• The magic and the mystery of blogging

    Illustration from the post “The magic and the mystery of blogging”

    An ikon I’d never seen before popped up on the right hand side! Word Press, bless their little cotton socks, telling me I’ve been blogging for a year.

    Really? A whole year of writing, reading, liking, commenting, enjoying, sighing, worrying, wondering, exulting, agonising, delighting, puzzling, slaving over a hot computer?

    A whole year of writing for pleasure, knowing that no-one is going to stab me in the back? This is the amazing gift of blogging. Unlike journalism, where bouquets are few and far between, but angry, argumentative put- down letters are easy to write to a person whose name is in a newspaper, blogging has its own set of conventions.

    The best one is that bloggers don’t criticise or judge. They comment, they put another point of view, but they live and let live. When I first veered off the light and trivial and started to write about things I feel deeply about, I used to feel a bit sick when I pressed the Publish button, wondering what I had let myself in for … much the same as I used to feel when I was writing columns in magazines and newspapers, sending them off with trepidation, wondering who would attack me this week.

    The first time I did this, and saw the yellow button flash Comment, I opened it nervously, and when I saw the comment, exulted with relief. And so it went with every Like and Comment. This encouragement and courtesy means that bloggers can write honestly and from their heart, knowing that they won’t be judged and found wanting. If you don’t agree, just press delete, and read another blog and no-one is hurt or discouraged.

    This day a year ago, my printer had set up the blog, told me I could see the stats at the top of the page, and talked me through writing a post. He then pushed my boat off into the ocean of bloggers, and I wonder how many other bloggers began their voyage over this great uncharted ocean on that day… I was like someone adrift in a little rowing boat, who knew how to row, but didn’t know where to go or how to get there, how to read the stars or a map or the weather. It was only after about two months that I discovered what Tags were, and that they mattered, nearly five months before I discovered that the yellow light at the top right hand side meant there was a message awaiting the lucky blogger, and I still don’t know what a click or a referrer is.

    I puzzle over Stats, and still don’t understand the code… as far as I can see, from trying to do surreptitious checks when I think Word Press isn’t watching, followers don’t show up in Stats – or do they? And how does someone have 5,000 views and 18,000 followers… I don’t get it. But since I never deciphered algebra, geometry, logarithms, or even simple arithmetic at school, it’s not surprising that the intricacies of technology elude me.

    I learn that the first blogger was a student writing from Swarthmore College – a Quaker establishment – in 1994, but that blogging really took off in the late 1990’s. I also learn that there’s a whole vocabulary around different types of blogging now, and that in some countries it’s banned or that bloggers have to be registered. Google tells me that Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media and a supporter of the free software and open source movements, suggested a Blogger’s Code of Conduct.

    He and others came up with a list of seven ideas which included: taking responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog; lowering your tolerance level for abusive comments; considering eliminating anonymous comments; ignoring the trolls… and if you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so; don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say to the person.

    My experience of blogging has meant that bloggers practise far more than this basic list of protocols. They share kindness, encouragement, and friendship, they support each other, share helpful information, even love each other, and this sort of community is what makes blogging the experience it is. Investigating blogging has surprised me – apparently more men than women blog – I’d have thought it the other way around – 60 per cent to 40 per cent. Word Press alone has 42,000,000 bloggers – thank you for remembering my anniversary, chaps – and 500,000 posts daily, with 400,000 daily comments – wow.

    Blogging is more than this though. In my experience, I’ve become a better writer, without the fear of sub-editors changing my copy, or readers clobbering me. I dare to be true to myself. I constantly learn from other people’s blogs, and this stimulation, I find, is improving my memory, plus the research involved in checking my facts. This means I’m feeling more creative too, and have such a sense of fulfilment every time I press Publish, and then the fun begins and the conversations take off.

    Maybe the most incredible thing about blogging is that we are all tapping into the global brain, and contributing to it too. And more importantly, we are also dipping into the global ocean of goodwill and deepening it with our courtesy and kindness, and that maybe, will be the salvation of the world.

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets.

    With a lovely big bowl of jellied chicken stock from steamed chicken, I had lots of possibilities, but plumped for risotto. Frying onions and garlic until soft, and then chopped mushrooms, I used a cup of Arborio rice, poured into the onion and gently sauting until it became translucent. I added half a glass of good white wine, and when the alcohol had been boiled away, ladled in boiling chicken stock, and two sage leaves. When the rice was almost soft, I added the chicken scraps from the carcass, a handful of frozen peas, salt and pepper, and a knob of butter and some cream. I covered it for five minutes when cooked, and then served it with freshly grated Parmesan and salad. Yum. Enough for three normal people, or two incredibly greedy people.

    Food for Thought

    Youth is a gift of nature. Aging is a work of art. Anonymous

  • The noble art of reading in bed

    Illustration from the post “The noble art of reading in bed”

    When I was young and naive, and a novice journalist, I wrote an article in a woman’s magazine which began:’ I got most of my education under the bed-clothes’, and went on to discuss children’s reading. Some wag must have been reading his wife’s copy, and the clipping appeared on the office notice-board amid crude male guffaws. Thank you chaps, I got the message! Not a quick learner, but I got there in the end!

