along the verge. I snapped off two sprays which had gone to seed and put them carefully on the front seat so I could see if any seeds fell off.

Heading back I detoured to a tiny wharf on the edge of the estuary. The first settlers who came here in 1850 had landed their goods from Auckland here, and by 1880 this little wharf had been built. All the traffic into this region came up from Auckland and was decanted ashore here. A few years later, an enterprising local man built a shop out over the water next to the wharf, so that fresh goods could be taken straight off the boats, and this tiny space between cliff and sea became the hub of the area.

Now, only the restored wharf remains, and I stood there in the sunny silence watching the tide flow up the river, clear and blue. There were some huge shells down on the mud, so I climbed down the steep steps to gather a handful, magenta and maroon and plum colours merging into sherry and then cream. Big curved shells, and flat fluted ones, with not a chip or a mark on them.

As I stepped towards them, my black patent shoes sank deep into the mud, and I had a moment’s panic. But then thought, well you can always wash patent leather. I gathered a handful of shells, and then wiping the soles of my shoes in the grass, stopped in another bay with a tiny boat building industry, before driving home.

I put the forget-me-not stalks in a flower bed to dry and seed, but when I put the shells to dry in the sun, I found I’d inadvertently brought a muddy looking snail shell home too. I could see there was a live sea-snail inside, so put it carefully out of the sun to take back. It was only about an inch wide.

I was going to take it to the harbour, but then thought that was a bit unfair. If I’d been abducted accidentally by giants or aliens, I’d want to be dropped back home, so I did the same for the snail or crab.

Many people think it fanciful to attribute human feelings to other species, but since they can show fear and joy and all the other human emotions, why not credit them with other responses too? Some Christian authorities describe it as anthropomorphism, and use the term patronisingly and derogatively – okay for St Francis, but not for the rest of us!

But since we know that even a snail’s brain contains between 5,000 and 100,000 giant neurons, and they know when they’re being carted to market in a basket, and have lifted the lid in a concerted effort, broken out and escaped in recorded instances, can we really assume that any creature has no feelings or intelligence?

Elisabeth Tova Bailey wrote an exquisite book called ‘The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating’, a story about her companionship with a snail that came into her sickroom in a potted cyclamen. Snails, she discovered, lay eggs in different places, and visit them all regularly until their babies are hatched. So snails are maternal. The secret life of snails we can only guess at!

After reading her book I’ve been unable to put out snail bait in the garden. I either grow plants they don’t like, do companion planting, or in the case of petunias, put out some lettuce leaves by them at night, and they obligingly eat the lettuce leaves instead of the petunias. I know of a couple who go out late at night and gently gather up all the snails in their garden and taken them to a wild place where they can do no harm to a garden.

We don’t know what place snails occupy in the great chain of creation, but what we Are learning is that every creature seems to have a purpose. We are learning that now GM plants are bred with pesticides in them that kill off pests, good insects are also dying, and bumble bees who ingest pesticides, lose their sense of direction. In Africa where pesticides are widely used, not only are they polluting the lakes and rivers causing fish to die, and fishermen to lose their livelihoods, but the animals and birds that feed on creatures that have absorbed pesticides are also dying.

So it seems to me that every little snail and spider and insect may just matter more than we realise. That to tinker with the ecological chain, is as destructive to our planet as drilling for oil in the seas, burning down forests, clubbing baby seals to death, and all the other hostile acts that we perpetrate on our world. So I was happy to return my little captive to its home in this world – which is also our home – and the only one we will ever have.

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

There was plenty of risotto left over from the day before, so before putting it into the fridge that night I had fashioned it into patties. The next day they had set so firmly I didn’t bother to roll them in flour, but just put them straight into some hot olive oil and butter, and fried both sides. The crispy outside, and soft tasty inside were delicious, and sprinkled with parmesan, I almost felt the leftovers were better than the original dish.

Food for Thought

Man is so made that he can carry the weight of twenty four hours – no more. Directly he weighs down with the years behind and the days ahead, his back breaks. I have promised to help you with … today only; the past I have taken from you …

From God Calling written by Two Listeners in the thirties. You can Google it and find the messages for each day. The language is slightly dated after 70 years, but the messages are still timely.

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Filed under animals/pets, cookery/recipes, environment, environment, food, great days, life/style, philosophy, spiritual, sustainability, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life, Uncategorized, wild life

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October 22, 2012 · 11:04 pm

Soap Dramas and Domestic Power Struggles

Feeling I needed to rest my knee after some full-on glamping training, I decided to have a bath instead of a shower.

And I needed to warm up. It was a cold morning, and I hadn’t lit the fire because I’m going out to lunch, and the old chap is downstairs in his study. I could have put the heat pump on, but an innate meanness makes me feel I’d rather burn wood that I’ve already paid for, than use electricity that I’ll have to pay for in the future – probably through the nose.

I don’t often have a bath these days, mainly because I can’t trust myself not to go on adding more and more hot water, until I finally drag myself out, weak and exhausted from all the heat and steam, and need half an hour to cool down and recover. This seemed an attractive prospect this cold morning, so I put on the hot tap – hot first, so there isn’t a cold layer of water at the bottom, and sashayed off to make the bed.

I was waylaid by the thought that  I owed a thank you note to a friend for our dinner with them on Sunday night, so went to the computer instead. Thought I’d have a look at stats and notifications while I was there, replied to a few messages – suddenly remembered the bath! The water had reached the top, but at least was not over-flowing. But it had run cold, so I could put my hand in to let out some of the luke-warm water. As I stepped into this disappointing bath, I thought to myself – I may have to give up blogging.

I put my hand behind me into the soap dish and found it empty. Empty! I knew I’d put a fresh bar of Pears soap there only the other day. Why the old chap had to use the soap from the bath, when there were already three bars of soap in soap dishes in the hand basin was a mystery I grimly decided to solve. Three bars, because my son always gives me black Spanish glycerine soap to match my black and white bathroom. But the black soap does tend to stain white flannels, so I put an extra bar of inoffensive Pears glycerine soap there for flannel-using ablutions.

