Tag Archives: history

October 24, 2013 · 11:36 pm

Birds of a feather

100_0479My heart was in my mouth. I was sitting at the traffic junction in our small town where six roads meet and compete for the lights.  Would the traffic stop? A duck was slowly waddling across the road with a clutch of tiny ducklings in tow. They made it to the pavement which would lead them along to the river in the middle of town, with just one hiccup over two slow ducklings who stopped to drink from a puddle, and which an impatient woman nearly cleaned up as she got tired of waiting.

This is the duck season. We become very conscious of them as they shepherd their progeny across busy roads, oblivious of the killing machines skidding to a halt yards from them.

A friend told me how in the middle of the busy village street, he stopped to let a mother pass while her babies all scuttled to safety on the pavement, but she wouldn’t move from the middle of the road. As he wondered how long she was going to obstinately stand there, suddenly two recalcitrant toddlers made a dash from the other side to catch up with their mother and siblings. Ducks can count!

The same thrush (I think) who made life difficult for us last year, by nesting in the honeysuckle by the side door of the garage has returned, and I in-advertently uncovered this year’s nest as I began to trim the overhanging ivy on the arch into the garden from the garage. I saw with horror a beautiful blue egg in the exquisitely woven little nest, and hastily covered it with strands of the trimmed ivy.

I blocked the arch with a rake and a hoe and a plank of wood across the top of the steps to stop anyone using it, so now everyone has to go the long way round from the garage. (see pic above!) I tiptoed up the next day, to check if the bird had returned, and as I stood peering intently into the tangle of ivy leaves, I suddenly realised that a beady yellow- rimmed eye was staring at me. I backed away very slowly, apologising softly for my intrusion.

A grey heron unexpectedly circled in front of my car as I drove between spring- green trees and hawthorn hedges encrusted with white blossom this morning; and I noticed that the striking paradise ducks with black, white and sherry coloured plumage who mate for life, seem to have disappeared from their usual haunts – to tend their nests too, I presume.

Driving home in the dusk a few nights ago, I saw what I thought were burrs on the road in front of me, but they were moving. As I swerved, I realised that the tiny balls of black fluff rolling to the side of the road were probably paradise duck babies. They all start off as balls of fluff, and then the brown mallards develop tiny yellow legs and webbed feet that scurry frantically across the road, beautiful little creatures with not an ugly duckling among them.

Years ago as we walked down the lane by our house, being towed by two shaggy afghan hounds and a cavalier King Charles spaniel, I was consoling the children about the village fete, and their spurned handicraft entries.  “The thing is,” said my ten year old daughter, “other mothers think their ugly ducklings will grow into swans, but you think we’re swans already!”

Not surprising when I thought about it… swans had been part of my life as a child. We lived close to a lake called the Backwater. It had once been a tidal inlet, until the local authorities had built a bridge which blocked the flow from Weymouth Harbour. Until then the tide had washed up and down this long channel, where there’s evidence that the Romans once had a small port at the end of the inlet where we lived. There’s a legend that later, when the Vikings made their first raid on England at Portland just round the corner, they also pushed their way up the Backwater in AD 787.  Later the Saxons settled around here among local British tribes who‘d been inhabiting the area since Mesolithic times – 12,500 BC. (Genetic experiments have shown that a significant segment of the modern population here are descended from those original Mesolithic inhabitants.)

 When I knew the Backwater, neither  Stone Age coracle nor Viking long-boat could have rowed up the now tide-less water, for thick beds of reeds had spread to give safe cover for the big, white mute swans to build their nests and hide their cygnets. I used to walk my dolls pram down to the edge of the lake and throw them bits of bread. On the grass the other side of the road edging the water, the Americans had had all their tanks and armoured vehicles lined up row on row before they left for D-day, thus reversing the ancient pattern of invasion, and taking fire and sword back to the mainland.

There are so many legends and folk tales about swans, the commonest being that their nearly ten foot wide wing span can break a man’s arm. This is one of the long-running jokes in Sue Townsend’s gloriously funny book, ‘Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction.’ Adrian buys a trendy flat in a disused warehouse alongside the river, and discovers too late that a posse of swans consider this place to be their territory. Everyone who visits the hapless Adrian ends up warning him, “A swan can break a man’s arm, you know”.

They mate for life too, and I love the names of the different species: as well as the mute swans, there are trumpeter swans, whooper swans, tundra swans, and the Bewick, a sub-tribe of the tundra clan. The biggest populations of wild swans live in Russia, and it’s believed that the only reason swans didn’t become extinct in England un medieval times – since they were good eating – was that though everyone cut a notch in the feet of their own swans, birds without the notch were considered to be the sovereign’s property and protected by a royal swan herdsman. This preserved the native species. And as for cygnets, who can forget the all male corps de ballet who performed at Covent Garden, and then made their breath-taking and tantalisingly  brief appearance in the film ‘Billy Eliot?’

We only have the non-native black swan here, immigrants from Australia who now populate various lakes around the North Island in great numbers. I remember my disbelief when I saw the one black swan on the lake at Kew Gardens as a little girl. I love them now. The evil black swan queen in Swan Lake gives black swans an undeserved bad name – they are elegant, peace-loving family-oriented birds, loyal to each other, male and female raising their families of cygnets together year after year. 

It seems appropriate that all our swans here are black, when I consider that New Zealand’s  national colour is black… the All-Blacks play rugby, the NZ cricket team wears black, as does our Olympic team, the America’s Cup yachtsmen  and all other sports teams. And statuesque Maori women look magnificent in their black mourning with wreaths of green leaves around their heads, as they perform the ancient karakia or grieving  chants with their graceful waving arm movements. Black is indeed Beautiful in this country !

 

Food for threadbare gourmets

A green-thumbed – or is it green fingered –  neighbour generously left a bag of goodies outside the door the other day. Among them were delicious, tender young leeks and green cauliflower. They deserved a dish of their own so I used a recipe I’d just found. Steam enough cauliflower to fill a cup when mashed. Cut the leeks into rounds, and sauté in butter until tender. (I always put a little oil in too, so the butter doesn’t burn) Mix the cauliflower and tender leeks with an egg, a good quarter of a cup of flour, two tablesp of parsley and one of chopped dill, a good grinding of black pepper and half a teasp of salt. Form the mixture into patties and fry on both sides. I sprinkled them with plenty of Parmesan, but I would think crumbled goats cheese would be good too. Next time I try them I shall use coriander, and mix in some crumbled goats cheese.