    Reading under the bed – clothes was the refuge of a child who was sent to bed at seven o clock every night, and allowed to read for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! When I got older, and had more homework bed was set back to seven thirty, but the fifteen minute reading restriction still applied. Only a non-reader could have stipulated this ridiculous time limit, so under the bed clothes it was. When I had no torch I knelt for hours, freezing in my night clothes squinting to read by the crack of light under the door from the hall light.

    Occasionally I tried the loo or the bathroom, but this was risky, as books aren’t easily hidden by a skinny child under a thin nightie. When I was fourteen I picked up Jane Eyre in the library. It exploded into my consciousness. I felt dazed and obsessed by the strange, compelling self-centred story. I could think of nothing else. I read it over and over again. I read it under the desk at school, in the bus and on the train, and of course, in bed.

    Once the parents had gone to bed, I switched my light on with impunity, and read until I had finished Jane Eyre, and then started ‘Villette’, by which time it was heading for five o clock in the morning. Since I had to get up at six to cook my breakfast and catch the school bus at seven am, it seemed safer to stay awake, and soldier on. And having done it once, and finding it was possible to keep going without sleep, I quite often sacrificed my sleep for a good book after that.

    Boarding school was tricky, but once again, there was always the bathroom. When I left home and became my own master, reading in bed became one of my favourite pastimes. Mostly literature and poetry in those palmy days. And usually then I had a bowl of apples to munch meditatively as the hours went by, or better still, a bar of chocolate. Sometimes decadence overcame me and I had a glass of lemonade. Marriage and motherhood dished all that of course, and reading in bed became a distant remembered pleasure.

    But in the last few years since my husband’s snores have become so loud they wake me even when I’m sleeping in another room, we’ve taken a page out of the Royal Family’s domestic habits, and now sleep in separate rooms. This means I can read without disturbing him, and I’ve raised this noble pastime to a fine art.

    Usually three books go to bed with me… something that I call mental knitting, a relaxing series like Georgette Heyer, (a much under-rated, very funny, witty and clever writer) or other light-hearted books like the hilarious Adrian Mole Diaries, or ‘The Jane Austen Book Club’. Georgette Heyer is sort of Jane Austen lite – but the blessed Jane is also a regular companion, along with the Thomas Hardy’s, George Eliot’s, Anthony Trollope’s, to re-read for the sheer pleasure of enjoying their writing again. In theory too, because I know the story, I kid myself I won’t be tempted to read too late. But that is a false premise. And as CS Lewis said, ‘I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.’

    And then there’s the third category – those which are on the go, sometimes a new novel – Barbara Kingsilver at the moment, but not many of those – a biography, a history, a diary. And for real relaxation I sink into nature journals, often a classic like Flora Thompson’s: ‘Lark Rise at Candleford’ … Annie Dillard, Henry Beston or Ronald Lockley… mostly accounts of gentle, unpolluted country life.

    But reading in bed isn’t just books. The bed matters too… preferably by the window… in summer with cool white linen- cotton blend sheets that have a silky feel, in winter comforting coloured flannelette to match the duvet. Pillows – plenty of them, to lean back on and others to support the elbows. Electric blanket a must in cold weather… I use it a bit like the hot tap in the bath… whenever it seems a bit chill, I switch it on until the bed is like toast again, and then prudently switch off again until the next time.

    In summer, there’s the bliss of going to bed in day-light, knowing you have hours in front of you before dusk creeps up, before finally switching on the light. In winter, lamps on, curtains pulled, wood fire still burning in the sitting room to keep the house warm for when I emerge to make a cup of tea. And the bed, pyjamas warmed under the bed clothes on the electric blanket, cosy sheets and pillow slips, red mohair rug edged with wine-red satin, and a stash of peppermints to slowly chew as I turn the pages. No sounds, just the murmur of the soft sea, a distant owl, and occasionally a scuffle on the roof as a possum scrambles across. The sound of rain on the roof is good too.

    The art of reading in bed is a silent, sybaritic, solitary joy and has nothing to do with going to sleep. It has everything to do with the pleasure of reading, frequently to the detriment of sleep. So I have to confess, in the words of L.M.Montgomery that : ‘I am simply a ‘book drunkard.’ Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.’

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    Running out of inspiration, I took an organic free range chicken out of the deep freeze, and after de-frosting it slowly in the fridge for two days, stuffed it with a pierced lemon and put it on to steam. After an hour and three quarters, I placed around it in the steamer, new potatoes, carrots, leeks, small onions and parsnips.

    When the chicken is ready so are the vegetables. I usually make a parsley sauce to serve with this, but didn’t feel like a heavy floury sauce, so instead chopped garlic cloves very finely, sauted them in butter, and added a vegetarian oxo cube and cream. I boiled and stirred until it was thickened, and added lots of chopped parsley. It turned out rather well. The bonus of steaming is a wonderful chicken stock, as the chicken juices drip into the boiling water beneath the steamer. More on that next time!

    Food for Thought

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

    Sir Salman Rushdie – famous Indian writer, educated in England, lives in America, and winner of many prizes and honours.

  • Testing, testing, testing !

    Illustration from the post “Testing, testing, testing !”

    When Dr Christian Barnard, world-famous surgeon who invented the first heart transplant, decided to sue me for libel I was both intimidated and exhilarated.

