Tag Archives: spiritual

November 27, 2013 · 9:09 pm

The magic of a letter

You cannot tie up an e-mail in blue ribbon and place it tenderly in a casket containing others like it, to leave for a grateful posterity to find and marvel over its touching sentiments, and even write a blog about their great-grannie and the beautiful or scandalous love letters she received!

I miss letters which aren’t bills and rates demands. There was so much more to decipher in a real letter than just words. First of all there was the paper it was written on. Cheap, thin, lined paper or coloured paper was a no-no, and spoke volumes about the taste of the unfortunate writer. Discriminating letter writers used a thick writing paper like Basildon Bond in white or pale blue. Even fussier ones tried to afford thicker, expensive, crisp, cream deckle- edged paper, bought from specialist stationers. Yes, there were shops in those days that sold nothing but high quality stationery, often beautifully boxed, and of course, fountain pens.

Fountain pens had the same competitive edge then, that an Apple or an I-Pad has now (or am I out-of date?)… sporting a gold nib, a gold hook to clip it into your suit pocket if you were a man, and a gold clip to pull back for the ink to be sucked up into the pen. You had to remember to empty it if you were flying, or the pressure caused the ink to flood out and stain the suit. I particularly loved the mottled versions, a bit like the marbled end papers on old books.

The ink had to be black or blue…green was vulgar, red was for money matters! The hand –writing was usually based back then on a form of copper-plate. From the age of six onwards, we used horrible crossed nibs from over-use, and dip pens to copy rows and rows of letters in long-hand. It was actually good hand- to- eye co-ordination in retrospect, and there was all sorts of etiquette round that too.

A capable girl named the ink monitor (never me) filled the inkwells and handed them out. The pens were shared out, and our copy books sorted. Woe be-tied the careless child (usually a tiresome boy!) who spilled his inkwell over the desk. And unless you learned to hold the pen correctly, it was impossible to actually form the letters – so you had to learn – unlike the way children hold pencils nowadays, in all sorts of strange postures.

There was a lot of un-official lore around hand-writing. We gathered that a hand that sloped backwards, showed the person was deceitful – oh dear – that when the dots to ‘I’s’ were flung wildly far from the ‘I,’ that showed the person was wildly imaginative. My dots remained firmly in place over the ‘I’s’ in my tightly controlled handwriting, which disguised the anxious persona underneath my vivacity.

I read that if a person used the word ‘ I’ more than every seven words in a sentence, this showed how egotistical they were… I wonder if that’s why it was so popular to say, “one thinks”, instead “I think.” I even had a friend who referred to herself in the third person.

Graphology, the art of reading character from hand-writing, turns out to be rather accurate in the hands of a skilled practitioner. When my brother worked for a London recruitment agency, a potential employer asked for a graphologist’s report on a possible employee. Sceptical, my brother had his hand-writing analysed first, and was amazed when the report came back even detailing the problems he had had at birth!

But even an unskilled interpreter could enjoy the impressions that hand-writing displayed… scrawling, well-formed, exuberant – to un-readable – lots of that! Old people’s handwriting often became indecipherable, and what was always called ‘crabbed’, which seemed to mean it looked a bit spidery and wavery, thanks to arthritis.

Then there was the envelope – which had to match the writing paper, and here we come to one of writer Nancy Mitford’s famous jokes, or teases as she called them! She decreed that non-U (Non-Upper class) people called it ‘notepaper’, while the others opted for ‘writing paper’. Envelopes which displayed their owner’s regimental crest on the back were particularly prized when we were young – a symbol of the boy-friend’s status. But the fat envelopes stuffed with a thick wodge of pages of scrawl, sharing, gossip, and fun written by girl-friends were even better. They came through the letter-box, until I came to NZ, where we have boxes by the gate and I used to enjoy a stroll out to the letter-box to find these treasures.

Inside, the greeting obviously varied from dear, dearest and darling, to the more formal,’ dear sir or madam’, while the endings – here etiquette ruled with an iron hand. ‘Yours faithfully,’ and a full signature if a business letter… I think ‘yours truly’ was next in line, before getting to ‘yours sincerely’, which could be signed with full name or just Christian name depending on the level of intimacy.

No-one ever signs off: ‘I am, sir, your obedient servant’, these days or: ‘yours respectfully’, or even: ‘yours affectionately’, which rather appeals to me. And how I loved in those old romances the signing off by rejected suitors: “I beg of you to believe that now and always I am your very obedient servant to command” …those were indeed the days. Such chivalry seems dead when most of our e-mail communications seem to end either with Kind Regards – or Regards – so formal, so cold, so colourless.

Some of my favourite books are collections of letters. Will there ever be such collections again? Who keeps e-mails? Maybe some print them off or transfer them into a Keep File. But too often, it’s too easy just to hit ‘delete’ when the in-box gets too full. The one good thing about e-mails is that they’re easy to write so maybe we are in touch more often.

I had one friend whose hand-written letters were delightful puzzles. She was dyslexic and there were great and crucial gaps on every page where she’d left a space in order to go and check the spelling in the dictionary, and had then forgotten and sealed it and sent it. Dear Jackie would have loved the spell-checker… maybe she’s found a heavenly spell-checker in the land of her fathers, where she now rests in peace!

Food for threadbare gourmets

Home after another day gadding about with friends, and feeling guilty about leaving my husband with a scratch lunch, and I hadn’t planned a decent supper either. In the freezer I found some cooked pork sausages which he loves, and thought I’d better dress them up to make a decent meal. Lots of leeks gave me inspiration, and I adapted a recipe of Elizabeth Luard’s.

I sauted several large chopped leeks in butter till almost soft. I added some stock, and let it boil to finish cooking the leeks. At this stage I put the sausages into the leek mixture, then added a teasp of Dijon mustard, and a good sprinkling of nutmeg, salt and black pepper, plus plenty of cream to bubble up and thicken. Delicious, eaten with new potatoes, and green vegetables. I was having a little cold salmon, so I used some of the leeks as a sauce with it, and that worked well too.

Food for thought

There is no greater sin than desire, no greater curse than discontent,
No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself.
Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always
have enough.

Lao tsu

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Filed under cookery/recipes, culture, great days, humour, philosophy, spiritual, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life, Uncategorized

Tagged as food, fountain pens, hand-writing, humour, letters, Nancy Mitford, spiritual

November 25, 2013 · 3:32 am

Am I not a man and a brother?

My husband took one look at my ravaged face, and retreated to his study. I had just returned from seeing the film ‘The Butler.’ Instead of the gracious meander through history at the White House that I’d expected from the trailer, I had watched another episode of the American Civil War which I thought had ended in 1856.

Too appalled even for tears, at the end of the film was I shell – shocked to hear that many of the freedoms fought for in that bitter sixties campaign I’d just watched, had later been repealed, replaced or blocked by President Reagan. ( I’d like to think that information was wrong )

It’s hard to get my head round this long-running disaster for humanity. Having grown up in a country where people joyously belt out: “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves”, in their annual singing orgy at the Albert Hall on the Last Night of the Proms, slavery under its many names had been something I grew up thinking had disappeared from the civilised world,

It ended in England before the founding of the US, when in 1772 the Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, decreed that anyone who set foot in England was automatically a free man. By this act he initiated the beginning of the abolition movement, led by William Wilberforce, and his supporters who included Quakers and Evangelicals. (Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic had been agitating for emancipation in the ‘Citty upon a Hill’ since George Fox, founder of Quakerism, visited the States, and preached against it in 1672)

Though a sick man, who took opium for most of his life to alleviate his pain, the heroic and persistent Wilberforce brought his anti – slavery bills before Parliament for over twenty years, until finally, Parliament voted against the slave trade in 1807. In 1808 the US also voted to end it, but not slavery itself, and so slaves were still bought and sold in the States. As a result of the British vote, the British Navy created the West Africa Squadron to patrol the African shores to prevent slave trading. The navy patrolled for sixty years, and at times, one sixth of the navy’s ships were at sea on this mission. Freed slaves were taken to Freetown in British Sierra Leone where they were safe from being re-captured. Over 150,000 Africans were freed in this way.

By 1834, England- as personified by Parliament – had come round to the idea of emancipation, and slaves were freed in most of the British colonies, including Canada and South Africa, and slave owners compensated at huge expense to the government. It meant that 800,000 slaves were gradually freed, and it also meant that many imports into England now cost a lot more. In the sometimes unhappy history of the British Empire this is one brownie point.

When Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it had bigger sales in England than America, and as one of her readers, as well as being an afficionado of the American Civil War, I had thought all had ended well for the slaves when the South was defeated. ‘Gone With The Wind’ did incalculable damage to the thinking of ignorant people like me.

The picture it painted of a noble, benevolent society with happy, contented slaves living in harmony with masters they loved, was a travesty of truth, I discovered – no hint of anyone being bought and sold, families destroyed, and later, lynch mobs, Klu Klux Klan or Billie Holiday’s song ‘ Bitter Fruit’- which came out in the same year as the film. The rude way black people were spoken to and humiliated, even in benign films like ‘Driving Miss Daisy’, shocked me. As did the true story of Hadley Hemingway losing all Hemingway’s manuscripts, and when she was too shattered to tell him, he finally confronted her with the thing he dreaded most: “You’ve been sleeping with a Negro.”

Twenty years ago when Ken Burns’ moving films introduced me to the Civil War, I also read a fascinating and horrifying series of reports which jobless students were commissioned to write during the Depression. They interviewed and recorded the memories of the slaves who were still alive in the thirties, and those memories were harrowing, whether before or after Emancipation. Singer and actress, Hattie McDaniels, who played Mammy in ‘Gone With The Wind’ was the daughter of slaves, and her lot was not much better.

She was asked not to attend the opening night of the film in Atlanta in 1939, and when she won Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars, had to sit alone in specially segregated seating. She was also not allowed to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery which even practised segregation in death! When I learned this, I was still not aware of how the South had been gradually winning the Civil War with Jim Crow laws, and especially in the twenties and thirties, suppressing black civil rights, expanding segregation, and passing laws like the ‘one drop of negro blood’ in 1924, which condemned innocent people to a ‘shadow’ existence.

‘Shadow’ families were those like Thomas Jefferson’s children, born to a slave, Sally Hemings. She was herself more than half white, and thanks to the exploitation of slave women then, was also an aunt of Jefferson’s legitimate daughter through Jefferson’s wife. Jefferson’s and Sally’s children were seven- eighths white. If they hadn’t already disappeared into white society back before the Civil War, they would have been trapped by these creeping race rulings.

A friend whose ancestor was General Pettigrew, the other general who led Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, gave me a biography of the general which had been published recently. As I read it I became increasingly puzzled, for the general was such a heroic paragon , who apparently embodied all the chivalric qualities of a noble cavalier, that even his predilection for quarrelling and the resultant duels were held to be virtues, and typical of his aristocratic society.

The barbarians of the North, inhospitable, dour, materialistic Protestants, had destroyed both this magnificent young man and the civilisation of the ‘old South’ that he represented, according to the writer. In the end, I Googled him, and light dawned. He was still fighting the Civil War! Not only was this writer a man of great reputation in the South, but he had founded a league of Southern gentlemen, which some people – like me – would feel that in the light of Southern men’s record, was an oxymoron.

There’s another film due to come out about slavery, the true story of a free black American living in the North who was kidnapped, and sold into slavery in the South. His horrendous ordeal lasted for twelve years, and when he escaped he wrote his story, which has gradually been forgotten.

Two black Englishmen have produced this film, and I won’t be watching it. I know enough. I already believe in the cause of freedom, and I’m too much of a coward to watch the cruelties and inhumanities that I saw in the trailer. The title to this blog comes from a medallion struck in 1787 by Josiah Wedgewood, the great potter, and supporter of Wilberforce’s abolition campaign. The words go straight into my heart.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

I had a big bunch of watercress, and decided to make soup with it. Mrs Beeton, who I consulted, had three recipes for it, and this was the one I fancied. The fiddliest bit was taking the leaves off the stalks, as I have a feeling the stalks taste bitter. Gently sauté the leaves in butter for a couple of minutes, then remove from heat. Mix about a dessertspoonful of cornflour with some milk, whisk it into chicken stock, and add the cress. I leave a few leaves aside, and then whisk everything with my stick whizzer. Quickly re-heat and add cream to taste, and a pinch of cayenne. The rest of the cress leaves float greenly on the top. The amount of stock depends on how much cress you have, and it’s easy to gauge.

Food for Thought

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference” Elie Wiesel- born1928. Writer and survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a “messenger of peace”.

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Filed under cookery/recipes, gettysburg, great days, history, slavery, spiritual, The Sound of Water, the sxities, Thoughts on writing and life, Uncategorized

Tagged as American Civil War, British Empire, food, Gone with the wind, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hattie McDaniel, philosophy, spiritual, Thomas Jefferson, United States, William Wilberforce

November 19, 2013 · 10:48 pm

Talking about silence

A friend went for a happy break away with distant family, and returned home to find the bliss of silence awaiting her. She shared it with her readers, the deep need for solitude and silence, and how simply being with her plants, communing with her creatures, savouring the long views, the huge skies, and never speaking a word, she felt restored and at ease with herself.

Her readers, a band of like minds, responded that silence and solitude were necessities in their lives too. We discovered that we were not strange, we were not eccentric recluses, but that we were all strangely normal !

I thought about this, and realised that this group of women who had responded had probably reached that point in life when we want to experience our Hestia natures. Hestia was the Greek Goddess of the hearth and in her wonderful book, ‘The Goddesses in Everywoman’, Jean Bolen explores Hestia’s nature, and describes the Hestia archetype as being centred on home and family. She suggests that if Hestia wrote a book about her inner process she would call it Zen and the Art of Housekeeping.

Attention to the household, which includes the plants and animals in our care, is almost a spiritual process for a Hestia person. Women with this archetype find a sense of inner harmony as they cherish their surroundings and they know that this nurturing of their corner of the planet, is a form of mindfulness. Jean Bolen called this time in which the Hestia archetype is totally absorbed in her activities: ‘kairos’ time, a lovely Greek word describing that sense of being outside time, and feeling completely fulfilled. It’s also time-Less, we emerge from the ‘Zone’ as some call it, to find that time has flown while we were unconscious of the very word.

It feels like a creative activity, which it is, when we are so immersed in our tasks that time is meaningless. This is psychologically nourishing, and we feel deeply satisfied and energised, powerful and peaceful when we come out of the ‘Zone’; like a writer feels on completing a piece, a poet when her poem has emerged, or an artist after an inspired day at the easel.

Hestia women need and seek solitude, and as children they often felt out of kilter with their families, finding refuge in books and withdrawing emotionally. As adults, they need ‘A Room of Their Own’. The late Ardis Whitman, free-lance writer quoted in ‘The Feminine Face of God’, said that: “…when we are surrounded by people, some of the passion and insight natural to us leaks away through the sieve of small talk. At your most daring moments you believe that what is going on is the ultimate human work – the shaping of a soul. The power of life comes from within: go there. Pray, meditate. Reach for those luminous places in yourself”

The obstacle to taking this time for self is women’s guilt. Too often they feel guilty at making time for themselves, fear they are being selfish, and so give away their vital self-nourishment by trying to please others. With maturity and the confidence of age, they can reclaim the time and space they need, knowing the truth of Rabbi Hillel’s ancient imperative: ‘ If not me –who? If not now – when?’

I have a friend whose stepmother is part Native- American. She was brought up by her Native -American grand-parents, and she told me: “there was no idle chatter in our house. It was silent. My grandparents believed silence was sacred and should not be broken unless we had something of worth to say” … Whenever I feel the need for silence at home, I say to my husband (politically incorrectly – sorry chaps!): Red Indians! He gets the message.

Living in an intimate relationship with one person is so demanding when they no longer go to the office every day, in order to regain the silence and solitude that I need, we have a silent Tuesday, when no words are spoken. The house fills with something more than silence, a full, flowery, beautiful essence, which is only present in that magic space. Sometimes we have a Tuesday on a Thursday or a Sunday… whenever we feel we need it.

It isn’t just women who need solitude… I suspect there are many men too, who need the refreshment of peace and quiet… Thoreau famously wrote that he found it “wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time… I love to be alone”, while one of the early Desert Fathers, Abbas Isias said : ‘Love to be silent rather than to speak. For silence heaps up treasure, while speaking always scatters.’