 

Food for thought

From Midrashim: Proverbs 6.6

Go to the ant, you sluggard,

and watch it lug an object

forward single file

with no short breaks for

coffee, gossip, a croissant,

And no stopping to apostrophize

blossom, by-passed because

pollen is not its job,

no pause for trampled companions:

consider her ways – and be content.

David Curzon, born 1951 – poet, essayist, translator and United Nations official retiring in 2001.

 

 

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September 30, 2013 · 9:50 pm

Home, history and a house

After three years in foreign parts – tropical ones, with only bougainvillea, cannas and frangipani to excite me, I found myself walking in an English field of shiny buttercups and shimmering green grass … hawthorn hedgerow cascading with pink and white blossom on one side, river on the other. I could hear a cuckoo. It felt like very heaven.

I was eighteen and this was how I had remembered the scenes of my childhood… shades of Sir Walter Scott’s:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead

 Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land…

We were living in a house lent to us by friends, far out in green hills and deep valleys. Offa’s Dyke was reputed to end in our garden, just above a huge S-bend in the River Wye. Offa lived from 757 to 796, and invented the penny. His dyke separated Mercia from Wales and stretched for ninety-eight miles from north to south. Whatever the truth of the rumour, behind the un-used stables there was a huge mound stretching into the back garden from the fields and woods beyond, and covered in hazel and hawthorn.

 Our nearest market town sported a magnificent ruined castle stretched above the river, and further out, poetic Tintern Abbey. And at nearby Devil’s Pulpit, a rocky outcrop looking over the river and across to the abbey, there was the usual legend of someone leaping his horse over in the dark, and coming to a sticky end far below.

The house was part Queen Anne and part Georgian, with a charming regency style wrought iron porch stretching along the garden side of the house. It looked over a lawn, where two ancient lime trees hummed with bees in summer, and seemed like silent sentinels in the wintry mist which hovered among their thick tangle of branches in damp winter months. Beyond the lawn was a ha-ha, but not deep enough to keep out the piebald pony who led a small herd of young steers through the gate-posts, up the drive, over the ha-ha and across the garden while every-one else was at church one morning.

By the time I’d rushed downstairs to shoo them away, they had meandered on into the little sheltered garden with a sundial, and pushed their way through the scraggy hedge which gave onto a lane, leaving only their deep hoof-prints.

The lane led down to a farm house, but before I got there, I would branch off through the woods with my puppy, and take the winding path which meandered down to the river. Just below the tree-line, and in the grass which borderedthe riverside was the ruin of a tiny fifth century church, only its outer walls still standing, empty windows framing the sky, ivy climbing part of the grey stone walls, and tangled brambles guarding the foundations. In spring the woods were filled with bluebells and windflowers. It too seemed like heaven.

The house was faded and gentle, dreaming in the silence of the country-side, no neighbours within sight. My bedroom had pretty flowered wallpaper, pale green painted thirties furniture and long windows looking over the garden. It had a soft sweet atmosphere. The other place that I loved, and where I spent solitary afternoons engrossed in a book was the so-called ballroom. Not a grand one, its claim to fame being the ceiling which had been copied from some famous library in a grand house.

Apart from the large and somewhat threadbare faded old carpet on the polished floor, the only other furniture in the room was a big drab-green brocade-covered Knole sofa, and a large gilt mirror over the carved fireplace. That was all I needed. On sunny days I sat on the cushioned window seat, on other days I curled up on the sofa. When I shut the door the silence and the solitude were absolute.

In the drawing room where everyone gathered, I amused myself by reading ancient copies of bound Punches from the book-shelves, and cracked up over stiff Edwardian jokes. Once, after a fearful row in which my step-grandfather took my side, calling me his little high-brow, I managed to get the wireless to myself to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and so I dreamed around the place, head in the clouds, picking flowers, adopting two wild kittens as well as the puppy, and driving everyone else mad.

I didn’t know anyone, but once a boy nearby invited me to a hunt ball at Tintern, and the rather erudite and elegant bachelor who lived on the corner further down, in a house filled with books and good furniture invited us to a pre-ball party. I thought he was much more interesting than my escort, and found the ball very dull, spoiled with too many in Malaya.

In Jane Austen’s time I suppose I would have loved the older man hopelessly, and ended up marrying the boy. As it was, I was catapulted into the army, my father hoping that “it would wake me up”.

Thirty years later on one of my trips back to England I went to see the house. I hardly recognised it. The beautiful grey stone walls had been covered with suburban ‘pebble-dash’ cement and stones. The grounds seemed to have been subdivided anda boring brick bungalow built in the new area. A row of dark evergreen windbreak trees replaced the charming informal groups of old deciduous trees down by the vegetable garden, and the ha-ha seemed to have been filled in. I wished I had never come back.

I drove sadly on down the lane. Walking through the woods, nothing had changed there, and thirty years had passed over the ruined church with barely a blink. Just a few more stones tumbled off the end wall, and the empty windows more crowded with ivy. Nature is gentler than mankind.

These memories were prompted by reading Clanmother’s lovely blog on Tintern Abbey

http://ladybudd.com/2013/09/29/tintern-abbey-on-the-banks-of-the-river-wye/#respond

So it looks as though my tea-break is over… it’s been a busy one, with lots of family commitments as well as my own, but I’ve been so touched by messages from my blogging friends  – with so many blogs to read, I find it truly wonderful to be remembered and to receive so many messages encouraging me to return. Thank you all, so much. My word press settings seem to have changed since I took my tea-break, and I can’t work out how to put in pictures or any other paraphernalia, so in some ways this is an experimental post!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Ah well, Friend and I have been at it again. Meeting to have a glass of wine to catch up and discuss the mechanics of hiring chairs glasses etc etc for an eightieth birthday party she’s organising, we take to heart the dictum of always having something to eat with the wine. We’ve discovered a wonderful new spread to eat with a small chunk of roll.Roast a couple of aubergines, and scrape out the flesh into a blender. Pour in a cup of cashew nuts, ground coriander and ground ginger powder to taste, the juice of a lime or a lemon, and salt to taste. Whizz this into a thick textured paste and enjoy with relish and some bread or biscuits!

Food for Thought

A grace found in an old book of recipes…

Lord, forgive us that we feast while others starve.

