• The Facts of the Matter – King Charles & the West Indies

    So King Charles is due to visit various islands in the West Indies I read. I also read that he will face a barrage of accusations and claims for apologies and reparations from the various islands where slavery was once practised.

    Those slaves would have been transported from Africa, where the organized slave trade has been practiced for over a millennium, with external networks like the Arab-Muslim trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean slave trades flourishing from as early as the 7th century, while the Barbary Pirates raided the North African coast – Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco – as well as coasts as far away as Ireland and Cornwall from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Spanish writer Cervantes was among their captives, and condemned to rowing in their galleys until ransomed.

    Meanwhile the British practised the “peculiar institution”, as it was known in the American South, for 240 years. They were the first nation both to abolish it and fight it – using the Royal Navy to try to stop trading on the seas, for over sixty years until it was ended – losing both ships and some thousands of sailor’s lives during this campaign.

    So if King Charles is to be exhorted to apologize and pay up, there are many other people, groups and societies who should be ahead of the queue.

    Tidiiana N’Diaye, the Senegalese  anthropologist, says that what happened in East Africa over the centuries should  be openly discussed.

    “Most of the African authors have not yet published a book on the Arab-Muslim slave trade out of religious solidarity. There are 500 million Muslims in Africa, and it is better to blame the West than talk about the past crimes of Arab Muslims. Initially, the Arab Muslims in Eastern and Central Europe took white slaves to sell them to Arabia,” Tidiane N’Diaye said in an interview. “But the growing military power of Europe put an end to Islamic expansion and now that there was a shortage of slaves, Arab Muslims were looking massively to black Africa.”

    When missionary David Livingstone was exploring central Africa, and based at Zanzibar, one of the centres of the slave trade, he estimated that 80,00 to 100,00 Africans were captured by Muslim Arab traders every year. He wrote: “The strangest disease in this country seems really to be broken heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves”. And out of those huge numbers of slaves captured to be sold and transported from Zanzibar, only one in four survived the journey, most of them died from hunger and exhaustion. A stick was chained to their neck and linked to the next man in the long chain of desolate captives.

    It was not until 1873 that Sultan Seyyid Barghash of Zanzibar, under pressure from Great Britain, signed a treaty that made the slave trade in his territories illegal. But that decree was not enforced effectively. It was in 1909 when slavery was finally abolished in East Africa. It was the mid thirties before it ended in Ethiopia.

    According to author N’Diaye, slavery still exists, albeit in a different form. It is estimated that nearly 40 million people worldwide –  in Mauritania they abolished slavery in 1981, but in reality the situation in North Africa has not changed much. Young people are still enslaved against their will, forced to work and sexually exploited.

    “When it comes to racism, the woke – racism weapon against the past is to see only the West’s part in the terrible historical centuries old crime of slavery and the apparent miseries of colonialism. Even a search of the internet, in entries about Africa, only mention the Atlantic West coast slavery.

    Between the late 1870’s to the 1960’s, Colonialism took over from tribal warfare throughout most African kingdoms, tribes, and provinces. The tales of the atrocities and tortures and massacres that were visited previously on defenceless peoples, or on the beaten armies, or revolting tribes, are horrendous. James Bruce, the British explorer who traced the source of the Blue Nile in 1770, spent two years at the Ethiopian court, and described not only the dreadful fates of the king’s constantly warring enemies, but the Ethiopian habit of enjoying fresh meat cut from a living beast, describing one horrible victory feast when a bull was tethered and steaks systematically carved from the bellowing desperate creature.

    The accounts of other explorers over the hundred years before western rule, tell of the same brutalities and cruelties by psychopathic rulers who inherited bloody tribal rites and continued to practise them. In spite of ancient civilisations which had risen and fallen in other ages on this continent, the Africa the explorers found was primitive and bloodthirsty.

    In 1861, explorer Christopher Speke described King Rumanika of Karagwe’s harem, whose wives were force fed milk through pipes from a gourd, to become so horrendously fat that they couldn’t stand, but rolled around like seals, he said. Men with whips stood by to enforce the endless fattening up.

    While Speke was detained at his court for months in 1860, he described King Mutesa of Buganda killing people at his court daily, for trivial reasons such as a girl speaking too loudly, or a page neglecting to open or close a door, innocent people burned alive, tortured and murdered in all manner of ways.,

    So was the advent of colonial rule for that one hundred years, really such a tyranny? In Nigeria for example, the governor, Sir Evelyn Lugard having brought peace to the warring north, ‘set out the same principles of the administrative system subsequently institutionalized as ‘indirect rule’. Essentially, local government was to be left in the hands of the traditional chiefs, subject to the guidance of European officers.

    ‘ While this system had built-in contradictions, over the years the Nigerian system developed into a sophisticated form of local government, which became the hallmark of British colonial rule in Africa. ‘

    The colonial authorities of most nationalities, French, Portuguese, German, as well as British, left behind the rule of law, plus roads, hospitals, schools, railways, drains, and most of the advantages of western civilization. Since these countries gained independence, many have ignored ‘due process’ of law, press freedom, individual liberty and human rights’, in the words of Amnesty International. Systems of democratic government established at independence have been dismantled, and corrupt authoritarian regimes imposed, with many presidents declaring themselves in office for life.

    Since Independence there have been unspeakable massacres, tribal wars, repression of any dissent, and previously prosperous countries like Zimbabwe reduced to bankruptcy – though to read the internet, you would think it was a thriving happy prosperous society, untroubled by violence, famine, corruption, unemployment, and bulging prisons filled with people from the wrong tribe. ( I know, I have a close relative who was matron of the hospital in Harare. I have two friends who worked in Kenya for a few years, where they had to have an iron door fitted to their bedroom like everyone else so that they wouldn’t be murdered in their sleep by robbers. When they left, they left all their possessions, being allowed only enough cash to buy a coffee and bun at the airport.)

    Human rights groups have gone on record as describing ‘extensive political repression, including illegal and arbitrary detention, threats or other forms of intimidation, disappearances, politically motivated trials, and the massacre of peacefully protesting civilians ‘ in many countries.

    None of these regimes are castigated by the critics of the West. Both the crimes of the past, and the crimes of the present are ignored, overlooked or unknown to those pulling down statues and condemning European and American slave owners. Slave owners who were also philanthropists whose generosity sustains the very colleges and schools, hospitals and libraries, art galleries, orphanages, that today’s woke critics benefit from. And apart from all their other crimes, these were mostly old white dead males – an unbeatable combination if you’re inclined to find a good whipping boy… while modern woke culture requires that we change our minds and our beliefs about these men and about the past, and condemn them too.

    The philanthropy of many traders and owners, which contributed to the great civilization of the west, their gifts to the arts, to medicine, to science, to music, to literature, to architecture, to good government and a decent society may be forgotten in this present orgy of righteous indignation and judgement, but let us hope that the pendulum swings back before all that they gave and achieved is obliterated.

    Those lovely words from the book of Ecclesiastes honour these sort of men, ‘Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begot us’… Some of the most famous and indispensable men in history have been slave owners – men who reflected the customs of their times and place. Like most of us they all had gifts and they all had flaws, and they were men of their time. In time to come we may be abhorred too, by more advanced societies for the way we treat and eat other species, and exploit the natural world

    These slave-owners include men like the Prophet Muhammad, William Penn, the great Quaker who founded Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the unforgettable words of the Declaration of Independence, Demosthenes, influential ancient Greek statesman, many US presidents, including George Washington, most rich Romans and ancient Greeks, not many British, they tended to have money invested in trading, and so we come to wonderful William Wilberforce, and his supporters who battled so long to abolish the slave trade.

    Many of their descendants have been proud of the achievements of such men, others have been influenced by them, or inspired by them, while others have followed them – as in the case of Muhammad. So perhaps their critics could try to forgive them, leave their statues where grateful people erected them, and remember that it is because so many of them worked for a decent humane society, that we have the freedom today to say and think without fear – a freedom which applies to us all in the West, black or white, privileged, terf or transgender. “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls,” said Elizabeth I back in the 1550’s, and I think she had the right idea. So lay off King Charles !

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    Leftovers are wonderful! I had two buttery garlicky new potatoes sitting in the fridge, and wondered what to do with them, as well as wondering what to have for supper. It didn’t take long to decide to concoct a makeshift Spanish omelette for one, using a mushroom, small tomato, small piece of ham, and the aforesaid potato. Their garlicky flavour made up for not bothering to fry an onion, so after chopping everything up, and frying first the mushrooms, and adding the potatoes, then the tomatoes and then the ham, I tipped two beaten eggs over the the mixture, and cooked the omelette to the soft side, which is my preference.