We’re not talking of the harsh, ascetic, masculine discipline of a Trappist silence, but respite from continual communication. This respite is more like immersing the self in a deep well of nourishment, from which we emerge refreshed and invigorated. In his book ‘A Time to Keep Silence’, famous travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor described his stay at a Benedictine monastery in France. The Benedictine order with its gracious silences and routines was a revelation to him, and he went through three stages – depression and despair for a few days, then days of deep exhausted sleep, from which he emerged feeling purified, energised, joyful and peaceful. When he remarked one day to the Abbott what a blessed relief it was to refrain from talking all day long, the Abbott replied, ‘Yes, in the outside world, speech is gravely abused.” And even sixty years ago, C.S. Lewis said: “We live… in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy.”

I haven’t mentioned the word introverted, as I feel that Jung has no place in this discussion since he felt that spirituality was a masculine quality. Yet the thoughtful, mindful qualities that both men and women develop when they seek silence, which he would define as introversion, does lead to a greater awareness of the spiritual side of life. This inward turning of focus is a path that both men and women are taking more and more in these turbulent times, and if anything women are more likely to take it than men.

I’ve always loved Hestia, the home-loving, feminine personality who is her own woman. Not all women have this side to their personality, but when we deeply focus on our inner life, or give ourselves time to calmly enjoy our household chores – sorting a cupboard or baking a loaf, we are getting in touch with that aspect of ourselves. We all have other archetypes in our natures, from Aphrodite to Athene, Demeter to Hera, the goddesses of love and careers, motherhood and marriage, but as we grow older and wiser it seems that Hestia is more present in our consciousness.

When I was a child we used to buy Vesta matches in red and yellow oblong boxes. I didn’t know then that Vesta was the Roman name for Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, believed to be present in the living flame. Her sacred fire was supposed to provide light, warmth, and heat for food, and her presence to inspire peace, meaning, and sanctuary for family. These things seem very precious in our tempestuous times… they are what can sustain us, and make our homes a serene and happy refuge – and not just for ourselves – but for those we love.

Celi’s post ‘The lack of chatter in the box’ at her beautiful blog http://www.thekitchensgarden.com inspired this post.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

The French call them ‘bonne-bouche’, and I needed a little something to start an impromptu supper with friends. To make it fun, I collected together the big pink and maroon shells I’d collected from the beach, lined them with slices of cucumber, arranged on the cucumber four fat prawns lightly sauted in garlicky butter, and dabbed freshly made aoli over them. Sprinkled with finely chopped parsley, they were a hit, eaten with fingers, but served with a paper napkin that matched the rest of the table.

Food for Thought

To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven… a time to keep silence and a time to speak. Ecclesiastes: chapter 3, verses 1 and 7

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Filed under consciousness, cookery/recipes, environment, family, food, great days, happiness, life/style, philosophy, spiritual, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life, Uncategorized

Tagged as Desert Fathers, food, Greek mythology, Hestia, Patrick Leigh Fermor, philosophy, silence, solitude, spiritual, Thoreau

October 18, 2013 · 11:10 pm

We are all witnesses

Who would have thought that when a group of murderous men attempted to kill a fourteen year old girl that they would have made her a global heroine and given her cause world-wide coverage? Malala Yousafzai is extraordinary. It’s hard to believe that a school girl should have become such a threat to the oppressive policies of the Taliban that they should try to suppress her and her campaign for women. And so heartening to know that two years later, in spite of her terrible wounds, she is living in peace in England, has written a book, and is still campaigning for the right for all women to an education.

Her poise, beauty and intelligence as I watched her fluently explaining the situation on TV and how she came to be such a campaigner was so moving, that it seemed even the interviewer was nearly in tears. The next day she had tea with the most powerful man in the world and fearlessly asked him to stop killing her people with drones – that anyone should have to ask – since when has it been OK to kill innocent citizens of countries who are allies – and is reported to have told the President that it was counter-productive and caused resentment. A simple enough deduction that one would think the highly educated men in the White House could have reached for themselves!

But what is so exciting about sixteen year old Malala is that she is free to spread her message and to resist oppression and tyranny. She can speak and be heard. Her country and her people listen, and it’s only extremists who want to silence her.

Hers is such a contrast to the life of another inspiring and famous woman who was not free and who had to keep silent. Anna Akhamatova was the beautiful Russian poet whose husband was shot in the Stalin’s terror, and whose son was in and out of gulags until 1956 for the crime of having the parents that he had. In her long poem ‘Requiem’, which took four years to write between 1935 and 1940, she wrote these lines, having resisted the temptation to flee to the West like so many creative people whose lives were also in danger:

‘No foreign sky protected me,

no stranger’s wing shielded my face.

I stand as witness to the common lot,

survivor of that time, that place.’

Later, when the poem was published in 1961, she wrote: ‘Instead of a Preface’.

‘In the terrible years of the Yeshov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):

“Can you describe this?”

And I said: “I can.”

Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.’

Simply because she was a poet, whose writing the Soviet authorities condemned with the usual epithet – bourgeois – Anna’s life was perpetually in danger, and she was banned from most activities. She could have fled, but she stayed to be with her people – their witness – her only weapon, silent passive resistance. Active resistance would simply have meant the anonymity of being one of between forty and fifty million Russians shot, starved or worked to death in the gulag – the common fate of Soviet citizens under Stalin.

Poets met secretly, they wrote their poems in secret, and read them to each other. They each memorised them, and then the dangerous and incriminating pieces of paper were burned. So Anna became a witness. Witnessing was the only thing she could do.

And when Stalin died, and conditions eased, she emerged and she described. Her poetry was published and she became famous, and an inspiration to all who had resisted, and a lesson to those who came after her. Her words meant that no-one could forget.

I’ve often thought about Anna, and how witnessing matters so much to each person who suffers – somehow, to have a witness dignifies and validates the suffering and mitigates the loneliness. And women seem to have always instinctively been witnesses – witnesses at birth and death – witnesses to war, witnesses to life. Watching, validating, and by the very act of being there, loving.

It’s an unsung gift, but when I listen to a friend who works in a hospice, I realise that it’s one of the greatest gifts. Witnessing requires no words. It’s commitment and unspoken love, whether it’s Anna Akhamatova witnessing her country and her people’s agony and being there for it, or the mother, the daughter, the sister, the friend who watches through the night when the great life dramas of birth or death are being played out.

And often it isn’t even as dramatic as that. My daughter was driving a lonely immigrant who had no family, to hospital for a breast cancer operation. As she got out of the car, she saw the woman’s face. My daughter rushed round to her side, and stood, arms around her, just holding her, tears flowing down both faces. Frantic, she called out to the door attendant – “is it alright to park here?” “Of course,” this beautiful man replied, “it’s for people like you”. They stayed holding each other until the friend felt strong enough to go inside – my daughter with her.

And one image is forever imprinted on my mind. I was sitting on a bus with the rain pouring down, dusk just beginning to darken the overcast skies. Something made me look out. There was a man I had got to know on a series of consciousness- raising courses. I hadn’t seen Brian for a while. He was sitting in the gutter in the rain with his arm around the shoulders of a drunk. Being there. Witnessing.

Food for threadbare gourmets

Trying to keep to my resolution to simplify life, and stop giving useless objects to people who lack for nothing, I’m making a jar of lemon curd for a friend who has a birthday. I’ve collected over time some of the nicely shaped Bon Maman French jam jars with red and white check screw- top lids – perfect.

Juice three lemons, and grate the zest. Put in a saucepan with ¾ cup of sugar, 150g of cubed butter, and six free range or organic beaten eggs. Stir over a medium heat until the butter is melted and the mixture has thickened. Don’t boil, take off the heat before it does. Pour into sterilised heat proof containers, and leave to set. Cover and keep in the fridge, and it will last for a month or so.

Food for thought

To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-wracking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.

Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.

E.F. Schumacher 1911 – 1977 – discussing Buddhist economics in ‘Small is Beautiful’. Schumacher was an international economist whose thoughts on economics evolved to cover many aspects of environmental protection, as well as the preservation of the integrity of small local economies.

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Tagged as Anna Akhamatova, food, Malala Yousafzai, passive resistance, philosophy, poetry, Soviet Union, spiritual, Taliban, White House

August 8, 2013 · 12:33 am

A is for Dictionary

There was a framed photograph of me as a toddler on the wall, which just showed my head, with a mop of dark hair, dark eyes, and my neck fading away into nothing. When I was between two and three years old I used to gaze up at it and study it, and wonder when my arms and legs and the rest of me grew.

We lived in a tiny cottage on a farm in deepest Dorset countryside, far away from the bombs. I stood in the soft summer night and watched overloaded hay-wains swaying and creaking down the narrow lane past our cottage, pulled by huge, tired dray horses. Stray wisps of hay were straggled horizontally as the load brushed against the high hawthorn and hazel hedgerows. I could smell the fragrance of the hay, the warm sweet smell of the horses, the honeysuckle in the hedge and the scent of yellow gorse flowers.

