Category: Memoir & Family

“Use your elbow–grease,” my grandmother would chide me good humouredly… or ask: “where’s your gumption?” Where indeed? I searched my somewhat limited seven year old soul but could find no trace of these desirable qualities – whatever they were – for I had no idea. I was completely puzzled, and sad to disappoint her.

However the lack of these mystifying gifts ceased to matter when at a fortnight’s notice, I left my grandmother forever, to join my father just returned from Egypt with his new wife. After a month he disappeared to Germany, and my stepmother and I waited for his summons until a house had been found for us. During those months, instead of going to school, my stepmother gave me lessons in the afternoon. Looking back, though a fully trained physiotherapist, she may not have been quite so well qualified to teach small children, but those were more carefree times, when anything went, and often did.

In my case, we didn’t do much maths, thankfully, but I learnt lots of poetry, mainly, I think, the poets my stepmother had ‘done’ at school in the thirties. These included Sir Walter Scott, Elizabeth Browning, Wordsworth and chunks of Longfellow’s Hiawatha. She was hot on spelling – and as a nine year old, lists of words like phlegm, diaphragm, diphthong, delphinium, rhododendron, asthma, psychology, diarrhoea had to be memorised every day. If I’d ended up in the medical profession this vocabulary might have stood me in good stead, but since then I’ve often wished that I had instead mastered how to spell ‘receive’ and all the exceptions of’ ie’, as well as ‘commitment’, both my constant stumbling blocks.

When it came to composition – as it was called – I was a disappointment to her, the way I’d felt with my grandmother, when I lacked elbow grease and gumption. But what I was lacking now, was imagination. “Use your imagination,” she’d say, and once again, I had no idea what imagination was, though I thought it might have something to do with writing about fairies, which I felt was childish.

I felt mysteriously depressed, as at school I’d always been quite good at composition. But the problem of imagination didn’t seem so important once we got to war-torn Europe. We travelled through apocalyptic scenes – cities of mountains of bricks, with half buildings with crooked pictures still on the wall, a door open and chairs still at a table, and skeletons of ruined churches – before finally reaching the infamous place called Belsen, where our new home was the Beast of Belsen’s old digs.

Those were bleak times in Europe and I often felt bleak too. Now my father, almost unknown after years away at war, expected me to have common sense. This seemed more important than gumption, elbow grease, or imagination all put together, and just as un-attainable. I think they thought I was sensible when my best friend was murdered. I had gone to fetch her for our early morning riding lesson, but she didn’t answer the door. When I got home after riding, Mary had been found shot in the kitchen, and her younger brother was shot at the door as he had tried to escape. Her father had then shot himself because his wife had left him.

I never spoke to my new parents about this, my chief worry being Mary’s brother’s feelings as he dashed for the door, and also that Mary mightn’t have made it into heaven, which I knew my parents didn’t believe in. I cried every night in bed, and begged God to let her in. But though I was apparently phlegmatic, the magic of common sense still eluded me – as in: “do use your common sense, child,” or the unanswerable question: “haven’t you got any common sense?” When I joined the army as a teenager at my father’s behest, I knew he hoped I might now discover some hidden well of this commodity which he seemed to think I really needed for a successful life.

But here was another pitfall. An officer was supposed to have initiative and to use it! This, as a very young officer, I quickly realised, was dangerous. Initiative was a two-edged sword, with unknown consequences, which not everyone appreciated. So it was with relief that I looked forward to marriage, when, I supposed with blind optimism, none of these things would be required of me.

But on the third day into married life, I discovered that things were not as I had thought they were, had to write a big cheque which cleaned me out, and then faced an unpredictable, precarious, and impoverished life on shifting sands. The upside was that I discovered I did have gumption after all! And I needed it.

Elbow grease, on the other hand, was something quite prosaic I came to realise, and was only needed for wax-polishing antique furniture, the idea being that the intense pressure of the elbow grease created friction, and the resultant heat melted the invisible wax crystals, causing them to meld together and create those shining surfaces. Frankly, it was easier just to put the dusters in the oven, and polish with hot dusters instead of elbow grease. The only other use for elbow grease seemed to be for scrubbing burnt saucepans, an activity I have always strenuously avoided.

Common sense? Well I’ve discovered that common sense is merely a matter of opinion, and that one man’s common sense is another man’s madness… so to take a somewhat extreme example, Hitler’s idea of common sense would not be mine – so I’ve flagged common sense. And initiative doesn’t bother me any more – I’m in sole command, and don’t have to answer to any superior officers!

Which leaves me with that lack of imagination. Well, it’s something I’ve got used to, and have had to realise that I never could produce an interesting imaginative novel! I recognise imagination in great works of art, both literary and artistic, in fine blogs, in glorious architecture and opera, in gardening and interior decoration, even in solving problems… but I’m still digging for it in myself…

Jane Austen has sometimes been un-imaginatively accused of lacking imagination, and I used to cling to her definition of her art in a letter to her brother Edward, in which she refers to her: ‘little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush’, but to be brutally realistic, this is not really much comfort, since she painted masterpieces on her little bit of ivory with her fine brush. For me, lacking the flights of fancy that come with a soaring imagination, all I can do is to notice and to describe, and I did find some consolation in these words by the enigmatic writer Fernando Pessoa.

He wrote: “What moves lives. What is said endures. There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having been described. Small- minded critics point out that such and such a poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it’s a nice day. But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.”

These words hearten me for I too, can at least conserve the day in wordy, florid memories, try to sprinkle new flowers over the fields and skies of the fleeting outer world, and thoroughly enjoy myself while I’m sprinkling! So here’s to florid memories and new flowers!