    Eaten with a crusty warm roll, it was as good as the real thing.(With apologies to Spain.)

    Food for thought

    Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; … but to weigh and consider”. Sir Francis Bacon 1561- 1621

  • The Long and winding road

    A hundred and twelve years ago, Mr Bill Topp obtained a license from the Post Office to carry the mail once a week across a precipitous muddy track from one tiny settlement to another, using one horse. It took him three hours and nine minutes to traverse the fourteen miles of steep hairpin bends rising to 1,410 feet, and thus, over time the rough track acquired the name The 309 Road.

    There are just under 300 of these steep hairpin bends. A river winds fifty feet below, and in the years since we moved here, the increasingly violent storms have made it an increasingly dangerous drive, with steep slips into the river below, making it narrower and narrower, as we negotiate what is left of the road. It is still unpaved, dusty in summer, muddy in winter.

    We live halfway along it, at the very top of the range, in our protected forest. When we reach the high wrought iron gates and the civilized paved road inside, which leads to our little home another mile and a half further on, we heave a sigh of relief. Home safely !

    The 309 is famous in these parts for its horrors. We have a joke whenever we see a spanking new clean car creeping around the bends ( often on the wrong side of the road because they think it’s safer) we call them TT’s – Terrified Tourists. They are a menace to our safety, as are the tradies’ cars, tearing around the bends often on the wrong side too.

    If we turn left when we drive out of our gates, we head down to an old gold mining town, still full of Victorian settler charm, with a population of 2,000, and reliant on summer tourism with its beautiful harbour, enticing little shops and cafes, and famous potters. On the drive down, there are waterfalls and forest glades with giant kauri trees where tourists visit, and  a farm which is bisected by the road. Here until two years ago, dozens of wild black pigs roamed around the farm, and across the road with their tiny black piglets. 

    Tourists used to stop to pet them and talk to the gentle, eccentric, white haired old man who cherished them until one day just before Christmas, when he unwittingly became a murderer. A rustler described by his mother as ‘a loveable ratbag’, descended on the farm yet again, to help himself to a free Christmas ham. The frantic old farmer chased after him, beside himself from guarding the pigs night and day from thieves. He heard the terrible screams of his pet pig being butchered, snapped, and shot the man. He is now in his eighties, awaiting trial. Everyone, including the police, sympathise with him, and money was raised to pay an animal charity five hundred miles away, to round up the 60 beloved and abandoned pigs and re-home them in a sanctuary

    When we turn right out of the gate, we head downhill to a holiday destination which was once a tiny fishing village with a magnificent harbour. Nearby, Captain Cook first set foot in this land which is now called New Zealand. I often visualise the Endeavour sailing into these empty, glistening waters, edged by scarlet, flowering pohutukawa trees, no sound but the singing birds, and the creaking of the sails and rigging of the battered sailing ship.. 

    Back when Mr Bill Topp began his post office service, there were just a few hundred people living here, mostly reliant on the felling of the kauri trees for their living.

    These wonderful straight trees were ideal for ships masts as well as for building the settler cottages and Victorian villas.

    Driving down the road this side, with the steep cliffs one side, and the steep drop to the river the other, we cross a water splash, with its tiny waterfall splashing into a mossy grotto on one side, before crossing the road to fall into the river below. We pass a field near the bottom where a black steer known as Houdini used to live – we were just two of those who rescued him from his escapes. Past the quarry and we emerge onto flat farmland and into the now bustling little sea-side town.

     It’s now the second largest town in distant Coromandel peninsula, with 6,000 people revelling in the glorious, miles long, empty beach edged with royal palms. The beach is called after HMS Buffalo, a ship which sank here in July 1840 in a fierce storm. It went down only fifty metres from the shore, and the remains can sometimes be seen at low tide. 

    Locals shop in the one main street, perhaps a quarter of a mile long. A friend visiting from England marvelled at the tree lined streets and immaculate mown grass verges, with not a piece of litter to be seen – it’s a trim tidy little town, more like a village, where everyone knows each other and we’re greeted by our Christian names in every shop. 

    In the hardware shop, the women wanted to send me flowers when I had cancer, only deterred by the fact that my husband told them I was coming out of hospital the next day.

     In the cafe, the owners did send me flowers, at the chemist the gentle Iraqi pharmacist greets us by name, and at the timber store where my husband is a regular, we’re always warmly welcomed.  

    As we sat in the cafe the other day, I looked around and said to my husband – there’s a microcosm of society sitting here today… the two youngsters with their dog sitting outside by the dog’s drinking bowl, inside an elderly gay couple I often see here. In the corner, two well dressed middle class couples with elegant haircuts and soft voices. At the table next to us, a couple of archetypal residents in this place famous for the eccentricity of its settlers – potters and painters – a man whose white beard spread down his chest, and white hair reaching his shoulder, talking to a woman whose long grey hair billowed around her face and down her back.

    Yes, a microcosm of the gentle, unhurried people who share this remote peninsula with us.

    We thank our lucky stars every day that we live in this peaceful, beautiful place, with the sea and the trees, the wind and the stars… far from the strife and struggles of the world, and it seems to us like heaven on earth. 

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    When I want to cheer up a pedestrian meal, I make some soup, usually tomato or lentil.

    Tomato soup is the easiest and quickest.

     A chopped onion softened up for five minutes in the microwave with a sprinkle of olive oil, joins a tin of tomatoes in the pot. A bay leaf, a garlic clove, a generous squeeze of tomato puree and a big knob of butter all go in together with about two cups of chicken stock. Simmer for twenty minutes or so, whizz with the blender, and when it’s smooth, stir in some milk, or preferably cream. Easy and delicious, and tons better than a tin of tomato soup.

    Food for Thought

    We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.

       Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a musician, philosopher, theologian and founded a hospital in Africa.

  • Art and Soul

    Yesterday we set off on a long journey along the coast to the tip of the peninsula where we live.

    The road was a succession of hairpin bends winding past big empty beaches and bays, and among hills and streams and fields with sheep, a spectacular drive.

    At the end of this odyssey was a tiny settlement of between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and fifty villagers.

    The village consisted of a grocery store which also sold petrol, a farm shop, with delectable homemade jams and pickles as well as a wide assortment of meats, sausages, pickled and preserved goodies, and which served coffee on a terrace.

    We came away with a jar of my favourite quince jelly. There was a Himalayan centre – of all places – selling wonderful hippie artifacts, and a fire station and a village hall.

    There was also a smaller War Memorial Hall, commemorating the thirty men from this place who fought in the First World war, and the four who remained on the battlefield, and the twenty-three men who travelled across the world to the Second World War, one of whom also did not return. 

    How the departure of these contingents of brave men who crossed the oceans to fight for peace must have affected the farms and homes in this remote place is hard to imagine. Most of the men were gone for four and six years… who was left to fix the fences, milk the cows, shear the sheep, dig the potatoes, stop up a leaking roof, or father the children?

    It wasn’t just the men who went to war and came home traumatised who were the heroes.

    The War Memorial Hall was our destination. It’s a wooden building with wonderful acoustics, we had come to listen to an accomplished musician play the six Bach Suites for Solo Cello. We sat there for four hours, an audience of nearly thirty, silent and awed by the glory of the throbbing and thrilling notes, the vibrating chords and soaring ecstasies of  Bach’s glorious music, composed over three hundred years ago.

    The musician, who performs around the world, had come to live here recently, and gave this gift to his little community, and they responded with deep appreciation.

    As we drove away, still glorying in the harmonies and trajectories of soaring sound, I thought about the unexpectedness of such high art in such remote human settlements. 

    In the next small town with two thousand inhabitants, there is a concert in two weeks being held at a famous potter’s gallery. Milton’s Paradise Lost will be recited accompanied by a trumpet, and then a baroque concert will be performed. I expect there will be a full house.

    In the remote fishing village where I previously lived was a retired ballet dancer. 

    She’d won a scholarship to the famed New York City ballet as a seven year old, and now in retirement she had created her own modern dance company, aided by an Arts Council grant. Her pupils performed the ballets she’d envisioned in the village hall, and it was always packed with enthusiastic supporters. They seemed to think it mattered.

    “Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one”, wrote Stella Adler, actress and drama teacher. It also gives the soul the courage to reach the depths and find the strength and power to live life at the depth of our being. 

    I felt the truth of these words one day when I received an emotional blow so devastating, that the room turned black as I read the letter. Later, packing to go home in my bedroom, I saw the rose I’d picked on my dressing table, and as I gazed at it, feeling deeply its beauty and living energy, it gave me the hope and the courage to feel that somehow life could go on

    (I was all of twenty -two !).