On our way to the village shop we passed over an ancient stone bridge. I used to push my head between the balusters encrusted with lichen to watch the emerald green weed rippling in the clear water, until I realised my mother was far ahead with the push chair and I rushed panic-stricken after her. I dreaded going into the shop. Hanging from the ceiling was a flypaper covered in buzzing, screaming, struggling, dying flies. I felt frantic to get away from the noise and carnage.

In those halcyon days before I was four, our mother sang us to sleep in her beautiful voice with lullabies like: ‘Where the bee sucks there suck I, in a cowslip’s bell I lie, there I couch while owls do cry, and on a bat’s back I do fly,’ ‘One fine day,’ from Madame Butterfly, was another, and ‘Cherry ripe, cherry ripe’. The words, even to a small child, were as beautiful as the music.

In the same room as the picture of me sans arms and legs, was an enormous book. It got smaller as I got older. It was so thick and heavy I couldn’t lift it back then, but it was irresistible. It was covered in maroon coloured morocco, and had fascinating black thumbnail places at the side, and in the front coloured pages with patches of colour, green and blue, and pink (the British Empire I learned later!) These pages I also discovered later, were called maps, and I learned too, that the book was Webster’s Dictionary.

The A’s came straight after the maps, and there-in lay my downfall. I played for hours with this book, and inevitably, since the A’s came after the maps, they got a lot of wear. The pages became torn and dog-eared, wrinkled so as to be un-readable, crumpled, dirty, and scribbled on. Some pages of A’s disappeared altogether.

When my father came back from the war when I was nearly nine and re-claimed his dictionary along with his children, the dictionary became a source of anguish to us all. We were living at Belsen, and grim post-war Germany had no diversions like TV, cinema, or all the other entertainments we take for granted now. So everyone did the crossword, either from the Times or The Daily Telegraph, as it was called back then.

I think there must have been a sweepstake at the officers’ mess, because there was always great competition to get it finished first. If ever phone calls came from the mess – which was actually the Duke of Hanover’s palace – asking my parents – we lived in the Beast of Belsen’s former home – to quiz me about Alice in Wonderland or The Wind in the Willows, that would set my stepmother off on a frenzied hunt for a previously unrecognised clue.

Then the agony began when my somewhat unknown father wanted to look up a word beginning with ‘A’. He’d pick up the now shrunken dictionary, and start leafing bitterly through those tattered first pages as I watched anxiously. Finally he’d give up in disgust, with the exclamation: “Bloody kids!” and I’d slink guiltily away. He never normally swore, so it seemed all the worse. As the years went by, he said it every time, and as I got older, I finally realised it was a joke, and was able to stop flinching.

I still can’t resist dictionaries, almanacs, encyclopaedias and the like. My step grandfather used to give the family a copy of wonderful Whitaker’s Almanack every year at Christmas, and even now if I see an old copy in a second hand book-shop I’ll buy it… and read up about the scientific discoveries for that year, symptoms of every disease, orders of precedence in the English peerage, major architectural triumphs for that year, politics in outer Mongolia and what the stars have to say – astronomy, not astrology – amongst other pieces of useless but fascinating information.

Sadly, we gave away the thirty well loved and well travelled volumes of Encyclopaedia Brittanica last year to a boy’s school which needed some reference books. With all the glories of Google at our disposal, we never opened those heavy volumes with tiny print any more. I even bought my own thick copy of Webster’s years ago, but we never even use that now – the Concise Oxford is easier to handle, as well as Google.

All this came back to me as I tried to piece together a talk I’ve been asked to give about books to a local retired professionals club. I’ve dodged them for years, but have no more excuses left to fob them off with. So now I have to settle down to the hard work of talking, instead of the fun of writing – especially about books! How shall I start – “The A’s have it – dabbling in a dictionary – or what to give a three year old to read?”

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Gallivanta asked me what pink pudding is…since I gave this recipe over a year ago, I’ll repeat it now for others who’ve missed out on a real treat! I found it over forty years ago in an old Vogue Living, and it’s been a favourite ever since. All you need if half a pint of cream, the same amount of plain or strawberry/ raspberry yogurt, and a tin of boysenberries or raspberries.

Drain the juice from the berries. I don’t use frozen, as they get watery and spoil the dish. Whip the cream until thick, fold the yogurt and fruit in, add caster sugar to taste, and chill in the fridge. You can melt some marshmallows in some of the fruit juice to make a firmer pudding, but we like all natural ingredients. Serve in a big glass dish with a rose in the middle or in individual glass dishes with a tiny hearts-ease flower to pretty it. Good shortbread is nice served with it.

Food for Thought

If souls were compared to moving vehicles, an unforgiving soul could be seen as a dump truck with tin cans dragging off the backside. Clatter, clatter, clang, clang!! If you listen you can hear them coming. from ‘Love Without End. Jesus Speaks’, by Glenda Green

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Tagged as childhood, country-side, crosswords, Daily Telegraph, dictionaries, Encyclopædia Britannica, food, Glenda Green, Google, humour, spiritual, Wind in the Willows

July 13, 2013 · 11:50 pm

The real Dalai Lama

That Christmas, when they were seven and eight, I had sent the children to the other side of the world to see their father and grand-parents. Instead of cancelling their daily treat of chocolate milk, I gave it to the children who lived around the corner with their single mother and cat called Mehitabel.

I lived in a big old white verandahed house next door to a park, and sometimes when I looked out of the window I would see them trailing dispiritedly past in single file, mother in front, and three small scruffy children aged seven downwards, straggling behind her, followed closely by the cat.

One warm summer night, the eldest, my son’s friend, with the unfortunate name of Ezekiel, came rushing into my flat, and said: “Mum says ring for the ambulance!” I did, and a few minutes later he was back, saying: “Mum says cancel the ambulance. The police might come too. She wants you to come. “

As we ran I tried to find out what had happened. His father was a drug addict, who had recently, according to my horrified son, “stomped” his mother in law when he was high. As we hurried towards the house, I worried that I might get stomped too. When I got there, Melanie was waiting. At the door-step I had to step over the cat Mehitabel who’d been speyed that day and was mewling in pain, while at the same time her kittens were clamouring for milk. Not a good start. My heart sank. The smells and the squalor turned my stomach.

Melanie whispered to me in terror that the ex-husband had taken an overdose, and because he was on a methadone recovery programme was furious when he realised she’d ordered an ambulance, as it could get him into trouble with the police and wreck his programme.“He’s just coming to now,” she agonised, “and I don’t know what to do.”Neither did I.

I could hear heavy dragging footsteps moving across the uncarpeted wooden floor overhead. All the family cowered, and I stood in the hall facing the stairway with them behind me, as a tall heavy man lurched round the bend in the wooden stairs. To my astonishment, as though I was at an English garden party, I smiled, stepped towards him, stuck out my hand to shake his, and heard myself say: “How d’you do, we haven’t met, I’m Valerie …”

His blank blue eyes focussed, he took my hand, returned the greetings, and a sigh seemed to emanate from the three small children and his wife holding their breath. We discussed the cats, let a few other polite nothings pass between us, and with everything seeming to be quiet and normal, I left. And shortly after, he did. In the years that have passed I’ve often thought about this unconscious knee-jerk conditioning which was so banal and mundane that it lowered the temperature immediately. Would I do it differently now that I’m older and more conscious?

Ten years later when I was doing hard labour on a consciousness – raising course in Australia – with nearly a hundred others – one of the charges laid against me by the course leader was that I was gracious! He said it stopped me being real, and was a defence mechanism that didn’t serve me. I didn’t get it then, and neither did some others who came up to me afterwards, and told me they liked me the way I was. But as time went by, I did get to see what he meant about avoidance and being real, and also to understand at a deep level, the truth of these well-known, lovely lines from Margery Williams’ classic, ‘The Velveteen Rabbit.’

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you ….
‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.
‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’
‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Being real to me, is about having the courage to be honest, never hiding who we are, never being ashamed of anything we are, accepting who we are – and most important of all – being vulnerable. When we’re vulnerable we don’t fear being hurt, but know that great gifts can come out of risking ourselves. And somehow when we are real and therefore honest about our feelings, others can respond at that level of vulnerability and truth.

