Tag Archives: lockdown

September 2, 2020 · 4:39 pm

That’s Life

Family-friendly recipes and snippets of family life from an Irish kitchen. Irish Recipes, Chef Recipes, Baking Recipes, Dessert Recipes, Dessert Food, Rachel Allen, Apple Desserts, Apple Recipes, Cooking Forever

I lost my blog, and had no idea how to get it back until dear Linda at coloradofarmlife.com told me how to find it, after I told her how frustrated and helpless I was. However, I was still writing, and this is the result of my labours:

Dearest Alice,
I know what you mean about time getting away from you… it’s got away from me…
What an interesting letter, thank you… loved the stuff about the trees drinking the water…. have been fascinated by the life in them ever since I read how they communicate with each other through their roots, and there is a mother tree who is leader of the pack !!!
Like all animals… It broke my heart to read that when a grandmother elephant was returned to a zoo recently where her daughter and granddaughter were, after a twelve year parting, she immediately entwined trunks and showed how she remembered them… we break up animal families without a second thought… years ago I read about a sheep farmer who milked her sheep for feta cheese, and she told how when she banged on the bucket to milk them, they all came to her in their family groups of three or four generations, great grandmothers and all their offspring…

Wild swimming, we did it without thinking when we were young didn’t we – swam in rivers and lakes without ever thinking it was wild swimming! – lovely for you to find a place where you can… do you feel you’re settling into your new home?

Huntington’s chorea – ugh – a terrible illness… we also knew a family with it, and all the children in this generation decided not to have children…

We’ve been having strange times here… got back from the dentist in Thames the other day to find a snowstorm up here, and drifts of it lying around for ages it was so cold. We’ve never had snow in this temperate region with a podocarp – almost tropical forest… The night before last we were awakened by a stiff earthquake, the rattling of everything in the house woke us, and then we felt the tremors… we went back to sleep and slept through the after-shocks… then last night another earthquake…
Strange times … first snow, then earthquakes, maybe a plague of frogs next – I hope they’re the environmentally threatened Archey’s that we protect here !!!

D- is busy putting an elegant coved ceiling in the sitting room, it feels so snug and light and airy… plus a lovely wrought iron chandelier a friend gave us when she didn’t want it… I painted it cream and it looks great…
And now a small gang of quail have arrived for a snack of bird seed… they’re eating us out of house and home, but D- adores them…

I was thinking about spring coming soon, and an old memory came back… when we were at Guildford you gave me a book of funny rhymes, and I still remember :
In the springtime come the breezes.
With the breezes come the squeezes,
With the squeezes come the maybe’s
With the maybe’s come the babies !!!

It was my twenty first birthday, and you also gave me a beautiful silk scarf of pink and white squares which I loved. Very useful when you had the hood down in your MGA.

Just off to make a fudge icing for an apple cake I’ve made to take to some very old friends. There isn’t a swish restaurant in Thames where they live and we wanted to take them out to lunch. So I’m taking everything to their lovely house, oyster bisque and rolls, cheeses and pates, and the cake and champagne… I’ve known them since we were neighbours back in 1975….

Andrew was lovely, and I’m so glad you have such happy memories to comfort you…
Much love, dear friend,

To a grandson

Darling, when you rang yesterday, you explained / apologised for not ringing me last week.
I Really want you to know that there is no onus on you to ring me regularly. I always simply love it, and feel smiling and happy when we ring off, because it is a gift…
But I do not expect it, and know too that you Are busy so I always appreciate it when you think of me, but would never start wondering why you hadn’t – if you didn’t!
D- always says it’s a ‘bloody miracle’ when you ring me, (meaning that so few young people remember oldies ) he thinks you’re so wonderful to think of me, and usually makes me a tray of tea when you ring, so I can sit and enjoy talking to you and sip my lapsang souchong at the same time…
I think you’re wonderful too, to include me in your busy days, so thank you, thank you for making the time, and know that it’s a bonus for me, not something expected.
You have always been so special to me from the moment you were born and I held you while V-  had a shower – and that too I felt was such an unexpected joy and a gift…. and when you were fretful in the days after you were born because your head had been so squished out of shape and it must have been so painful, I used to hold you to my chest
and sing Tallis’s Canon over and over so that the sound would reverberate and throb and beat against your heart to try to comfort you.
In e.e.cumming’s words, I have always held you in my heart.
So much love from your Grannie XXXXXXX

To my son,

Hi darling, thought you’d be interested in this comment about Sophia’s video from Jilly, I had sent it to her. She wrote:

I must comment on your amazing step-grand daughter’s video. Thank you for sending it, and what a great story it is. She readily admits her family had to make huge adjustments, and I do know just what that means. It is a lovely uplifting story and I felt she is a very strong and gracious young woman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ahGz2nhOps

I’ve watched it again, and it’s amazing just what a person with tetraplegia can do and what she is making of her life.