    When resistance worker in war-time France, Odette Churchill, was asked how she kept her secrets under torture from the Gestapo, she said they sat her on a chair in front of a window. She could see green trees billowing in the sunshine and as her torturers ripped her fingernails out, she concentrated on the trees and their life and beauty.

    And later when she was being returned to her underground cellar in solitary confinement, the skeleton of a leaf blew in the door with her. She seized it, and its beauty and the promise of life sustained her. Even after she was burned with a red hot poker, she was able to hold on to her sanity and integrity.

    The rest of us are never tested to such a horrendous degree, but art and beauty can sustain even lives of hardship or drudgery. 

    The Scottish philosopher Henry Drummond wrote:

    “Ask the working-man’s wife, and she will tell you there is a moral effect even in a clean table-cloth.” 

    And in my experience, even a handsome tray laid with a crisp tray cloth and pretty cup and saucer lifts the spirit.

    So off to put the kettle on, fill the milk jug, and spoon the lapsang souchong into the pot. Music, art and beauty and a good cup of tea are an unbeatable recipe for a good life to me!

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    Back from the concert, I had little appetite for cooking supper. Luckily I had some cold chicken in the fridge, and some cooked rice in the deep freeze. Remembering Coronation chicken devised by Constance Spry and others for Queen Elizabeth’s crowning, I did a quick simplified version. The chopped chicken was mixed into mayonnaise, golden syrup, curry powder and cream to taste. The rice was defrosted in the microwave, and a handful of almonds toasted as in the previous blog. Couldn’t be bothered with the peas and sultanas in the classic recipe, just stirred vinaigrette dressing through the rice, sprinkled the almonds through and piled the chicken mixture on top. Quick and easy…

    Food for Thought

    Don’t cry for me, for I go where music was born. J.S.Bach on his deathbed

  • The Power of One

    Headlines are seductive. I was sucked into a story about the D-Day landings the other day.

    D-Day has always fascinated me, ever since as a six year old I listened to the thunder of 11,500 aircraft fly overhead to France that summer night in June 1944.

    The story I watched on video was not new to me but I didn’t know much about it, and intriguingly, it told me that the Allied invasion was won hours before the troops arrived on the beaches of Normandy. This was new to me.

    Operation Coup de Main was performed by 181 men silently dropped from six gliders by the bridges over the Caen Canal and the Orne river, now called Pegasus and Horsa in honour of those brave men. It took them ten minutes to overcome the German defenders, and to capture the bridges, and for Major John Howard to send the agreed message, Ham and Jam to headquarters. 

    The surprize capture of these bridges by John Howard and his men who he had trained for eighteen months to do this, making them perform the operation until they knew it by heart and could do it with their eyes shut, meant that the German Panzer divisions and other forces couldn’t get to the invasion beaches to stop the Allies landing.

    General Rommel had said the only way to repel the Allies would be on the beaches, General Von Rundstet and Hitler were sure they should be fought further back. Neither of these possibilities were available to the Germans once these bridges were blocked to them.

    Famously, as they waited anxiously to be reinforced, while all the while keeping attacking Germans at bay, the dashing 15th Lord Lovat commanding his regiment, with his piper playing as they marched the five miles from the landing beach, arrived at one pm, an hour later than the time he’d promised Major Howard, and apologized. 

    Another delicious detail of this daring operation which sealed the fate of Germany, was the part played by the innkeeper by the bridge.

    When France had been occupied four years before, he had dug a hole in his garden, and buried his finest champagne. Now as the troops were gathered on the bridge after driving off the enemy, he hurried into the garden in the dark night and dug up his champagne. He grasped the first one, dusted off the dirt, and walked over to the soldiers to celebrate with them.

    As the night wore on, he and his wife nursed a dying officer and tended to the rest of the wounded on the wooden floor of their cafe. Every year until they died they served the returning relatives on 6th June for free, and when their daughter, who was four years old during the battles, took over the cafe, she too continued to welcome and refresh the families who came each year.

    Major Howard’s feat made me think of other men who had single handedly influenced the course of history, and two others sprang to my mind. There was Major Chris Keeble, who was handed command of his regiment when the CO,  Colonel H. Jones, was killed during the Falklands Islands battle at Goose Green.

    The remaining men of Major Keeble’s command were on their last legs after fighting for forty hours non-stop, 80 men dying and wounded, almost out of ammunition, and hemmed in by burning gorse. 

    At this  moment Major Keeble, a devout Catholic, went behind some burning bushes, and knelt to pray for guidance. When he returned, having decided to try psychology, instead of arms, he sent two Argentine prisoners into Stanley to tell the Argentine commander to surrender or an attack with artillery would be made on them. The Argentine colonel took the bait and did surrender with some thousands, to Major Keeble’s 400 spent men, and the war was ended.

    This saved the lives of the Falkland Islanders locked up in the village hall and of everyone else fighting on both sides. One man tilted the balance.

    As did another man who won a battle in 2003 without firing a shot. Lt Colonel Christopher Hughes was leading his men in the Iraqi city of Najaf, and when they reached the mosque, the holiest in Iraq, the Iraqis thought they were going to arrest the imam and destroy the mosque. An ugly crowd gathered, and a very tense situation developed for the 130 Americans surrounded by hundreds of furious Iraqis.

    Col Hughes remained calm, ordered his men to “take a knee “, point their weapons to the ground, and smile. (that must have been hard to do)

    In the silence and surprise which fell, the crowd drifted away, and calm spread in the city. 

    Unknown numbers of lives and an international incident had been averted by the quick thinking and courage of one man.

    I find these stories so inspiring, a reminder of the amazing human spirit. And these are just the stories we know about. There must be countless other stories of the nobility of men and women who have risen to the moment, with courage and intelligence like the Nepali headmaster who saved all the children in his school when the floods came pounding down the valley a few weeks ago.

    Yet as I think about these heroic moments, I also remember that there’s another sort of courage and nobility… to carry on uncomplainingly through hardship and boredom, day after day. Like the Y Service listeners who supplied the messages for Bletchley Park for decoding. They were young men and women barely out of their teens sitting night after night, day after day, for eight hour shifts and longer, with earphones clamped to their heads in freezing conditions, for four or five years, taking down amid hisses and crackling morse code messages about enemy army moves. Footsoldiers ( “the poor bloody infantry, or PBI”) slogging away for weeks in the snow, rain and mud of the freezing winter in the Hurtgen Forest, struggling across swamps and rivers, or trudging through the rubble of ruined cities, dodging sniper bullets and displaying dogged determination were also unsung heroes. 

    “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow’.”says writer Mary Anne Radmacher.

    So courage is also endurance, perhaps the only sort that is called for today.

    Now that those times of crisis are so far away,  I sometimes wonder if the youngsters of today, many adorned with tattoos and nose rings, and all the other embellishments of a different world, would have the same spirit of selfless duty that those people back then displayed so constantly,  and for so long when their country was in danger.  Or am I under-estimatng the power and the glory of the human spirit to rise to challenge and danger, or to tedium and exhaustion? Maybe I am and I so hope so…

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    Cauliflower cheese for a light supper last night,with some crusty rolls and the unsalted butter I love. Just a cheesy white sauce, poured over the cooked flowerlet of the cauliflower,either steamed or boiled. I usually add some carrots to cook with the cauliflower to save on saucepans. 

    When the cheese sauce is ready, and the cauliflower cooked, I throw several tablespoons of  slivered almonds into a dry frying pan and toast them until slightly coloured. Sprinkled over the top of the cauliflower cheese before lightly grilling the top, makes all the difference -some crunch and savoury taste.

    Food for Thought

    Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible. 

    Dalai Lama

  • Harry Windsor and the Poisoned Chalice

    Christmas Day when I was twelve was made hideous by my younger sister’s tantrums all day because she thought I had one more walnut than she had had in our Christmas stockings. I had four, and she had three. The next day the fourth walnut was found under her bed where it had rolled.

    I was reminded of this when I read Harry, ‘Prince of England’, as he calls himself, sharing his angst with the world over the time William had three sausages and he had only two, while his older brother had a bigger bedroom than he.

    Like my poor sister, he has drunk deep of the poisoned chalice of jealousy and envy.

    Five years after the Walnut Debacle, my headmaster at boarding school was writing to my father that my sister was obsessed with jealousy of me, as a reason for some of the mayhem she was creating.

    Disturbed  children with painful backgrounds rarely do well at school, and Harry is a classic example. 