Soap has been on my mind since reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s  ‘Love in the Time of Cholera,’ a few weeks ago. One of many delicious incidents was between an elderly married couple, and how their marriage had nearly broken up thirty years before over a bar of soap. For a few days she kept forgetting to put a new bar of soap in the bathroom, and would remember each time she went in for her shower. On the third day her husband came out of the bathroom in a tantrum and accused her of leaving him without soap for a week.

Neither would back down. The petty argument developed into hostile silence between them, and he then went to stay at his club for three months – finally he had to come back home because they were re-furbishing the club, but he moved into another bedroom. He had to come through hers though, to get to the bathroom, so if she was in there, he lay on the bed, waiting. One day he fell asleep, and when he woke couldn’t be bothered to get up. “It wasn’t a week” he said. She then admitted she had meant to replace the soap each day.

It was the perfect illustration of the petty squabbles that grow into huge rifts, simply because no-one will back down, or admit they were wrong. I have some friends, married now for nearly forty years, and she told me they had had their first row the night they came back from honeymoon and moved into their first home. “Paul said the toilet roll had to have the paper hanging down behind, and I said it had to hang down the front.”

“What happened?” I asked. “I let him have his way,” she said … and she’s been letting him have his way ever since! So they’ve never had any power struggles because she just gives in. It’s when we change, that those sorts of rackets can cause relationship breakdowns. If both change, the relationship may survive, but if one can’t give up their need to control, then the other for their own self-respect has to go, or engage in endless power struggles.

There was no power struggle in this case. I simply asked him rather coldly why he needed a fourth bar of soap. The poor chap had no really convincing answer, unless domestic blindness qualifies, and in the interests of compassion I let him off the hook.

Glamping training? This is beginning to eat up as much time as blogging. Glamping is short for glamour tramping, and means we walk for some hours every day, while our luggage is delivered to our destination. We arrive at a comfy cabin, with a masseur waiting, a glass of wine and a platter of nibbles, before showering and enjoying the gourmet meal provided. We then relax into our freshly made up beds. The next morning we set off across another farm, the sea on one side, rolling hills on the other, to arrive at another destination equipped with masseur, wine, platter etc.

I’m ten years older than the friends I’m going with, and hoping I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew. Twice a day I set myself on the road, trying to get fit after months of sitting in front of the computer. After striding up and down a length of flattish road, I walk round and round the cemetery, figuring that I also need to practise walking on grass and rough terrain. I’m becoming increasingly nervous. The closer it gets I will need your prayers or goodwill, depending on whatever you think is appropriate !

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Reading Honie Brigg’s blog on her Italian holiday has had me in a fever of greedy desire as I scrolled down the pictures of their foodie feasts. Finally last night I could stand it no more, and cancelled the plans for our evening meal. The old chap didn’t fancy mushroom risotto, so he had a steak pie with all the trimmings, and I meditated over the risotto, fortified by a glass of wine.

Gently fry an onion in a little olive oil or butter – I use a bit of both so the butter doesn’t burn. When the onion is soft, add plenty of finely chopped mushrooms – I estimate three to four per person. When they’re soft, stir in three quarters of a cup of Arborio rice, or other risotto rice, and gently fry till the grains are translucent. Add a glass of white wine and let it bubble away. Then keep adding- in small amounts- hot chicken or vegetable stock – I used vegetable bouillon cubes for this emergency risotto. When the rice is cooked and has absorbed as much hot stock as it can take, I stir in a big knob of butter, cover it and leave for about five minutes.

Serve with plenty of freshly grated Parmesan, followed by salad, and eaten with a glass of wine, of course – in this case I had a bottle of Gewurztraminer already open, so it was that. And the whole thing- served in a big white Victorian soup dish with a broad blue rim – was delectable … and the nearest I could get to Italy.

Food for Thought

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.                                                                         The last lines of the novel Middlemarch by George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans. Great Victorian novelist, 1819 – 1880

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Filed under cookery/recipes, culture, great days, humour, life/style, Thoughts on writing and life, Uncategorized

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September 27, 2012 · 10:16 pm

A Soldier’s Life is Terrible Hard!

Too tired after Tai Chi to discover what I think today, so here’s a story instead… a soldier’s life is terrible hard, said Alice – when Christopher Robin went down to the Palace! It didn’t seem that way to me when I joined the army at eighteen.

I’d left school, and was mooning around at home not knowing how to get myself to university. I didn’t think I was pretty enough to be a model, or clever enough to be a nurse, so uni seemed the only option; until the day my military father came home and told me he’d made an appointment for me with the local recruiting officer. To say I was flabbergasted would be only a partial description. I was also deeply depressed, but consoled myself with the thought that at least I’d be earning money so I could buy books and records and bury myself in them.

So I signed up, and went off to be tested to see if I was officer material. And there I had a pleasant surprise – though I was the youngest, everyone else was young and full of fun – life began to look up. So when I continued to drive my parents mad dreaming around the place waiting for the date to join up, and my father would utter with relish threats like: “they’ll wake you up when you join the army”, and: “you’re going to get the shock of your life when you get there”, I wasn’t too worried.

I got there on the wrong day, just as I’d got the dates wrong all my life, taking half term holidays when every-one else was at school, arriving to catch the plane as it landed the other end, taking a train to Chester instead of York, or Birmingham instead of Cardiff. Everyone had given up meeting me off trains, because it was so unlikely that I’d be on the right one.

So my unheralded arrival at the depot caused great consternation, and several anxious conferences I discovered later. It was decided to park me with the recruit company which was already half way through its training. The quartermaster resolutely refused to issue me with a uniform, because it would screw up her account books, but was prevailed upon to allow me a pair of shoes in order to do all the marching I was about to embark on.