Being vulnerable is about having an open heart, and being available to both spontaneous joy and un-regretted sorrow. There’s a freedom when we start being real, we dare to be adventurous in spirit, and calm and confident in adversity. We don’t have regrets, because we know that there are no wrong paths. “Paths are made by walking,” as the Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote.

One of the most real stories I’ve heard is about the Dalai Lama, who has never been anything but authentic, honest, wise, and now – I realise – vulnerable, spontaneous and real! A friend had spent the weekend with him (and a thousand others), studying Tibetan scriptures. The Dalai Lama read them aloud in Tibetan, and then someone else translated them into English, and he discussed them.

At the end of the second day, when they had reached the end of the programme, he held up the book, and said to his hearers something like: if you found this useful or enlightening, then you can read it every day.

“If not,” he twinkled, with his wide wise smile, “Fuck it,” and threw the book over his shoulder! There was a moment of disbelieving silence, and then everyone roared with delighted laughter.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

I’ve been battling with the damage the dentist inadvertently did to two good teeth some weeks ago, and am now about to have two root canals, so I’m eating ‘soft’ food. Yesterday I remembered a dish we used to call: ‘convent eggs.’ It’s comfort food – creamy mashed potatoes, and hard- boiled eggs covered with cheese sauce – simple, cheap and easy. When mashing the potatoes I pour cream or milk into the pan with drained potatoes, and as soon as it bubbles I take it off the heat, and mash with lots of butter, salt and pepper. At the end I quickly beat the potatoes with a wooden spoon to make them fluffy. Put the potatoes on a warmed plate, cut the hard -boiled eggs in half and press into the potatoes, then pour the cheese sauce over. That’s the quickest way. But the same layers placed in an ovenproof dish, and grilled until brown adds a dimension of crunch and taste.

Food for Thought

Absurdity is a very powerful tool for waking up. A good situation comedy is a wonderful Buddhist teaching, because it’s a parody of suffering. The cause of suffering is attachment to outcome, attachment to income, attachment to the world being a certain way.

Steve Bhaerman – Swami Beyondanandal – the Cosmic Comic

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Tagged as Antonio Machado, being real, consciousness raising, Dalai Lama, drugs, food, Margery Williams, philosophy, spiritual, Velveteen Rabbit

July 9, 2013 · 11:30 pm

Places in the Heart

The printed word has a lot to answer for and has changed the course of many lives.

On this occasion when it changed mine, I was cursorily scanning the personal columns of the Daily Telegraph looking for somewhere to live. My husband was away with his regiment on manoeuvres or practise camp, and I was filling in the trying gap between the baby’s ten o’clock and two o’clock feed.

We had to find somewhere to live for a year, and this night I found a few lines offering a country house in the right area for nearly the right price – for a year. The next day I rang. The owner was delighted – he was off to Greenwich Naval College and wanted someone to keep his house warm. “Chudor, ya’ know,” he told me, listing the bedrooms… We arranged a time that weekend to inspect the place, and when my husband returned the next day he went off on what he called a recce. He came back looking rather panic-stricken. “It’s bigger than Hampton Court,” he said, “and looks like it too, all red brick.” Undaunted, I persevered, rather fancying the idea of a stately home. We’d never be able to heat it, he argued, and then I saw the light – with an eighteen month old and a four month old, that mattered.

So I returned to the personal columns, and struck gold a week later. “This one sounds OK”, I said,” right area, right rent, and only five bedrooms” (my ideas had expanded considerably since my brush with Layer Marney Towers the previous week). I rang the owner – same story – wanted someone to live in it for a year, this time while he wound up his boat building business in East Anglia. “You’ll love it,” he said, “there’s the garden bedroom, the oak bedroom, the red bedroom, the four poster bedroom, and the end bedroom…” My husband panicked again.

But a few days later we set off on a light June evening driving through quiet Essex lanes, with honeysuckle and dog roses winding in among the high hazel, hawthorn and elderberry hedges. We found Newney Hall dreaming between fields and hedgerows, a small lake – which in the twilight was almost black, and edged with a tangle of lilacs and shrubs – lying between it and the road. The house, Tudor red brick, and Essex pantiles on the upper floor with casement windows, stretched beyond the lake, reaching into a circular lawn with a cedar in the middle. Beyond that, a walled orchard.

As we walked down the gravel drive I could hear the sounds of music coming from the house. A knock on the door revealed a rather vague looking woman with a viola tucked under one arm, and the bow held in her other, as though she could hardly bear to stop between bars to open the door. “George!” she called imperiously, and the seigneur hurried to welcome us. Within minutes the deal was done, and we moved in a week or so later.

The house had been built in the time of Edward the Sixth, Henry the Eighth’s son, and all the land around had been gifted to Wadham College, Oxford in the same reign, so nothing in the landscape had changed for over four hundred years. The fields and trees, lanes and barns were untouched by time, and since there was no sound of traffic, no jet planes practising, and only occasionally the sound of a distant tractor, the whole place lay wrapped in an almost primeval peace. There was no other house in sight.

Wood pigeons cooed incessantly somewhere in the trees, cocooning us in their summer sounds, the donkey in the next field brayed occasionally, the cows mooed as they shambled past to the milking shed at the farm beyond the house. The old red-tiled barns, grain sheds on staddle stones, and stables were laid out around a square, where the cows sheltered in winter. I walked across to the cow- shed every day with a baby on my hip, my eighteen month old trotting beside me, and carrying a big cream- ware jug to collect my fresh milk. We also went there to pick up new-laid eggs from the farmer.

The house was built from huge beams, and filled in between them with a mixture of mud and straw. They were plastered over, and the walls were about three feet thick, with deep window ledges where I put books and vases of flowers. Two old aunts had been living in the house before expiring and gifting it to George. In the mid-sixties they were over ninety, and the house was unchanged since the days when they had been born back in the 1870’s. So was the dust. When I moved an antique chest of drawers to dust behind it, a thrush disintegrated into fine powder.

I spring cleaned from top to bottom, washed curtains, scrubbed floors, polished Sheraton tables and dusted Chippendale chairs. It was like living in a time warp. No heating, a gas stove so old I’d never seen one like it, and neither had the serviceman when he came. If it’s working, best leave it, he said, shaking his head. I had a big kitchen with a big square scrubbed table in the middle, red and white checked tile floor which needed scrubbing every week, and a real larder with marble slab. My only gadgets a pop-up toaster and a wooden spoon!

At weekends a stream of friends came through, a childhood friend getting used to having MS, school friends with their babies and husbands, army friends with theirs, a friend of my husband, shell- shocked after being court- martialled – a Polish/ French student who had nowhere to go, a girl who was pregnant and needed somewhere to stay – she moved on, didn’t like my food, I think – cousins, godparents, in-laws, family… and then back to primeval peace during the week.

Once I dumped his steak and kidney pudding and vegetables on my husband’s head. Mistake. Apart from reprisals, lots of cleaning up to do. And later, I lay in the long sweet smelling grass in the orchard, where I’d seen the red fox glide through, and cried my eyes out under the late evening summer sky. At twenty six I thought no-one would ever love me again.

Not long after, we left that beautiful house to go to Hongkong, where the hectic life and chaos of those times obliterated the memories of that year in the country. But for years I have dreamt of it. In my dreams it’s bigger, and there are many more rooms. The furniture is more elegant and the rooms more beautiful. There is one room which is filled with such treasures that I only go into it sometimes… it feels sacred. I have no idea why I dream so often of this house I lived in for a short year so long ago. I don’t know what it symbolizes. I’ve lived in other houses and places just as magical… no doubt a psychologist would mine some profound Jungian theory from these dreams, delving into the unconscious and maybe coming up with an archetype!

Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with Menabilly the house she immortalised as Manderley in ‘Rebecca’, and wrote about her dreams of it, while another writer, Elizabeth Bowen, clung to the memories of her ancestral home in Ireland, Bowen House. Evelyn Waugh immortalised Lygon Hall in his book ‘Brideshead Revisited’. Like du Maurier writing about Manderley, Waugh’s writing about Brideshead breathes love, nostalgia and an ache, a longing to return.