    But unlike my sister who had lost our mother at age five, and with a father fighting in North Africa and then Italy, and no family, Harry was surrounded by love, with not just a very concerned father, but devoted grandparents, aunts, loving cousins, a friend and companion in lieu of a nanny appointed to always be there for him, and various dedicated military men who made it their business to mentor him.

    With all this love and support Harry is still stuck in self pity and victimhood, and is still possessed of a burning sense of injustice that he didn’t get the same goodies as his brother.

    He says he’s done lots of therapy (with that same brother’s support, he tells us) to move on from the grief of losing his mother – though he doesn’t acknowledge that his attitude towards his brother is jealousy.

    But therapy is designed to help people cope better with their problems and their lives, and not to change their personalities. Unfortunately Harry’s personality has been revealed to us in his autobiography, his interviews and self-indulgent films for Netflix.

    And his real self is not a pretty sight. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the Harry saga is his level of ingratitude. Rules have been broken for him, strings pulled, excuses made, cover-ups concocted either to explain away his behaviour or to get him what he wants.

    Somehow he scraped into Sandhurst with two questionable A levels, and somehow got through the four to five day long officer selection board during which time a team of senior officers watch, note and assess every aspect of a candidate’s behaviour. 

    During my assessment at Westbury, I still remember the unnerving sound of the officers scribbling their notes on their mill boards throughout all the test sessions, inside and out.

     I remember a question right out of left field – what book are you reading at the moment? Fortunately the book I was reading was also being read by the Colonel at that moment too, and we had an amicable chat – what books would Harry have been able to list:  ‘How to look after a polo pony,’  or a: ‘ Guide to choosing in-offensive fancy dress’?

    Luckily the experienced staff sergeants and sergeant majors at Sandhurst have nursed  kings and princes from many countries through the Academy, from Jordan, Oman, Dubai, Bahrain, Qatar to Luxembourg, so Harry was in practised hands at Sandhurst.

    Yet during his time in the army he brought it into disrepute when he gained headlines for wild antics –  playing naked pool in Las Vegas, (his CO was not pleased) tossing girls in full evening dress into a stately house swimming pool, (until stopped by the butler) and staggering out of nightclubs barely able to stand up, (supported by a sober military mentor). 

    After being caught smoking cannabis as a teenager, Charles took him to a rehabilitation centre to help him see the long term consequences, yet in 2023 he was recorded as saying 

    that: “psychedelics are a fundamental part” of his life and that he used “psychedelics, ayahuasca, psilocybin, mushroom.”.

    Which leads me to wonder if these mind altering drugs may be responsible for some of his irrational behaviour and vengeful pursuit through the courts of those who incur his displeasure, or who thwart his desires for status and recognition, including round the-clock- police protection.

    The Anglican church broke its rules so Harry could have a big, fat, white wedding like his brother, even though his father had had to make do with a registry office when he married a divorced woman. But after the wedding the green-eyed monster pounced again, when instead of moving into a 20 room apartment like his brother, he had to settle for the same three bedroom cottage that William had used when he was first married.

    The faithful, loyal Duke and Duchess of Gloucester were turfed out of the 20 room apartment in Kensington Palace where they had lived for 47 years so Harry could move in. But his new wife preferred Windsor Castle – the Queen gave them a five bedroom cottage in the grounds instead.

    In his book Spare, Harry details his rows and disagreements with his brother and sister-in- law, and the annoyance of the ‘grey men in suits’ who were trying to keep his circus on the road, and disguise his irresponsible behaviour, as they had been doing ever since Harry had left school  – hard work for them, but which Harry felt was obstruction and interference. 

    And now he has removed himself from behind that shield of help and protection, the world has seen who and what the real Harry is. And the strange thing is that Harry himself has revealed it, reminiscing about his school days when he mocked a disabled teacher at school as she made her way painfully backwards down the stairs, and disparaging the first girl he had a sexual experience with.

    It’s an absolute taboo in the forces to mention lives lost in combat, but Harry boasted of killing 25 Taliban who probably had wives and children like him, describing shooting them from a helicopter.

    As Captain General, an honour he inherited from the Duke of Edinburgh, he skipped the  memorial service for Royal Marines who were killed in the 1989 Deal barracks IRA bombing, a tone deaf dereliction of duty, in order to posture at the Lion King premier with his wife, and angle for work for her.

    And since his departure from Royal duties, this person who didn’t even have the courtesy to speak to or visit to tell his future father-in-law he was marrying his beloved daughter, has undermined, maligned, lied about and sabotaged his own family.

    He has colluded with his wife, who has fuelled his jealousy, in a campaign of revenge for all his imaginary injustices and has become a professional victim in which his steadfast family, the grey men, the press, the legal system and anyone else who thwarts him are villains out to get him. In the years since he married, the party-loving, rebel young prince has morphed into a resentful, tone-deaf, middle-aged man exuding self-righteous, offended dignity

    Many commenters keep quoting the Prodigal Son as grounds for forgiving and welcoming Harry back into the family. But they miss the point about being forgiven. The Prodigal Son had repented, but Harry doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. 

    Instead, he’s demanded apologies from the family he told radio listeners during his engagement had welcomed Meghan, and had become: “the family she had never had.”

    (Never mind the father and uncles who’d paid for, supported and loved her.)

    My husband has a saying you can’t fix stupid, which puts me in mind of the ancient Sufi 

    adage: ‘He who knows not and knows not that he knows not, is stupid – avoid him.’

    The next line is: ‘He who knows not and knows that he knows not is ignorant – teach him’.

    But sadly no-one seems to have been able to teach Harry anything. 

    He remains in a permanent state of not knowing and unawareness, and permanently too, in the claws of the green-eyed monster. Like my late sister he will probably be unable to escape this misery for the rest of his life. As Quaker William Penn said, “The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves.” 

    Food for threadbare gourmets

    I’m always fascinated by chefs and the like who disclose what are the staples that they always keep in their larder or pantry, aside from the obvious like bacon and eggs. For me, this is virgin olive oil, pasta, tins of tomatoes and parmesan in the fridge.

    When there’s nothing ready to eat in the fridge, and there’s no flicker of inspiration, these handy ingredients are the answer. Chopped fresh or tinned tomatoes are gently fried in the olive oil while the pasta is cooking, and parmesan grated. When the pasta is ready, tip it into the tomato mixture, toss it together, and sprinkle the parmesan on each  helping.

    Torn shreds of fresh basil are delicious if you have fresh basil on hand. I cook the pasta in cold water, a la Nigella Lawson, and find it avoids the dreaded clumping as long as it’s given a stir every now and then.

    Food for thought

    Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts.

    Salman Rushdie

  • California Markled

    Whistleblowers are traditionally punished for whistling, and when I first wrote about M. Markle back in the distant day, one reader castigated me as bitchy. Another said I had skewered my victim with the accuracy of an Exocet missile.

    The story began of course, back in the dark ages of 2018, with the engagement interview and later at a meeting of the Fab Four, with her information for us all that she was going to hit the ground running (part of her campaign to bring the 1000 year old monarchy up to date.)

    Then the strange saga began – first with what we all know as Tiara – Gate, when Harry pronounced the immortal words – “what Meghan wants, Meghan gets.” But she didn’t – instead of the tiara feared to have Russian links which might trigger an international incident (with Putin over a tiara?) the poor bride had to settle for the magnificent diamond bandeau tiara, especially made for Queen Mary in 1932, and this Queen Never wore jewellery that wasn’t magnificent.

    Next came the Tragedy of the Tights – with tiny bridesmaids having to wear bare legs in new shoes ( sore, blister creating ) instead of traditional white tights, and Princess Catherine three weeks out of childbirth and difficult pregnancy, getting stick, either for causing our heroine to cry according to Markle herself, or the postnatal mother with two other under fives to cope with, to cry . 

    Private emails later published unforgivably by a duplicitous Harry who didn’t realise how tough they made his wife sound, show a rather uncompromising Markle berating Catherine for not joining all the other mothers for fittings. Later Markle, during a tour of South Africa whinged about being vulnerable as a mother during and after birth, but this had never occurred to her when relating to a fragile Catherine who suffered hyperemesis gravidarum throughout her pregnancy – nasty morning sickness for nine months, (I know what it’s like )

    Then there was the Mystery of the Invisible Family. No “Daddy” (as she later called him to “wring the public’s heart”, she wrote to Jonathan Knauf about her father spat), no uncle who wangled an internship for her at the embassy in Argentina, (didn’t last long as she failed the exams ) no bishop uncle, no brother or sister or extended family who figure in old family photos. All Markled.

    Just Doria, the absent mother during her childhood when her father brought her up, and a parade of Hollywood names like Oprah Winfrey and the Clooneys who admitted they’d never met Markle.