Bishop Charles Gore at a banquet

 

 

 

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July 21, 2013 · 4:38 am

Not Royal but Remarkable

100_0175The attention of the whole country was focussed on a charming country house set amid quiet leafy lanes. Everyone was waiting for the Royal baby to be born. The Royal mother had gone home to her mother to have her first baby, which would be the Queen’s great grandson. And it would be the first time in history that there had been three generations of heirs to the throne. When the baby was born, he and his mother stayed with their grandmother at White Lodge for another six weeks.

 So many people wanted to congratulate Princess May, who later became Queen Mary, that a marquee was set up on the lawn for hundreds of people to sign the visitors’ book. Queen Victoria came over from Windsor to see the baby, bringing her grand-daughter Alex, and her fiancée- soon to become last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia and eventually meet their fate at Ekaterinburg.

 History repeats itself. A hundred and nineteen years later, another mother- to- be and baby are keeping everyone waiting.  Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge is going home to her mother’s country home for six weeks, and her baby is also the third in line to the throne. But her baby is the lucky one, whatever lies ahead. And this baby’s great grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, is also awaiting news of the birth at Windsor.

 The baby born to Princess May was David, better known as Edward V111, the only king to have abdicated. His mother was not a natural mother, and left him to his nanny. She used to pinch the baby before he came into the room in the evening to see his parents, so he entered, crying, and was hastily sent back in disgrace to his nanny. When he was three this woman had a nervous breakdown, and it was discovered that she had not had a day off in three years.

 The next generation was this Queen, and her mother used her own old nanny – Alah, who gave the Queen and Princess Margaret a happy tranquil childhood. This was not the case for the Queens’ children, who had a fierce old dragon to look after them. Like all the Royal children before them, except for Queen Alexandra’s, Charles and his brothers and sisters too only saw their mother for an hour before bed-time, and for a short time in the morning. Someone who knew the Queen well has commented that if she had given her children the same time and attention she had given to her horses, things might have turned out differently.

 We all know that Charles’ wife Diana was a devoted mother. But she was back at work within two months carrying out Royal duties, leaving William in the care of his nanny Barbara Barnes. He adored her, and one day after Diana found him cuddled up in bed in the morning with his nanny, she couldn’t cope with this competition so Barbara Barnes left when he was four…  a huge emotional blow for him.

 So his decision and his wife’s to manage without a nanny is a huge breakthrough in the pattern of Royal maternal and emotional deprivation! Catherine – as she is known in her family rather than the media’s Kate – is the daughter of a devoted hands- on mother. Carol Middleton has endured many slights for her humble background as a working- class builder’s daughter, and as an upwardly mobile air hostess.

 But the slim, elegant figure in pale blue who arrived at Westminster Abbey for her daughter’s wedding is a remarkable woman. When her children went to Marlborough other parents said they just gave up – they couldn’t cope with the care that she gave her children right down the beautifully embroidered and hand sewn Cash’s name-tapes on their clothes. We all had these name tapes in my day, but most people use indelible marking pencils these days. She didn’t just give her own children hampers of tuck food, but also supplied a girl from a broken home with a hamper too.

 When her flamboyant younger brother who she had always mothered, was set up by the press for a drug sting, rather than belabour him for the bad publicity, she rang and apologised that because of their public profile with Kate, he had been targeted. She’s kind, sensible and conscientious.

 And as everyone knows she is the creator and driving force behind the thriving business which supports their now rich life-style. When Catherine was born, her mother devised a little business from her kitchen table so that she could stay at home with the children. From this grew their party-bags empire.

 William spends much time in her home with great enjoyment, savouring the tight-knit family and loving informality he never knew. Carole Middleton sounds as though she’ll be the perfect grandmother – always there, experienced, loving, and well-adjusted. So this baby, born in the green English country-side will have all the good fairies ranged on his/her side, and people watchers and royalty fans will have a new and intriguing family saga to watch.

 And the builder’s daughter born in a council house, brought up by working class parents with the values of hard work, thrift and good manners will be the the most important maker and shaper of a modern king or queen – if the monarchy lasts for another fifty years.

 Walter Bagehot, the Victorian authority on Royalty famously wrote that a ‘Princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact”, and the birth of a new prince or princess to a couple who we’ve followed with various degrees of interest for years is magnified also. To see Diana’s son emerge from all his childhood traumas to become a father in his own right is of immense interest to many of us, monarchists or not… there’s something irresistible about watching glamour and goodness combined with history, high fashion, drama and domesticity. And this is where Carole Middleton- grandmother- waiting, steps onto the stage to join the other players !

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

 I get bored with bread ! So sometimes I make something else to go with bread and cheese – this is a courgette loaf, good with soft blue cheese, or even just good old Cheddar. Mix two cups of SR flour with one cup of grated courgette/zucchini, half a teasp salt, one teasp mild curry powder, and a cup of grated cheese like Cheddar.  Add a quarter of a cup of oil, one egg and one and three quarters of a cup of milk.

 Lightly mix and tip into a greased loaf tin. Sprinkle the top with grated cheese and bake in a hot oven for forty minutes or so until brown. Switch the oven down after ten to fifteen minutes if it starts to brown too quickly. Serve warm with butter and cheese for a tasty supper…

 Food for Thought

 The feminine principle is the eagerness to collaborate rather than compete, it is the eagerness to relate rather than stand out as an individual, it is the longing for harmony and community and caring and nurturing.

 Lynne Twist –  Global activist, fundraiser, speaker, consultant, coach and author. Dedicated to global initiatives that serve humanity.

 

 

 

 

 

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April 1, 2013 · 2:50 am

Carrying On With The Army Again (part 4)

100_0179

This is the continuing story of ‘my brilliant career’ in the army! I had returned from my regime of prayer and fasting, otherwise known as a Religious Leadership course, none the wiser, but many times lighter from the in-edible food provided along with regular religious services by the Army Chaplain’s Department..

Back at my all women unit I prepared for my next adventure, and another opportunity to meet the young men we yearned to fall in love with, but never got within coo-ee of. Going on a  course was the only opportunity of meeting the opposite sex, so this time I’d sent my name in for a fire fighting course.

The instructions told me to bring a boiler suit. This did not bode well for a non-athletic person, but I accordingly went to the quarter-master, a grim north countrywoman who’d served all through World War Two, and didn’t approve of frivolous young things like me. Accordingly she issued me with a khaki boiler suit with its outrageous measurements listed on a label stitched to my bottom. It was so huge I had to wear a belt round the middle of my newly skinny frame to keep it up, and was, as I assumed the quartermaster had intended, a perfect antidote to any masculine interest!