Food for threadbare gourmets

This is the strawberry season, so it’s crazy to serve anything else for pudding besides these luscious fruits. Friends for dinner meant a quick foray to the nearest strawberry fields. The ones I wanted, where the strawberries are grown by a Vietnamese genius, whose berries are the biggest, sweetest and cheapest, hadn’t opened, so I had to fall back on the other strawberry fields. I usually find theirs a bit tough and tart, but solved the problem by hulling them, and putting them in a dish out in the sun. As the day went by, the delectable scent of soft, sweet, ripe strawberries warm from the sun tempted my taste-buds every time I passed them.

With them I usually do Chantilly cream. One of my grandsons will eat this neat, and has learned how to make it for himself, a useful skill when he goes flatting at University! Take one cup of thick cream, two table spoons of icing sugar and a few drops of vanilla and whip them together. I usually make three times this amount, just tripling all the ingredients.

Food for thought

So long as a bee is outside the petals of the lotus and has not tasted its honey, it hovers around the flower buzzing. But when it is inside the flower it drinks the nectar silently. So long as a man quarrels about doctrines and dogmas, he has not tasted the nectar of the true faith; once he has tasted it he becomes still.

Sri Ramakrishna 1883- 1886 Famous Hindu teacher and mystic, who believed that all religions led to the same God, and who practised both Christianity and Islam

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

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

Breathes there the man with soul so dead

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

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

Food for Thought

A grace found in an old book of recipes… Lord, forgive us that we feast while others starve.

Bishop Charles Gore at a banquet

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.

I knew what it was as soon as I saw it. It was unmistakable. The one and only. Its price far above rubies. And I knew it was irreplaceable. We were standing in Friend’s kitchen making a pot of tea, and my eyes fell on this strange looking knife, with a black bone handle and a short pointed blade that looked as though it had been buried for aeons.

“Is that your special knife? “ I asked. Her soft, be-ringed hand covered it protectively as it lay on the bench. “Yes”, she replied, her voice throbbing with all the weight of the years of devotion. “I’ve had it since it came out of the house when my first mother- in- law died over fifty years ago. I hide it from Jim so he can’t use it or lose it. I don’t know how old it is, I think the blade may have broken in half, which is why it’s so short. But I use it for everything.”

“You don’t have to explain,” I laughed, “I recognised it straight away. My father had a knife like that.”

He and my stepmother married just after the war when there was nothing to buy in the shops, and couples starting on their married life subsisted on the gifts of family and friends. This knife came from my stepmother’s father. He didn’t value it obviously. But nothing would have wrested it from my father’s hands, the talented cook in the family.

It was just your ordinary bone handled, long bladed knife. Not an actual carving knife, but the sort that was used for carving fowl in the days when people had a different utensil for everything. This meant that the blade was quite slim. But it was known as The Carving Knife.

For all the years of their married life, my father and stepmother used it for everything – peeling vegetables, carving the Sunday joint, cutting the Christmas cake, filleting a sole – they had no truck with dinky little vegetable peelers and fancy little kitchen knives. This was their treasure, versatile and indispensable. As the years went by the blade became more and more curved and thin from sharpening and from constant use, but it never buckled under the pressure.

If it went missing the whole house was in uproar and panic. Frantic searches ensued until the precious object had been found, and peace returned to the kitchen and peace of mind to the drawing room. We children were dispatched to all corners and cupboards in the kitchen- always feeling rather hopeless. I can still see my handsome, moustachioed father bent over the dustbin outside on a dark winter’s night, unwrapping the bundles of rubbish wrapped up in newspaper the way we did back then. He found it too, that time. It was not only well used, but well travelled, accompanying us to and from army quarters, from country to country and into retirement.

Now that they are both dead, and I was far away each time, first in Hong Kong, and then here in New Zealand, I’ve often wondered what became of their most precious possession, whether anyone else remembered and treasured it, or was this cherished hard-working, faithful kitchen help-meet just jettisoned?

My husband will only use the same mug for all his drinks. It’s a blue willow pattern mug, which the children bought for me for Christmas 1974, and has lasted until now. It actually has one chip, but it doesn’t put him off. He will also only use two stainless steel spoons from the kitchen drawer for his breakfast muesli, out of all the spoons in the house. He likes their shape. They are amongst the oldest, ugliest and cheapest in the house. They came out of the top of a large packet of Tide in 1965. Tide was a washing powder we used in the sixties. The spoons were part of a set of knives and forks as well, which were buried in the soap powder in each box – which of course, I used in copious quantities for all those nappies.

And my son, when he was four and five, on being asked what he wanted to eat would always reply: “Toast with melted butter and the crusts cut off and my drink in a rose cup”. Like me he is still addicted to using beautiful things – but not, maybe, as addicted as me…

In her funny and charming little book ‘The Holy Man’, Susan Trott has a chapter called “Fussiness”. The Holy Man noticed that one of his disciples, Henri, always sat in the same place for meals, and always used the same blue plate, and he also noticed that the sleeves of Henri’s robe were always folded back in exactly the same way with three folds.

So the next day the Holy Man sat in Henri’s place. When Henri asked him about this he just pulled down the sleeves of Henri’s robe. The next morning as Henri entered the kitchen, the Holy Man dropped the blue plate, and then swept up the shattered pieces. Later, Henri nabbed the Holy Man – who was called Joe, actually, and said: ‘Okay, you think I’m being fussy,’ but Henri still couldn’t see the problem. In their discussion, Joe pointed out that attachment means suffering, and he also suggested that these attachments meant that Henri was trying to control his environment, which leads to rigidity of thinking.

I often think about this chapter, being an extremely fussy person myself, and try to train myself to let go without suffering when I chip a plate or break a favourite mug. I try to see it as an opportunity to find something new, just as pretty – which I’m not sure is what Buddha or the Holy Man had in mind!