    All the rules were bent for Harry and his American bride – King Charles and Camilla were not allowed to marry in a church as Camilla was divorced, just the registry office for them – but touchy Harry got his way, and the Church of England broke its own rules and laid on the  works for divorced Meghan Markle.

    She went full on, dressed like a Royal virgin bride, and inserted into the lovely Anglican ritual the top, African American, activist bishop who overran by his stipulated five minutes with a full blown radical rant of over fifteen minutes, railing about poverty, racism and war. She organized a gospel choir who performed ‘Stand by me’, and a beautiful black English teenage cello player also performed in the church.

    As she stepped out of the Rolls Royce once used by the Duchess of Windsor on her way to the Duke’s funeral, she slapped aside the helpful hand proffered by a royal attendant, and processed into the St George’s alone, until met by a courteous Prince Charles who escorted her to the besotted groom.

    Afterwards they danced and partied into the night accompanied by their new Hollywood mates, while Harry’s besties and old school friends were left out of this jolly, a telling hint of things to come… the first obvious Markling, though we may have missed the other less important dropped buddies, like Liz Cundy and Piers Morgan.

    Later, in the notorious Oprah interview sprinkled with lies and barbs directed at the family which had welcomed them, broken all its long established rules, and given them a 30 million wedding, a house, and significant marks of good will, M. Markle described the ‘framed’ document hanging on the wall of their Montecito home, which was the certificate of their ‘secret wedding’ three days before the spectacle put on for the peasants and hoi polloi.

    She described how they ‘called up’ the Archbishop of Canterbury ( I could just imagine this ‘woke’ smug prelate pulling up his episcopal skirts and running over to Kensington Palace to do their bidding) to come round and marry them in the garden. He was obliged to disown his part in this imaginary ceremony, saying that to have done so would have been a criminal act, with no license, no witnesses etc etc.

    To my knowledge no one has called them out on this story and asked to see the ‘Framed Certificate’.

    Before they flounced off on what eco-warrior Harry called “their Freedom  Flight” on yet another private jet, ( they always use private jets, while the Wales fly commercial on private trips and business class on official trips) M. Markle had managed to ruffle a good few feathers, and incurred much ridicule too, including the time she wrote uplifting messages on bananas to give to female street sex workers in Bristol.

    Later it wasn’t ridicule, but disbelief and then rage at her misuse of power in a way that no Royal had ever done before – showing her contempt for the ordinary Brit, when she had forty dedicated tennis watchers turfed out of the Wimbledon seats they had queued and paid for, so she could sit in splendid isolation with two friends, showing off to them how powerful and special she was.

    Catherine tried to mend matters by taking her to the tennis with Pippa the following day, but even then, M Markle refused to conform with the formal dress code, but shuffled in wearing over – long trousers and a casual striped shirt. When Oprah questioned her, she denied that Catherine had been helping her defuse the scandal.

    Sadly she even manipulated royal aides to unknowingly lie to the public when she allowed them to announce the birth of her son, while she’d already gone home from hospital with him three days before.

    Everything she did seemed to demonstrate her contempt both for the ancient Royal institution and for the ordinary and openhearted Brits who had welcomed her so warmly a few years before. And it seemed as though she just didn’t ‘get’ what the institution was about.

    She was recorded on their Australian tour saying as people shook hands with her:

     “I can’t believe I’m not getting paid for this”.

    When she and her “Prince of England ” as he pompously described himself in a recent interview, left the country in 2020 they castigated the Brits, and the Royal Family as racist and victims of ‘unconscious bias.’ Meghan Markle had lasted one year and eight months in England.

    Ensconced in California, opening her heart – if she had one – to Oprah Winfrey, she claimed she had been silenced, she had had to give up her car keys and her passport  – so how did she manage to slip out for Serena Williams’s ( slow motion Markling in progress?) gift of a $400,000 to $500,000 baby shower in New York, and holidays with the Clooneys and Elton John at their Mediterranean villas?

     Harry told us he found her weeping on the floor because she was so desperate during pregnancy –  (what was wrong with sofa or a bed, I’ve used both for that purpose) and she recounted how close to suicide she became. At the same time she was guest editing Vogue magazine at her own request, working with her buddy Edward Enninful (since Markled) and designing stuff for Dress Smart – a women’s charity. What a woman !

    Since then, her mockery of the loving and beloved Queen with her infamous courtesy and war of words – including a shot at the Queen – ‘We can all live lives of service. Service is universal;’ her continual attempts to one up Princess Catherine, trying to steal her thunder every time Catherine wows the public in a gold dress, or climbs a mountain or two; putting out pictures of the back of her children’s heads as soon as Catherine issues an anniversary photo or announcement, and her strange undignified stunts like twerking in the delivery room, or leaping into a swimming pool on her birthday, have not endeared her to critics like me.

     For six years now she has carried on her vendetta against the blameless family she obviously despises, never missing an opportunity to undermine them, even boasting to the magazine The Cut that she’d never been asked to sign an NDA, as though she didn’t recognise that the family had never expected her to bad-mouth, undermine and lie about them to the world. Decent people don’t either air or invent dirty family linen to expose to the outside world, never mind the whole world.

    Is her penchant for making her daughter walk barefoot in crowded places like Disneyland where thousands of people walk and spit out their chewing gum, or in a garden centre on the gravel, or on the grass at Montecito with beetles or bugs underfoot, meant to demonstrate what a carefree informal life her children enjoy, compared to the immaculate Wales children? Is the daughter’s unkempt untrimmed hair ending in rats-tails some gesture to show what freedom they all have? Beats me.

    This diatribe about one of the world’s most disliked women according to some polls has allowed me to get my disgust of this strange, compulsive liar and poseur off my chest.

    Good thing I am too unknown and insignificant to be Markled like so many of her besties like poor Jessica Mulroney, or sued like so many of her other critics. 

    And now California has been Markled. For how long I wonder.

    England is cold and wet or dry and too hot, depending on climate change, while California is warm and sunny, and swarms with minor celebrities who would willingly gush over a faux duchess. I don’t think England need worry for long about the return of the Markles.

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    Since I learned that older women ( like me) need a lot more protein than younger women, I’ve become an authority on protein counts in food, as opposed to calories.

    One of my favourite staples after learning this blinding piece of intelligence, are green Puy lentils  – so delicious I can eat them on their own, but just as good as an accompaniment to salmon, chicken or just fried onions and mixed vegetables- even sausages.

    No soaking needed. Just a wash. Fry gently an onion, stick of  celery and a finely chopped carrot in olive oil. Cook until soft, then add a clove of chopped garlic, and fry for a minute. 

    Then add a cup of lentils, three cups of chicken stock, a bay leaf, two sprigs of thyme or  some dried thyme, salt and black pepper, and simmer until the lentils are soft and have absorbed all the liquid, about 25 minutes. If the lentils are still firm and the liquid is all absorbed, add a little more and cook till the lentils are soft but firm, not mushy.

    Take out the bay leaf and thyme sprigs and serve. I often have plenty left over, and re-heat in the microwave with added knobs of butter, or a splurge of virgin olive oil to keep the lentils lubricated.

    Food for Thought

    There are three forms of culture; worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development.

    Sufi Master  -Revelation of the Veiled

  • Gossip and gaiety – a Kaleidoscope of Extraordinary Lives

    When my husband and I became an item he told his friends to look me up on the internet.

    One of them said to me that she’d never known anyone who figured on the internet before, and this prompted me to search my memory for people I knew who were described on the internet.

    It turned out there were an awful lot – thanks partly to a career in journalism when I’d interviewed some amazing people..

    Leaving aside the privilege of interviewing celebrities who were masters in their field, like Dr Spock and Dr Seuss, wonderful ballet dancer Robert Helpman, and David McTaggart, founder of Greenpeace, who I interviewed in Auckland harbour as he set sail on his first protest voyage to the French nuclear tests in the Pacific-  the first story about Greenpeace – there were other categories .

    There were the fascinating interviews with people like the Maori Queen, novelist Iris Murdoch and Aborigine tennis champion, Yvonne Goolagong.

    There were the’ encounters’  – connecting through a best friend, with eccentric author, Barbara Cartland who wrote 723 books,  chatting with Sir Edmund Hillary at a fundraising lunch for his local surf  club, and watching as all eyes were riveted on the tall figure of Raine Spencer, Barbara Cartland’s daughter, and later Princess Diana’s reviled and then beloved stepmother, as she walked across the dining room at the Eagle’s Nest in the Hilton in Hongkong to talk to me. She had huge blue eyes, a complexion like porcelain, and oozed beauty and charm. 