Arriving at the squalid house where a harpy ripped off the army by giving us abominable food and beds, I walked into the ante room, where a group of attractive -looking young men stopped talking and sat in frozen silence, while I wondered what on earth to say or do. Luckily an old boy friend arrived and took me out to dinner (my last decent food for a fortnight), and told me that while he waited for me to go and change, one of these young men addressed the room, and declaimed: “What was that!”

The next day we all gathered at the Maidstone Fire Station. We began with a long introductory lecture, the gist of which I found hard to follow, as the Chief Fire Officer repeatedly emphasized that there would be no blue jokes and sexual innuendo. Every time these remarks were re-iterated, the various young men stole sideways looks at me, and I sat there completely mystified. But after a few days of lectures, when the practical work began, light dawned. From now on, as we reeled hoses, and ran up and down directing icy water, and manhandled female couplings, man holes, male-female connections and a number of other technical terms, I realised what these kindly firemen had tried to spare me!

Every day when we staggered back to our digs on freezing foggy December afternoons, I for one, was absolutely shattered with reeling and running and sliding down greasy poles and even climbing out of a tower on what seemed to be a piece of white cotton, and being lowered to the ground. (where my knees gave way from the aftermath of terror, and I fell on them).

I made sure I was first into the bathroom to warm up with a hot bath, and it was only on the last day, I discovered that the extreme chivalry of my fellow sufferers had caused them to hide from me the fact that that was the only hot bath in the cistern. There was no more hot water until the next morning when I had my early morning bath! On the last day too, the lovely men at the Fire Brigade staged a ceremony at which they gave me their badge mounted on a piece of leather for me to wear as a medal, and said I could come back and join their brigade any time I wanted.

Back to my nunnery at the depot, I thankfully forgot about fire fighting, and never gave it another thought. Two years later, when I had unexpectedly been made a captain at the early age of twenty two, I was posted with this rank to another all-women unit – the training centre! Did they have something against me at the War Office?

When I was taking over the job from a much older and rather sporty woman who drove the latest model expensive sports car – a cream TR4 –  she pointed out that I would also be taking over as fire officer from her as well.  “Did you do that awful course at Maidstone?” she asked in her clipped tones.  I nodded, feeling slightly intimidated by this very assured person. “Some bloody Amazon had done it just before me,” she continued, “and I was expected to run around and climb out of towers and generally behave as though I was on an outward bound course.”

Good heavens, I thought to myself. That must have been me. Didn’t I have to do all those hefty horrendous fire- fighting exercises? No wonder the Maidstone Fire Brigade had taken me to their hearts, given me their badge and offered me a job! My fire fighting duties here at Liphook were not too onerous, and consisted of regularly inspecting the seven rather dim General Duties soldiers, allotted to us to do any heavy work. When lined up for inspection they looked rather like the seven dwarfs. Our fire-fighting equipment consisted of rows of three red – painted galvanised steel fire-buckets filled with sand lined up outside each hut, along with a stirrup pump. Naturally we made sure that the ancient stirrup pumps were in good working order!

The camp was surrounded by bracken covered heath which often caught fire, and I would hear the Liphook volunteer fire fighters sounding their siren. One night I turned over hearing the siren again, and was just sleepily thinking that it sounded much nearer than usual, when my bedroom door flew open, and there stood my stout colonel, fearsome in riding breeches and a duffle coat flung on over her pyjamas. “That’s Our fire alarm,” she barked!

To be continued ! Three previous instalments of this account of my brilliant army career are in the archives under: ‘A Soldiers Life is Terrible Hard’ and: ‘Carrying on with the Army.’

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

 

I’ve spent the Easter break knocking up dinners, lunches and morning teas for relays of family and friends who’ve come every day of the holidays. At the beginning of the holiday I baked a fruit cake which would last for the whole holiday, moist and too filling to gobble up.

It’s simplicity itself. The basic recipe is one pound of mixed fruit, half a pound of butter and a bit less of sugar, three eggs, half a pound of flour, pinch of salt and vanilla. You simmer the fruit in a little water until soft, then add sugar, butter, essence and salt, and when cool add the beaten eggs and the flour. Bake in a medium to slow oven for an hour or until cooked.

I’ve never made the basic recipe. I add extra fruit, things like chopped dates, finely chopped figs and sometimes prunes, a spoonful of fig and ginger jam or apricot, I use brown sugar, treacle or golden syrup instead of some of the sugar, and sometimes add spices and nutmeg, or orange and lemon juice…ginger marmalade…  sometimes ground almonds, or oatmeal or whole meal flour – anything that I think will be delicious! It never tastes the same, but it’s always moist and more-ish. I dredge the top with sugar, so it has a nice crisp sweet top. Simple!

 

Food for Thought

Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song – the joy that makes the earth flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its tears on the open lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.

Rabindranath Tagore, the very sound of whose name is poetry, is one of my favourite poets. He was a Bengali, and lived from 1861 to 1941

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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January 24, 2013 · 10:55 pm

The Pursuit of Love and Other Interests!

 

 

 

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When I was twenty and longing to fall in love, I came across a book that seemed made for me. It was called The Pursuit of Love.

But far from being chick-lit (a term which hadn’t been invented then) it was an elegant, deliciously funny work of literature. Back then with no internet, and no Wikipedia, it was almost impossible to find out anything about the writer, Nancy Mitford, but when her next book appeared, I was waiting with eager open hands. Since however, a whole library of books has been written about Nancy Mitford and her extraordinary six sisters.

Actually The Pursuit of Love has wickedly funny descriptions of most of her sisters, and her parents too. Uncle Mathew – her father – having passed into legend. Nancy was the eldest, and had a series of love affairs and a miserable marriage until she met General de Gaulle’s chef de mission, a philanderer called Gaston de Palewski. She fell hopelessly in love with him, and after the war moved to Paris to be near him, swallowing his other affairs with difficulty. She went on to write a series of witty and sparkling best-sellers, including historical books. She was probably the most brilliant of the sisters.

Pam, next in line, was superficially the least interesting of the sisters – her idea of bliss was working a farm and milking. Poet John Betjeman wanted to marry her, and wrote poetry about her, but she ended up marrying a famous physicist, millionaire and amateur jockey, who won the Grand National, the most famous race in England, and also became a much decorated RAF pilot. There’s no room here for more of his extraordinary life and serial marriages! But when their fourteen year old marriage broke up, Pam became a lesbian, a farmer, bred dogs, and practised re-cyling so obsessively that she was the laugh of the family – but in hindsight, may have been one of the first conservationists.