And as for the kitchen knives – yes, I have one too. No it is not a fetish, but a right hand man. Over a life-time several of these precious objects have broken or disappeared, but I feel my present general duties, all purpose kitchen knife will last the distance. I found it in the garage when we moved here, seven years ago. It’s the most comfortable of all my knives to hold. The curve of the blade is perfect for everything I want to do, it gets sharper than any of the others, and if it goes missing, there‘s hell to pay. But my better half is oblivious to all this, and uses it as if it were any old knife. So I end up like my father, searching frantically in rubbish bags, over-loaded dishwasher and kitchen drawers for my indispensable partner in the kitchen. Yes, I am shamelessly attached !

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

With a slow-cooked casserole the other day, I decided to skip the mashed potatoes which it cried out for, and do pureed kumara/sweet potato instead. Peeled, and boiled until soft, I tipped them into my new toy, the stick whizzer. First I put a big knob of butter and a good dollop of cream, then the kumara, salt and black pepper and nutmeg to taste. A quick whizz, and there was this melting, delectable orange puree.

Inspired by this, I decided not to mash the carrots and parsnip together, but to puree them too. This meant cooking the carrots for longer than the soft parsnip. But whizzed again with the butter and cream, they were heavenly too. They soaked up the beautiful sauce of the casserole which had been cooked in spices and pea – nut butter for twelve hours at fifty degrees. Recipe next time!

Food for Thought

In the morning the ignorant man considers what he will do, while the intelligent man considers what Allah will do with him.

Ibn Ata’illah-Sakandari Sufi saint, born in Alexandria circa 1240, died in Cairo 1309, where his tomb can still be visited.

There were six of us sitting at the dining table. The only husband was ‘a former naval person’, in the words of Winston Churchill signing off his telegrams to President Roosevelt. My husband wasn’t well enough to join us, so the rest of us were what some people would call old ladies, but I don’t think it had occurred to any of us.

There was the magnificent matriarch, well into her eighties, now a great grandmother, still jetting around the globe to various children and grand-children, still walking her dogs every day, still wiping the floor with everyone at bowls and golf, still giving lectures on arcane subjects to U3A, the university of the old, still beautiful, slim and elegantly dressed. She was entertaining two of the other ladies in her sea-side house, so I’d suggested they come for lunch.

One of her friends was a gardening devotee, fresh from a tour of the gardens in Melbourne … sitting beside her, she and I discussed great Australian gardeners like Andrew Pfeiffer and Edna Walling. Magnificent matriarch’s other friend was the titled widow of a distinguished sailor, and a painter, while my other friend, who also painted and had spent her life in France, also sported a title. So you might think that we would generate a decorous and refined level of conversation. I’m not sure what triggered the subject of washing nappies, but this generated more energy, heat, and hysterical laughter than many other subjects before or since around that dining table.

We explored the horrors of scraping and rinsing, the wringing out and pegging on the line outside in freezing cold with frozen fingers. I described my primitive electric boiler on wheels, into which I placed a hose for the water. In it I put the horrid wet smelly nappies and soap powder, and boiled it up, steam filling the kitchen while a particular smell of boiling clothes would penetrate the place. When they’d boiled sufficiently, the heavy boiler had to be rolled to the kitchen sink, the nappies fished out one at a time and swung from the boiler into the sink for rinsing. We all agreed that we used a wooden spoon for this rather than the tongs. By now the kitchen was filled with steam and all the windows misted up.

The sailor’s widow claimed that her lot was worse than the rest of us. She didn’t even have a boiler, but had to fill a bucket and lug it across to boil it on the top of her stove, which then entailed heaving the boiling bucket with stewing nappies back across the kitchen to the sink. The magnificent matriarch reminded us of how the fingers used to swell with all this rubbing and wringing, and I remembered how I’d stopped wearing my wedding and engagement rings as my fingers had swelled so much.

French lady complained about the horror of having a baby sitting on your lap, and the sudden realisation that the bottom of the baby was sodden. Sailor’s widow and I swapped notes on the anguish of getting them dry in a cold climate. Her husband was stationed in Canada then, and mine in England. We carried stiff , square, frozen nappies in from outside, and draped them over a clothes horse or chair in front of the fire to thaw them and dry them. With two babies under two, I was often only one nappy ahead of each baby. No such thing as a dryer back then – a clothes horse in those days was made of wood, with hinges of heavy- duty linen.

We discussed the fine cotton inner nappy and the bulky outer terry towelling nappy, and the great day when plastic outer pants were invented, thus saving us from the trauma of the wet nappy sitting in the lap. Former naval person sitting at the end of the table sat riveted with horror at this refined lunch-time conversation, and rolling his eyes and groaning at intervals, just to remind us he was there.

We happily ploughed on eating our chicken vol- au- vent, and alcoholic dried fruit compote for pudding, his revulsion just giving an added edge to our enjoyment – maybe even revenge for the trials we had all endured. We envied flower expert’s possession of a high-ceilinged old fashioned kitchen which had meant she had room for an airing rack on a pulley to dry everything in the warm air up on the ceiling. French lady boasted that by the time she had her last child, she could order a nappy service in Paris to collect and deliver. We practically jeered at this decadence, sailor’s wife claiming with determination that she had had the worst experience with nappies, and who could argue… buckets, frozen nappies, an’all ?

Our children had it easy, we all agreed, and we had all noticed that our grandchildren never had any problems with nappy rash from their easy disposables. Threat though they are to the environment, this, we agreed was a huge plus, freeing mothers from the guilt which we experienced if any of our babies displayed that bright red rash, for which we blamed ourselves for not rinsing the nappies well enough, or not changing them often enough.

This burning subject and un-savoury occupation which kept five intelligent, well-educated women from prosperous backgrounds fully occupied for years of their lives, would seem utterly trivial to today’s mothers, who not only enjoy disposable nappies, but washing machines and dryers which do the job at the touch of a button.