Not knowing the procedure, when they took me to the quartermaster’s stores, I took fitting my shoes as seriously as though I was in Russell and Bromley buying some fabulously expensive gear. I pinched the toes, checked the heels, worried about the width, and walked up and down trying several different ones for size, while the quartermaster’s staff looked on in dumb disbelief, and allowed me to get away with it, since I was obviously away with the fairies! Later I discovered that it was just a question of saying your size and taking what you were given. Innocence was bliss…

I was then escorted to the barrack-room, with a corporal helping me to carry my stuff. As we neared the entrance, I heard the clatter of seventy pairs of shoes thundering along wooden floors, and can still remember my subconscious thought, “ Oh, they must have taken the carpets away for cleaning”…

Since the Quartermaster – a fearsome figure – had dug her toes in over my uniform, I had to trail around at the end of the squad in my red raincoat, the only thing I’d brought with me. Every time the Colonel – another fearsome figure – saw my red mac, it was worse than a red rag to a bull, because she then trounced the Adjutant for the incompetence of everyone down the chain of command who hadn’t issued me with uniform. Thus, unbeknown to me, I became famous or rather, infamous throughout the depot.

Meanwhile I solemnly got on with the job of being a recruit, with a lot of help from my fellows, who thought I was going to be a clerk or a cook like them. Since I was out of sequence with the other officer cadets, I was in with a room of diverse and fascinating girls, some escaping the slums, some escaping their parents, others escaping an unhappy marriage, or a cruel employer. There were also two girls from the Gorbals, the notorious Glasgow slums, whose speech was salted with curses and swear words – most of them new to my ears.

One night, after another exhausting day of “by the right, by the left”, right wheeling, left wheeling, right form, and lectures, with the same programme on offer the next day, I got tired of their strident voices and obscenities keeping us all awake while we tried to get our much needed sleep.  So I said very crisply in my pukka Queen’s English, down the length of the barrack room – “Good Bloody Night”. There followed a deafening silence and I went straight off to sleep.

At lunch-time the next day, a deputation from the barrack room came to me, and asked me very seriously not to be corrupted, and start using bad language. They gently told me I’d been brought up properly, and they didn’t want me to be influenced by people who didn’t know any better!I promised them I’d be a good girl, thinking of my father, and wondering if he would think I was getting that shock to the system that was going to wake me up!

Because I’d muddled up my dates, when I emerged as a fully fledged recruit, my fellow officer cadets were still some weeks behind me, so I was a spare wheel. They invented a temporary rank for me, and I was called a Senior Private. I had the job of marching the new recruits to the cookhouse, which was no sinecure, because you had to remember the right military words of command, shout them loud enough for a long column to hear, and get them timed for the right feet to come to a halt in sequence.

My counting was a shambles, so they stumbled instead of coming to a brisk halt, and the worst time was when we’d reached the cook house and I couldn’t remember the word for Halt! Finally, as they were in danger of piling up against the door, continuing to march with no word of command to halt them, I shouted “Stop!” in desperation, and I could hear them all muttering things like, “we didn’t get the right foot… she didn’t give us the right command… what’s wrong with her”… responsibility is a terrible thing, I would have told Alice.

By now I was in a new barrack room with all the tough old hands, and one morning in the first week, someone dropped their highly polished shoes for parade, and exclaimed: “Shit”. There was a heavy intake of breath around the room, and then silence. She turned to me, and said “I’m sorry”. “Why apologise to me?” I asked in amazement. “Because we all decided we wouldn’t swear when you came into this room,” she said!

My poor father would have been sadly disappointed – coddled and protected, when was I going to wake up! Well, that’s another story! But a soldier’s life was terrible fun!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Feeling chilled after getting back from Tai Chi on another cold night, I decided to spoil myself as I collapsed into bed. Hot chocolate flossied up with some orange essence drops, since I hadn’t got a fresh orange, some drops of vanilla essence, and a tot of kahlua. I slept like a top.

Food for Thought

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.               Virginia Woolf   1882 -1941  renowned  writer who pushed the boundaries of literature.

 

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Filed under army, british soldiers, cookery/recipes, great days, humour, life/style, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life, Uncategorized

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September 19, 2012 · 12:40 am

Bloggers Addictions

I’m going through what can only be called a life crisis. Looking at my stats this morning I saw in that funny place called search engines, two separate entries, one saying ‘Valerie Davies died abroad’, and the other ‘Valerie Davies dies abroad’.

I tried to click on it to find out more about my death, feeling somewhat as Mark Twain must have done when he said that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated.

But it won’t let me click, so perhaps – since I feel very much alive – I’m in that place called limbo, where I gather, we spend some time reviewing our lives and our mistakes and our decisions.

This feels quite a familiar place to me, having spent or wasted quite a chunk of my life reviewing my decisions, and regretting my mistakes, and now I’m doing it in Bloggerland.

It’s four months since in blissful ignorance, I posted the first blog. If I’d read any blogs first, I might have started differently, but since I knew no better, when my friendly printer said he’d got my blog ready, and now all I had to do was to write, I believed him. Four months later, having worked my way through the most obvious Blogger Complexes, I’m now swimming in deeper waters.

Yes, there is that Bloggers Delight, when a reader writes a comment that blows your socks off with its intelligence, perception, kindness or goodness. There is also the Bloggers Delight of discovering a blog that sings to you, so you click the follow button without more ado. This can happen with both photos and the written word.

Then there are the Bloggers Friendships, when a select group of like minds read your blogs regularly, and leave comments that range from encouraging to loving – a unique form of friendship, in which goodness and mercy float across the aether, blessing him that gives and him that takes.

Bloggers Dilemma is the apparent randomness of whether a post is successful or not. The blogger writes a post, anticipating a nice spike in the stats, wall to wall ‘likes’ or a rash of interested comments, only to find a flat plateau, and few ‘likes’, and nothing much in comments. This leads to Bloggers Heart-searching: was it too long? Was it too short? Why didn’t they like it? Am I writing too often? Am I writing enough? Longer or shorter gaps? Should I take it off now, or leave it a little longer?

In its most extreme form, this Bloggers Angst is likely to deteriorate into Bloggers Breast-beating:  am I a bore? Do I kid myself in thinking that what I have to say is interesting? Am I old hat? Am I irrelevant? Was it a mistake? Should I stop blogging and get myself a life again?