    There was a conversation with Princess Alexandra, the Queen’s cousin at Government house, when  she asked me how I coped as a solo mother and a full time journalist.

    Prince Phillip joked about working above the shop, ( Buckingham Palace) when I told him I worked from home, and then on board Britannia there was the Queen, another woman with big blue eyes, and porcelain complexion.

     She was asked by a fellow journalist when we were talking, what Kava, the Fijian drink she’d just sipped in the Islands, was like.

    She was about to tell us, when she suddenly realised she would offend the people of Fiji, so she quickly quipped – ‘like a nice cup of tea.’

    And then there were the friends, and when I looked them up on Google, I realised what amazing lives so many of them had lived.

    Nicholas Groves – Raines was a lanky school mate when I knew him in the early fifties, famous at school in the Cameron Highlands in Malaya  for catching numbers of what were known as buzz bombs. Big sticky beetles with large clicking wings which made a piercing buzzing sound as they flew. After storing them in matchboxes, he released them one morning during assembly, and we all shrieked and ducked and covered our heads with our hymn books to avoid the weirdly buzzing panic stricken creatures blundering around, getting tangled in our hair. 

    His google entry describes this mischievous youth as

     ‘an acclaimed Scottish architect and conservationist renowned for rescuing and restoring ruined and neglected historic buildings across Scotland.  He has been celebrated for saving more significant historic listed buildings in Scotland than any other private individual. In 2017, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland.

    Then there was John Blashford – Snell, a young officer cadet, who one lunch time took me punting on the lake at Sandhurst, and when the ancient craft began to sink midlake had to ignominiously tow me back to shore in his now soaking khaki uniform.

    His Google entry describes him as a ‘renowned British explorer, former Royal Engineers officer, and author who has led over 100 expeditions worldwide. Famous for combining adventure with scientific research and humanitarian aid, he founded the Scientific Exploration Society and is the creator of the youth initiative Operation Drake/Operation Raleigh.  

    ‘He led the first successful descent of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia,  mapping the dangerous river and essentially pioneering modern whitewater rafting. He headed the British Trans-Americas Expedition, completing the first-ever vehicular crossing of the notoriously impenetrable Darién Gap swamp and jungle in Panama, and directed the first major scientific navigation of the  Zaire /Congo River, focusing on medical research regarding river blindness.‘

     The last I heard of him a few years ago in his eighties, he was looking for a medical officer to join him on an expedition to Mongolia!

    Footie was my next famous friend, our lecturer in constitutional history at officer cadet school. Footie’s real name was Edgar Feuchtwanger, but generations of irreverent officer cadets had called him Footie for short. Later he and I became good friends and I loved him.

     His Google entry among other things says Edgar, was a:

    ‘German-born British historian, who died at 100 year old  at his home. As a Jewish child in 1930’s Munich, Feuchtwanger had an intimate view of the rise of the Nazi Party through the daily life of one of his closest neighbors, Adolf Hitler, and wrote the bestseller  “I was Htler’s Neighbour” amongst many other books – ahistorian who was a vocal critic of Hitler and the Nazis.

    A few years later, as a gay giddy twenty year old, John Gouriet swam into my consciousness. 

    He was my best friend’s boyfriend, a captain in the 15/19th hussars, and we had a fun foursome with my cavalry boyfriend. Later when we had all married other people, John became famous “as a right-wing political activist who campaigned relentlessly in the 1970s against what he saw as the abuse of power by trade “…one of these campaigns was known as Operation Pony Express when John organised the delivery of the post when Post Office workers went on strike.        

    In later years, John Adair was the man I wished I had plumped for instead of the other man I was seeing at the time. John’s Google entry describes him as  a British academic who was a leadership theorist and author of more than 40 books (translated into 18 languages) on business, military and other leadership. I knew him when he was a lecturer at Sandhurst, and I was a lecturer at WRAC cadet school, and he was witty and kind and clever and a lovely dancer at summer balls.

    David and Elspeth were friends in Hong Kong when as young marrieds we made a foursome, who since we had amahs to baby-sit enjoyed an interlude of partying, dancing in night clubs and having fun before my marriage broke down, and I lost so many friends. David’s very long Google entry reads in part:

     ‘Sir David Robert Ford, KBE, LVO  was the fifth and the last non-ethnic Chinese Chief Secretary of Hong Kong and Deputy Governor of Hong Kong from 1986 to 1993 and was Hong Kong Commissioner in London until 1997  He was also very briefly Governor before Hong Kong was handed over to the Chinese.’

    Andrew Grima’s Google entry said among other things that he was the most influential jewellery designer of the post-war period, widely regarded as the father of modern jewellery. Prince Phillip commissioned him to make lovely brooches and earrings for the Queen and Princess Anne.

    I interviewed him when he came to buy pearls in Hong Kong, and we became good friends. He introduced me to high society and suddenly I was enjoying witty lunches at the home on the peak of Hong Kong’s then Chief Secretary, and dancing at balls in marble halls. 

    He was a big gentle dark haired man who had started life as an engineer, and on joining his father in law’s firm as an accountant segued into designing beautiful avant garde jewellery which set the tone for modern jewellery, snapped up by high society, pop stars, and everyone in between.

    Too many other distinguished people passed  through my life in Hong Kong to write about – French couturiers, singers, artists, musicians, dancers, writers, even a good, kind and talented diplomat who ended up being lynched on Shanghai station and then imprisoned in the besieged embassy in Peking, and who later became an eminent MP and knight of the realm . In the 60’s Hong Kong was a glamorous and stimulating place. 

     I finally ended up in New Zealand with my two children. Again, this life turned out to be full of fascinating people, among them a woman who became a close friend, Babette Hayes. She was French Syrian and after the war grew up in France and London, before emigrating to Australia. There she electrified Sydney with both her French gourmet cooking and cookbooks, and even more spectacularly  as a pioneer of beautiful creative interior design.

     One of her Google entries describes heras Australia’s first stylist,  recognised for her ground breaking work in magazine styling and her committment to raising standards of interior design and decoration… She loved my house, and photographed it for the Australian magazine Belle.

    Life in NZ was dramatic and traumatic in many ways, and among the extraordinary persons I became close to was probably this country’s blackest sheep, though, when I first knew him, I like everyone else was deceived by his persona- erudite, upright, art connoisseur, statesman, humanitarian. 

    In the end Bill Sutch was discovered to be a Russian spy, and though tried and exonerated in the 70’s, after his death and the crumbling of the USSR and opening the files, it was found that he’d been recruited in New York in the 50’s, when working at the UN at the height of the Cold War. 

    But perhaps the most colourful and incredible life I encountered was an admiral from the First World War. His Google entry merely records his distinguished military service, ending on a mission to Sydney in 1919, but that doesn’t even cover a fraction of his extraordinary life. After his first wife died, he roistered around the world on his yacht until anchoring in the harbour at Monte Carlo in the mid thirties when he was 68. 

    One night a 24 year old blonde socialite slipped off the deck of the yacht moored alongside, and joined the Admiral. Off they sailed, and had four children, besides the two from the Admiral’s first marriage. They rubbed shoulders with the likes of Noel Coward, and the Windsors and Barbara Hutton in the South of France, and after the war, when Monaco  became too expensive, moved to a rambling villa by the sea in a remote fishing village in Spain. They took with them the speed boat given to Clementina, the youngest daughter, after she’d rescued Barbara Hutton’s son from a hideous water skiing accident in the harbour at Monte Carlo.

    When I encountered them the Admiral was 92, Dora, his wife, 54, the two younger children nineteen and eighteen, and their tutor Mark, a fair haired handsome Canadian of 34. He was Dora’s lover, and looked after everyone, and also the wistaria shrouded villa. It was built around a courtyard, with lots of geraniums in big pots and a fountain, and they were all dependent on the ancient Admirals’ dwindled pension.

    The following year everything had changed. 

    The Admiral had died, Dora was in London, and Mark was dead from polio.

    After a delicious affair with one of the James Bonds – Shaun Connery –  beautiful blue-eyed Clementina with waist length fair hair – married a Polish Prince. The eldest son was sailing yachts in the Mediterranean for millionaires, and the youngest son turned the charming villa into an exclusive Mediterranean getaway for aristocratic friends and contacts. Even now it still flourishes as a luxury hide away for the exclusive few. 

    The Admiral’s son by his first wife had died in a Nazi concentration camp after being captured and tortured as an SOE agent, and decorated for valour, while the eldest daughter had married a Spanish nobleman who was shot by Republicans as he opened the front door. She ended up in South America married to a millionaire. The lives of this intrepid family spanned both the world and history..