Diana, the next, was a great beauty, and like all her sisters possessed of great intelligence and spirit. Married for a couple of years to a rich Guinness heir, she threw it all away for love of Sir Oswald Moseley, another philanderer, who was ravishing not only his wife but her two sisters at the same time that he was  seducing Diana. When his wife died of appendicitis, Moseley, founder of the British fascists, the Blackshirts, married Diana. As fascist friends of Hitler and co, their wedding took place in Goebbel’s home, and Hitler strolled over from his office with a wedding present, to celebrate the occasion with them.

Back in England when the war broke out, Diana and her husband were imprisoned as potential traitors for most of the war, and Pam looked after their children. After the war, the Moseleys settled in a famously beautiful country home outside Paris, where he carried on his trouble making politics and his philandering, while Diana wrote and edited a fascist magazine plus her books. She never recanted her belief in the goodness of Hitler, and to her dying day said what had happened was exaggerated, or that his underlings had done it without his knowledge.

Unity the fourth sister, a tall imposing blonde, went to Germany to learn the language and fell in love with Hitler. Being a snob, as well as a racist, he found the blonde Aryan- looking aristocrat  intriguing, and they became good friends. She introduced all her family to him, except for Nancy, and her two younger sisters. They were all very taken with Germany’s dictator who showered favours upon them. When war broke out, Unity shot herself in the head, but survived, and Hitler paid her medical expenses, and sent her on a special ambulance train to Switzerland, from where her parents could retrieve her. It caused a sensation! Unity survived until three years after the war, with the mind of a twelve year old, incontinent, and confused. She died of meningitis caused by the head wound.

Jessica ‘s story is in The Pursuit of Love – how she saved all her pocket money throughout her childhood for her running – away fund, and on meeting Esmond Romilly a troubled and truculent nephew of Winston Churchill, they eloped together at eighteen to join in the Spanish Civil War. Nancy Mitford’s account of their escapade is very funny, she had a gift for sending life up. Back in England, their first child died at a few months old, and they went to the US, as convinced communists.

When war broke out, Esmond joined the air force, and was killed, leaving Jessica with a daughter and no money. Eventually she married another communist and they had numerous problems during the McCarthy era, when they worked to help blacks in California. She made a name for herself in America writing books exposing scandals like the funeral parlour business – The American Way of Death etc. and her best- selling autobiography,‘ Hons and Rebels’.

Deborah, the youngest, married a Guards officer. His eldest brother, who was married to President Kennedy’s sister Kathleen, was killed in Normandy, so the young guards officer became the Duke of Devonshire. John Kennedy, Deborah’s brother in law was very fond of her, and invited her to his In-auguration where she sat beside him to watch the parade, and she attended his funeral of course, broken hearted.

As chatelaine of Chatsworth, one of the greatest houses in England, she restored it, made it a prosperous business so the family can afford to live there, and preserved all its treasures so the public can enjoy them too. She opened farm shops, bred and showed dying breeds of hens, cattle and ponies, has written wry witty books, preserved her marriage to her alcoholic philandering husband and survived several miscarriages to bring up a happy family.( So many of the Mitford girls’ men seemed to be both powerful and philanderers, unlike their rigidly upright father)

The story I like best about Deborah was when war broke out when she was nineteen. She was staying on a remote Scottish Island in the Hebrides with her mother, and had to get her goat, her Labrador and her whippet back to Oxfordshire. To get from the island there was a long walk from the house across a slippery sea-weed covered causeway at low tide to reach their boat. This meant leaving in the dark at 6.30 am. Once in the boat and having reached the Isle of Mull, there was another long and hazardous walk over rocks to the tin hut where their car was kept. From here she drove across Mull to catch the ferry to the mainland. The ferry took three hours to get to Oban, where she waited all day with all the animals for the London train. To pass the time, she went shopping around Oban. Accompanied by the goat and two dogs, and buying their lunch from a butcher and a greengrocer!

The train arrived at Stirling in the middle of the night, where she had to change trains and wait an hour for the London train. She took the animals into the first class waiting room, which she characteristically mentions she shouldn’t have done since she only had a third class ticket. Here she milked the goat, and gave it to the dogs to drink. Then off to London in the train, a taxi to her sister Nancy’s house, where the goat cleaned up her garden while they waited another two hours for the train to Oxfordshire. Now that’s what I call an epic journey. Deborah is still alive and lively at ninety three, her son now being the present duke.

The only son in this extraordinary family whose father, Lord Redesdale, prospected fruitlessly for years in the 1920 Gold Rush in Ontario, was a lawyer, musician and soldier who was killed in Burma. Book lovers like me have a whole library on this coterie of girls who were related to, or knew many of the main players in history at that time, including Winston Churchill who was their uncle. There are all their books, their letters to people like Evelyn Waugh, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, autobiographies, biographies, their novels plus memories of them written by others – a real niche market – and I have them all. Like ‘em or hate ‘em, they were an extraordinary phenomena, who unself-consciously lived lives less ordinary.

And this is why I prefer fact to fiction – facts are so interesting and truly, in that old cliché – so much stranger than fiction.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

This recipe for courgette slice was given me by a friend twenty five years ago. It’s one of the most blotched and spotted recipes in my book, as I often use it at this time of year when courgettes /zucchini are cheap and plentiful. The original recipe used three slices of bacon, but I use a tin of salmon. Beat five eggs, and add a chopped onion which has been gently fried in butter, a cup of cheese, chopped bacon or drained tin of salmon, and about four or five grated courgettes – 12 ounces in weight. Mix well with a cup of flour and half a cup of oil, add salt and pepper, and if using salmon, a good helping of dill.

Bake in a moderate oven. I serve it hot with new potatoes, green vegetables, and sometimes make a quick tomato sauce, frying tomatoes in olive oil, adding a little sugar, salt and pepper. I prefer it luke warm or cold, when it’s good with salad and summer vegetables. It’s great to take on a picnic, and cut off slices, or in a packed lunch. This amount serves six, but I often make double the quantity and freeze one.

Food for Thought

“Through respect for Divine Order, patience is cultivated. This brings knowledge of proper timing. In that is great intelligence. Often other issues and other needs have to be worked out before your plans can unfold, before your place can be set at the table. By respecting all things, and most especially Divine Order, you will attain peace and patience. Through this, you will be directed to the most efficient use of your life, so that you can experience self respect to the fullest…”

“ Love Without End – Jesus Speaks”  by Glenda Green

 

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September 21, 2012 · 10:51 pm

Follow The ( American) Leader

What IS a modern leader? A – a politician with pots of money and a longing for power?  B – an idealistic altruist who wants to help humanity?  C – a petulant six year old wanting to play with grownup toys?