But today’s women also juggle jobs with housework, children and commuting. I don’t envy them. Though fifties women are considered a joke by most people now-a-days, we actually had time to spend with our children and ourselves. And our trials were very character-forming!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Dried fruit compote is one of the easiest luxurious puddings I know. Roughly chop about three cups of dried peaches, prunes, figs and apricots into three cups of cold tea and add rum to taste, plus a cup of brown sugar. Add a stick of cinnamon, six cloves, and two or three star anise and at least a teasp of vanilla essence. Gently heat and simmer until soft, and serve hot or cold with crème fraiche or whipped cream, and maybe a little shortbread biscuit. Peeled sliced apple and tamarilloes are also good in the mix. Add more liquid is needed.

Food for Thought

In Islam, especially among the Sufi orders, siyahat or ‘errance’ – the action or rhythm of walking – was used as a technique for dissolving the attachments of the world and allowing men to lose themselves in God.

Bruce Chatwin, 1940 – 1989 Traveller and writer

What to wear has occupied many happy hours and years of my thinking life. So though some research has claimed that little girls and boys are conditioned to be male and female… pink versus blue etc, and that clothes have nothing to do with gender, I have to disagree.

I don’t think any little boy could have felt the bliss that I did at three when I finally got to wear a sun-suit that had been too big for me. I remember the day I was allowed to wear it, I remember what it looked like, and I remember the ecstasy of wearing it.

Not quite the same rapture over my white petticoats trimmed with broderie anglaise, and the smocked pink dress and the blue dress, made of ninon – a fine muslin type fabric with soft little dots on it, but I loved them, and I remember them still. I loved my grey flannel coat with the red collar and cuffs, and I clearly remember my utter disapproval of my mother in her new coats.

I stood and watched with some disapproval as she preened herself in the two new coats she had just bought, one a black fluffy material with gold buttons, the other a smooth jade green wool with big black buttons. When she asked me which I preferred, I couldn’t tell her which because I thought they were both so hideous. Poor mother!

School uniform was a treat then too, with beautiful quality velour hats with big brims and a wide ribbon round it for winter, and a Panama hat the same shape with another big ribbon round it for summer. Both hats had elastic to fit under the chin, and I would chew the elastic on the way home from school in a satisfying sort of way.

When my Victorian grandmother came to care for us after my mother had gone, she dressed me according to her firmly held notions. I went to school one day in an anguish of embarrassment, wearing a hideous garment which had been my aunt’s during the war. It was a beige coloured pixie hood, which had a long scarf part which you wound round your neck. I hated it, and knew all the other children would jeer at it, and they did.

Worst of all were the bright purple fluffy mittens she got hold of – warm – but hideous. It lacerated my fashion- conscious soul every time I put them on. And the boys, who had a genius for the deadly nick-name, called out ‘Mickey Mouse gloves’ whenever they saw me in them, and I burned with shame.

Bundled off to my new parents at nine and a half, they threw away all the clothes my grandmother had lovingly made me, and took us shopping in London, buying up big at the smartest children’s shop, and I felt I had died and gone to heaven, with new red coats and blue coats, tartan skirts and jerseys, red kilts and pretty dresses.

But they had to last… that was the last time we enjoyed such largesse. When I grew out of them, there were no replacements, and I had to manage on various left-overs. This was when I read ‘Little Women’ and found my kindred spirit in Meg, the eldest sister. Amy also spoke to my soul when she wrote in her diary that: ‘Meg is very kind to me and lets me wear her blue dress with the white dots’.

The scene in which Meg, also humiliated by her worn clothes, allows her frivolous friends to turn her into a fashion plate for a party, and overhears her mother’s friend describing her as ‘a doll’, was one that I read and re-read, and I felt her humiliation as though it was my own.

Oh, the lovely cut of winter clothes, the fabrics, the wool and tweed, the gabardine and mohair, the lambs-wool and cashmere, the knits and jersey, velvet and corduroy, moleskin and flannel. And for summer, the shirtwaisters and the full skirts, the pretty blouses and the cotton dresses.

And for summer, we had linens and cottons and seersuckers and silk, the muslins and tulle, taffetas and brocades for evening. We’d never heard of denim – and I still hate it. And blessedly, we’d never heard of polyester, and all those hot and horrid man-made fabrics.

When I went into the army at eighteen, we were kitted out with uniforms which were made to measure, and a great deal of thought had gone into the design. Even our shoes were beautiful hand-made leather with elegant lasts made by a famous shoemaker.

The winter uniform was a barathea skirt and jacket – a fine soft wool, and the summer uniform was a beautiful gaberdine, with beige shirts and a tie. We had khaki felt hats, and green ties for the summer. And on our shoulders and hats we wore the emblem of the Corps – Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war.

Since then, mini-skirts and maxi-skirts, hot pants and shift dresses, kaftans and flares have all come and gone. Not to mention shoulder pads, platform soles, stiletto heels, wedges, kitten heels and winkle pickers. And now – anything goes.

So the great gift of growing older, is that one can wear what one wants, be comfortable, look at fashion with detachment, and remember the fun and the pain and the pleasure of all those clothes over the years – ‘the fabric of our lives’, as the cotton advertisement says.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

The oven was on, so I decided to bake some potatoes. When they were done I scooped out the insides, and mashed them with butter, cream, plenty of chopped chives, salt and pepper. I piled the mixture back into the potato skins, sprinkled grated cheese on top, and put them back in the oven until the cheese was melted and golden. Delicious with a green salad.

Food for Thought

The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you.

Kendall Hailey Writer

These I have loved, to quote Rupert Brooke. I think I’m a serial monogamist – but didn’t dare put that in the title and invite a torrent of prurient spam into the file! Neither did I dare put ‘men’ in the title – that would have meant more Viagra ads.