    It wasn’t an easy time for us at that point… after eight years of campaigning by my husband for the release of a man wrongly convicted of a double murder, now that he was pardoned, we were embroiled in a Royal Commission and another battle with the police. In the previous eight years we had had our phones tapped, had our letters intercepted, and I awoke one night to find a plain clothes policeman in a grey suit and a stocking over his face at the foot of our bed, rummaging for stuff in my husband’s suit jacket.

    Until then I had never locked the front door – so the children could always find their way in! My husband also had a price on his head, a lucrative contract put out by a worldwide drug ring he had been exposing in his newspaper for the last year. They too had penetrated our home when we were away on holiday, and switched off every appliance in the house, leaving a rotting deep freeze amongst other things, as a message to show us that they knew where we lived – even in remote country.

    I had told my husband my car had a funny rattle, and when he checked he found that all the nuts on the front wheels had been loosened, so as to cause an accident. The children were frightened to answer the phone. Luckily, the drug barons fell out and ended up murdering each other until the survivors were caught and convicted in England.

    During this time I’d resigned from my job as women’s editor through ill health, but had continued to write my weekly column in the newspaper and in a magazine read by over half the (tiny) population. (I only mention this because it was significant)

    It was an article about vivisection which had activated Christian Barnard. Among other horrors, I’d quoted his boast about making a two-headed dog to show the Russians he was as clever as them, and the heart-rending shrieks of the baboon when Barnard took his mate to use his heart for an operation. This article resurrected the moribund anti -vivisection society here and my husband and I became president and vice president until it was on its feet again.

    The medical establishment were furious, because I’d also called into question every student having their own personal rat to kill by smashing it on the lab desk, and then dissect. A meeting was called at the university where the medical council discussed: “what to do about me”, as someone told me later. They felt that with my wide readership I had too much influence. How to shut me up? They decided to alert Christian Barnard, with the result that he sent writs to my newspaper, Safe (Save Animals From Experimentation), and me.

    When I got over the shock of opening this bullying letter demanding a large sum of money (which I didn’t have), or the ordeal of a court case, I was thrilled. Now we could bring vivisection out into the open. Maybe it would become an international scandal, since it involved the world famous surgeon. But to my chagrin, my newspaper paid up and apologised without even discussing it with me, and Safe – by then in other hands – paid up too – all the money going to the Heart Foundation – for more testing on animals, I supposed.

    So that left me. I said to the family I’d rather go to prison than pay up if we lost the case. Two big tears oozed from my son’s eyes, as he contemplated his friends at school knowing his mother was in jail…. My solicitor wrote to Barnard’s men and did an unusual thing. He told them what our defence would be – listing Barnard’s boasts as they came straight from a TV interview and his autobiography. We never heard another word. So the vivisection issue just died.

    This all happened thirty years ago, and it still goes on all over the world. I refuse to give to cancer appeals as I know that in this country anyway, their research includes testing on animals. I only buy certain brands of make-up – the ones which proclaim that they haven’t been tested on animals. The problem with vivisection is that no so-called scientist is going to talk himself out of a job, so they go on finding fresh ways of researching on animals, and fresh horrible ideas about how to test, and so it never ends.

    We know that chimps have roughly ninety eight per cent of the same DNA as us, and we know that animals have a level of intelligence that ranges between that of a two year old and an eight year old – quite apart from their own special intelligences that we know nothing of.

    Darwin himself said that animals have all the same emotions as people – they know joy and fear, depression and boredom, pain and happiness. We would never treat a two year old child the way we do animals, we would never think of torturing an eight year old in the name of science. But we have no compunction about doing this to animals.

    Peter Singer, the great philosopher and animal rights campaigner who wrote the influential book: ‘Animal Liberation’, refers to this treatment of animals as ‘speciesism’, like sexism and racism. He, like many of us, hopes that by the next generation this sort of discrimination will be as un-acceptable as those other forms of intolerance. Even today, so many people, especially the young, find this discrimination abhorrent. People for Ethical Treatment of Animals – Peta – is doing a great job of raising people’s awareness about the way we treat other creatures..

    But there are, of course, a million other ways that man has devised to kill, maim, exploit, work to death and torture most varieties of creatures on this planet, including cutting off the fins of sharks, thus crippling them, and then dropping them back in the sea to drown; destroying the habitats of hundreds of species so they die out anyway, and perpetrating factory farming to name a few.

    If we care, we can ‘put our money where our mouth is’ as they say in this country, and find ways of not using anything which is the result of animal testing. There is plenty of research these days to show that there are other effective ways of testing drugs rather than on animals, which is not fail-safe anyway. Thalidomide famously was tested on rabbits and found to be safe for them. But that didn’t make it safe for humans.

    A year or so after my brush with Dr Barnard, a South African newspaper quoted him as saying he had given up vivisection. Asked why, he said he had heard the grief in the cries of a baboon for his mate who he had taken for an operation. There are some limits beyond which no civilised human being can go, he said.

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    This sauce served with vegetables is one of my favourite meals. I thinly slice a selection of vegetables – pumpkin, kumara/sweet potato, red and yellow peppers, mushrooms, carrots, and either fry them in an electric fry pan, or bake them with olive oil drizzled over them. Meanwhile in a blender I put two cups of good pea-nut butter, a cup of olive oil, two whole lemons, four cloves of garlic , two teasp fish oil, a dessertsp or more of dried thyme, and a tablsp or more of brown sugar, plenty of freshly ground black pepper, and salt.