Such courage and persistence.

From Daughter:

Got these lovely beeswax candles in Wanaka at lavendar garden and put in Great Grannie’s candlesticks today…

Me: Oh, how gorgeous… they always smell divine…. you can get more at the church shop on the corner of the Ellerlie off ramp. I hate the ordinary candles, which burn paraffin, and I discovered, because we burn candles quite a lot, that they actually leave grime on the windows… funnily enough D- bought me a pack of beeswax candles while I was at the dentist on Thursday, to cheer me up…. we’ve even explored the internet to buy beeswax, and make our own, but it’s just as expensive as buying them….

I’ve often thought I’d like to tell the family that I don’t need any birthday or Christmas presents – just beeswax candles !!!

Daughter:

Found these on Trademe. $12 for the pair which is cheaper than church shop. It’s a shop in Hawkes Bay that makes their own…

Me: Thank you darling.

To another grandchild….

Lovely to see you darling… to continue our conversation – I knew how you felt about BLM when it started… I really hadn’t realised how subtle  much racism is (and simply bad-mannered) until you explained, and I could really sympathise with the movement in its beginnings. But I now feel differently. It was the last straw for me when the German director of the treasured British Museum said ‘we’ (obviously forgetting Germany’s painful past) had to face up to the painful facts of British colonial history and ‘cancelled’ Sir Hans Sloane.

He was the person born in 1660 who funded the British Museum, the British Library, the Natural History Museum, Chelsea Physic Garden, gave medical attention to the poor every morning for free, and gave his salary to the Foundling Hospital, as well as being a scientist and naturalist who was a benefactor to these fields of English endeavour as well.

His wife owned slaves in the colonies, so Sir Hans, a kind, good man and generous philanthropist, has been symbolically tarred and feathered, and his statue moved out of sight. I wonder what these fanatics thought people living in those times should have done. If Sir Hans had freed his wife’s slaves, how would they have survived in the society in which they had been enslaved. No-one would have employed them when they had their own free labour – their slaves… so these freed slaves would have faced a life of starvation or deprivation and outlawry, having no place in society.

I read this comment below, in a newspaper  story dealing with all the destruction of treasured heroes of the American past from Washington, to Lincoln and U.S. Grant, whose crime was to be given a slave by his father in law and to free him within a year, at some cost to himself since he was  on the bare bones of existence at the time.

“This describes a lot of us. Tread lightly! My tolerance is running out. I never cared what colour you were until you started blaming me for your problems. I never cared about your political affiliation until you started to condemn me for mine. I never cared where you were from in this great Republic until you began condemning people based on where they were born and the history that makes them who they are. I have never cared if you were well off or poor because I’ve been both.

“Until you started calling me names for working hard and bettering myself, I’ve never cared if your beliefs are different than mine. Until you said I am not entitled to my beliefs, now I care. I’ve given all the tolerance I have to give. This is no longer my problem. It’s your problem. You can still fix it. It’s not too late, but it soon will be.  I’m a very patient person at times. But I’m about out of patience. There are literally millions of people just like me. We have had enough.”

I know where he’s coming from! We’re never going to make a better world for all those who feel deprived or victims, until we stop shaming and blaming everyone for the colour of their skin. Many white people don’t feel privileged at all! Many of them are descended from ancestors who lived lives very nearly as hard as slaves, working crippling hours in mines, being impressed into the navy, making lace in badly lit attics and going blind to mention only a few instances… history is full of injustices.

So is the present, with slavery still being practised /endured all over the Middle East and Africa… and China too, in all but name. Those are the people who are suffering today. BLM being victims of the past doesn’t solve the present. Patience, tolerance, kindness and generosity are the things that may. And until we all try them we will never know.