Looking on the bright side of things is Bloggers Fancy, the logical conclusion of that wonderful hobby of Blog Hopping. Browsing through a blog and its comments, the wit, intelligence or humanity of a comment invites you to trace that blogger, and having found her and read her stuff, finding another like minded comment, jumping to that blog, scattering ‘likes’ and ‘follow’ with gay abandon. Which means that when one of these bloggees asks how you found him or her, you have no idea by what zig-zag path you got to them.

Bloggers Fancy can thus trigger a certain amount of over-indulgence, which begins to add up to Bloggers Burden. This is when the blogger opens her e-mails and finds dozens and dozens of tantalising titles, subjects and topics, all must- reads, all demanding her attention, and too little time on her hands.

Suddenly meals arrive late, ironing piles up, business gets pushed aside, weeding is forgotten, books are unread, nights get later. This is the stage when blogging slides from a Bloggers Hobby to a Bloggers Complex, before flowering into a full blown Bloggers Addiction.

And this is when we become defensive about the amount of time we spend on the computer. We hastily switch off when partners come into the room, pretending we’ve just been reading a book, or checking something. We find ourselves making meals a little more ordinary, no time to spend slaving over a hot stove any more, whipping up some fresh mayonnaise or concocting a tasty rice dish.

Pasta becomes popular, as it’s quicker to cook than potatoes when we’ve forgotten the time. Saucepans get burned as we slip away to the computer to catch up on just a few more blogs, while the eggs boil, or the soup heats up, or the potatoes cook. Sometime later the soup is stuck to the bottom of the pan, the boiled eggs are hard as cannonballs and about to explode in an empty smoking saucepan, and the potatoes are an un-mashable soggy disintegrating pulp.

This is the dark side of blogging! There are also Bloggers Challenges. I inadvertently stumbled into an impassioned defence of guns between a macho group of far right extremists, who all agreed that Jefferson had said they could all carry guns and defend themselves, rather than that he meant they could carry guns to defend their homeland. The Challenge was to move on before becoming either depressed or dismayed by an alien culture. There are, I discover, plenty of alien cultures in Bloggerland.

But the Challenge is a necessary stage of the Bloggers Rite of Passage, when we discover that though we all share the same planet, we actually live in different worlds. Bloggers Challenge then, is to find our own world. And the funny thing is, since birds of a feather actually do flock together, we do all find our own community of kindred souls. Not quite heaven on earth, but better than limbo. And it’s called Bloggers Blessing.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

While still plying my husband with steak and the like, I’ve given up eating meat myself in the hope of easing my arthritic hands, having tried everything else, like giving up sugar and giving up carbohydrates. Still eschewing the sugar, and hoping that the meatless regime will help. So this is one of the delicious non-meat dishes I’m enjoying.

It’s an Indonesian dish called Sambel Goreng Telor, which means eggs in coconut milk, and though it may not sound very promising, it’s actually delicious (and cheap).

This recipe is for four eggs. I use two, but still make the same amount of sauce. While the eggs are hard boiling,( and no clandestine checking of blogs) finely slice an onion, a large clove of garlic, a tomato and a red pepper. Fry the onion and when it’s beginning to soften, add the garlic, tomato, pepper, some salt and some sugar to taste, and continue to cook. Lastly add half a cup (I use a bit more) of coconut milk, and finish cooking. Slice the eggs in half and pour the sauce over. Serve with rice.

This recipe was adapted for westerners. I think that the original recipe would have used palm sugar rather than sugar – it also specified a tablespoon of sugar – this seemed a lot to me, and I used less.

Food for Thought

I love the juxtaposition of serious and ridiculous, so this parody of Kipling by Catholic priest and English writer Ronald Knox 1888 – 1957 just fits the bill:

The tumult and the shouting dies,

The captains and the kings depart,

And we are left with large supplies

Of cold blancmange and rhubarb tart

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Filed under addictions, bloggers, complexes, cookery/recipes, food, great days, humour, life and death, life/style, The Sound of Water, Uncategorized

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July 3, 2012 · 8:54 am

Ladies Who Lunch Merrily

This is A Winter’s Tale, and our escape day – from domestic blindness – not ours – from domestic chores – ours – and a chance for another belated birthday lunch (I said before that I spun it out!).

Off we drove to the winery, all flossied up with our little morale-boosters, pearls and rings and scarves and high-heeled boots naturally. We thought we’d missed the turn down a long, winding, muddy, country road, so I did a difficult u-turn and drove back to the main road. We searched for another turning, but finally admitted defeat and turned back to the first muddy road. Three minutes away said the signpost, so I took the second drive, since the first had barred gates. Half a mile from the road, the narrow track ended at a farm gate. Not the winery. I did a three point turn, but alas, the green grass hid a deep muddy ditch.

After grinding deep into the mud, I stripped off my coat, dragged some cardboard and a rug for good measure out of the boot, and tried to spread them in the mud behind the wheels. I’ll push, said my 75 year old Friend. Nothing worked. This felt like a midwinter’s nightmare.  Neither of us had a cell phone, and or could work one anyway. So I tottered down the muddy lane in my high-heeled black leather boots, but there was no tractor, car or person in the vista stretching to a far horizon of olive trees and grape vines, green hills and a few cattle. Finally, I saw a distant car turn into a drive, and called in a ridiculously faint voice, “excuse me,” which cut no ice across the distance. Finally puffing up to the house, I caught the woman as she carried her shopping inside. She wasn’t interested in the slings and arrows of our outrageous misfortune, but said when she’d got her frozen stuff into the deep freeze, she’d let me use her phone.

Ringing the winery, I blackmailed the maitre de shamelessly, saying unless they were able to send a tractor to rescue us, we wouldn’t be turning up for lunch. After a long interval while she searched for someone with a tractor, the chef (who else?) arrived in his four wheel drive. Nice young man, very over-weight, with jeans about fifteen sizes too small, and his builder’s crack positively worrying as he wrestled with a piece of cord between his car and mine. After watching him try fruitlessly to tie a knot that would hold (he was after all, a chef, not a mechanic) I turned away for the sake of my blood pressure, and comforted myself that there was always the AA. As I turned I caught Friend’s eye, the other side of the car, and we both hastily stifled our giggles. After a few more minutes of the increasingly catastrophic builder’s crack and knots that kept unravelling, we were both nearly hysterical with suppressed laughter.