    Whizz everything together, and add more thyme and sugar or salt to taste. If it’s too thick, add some water. I pile the vegetables onto a serving dish, and hand round the sauce. It keeps for a few days in the fridge. It’s delicious with crusty rolls and wine for lunch with the (metaphorical) girls, or for supper for the two of us.

    Food for Thought

    All of the larger- than-life questions about our presence here on earth and what gifts we have to offer are spiritual questions. To seek answers to these questions is to seek a sacred path.

    Lauren Artress, Episcopal priest, counsellor, writer and founder of the Labyrinth spiritual movement. Walking the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral has led to the building and walking of labyrinths all over the world.

  • The drug we can’t live without

    Illustration from the post “The drug we can’t live without”

    “Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.” I couldn’t agree more with Sidney Smith, an Anglican clergyman, who died in over a hundred and fifty years ago. And as far as I’m concerned it can’t be any old tea. And certainly not a tea-bag, a monstrous invention that I suspect is just tissue paper filled with tea-dust left in the bottom of the tea chest after my proper tea leaves have been packaged.

    And for me the only tea worth drinking is Twining’s Lapsang Souchong. It comes from Fujian Province in China. According to the packet: “the delicious smoky flavour is produced by lying the leaves on bamboo trays, and allowing the smoke from pinewood to permeate through them”. Ah, so … other tea now tastes quite crude to me after years of drinking nothing but this brew.

    Though the Twining family may be surprised to hear this, I always feel quite connected to them, as I had a great friend who was a Twining, and my former in-laws had lived in a rose- coloured, brick Georgian house built by Elizabeth Twining down by the River Thames. I spent a lot of time there in that beautiful house, very conscious of Elizabeth. The firm of Twinings has been selling tea for three hundred years from premises in The Strand in London, so when the latest head of the Twining family came out to NZ to talk tea, naturally I heeded his instructions on how to make it.

    Always happy to take the least trouble, I was delighted to hear from him (on the radio) that we don’t need to heat the tea-pot – swishing boiling water around the pot before putting the tea-leaves in. Previously it had been an essential part of the ritual of making a pot of tea. But my tea leaves now go into a cold tea-pot. I missed the rest of his talk so I don’t know whether he addressed the thorny problem of milk. To have or not to have – that is the question. Purists don’t. I’m not a purist. I’m a conservative who has had milk in my tea for more than seventy years.

    There‘s a further twist to the milk problem – known as MIF. Legend has it (which is not always reliable) that the Royal family refer to people as MIF’s. But I don’t believe this snobbish canard. MIF means exactly that – milk in first. And this is what the late Nancy Mitford used to funningly call non-U. (U meant upper class, and non-U the opposite!) Milk in first means you’re probably the sort of person who’d lift the port decanter and push it across the table instead of sliding it along clockwise around the table – horrors – or would say: ‘pleased to meet you,’ instead of:’ how do you do!’ – shudders! Incredibly, when I grew up these snobbish rituals defined the man – or woman.

    So for most of my life, I had put the tea in first. But the worm turned about fifteen years ago, when I discovered that the tea tastes much nicer when you do MIF ! This puts me firmly on the wrong side of the tracks – but the bonus is delicious tea.

    If I’m offered a cup of tea that I know will not meet my impossible standards of taste and strength – other people’s tea is always too strong for me – I add sugar, and then it becomes something else. Tea out of a mug is not the same as tea out of a bone china flowered cup and saucer. I dread the day when I’m plonked in an old people’s home, and will have no lapsang souchong and no bone china tea-cup.

    Life without tea is unthinkable. There was no bombing so bad in the Blitz, that you weren’t offered a cup of tea after it; no shortage of water in the Western desert so tight, that there wasn’t always enough for a pot of tea brewed by the tanks; no misery so deep that a cup of tea doesn’t at least give the sufferer a second’s respite; no cold so deep that a cup of hot tea doesn’t warm the innards; no thirst so terrible in the tropics, that a cup of tea doesn’t quench it, and no morning in the office so boring that a cup of tea doesn’t briefly break the monotony .

    I often jokingly use the poet Cowper’s delicious phrase: ‘the cup that cheers but doth not inebriate!’ My grandmother always had a trolley laid for such a cup – on a lace tea-cloth with two tea-cups and saucers, sugar pot and tea-spoons, and the milk jug covered with a crocheted lace doily weighted with coloured beads. (Milk that wasn’t mucked about with didn’t go sour like it does today!)

    In her book ‘Urban Shaman’, American writer CE Murphy writes a delicious description of having a cup of tea: “In Ireland, you go to someone’s house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you’re really just fine. She asks if you’re sure. You say of course you’re sure, really, you don’t need a thing. Except they pronounce it ting. You don’t need a ting. Well, she says then, I was going to get myself some anyway, so it would be no trouble. Ah, you say, well, if you were going to get yourself some, I wouldn’t mind a spot of tea, at that, so long as it’s no trouble and I can give you a hand in the kitchen. Then you go through the whole thing all over again until you both end up in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting.

    “In America, someone asks you if you want a cup of tea, you say no, and then you don’t get any damned tea. I liked the Irish way better.”

    She must have forgotten that the American way with tea is simply to toss it into Boston Harbour!

