July 9, 2012 · 4:20 am

Dedicated Followers of Fashion

One of the things I missed most when Princess Diana died, was that all the fun seemed to go out of fashion.  Suddenly there was a vacuum, which wasn’t really filled by the celebrities who dressed to get attention – Royalty doesn’t have to dress to get attention..

But now we have another beautifully dressed woman to enjoy. Diana’s daughter- in- law, her son’s new wife.  And Kate Middleton has assumed Diana’s crown with elegant ease. For the last year, frivolous empty- headed women like me who enjoy looking at exquisitely dressed, beautiful women, have had a feast for our eyes. The Queen’s Jubilee has actually been a banquet, because the Queen too, has looked a picture in the most wonderfully coloured clothes designed for the most part, by her dresser, Angela Kelly. Angela Kelly is a fashion story in herself, having been a housekeeper at the British Embassy in Germany. When she was introduced to the Queen on an official visit, when a gap occurred later, she invited the housekeeper to become her dresser. An amazing relationship has flowered between them, there is always laughter when the two are together, and Angela, rescued from organising embassy dinners and counting other people’s tea-spoons, took to fashion to the manner born. She has now started her own design house, with the Queen as a walking advertisement for her taste and flair.

The once infamous Camilla, second wife of the heir Prince Charles, has also blossomed this year, appearing in a succession of wonderfully over- the- top hats, and elegant unfussy clothes. Even notoriously under-dressed Princess Anne has taken the trouble to appear in some delicious pale pinks and eau de nil, and even some pretty hats during this time of national rejoicing for the Queen’s 60 years on her throne. The Royal women have looked like a bunch of pretty spring flowers, with their petalled hats, soft clear colours, and pale shoes at the various events where they’ve clustered together.

But Kate takes the biscuit. With her long dark hair and long slim legs, killer heels and cheeky hats, she always looks ravishing in the understated little dresses, coats and suit she chooses. Some of them are couture, some of them are cheap as chips. But it doesn’t matter who makes them, she always looks wonderful. It cheers up the morning when I Google UK newspapers and see Kate once again beaming across the front page, dimples flashing, slim, leggy, gorgeous.

It also cheers me up to know what she achieves in the way of style – not exactly on a shoe string, but shopping wisely and well. I do the same myself! There’s not a factory sale or a charity /opportunity shop I don’t know the inside of in various parts of the world. A real silk cream shirt in a Plymouth op-shop has taken me to various weddings and dinners, teamed with black velvet trousers bought in a factory sale in Auckland, and black shoes from the local Chinese import store. So cheap and comfortable I bought three pairs, which cost less than one good pair of shoes, and which lasted for three years – I was bereft when I had to ditch the last pair this year. However, I was able to replace them with a natty black patent pair found in a half- price, end- of -season sale.

So Kate and I have a lot in common! I used to think that thinking about clothes was the mark of empty-headed frivolity, but when I was 17, I had the good fortune to live with my step-grandmother for six months, and she lent me her favourite book. It was Vera Brittain’s ‘ Testament of Youth’, and I cried all the way through. It was about her fiancée and friends killed in World War One, and I felt I understood my grandmother much better after reading it. But the bliss of it was that Vera, a solemn, somewhat humourless early feminist, described her clothes in detail – I still remember the terra-cotta coloured hat and dove-coloured outfit she described wearing, when she went to meet the boat-train and the man she ended up marrying. It was a Eureka moment. I realised it was possible to love clothes and still think intelligently. Thank you, Vera.

So I continue to drool over Kate and her clothes. Today it was Kate and her sister, the famous bridesmaid, whose elegant derriere practically caused strong men to weep all over the world, and sitting together at Wimbledon they were an unbeatable combination. In the eighteenth century two similarly beautiful sisters, also from an ordinary background, took London by storm with their beauty. Crowds gathered wherever they went, and they needed bodyguards. The elder, Elizabeth Gunning, married one duke, and when he died, married another. Her sister Maria married an earl and died young. Probably from lead poisoning from the makeup she loved to wear.

The Middleton sisters remind me of this glamorous pair, and when Kate and Pippa sat in the Royal box at Wimbledon, the one in white, the other in a pretty blue and white flowered dress in a somewhat eighteenth century style, they looked as captivating as the  legendary sisters. Beauty and fashion are still a fascinating phenomenon and still draw crowds.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets.

The cold weather and the longing for comfort food goes on. Soup warms us up, but sometimes it’s not a meal in itself, and that’s when a pudding comes in handy. Good old rice pudding is one of those standards that’s always welcome in this house, but it must be made properly, with the rice really creamy, and a good nutmeg topping to it.

You need two ounces of short grain or pudding rice, and a pint of boiling milk. Grease a pie-dish, and pour the boiling milk on the rice in the dish. Stir in two to three ounces of sugar, and dot the top with butter. Sprinkle with nutmeg. Cook for an hour to an hour and a half in a slow oven, until the rice is soft and creamy. This can be eaten on its own, or with a spoonful of raspberry jam as we did during the war, or with some stewed fruit – plums are good.

Food for Thought

In the overabundance of certain things I find vulgarity. Thus I object to an overcrowding of furniture in the sitting room, to a whole bunch of writing brushes beside the ink-slab, too many images of Buddha in the chapel, too great a profusion of stones, trees, grass in a garden…  Things that I feel can never be overdone are books in book receptacles and rubbish on the rubbish heap.