Finally the chef instructed me to sit in the car and put it in neutral. Naturally this didn’t work. Again, my thoughts winged to the AA. Then another car arrived. The woman gardener from the winery. She had the thing sussed in no time. Wearing boots and workman-like trou, she strode into the breach and through the mud, told me to put the car in reverse and rev, while the chef backed his car. The gardener stood in front and lifted the front bumper, mud flew everywhere, and suddenly I was free.

After this comedy of errors, our chef dashed off back to the winery, some miles away, to get back to cooking for the waiting guests, while we followed the gardener in good time, and were escorted into the dining room with much courtesy. Phew.

Lunch was obviously going to be some time, by the time the chef had washed his hands and steadied his nerves, so we comforted our shattered ones with a nice glass of rose. By the time lunch arrived we needed another one, which was one more than our usual allowance. The pudding course was not as we like it, so we had affogato, Friend with cointreau, me with Bailey’s. By now, our liquor quota was about two and a half weeks overdrawn, but our spirits were soothed and mellow.

When we went to pay, the restaurant now empty, we explained to the maitre de who had answered our SOS that neither of our sick and elderly husbands was in a fit state to come to our rescue. This was like a red rag to a bull. “My father is such a burden to my mum, I think he should be pushed over the cliff,” she said fiercely. “He recovered from an operation with all the drugs and now sits around talking of nothing but himself. “ She didn’t seem to realise that she was talking about to be or not to be.

We got ourselves away after I told her that when it was my time, and age had withered me, I intended to grow a garden full of hemlock, and make myself a nice strong cup of hemlock tea, going quietly to sleep like Socrates. She thought this was a good idea.  And in spite of all the excitement and the excess, the merry wives from the winery still managed to drive home in a straight line.

So after much ado about nothing, all’s well that ends well, with apologies to Shakespeare.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

A storm has raged, wind and rain lashing the windows – more comfort food is needed. Today it’s thick lentil soup. All you need is two cups of red lentils, two  onions, three or four large carrots and some chicken stock or bouillon cubes. It’s a nourishing protein- rich meal in itself. And cheap too.

I simply fry the onions gently in a little butter till soft, grate the carrots into them and fry for a minute. Add the lentils, which have been well washed, and four cups of stock or hot water and bouillon cubes to taste. Simmer gently till soft, and then whizz to a smooth consistency in the liquidiser. In the old days we would push it through a sieve to get this lovely smooth consistency. Taste for salt. You can add more or less stock, depending how thick you want it.

You can flossie it up with a bacon bone, or a few chopped rashers of bacon, you can add garlic, bay leaves and a dash of curry powder. But I love the sweet simplicity of this recipe with the sweetness of the carrots off-setting the earthiness of the lentils. Serve with salt and pepper, and lots of chopped parsley on top, and with a hot roll and butter you have a filling meal. If you have plenty left over, you’ll find it thickens up over-night, and you might want to dilute it slightly with more stock.

Food for Thought:    Truth has as many skins as an onion.   Old French Proverb

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June 28, 2012 · 9:31 pm

Royal Power Games

Someone once said that you can see where people are in the family pecking order by watching who ends up doing the washing up!

Family power games can be fun to watch if you’re not part of the power struggle and we‘ve had a very public power struggle to enjoy in the last week, in one of the most famous families in the world. It wasn’t about washing up of course, but it was definitely about the pecking order.

I mean the Windsor family of course – its main members sometimes known in a popular skit as Brenda and her son Kevin and daughter in law Cheryl – probably better known these days as The Queen, Charles and Diana. The court has just announced a new Order of Precedence – meaning the Queen has decided who will have to defer to whom.

She’s decided that Kate Middleton is going to have to courtesy to the “blood princesses”, which means the two sisters known as Princess Beatrix and Princess Eugenie, both of them famous for their fantastic headgear at Kate’s wedding. Apart from being known as Fergie’s daughters, Beatrix has famously lost weight, and Eugenie always looks as though her mother has just run up her dresses on her Singer sewing machine at home.

Neither of them can get a job, apparently because no-one wants to employ two unqualified socialites who go everywhere with a burly bodyguard in attendance. A large chap sitting around the office drinking tea, in and out of the loo, cluttering up the photo copier, unable even to read a good book if he’s supposed to be on duty, stopping in-house terrorists from bumping off his charge, would be rather in the way in a busy office. So no jobs for princesses.

These two girls are the daughters of Andrew, Duke of York, once known as Randy Andy, but more recently as Air-Miles Andy. He earned notoriety when he had a job promoting British trade. During this career, a number of highly trained mandarins in the Foreign Office put their careers on the line by reporting that amongst other problems, his association with a notorious American sex offender, and his links with Gaddafi’s family, and with corrupt regimes like Kazakstan were counter-productive. He was also accused of exploiting his travel opportunities.

Soon after leaving this job, the Queen gave him one of her personal medals signifying her approval of her favourite son, and presumably her displeasure for those who had ousted him in the name of duty and patriotism. So no medals for mandarins.

Love is blind. So in this family struggle in which the Duke is reportedly also trying to wangle royal jobs for his daughters – which Prince Charles is said to be resisting – the Queen has obviously given in to Andrew’s pressure to have his daughters placed above Kate in the Royal pecking order, hence the new curtseying regime. The logic behind this is that the sisters have the blood royal, and Kate doesn’t.

Certainly Beatrix is the spitting image of her great- great- great- great- grandmother Victoria. Take away her red Fergie hair, and give her black hair coiled in a bun at the nape of the neck, and she would look exactly like the young Victoria in the beautiful Winterhalter portraits  with her husband Albert, and some of her eight children. Beatrix has the same protuberant eyes, sharp little nose and rosebud mouth and she’s also named after Victoria’s youngest daughter, who married a Battenberg, the same family as Prince Philip. But do these connections make her any more worthy of respect than beautiful, dutiful, middle-class Kate?