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    This is the perfect cake to have with a cup of tea – if you’re not planning on cucumber sandwiches! It’s the classic French cake with equal quantities of everything. So it’s four eggs, and the same weight of butter, sugar and flour. You can halve the amounts for a smaller cake. Soften the butter, and beat it with the sugar – until it’s almost white and fluffy. Add the eggs whole, one at a time and beat. If it starts to look grainy, add a spoonful of sieved flour. When all the eggs are in, fold in the flour a spoonful at a time, using a metal spoon.

    Add enough milk to make a soft smooth mixture which drops off the spoon. Stir in the grated rind of half a lemon. Gently push into a buttered cake tin, the base lined with greaseproof paper, and bake in a moderate oven around 180 degrees. Bake for fifty minutes … if it’s still soft and hissing, cook for another ten minutes.

    Leave the cake in the tin for a few minutes, and then tip onto a rack to cool. I make a butter icing for this, soft butter, icing sugar and lemon juice and the other half of the grated lemon rind, all beaten together. Food for Thought

    Development cannot fly in the face of happiness; development should promote human happiness, love and human relati0ns between parents and children and friends. Life is the most important treasure we have and when we fight, we must fight for human happiness.” Jose Mujica, President of Uruguay at the Rio Conference

  • Food, fear and films

    Illustration from the post “Food, fear and films”

    Village life takes ingenuity in a tight spot, and stamina – plenty of it! These are the times that test men’s souls! Well, we haven’t actually had any chicken stealing like Mr Woodhouse in ‘Emma’, but life has been pretty hairy in our neck of the woods in the last few days.

    Where do I start? We are a quiet law-abiding community, we look out for our neighbours, share our garden goodies, swap cuttings and seeds, and admire each other’s grandchildren. Our greatest excitement is the weekly testing of the fire alarm by the volunteer firemen. But the other night the peace of the four hundred law-abiding souls was rudely shattered. A dog began barking as dusk fell, and continued without end for the rest of the night. I woke every hour of the night, and heard all the other dogs joining the chorus. I overslept and arose bleary – eyed, and then had to rush to attend a veteran’s memorial service in the graveyard.

    I came away somewhat disgruntled that the officiating clergywoman should in-appropriately refer to the Somme as a romantic name. The Battle of the Somme was the day that the British Army lost 20 per cent of its men – 60,000 killed or wounded on one day in France, my step- grandfather being one of the badly wounded. No! Not romantic. Naturally I aired my disgruntlement back at home, and felt all the better for it! So I was quite gruntled when the phone went later that afternoon and a friend rang to see how my husband was; and since his wife was overseas, I invited him for supper that night – three hours later in fact..

    Putting down the phone, my mind raced through the possibilities. We were going to have cauliflower cheese, but could I give this to a man accustomed to gourmet cooking from his talented wife? I thought of various alternatives, but I was always missing one vital ingredient. Cauliflower cheese it would have to be! We were already having Brussels sprouts and carrots with it, and toasted almonds sprinkled over the cauliflower, so I added some chopped and baked golden kumara – crisp and crunchy on the outside – soft and sweet inside. Washed down with pinot gris.

    With some pumpkin soup from lunch, thinned with a little cream and jazzed up with a sprinkling of coriander, served in little gold rimmed coffee cups before we sat down, it seemed a reasonable meal, topped off with hot chocolate sauce poured over locally made coffee ice-cream. No-one wanted coffee after that, but smoky lapsang souchong tea went down well.

    Later that night, I heard the dog again. I thought: I cannot face another night worrying about it. So I jumped in the car and scouted round the neighbourhood in the dark. In the next street, I found a frantic pit- bull terrier on the loose – pacing back and forth and barking ferociously and fearfully outside a darkened house. We have no hedges or fences, just grass flowing out onto the pavement. So there he was, and I was available to him…

    I went next door, where I could see a light on, knowing the people there, and hoping the resourceful man of the house had a solution. But they were visitors, who’d borrowed the house, and were dreading another night of torment. So it was up to me! The husband told me the dog had been alone for two days, was dangerous and and had frightened two children, so I revved off back home to deprive my husband of six pork sausages sitting in the fridge for him to enjoy the next day.

    Back at the house, Daphne, a friend living across the road from the deserted house, was talking to the other neighbours. When I got out of the car, she hurried across, sounding so relieved to see me that she made me feel as if I was the US Cavalry. She warned me to be careful. The poor dog had now retreated to the back of the house, so while I strewed sausages around the front lawn, she went to get some water to fill his empty bowl.

    Home, and a glorious peace settled back across the cottages and gardens, the only sounds the restless sea surging onto the rocks and an owl calling. So I rang the lovely Daphne, and she told me the renters had come back not long after. I tried not to regret the sausages, and hoped the dog had managed to eat them all before his somewhat callous-seeming owners returned. (There are dark rumours that they are on drugs and are up to no good!) But a good night’s sleep was apparently had by us all, both the (slightly) wicked and the (mostly) virtuous .

    After all this mayhem I took myself off the cinema in the next village in the morning, as I feared the film might go off before I’d seen it -‘Performance’ – about a quartet, set in a snowy and romantic-looking New York. When one member of the quartet has a crisis, all the others go to pieces, with all their repressed emotions and frustrations about their lives welling up. The famous quartet is in danger of dis-integrating, until they finally put their art before their distress, and play the glorious Beethoven Violin Quartet No 14 Opus 131, music which reverberates through the whole film.