I’m still learning all the new terms to keep myself up to date! –  have mastered woke, and now there’s cis-gender, transgender, AFAB – that’s a funny one – Assigned Female At Birth – don’t think anyone bothered to do that with me – they just supposed that on the evidence I was a girl!

Looking forward to seeing you when lockdown is over again…

Dearest Dick and Bella,
What a lovely, lovely occasion…. it was lovely to see you both, and so sweet of you both to make it such a beautiful occasion, flowers, champagne and fun and good conversation… Douglas and I loved every minute, thank you so much XXX
And I loved hearing about Lily, what a precious person she sounds … you brought up special people…Lily’s beauty is something really
rare…
It was such a celebratory event…you are so good at them, thank you !!
And then, to get home and savour more generosity, all your beautiful gifts… The beautiful posy is sitting in a big pink paisley patterned
mug, with the word love on it… not quite as unique as your mother’s gorgeous green vase, but it works!
Oh Bella, what a collection of treats in your beautiful hamper – so spoily and undeserved – you are amazing… I slowly unwrapped each treat, feeling more and more amazed at your imagination as well as your generosity… the eggs – what a precious way of presenting them… it made me realise just how exquisite eggs are… the ginger puddings – echoes of childhood when we Always had a pudding – steamed ginger, apple pie, treacle tart, or just stewed apple or plums or rhubarb with rice pudding or custard… I shall savour them, as well as all the other beautiful handmade goodies… the extra special chocolate, and the lovely scented soap…and that darling delicious little bell… so delicate and beautiful… thank you so much for all those thoughtful imaginative treats… The lemons look lovely in an antique French provincial pottery bowl I recognised in the op shop, and which they sold disdainfully ( ‘tatty old pottery thing’ ) for five dollars… and  I can’t wait for the house to be back in order after all D-‘s efforts when we had already planned to celebrate with lighting some beeswax candles, and now we have them, thanks to you !
I feel really moved and quite overwhelmed with your generosity dear friend… thank you thank you… I do hope you’ll feel like the journey here when the weather improves, so we can try to spoil you XXX

Now, the apple fudge cake – I still have the 1987 cutting from the Herald in my scrapbook… Elizabeth Pedersen, a nice Dutchwoman I think she was… The recipe calls for three fresh Grannie Smith type apples, but as I mentioned I do it the lazy way now with a tin of apple, chopped small…she says vegetable oil, so I tend to use grape oil… and I usually use slightly less milk in the fudge topping so it’s a bit dryer and more manageable as a cake…and I use SR flour instead of plain plus baking soda ( a lazy cook !)
12 oz SR flour
tsp salt (I just use a generous pinch)
10 ozs vegetable oil
13 oz caster sugar
3 eggs
3 medium sliced apples ( or one tin )
few drops of vanilla essence – (I use nearer a teaspoon)
Oven gas 4 or 175 C
Cream oil with sugar till light and smooth. Beat in the eggs one by one, vanilla, then the flour in three batches, and then stir in apples. Bake for one to one and a half hours. When it’s cool, spread the topping…six generous ozs brown sugar
60 ml milk
125 ml unsalted butter
vanilla (I use half a teaspoon)

Melt, and stir until smooth, boil for two minutes, then cool, stirring occasionally. Stir the topping over ice until it begins to stiffen, then spread over
the cake, letting it drip down the sides…
As you can see – so easy.

So that’s some writing in the life of… letters…and now to catch up on all my blog housekeeping, and with all the other old friends around the world linked by our network of golden threads called WordPress.

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April 13, 2020 · 3:55 pm

Love Actually

Fern.jpg

Over forty years ago I found myself visiting a man imprisoned in a psychiatric ward.He had no family, no other visitors, and the story of his life was a search for the only person who had ever loved him. His mother.

He was thirteen when he had his first brush with the law, and was placed in a juvenile delinquent institution after he attacked his mother’s lover with a baseball bat when his mother was the victim of domestic violence. Back then domestic violence was not taken as seriously as it is now.

He ran away to get back to his mother and from then on was placed in stricter and harsher environments. Having no trade, skills or any means of support he ended up robbing a bank. This is a gross simplification of his tragic descent into despair and the appalling experience of solitary confinement in the prison hospital.

His cell was bare, no books or television, yet with all the deprivation of twenty years in and out of prisons, he was an articulate and sensitive man. In retrospect his whole life had been a search for love, and yet he’d had no opportunity  to find or develop relationships, or to find a person to love.