Frequently A and C are combined, and it seems to me that this is the sort of leader most of us get these days. I read a report the other day that the most successful leaders also have the character traits of a psychopath. This certainly explained a lot to me.

But do we really need leaders who are psychopathic, spoiled rich men, politicians who’ve compromised and bent their principles until they haven’t got any? Bring back The West Wing I say, at least we had decent men then, even if half of them were alcoholics, workaholics and egotists of various shades. Oh gosh isn’t it possible to think about leaders and leadership without thinking negative thoughts like that?

I’ve thought of other leaders, people like US Grant, who right at the beginning of the Civil War, on his first march with the civilians he’d trained, found that few of them were ready for the first stage of the march. The next day was the same. The third day he set off at the agreed time, leaving the stragglers behind. No threats, no harangues, just marched off without them. Boy, did they scramble to catch up, and he never had any trouble again. A man of his word, and one who never wasted them. (Also a man who loved animals, never went shooting, punished his men if they ill-treated their horses, and refused to attend a bull fight in his honour in Mexico when he was president)

But great soldiers don’t seem to make great heads of state. Grant made a hash of his presidency because he didn’t understand power games and trusted corrupt politicians. Eisenhower was not as successful a president as he was a genertal (towards the end of his presidency when he spent most of it on the golf course, the joke was that the White House was known as the Tomb of the Well-Known Soldier). Even the Duke of Wellington, when he was made prime minister, made a mess of it.

Interestingly, none of these leaders seemed to show the psychopathic traits that successful heads of state are supposed to need (presumably, Hitler, Stalin and Mao were role models for this type of leadership – and I wonder about Putin).  Lyndon Johnson would have been a prime example of this sort of leader in the west, with his iron controlling will and ambition, which is not the same as wisdom and judgement. Jimmy Carter by contrast, a reasonable man who was the exact opposite of Johnson, didn’t make a second term.

The whole world is watching the contest going on in the US at the moment, and yet after having watched the West Wing, we are now so savvy about the constraints and checks on a president’s power from his lobby groups, senators and congressmen, and their need for votes from satisfied voters, that we know that maybe the man is not who matters , but the party and its policies.

And yet at the same time, thanks to TV and media outlets, we still see the parties’ figureheads as personifying the policies. So when one hasty or ill-chosen word can trigger riots and violence all over the Middle East, and terrorism in our own countries, it matters terribly who is speaking for America and by inference, for the West.

So we all have our preferences, hoping that the man we think thinks most like us will win. One of the things that made non-Americans love John Kennedy, regardless of his politics, was that he seemed to value the rest of us all around the world, and to see us as partners in the progress of the planet.

Since then, other presidents have often seemed to us outsiders as thinking that America matters more than the rest of us. Yet the day of 9/11 actually showed us how the world is a village, that we are all connected, and people shared and grieved collectively all around the world. And people all around the world also grieved for loved ones they too had lost in New York that day. So it’s never been possible to think since then, that what happens anywhere doesn’t affect us all.

What happens anywhere does matter to us all, whether it’s the third year of drought affecting American farmers, and the consequent drop in their earnings, and the raising of food prices around the world, to honour killings in Pakistan and the ripples of hostility that go round the world, raising levels of distrust.

So when America chooses its leader, we long for a man who can see the rest of us as valuable inhabitants of our world, not just fodder for American corporates peddling pesticides, milk powder, GM foods or arms.

Many of us are beginning to understand Nurse Edith Cavell’s words. She was the English nurse executed by the Germans for nursing wounded soldiers of all nationalities, whom they shot as a spy in 1915. Her last words were: “Patriotism is not enough”. We are beginning to understand that if something doesn’t work for one country, then it will affect us all; that western countries can’t go on supplying arms or polluted goods or subversion in the name of diplomacy to other parts of the world and not be harmed ourselves eventually.  ‘My country right or wrong’ is now an outmoded concept for the citizens of the twenty-first century.

Most importantly in a world where nuclear arms are commonplace, is to know that our leaders are not ambitious patriots, or frightened six year olds who can press a nuclear button without thinking it through. Tsutomu Yamaguchi who survived Hiroshima, and then dragging himself to his family in Nagasaki, survived a second atom bombing, said before his death in 2010, that: ‘Nations with nuclear armaments should be lead only by women who are breast-feeding.”

I’d go further than that, and say that maybe all nations would be better led by mothers who are breast-feeding. And I don’t need to explain why, do I?

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

This recipe comes from a little book of risottos by Anna del Conte. The page is badly thumbed and stained, and it’s one of my favourites, though I’ve adapted it slightly. Risotto al Limone, risotto with lemon.

Simmer five cups of vegetable or chicken broth, and keep it simmering all the time. Sauté an onion and finely chopped celery stalk in two tablespoons of butter. When they’re soft mix in a cup and a quarter of Arborio rice or similar, and stir for a few minutes till the rice is translucent. Stir in two thirds of a cup of broth until it’s absorbed, and continue to do this until the rice is cooked. You may not need all the broth.

While this is cooking, thinly pare the zest from an unwaxed lemon, and chop it into six fresh sage leaves and the leaves from a small sprig of rosemary. Stir this into the rice halfway through cooking. Squeeze half the lemon into a small bowl, and combine with an egg yolk, quarter to half a cup of freshly grated Parmesan cheese, quarter of a cup of cream, a little salt and a good grinding of black pepper. Mix with a fork.

When the rice is cooked, add this to it, plus another two tablespoons of butter. Cover and let it rest for a minute or two. Give it a stir and serve immediately with more Parmesan if you want. Serves two greedy people over-generously, three well behaved people comfortably, and four as a starter. If I have any left over, I mould it into patties, sprinkle with flour, and fry to make a delicious light meal.

Food for Thought

Prayer obviously produces results, otherwise millions wouldn’t pray.                                                                                                                       Krishnamurti    1895 – 1986  Indian spiritual thinker and teacher

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July 27, 2012 · 1:36 am

A Village is a World

‘Pet Pig Lost’ read the notice pinned on a telegraph pole as I drove into the village.