It isn’t just writers who long for these enchanted places from the past. It’s as though the romance of their lost beauty, surrounded by dreaming country-side, grows tendrils into the heart which can never be untangled. … and this is not just the experience of a few. For some, it’s the house by the sea, for others, the log – hut in the wood… a longing perhaps for memories of happiness and holidays past, innocent times of laughter and love, for the sweet days of years gone by. It rarely seems to be a house in town that arouses these emotions … mostly these lost demesnes are part of an idyllic landscape. As the years go by, these landscapes become almost mythical places of perfection…

And once we’ve left, we can only return in our dreams. Though we have left something of ourselves behind in these special places, it is a different self, a younger self seeing the world as it was then. To return in the physical is to invite dis-illusion or disappointment. Things change, new owners improve on the simplicity that we treasured, the light is harsher, the house smaller, the garden neglected or smartened, trees and shrubs overgrown or cut down, the lake stagnant, and nothing is the same. So memories and dreams are the best we can have. And they are precious, and time cannot warp them or fade them. These are our private, personal paradises – our places in the heart.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Friend popped in for a girl’s drink. I still had some delectable rose from lunch together a couple of days before, so she came to help me finish it. Too late to get to the shops, I found I had nothing to nibble… no thin brown bread for smoked salmon and lemon juice, so blinis were fished out of the deep freeze, but then I had no cream cheese.

So I improvised by hard boiling a couple of eggs, slicing them thinly, and placing a slice on each buttered blini. Next layer was mayonnaise on the eggs, and lastly the salmon with a sprinkling of parsley. I cut the salmon in two pieces for each blini, so it was easy to bite them without wrecking the whole edifice! They went down a treat, and we had a happy hour laughing at ourselves and the world, before returning to the inescapable task of feeding our always hungry husbands.

Food for Thought

“’One pure act of acceptance is worth more than a hundred thousand exercises of one’s will,’ since it is a state of interior silence and quietude from which at the right time, the right action emerges without any volition.”

From ‘Taoism – The Way of the Mystic’ by Jean C Cooper 1905 – 1999 Born in China to missionaries, she grew up learning about Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism from her amahs. After studying philosophy at St Andrews, Edinbrugh, and lecturing in comparative religions, she lived with her husband in a remote Cumberland home (the lake district) where she had to generate her own electricity from a stream.

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Tagged as Daphne, Daphne du Maurier, dreams, Elizabeth Bowen, English country house, Evelyn Waugh, food, houses, love, Manderley, Maurier, nostalgia, Rebecca, spiritual

July 6, 2013 · 12:41 am

Their many-splendoured thing

To get to the truth of this love story was a journey through two thousand years of male chauvinism and prejudice.

I’ve discovered that the story of Caesar and Cleopatra’s love has been distorted for centuries, belittled, and encrusted with calumnies of Cleopatra. Even Caesar’s twentieth century biographers seem to have had their judgement warped and their vision dulled by some unconscious hostility towards one of the great charmers of history – the last Queen of Egypt.

I think I could have fallen in love with Caesar. He was a strikingly good looking man with sensitive features and piercing eyes according to contemporary sources; a brilliant orator -second only to Cicero – who kept his legions loyal both with his oratory and his generosity to them, getting land for them to settle on, and doubling their pay. He was a prodigious horseman with enormous stamina and a reputation for travelling a hundred miles a day in a light carriage in those days on those roads, while writing letters and reports to Rome – sounds like Napoleon…

Caesar’s Gallic Wars may have been the torment of generations of school-children (‘ Gaul was divided into three parts,’ etc) but they are esteemed for their historic record, and admired for their taut elegant Latin prose style. He was intelligent, and tackled Rome’s chronic debt problems and began to find a solution for the huge under-class of unemployed people in Rome. And he was one of the greatest generals in history.

When he met Cleopatra, she’d been queen since she was fourteen, but had just been deposed by her younger brother and his power brokers. Young Ptolomy’s men had seized Pompey, Caesar’s enemy, when he had fled to Egypt, and according to some accounts, beheaded him then and there in front of his wife and children. When Caesar arrived in Alexandria two days later to deal with Pompey, Ptolomy presented him with his enemy’s head, thinking to gain his favour. But Caesar was disgusted and so antagonised the Egyptians.

Twenty-one year old Cleopatra had decided that she would get Caesar on her side to win back her crown. Barred from Alexandria by her brother, she sailed up to Caesar’s palace at dusk. A servant named Appollodorus, the Sicilian, carried her in a carpet past Ptolomy’s guards, and in this exotic way she met the great Roman general. What courage! What audacity!Who wouldn’t fall for such a high-spirited and ravishing young creature? Fifty-two year old Caesar was enchanted.

And Cleopatra? No contest! We all know why, thanks to Henry Kissinger’s helpful advice to his aide – “ you’d have no way of knowing, Pederson, but power is the greatest aphrodisiac,” – and so it was with Caesar. Cleopatra stayed there in the palace with him, and when a few months later, his legions arrived from Italy, he defeated the Egyptians at a battle on the Nile, where Ptolomy was drowned.

Caesar was a descendant of the mythical Aneas, who had fled the sack of Troy, popped in on Dido in Africa, and then left her, thereby bequeathing to us another of opera’s greatest songs, ‘Dido’s Lament’, and finally ended up in Italy. The fabulously rich and beautiful Cleopatra was a descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s generals, who was Satrap governing Egypt when Alexander died. He proclaimed himself Pharoah, and the Ptolomies reigned in Egypt for nearly three hundred years.

They had continued to speak Greek throughout this time, though clever Cleopatra had actually taken the trouble to learn Egyptian. So it would have been no problem to converse with Caesar, since Greek would have been their common language, spoken by all educated people in those days.

After Caesar had defeated her brother, he re-instated Cleopatra on the throne, and before rushing off to mop up the rest of Pompey’s supporters in Spain (he certainly got around) he spent several months cruising on the Nile with his beloved. They were accompanied by 400 craft, and the picture of them in my mind, reclining on cushioned couches under draped awnings, soft voices, perfumes, music and beauty all around them, makes me think of the words:

They live in such delight,

Such pleasure and such play,

As that to them a thousand years

Doth seem as yesterday.

Then, while Caesar went rushing about his empire putting down riots and rebellions from the fall-out of his quarrel with Pompey – he spared his enemies, which meant trouble for him later – Cleopatra gave birth to his only son, called Caesarion. For the next two years, their love must have been sustained by relays of couriers delivering papyruses. It’s very hard to work out the chronology of their love affair as different commentators and historians dropped facts or fudged them; and they prefered to write that ‘Caesar aligned himself with her’, as though it was just political policy, rather than admit that he loved her.

One of them says that when Caesar went back to Alexandria, he was putting down a remnant of Pompey’s force – really? A handful of leaderless dissidents, hanging out in Egypt for two years, while the legions he had left behind to protect Cleopatra ignored them? Of course he had gone to see Cleopatra. This time she followed him to Rome with their baby and her young brother, technically her co-monarch. Taking him with her, meant that other factions couldn’t cause trouble back home on his behalf.

Caesar installed his mistress in one of his villas. It caused a scandal of course. He was already married to Calpurnia, but clearly adored Cleopatra in spite of her detractors insinuating that she was not important to him. He had a gold statue of her made and placed in the temple of his ancestors. Cicero hated her, as did many others, who feared her influence over Caesar. But in spite of every historian’s attempts to write Cleopatra out of Caesar’s story, this one action shows the depths of his commitment to the fascinating Queen.

As proof of this lack of commitment to her they say that he failed to make their son his heir. But why would he nominate a three- year- old illegitimate half- foreigner to run Rome, when he’d already named his adult great- nephew Octavian, who became Emperor Augustus? Historians also say that she “claimed” that Caesarion was Caesar’s – how insulting – at one stroke this implies she was promiscuous, and the child’s father unknown.

A twentieth century biographer makes no mention of Cleopatra when he describes Caesar’s innovation of creating public libraries like the one attached to the Great Library of Alexandria. He also tells how Caesar used an Egyptian astronomer to re-organise the calendar, and institute the Julian Calendar, which was used throughout the western world for over fifteen hundred years. Gradually countries changed over to the slightly more accurate Gregorian calendar in the seventeenth century, but to do so caused riots in many countries. Russia didn’t change over until the Revolution in1918, and Berber Arabs and the monks of Mt Athos still use Caesar’s calendar.

Despite the Egyptian astronomer, historians pretend this too had nothing to do with Cleopatra. The one thing they’re happy to sheet back to her, was that Caesar grew more dictatorial, which they claimed was due to her Ptolomy influence – not to the circumstances in Rome and his increasing age? At the end of two years, Caesar was assassinated, by enemies claiming that he was aiming for too much power. He died on the steps of the Senate on the Ides of March, 44BC.