I started young and can date the first love of my life back to age nine. Stuck in a London flat with two new parents, waiting to move north, bored with playing in the park and endless games of ludo, these two strange adults took us to the cinema one afternoon. ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ no less. My heart did a tumble – Leslie Howard alias Sir Percy Blakeney, standing, quizzing glass raised in one hand, one long leg in pantaloons and buckled shoe resting on a chair, lace cravat tumbling from his neck, and laughingly baiting his pursuers with his little ditty: “ They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven or is he in hell, that damned elusive Pimpernel?” Oh, his gaiety, his nonchalance, his recklessness…

My heart was his. I sought out Baroness Orxy’s Scarlet Pimpernel books and they sustained me for some years, until the glowing image dissolved when I found ‘Jane Eyre’. Mr Rochester! He truly enslaved me. I read the book over and over, memorising every scene in which my (rather doubtful) hero figured. I found him terrifying and mesmerising. I used to terrify my dormitory at school too, sitting on the end of the bed in the dark, reciting the latest instalment of Charlotte Bronte’s homage to plain women and masterful men.

Mr Rochester’s black beauty faded on board ship to Malaya, when I discovered that Cupid really could throw darts. I was fourteen the night we boarded at Southampton, and my father suggested that he and I take a stroll around the decks to watch the bustle of embarkation. As we passed an open window where a posse of young naval officers were making merry, one of them glanced out of the window. A pair of deep blue eyes looked straight into mine, and for the rest of the five week voyage I thought of nothing else. I craned to see the possessor of these magnetic blue eyes whenever we were all in the dining room, and pined between meals.

I rejoiced when we were delayed in the Suez Canal for a few extra days after a crashed oil tanker blocked our passage. I glowed when I found him playing tennis at Mount Lavinia in Columbo while we had afternoon tea. I never spoke to him. I cried for days when we landed in Singapore and he sailed on to Hong Kong, immaculate and oblivious in his white tropical uniform. I think my parents must have gone mad with irritation, never knowing when I was going to dissolve into what they probably thought were hormonal tears. My secret was locked in my non-existent bosom. I never even knew his name.

Then along came ‘Gone with the Wind. My father, knowing nothing of my amorous past, assumed I would come home crazy about Clark Gable, and decided to put a spoke in Mr Gables ‘s wheels before I left, by telling me to watch how his ears waggled when he spoke ( they did!) This malicious dart fell harmlessly by the way. There was my new/old love, Ashley Wilkes, with his brooding blue eyes, his noble brow, his elegance and his honour! I watched ‘Gone With The Wind eleven times before I was over Leslie Howard. My father was disgusted that I would love such a wet!

But time has revealed that not only was he a talented stage actor, playwright and producer, but also a patriotic man who left comfortable Hollywood to return to war-time England, and who died when the Luftwaffe shot down his plane on a flight outside the war zone. He was reputed to have been on an intelligence mission. He also had a reputation for womanising (who doesn’t?). He himself said he: “didn’t chase women… but couldn’t always be bothered to run away”.

By the time I’d worked through the eleven viewings of ‘Gone With The Wind’ in various parts of the world, some years had passed, and I then became pre-occupied with flesh and blood. But come re-marriage, contentment and a deeper appreciation of the beauty of men, I became a serial lover again.

My first new love was the noted Pakistani cricketer, Sarfraz Nawaz, who discovered ‘reverse swing’, and taught it to Imran Khan and other Pakistani cricketing greats. But I loved Sarfraz before he achieved greatness ( you could almost say I discovered him!) and having seen him by chance on TV while my new husband was watching a test match, I demanded to be taken to the cricket to see him live.

This was the early to mid-seventies when great – or rather infamous events were a-foot in Washington, and a tall gentleman with a twinkle in his eye shot to fame, as they say. Archibald Cox. Some may remember him. I loved him for his rumpled suits, fine intelligence and un-assailable integrity. My exasperated husband triumphantly waved a wire photo he’d found in the office, hoping to break his spell. But I thought Archibald Cox lolling in his chair with his long legs propped on his desk, and the leather soles of his shoes facing the camera – sporting two large holes – was irresistible.

If I had loathed Nixon before, my hatred knew no bounds when he famously sacked my man, and I never saw him again. So that left me with Andrew Young, (another groan from husband) Ambassador to the UN. I looked at a recent photo of this interesting man, and it just didn’t do justice to his youthful fire and fierce good looks. But even he couldn’t compete with that spectacular entrance of Omar Sharif emerging from the desert on his camel, jingling and shimmering and enigmatic in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.

When he re-appeared as Dr Zhivago that was it! My husband was as usual, chagrined, and assured me that all this gorgeous man ever did was to play bridge… he was brilliant apparently and wrote books and newspaper columns about a subject that is a closed book to me.

This was disappointing, so for a few years I transferred my affections to Robert Redford as the handsome, eccentric and very decent great white hunter Denis Finch Hatton in ‘Out of Africa’… he had a lot in common with Sir Percy Blakeney and Ashley Wilkes.

But like all my other loves, Robert Redford is aging, and is not the glorious young man he once was. So in my twilight years, my loves have been fewer, and indeed, I thought my love life was over, until we went on a cruise a few years ago. Reader – to quote Charlotte Bronte – I, like every the woman on our dining table, fell hopelessly in love with our handsome young Indian waiter.

All the husbands ground their teeth, knowing they couldn’t compete with this charming clever and exquisite young man. He dispensed sour green apples to a woman he’d noticed hovering on the edge of sea- sickness, cherished an autistic teenage girl, attended to each of us as though we were each the only woman in his life, and in my eyes, at least, achieved perfection when I discovered that he was deeply spiritual. He was a devout Hindu, a vegetarian and a man who saw all religions as having the same value. In other words – a good man.