Prince Andrew’s wife Fergie and non-royal mother of the girls was called vulgar by royal courtiers at the time of their marriage, by which they probably also meant that she was tasteless.  Fergie’s bad taste included various toe-sucking lovers, a cringe-making session on the Oprah Winfrey show having public psycho-therapy, and an attempt to get money using Royal connections. A former principal of Goldsmith’s College in London (co-incidentally the princesses’ university) Caroline Graveson, a Quaker, once wrote that if the church had paid as much attention to aesthetics as to virtue, we would probably feel as strongly about bad taste as about sin…

I think she’s right, bad taste is actually a lack of discrimination, which was one of the virtues of the ancient Christian Desert Fathers. So this week’s public power struggle in which Mummy’s favourite (but rather shady) son has come out on top, dragging his daughters with him, is not just power play and egotism, but a triumph of dubious values over virtue.

Kate Middleton can be seen to be virtuous, even paying for her own clothes, unlike the late Queen Mother, for example. She practises middle class thrift, buying clothes from chain stores as well as couturiers, and dresses with understated elegance instead of being extravagantly fashionable. It’s her husband who drives a freebie, like the two princesses, who were all given a Chelsea tractor each (large gas-guzzling four wheel drives) by the makers.

If only we were flies on the wall, we would be able to see how cleverly Kate is able to circumvent this attempt to put her down… only entering rooms with her husband, so then she doesn’t have to curtsey, telling the girls with a laugh at the Sandringham breakfast table, that they can take the word for the deed? Not doing it, and waiting to see if they report her to Granny?

Games people play! …  especially in families, even when they don’t have to wash-up!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Winter food is comforting, often stodgy, and frequently fattening! This recipe is all of those things and delicious too, and I crave it in cold wintry weather. It’s a simple apple crumble, but not your dry crumby institution version, but a rich luxurious version, in spite of being an economical pudding using apples in season.

You need at least six cooking apples, but sweet ones will do if you have none.  Take eight ounces of flour (I use self raising for everything), and six ounces of butter. Rub them together like coarse breadcrumbs, and then stir in six ounces of brown sugar (white will do if you have none). If you like, add some grated lemon peel. This mix will keep for three or four days in the fridge if you want to make it in advance, and I’ve also made extra and put it in the deep freeze and brought it out when I wanted.

When you want to eat it, boil the peeled chopped apples with sugar or stevia to taste, and when soft pour into an oven- proof dish and cover with the crumble. Cook for 40 minutes in a hot oven. Sometimes I add a cup and a half of mincemeat to the apple, to make a Christmassy tasting pudding and even add a tablespoon of brandy. Sometimes I add a few ounces of ground almonds to the crumble to make it extra rich, when I’m feeling rich. It’s just as good with a tin of plums if you haven’t got apples, and sublime with stewed rhubarb, or apple and blackberry. Serve it hot with cream, custard, or crème fraiche if you feel like pushing the boat out. You can re-heat it.

Food for Thought                 We will be held accountable for all the permitted pleasures we failed to enjoy…..  reputedly from the Hebrew Haggada.

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June 26, 2012 · 2:12 am

Mental Knitting

With the rain lashing down and the wind howling round the house, it’s time to blob out by the fire. Some people blob out with TV or a DVD – I blob out with a book. And not just any old book.

Men often relax with crime or detective novels, depending what you want to call them, and science fiction. Time was, when men would devour westerns, but they don’t seem to be around these days… and these forms of escapism always seemed respectable. Intelligent men can boast that they read detective novels for relaxation, but women tend to admit somewhat shamefacedly to blobbing out with Mills and Boon – romance seems slightly down-market, while chick-lit seems okay.

I’ve often thought that Jane Austen was a sort of superior version of Mills and Boon – like the real thing – real roast beef and Yorkshire pudding as opposed to meat-flavoured  potato crisps. Jane had plenty of love interest, and concerns about position and status, just like a Mills and Boon paperback, but developed the same themes in beautiful elegant English, unlike Mills and Boon.

But sometimes you don’t want roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I go for the middle ground, not roast beef or potato crisps, but for the literary equivalent of chicken and chips. A lot of men would prefer something heartier than chicken and chips, but as a woman I could eat them forever. Which is how I feel about my favourite reading when I just want to be alive, but not to think.

I ‘m taking a long time to get round to owning up what is my favourite Jane Austen lite. Partly because I’ve spent a life-time concealing it,  partly because as soon as I divulge the name, or people get to see the rows of books on the shelf dedicated to Jane Austen lite, I get superior remarks, patronising jokes and some male derision, as though I’m reading some sort of trash! I was greatly relieved to read a few years ago about a very intelligent woman who used to hide the latest book from our favourite author in the covers of something acceptable  – like ‘The Great Gatsby’, or Shirer’s ‘The  Third Reich’. At least I wasn’t the only one with these apparently laughable lowbrow tastes!

I knew exactly how she felt. But I’ve come out of the closet now I’m old enough and tough enough to put up with people’s scorn – based mostly on ignorance, I should say – because anyone who’s read these books knows that they are full of wit and fun, well written, historically accurate without being boring, and often deal with themes like self esteem, the evils of gambling and racing, the value of good manners and integrity, and best of all, they END. They don’t leave me hanging in the air, the story unfinished, and fashionably enigmatic. And even better, the good always triumph over the evil, the dreary, the boring and the unwise!

Years ago, whenever I felt a bout of chronic fatigue syndrome begin to close down on me,  I’d stock up with bars of caramello chocolate, and stop at the bookshop where they had a permanent stock of the latest re-prints, even though the author had been dead for some years. Armed with these essentials, I’d drive home and collapse into bed, and read until the fatigue closed my eyes. Nowadays I don’t have that excuse for reading these books. Instead I take them when I’m too tired to concentrate on anything else – mental knitting. I know them practically by heart now and have to rotate them .But the wit and the fun remain intact, familiar though they are.