    A simple story, and I was glad I hadn’t read the dreary reviews of it before I saw it, as they were all uniformly patronising. So, ignorant of the fact that apparently the film had so many fatal flaws, I loved every minute, and came out walking on air, feeling joyful that art had triumphed over all!

    This was thirty six hours in the life of our village for me – mundane and busy – no mystery or profound or significant events… just the daily round and common task. A spiritual teacher once said to me that our spiritual destiny is to be in the right place at the right time. So I have to accept that however mundane, this is my destiny these days – right place – right time… food for friends, fearful dogs, and flawed, enjoyable films.

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    Kumara is the New Zealand equivalent of sweet potatoes, and I love the golden ones best. I cut them to the size of a walnut, this time – normally I’d have them bigger. They were then parboiled, and when the water had been drained off, the kumara was slammed around the saucepan and flour sprinkled over them. So with a rough surface covered in flour, hot oil spooned over them and quickly baked in a hot oven, they were crisp and tasty – the crunchiness was just the texture we needed with the soft cauliflower and brussels sprouts.

    Food for Thought

    I don’t know where this comes from:

    Weak people revenge, strong people forgive, intelligent people ignore.

  • Many lives or just one?

    Illustration from the post “Many lives or just one?”

    “To live is by universal consent to travel a rough road. And how can a rough road that leads nowhere be worth travelling? “

    A well known philosopher, MacNeille Dixon, asked this question in a series of lectures at Glasgow University in 1938. Good question as they say. He was discussing the concept of re-incarnation. Another writer, Gina Cerminara, has suggested that: ‘Perhaps we have reached a stage of our history where this knowledge (re-incarnation) is necessary to us – otherwise it would not be appearing in so many places.’

    The word re-incarnation often provokes the same sniggers that a belief in angels does, but it was an accepted part of Christian belief until the sixth century. Since then the records show that although people have assumed it was banned, according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, it actually wasn’t. It’s a common belief in many other cultures, though it’s earned itself a bad name for the mistaken interpretation that we come back as animals or insects if we lived a questionable life. In all the cultures around the world re-incarnation is seen as an opportunity to continue the life of the soul and perfect the things that were left undone in other lives.

    In most of Asia, and in cultures as far apart as Mexico and Egypt this belief has always been a constant. In Christian history, the Gnostics, the Cathars, the Templars, the Bogomils, the Albigensians were all believers in other lives, and they were all wiped out by the Christian church.

    Today, it’s not a dangerous belief in the west, but “a very private belief” according to a survey in the UK which showed that twenty five per cent of people believe in re-incarnation irrespective of their church or creed. It’s the same figure in America. Many orthodox Christians tend to regard it with the same suspicion as clairvoyance. And because it’s been considered a rather eccentric belief – to put it mildly – there are also many misunderstandings about it. The word karma for instance, is often used in a mistaken sense that when bad things happen to us – it’s karma – sort of payback time. But karma is really the unfinished business from other lives, which we choose in this life to complete.

    Henry Ford said: ‘The discovery of Re-incarnation put my mind at ease’ … and he wanted others to know what peace of mind it brought. He also said: ‘Genius is experience. Some seem to think it is a gift or a talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives… ‘ When one thinks of Mozart writing music at five, and all the other artistic geniuses and child prodigies who understand branches of mathematics and can speak many languages from their earliest years, this sounds like a logical explanation.

    Many famous writers, scientists, philosophers and others believe in re-incarnation. Gustav Mahler the great composer said: ‘We all return; it is this certainty which gives meaning to life, and it does not make the slightest difference whether or not in a later incarnation we remember the former life’…

    There’s been a lot of research into what is sometimes called life before life in the last forty years, and there are other methods of returning to previous lives than by hypnosis. Joan Grant who wrote books about her former lives in Egypt in great detail, which could not be faulted by Egyptologists, later used her gift for divining other lives to heal fears, phobias and other psychological traumas in partnership with her psychologist husband. This is how it’s used today, for healing, not for curiosity.

    Sometimes people spontaneously return to a time in the past where they faced the same challenge but had failed to understand or respond to it. They see the pattern in this life and are able to work through to a better outcome this time round. And there are many documented examples of children giving the details of their previous life, and the facts being checked and found to be exactly as the child has said- even the family history and family members which they’ve described.

    Some people feel that time as a straight line is a human concept which may not bear much relation to reality, and that we may be living parallel lives in a parallel continuum. Joan Grant used to say that her lives were like beads on a string, and the string was the eternal part of her which never died. There are instances of people going forward to lives in the future, as well as lives in the past, and also of lives overlapping, so that a woman dying in a German concentration camp was also living as a five year old child in England.

    Whenever we seem to recognise a place or a person, we instinctively know that this is not the first time. When we find certain skills easy or are drawn to different books or periods in history we can be fairly sure that we have known those times before. The Greek philosopher Plotinus said that ‘the spiritual life cannot be described to those who are not living it’. The same applies to re- incarnation. Some people know in their bones that they’ve lived before, while others cannot even imagine the possibility.

    The point of re-incarnation is not to go on plodding along making the same muddles and mistakes, but to rise to a higher level of consciousness with each fresh opportunity for growth on earth. This makes nonsense of the cruel beliefs in hell or heaven – a human concept which projects onto the Creator human notions of judgement and punishment. It means that instead, we know that we are part of the long history of the planet in which civilisations rise and fall, in times far beyond our knowledge or recall, in both the past and in the future. And we have been there, and will be again.