Well, he sailed away of course, and I now face the unpalatable truth that men my own age are not figures of romance. But I don’t want to become a cougar … a term I’m told which describes older women who pursue younger men. So I will just have to fall back on the sweet memories of my youth… though you never know… they say the party isn’t over till the fat lady sings… I mean the slightly over-weight lady… oh – that could be me!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

The most useful thing I learned when I was in the army was how to keep peeled potatoes fresh. Sitting in the cook house at night as a recruit peeling hundred of potatoes for all the hundreds of women the next day, I had to put a knob of clean coal in the water to keep the potatoes fresh and the water clear. The tragedy of my life is that I haven’t seen coal for years, so can’t use this pearl of wisdom myself…

Food for Thought

While we wonder what will happen next in North Korea, I found this, written nearly two hundred years ago, and it seems that nothing has changed since then. “What experience and history teach us is this – that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. 1779 – 1831 Influential German philosopher.

My accident was a fascinating experience – in retrospect! I was driving happily down the main highway to the village crossroads in my little silver car about ten years ago, when a large, heavy old car – solid as – shot out of the side road, without stopping at the Stop sign.

The daffy woman driving it was oblivious to me, and was going to hit me right in the driver’s seat. I had less than a second to brake, turn the wheel to the left to try to lessen the impact and hurl a prayer into the void as I faced what I thought was certain death. “Help me”, I silently implored. The braking meant that she hit more of the right side of the bonnet than me, and the deafening sound of the impact nearly shocked me into the next world.

In what felt like slow motion my car ricocheted away from hers, with my hands still on the wheel, and I just wanted to hit the brake and stop. But if I did, I was going to hit a line of parked cars. As the impact shot my car towards a parked blue car, I heard a voice say: “keep going, keep steering”. I did as I was told, using every ounce of my shattered will power to do it, and as I longed to stop, a red car loomed in front, and the voice said: “keep going, keep steering”. I thought, at the end of my endurance, surely I can stop now, but another car loomed. “Keep going”, the firm imperative voice instructed. I did as I was told, and finally, still steering, still going, came to rest safely 180 degrees from the impact, on a side road where there was nothing. And by now people were running out of their shops having heard the big bang.

I was reminded of that Voice last night, when I was re-reading Joe Simpson’s incredible account of nearly dying, and surviving, on a Peruvian mountain. He had broken his leg and his ankle, and then slipped into a crevasse, so deep and dark he had no idea where it ended. His climbing partner thought he was dead and cut the rope between them in order to survive himself, and Simpson fell even deeper into the terrifying black space.

Somehow, using climbers’ skills I don’t even understand, using his ice axes, he eased himself endlessly up the icy sides of the crevasse and out onto the cruel mountainside. Then, without food or drink for over three days, he dragged, hopped, and hauled himself over rocks and glaciers, ice and snow; he got himself back to base camp about eight miles away over terrain, and through cold that I cannot even imagine. And he would never have made it without the Voice.

” It was as though there were two minds within me arguing the toss. The Voice was clean and sharp and commanding. It was always right, and I listened to it when it spoke and acted on its decisions. The other mind rambled…. as I set about obeying the orders of the Voice….”

When he wanted to rest or sleep, the Voice would wake him : “go on, keep going… faster. You’ve wasted too much time. Go on before you lose the tracks”… Later, as he fumbled blindly, wanting just to sink into the snow and sleep, the Voice urged him on: “don’t sleep, don’t sleep, not here. Keep going. Find a slope and dig a snow hole… don’t sleep”.

The Voice got him back to base camp the night before the other climbers were leaving first thing in the morning. The rest of the story is in his book ‘Touching the Void.’

His story reminded me of Charles Lindbergh’s experience when he flying The Spirit of St Louis over the Atlantic on his historic 34 hour flight across to France. Lindbergh, not noticeably a spiritual man, but one who was very impressed by the Nazis, had a unique experience, in which, unable to keep awake, his conscious mind fell asleep, while a mind entity standing “apart” held firm. This state gave way to a new extraordinary mind, which at first he feared to trust, and which took over.

‘He became conscious of other presences, advising him on his flight, encouraging him, conveying messages unattainable in normal life… He felt himself in a transitional state between earthly life and a vaster region beyond, as if caught in the magnetic field between two planets and propelled by forces he cannot control, “representing powers incomparably stronger than I’ve ever known”.’

Battered by winds and storms, and guided and supported, he arrived safely in France. This was like the experience of some of Ernest Shackleton’s men. As they struggled through the Antarctic snows at the extremity of their strength they became conscious of another member of the party, ‘who could not be counted,’ but who was always with them.

Whatever we call them… angels, spirits, voices, these visitations are always helpful and benevolent. In each of these cases – and there are many more – these unseen energies are rescuing us from situations in which we are powerless. Regardless of belief in a god or not, these inexplicable and indefinable happenings make me feel that the world is a supportive and benevolent place, with Resources to help us all, whatever our beliefs, if we are open and available for help.

Sometimes we ask, sometimes the help comes unbidden, as when an accident happened in Wellington at a Christmas party a few years ago. A balcony collapsed on a two story house, hurling all the party-goers to the ground. A heavily pregnant woman said she felt perfectly safe because a great white angel was holding her, and put her safely on the ground. She was unhurt.

Some people find it hard to believe these things. But it doesn’t really matter. When they happen, they happen because they’re needed. But a faith that there is help available does seem to make things fall into place quickly and more often. I sometimes think that there is more preventive thinking in that other Reality than we realise, so that we don’t have to be rescued from the big dramas. So deciding to drive another way today, may mean we’ve been prodded to avoid an accident. Locking a door we never normally lock, may be a message from our helpers because we need protection on that day. When we listen, there are so often messages to hear, and when we look, so many subtle signposts.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Not much in the house until I go shopping, so I’ll cheer us up with a cheese soufflé – quick, cheap and easy. The most difficult thing about it, is tying some greaseproof paper round the outside of the soufflé dish so that the soufflé stands up above the brim of the dish, and looks spectacular.