My heart turned over. I do hope no-one catches him and eats him, I thought, and then banished the thought before it could take wings. This was a serious matter, but two days later the notice disappeared, and I heard that the pig had come home. He had better luck than a neighbour’s labrador, which being old and doddery wandered off in the wrong direction after he’d gone out for his late night pee. His owner searched frantically into the night, and then gathered the neighbours to search all next day. Finally, 36 hours later, someone realised they’d heard intermittent barks down in a wooded gully, and there was the poor old thing, he’d fallen into a drain and couldn’t get out, being too frail and arthritic.

This is the stuff of life in our village ( we also have births and deaths, strange accidents and surprising elopements). It’s made up of four hundred and fifty permanent residents – fishermen, retirees and the rest – and at weekends and holidays, what are known as weekenders. We’re a mixture of teachers, builders, mechanics, writers, potters, painters, lobster fishermen, retired professors in disciplines ranging from botany to marine biology, one ballet dancer who is now a choreographer, so we have our very own dance company, a lady who threads beads and makes necklaces, an odd job man, a mountaineer, a reiki teacher, a weaver, a sewing lady … the list could go on, but you get the picture – a mixed bunch. We’re Kiwis, English, French, German, American, Canadian, South African and Australian.

The first settlers landed in this beautiful place in the 1860’s. Their names still people the bowling club teams, the volunteer fire brigade and the library rosters, they adorn the grave-stones in the cemetery and the war memorials, the names of roads and rocky bays. The first family who landed, arrived from England, bringing a tent which they set up on the beach at the end of the harbour, the first Europeans to set foot here. They were joined by settlers from Nova Scotia who had originally come from Scotland. They had found life in Nova Scotia so hard, that after several consecutive years of the crops failing,  they packed up their lives after 30 years, built a couple of ships, and sailed off with unbelievable courage and optimism, to find another promised land.

They found it here, and once more set to, to chop down trees for their homes, and clear land of bush and forest to plough and plant their food. The nearest provisions were several hours of sailing down the coast to Auckland, or a long ride through untamed and unmapped country, to the nearest small town of a few hundred people.

So women made their own clothes, and carried and boiled the water for the copper. When the clothes had boiled in the copper, they pulled and pushed them through the mangle, and blued and starched them and hung them out to dry on bushes and make- shift lines with a forked branch as a prop, before the labour of ironing ; heating up the irons on a fire and testing to see if they were hot enough by spitting on the base to see if the moisture sizzled. They cooked and preserved and baked and dried and salted and bottled the food. If they ran out there was no store nearby to re-fill the larder. Those were the days, and they were also the days of my childhood, when neighbours were forever popping over to each other or sending a child to ask for an onion or an egg, or half a cup of sugar or milk. Neighbourliness was an absolute necessity of life, particularly in childbirth.

People gave each other lifts in their carts. The men helped each other fell the trees and saw the planks for building their homes, they lent their horses for the ploughing, and joined together to fence their fields, plant hedges and crops, cut the hay, build the hayricks, and even grind the wheat which they had to grow, or go without. Ships of supplies might berth at bigger ports like Auckland, but if they missed a tide or were caught in storms, then the supplies didn’t arrive. These settlers started their own school and paid the school mistress out of their own meagre pockets, and built the schoolroom, and found accommodation for the teacher.

And they made their own fun. They put on their Sunday best for church, they organised picnics, and sang round the piano, and formed a brass band… it was astonishing how many people learned a musical instrument then, and could play dance tunes on their violins or their flutes or mouth organs. And people whistled in those days, and sang songs to each other. They read aloud to each other at night by candle-light, and the children played hopscotch and five-stones and marbles – games that encouraged highly developed eye and hand and foot co-ordination . They skipped and played ball, and the boys played endless games of foot ball, kicking stones all the way home from school, so their boots were always scuffed, but they developed tremendous ball skills.

It was a hard life and a simple life, but also a satisfying life. Neighbourliness supported the whole community, and there were no extremes of rich and poor, it was a truly egalitarian society. Many of those qualities still make this small village what our store owner used to call paradise. It’s still a small self sufficient community. We have our own private library, run by local ladies, the school bus is driven by a white bearded retired professor, the store run by a retired social worker. We have our own fire brigade, all unpaid volunteers, who come for first aid as well as fires. We have our own garage, our own school, and most importantly, our own fresh fish and chip shop;  our own classy restaurant where local gigs are held, and some still sing hymns in our pretty white painted church with its tiny bell tower, while others do yoga in the church hall.

Our little cottage is on a cliff overlooking a small bay, where the waves crash onto the rocks below, and I go to sleep to the sound of the sea.  The Japanese poet Yoshi Isamu might have written his haiku especially for me:

 Even in my sleep 

the sound of water

flows beneath my pillow.

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

This is called Healing Soup, and it’s certainly very comforting, due, I think, to the unusual inclusion of ginger and coriander. I love it, and you couldn’t get more economical than this. All you need is a large onion, a carrot or two, a few stalks of celery, a couple of garlic cloves, a piece of ginger the size of half a walnut, and a sprinkling of coriander.

Chop the vegetables and saute them till they begin to soften. Add the garlic and ginger, and sautee a bit more. If you haven’t got ginger you can use the powdered sort, but the real thing does taste better. Stir in a quarter to half a teaspoon of coriander powder. You may find you want more or less, but it’s the coriander that gives it its warming quality. Pour in some chicken stock or use Braggs amino acid or chicken bouillon, and make the liquid up to about a pint with this amount of vegetables. Boil until the vegetables are cooked, and then whizz in the blender, and you should have a lovely warming soup. I make it the consistency to sip from a cup.

You can double the amount, use less stock to make it thicker, use other vegetables, even cucumber which then makes it a cleansing soup. I’ve added mashed up sweet potato/kumara, left over from the day before, pumpkin… all delicious, but the original recipe is still my favourite. Salt and pepper to taste, and serve with lots of fresh chopped parsley.

Food for Thought

Loss

The day he moved out was terrible-

That evening she went through hell.

His absence wasn’t a problem

But the corkscrew had gone as well.       By Wendy Cope   English poet

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July 16, 2012 · 12:14 am

Bedazzled by Their Jewels

The French want the Queen to give them her crown jewels as compensation for killing the last Plantagenet in 1499. Well I can understand that -those jewels are more than something- especially the tiaras. Oh, for a tiara – some people are born to wear them, and some are not. Alas, I was not.

The nearest I’ve got to it was on Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding day. I was in a sewing shop looking for buttons that morning, and just by the door was a stand draped with fairy clothes, wands and jewels for children’s parties. I seized the amethyst and diamond tiara, knowing I would need it that evening.