He sat on one side of a table placed across a bleak corridor in the hospital, we sat the other side. With warders standing nearby, he told us that his one amusement was watching the birds from behind the bars of his tiny cell window. He saved crumbs from his meals and fed them to one particular sparrow who came to the window sill. It was obvious as he spoke that he loved that little sparrow, and that the sparrow was giving his life some meaning.

He didn’t need to know whether the sparrow loved him. The sparrow filled his need to love. I still remember when my first great love sent me a Dear John letter. (Dear John oh how I hate to write, dear John I must let you know tonight that my love for you has died )

I was twenty- one. When I read it, my head spun and the world seemed to go black amid the giddyness. As time went on, I realised that one of the worst things about it was feeling was that I could no longer love him. At which I also realised that there was no need to stop loving him… loving was what made me feel less bereft, and loving him filled the gap in my heart until I was able to move on.

A teacher on one of our personal growth courses once observed that when a person lives alone, they often make a loving connection with a creature, if they have no-one to love – pets, birds, wild creatures become their beloved companions. Even snails can become the beloved – Elisabeth Tova Bailey wrote one of the most exquisite books about love, when she became aware that a snail lived in the wild cyclamen a friend had dug up and brought to her sick room.

Her loving descriptions of the tiny creature and its habits, and the knowledge she acquired about one of our humblest companions living alongside us on this planet teeming with life, gave me a deeper understanding of the value of all life. Loving this tiny snail gave the sick woman joy and meaning to her life.

Being loved somehow doesn’t seem as sustaining as loving. ‘Lord grant that I may not so much seek to be loved, as to love,’ was the prayer of St Francis, who loved ‘all creatures great and small’, in the words of the hymn. Krishna Murti described another aspect of love in his journal.

‘He had picked it up, he said, on a beach; it was a piece of sea-washed wood in the shape of a human head. It was made of hard wood, shaped by the waters of the sea, cleansed by many seasons. He had brought it home and put it on the mantelpiece; he looked at it from time to time and admired what he had done.

One day, he put some flowers round it, and then it happened every day; he felt uncomfortable if there were not fresh flowers every day and gradually that piece of shaped wood became very important in his life. He would allow no-one to touch it except himself; they might desecrate it; he washed his hands before he touched it.

It had become holy, sacred, and he alone was the high priest of it; he represented it; it told him of things he could never know by himself. His life was filled with it and he was, he said unspeakably happy…’

This beautiful story electrified me. It showed me that by loving, whatever the object may be, loving gives life and meaning to whatever it touches. My friend Oi, who I’ve written about in another blog once told me about a very rich friend, whose house was filled with opulent treasures, which Oi found overpowering. But, she told me, as the years passed, and she visited her friend, though all the treasures were still there, gleaming and cherished, she felt differently about them. She said they had been so lovingly cared for and cherished by their owner, that they no longer had the patina of wealth, but exuded their intrinsic beauty.

So it’s the loving that matters, that transforms and gives meaning. Which is why the experiment I once read in which people in prison were given an abandoned dog to rehabilitate, were rehabilitated themselves. Love heals.

Here in our forest, where we are not allowed dogs or cats who might kill the threatened species of flightless birds who shelter beneath the thick undergrowth, we have become devoted to the wild quails who make their way into our garden. We began feeding them, discovering that the food they love best is budgie seed.

Every year they return with their tiny fluffy babies, who scamper after their parents like little windup toys; and we now have dozens of beautiful little creatures who push through the undergowth out of the forest and march determinedly down the drive to feast. When they hear our voices, they break into a run. We spend far too much on birdseed, and in lockdown, it is the one thing we make sure we always have plenty of. They start arriving early in the morning and when we hear their sharp call, one or other of us leaps out of bed, still half asleep, to scatter seed

Loving them makes us ‘unspeakably happy’. There must be many other people in these strange days who find that having the time, no longer trying to stuff too many duties and activities into their day, they can now discover the world of small things around them, and find it utterly loveable. Birds singing, leaves unfolding, spiders spinning their miraculous webs – all these things can be food for the soul and can remind us of the goodness of life even in ‘these interesting times’, in the words of the Chinese proverb.