Next step is to separate three eggs. After greasing the dish, I make a thick white sauce, with two ounces of flour, two ounces of butter, and half a pint of milk, salt and pepper. When it’s bubbled a few times, so you know it’s cooked, stir in four or five ounces of grated cheese with a pinch of cayenne. I often add Parmesan to strong cheddar.

Stir in the egg yolks. Putting this aside, whip the egg whites until stiff in a large bowl. Then gently stir in the cheese mixture in three lots. I use a slotted spoon to make this process as gentle as possible. All you have to do now is pour it into the soufflé dish and cook in a moderate oven. Serve at once. I often make a little tomato sauce to go with this, and maybe some thinly sliced green beans. Salad if you’re feeling healthy. This is enough for three, and masses for two- but easy to eat too much…

Food for Thought

Notice in the grandest and stuffiest club in London, the Athenaum: Will the clergyman who stole my umbrella kindly return it. This club consists half of gentlemen and half of clergymen, and it is clear that no gentleman would steal an umbrella.

Feeling I needed to rest my knee after some full-on glamping training, I decided to have a bath instead of a shower.

And I needed to warm up. It was a cold morning, and I hadn’t lit the fire because I’m going out to lunch, and the old chap is downstairs in his study. I could have put the heat pump on, but an innate meanness makes me feel I’d rather burn wood that I’ve already paid for, than use electricity that I’ll have to pay for in the future – probably through the nose.

I don’t often have a bath these days, mainly because I can’t trust myself not to go on adding more and more hot water, until I finally drag myself out, weak and exhausted from all the heat and steam, and need half an hour to cool down and recover. This seemed an attractive prospect this cold morning, so I put on the hot tap – hot first, so there isn’t a cold layer of water at the bottom, and sashayed off to make the bed.

I was waylaid by the thought that I owed a thank you note to a friend for our dinner with them on Sunday night, so went to the computer instead. Thought I’d have a look at stats and notifications while I was there, replied to a few messages – suddenly remembered the bath! The water had reached the top, but at least was not over-flowing. But it had run cold, so I could put my hand in to let out some of the luke-warm water. As I stepped into this disappointing bath, I thought to myself – I may have to give up blogging.

I put my hand behind me into the soap dish and found it empty. Empty! I knew I’d put a fresh bar of Pears soap there only the other day. Why the old chap had to use the soap from the bath, when there were already three bars of soap in soap dishes in the hand basin was a mystery I grimly decided to solve. Three bars, because my son always gives me black Spanish glycerine soap to match my black and white bathroom. But the black soap does tend to stain white flannels, so I put an extra bar of inoffensive Pears glycerine soap there for flannel-using ablutions.

Soap has been on my mind since reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Love in the Time of Cholera,’ a few weeks ago. One of many delicious incidents was between an elderly married couple, and how their marriage had nearly broken up thirty years before over a bar of soap. For a few days she kept forgetting to put a new bar of soap in the bathroom, and would remember each time she went in for her shower. On the third day her husband came out of the bathroom in a tantrum and accused her of leaving him without soap for a week.

Neither would back down. The petty argument developed into hostile silence between them, and he then went to stay at his club for three months – finally he had to come back home because they were re-furbishing the club, but he moved into another bedroom. He had to come through hers though, to get to the bathroom, so if she was in there, he lay on the bed, waiting. One day he fell asleep, and when he woke couldn’t be bothered to get up. “It wasn’t a week” he said. She then admitted she had meant to replace the soap each day.

It was the perfect illustration of the petty squabbles that grow into huge rifts, simply because no-one will back down, or admit they were wrong. I have some friends, married now for nearly forty years, and she told me they had had their first row the night they came back from honeymoon and moved into their first home. “Paul said the toilet roll had to have the paper hanging down behind, and I said it had to hang down the front.”

“What happened?” I asked. “I let him have his way,” she said … and she’s been letting him have his way ever since! So they’ve never had any power struggles because she just gives in. It’s when we change, that those sorts of rackets can cause relationship breakdowns. If both change, the relationship may survive, but if one can’t give up their need to control, then the other for their own self-respect has to go, or engage in endless power struggles.

There was no power struggle in this case. I simply asked him rather coldly why he needed a fourth bar of soap. The poor chap had no really convincing answer, unless domestic blindness qualifies, and in the interests of compassion I let him off the hook.

Glamping training? This is beginning to eat up as much time as blogging. Glamping is short for glamour tramping, and means we walk for some hours every day, while our luggage is delivered to our destination. We arrive at a comfy cabin, with a masseur waiting, a glass of wine and a platter of nibbles, before showering and enjoying the gourmet meal provided. We then relax into our freshly made up beds. The next morning we set off across another farm, the sea on one side, rolling hills on the other, to arrive at another destination equipped with masseur, wine, platter etc.

I’m ten years older than the friends I’m going with, and hoping I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew. Twice a day I set myself on the road, trying to get fit after months of sitting in front of the computer. After striding up and down a length of flattish road, I walk round and round the cemetery, figuring that I also need to practise walking on grass and rough terrain. I’m becoming increasingly nervous. The closer it gets I will need your prayers or goodwill, depending on whatever you think is appropriate !

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Reading Honie Brigg’s blog on her Italian holiday has had me in a fever of greedy desire as I scrolled down the pictures of their foodie feasts. Finally last night I could stand it no more, and cancelled the plans for our evening meal. The old chap didn’t fancy mushroom risotto, so he had a steak pie with all the trimmings, and I meditated over the risotto, fortified by a glass of wine.