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    Organic minced chicken was on special at the village delicatessen, so minced chicken it was. I’d been wanting to try a recipe with it. Take one cup of grated or torn up good bread, ciabatta or sour dough, and soak it in quarter of a cup of milk. Chop three cloves of garlic and two tablesp of parsley. Mix them with 500g of chicken and the bread and milk. Add half a cup of freshly grated parmesan. Season and mix well. Form into walnut sized balls and roll in flour. Cook in hot oil in batches.

    Put aside and gently sauté two large leeks, the white parts only, with a dozen sage leaves, until the leeks are soft. Add half a cup of wine and when it’s bubbled up, add the stock and the chicken balls. Simmer for twenty minutes, and then add salt and pepper, a cup and a half of frozen peas, the grated rind of a lemon, and lots of cream. One night we ate it with mashed potatoes, another night with rice.

    Food for Thought

    They will come back, come back again, as long as the red Earth rolls.

    He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Do you think he would squander souls?

    Rudyard Kipling 1865 – 1936 Writer and poet, first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the youngest person ever to do so at 42.

  • The fun of fashion

    Illustration from the post “The fun of fashion”

    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

  • Peace or Patriotism?

    Illustration from the post “Peace or Patriotism?”

    Is patriotism enough? Nurse Edith Cavell first raised the question before she was shot by the Germans for treason in 1916. She was an English nurse, matron of a Belgian hospital when the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914. She nursed both German and Allied soldiers, but also helped Allied soldiers to escape from occupied Belgium.

    The Germans arrested her, and court martialled her for treason. Under German law she was sentenced to death. From this perspective, it seems strange that an English nurse working for a Belgian hospital in Belgium should be sentenced under German law – but that was the price of German occupation.

    She raised the question on patriotism just before her execution, when she actually said that: “Patriotism is not enough”.

    This phrase has been in my mind, as this country prepares for the most solemn day in its calendar – ANZAC day – a day of national mourning and unity which it shares with Australia. It commemorates the disastrous landings on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey in 1915. In New Zealand it’s not called Remembrance Day, or Veterans Day, or Memorial Day, as in other countries.

    In the forty three years that I’ve lived in NZ, I’ve seen a revived connection with these ceremonies, as more people remember – though they may not understand – their history, and the heroism and the suffering of those young men who so often gave their lives. There are also many young people who now make the pilgrimage to Gallipoli to attend the dawn ceremonies there.

    And one of the things that always saddens me about these ceremonies and rituals in my adopted country, is that this day also becomes an opportunity for some to bash the British in their sermons and speeches. It becomes a chance to blame others for a national tragedy, instead of a time of remembrance of the suffering of all those young men – Turkish, French, British, Indian, and Australian and New Zealanders.

    And it happens all around the world, in some countries more than others. On the other hand, there are also many people around the world who have responded with the sort of insight and generosity that Nurse Cavell showed.

    Another one who did have those insights was the officer commanding the Turks at Gallipoli. Fourteen years after the Gallipoli campaign, some of the most magnanimous and healing words ever spoken were written by this man, Kemal Ataturk, who by then had become the leader of Turkey. He was writing about the men who had invaded his country and who had died there. His words are engraved on a memorial at Gallipoli:

    “Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives… are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours… you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”

    I can never read these beautiful words without the tears welling in my eyes….

    Kemal Ataturk was the great visionary leader who transformed Turkey into an enlightened and free country back in the twenties and thirties. In two years he abolished the Caliphate, emancipated women, closed religious courts and abolished religious law, replacing it with a secular civil code, and adopting the Western calendar. He introduced the Latin alphabet, abolished the fez, and gave the whole country surnames, since only the elite had them.

    His foreign policy was simple: ‘Peace at home. Peace in the world’. These are the words and thoughts that rise above mere patriotism, and to use those unfashionable words, they encompass truth and beauty and goodness.

    Peace has become an unfashionable word too. Patriotism seems more powerful and more admired. Wars are still fought, and yet there is a difference. It’s only in the last hundred years that international bodies have been set up, first the League of Nations, and then the United Nations, in an effort to address problems by talking, negotiating, and mediating.

    Slow, imperfect and unsatisfactory as these processes often are, they’re a huge step forward from the days when the only way to solve a problem was to fight. And even Nurse Cavell’s hard fate would be different today, protected as she would be by the Geneva Convention.

    But the ultimate irony of Nurse Cavell’s death is that in this modern age, she would have been a war criminal, since it’s now against the laws of war for a medical worker to use their protected status for military purposes. So maybe we haven’t made much progress after all.

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    A friend for lunch, and I needed a pudding. In the fruit bowl were three bananas and some passionfruit. So – banana fritters – something I hadn’t made for years and years. Sifting four ounces of flour and a pinch of salt into a bowl, I made a well in the middle, and dropped in an egg and a tablespoon of oil, and beat it, gradually adding half a cup of tepid water, and beating until it was smooth. Halve the bananas lengthwise, dip in the batter, and fry in hot deep oil until golden brown. Drain, and sprinkle with sugar, and serve with the passionfruit pulp and whipped cream.