 

Food for Housebound Gourmets

The cupboard is bare – not of food, but of inspiration, Having put my back out and drugged up with painkillers, unable to stir from bed without yelps of pain, I’ve been calling instructions to Himself  in the kitchen, on how to boil an egg, or where to find the butter…

Food for thought

By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world. By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.  Albert Schweitzer

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March 26, 2020 · 2:32 pm

Comfort and Calm in the Crisis

Lot18again

This is the first day of our NZ lockdown. We are in self-isolation in our forest, enjoying peace, solitude and solicitude.

Not just words, and offers of help from our little caring community, but the delivery of a bag of organic fruit and vegetables and a dozen big brown free-range eggs from neighbours who also have a farm-let some hour’s drive away.

The doctor rang me, so I didn’t have to drive into town to see her, and wrote a prescription which I can collect from the chemist.

When we ventured into town briefly yesterday before lockdown, to pick up a prescription for Douglas, both chemists had a table at their door, where drugs were handed to customers. The queues at each place stretched along the pavement in the gentle autumn sunshine because everyone was observing the six feet rule between each person. The atmosphere was calm, sensible and caring.

At the supermarket there were far fewer people than normal and no loaded trolleys. People seemed to be picking up last minute items, as we were. No pasta or tins of tomatoes left, and intriguingly, shelves bare of chocolate. Lots of fresh fruit and vegetables and no panic.

Douglas insisted on us washing the beautiful apples, pears and squash from our friends, after watching a video which had showed how germs travel and last on surfaces. I hard boiled one of the precious eggs for my lunch, and nestled the peeled egg into a bed of steamed leeks, poured some cream over them and topped them off with a thick layer of grated parmesan leftover from the previous night’s supper.

A few minutes under the grill turned it into a crunchy gold topping. I had forgotten what an almost sweet taste and texture a fresh egg from a happy hen was like. This delicious little lunch ended with one of the crisp, freshly picked apples from a tree which had never come in contact with a chemical.

Himself had tender pork sausages for his lunch… I boil them now to cook them, and then they just need a few minutes in the frying pan acquiring a crisp golden skin.

In the soft sun-light I sat on the sofa looking out through the open French doors across the green valley. The urgent call of a covey of distant quails were the background to the sounds of swallows twittering as they circled and dived around the house, and I heard  the first autumn serenade from a cicada. Though I am concerned about my beloved family, this place felt peaceful and nurturing.

Like everyone else, my family is scattered and coping with this unprecedented crisis. One grandson is in London, another has had his business closed down for the lockdown, the end of which is uncertain and unknown. Our tetraplegic step-grand-daughter, who only has thirty percent use of her lungs and a totally compromised immune system has had her three daily carers leave… the family don’t know who they would have come in contact with, the risk too great, so the huge burden of 24 hour daily care has fallen on my son’s wife. He has to work from home so as not to bring infection into their isolated little bubble of comparative safety.

Other family members who were going to share the load can no longer do so under ‘lockdown’ since they don’t live there. My daughter who is president of boards and clubs, and director of national organisations, is coping with total chaos across every facet of her normally hectic life. And I can only watch from the distance. I am like every other older person, watching sadly from the sidelines as our children and grand-children and other family struggle, while this tsunami engulfs their lives and their livelihoods and threatens every known certainty.

The actual illness seems almost like a sideshow compared with the dire effects of it on the whole world. And yet when I woke this morning with the dry thyroid cough I often have, and remembered the head-ache I’d had in the night, and felt the slight soreness in my throat, I had a sudden moment of panic – these are the symptoms of the bug. Then I had a drink and the throat returned to normal, and the fear faded, and I remembered my firm intention not to join the crowd!

I looked across to the window, where outside, the sun was shining on the mountain, and the jitters – a word that emerged in the early days of the Second World War, evaporated in the peace and beauty of this blessed place.

Now the day is ending, night is drawing nigh, shadows of the evening, steal across the sky – the first lines of a hymn my grandmother taught me during WW11. The first day is ending of our long retreat into self-isolation, night is drawing nigh. It has been a good day for us. I just long to share that goodness with others, before the shadows steal across so many lives.

Afterword.

It may cheer some to know that ISIS’s Health and Safety Department – fancy a terrorist group having such a thing – have advised their enthusiastic jihadis who are all dying to create mayhem, to steer clear of western infidel countries in order to avoid infection from the virus. So there is a silver living to every cloud!

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