Gently fry an onion in a little olive oil or butter – I use a bit of both so the butter doesn’t burn. When the onion is soft, add plenty of finely chopped mushrooms – I estimate three to four per person. When they’re soft, stir in three quarters of a cup of Arborio rice, or other risotto rice, and gently fry till the grains are translucent. Add a glass of white wine and let it bubble away. Then keep adding- in small amounts- hot chicken or vegetable stock – I used vegetable bouillon cubes for this emergency risotto. When the rice is cooked and has absorbed as much hot stock as it can take, I stir in a big knob of butter, cover it and leave for about five minutes.

Serve with plenty of freshly grated Parmesan, followed by salad, and eaten with a glass of wine, of course – in this case I had a bottle of Gewurztraminer already open, so it was that. And the whole thing- served in a big white Victorian soup dish with a broad blue rim – was delectable … and the nearest I could get to Italy.

Food for Thought

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. The last lines of the novel Middlemarch by George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Anne Evans. Great Victorian novelist, 1819 – 1880

Nothing like a girls’ lunch to keep the juices flowing and the mind agile. These girls were eighty two and eighty one. Eighty two years old has just got back from Europe, where she watched her grand-daughter win a gold medal at the Olympics, then nipped across to Germany where her son had restored an old building, and was giving a celebration thank you to all the forty helpers. Friend found herself cooking said dinner for the forty. After a cruise down the Rhine, she came home and popped straight into hospital for a hip replacement. Today she was hiding her white elastic post-op stockings under a snazzy pair of well cut black trousers, and wearing a beautiful turquoise French jacket with silver buttons.

She plays golf, walks her two dogs, attends endless lunches, dinners, and concerts, and is doing a thesis for the U3A on medieval medicine, reading Chaucer in the original Old Englische. If I meet her walking her dogs, and greet her with “Hail to thee, blithe spirit”, she’ll reply with the rest of Shelley’s verses, all twenty one of them, or any other poem I want to mention.

Eighty-one year old gave up sailing last year when her eighty year old husband had to give up judging international yacht races, but she still does yoga every day. She still paints and has exhibitions in a smart gallery, makes all her own exquisite clothes, the envy of her friends, and creates her own jewellery. She’s just finished re-painting and re-decorating in black and white, their holiday home on a near-by island. This included re-covering sofa cushions and chairs and painting furniture.

After much laughter as we consumed fresh salmon on puy lentils with a glass of rose, followed by fresh- out- of- the oven plum and almond tart and coffee, we talked about our lives. We discovered that we each envied the others aspects of their lives, and felt that everyone else had much better relationships than our own. When we discussed our own truths, amid more laughter, we found that our assumptions about each other were completely wrong.

This conversation cheered us all up, and put a lot of things in perspective, so we could count our blessings instead of comparing ourselves with others. Finally our mutual admiration society broke up and we went back to our husbands and children, dogs, painting, writing, golf, reading and grandchildren.

That night one of the loves of my life rang. “Hello,” he said. After we’d discussed his essays and lecture schedule, and covered the various 21 birthday parties he’d been to, he told me he was heading overseas to get a job before going to an overseas university. I had a moment’s inspiration, and said, “darling, you know you could make a fortune if you’d grow a field of hemlock and turn it into little pills for me and all my friends to take when we feel it’s time.”

He entered into this discussion with enthusiasm, replying, ”Yes, Grannie, I know euthanasia will be the thing in future, but I think there’s a better way than hemlock”.

What about Socrates I protested, all he had to do was drink, and then just let himself go cold from his feet up until the poison reached his heart. We discussed Socrates, but grandson was unsure that hemlock was the best way. They’re experimenting with all sorts of things these days, he told me – partly to find methods to kill animals so that people feel they can eat meat without feeling guilty. Really, I queried?

Yes, there’s a gas which expels oxygen, and when the brain is starved of oxygen, you go into a state of bliss, so you die blissfully he assured me.

Well how do they know, I asked, unconvinced? They’ve been experimenting with pigs, he said. (My hackles began to rise at the thought of experimenting on animals.) He went onto tell me that they filled two troughs, one with ordinary apples, the other with apples injected with this gas. The pigs who chose the gassy apples ate their fill, and then staggered off and collapsed. When they came to, because there wasn’t enough gas to actually kill them, they rushed back to the trough to get more of these bliss-filled apples, and they did it several times till the apples had all gone! They knew a good thing when they tasted it. Pigs in heaven!

I was convinced. If intelligent pigs had blissed out and wanted more, it sounded just the ticket to me. And since my husband had just reported from a health board meeting, that an overseas geriatric expert had told them that today’s old never saw their children, because the children were all so busy still working; that it’s one of the biggest health problems these days that there’s no one around to care for the old, I tucked away the thought of those apples. Bliss – filled apples would be just the thing for a rainy day… we could die happy and go straight to heaven!

st Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Apples, as we know are cheap, and if there are no bliss-filled apples around we might as well make a heavenly apple tart!

The good thing about this recipe is that you don’t have to cook the pastry blind. Line a pastry dish with short crust pastry, and sprinkle the base with a quarter of a cup of fine white breadcrumbs. Peel and thinly slice four apples and arrange in overlapping circles on the pastry. Combine one cup of cream with half a cup of sugar and two eggs, and pour over the apples. Sprinkle with quarter of a cup of almond slivers and bake at 180 degrees for half an hour or longer until the custard is set. The jury’s out on whether we need cream or not!

Food for Thought

There is something that can be found in one place. It is a great treasure, which may be called the fulfilment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place on which one stands. Martin Buber 1878 -1965 Austrian-born Israeli philosopher