I wore it with a purple top and all my pearls and amethysts. Mostly faux, just the odd decent pearl winking under the load of beads and baubles. I looked like the late Queen Mary actually – laden with jewels – and as the evening wore on, and the champagne flowed while we watched the Wedding, I wondered how Queen Mary had managed all those years, with her bosom bedizened with strings of diamonds, ropes of pearls and layers of diamond brooches. My strings and strings of beads and brooches, earrings and bracelets were all fake, and therefore comparatively light.  But as time went by I wilted under the weight of wearing all this stuff. Queen Mary’s glittering jewels were the real thing – two large chips off the fabulous Cullinan diamond for starters – the biggest stone ever found – frequently adorned her bosom. They were known as Grannie’s chips to the present Queen, who wears them quite often. Then there were those lustrous pearls, giant rubies, heaps of emeralds, gorgeous sapphires…

Queen Mary, who married Queen Victoria’s grandson, George, who became the Fifth, did rather well in the jewellery line. Queen Victoria had lost most of her family jewels in a family wrangle which went to court, and the judges – English – found against her, and let the King of Hanover keep all the crown jewels. This left only a string of pearls which had once belonged to Queen Anne, who died in 1714, and another string which had belonged to Queen Caroline, wife of George 11. Queen Victoria later amassed plenty of jewels in her sixty-two year reign, not because she was particularly impressed by jewellery, but as symbols of the royal status. But Queen Mary, who’d always been an impecunious princess, adored jewels, and was showered with diamonds when she became engaged to the heir, including the diamond tiara the Queen often wears, known as Grannie’s tiara, and given by the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland.

Then there were the diamond brooches from the inhabitants of Kensington, another tiara from the county of Surrey, a large diamond bow from the county of Dorset, a diamond and ruby bracelet from the County of Cornwall, and this incomplete list doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the collection of treasure she received, including precious gifts from all the royal families of Europe (they were all family anyway).  Queen Mary was famous for her acquisitiveness, and managed to snaffle many fabulous jewels, tiaras and bracelets from the desperate Russian Royals when they had escaped the Revolution, and needed money in the thirties.

Her mother in law, Queen Alexandra, had also done rather well, receiving hoards of priceless tribute from the Indian princes at various durbars – ropes of pearls, ruby and diamond chokers, an emerald girdle, to mention only a few of these princely gifts . So by the time the present Queen inherited all these generations of jewellery, she had a choice of over a dozen tiaras, diamond necklaces for Africa ( and many were African gifts and from African diamond mines) not to mention ruby, emerald, amethyst and sapphire tiaras, with their matching earrings, necklaces and bracelets. They all have names, like the Russian fringe tiara, the Brazilian aquamarine, the Greek key, the Vladimir circle tiara.  

But the favourite jewels in every generation of Royals seem to have been the ones with historic or sentimental value, like Albert’s brooch, the Prince Consort’s wedding gift to his bride Victoria. A huge sapphire ringed with diamonds, all the succeeding queens have worn it regularly, and Albert had a copy made for his eldest daughter, which Princess Anne now owns. The historic Crown pearls, rescued from the Hanoverian raid, were worn by the Queen on her wedding day, and she still often wears them. The Cambridge emeralds, large cabochon emeralds set with diamonds inherited from Queen Mary’s family, were given to Diana, who wore them as a head-band on a trip to Australia-  dancing at a ball in a matching green dress.

Diana also wore the bow knot tiara, another of Queen Mary’s family heirlooms. But Kate, as yet, has only been seen in a very modest, and entirely appropriate diamond tiara lent to her by the Queen on her wedding day. Meanwhile Camilla, Prince Charles’ second wife, flashes the dazzling jewels owned by the Queen Mother who left them to Prince Charles. The Queen Mother wore them with some restraint, but Camilla wears as much as possible at the same time! Sporting the huge modern diamond tiara, she adds a necklace of five rows of enormous diamonds, even managing to make the Queen’s exquisite jewellery look less impressive if big is what you like.

The history of all these jewels is recorded, and this is what makes jewellery so fascinating to me, that all the great pieces have a history behind them. Elizabeth Taylor possessed a famous necklace known as La Peregrina, dating from the sixteenth century, when Philip 11 of Spain gave this huge symmetrically perfect pearl to Mary Tudor (Bloody Mary) of England on their marriage in 1554. When she died, the necklace went back to Spain, and two hundred years later, Napoleon captured it, which was when it earned the name of La Peregrina (the wanderer). Later Napoleon 111 sold it to the Marquess of Abercorn while in exile in England, and Richard Burton bought it from the Abercorns. Elizabeth Taylor also owned another famous jewel, a heart shaped diamond which had once belonged to Shah Jehan, who built the Taj Mahal.

A scroll through Google, studying the jewels of the reigning and deposed royal houses of Europe is mouth-watering if jewels are your thing. One of the best things about the wedding of the Danish Crown Prince, a few years ago, was that everyone was asked to wear a tiara, and for the first time in years, all these wonderful jewels came out of hiding and bank vaults to dazzle and enchant.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

My granddaughter came today, to give me another session wrestling with the intricacies of computers. Not a big eater, so rather than proper lunch I gave her things to pick at… shredded ham sandwiches made with brown bread one side, and  white the other, with a touch of mustard. Crusts off, and cut into dainty squares to tempt her appetite.  The grand-children call the Danish slightly salted butter I always use, Grannie’s butter, so that was de rigueur on the bread. I also made some maple syrup and date muffins, but another time wouldn’t waste expensive maple syrup , brown sugar would taste just as good.  And we had celery soup to sip in a cup for those who wanted it, a fragrant gentle soup, made with just celery, a potato,  chicken stock, (stock cube actually), nutmeg and a dollop of cream. Gently sauted, then boiled till soft and whizzed in the blender with salt and pepper and nutmeg to taste – quick and easy.

The muffins – two cups of self raising flour, a cup of dates, chopped and softened in hot water, pinch of salt, 125 g of butter and of brown sugar, melted together, one egg, half a cup of milk and half a teasp of cinnamon. Beat the egg lightly with the milk, and stir all the ingredients together. Spoon into greased pattie tins, two thirds full, sprinkle with castor sugar and bake in a hot oven for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the muffins spring back when lightly touched. I did a dozen miniature ones, and eight big ones with this amount. Eat as soon as possible, while warm – with butter if waist-lines are no object!

  Food for Thought

The centre of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

 Stephen Jay Gould, 1941 – 2002  Popular science writer,  American palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist.

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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 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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