Cleopatra fled back to Egypt. None of these heartless male historians ever credit her with a broken heart, but how could she not have been broken-hearted? She and her lover had been together for four years. If Caesar had lived, where would the story have ended? Roman writers denigrated her and de-valued her place in Caesar’s heart, but admitted that her great beauty and her wit, charm and ‘sweetness in the tones of her voice,’ according to Plutarch, were legendary. “Brilliant to look upon and to listen to,” wrote another. Shakespeare had the famous last words: ‘Age shall not wither her, not custom stale her infinite variety’…

And when four years later, Mark Antony summoned her to meet him at Tarsus to answer for her loyalty to Caesar – at nearly thirty, and at the height of her radiant beauty – she famously pulled out all the stops for him; her life and her throne depended on it. Yet ten years on, the rather unreliable and vain-glorious Mark Anthony failed her, and she committed suicide rather than be dragged in chains through Rome as part of the Triumph of Mark Anthony’s enemy – Caesar’s great-nephew, Octavian. Honesta mors turpi vita potior – an honourable death is better than a dishonourable life – Roman historian Tacitus

P. S. Seventeen- year old Caesarion was killed by Octavian – ‘too many Caesar’s’ – thus proving, despite the sneers, that he was Caesar’s son. Cleopatra’s twins and a son by Mark Anthony, were brought up by Octavia, Mark Anthony’s divorced wife – an act of generosity and goodness in the circumstances.

PPS The poem comes from an old hymn called ‘Jerusalem, my happy home’. It was written circa 1580 by an anonymous Catholic priest and based on the writings of St Augustine in 400AD.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Shopping for vegetables this morning, I saw some fresh cos lettuce. I don’t really like salads in winter, but promised myself a nice Caesar salad. It was only when I reached home, I realised the hilarious workings of my unconscious!

Anyway, we had one – this is my down home version: a few rashers of organic bacon chopped and fried. Some crisp croutons fried to golden brown. I either poach the eggs or boil them very lightly. I don’t use anchovies, as my husband doesn’t like them and the original recipe used some drops of Worcestershire sauce, which is what gives the faint anchovy flavour. Toss it all together, except for the egg and sprinkle with a good vinaigrette dressing which has some crushed garlic in it. Then add grated parmesan, which amalgamates with the dressing, and then with the egg yolk when the egg is added and broken. Delicious – even in winter!

Food for Thought

Something going on here – after using the words below in a conversation with a friend the other day, I decided to put them on the end of this rather long blog – nice and short Food for Thought! When I Googled to check who had written these words, I was astonished to find that they date from the same times as Julius Caesar!

If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? …. And if not now, when?”

Rabbi Hillel – Great Jewish teacher who lived at the same time as Julius Caesar and later, King Herod, dying in 10 AD.

The modern version is “If not me –who? If not now – when? “

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Tagged as Alexandria, Augustus, Caesar, Cleopatra, Egypt, food, Julius Caesar, love, male chauvinism, Pompey, Rome, spiritual

July 2, 2013 · 1:41 am

Storms of Delight

I awoke to the roaring of a savage sea hurling itself onto the rocks below. The window is always open so that I can hear the sea.

Looking out, it was a grey wolf sea, with a steel-grey haze obliterating the islands that hover on the horizon. White capped rollers raced in across cruel grey and glacier- green water, and when the waves hit the rocks spilled over in sheets of white foam blowing high in the air. Low tide is almost more spectacular than high tide, because the water hits the rocks instead of flowing over most of them.

Later, I put on a hood and jacket and walked out into the storm. The wind was thrashing the trees and making much the same sound as the roaring sea. First I walked to the garden of some friends overlooking the little harbour. It’s usually like a shining green jewel set deep in high rock and forested walls. It was calm, the only sign of the storm being the muddy-looking water.

These friends own the goats and are away overseas for some weeks, so I pocketed the lemons lying under the tree. It was only a little tree, but had been so nurtured and well fed, that where one lemon would normally hang, between five and ten weighted down each fragile branch. The scent of the blossom still growing swirled round the tree before flying in the wind.

As I walked down their long drive, between two rows of palm trees, three little speckled red hens came running out of a nearby garden, and solemnly picked their way behind me in single file. I felt like turning round to stroke them, but they weren’t keen on this. The way they followed me reminded me of Konrad Lorenz’s imprinted geese, and I hoped these little hens weren’t busy imprinting themselves on me. They gave up in the end, and returned home to where their supper was awaiting them in the hands of a pretty girl in a cream poncho.

Strolling back in the flying rain I walked down the cul de sac to say hello to the three goats, and give them a little leafy, twiggy treat. Robert, the grumpy old billy- goat, would keep dropping his mouthful in order to snatch the little darlings’ twigs from their mouths. So I had to do a dodgy dance to try to fend him off while the babies managed an uninterrupted munch for a few minutes.

As I turned round to come home, I heard a piteous whine. It was Zeb, the black and white pointer who lives opposite the goats, and sometimes escapes to come and see me. She had her head to the fence, hoping I’d come and say hello to her too. Of course I did, and while I was doing so, Kate, her owner, came out and asked if I’d like some new-laid eggs. Would I? So when Zeb and I had finished our tete- a- tete, I returned home the delighted carrier of six fresh eggs.

I laid them carefully with the glowing yellow lemons on the garden seat at the top of the steps, and continued my wander in the storm. We live on a tiny peninsula sticking out into the sea, our house facing one way, and on the other side of the little neck of land, the old village graveyard faces out to sea in the other direction. Beneath spreading trees, it holds the graves of the earliest settlers in this place, and the latest inhabitants.

I walked on the wet grass between the graves, heading for the end of the cemetery where it ends in a deep crevasse where the sea throws itself against this neck of land. Here I look down on a flat rock fifty feet below. The seas crash over it in rough weather, or lap against the sides on calm days, revealing tempting still green depths and white rock below the waterline, where I’d love to swim if I could get down there. Today it was almost invisible beneath thick sheets of green water swirling over it and spumes of foam flying through the air.

As I stood looking down here, as I so often do, I realised that every time I come here, I think of Pincher Martin, and William Golding’s description of hell. Pincher Martin scrabbling desperately to escape the raging seas, and clinging onto the slippery rock and slipping back down again into the tormenting cauldron of murderous waves… over and over again … not a pleasant remembrance, and one I try to banish, but it always comes back … just as I never see the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, in the flesh or in pictures, without thinking of Golding’s ‘The Spire’ and his painful story of spiritual disintegration. Thank goodness I’ve avoided reading ‘The Lord of the Flies’, as I know I would be tormented by that too.

Today, the wind crashing through the old pohutakawa trees – which were probably growing here when my hero, Captain James Cook sailed past in 1769 – was bringing down lots of small twigs and gnarly broken branches. When they’re dry they’re wonderful to start the fire with, and the peasant in me can’t resist gathering bundles. This was a successful foray and I returned home with a big armful of wet branches and twigs to dry out in the garage. Pohutakawa trees grow to the size of a good oak tree, and have dark green, hard, crunchy leaves all the year round. They’re sometimes called the New Zealand Christmas tree because at Christmas they’re smothered in flaming red blossom, and here, where the whole coast is ringed with them, they are a unique sight.

And so back home to a blazing log fire, with the haunting and tender sounds of Handel’s opera Julius Caesar still ringing through my head. I went to see it for the second time in three days yesterday, five hours of it, and would see it again – and again, if it was available. Today I Googled Caesar and Cleopatra, since I only knew of Anthony and Cleopatra. And yes, Handel hadn’t messed around with history, Caesar and Cleopatra had had a love affair, she had borne his only son, and she stayed with him in Rome until his assassination.

So well before her alliance with Mark Anthony, she had loved Caesar, and he her.Knowing this made the exquisite songs of their love affair in opera seem even more poignant.Cleopatra inveigled her way into Caesar’s presence rolled up in a carpet, and in the opera sang a song of enchantment for him. I read somewhere that Cleopatra’s glorious song to Caesar: “v’adoro pupille” (I adore you, eyes,) is the most seductive love song ever written. I can believe it. In Natalie Dessay’s version she didn’t seduce, she poured out her heart. It was beautiful.

And this life seems so beautiful too, with all its gifts and grace notes, allusive thoughts and memories, the stormy seas and wild winds, the hens and the goats, the centuries of music and aeons of love, the lemons, the eggs and the firewood!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

The pantry was bare. So I made a treat I haven’t made for years – cheese aigrettes. All I needed were things like eggs, flour, and grated Parmesan which I always have in the deep freeze. So into a saucepan went two oz butter and half a pint of water. When boiling I added 4 oz flour and stirred hard until the whole mixture was coming away from the sides of the saucepan, leaving it clean.