    Food for Thought

    You must give some time to your fellow man. Even if it’s a little thing, do something for others – something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.

    Albert Schweitzer 1875 – 1965 Theologian, musician, philosopher, physician and medical missionary in Africa, Nobel Peace Prize winner

  • The mystery of other lives

    Not a picture of hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil, but a picture of the three fat wood pigeons sitting on the power line outside our house yesterday.

    Illustration from the post “The mystery of other lives”

    They used to be plentiful, but between the Maoris and the settlers they nearly became extinct. They’re now protected, and their numbers are increasing. The Maoris call them kereru, we call them wood pigeons, and they are big, heavy, iridescent green and bronze, with a white bib, and they crash around the trees, so we can hear them coming.

    This morning, waiting for the kettle to boil while I made a cup of tea to take back to bed, I stood at the bench looking out of the kitchen window, and watched one of these pigeons in the guava tree, gobbling up the tiny yellow fruit.

    I was fascinated to see how this big heavy unwieldy bird kept his balance on the thin frail branches. He moved from fruit to fruit, gobbling them up, without ever looking or checking to see where he was putting his feet. He knew instinctively how to move, whether the branch was strong enough for him, and how to keep his balance without thinking. I watched him for a long time, in awe of his skill and his knowing.

    I took the tea-tray back to bed, and lay back on the pillows looking out of the window on the other side of the house. The loquat tree, just beyond the window, which is covered in blossom, was alive with movement, and I saw the tui, another native bird, also feeding on the flowers. He too, moved from twig to twig, hanging upside down, sideways, whichever way suited him, to reach the blossoms and the nectar.

    As I watched this bird, with his bright white bobble of feathers jiggling at his throat, which caused the early settlers to call him the parson – bird, I felt I was watching something familiar, and then realised that this was the same knowing and instinct that I’d just been watching in the wood pigeon.

    During the nightas I turned over in my sleep, I heard a morepork, the New Zealand owl calling, very close; later, the huffing

    of a possum in the loquat tree, which sounds like the hissing of a python and what I feared were rats rustling in the roof above. I hoped the hedgehogs were still busy hoovering up the snails and slugs in the garden.

    When I drove through the little hamlet at the edge of the sea on my way to shop the other day, I slowed down when I saw a couple of ducks crossing the road ahead. They had a purpose. They were making for a drive-way where a mulberry tree hung over the fence, and the ripe fruit had fallen on the ground.

    The ducks were feasting… how did they know the fruit was there, that this drive was the only way to get at it, and that this is the time of year for fruit? And how did they know how to cross the road, and get out of the way of cars?

    And on the way home I dodged a quail family scuttling along the side of the road with half a dozen speckled brown babies. In our last house, I once looked out of the window to see a quail family sitting in a row on a fence, all six babies snuggled up against their parents. It was a picture of such love and content, and one that stayed in my mind, so that whenever I remember it, I re-live the feeling of joy in the sight.

    Henry Beston wrote in ‘The Outermost House’: ‘We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate in having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.’

    This wonderful passage says it all… the mystery of other lives, other consciousness, and the sacredness of all life. I love the phrase: ‘they are other nations’. It gives them dignity and mana, and no longer are they lesser beings on whom we can practise our cruelty and our indifference.

    Long ago, when I was a young reporter, I was sent to interview a woman who had a black cat. When she called it, this cat came bounding towards her, running like a dog. She told me it had never learned to purr, and it never miaowed. And it thought it was a dog, because it had been reared by a dog.

    The dog was a black cocker spaniel, whose puppies had died. She was so unhappy that they got a black kitten for her, and she reared it as her own, teaching it to run like a dog. The kitten watched her mother, and copied her behaviour, but she didn’t know she was a cat, since her mother didn’t know she was a cat either. So how do we know when animals and birds know instinctively what to do and when they know it from copying?

    Living in the country, I feel we are on the fringes of these other nations, catching glimpses of their mysterious lives, and hearing their calls to each other. Sometimes I sit in the garden and hear one bird calling in a tree, and another answering in a tree in the distance. Where a hawk is hovering, the tiny birds set up a warning, and the ducks quack in fear on the pond as it drifts overhead.

    I love the sound of the birds calling in the middle of the night, in that dark stillness. In the morning the songs of the birds are different – full of pleasure at the coming of a new day. I love watching the sparrows and the finches bathing in the little bird bath in the vegetable garden, and the way they flock down to the wheat I scatter on the lawn.

    It’s hard to describe the pleasure of just being with these other beings, other nations. And when I see the black backed gulls, hovering, wheeling, gliding on the wind currents above the cliffs, dazzling white against the deep blue sea, I feel a wild wonder and joy at their beauty and their freedom. So many nations, so many mysteries.

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    I had some silver beet – or chard – to use up. So I chopped up an onion, and softened it in butter and oil, added a chopped up rasher of bacon, and then the chopped up chard. When it was all wilted, I added a handful of raisins, some pine nuts, and salt and pepper. It’s so good, and would make a good vegetarian meal with the bacon left out, and served with rice.

    Food for Thought

    It is the very nature of Grace to fill spaces that have been empty.

    Goethe 1749 -1832 Poet, novelist, playwright, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic and amateur artist

  • Cricketers, bridge-players and great white hunters

    Illustration from the post “Cricketers, bridge-players and great white hunters”

    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.