So this is my private pleasure and mental knitting, and Sylvester, and The Grand Sophy, The Devils Cub and The Reluctant Widow, Frederica and Arabella relax me and send me off to sleep, just as surely as a good brandy or a bout of bad TV does for others.

Georgette Heyer is the hallowed name of my secret vice. Are there any other devotees/fans out there?

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

In the cold days of the Antipodes winter, I’m thinking comfort food, and what better than the old fashioned and very economical toad-in-the hole. The combination of (good) pork sausages, and batter, baked in the oven, served with well buttered, mashed potatoes and baked beans in tomato sauce, or a good tomato and onion sauce, is homely, tasty, cheap and filling.

You can either have a crisp batter or a soggy batter. I always incline to the soggy sort, but will give both recipes. You need one sausage person. For soggy batter:  take four ounces or four rounded tablespoons of flour, good pinch of salt, an egg, and a quarter of a pint of milk mixed with a quarter of a pint of water. Break the egg into the flour and salt, and gradually add the milk and water. Then beat well. Leave in the fridge for at least half an hour or longer.

Heat two tablespoons of fat (not oil) till smoking in the roasting pan. Take out the batter and give another quick beat. Then pour it into the smoking pan, and lay the sausages in it at regular intervals. Bake for an hour in a hot oven at 200 degrees. This amount will serve four, and if you want to feed more, just double the amounts. For a crisper batter, simply use all milk, and no water.

Food for Thought

Look to this day: For it is life, the very life of life… For yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision.                                         But today well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore to this day.             Sanskrit proverb

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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 19, 2012 · 8:53 pm

A Brave New World

The bright frosty days have gone. It’s midwinter, and the storm is around us, the wind thrashing through the trees, the waves crashing on the rocks below so there are two rolling layers of incessant sound surrounding the house. And it’s now four weeks – four weeks since I started blogging, writing, posting, wondering, checking, counting, puzzling and feeling I still don’t know how to do it!

The writing’s the easy part, the lovely part, the part that makes my heart sing. It’s all the rest which is a challenge.

First of all, a big thank you to people who’ve made comments, and people who’ve contacted me via their blogs. I still haven’t learned how to get back to you with my appreciation, but am determined that by the end of the next four weeks of blogging, I’ll know my way round the communications side of it. And then there are the blogs I’ve discovered that I’d love to make contact with, but am gagged by my incompetence.

When I began, at my daughter’s suggestion and one of her special friends, and thanks to my printer, Peter Harris, (www.ebookuploader.com)  I had no idea what fun it would be and what a journey it would be too. As a computer illiterate, I hardly knew what a blog was, though I’d heard of them!

Saturday afternoon four weeks ago I sat at one end of the phone, with Peter the printer on the other end. He talked me through, and when we got to writing a post, he told me to put something in the space for a title. I wrote ‘Goodbye Cat’. Now write the blog, he said. So I typed in my requiem to my beloved cat, pressed the button, and sent it out to the unknown world!

The next day one of New Zealand’s best known bloggers, Graham Beattie, generously posted my site on his blog. Thanks to him, an awful lot of people looked at it (though they haven’t since!) and the first comment came from this country’s only Booker Prize-winner, writer Keri Hulme. It was like being handed a bouquet, or being patted on the back by the head-mistress!

Since then, I’ve rushed to the lap-top every morning while the kettle is boiling for my early morning cup of tea in bed. Because we live in the Antipodes, the rest of the world is awake when we’re asleep, so there are always good surprises awaiting  in the morning. Two readers from Finland, I crow triumphantly to my husband –  five from Denmark, someone from Japan, two in Hong Kong, a whole lot from the UK, some from Canada, some from India, someone from the Philippines… this may all sound very small beer to most people, but to a newbie it’s magic, and gives me a real thrill every morning.

I see the name Finland, and visualise the snows of winter, the bright woollen clothes people wear, reindeer, and the lakes and islands and birch woods in summer; Japan, and the huge red sun sinking over the horizon at Narita airport, antique silk kimonos, and the miniature  origami cranes made from toffee papers by an Air Japan air hostess; they live in a tiny walnut box lined with red velvet.; Hong Kong, and Star Ferry and the junks streaming out to sea for a night’s fishing as I watched them from my bedroom window at Repulse Bay; India, and the romantic  pink palaces of the maharajas, beautiful women  in rainbow-coloured saris, elegant men in jodpurs and bright turbans; Canada, the lakes, the prairies and the hardy people who fled the War of Independence instead of becoming Americans; the US, the flaming autumn woods of New England and the Grand Canyon, the long beaches and blue Pacific of the West Coast; and England, grey stone walls and rolling dales, green meadows and cottages nestled into wooded hillsides, hazel,  honeysuckle and wild roses in the hedgerows; Denmark, and the grey beautiful architecture of Copenhagen, pretty Crown Princess Mary, and the Little Mermaid in the harbour… It feels as though the world comes into this tiny cottage by the sea every morning, as I read the names of the countries.

It’s tantalising not knowing whether it’s the same people who come back to read, and I realise I just have to flag many who won’t come back. And I can’t follow the various tables, graphs, and arcane words like tags… but I’ll get there in the end. I’m told by one of my nearest and dearest’s that I shouldn’t write too often, or I’ll wear people out, and they won’t have time to read all my posts. Point taken.

But in the mean-time, hello to all the friends and people who have peeked at this blog so far, all six hundred and eighteen of you. I hope some of you will go the distance with me, and hope too, to find new contacts and friends and readers as the weeks and months slip past. I don’t worry about drying up, because life doesn’t dry up… so I’m here for the long haul, the fun and the friendship – so ciao and arrivederci, shalom and aloha, farewell till we meet again in this brave new world. (probably tomorrow!)

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

I started adding on this little foodie thing because I love food, and have so often been hard up, that I’ve become expert at eating well but cheaply. I hope to give others in the same boat some ideas they may not have thought of!

So following on from yesterday, and stretching a tin of salmon to feed several. There are few items in the store cupboard so versatile. This time it’s a salmon soufflé which is dead easy to make and looks fabulous. Many people panic at the thought of making a soufflé, but if you can make a white sauce, you can make a soufflé. So once again open the tin of salmon, pink if that’s all you’ve got, red if you feel rich, and drain off the liquid into a cup. Once again make a fairly thick white sauce, and add the salmon liquid, salt and pepper. The only extra ingredient you need for a salmon soufflé is three large eggs.