Yoshida Kenko, 13th century Japanese hermit monk, who was a soldier before retiring to his hermit hut.

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July 6, 2012 · 1:03 am

The Love of A Lion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

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

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

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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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July 1, 2012 · 12:04 am

Young Men Walking to Their Death

Ninety- six years ago, my step-grandfather stepped out with thousands of other young men on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. It was the first of July, 1916.

He was a north countryman from Northumberland, and the four Northumberland regiments were the first to walk into battle at 7 30 am on a blue sunny morning with the birds singing. The four Geordie regiments stepped purposefully towards the German lines which were supposed to have been bombarded into nothing, the barbed wire cut by the bombardment also.

For a moment, they walked into the sudden silence, and then the German machine guns began to fire. The guns simply swept the battle field, as their targets continued walking steadily towards them, and line after line of brave young men fell. These regiments belonged to what was known as the New Army, bodies of men who had joined up from their towns, villages and workplaces, calling themselves names like the Grimsby Chums, and the Manchester Pals. They had set off that morning believing that this battle would end the war.

Percy, my step-grandfather, didn’t become one of the 60,000 dead British soldiers killed on that one day, but just one of over 30,000 wounded. He was a young officer, and like them all, easily distinguishable to the German machine-gunners. Officers went into battle wearing their service dress, collar and tie, shining leather Sam Browne belts, and carrying a pistol, not a rifle. By the end of the day, 75 per cent of officers had been killed, compared with fifty per cent of men. The three colonels of the four Geordie regiments were dead, the fourth badly wounded.

Percy was shot in the face, and later buried in a huge crater after a mine had exploded. He was found four days later, still alive – just – and he grabbed a helmet lying on the ground to drink from it and quench his terrible thirst. The helmet was full of chemicals and poisons from the battlefield, and Percy ruined his insides. The face wound healed, he was returned to the battlefield,  and unlike so many of the men who endured the hell of the First World War, he survived to see peace.

The day that 60,000 brave young men died on the Somme was the worst day of that terrible war. Waterloo was accounted a bloody battle, but Wellington lost only 25 per cent of his army, 8458 men. El Alamein, an eleven day battle, cost 1,125 men a day, while on D-Day the British and Canadian casualties cost 4000 men.

So my grandmother, living in a north country village, had seen all the young men march proudly through the streets on their way to fight for their country, trumpets blowing, banners flying, girls throwing flowers. Now all the houses had their blinds down, mourning their sons and husbands, brothers and fiancees, friends and neighbours. It wasn’t the same back in Germany. The Germans had not been slaughtered. For every seven British soldiers killed, they had lost one, from a much bigger population.

Paddy Kennedy, a soldier with the Manchester Pals, another regiment which was destroyed that day, helped to take a German post at Montauban. In the German trenches he found a small black frightened kitten, the pet of a dead soldier. Feeling sorry for it, he fastened it inside his pack, and took it with him. During lulls in the fighting he took it out and played with it. A few days later, he gave it to the company cooks as a mascot, and got on with his job… The following year, the kitten, now known as Nigger, went back to England hidden in a soldier’s battledress. The young man took it home on leave to his family in Rochdale, and left it with them. He was killed at Passchendale shortly afterwards. But Paddy Kennedy, who’d gone back to Manchester after the war, had not forgotten the cat. Throughout the twenties he went to visit Nigger at Rochdale.

This reminded me of the Dogs Cage on the beach at Dover. As the soldiers arrived back from Dunkirk in 1940, hungry, wounded, shattered, they brought with them dogs and puppies which they’d rescued from the deserted, burning town of Dunkirk. Since rabies could not be allowed to invade the British Isles, the commanding officer at Dover organised for the dogs to be labelled, and their addresses recorded; and after six months in quarantine, these French dogs were delivered to their rescuer’s homes around the British Isles. I suppose that by then they knew what ‘sit,’ and ‘stay’ were in English…

These loving actions by soldiers in the midst of fighting, somehow ease the heart when one reads the horror of those battles. So when I think of Percy and all those other wonderful young men, whose deaths wring the heart – “theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die”, I think of their kindness and courage and decency – and try not to think of the stupidity of the generals and politicians who sent them to die.

Do other families have their stories?

Food for Threadbare Gourmets.

Like the soldiers of most recent wars, when my military husband (first one) and I were down to the bare boards at the end of every month,( since we had married too young and didn’t get any allowances) we opened a tin of bully beef . If you’re really up against it and hungry too, this recipe is good value.

Fry a few onions in a little oil and butter. When soft, add some curry powder to taste, just enough to give some flavour, and fry a little more. Then add the chopped- up tin of bully beef, a few tomatoes if you have them, and a squeeze of tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, pepper – salt if it needs it, or any spices you think would taste good. Stir-fry this altogether. Sometimes I might add a tin of baked beans to the mix. If it’s dry, add some water and a chicken bouillon cube and some flour to thicken it. Stir the flour into some water till the lumps have gone, before adding to the mix and cook for a few minutes. Serve hot with plenty of creamy mashed potatoes and some green vegetables. Not an elegant dish, but tasty and filling!

Food for Thought

Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.

The prayer of Cavalier  Sir Jacob Astley before the Battle of Edgehill 1642

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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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June 14, 2012 · 5:27 am

Farewell to George

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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