    As Mae West once said,  “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” 

    Looking back through my life, I’m amazed at these extraordinary lives. Poet Rupert Brooke wrote a poem ‘These I have loved’… I can’t say I loved all the people in this list of friends, acquaintances and oddities, but I have relished them. 

    And in another poem he says – “happiness crowned the room when you were there and you and you”… and again, I feel that these lives, though I haven’t loved all the owners of them,  have added such fun and fascination and crowned mine. I feel, like Helen Keller ” that so long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.”

    Food for threadbare gourmets

    Only sausages in the fridge last night, so I fell back on a postwar childhood recipe.

    It went down a treat.

    Fry pieces of chopped bacon with onion and garlic. Add a tin of tomato baked beans and cooked sausages  chopped into bite sized pieces. I added some tomato puree for extra taste and a little water to lubricate the mixture and served it with mashed potato creamed with lashings of butter and a little cream.

    I had some cooked puy lentils from the night before, so I separated the onion bacon mixture and used the lentils instead of the baked beans for me – very good.

    Food for thought

    “The purpose of our lives is to be happy.” — Dalai Lama

    #lives #history #famous people

  • Millions of years of secret lives

    In the forest which surrounds our little house amid the rolling ranges, are reminders that time truly is an ever rolling stream. 

    The plants and creatures here are older by millions of years than those in Europe which had to recover from the Ice Age 10 million years ago.

    Here in this remote country, New Zealand split off from the ancient continent of Gondwana between 80 and 85 million years ago, and some flora and fauna here date back 250 million years.

    So when I walk in our forest, I’m conscious I’m in touch with life forms that have survived since primeval times in this isolated place, and what recent arrivals on this planet my species and I are..

    Mankind didn’t  arrive on these islands until around 1000 years ago. They found it inhabited by peculiar flightless birds, giant invertebrates, and plants – some having survived more or less unchanged since Gondwanan times. These unique trusting creatures which had never seen human beings before were easily hunted to extinction.

    Roughly 64 endemic species—including at least 51 birds, 3 frogs, 3 lizards, a freshwater fish, and a bat—died out thanks to hunting, and introduced animals like pigs and goats, possums and rabbits..

    The amazing giant bird, the moa, disappeared in two hundred years, and then the Haast’s eagle, known as ‘the biggest, baddest, most magnificent eagle ever to have existed in the world’ died out as it had fed on the moa.

    So sadly, these once isolated islands are now part of the 6th Mass Extinction, in which scientists warn that by 2050, up to 30% to 50% of all Earth’s plant and animal species could face extinction due to climate change, habitat loss, and human activity.

    The forest appears empty, apart from the birds, compared with European woods and forest alive with squirrels and rabbits, foxes and deer, and so many other fascinating creatures, there are no indigenous mammals here except bats, but we host other primeval treasures.

     And we wage a constant battle against the animals introduced by man in the last thousand years, as they eat these native creatures and destroy their habitats.

    So we treasure rare species like our frogs, the Archey’s frogs whose ancient evolutionary lineage stretches back roughly 150 to 200 million years, making them living fossils that coexisted with dinosaurs.. They are only found these days in our forest and two other places in New Zealand. 

    These tiny delicious creatures, only an inch and a half, live on land and their minute tadpoles hatch on their father’s back, and live there until they are old enough to cope on their own. The froglets often stay with their dad for several years, and they can live up to forty years. One night I saw one the size of a fingernail.

    Their cousins the Hochstetter’s frogs, also ancient and endangered, live here too, and they both are our pride and joy, as is the butterfly extinct in the rest of the world, and only found in our forest – Helm’s butterfly, the forest ringlet, so rare and special that scientists come here to study it, even some of David Attrenborough’s researchers.

    And then there are our lizards, known as striped geckos. They are described as ‘rare and stealthy reptiles’. They were first discovered in the 1990s when one turned up in a home nearby.. Now we have teams of scientists turning up here to discover and map these beautiful little creatures hiding in the ferns and trees..

    But besides these rare species, I’m conscious as I walk in the forest that there are others, just as precious, but so plentiful that we take them for granted. There are 170 different sorts of worms in this country, including the beautiful glow worms…  I’ve learned that they, like all other living beings, have their own secret life, communicating with each other through touch and taste and ground vibrations. Being hermaphrodites, after they have mated they can both produce offspring.

    We all know now how vital their lives are to the health of the soil, and that modern farming methods, fertilisers etc, are death to these invaluable forms of life – which are also food for many birds and reptiles.  As long ago as 1881 Charles Darwin wrote: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.”

    I used to think that spiders were just a nuisance, but have now discovered that they have a massive and vital use in nature. They act as Earth’s natural pest control by eating billions of insects like flies, mosquitoes, and crop-destroying bugs, keeping the balance of the ecosystem. Their exquisite webs are their form of communication, which they can read, knowing what fly or other insect is invading their web, and spinning and retracting and   playing its strands like a guitar.

    The amazing NZ snails are cherished too, there are over a thousand different species in this country, and after learning how intelligent and maternal they are from Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s wonderful book, ‘The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating,’ and reading about dozens of French snails lifting the lid of a basket taking them to market in a concerted effort and scattering, I have a great fondness for them. I’ve watched two snails crawl up the water bowl in my garden, and drink together, and then crawl back  out and away, and I’ve read of a snail making his way over a garden wall and finding more food in that  garden, and coming back to bring his wilting companion to a better place. Snails are more than petunia devouring pests !

    We also have a very long centipede with a painful bite – not my favourite life form, but I was fascinated to discover that their  pairs of legs are a different length so they don’t trip themselves up!

    Birds, butterflies, moths and bees, so many forms of life which we so often take for granted, but when their lives are decoded, turn out to have intelligent, intricate rituals and systems which support not only them, but the planet.

    Insects, which are fast disappearing, are the tiny workers that keep nature alive. They pollinate three-quarters of our food crops, feed countless birds and fish, and clean up dead waste to enrich the soil. It’s estimated that without them, our global food and natural systems would completely break down.  Yet the total extinction rates for insects are happening up to eight times faster than for mammals, birds, or reptiles.

    It turns out that our world could not exist without them, and since they lived for aeons before we latecomers trampled across the planet, they could probably manage without us for many aeons, world without end.

    So I try to tread softly in this forest among its ancient creatures, and marvel at the silent secret lives of the senior partners in our life here. While I grapple with technology and use electricity, gas, oil and other resources of the earth,  invisible primeval lives continue to support the planet as they have done for more millions of years than I can imagine. 

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    When I’m really up against it for time or energy, there’s nothing like that packet of pasta and tin of tomatoes always lined up in the pantry. My favourite pasta is angel hair and my husband loves macaroni, so I do both, it’s so easy.

    Thanks to Nigella Lawson, I no longer bother with boiling water, but just use cold water, and cook until the pasta is done.

    With long pasta like angel hair ( capellini) I use a big frying pan and plonk the strands in the cold water with some salt.

    The tin of tomatoes is embellished with garlic and chopped onion ( cooked for five minutes in the microwave) and a big dollop of butter, maybe a slurp of soy sauce for the umami flavour. Gently simmer for ten minutes or so, and tip over the drained pasta. Freshly grated parmesan is a must…I sometimes stir some cream into the tomatoes too.

    Food for Thought

    We say ‘I have done nothing today.’ What! have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental, but the most noble of your occupations.” 

    French philosopher Michel Montaigne

  • The House in the Forest

    The house in the middle of the forest, among the endless ranges stretching as far as the eye can see in the picture above, is ours.

    There are a few neighbours hidden around us in the thick canopy.

    We’ve lived here for almost eleven years now, since my husband left his far off home to join me in this remote little country of just over five million people. I was in my late seventies, he in his sixties.

    It was a leap of faith for us both, and since we had no money between us after leaving our previous lives, a tough start.

    He had left his ranch, and I left my beautiful clifftop cottage in a little fishing village.

    He found this place on the internet – a tiny wooden cabin surrounded by trees, gazing across to an amphitheatre of hills and forest.

    We joke that we own a quarter of a mountain.

    We used to gaze at the ad on the website every night for a year before he arrived on these shores, causing the estate agent to believe that there was massive interest in this remote cabin with no running water, no electricity, and no amenities.

    The forest is hidden from the winding dirt road with 298 hairpin bends by huge wrought iron gates, and is a protected area, so that it cannot be spoiled, developed or changed in any way..

    The dirt road, we discovered, was notorious for its difficulty, danger and beauty. The river which runs alongside it far below has its source on our forty acres of land.