Separate the yolks from the whites, and taking the pan off the stove, stir the yolks into the white sauce. Then stir in the salmon. Now whip the egg whites till they’re stiff, and lightly fold them into the salmon mixture. Pour into a greased souffle dish if you have one, and tie some greaseproof paper round the top so it supports the souffle when it rises. Or use a bigger casserole, and don’t worry about it popping over the top. But if you’re serving this to guests it does look spectacular to use the greaseproof paper version. Bake in a moderate oven for 35 to 40 minutes and serve at once, before it all sags! Eaten with salad and hot rolls, this will serve three or four people. I also make a parsley sauce to serve with it, and cook some new potatoes and green vegetables instead of salad and rolls. (The recipe for white sauce is in the previous blog)

Food for Thought  

 It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.            From ‘The Little Prince’,   by French aviator, poet and writer, Antoine de Saint Exupery

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June 17, 2012 · 12:54 am

Paradises Lost

The spice of life! Synchronicities or benevolent coincidences, as they’re sometimes known, have been coming at me fast this week.

It all started with reading the autobiography of an old soldier, General Carton de Wiart VC etc etc, who had one eye and one arm by the end of all his wars, and had been shot in the face, leg, stomach, ankle, leg, hip and ear on different occasions!

He was supposed to be the model for Evelyn Waugh’s Brigadier Hook in ‘Sword of Honour’, but there was a lot more to him than that. What intrigued me  was that having married the daughter of a European prince, who sported a stately eight names, he moved easily around pre-war European aristocracy, ending up living in a hunting lodge in the Pripet Marches between wars, courtesy of his ADC Prince Radziwill.

Then, picking up a book at random to read in bed the next night, I took Patrick Leigh Fermor’s anthology of his best bits. I read of his stay with Hungarian aristocrats outside Budapest, and a way of life now gone, and was fascinated, as I had been by Carton de Wiart’s  entree to this civilised European way of life. The sons of the houses had all been educated at English Catholic schools, Ampleforth, and  Downside.

These Europeans all spoke the same languages, and shared the same culture. Later Leigh Fermor stayed with a Rumanian family in their castles, playing bicycle polo with both the family and the footmen. They were tightly knit communities of families, both peasants, servants and owners’ whose lives all intertwined in what seemed like a centuries old alliance. And these families too, had been educated in England. At this level of society, friendships were international, something which has almost disappeared in the aftermath of World War Two.

Leigh Fermor had famously kidnapped a German general in Crete during the war, and his accomplice, Billy Moss, married a Polish aristocrat, a refugee from the war living in Cairo. Her Tarnowski family also lived in civilised pre-war European splendour, their homes filled with Titians and Rembrandts, family servants and international guests – their story told in a book called ‘The Last Mazurka’ – written by the last of the Tarnowski’s.

What struck me about all these families stretching across the continent from Poland and the edges of Russia through Hungary down to Rumania, was how the war destroyed this way of life, for both the families and the symbiotic communities they lived in. Centuries of beauty, loyalty, civilisation, all gone. And mostly they disappeared under the hands of the Nazis, and then Communist takeovers. The Rumanians were taken from their castles, the men sent to slave labour, the women to live in garrets far from their homes, as Leigh Fermor discovered when he went back to trace his friends from decades before. Most people were too frightened to talk to him. Much the same happened in Hungary and Poland, while Carton de Wiart’s hunting lodge in the Pripet Marshes disappeared in the same destruction.

And now I read from a Facebook friend, about the passing of her family’s way of life in East Prussia. In her soon to be published  novel ’ Last Daughter of Prussia’, Marina Gottlieb Sarles writes of the same centuries old story of beauty, decency and goodness destroyed by the Second World War – in the maelstrom of hell created by Nazis and Russian Communism. Her story is about the heroic escape of the lucky ones. Those left behind faced the horrors of starvation, un-imaginable tyranny and soul- destroying surveillance, as in Poland, Hungary, Rumania and elsewhere.

Writer Julian Barnes wrote recently that history is “where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation”, but that seems to me to be an account of political history. These stories of paradise lost are the real histories – the  truths  about people and their ways of life – broken by ideologies and decisions of distant demagogues, tyrants, far-away bureaucrats and politicians of the twentieth century.

Books like Marina’s, stories like Leigh Fermor’s, memories like Carton de Wiart’s, tell us more about our past than the official histories. Their stories are the spiritual logbooks of mankind, and maybe now, all our blogs are becoming part of that stream of consciousness too… 

Read more about Marina’s story : www.marinagottliebsarles.com  

Food for Thread-bare Gourmets

A tin of salmon and some pancakes means a delicious lunch or supper for hungry gourmets. Make the pancakes according to the last recipe – they can be made ahead of time. Open a tin of pink salmon – red if you’re feeling rich – and drain off the juice into a cup. Make a fairly thick white sauce – melt an ounce of butter, stir in a heaped tablespoon of flour, slowly add warm milk, or a mix of milk and hot water. (If I do this, I add a bit of cream too.) Let the sauce bubble and cook for a few minutes, stirring all the time, so it doesn’t stick or go lumpy.

To the white sauce, add salt and pepper to taste, the juices of the salmon, and lots of chopped parsley. Break up the salmon and add to the white sauce. Spread this mixture down the middle of each pancake, and fold over into three. Lay on a flat dish, sprinkle quite lavishly with grated Parmesan cheese, and gently re-heat in the oven. Serve with a green salad, and some hot buttered rolls, and it feels quite luxurious.

Food for Thought :  The unexamined life is not worth living.

 Socrates, Greek philosopher condemned to death in 399 for allegedly corrupting the young. He drank the poison hemlock, and as he breathed his last, asked for a cock to be sacrificed to Asclepius, the god of healing. This was taken to mean Socrates’ joy and thankfulness at passing over into another world.

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