Off the heat I mixed in 3oz Parmesan and two egg yolks, beating them in separately. Add salt and pepper, and then fold in the stiffly whisked egg whites.That’s the easy part. When the mixture is cold, drop small rough pieces, about a teasp size or bigger, into hot fat. Don’t fry too quickly or the outside will brown before it’s cooked inside. But if the fat is too cold, the aigrettes will become greasy. It takes about four minutes for each batch to cook.

Fish them out with a slotted spoon onto some kitchen paper to drain, and serve with grated parmesan sprinkled over, and a dash of cayenne pepper. With salad, they’re crunchy, filling and delicious.

Food for Thought

Life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking, and of love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again.

From Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay English novelist 1881 – 1958

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Filed under books, cookery/recipes, culture, environment, great days, happiness, life/style, literature, love, spiritual, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life, Uncategorized, village life

Tagged as animals, Cleopatra, Handel, Julius Caesar, Natalie Dessay, Opera, recipes, spiritual, storm, village life, William Golding

June 23, 2013 · 2:29 am

Nineteen Eighty-Four has caught up with us in NZ

This blog is written by my husband, Pat Booth, a NZ journalist. It’s his weekly column, and I think it’s important for several reasons.

He writes: “It’s a pattern that an author would die for. Actually, he’s dead already. But interest in his book is at its highest level in decades. Latest figures: Sales up 6884 per cent in 24 hours.

An unlikely sales team is working on the project world-wide – the CIA, presumably MI6, some secret group called Prism, China’s deceptively tame-sounding Ministry of State Security, the Five Eyes partnership and NZ’s GCSB. New Zealand’s promotion team is headed by the Prime Minister, John Key.

The book? A brief resume (with credits to Wikipedia): “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell, published in 1949, is set in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thought crimes.

“Their tyranny is headed by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality, but who may not even exist. Big Brother and the Party justify their rule in the name of a supposed greater good. “The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, (Aha!) is a member of the Outer Party who works for the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism.

“His job is to re-write past newspaper articles so that the historical record always supports the current party line. Smith is a diligent and skilled worker, but he secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion against Big Brother.” Of course, any spy epic must include sex.

But Orwell would never have produced anything quite as cute as whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s girl friend, Lindsay Mills, who labels herself in her blog as “specialising in pole dancing, partner acrobatics and aerial dancing”. She knows her “Man of Mystery as “E” … As I type this on my tear-streaked keyboard I’m reflecting on all the faces that have graced my path …” etc etc

All this is good for a giggle – if only it didn’t reflect so clearly the sort of world we live in. Today’s facts are as worrying as anything in Orwell’s fiction. Digital science has outdated him.

Modern scandals represent so much of modern life – the ability in our society to dig into phone and e-mail records to identify who we call and when, phones that take and send photos, so called security systems on streets and in buildings intended as a protection from crime which can be tapped as to who was where and when, charting movements by vetting data in those same mobile phones.

Here is a guide to aspects of the spying world you may never have believed existed. The GCSB: The NZ Prime Minister, Mr Key chairs the committee which in early July will hear submissions on the “Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill” (to those in the know, “the Spy Bill.”) It allows the GCSB to spy on New Zealanders in set circumstances. GCSB’s web site boasts that it “employs the cream of New Zealand’s talent… many recognised as leaders in their field of expertise.”

PRISM: What’s most troubling about the U.S. PRISM isn’t that it collects data. It’s the type of data it collects. According to the Washington Post it collects: “…audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs… [Skype] can be monitored for audio when one end of the call is a conventional telephone, and for any combination of audio, video, chat, and file transfers when Skype users connect by computer alone. Google’s offerings include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and live surveillance.”

PRISM’s masthead has familiar massive white inflatable globes on its masthead – like those in that secret US base at Waihope in NZ’s South Island that no one will talk about!

Insisting that broad national security requests seeking users’ personal information were unconstitutional, Yahoo went to US court fighting a PRISM demand that they join the spying programme and hand over data. They lost. A secret US court operating under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) sided with the National Security Agency and forced Yahoo’s hand. Most recent figures show that Facebook got up to 10,000 requests for data from NSA in the last six months of 2012, involving between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users on a broad range of surveillance topics, from missing children to terrorism.

Microsoft had between 6000 and 7000 orders, affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 accounts, but downplayed how much they had revealed. Did you get all that? Similar “depth of access” applies to Facebook, Microsoft, and the rest. Just to be clear: This covers practically anything you or I have ever done online, up to and including Google searches as you type them.

Five Eyes: This “intelligence community” grew out of close UK-US intelligence cooperation in World War 11. Early in the Cold War, “faced by growing Soviet conventional and nuclear threats, American and British intelligence cooperation grew.” Out of that came a Top Secret sphere of sigint (secure integrated global network) cooperation whose existence was denied by participating governments – including ours – for many years. Its website includes an up-beat statement from Canadian Brigadier General James Cox:

“Cyberspace is now an accepted domain of warfare and Five Eyes sigint agencies are the principal ‘warfighters’, engaged in a simmering campaign of cyber defence against persistent transnational cyber threats… “…to provide governments with foreign sigint in support of national decision-making. In doing so, Five Eyes partners – the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – rely on each other to share the collection and analysis burden.

“Today, technological and computational advances create innumerable opportunities for the interception of diplomatic, military, scientific and commercial communications, as well as the extrapolation of radar, spacecraft and weapons systems. While it cannot always reveal what an opponent is thinking, sigint can tell you what he is saying and doing, Most critically, sigint can provide warning of imminent enemy activity at various levels.”

The general also says rather unconvincingly: “Five Eyes partners apparently do not target each other, nor does any partner seek to evade their national laws by requesting or accepting such activity. There is, however, no formal way of ensuring such eavesdropping does not take place. Each partner is trusted to adhere to this ‘gentleman’s agreement’ between allies.”

“Apparently” is not good enough. A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister says: “It is the Prime Minister’s view that New Zealand’s relationships with its partners are of overwhelming benefit to New Zealand’s national security. I’m not convinced. Are you? It’s worse than “1984”. It’s real.”

End of my husband’s thoughts on spying, and Canadian spy chief’s gobbledegook. Noam Chomsky has suggested that younger people may not be as outraged by this invasion of privacy as older people, since they’re already used to the open slather of Facebook and Twitter. But if so, I think they haven’t, in the words of the old joke : “realised the gravity of the situation”…

On the other hand, while a sinister interpretation can be put on these spying measures, in another way it shows us how we are all interconnected – that no-one is not, these days, part of the global village. The US and its allies have unwittingly united us all in their network of operations, and in so doing may well unite us all too, in our resistance to being swallowed up in the phantom fears of fighting terrorism and in the brain-washing of the so-called fight for freedom.

This determination to monitor the citizens of the world may back-fire and show us all that seeing every-one as a potential enemy, terrorist or undesirable person is not the answer to peace. Peace is a state of mind, not a war on anything.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

All the family came for lunch yesterday to celebrate my birthday. Too many to sit round the dining room table, so I had to devise a menu to eat on our laps. It was a cold meal, so I made some hot mulled wine to warm everyone up on a freezing day before we began on the champagne and the rest.

It was quick and easy, using one bottle of good red wine ( I used some local Sangiovese), quarter of a cup of brandy, a peeled and sliced orange, eight cloves, three cinnamon sticks, two teasp ground ginger, and at least a third of a cup of honey… you can use more or less, depending on your taste.

Gently stir /mull for about twenty five minutes without boiling. I served it in coffee cups. This amount is enough for four to six people, but serving it in little coffee cups stretched it out to more than that.

Food for Thought

From the centre which we call the race of men

Let the Plan of Love and Light work out

And may it seal the door where evil dwells.

Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth

The last verse of The Great Invocation, channelled by Alice Bailey 1880 -1949 writer on philosophy and occult themes

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Filed under books, cookery/recipes, great days, peace, philosophy, politics, The Sound of Water, Thoughts on writing and life, Uncategorized

Tagged as Facebook, food, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, George Orwell, Google, Government Communications Security Bureau, National Security Agency, New Zealand, nineteen eighty-four, peace, spiritual, spying, United States

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Nineteen Eighty-Four has caught up with us in NZ

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