    When my husband- to- be landed in this country, we packed up my beautiful possessions, walls of books, French antiques, china, lamps, pictures and rugs, in two 20foot containers, and arrived here on a sunny day just before Christmas. One loving friend had given us a Christmas wreath to hang on the door, and a tree one foot high equipped with tiny Christmas lights. I brought a stock of beeswax candles to light the cabin at night.

    We’d packed the bed last in the crammed container, along with candle sticks, a French mirror, a small table and lace tablecloth, and when I’d scrubbed and cleaned the inside of the cabin, we installed the bed, made it up with beautiful linen sheets and French counterpane, hung the mirror above the bed, arranged the tall candlesticks on the table under the window, and felt we had a home !

     Also to hand was a tiny gas camp stove, a frying pan and some plates and cutlery, and I cooked all our meals on a picnic table at the side of the house. It didn’t rain at all for the first few weeks, and we were able to unpack one container into a hastily erected garden pavilion so we could turn the now empty container into a minuscule kitchen and sitting room. We had bought a ranch slider from a demolition yard in a town an hour and a half away, carried home on top of the car, and installed at the end.

    Undeterred by our primitive conditions I persuaded my helpful new partner to hang up a big gilt Victorian mirror and several very large pictures in antique gold frames, we unpacked several bookcases and books to line the rest of the walls with books,

     furnished it with a sofa and two antique French armchairs, an oriental rug, and screened it from the kitchen with a weathered old grey French shutter.

    When our neighbours came to call, they were enchanted – one called it ‘petit Versailles’, another brought her mahjong group for afternoon tea to view it, and another, his daughter and then his sister out from England to view this extraordinary ‘room’ in the

     middle of the forest.

    Our neighbours were a fascinating group of people drawn here by the environment and the opportunity to help preserve both the trees, as well as some of the rare and endangered species which dwell here.

    Among the twenty so, are a well known architect, and a professor of aeronautics, who when he retired, went back to University to obtain a degree in zoology, and is now one of the foremost authorities on lepidoptera ( moths and butterflies ) in the country. He has discovered over three hundred new species of moth on the estate in the last ten years. 

    Our nearest neighbour is a Dutch cello player, and further away lives one of the country’s most renowned landscape architects and botanist wife, while further up the road, is a Dutch restaurateur and his artist wife. Nearby are a couple, one of whom is Swiss, who run a bungee jumping company in various parts of the world, an engineer, who’d retired from running African gold mines, and his Russian wife, and other fascinating characters.

    My husband is one of these fascinating characters, having started life in the US Navy as a highly trained nuclear specialist in a nuclear submarine, and when he left Hawaii to join me, was working at a famous observatory on top of one of the highest mountains in the world. He’s not only creative, designing and building our house, using a skateboard to create a sliding door and other ingenious devices, making concrete spheres and series of waterfalls for the garden and creating a thirty foot tree of lights at Christmas,  but he’s also the best informed person I’ve ever met, whether we’re talking about space and the stars, or how the body works, or the waves behave, or the theory of magnetism, gravity or Hadley Cells, or Leonardo da Vinci.

    We don’t have a television – instead every night after supper, we read to each other, a ritual we wouldn’t miss. 

    So we live in a world within a world, making expeditions down the long winding road to the nearest town for supplies, which include all the wood, doors and windows, which have been transported up the mountain to build our house on the sturdy roof rack of our loyal station wagon.

    My husband has built the house around us and as the years have gone by we have lived in warmth and comfort and beauty.

     I’ve planted a garden, and learned what flowers and plants the roaming bands of quail will spare when foraging for their salad course. 

    So this is the story of our adventure – the story of the forest and fauna and its rare and precious creatures is yet to be told.

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    Apple tart was a staple of our diet, growing up, nearly always eaten after Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

    But these days I can’t be doing with all the faffing of pie-making and instead make a quick, easy French galette.

    While the oven is heating to 200 degrees, I grease a flat oven proof dish, and place in it a sheet of frozen sweet shortcrust pastry to melt.

    Three or four eating apples, peeled and thinly sliced, are fried in butter. By the time they’re ready, the pastry has sunk into the dish and the apples are then piled in the middle. Then sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, fold the corners of the pastry over the apple, making a square… sprinkle with more sugar and cook for roughly thirty minutes.

    Leaves apple tart for dead !

    Food for Thought

    We will be held accountable for all the permitted pleasures we failed to enjoy .

    Hebrew Haggada

  • Beauty that connects

    My Beautiful Things was the name of a blog I followed back before The Horrible Hacker hijacked and ruined my own blog.

    My Beautiful Things was produced by a blonde beautiful retired ex-teacher living in Truro, Cornwall. Produced, not written, because it was a picture of a beautiful thing, object, view, bird, flower, gargoyle on a wall, a delicious plate of goodies,  or whatever else she had noticed that day. And every day, year in, year out, Sally showed us three beautiful things.

    Some would have called this mindfulness, I felt it was noticing – and wondered if perhaps these are the same thing anyway.

    Noticing means being present, which is what mindfulness is supposed to be about in Buddhist terms. It’s supposed to keep you anchored in the present, focusing entirely on the here and now instead of dwelling on the past or future.

    It’s also about non-judgment: observing thoughts and feelings as they pass without labeling them as good or bad.

    Noticing and being present isn’t just a passive thing.  When my daughter was driving along a busy road, she ‘noticed’ a man on crutches trying to make it across the road. So she stopped the car, and let the traffic bank up behind her, while she got out and helped him across the road. So being present – noticing – can enhance the life of others as well as our own.

    I was interested when a neighbour suffering chronic pain was sent to the Pain Clinic, and one of the things they suggested was mindfulness to improve her life.

    Yet no-one mentions there is also a downside to mindfulnes, or noticing. It makes you more aware, and sensitises you, and there’s no going back.

    There is the pain of seeing anguish in a white-faced toddler’s eyes as she is dragged along the pavement by a seemingly uncaring adult, the sadness of seeing a horse or other creature alone and depressed in a field in solitary confinement with no companion, even of noticing that new neighbours have moved in and are chopping down an ancient tree. (In a state of sensitivity all life matters, including the life of trees.)

    In an article on how claiming to have a mental problem like ADHD or anxiety is becoming almost fashionable, the psychiatrist said people have to accept that life can be awful sometimes.

    And this is where the non-judgement aspect of mindfulness comes in, I suppose, when somehow we invoke non-judgement and just  observe. But it’s hard.

    For me, it means  falling back on the ‘small happinesses’ – not just a huge NZ Kereru or wood pigeon drinking from the bird bath, or making the perfect poached egg, but beautiful moments of human contact and connection.

    A few days ago I was at the rubbish tip, browsing through the re-cycle/re-use shop, while my husband looked for treasures, and hearing the sound of birds I went outside. I stood there marvelling at the hillside opposite where a glade of pink cherry trees was in full bloom. They were alive with gleaming black and turquoise tuis, NZ songbirds, thrusting their long orange beaks into the flowers to suck the nectar, and as they did so, they sang and cooed exultantly .

    As I stood enraptured the lady from the shop came and stood by my side, and we stood in silence. Then we looked at each other, and she murmured, “beautiful, isn’t it?”, and we shared a moment of deep connection so beautiful it stayed with me all day.

    Mindfulness combined with connection is the glory of being human.

    In his classic book about the seashore, Henry Beston described connection. He wrote of the day a ship was being wrecked in tumultuous seas too dangerous and difficult for rescuers to reach the crew.

    All day long the local folk paced the sands, desperate to find a way to reach the men clinging to the wreck, barely visible through the mountainous waves.

    When night came, they felt they could not just go home and abandon the men in peril on the sea. They built huge bonfires and kept them flaming all night to tell the desperate men they were there for them. And when daylight came and the sea ebbed, and a few survivors made it to shore, they said what it had meant to them to know that there were people there, being with them, connected across the black night and thundering waves.

    Which has taken me a long way from Sally’s three beautiful things, except that this story of people and peril is beautiful, and fills the spirit with the same awe as a beautiful thing. 

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    I’m always looking for shortcuts and the days when I was happy to sit with a wooden spoon and beat egg yolks with olive oil and garlic for a delicious aioli are long gone. The other day I discovered the perfect compromise. Since my daughter introduced me to the Japanese mayonnaise, Kewpie, I find it indispensable.

    In this case, I decided to try using it for aioli. By beating in extra virgin olive oil and crushed garlic, I found a very reasonable substitute for the purist version.

    I also use Kewpie to make Eggs Benedict instead of labouring over a hollandaise sauce, and that works too. Enjoy!

    Food for Thought

    ” When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love…

    Marcus Aurelius. Meditations